Triangle Tweener Talks

00:00:04 - Announcer
Welcome to Tweener Madness, the high stakes startup showdown where eight promising companies go head to head for a $25,000 investment prize from the Triangle Tweener Fund. Each episode, founders from two companies will step up and pitch their vision to our selection committee. They'll face tough questions, defend their business and make their case. Then, after both have had their shot, the selection committee will decide who moves on and who's heading home. This is the exceptional eight where only the Shar startups survive. Here's your host, general partner of the Triangle Tweener Fund, Scott Wingo.

00:00:39 - Scot Wingo
Alright, we are here. In this round, we're going to have delivery with Jason Brown. Here he is representing the company, CEO, founder, and then on our selection committee we have, to my left, Robbie Hardy, Michael Jones and Jason Kaplan. We don't do intros on this part because we've put those out already. And so you can go to tweenertalks and find the Tweener Madness selection committee video. Jay and I are gonna finish his up and by the time you see this, it will be out there, I promise. So, Jason, you have 10 minutes and any questions before you get into it. Selection committee, any questions? Are we good? No. Here we go.

00:01:18 - Jason Brown
All right. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Jason Brown. I'm the founder of delhivery and at delhivery we are building an e commerce logistics tech stack for direct to consumer brands in the us, Canada and Latin America. Now, if you're a business owner, small business owner, and you decide you want to create a brand, you typically do a few things. You look up, shopify for your web store, you source your product, you integrate your payment system, maybe it's Stripe, PayPal. But what many people seem to neglect is their logistics part of their business, especially when it comes to E commerce.

00:01:55 - Jason Brown
So by time they start thinking about their logistics, they start getting inundated with all of these different options. You have rate aggregators, return services, insurance for your shipping, tracking duties and taxes. If you're doing international shipping, all of these services are independent of one another and none of them have a single platform that does all of these. And on top of that, they cost tens of thousands of dollars a year. So for these small business owners, they typically can't afford these solutions early in their business stage.

00:02:32 - Jason Brown
That is why we are taking the best pieces of a lot of those services and creating what we call a lightened version of that with tools like branded tracking pages, rate comparisons, the ability to bring your own account. So even if you are partnered with couriers, you can even Bring them into our platform and use those rates yourself. Duties and taxes for international shipments. We insure your packages and then we're also connected to your web stores like Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce and others. And then we also have a unique service for international returns for customers shipping into the US giving them the ability to offer returns to their end users in the US So we're billing this as the logistics tech stack similar to what Supabase is for developers. We are trying to be that for e commerce businesses. So as I mentioned, we provide insurance for all of these packages as an option.

00:03:30 - Jason Brown
Users can insure their packages, they can bring their own accounts, the international returns. And now with the talks of tariffs on the table and everybody being concerned about what the actual landed costs are in today's world, we have the ability to bring you upfront duties and taxes and pay for those duties and taxes at checkout. And then later this year we would like to launch our branded tracking pages. And then of course we have our rate shopping.

00:03:58 - Jason Brown
So we partnered with major couriers, FedEx, UPS, DHL, USPS and we negotiate discounted rates where we can save our customers up to 85% on their shipping labels. And then we pass those savings on to our customers so they can purchase and print their way bills, track their packages and create an entire new brand experience built around the logistics part of the business.

00:04:26 - Jason Brown
And then we take all of that and we wrap it into an enterprise API so that we can service upstream customers like family owned fulfillment operators, local operators who have a small fulfillment business or maybe a bigger business company that has their own ERP system and want to integrate some of these services. Why is this such a big deal? Well first, because we're landing on Shopify first. Shopify has over two and a half, almost two and a half million users stores today and they're growing around 66,000 new stores every month.

00:05:02 - Jason Brown
Tap multiply that by our our LTV around $2200 per customer per year. We're looking at an $8 billion per year underserved market in the Shopify, just in the Shopify space. That's not to mention that Etsy market that we are anticipating tapping into. And then even if you don't use a web store, you can still use us. You don't have to have a web store. And then when you look at the global e commerce market as a whole, the B2C market, it's growing exponentially every year. A couple years ago it was over a trillion dollar market and by 2030 it's over. It's expected to be over $7 trillion of global E commerce.

00:05:45 - Jason Brown
And because we focus a lot on cross border shipping, which is unique compared to a lot of these other businesses, we are anticipating expanding into that entire market. The way we make money we have three business model, three payment models so we have a pay as you go model so all these businesses can use our services on day one. It's free, there's no subscription to use it. We make money on the labels. So every time you buy a label we have a markup. We make money on that. We make money on the insurance that you buy. We self insure all these packages up to $500. Anything over that we buy from the courier. And then we duties and taxes also have a fee associated to that that we take to provide that for you. And because we are the broker, well we're not the broker but we provide a brokering service on top of that.

00:06:35 - Jason Brown
So for all that we provide a small fee and then we have for things like branded tracking pages, the returns. So we'll have subscription tiers into those different services, the API, those will come with subscription models. On a monthly SaaS we have pre product traction so we have over 2000 shipments in our wait list equating to around 40k a month in expected revenue, gross revenue.

00:07:04 - Jason Brown
And we are partnering with hello Atlas for a go to market campaign that will send an email out to their one and a half million small businesses with an exclusive offer for their customers that will be launching around April timeframe. So back to the go to market strategy. Shopify is our beachhead. We will have a Shopify app on their app store. We can also pay to have that promoted to the top of the App Store which we plan to do. And in addition to the hello Alice campaign, we anticipate at least around 1000 to 1500 customers responding and signing up to that email and that's in a very conservative number. It's 0.1% of the one and a half million. And then later this year we'll do another offering with them for other services as we get closer to the holidays.

00:07:58 - Jason Brown
Our founding team has built logistics products before myself I previously worked at another logistics startup prior to this where I gained a lot of experience in international shipping software. Our CTO Norman Santos has over 30 years of tech experience building tech products and Jason and Ivan are two developers who've built everything that we have to date. We've been extremely lean in how we built everything and we have a really amazing product right now and we're anticipating launching next month so far. I was recently a winner on David Meltzer's two Minute Drill back in December when it launched, which has been a great response. And I'm getting private coaching from David for the next couple months and I was last summer we were a top 250 company in the Entrepreneurial World cup with the Global Entrepreneur Network and the top 10 company in the US as well.

00:08:56 - Jason Brown
And then this past fall I was a fellow with the FCAP program and the fellowship we are raising right now we're seeking $500,000. We've raised 125,000 of that so far. We're raising it on a safe and that money is going to be used to build out the branded tracking pages and the international returns process which requires some fulfillment space here in Raleigh. And we are going to use that for our marketing and and lead gen campaigns that we use to acquire customers. We are also, as I mentioned three month post launch anticipating over 1000 customers. Around $185 a customer per month in revenue is our predicted take. So seeing around 150k, 155, 185Mrr and that's all I have. Thank you.

00:09:56 - Scot Wingo
All right, thanks Jason. Good job.

00:09:59 - Michael Jones
You're focusing on sort of the new businesses that start on Shopify. Like there's a sweet spot that you've got. My question is when does that sweet spot go away? Like when do they eventually grow out of you? Like what does that look like? And then do you think that there's enough opportunity for that to be okay, that they're like, you know, moving away almost using the example of hey, we're someone who uses QuickBooks and we inevitably have to go to NetSuite and something else is like how you're thinking about it and like just how big is the segment as a result of that?

00:10:31 - Jason Brown
Yeah. So over 50% of Shopify businesses are one to nine employees. Like it's actually kind of rare that they scale exponentially to QuickBooks to a NetSuite situation. Right. And for the ones who do scale, that's where the API comes in as long as possible. And the bring your own accounts because even though you may go to the courier and have enough volume to negotiate discounted rates. Great. Bring it in. You still need a centralized platform to shop those rates out. And we provide that and we just charge a subscription to access that or to turn that on and then there's a small fixed fee per label on that. But, but that's kind of the like as you mentioned, the more Growth model. But even I talked to some customers who were. I talked to a girl selling 20 ish thousand beauty cosmetic products a month and she's just now starting to look at using fulfillment. So it just, I think a lot of it depends on your business model and your strategy. But knowing the small business user on Shopify or the user on Shopify, they tend to stay small or kind of stay in there. Yeah, I mean they're doing a million or 2 million a year and they're happy with it. Right. And that's okay.

00:11:53 - Jason Caplain
So nice job with that. Nice study too, by the way. I had a couple questions that were kind of tied together into one really. So the plan is to go live next month and you've got this base of, you said 40. How many customers are on the wait list?

00:12:11 - Jason Brown
The customer base is actually, the wait list is pretty small, but it's a few customers that have large volume and then we're going to actually go live.

00:12:18 - Jason Caplain
You think they'll go live? Like a wait list is different than they'll sign up?

00:12:22 - Jason Brown
Yeah, yeah. I'm in touch with them. I'm sending them images, getting feedback, like screenshots, meeting with them regularly to.

00:12:31 - Jason Caplain
And then when does Alice send out their email? Alice sends out hello Alice.

00:12:36 - Jason Brown
That is when I decide. I just, whenever I'm ready, I call them up, hey, I'm ready. Here's the media content that you need, the images but.

00:12:47 - Jason Caplain
And then the Shopify piece goes live.

00:12:49 - Jason Brown
When the Shopify app will be live. When we go live, we'll launch on the app store right away as well.

00:12:54 - Jason Caplain
What's the relationship with, with Alice?

00:12:57 - Jason Brown
The hello Alice?

00:12:57 - Jason Caplain
Yeah, like what do they get off of this?

00:13:00 - Scot Wingo
Give us a background for folks that don't know.

00:13:02 - Jason Brown
Yeah, okay. So hello Alice is, is like a collective organization, kind of like an sba, like your local sba. And they provide resources to a lot of small businesses and minority owned. It's not just us, it's actually a lot of latam as well. The founder, Carolyn Rods, is Bolivian. So she actually approached me in Puerto Rico and I pitched and mentioned that we would be a great fit for her customers. And so they provide corporate partners, come in, offer deals and discounts to access that base and then they provide resources, webinars, educational content and I can even do a webinar with them, talk about e commerce, things like that. So I have a great relationship with them and they've agreed to put us on. So we'll offer them probably an at cost discount for the first hundred shipments to join and Then after that, we start making money, but at least we don't lose money doing it. We're still kind of working.

00:14:03 - Scot Wingo
So their members get a special offer, an exclusive offer. That's their, that's kind of their, their economic benefit. And you get huge customer acquisition.

00:14:10 - Jason Brown
Exactly.

00:14:11 - Robbie Hardy
So do their members pay? I don't know.

00:14:13 - Jason Brown
No, it's free. You guys can all go join, sign up, and you get added to their emails. You can join their webinars and then they have a whole offerings page. So you can get perks to, you know, Amazon credits or a Verizon phone discount for your business kind of thing.

00:14:28 - Scot Wingo
I'm going to go sign up now.

00:14:30 - Jason Brown
Yeah.

00:14:30 - Scot Wingo
This podcast sponsored.

00:14:34 - Michael Jones
So you mentioned a couple times that this is a, you know, a tech solution. In a world where the logistics part is going to actually matter, like what actually happens with the box that kind of ships around there, sometimes it's easy to think that you're going to get away with not being part of that in a much deeper way. So I know you said, hey, at the end of the day, we're going to integrate with a customer on one end and then on the back end there could be a bunch of logistics, like actual logistics capabilities that you're actually plugging into. I guess question one is, what's the plan if you're wrong on that? Meaning that you're actually going to have to go deeper and potentially actually be a logistics person, which is possible. The second is if you shook your head, which I think is a smart move, for the record, then it becomes, why doesn't Shopify or someone else try and do this? Because one of the things that you've seen them slowly start to do, which they hadn't done before, is value add for their platform customers. And in a lot of cases, they oddly don't choose the larger enterprise as much as they do some of the small business. So I'm curious, you know, what do you do if something like that happens?

00:15:43 - Jason Brown
Good question. So Shopify, it doesn't benefit Shopify to compete with all with apps on their app store. Same way Apple doesn't go and create apps that are on your iPhone. Right. I mean, they have some, but they don't have. But they don't have all of them. Right. And so you can't have a store, a marketplace as part of your business and then go and compete with everybody on your marketplace and just take the business away. Nobody will ever want to be on your store. Shopify has a logistics, like you can buy labels from Shopify, but it's usually just USPS and just ups. And it's very basic. Right. There's a couple services that you get to choose from and it works. It's fine. But what we're saying is there's more to it than just that one. You have more options. We can add couriers as we go, we're going to add more. And then you want to have a centralized platform so you can view the tracking, respond to issues, and we'll handle those. You know, if you have an issue, a missing package, you come to us, we handle it. So it's still just a better service. And, you know, laws of comparative advantage tells you that Shopify isn't. It's not in their best interest to go spend a ton of time. They're focused on building you the best web store product that they can do for you.

00:17:04 - Michael Jones
Does this mean you would say no if they wanted to buy you?

00:17:06 - Jason Brown
No, I would say yes immediately because they actually have bought people like us, like deliverer with two Rs, I think at the end, for like $4 billion a few years ago. And Alibaba, I've met with Alibaba is head of partnerships there. And they're very excited because we actually have a great. Where their customer relationship ends, ours actually begins. So we actually share the same customer because they're sourcing from Alibaba to get their raw materials and then they're finishing them and they're selling them on Shopify or Etsy or ebay, wherever they're selling it. And then Alibaba doesn't really work in that space after the sale. So we're trying to help you get that product out your door to your customer with a better experience at a lower cost than you otherwise would have as especially earlier in your business's life cycle.

00:17:58 - Robbie Hardy
What is onboarding customer like? I mean, you need this to scale, you need volume to make this work. So what is onboarding like? I know it's not always easy and a lot of things fall apart at that point. We'll talk about the backend, but the front end is.

00:18:13 - Jason Brown
Yeah, no. So it's super easy. I mean, on the back end we have a very complex system, type of HubSpot and our admin panel and, you know, all the backend AWS integrations.

00:18:24 - Robbie Hardy
But it's the simple stuff that sometimes the new customers don't get.

00:18:28 - Jason Brown
So in the US it's a little easier because we don't have to deal with like VAT taxes, whereas in Latam or other countries you have that which we've already built all this in on the back end, but we're going to hide it for the US customers, which is where we're launching first. But it's super simple. We walk you through a simple questionnaire, you know, through a couple steps you actually can create your account immediately, super easy. And then we get some basic data, just about what your current rates are, like how much you're shipping today. So we can see if you scale and what our expectation is of you as a customer. And then all we really need from you is your name, phone number, business address and email. And that's about it. Immediately you can go start buying discounted labels from four major couriers.

00:19:13 - Michael Jones
Tell me your perfect customer. And then one that would not be a good fit at all. But to be clear, not a, I don't want you to say, hey, Walmart wouldn't be a gig. Like I got that part already. It's more this in the space we're looking at, this would be a really good customer for us or types of customers. These ones would not fit. And especially on this part, like why would they not fit?

00:19:34 - Jason Brown
So the ones who fit it is we the way. Even our ui, it's designed to be super simple, right. We took a very complex, a lot of complex pieces and I simplified it to make it super consumable as a user. So our ideal customer is that person who is, hey, their first time on Shopify, it's their first time integrating their payment system and they just made their first sale and they're super excited and they have a product, they're in business, they're now going to grow and hopefully grow to great heights and we want to be with them. Part of that conversation on day one. So it's oh, I need a Shopify store, I need a payment system and I need delivery to do my logistics. Cause it does everything and it's free and doesn't require any kind of technical integration at all. So that's my ideal customer. Who it's not for is the very large brand who's using a fulfillment operator for one, a drop shipper who doesn't have an affinity to their brand. Because these are people who actually care about, about the brand experience. And a lot of people neglect logistics when it comes to brand experience. They made the sale, they did enough to acquire you and make you buy it. They don't really. They're there, that's it. But especially in international sales, you need to have a brand experience because I don't know if I can trust that seller and you don't know if you can trust that buyer, especially overseas. So we're trying to bridge and kind of alleviate that mistrust and build trust.

00:21:09 - Scot Wingo
Cool. All right, we got time for one last question each, Robby.

00:21:13 - Robbie Hardy
So the big guys, so you know, these people grow, if they grow, and I know you're not going after that, but there is a cost of change if they do decide to grow to go something else. So what if. You know, it's always interesting to me when companies that deal with big clients and their, the, the small ones and they expect them to change to get up here. So what if the big guys. Do you have any insight as to any of the big players that they might. Maybe they would acquire you. That would be lovely. But to go small so that people have a continuity because there's a lot of stuff, you know, there's a lot of things here.

00:21:46 - Jason Brown
So I feel like brand owners, especially in E commerce are like, they're pretty fickle in the sense that they don't like, there's a reason they're already an entrepreneurial brand owner. It's because they kind of already go against the mold of like corporate. Right. So they really do support other small brands and other small businesses. So because they're a small business.

00:22:10 - Robbie Hardy
Right.

00:22:11 - Jason Brown
So there is that affinity to the fact that we speak and that we are specifically built for that early, early stage that if a big company can came in and tried to service that. Right. Like an Oracle or somebody. Right. It's the same concept of NetSuite and QuickBooks, which I love that example and.

00:22:30 - Robbie Hardy
I just don't know why it's still.

00:22:32 - Jason Brown
And look, there's people who don't use Shopify, right. There's people who build it from their web store from scratch and code it, which is fine and you can still be our customer. But like to make things easy, you know, you want to have a very simple, easy to use platform. And if we are paying attention to you at your level and not ignoring that, then I think there's value and probably growing somewhere. Yeah. And hopefully growing with you. We have some, like with the bring your own accounts and the API, our goal is to grow with you to some degree. And even if fulfillment operators, because I've spoken to some, would implement the API just to even have access to the rates and then they can allocate some of their logistics managers to a different role inside their fulfillment operators.

00:23:18 - Jason Caplain
All right, my last question is a very optimistic question, is like, you know, when you started this, Jason, what's going to be A long term vision. Like what does this look like for you? What does success look like over the next five, ten years?

00:23:31 - Jason Brown
Yeah, I think in the next five years for sure. If we can prove that we've expanded into these other countries successfully, then that's successful to me. And being kind of the de facto conversation placeholder. When you talk about setting up an E commerce store and then growing it into about, you know, in the five to 10 years, we start getting the conversations from the major players for an acquisition from an Alibaba or Shopify or an Etsy or Flexport or somebody like that who makes a lot of sense.

00:24:12 - Scot Wingo
All right, up next we have Invite Jet featuring Paul Davis and Brian Watson, who's CEO in this mix. Do you guys thumb wrestle for that or like have you decided or.

00:24:21 - Brian Watson
We're co founders.

00:24:22 - Scot Wingo
Co founders. All right.

00:24:23 - Brian Watson
That's right.

00:24:23 - Scot Wingo
Tbd. So that's going to be a fun discussion. We may get into that in Q and A.

00:24:28 - Paul Davis
Okay.

00:24:28 - Scot Wingo
May have some recommendations on that one from our esteemed panel.

00:24:31 - Brian Watson
Yeah, sounds great.

00:24:32 - Scot Wingo
All right, let's go ahead and start your pitch.

00:24:34 - Brian Watson
All right, sounds good. So I'm Brian Watson, this is Paul Davis. Like we mentioned before, we're the Co founders of InviteJet. InviteJet is a marketing platform that allows brands to leverage the power of calendar invites as a marketing tool. So this is Jenny. She's a fitness enthusiast and she's been keeping an eye out for weighted jump ropes from crossrope. She gets 120 emails a day, however, so she completely missed their last campaign. This is Andy. He's a real InviteJet customer and he's in charge of marketing over at Crossrope. His last email campaign had a 30% open rate, which is great by email market, email marketing measures, but that just means that 70% of people didn't even see his campaign at all. That's when Andy found out about invitejet. Now because Andy has an established email relationship with Jenny, he he can leverage the power of invitejet to market to her in the moments that actually matter, not leading up to a promotion, but in the promotion time. As soon as Andy was able to use our one click integrations to integrate his marketing tech stack into InviteJet. Creating his first campaign was a breeze. He simply adds the information he wants to appear in the invite. He imports his audience from something like Klaviyo or mailchimp and then click Send Invite. On Jenny's side, she gets a mobile push notification in real time as the invite is sent and then again when the event actually happens. So that she's getting marketed to in the moment that actually matters. So Andy, like I mentioned before, He's a real InviteJet customer and he did a holdout test for us in our beta test period. He did a holdout test. So he sent 80,000 emails via Klaviyo and 50,000 invites via Invitejet. Now as you can see, the metrics are pretty mind blowing, hence the emojis, right? But the real standout here is that the conversion rate was four times greater than email and we generated double the revenue with half the audience size. Seven million invites later, we're still kicking email marketing's butt in terms of metrics. And this is a brand channel where brands spend $7 billion a year on this marketing channel. Our beachhead market is E Commerce brands that are analytics savvy in the six to nine figure revenue range. We are a B2B SaaS company. So we charge subscription pricing based on your volume of sins each month and then we also charge overages based on your usage as well. If you go over your subscribed amount, our average monthly contract value is $255 and we've managed to get up to 35 paying customers and we launched last September. So six months time frame. A bottom up look at the market opportunity here. This is your TAM slide. Right. But we like to take the bottom up approach. So this is how we get to $100 million in revenue in the next five years.

00:27:36 - Scot Wingo
Jason's going to want one of those out to 10 years, but we'll get back to that.

00:27:41 - Robbie Hardy
Of course he does.

00:27:42 - Scot Wingo
If you could do 2035 real quick.

00:27:44 - Brian Watson
We'Ll get there for sure. We're first mover in this space and we've got a three horizon approach. We stole this approach from Boston Consulting Group. Right. So the first phase for us is calendar marketing which we've done really well in terms of proving the concept out and actually getting customers building out the mvp. The next phase that we're kind of currently in right now is this integrations and automation space. So we've already done some really good work in terms of one click integrations. Paul's been in e commerce for 15 years, but he's not technical so he's the perfect guinea pig for all of my building. So I gotta make it very easy for these brands to jump in and experience a low time to value. So that's, that's the golden standard basically in those integrations and automations. We also want to build out a third party API because we don't know how everybody's going to use this calendar tech, right? There could be in terms of usage, in terms of brick and mortar, for instance, you're getting a haircut or you're getting your nails done or something like that. There's an opportunity there to actually patch up leaky funnels in terms of appointments and things like that that are missed. When you go book your delta flight, you get a nice calendar invite, the time of the flight. But with boutique hotels in New York for instance, you don't get that same calendar invite. So we want to offer this calendar technology not only for calendar marketing, but for patching up leaky funnels as well and who knows what else. When we offer the third party API then Third horizon thinking is AI enabled, time based marketing engineering. And there's actually a really big data play here as well. Like the boutique hotel example, if we have that data of when you're checking out, Uber probably would be really interested in that data. Right. To market to you in the moment that it actually matters to you as well. We're a repeat founding team. We've both built SaaS companies and exited them before. Paul, like I said before, has 15 years of experience in E commerce so he's got a wonderful network to sell into. Are where most of our beta brands come from. We've done a lot of founder led growth through Paul's network. I'm the technical co founder. I've built product and engineering teams at VC backed startups as well as public companies. And then we've got a good list of advisors you can't see because the font's really small. But one is X Gmail who's been really informative in terms of their privacy laws and things like that. Regulations, we don't wanna skirt any boundaries there. And then Matt Simoneau from ampt, who his company was recently acquired by mailchimp so it's very good for him to talk to us about long term strategy and things like that as well. That is it for us. Thank you guys for your time.

00:30:39 - Scot Wingo
So you're worried about time and you had four minutes left. I forgot five minutes. It was so engaging.

00:30:44 - Brian Watson
I was like launch makes us do a two minute pitch every week. So. So it's, you know, we've got it down to a science.

00:30:51 - Scot Wingo
Awesome. Great job guys.

00:30:53 - Jason Caplain
So my question is, I've got a bunch of questions here I wrote down but one of them is like around the feeling of spam. And I think I talked to you guys about this before. How do you think about that? How do brands think about it and also the recipient, how do you get around it?

00:31:07 - Brian Watson
Sure. So I've got two quick data points for you. The first is a personal one. My wife, she is a Bath and Body works lover. And every year there's a candle sale. Okay. And every year she misses the candle sale. And literally the week after the candle sale, she'll say, oops, I missed it and spend $200 on candles.

00:31:28 - Jason Brown
Okay.

00:31:29 - Brian Watson
So someone like her needs that calendar invite, so that's something that she welcomes. And then the other thing in response to kind of spam and unsubscribe. So when we first started this, we were worried about that as well. And so at the bottom of every calendar invite we have the Hotmail hack, the powered by invitejet. But we also don't hide the unsubscribe. Right. We want people to be able to get out of the calendar flow if they want to. Right. So when they click that unsubscribe, they have the option of getting out of calendars, getting out of emails from this brand, or both. But what we're seeing with the data is really surprising. I think unsubscribe rates for email on average are 0.05% or something like that. And we don't, we don't actually, we haven't touched that yet in terms of unsubscribes and spams. So.

00:32:17 - Jason Caplain
So you think about it as more like they are already warm connections.

00:32:20 - Brian Watson
Oh, yes.

00:32:21 - Jason Caplain
What about cold connections? How do you think about that?

00:32:23 - Paul Davis
So we don't, we don't allow.

00:32:24 - Brian Watson
We don't allow.

00:32:25 - Jason Caplain
Yeah.

00:32:25 - Brian Watson
So that's why I very specifically put that in the pitch of. Because Andy has an established email relationship with Ginny, he can mark it to her calendar.

00:32:36 - Paul Davis
Another thing, especially with the cold outbound sales and stuff like that, we enforce you connecting your domain that's obviously connected to your deliverability and your domain health. And then outside of that, obviously keeping track of those spam markers, bounce rates, unsubscribes with new customers that come in, we're going to throttle those sins just to be able to manage. If they are approaching that threshold, we will shut them off. So we're students for good, not for evil.

00:33:08 - Brian Watson
Yeah, we're students of the space. And you know, with, with, you know, mailchimp being down the southeast company, you know, one of their, one of their things that they do really well with spam, of course they've done so much in the spam space, but you know, the first thing that they did was, hey, we're going to throttle your first thousand sins and make sure that you're not like using this for evil. If you are, we're shutting you off. We're kicking you off the platform. If you're not, then we'll open up the. Open up the floodgates and let you send these invites out.

00:33:37 - Scot Wingo
Okay, thanks.

00:33:38 - Jason Caplain
Thanks guys.

00:33:39 - Michael Jones
Mj, am I right? You guys founded this out of. Is it you that has a tea company or something? Subscription company. Okay, so tell me. I would like to hear from your assuming that you're the guinea pig in this whole thing. I'm assuming the answer is yes. So tell. So tell me in the, you know, whatever time frame you want.

00:33:59 - Paul Davis
Sure.

00:33:59 - Michael Jones
Three months, four months. I don't know. You pick it. But like, tell me what is it that you saw that was like just so astounding, like for your business? That was like, oh my God, like this, like, tell me like the aha moment. And then like what were some things that came from.

00:34:14 - Brian Watson
Talk about the Kickstarter and the Black Friday sale.

00:34:17 - Paul Davis
Yeah, so yeah, these two examples. So 2019, I was launching Mozt on Kickstarter. I knew from just my experience within E Commerce that there was a trend of email engagement rates, SMS engagement rates going down with Kickstarter. It's super important on day one to hit your goal and to get that momentum going for the campaign to be a success. I knew that I was at the mercy of if or when people were going to open those emails. And so literally days before the campaign, I'm sitting there and I see my own calendar reminder for when I was going to be launching the Kickstarter and that's kind of when the aha moment happened. Why doesn't everybody have this on their calendar? It is a time based event. They've shown interest, they've given consent. I have people on this list, they probably want to show up. It was because of those calendar notifications the day of the launch. We hit our funding goal in less than five hours and then went on to raise over half a million on Kickstarter.

00:35:14 - Brian Watson
He sent those calendar invites manually. He sent 20,000 calendar invites manually.

00:35:18 - Paul Davis
It took a few days. InviteJet wasn't a thing then. So that experience sat with me and just being able to help brands monetize the calendar, something that we look at every single day outside of our phones or email. This was just a blue ocean space that we saw as if people love brands enough to allow them on the calendar. That's a really powerful place to be. The second example. So years later, Brian and I met and we started working on this project and come 2023 I wanted to give it a test on my own store, Mozy T and use the same campaign information that we had the previous year. During Black Friday Cyber Monday, we saw 400% growth on the day of which our growth, that point was maybe 20% month over month. So a massive growth just on that very day for the invites that were sent.

00:36:16 - Michael Jones
And are you basically saying that when you did your apples to apples test it was same people, same offer, different.

00:36:23 - Paul Davis
Method for delivery, different method of delivery. And we did do a smaller test with the same people that were within that. We obviously grew our list as well and had that separated. But of that list it was a 400% growth.

00:36:41 - Robbie Hardy
So talk to me about conversion.

00:36:43 - Michael Jones
Conversion, yes.

00:36:44 - Robbie Hardy
So to revenue. So you get them out there, you get them on the calendar. These are known people to you somehow, so they know who you are or they know who the brand, not you guys, but they know whatever the deal is. What's the conversion rate? What was the conversion rate for your tea, for example? We had a 400% increase in getting on people's people. Not throwing you away.

00:37:06 - Paul Davis
I'll admit. I don't remember the conversion rate for that campaign.

00:37:09 - Robbie Hardy
You can make it up because we'll never know.

00:37:11 - Paul Davis
100% conversion rate. What I do know is and maybe if you go back to the crossroad slide there. So over the 7 million million ish invites that we've sent thus far, our average conversion rate is around that 6%. Email marketing is going to be anywhere from 1.5 to 3% ish. I think this is due to being able to really get that open rate up. So calendar invites aren't considered promotional. So they're going to skip the promo tab. So that offers more eyeballs, which increases the click rate, which in in effect increases the conversion.

00:37:53 - Brian Watson
To add to that point, one thing that we have started measuring lately is revenue percent because we're interested. That crossrope example, they sent half the audience that they did with email and that's typically what we see in our sales cycle is that these brands want to test it out first and then they want to jump in full head of steam. So the 1:1 metric that we really like to point to is revenue per cent. Right. So with email, you know, I think it's like 15 to 25 cents cents per send in revenue. With us, our low end starts on 25 cents and we've, we've seen results up to $1.35 in terms of Revenue per cent.

00:38:37 - Michael Jones
Tell me how this doesn't work.

00:38:40 - Brian Watson
How doesn't this work?

00:38:41 - Jason Brown
That's a good question.

00:38:42 - Michael Jones
Yeah, the answer's not on the slide, I promise.

00:38:45 - Paul Davis
Never got that question.

00:38:46 - Brian Watson
We both look back, literally.

00:38:50 - Robbie Hardy
Well.

00:38:52 - Michael Jones
Okay, let me, like, I'll seed it a little bit. Which is. So you guys have, I think, very thoughtfully been like, you know what? This is a, to use your term, a blue ocean space that no one's kind of really seen a mark and it's really good. Which by the way, kudos to you guys for that. But then it becomes like, okay, something, I don't know what it is, steps in the way of that blue ocean and now we're in like muddy waters, whatever that may be.

00:39:18 - Brian Watson
Sure.

00:39:19 - Michael Jones
What's either next or what? Like what makes sure that that doesn't become like the end? Or maybe I'm thinking about it wrong. Maybe there's a. Something else that would happen.

00:39:28 - Brian Watson
So. So competition. Honestly, that's, that's great. Honestly, I don't, I don't shy away from competition. I'm kind of energetic and would welcome competition. But so to me that's a proof point that we're doing something right. Even if an 800 pound gorilla came into the space, which I don't think they're going to because they innovate through acquisition more than they innovate through iteration. But to me, the biggest risk I think that is out there is platform risk, which it would be very technically difficult for somebody like Google to say, no, you can't send Calendar invites. We've talked pretty extensively with our advisor about that and whatnot. But that's the one thing I would say that if somebody, some Google or Microsoft or something, said something like that, like no Calendar invites, then we'd be up a creek.

00:40:24 - Paul Davis
I'm not concerned about that from the Gmail side of things, me neither. People send billions of invites every single day. You know, even at scale, like, we're not going to touch that. And really, you know, Google just went through a policy change last year that usually doesn't happen except every three to five years. And that has to go through sec. I think if we're doing this right, there will be like a little checkbox eventually where it's like, accept Calendar invites, accept email the same way that you do email and phone number. Right now that's not required. My guess is that will be a requirement eventually. But good question.

00:41:10 - Scot Wingo
So I'll be the. So the straw man. So Klaviyo sees you guys importing and exporting all this, they're like, whoa, I don't know what this is, but the conversion rates are bonkers. Let's build it ourselves. What do you do there?

00:41:20 - Brian Watson
Personally, I don't think that they're going to do that.

00:41:22 - Paul Davis
Right.

00:41:22 - Brian Watson
So I worked in corporate venture capital for a while and our approach was, hey, we're going to invest in these like five or six companies. We're going to take a wait and see approach. Right. Most companies don't want to build a team around a feature or product and actually go build it and take a year to do that with budgets and red tape and blah, blah, blah. It's much easier to fund it, take a wait and see approach and then acquire and make that part of your suite, which we saw with SMS play out that same exact way.

00:41:57 - Paul Davis
And honestly, if Tomorrow Klaviyo launched a calendar feature, I would love that because their reach just increases our chances of being able to make a splash and being first there. I mean, we saw it with Amped. Right. Mailchimp had popups, they already had that software. Amped came along, built it better, got a bunch of brands on board and then they acquired them. So we would welcome the competition. Honestly, that helps with the Google search results for calendar marketing.

00:42:28 - Robbie Hardy
Right. So you don't have to create the marketing.

00:42:30 - Paul Davis
We have to create that which is always so expensive. Not too dissimilar from influencer marketing. And a lot of the brands that in recent years have popped up, that was hard in the beginning for them, but now it's catching like wildfire.

00:42:42 - Brian Watson
Yeah.

00:42:43 - Scot Wingo
All right, let's do our last questions. Robby, kick us off.

00:42:45 - Robbie Hardy
So we've left this alone. Your co founders.

00:42:48 - Brian Watson
Yep.

00:42:49 - Paul Davis
Yeah.

00:42:49 - Robbie Hardy
So I assume your investors are saying hello, what are we doing here?

00:42:54 - Paul Davis
Yeah.

00:42:54 - Robbie Hardy
So what are your. What are your plans?

00:42:56 - Paul Davis
Because we know, honestly, we've gotten good feedback on. We're 50, 50 split. He's. He's product and engineering.

00:43:04 - Brian Watson
We'll play rock, paper, scissors for.

00:43:05 - Paul Davis
Yeah, it's all good.

00:43:06 - Robbie Hardy
But when you grow.

00:43:08 - Paul Davis
When we grow, you know, there's a.

00:43:09 - Robbie Hardy
You know, there's a reason that, you know CEOs.

00:43:12 - Jason Brown
Yeah.

00:43:14 - Robbie Hardy
So no pushback.

00:43:15 - Brian Watson
We're totally against co. CEOs from. For sure. But like that's. We'll kick that can down the road, if you don't mind. We will. We will kick that can down the road.

00:43:23 - Robbie Hardy
So you don't think this round will cause it to.

00:43:25 - Brian Watson
No, I don't.

00:43:26 - Paul Davis
I don't.

00:43:26 - Brian Watson
It's not.

00:43:27 - Robbie Hardy
It'll be at the conversion.

00:43:28 - Brian Watson
Yeah. In all honesty, this, you know, the VC that's possibly coming on. We're looking at them as more of a partner than somebody who's going to come in.

00:43:37 - Scot Wingo
Robbie, has this not worked before, like, so you're scratching away at this. Give us the.

00:43:41 - Robbie Hardy
Well, no, I mean, I've seen it work and I've seen it horribly not work.

00:43:45 - Brian Watson
So we, we like, you know, where it's.

00:43:47 - Robbie Hardy
Everything is fine until one of you wants to. Yeah.

00:43:50 - Scot Wingo
Where it really doesn't work is if you've never talked about who's going, what percent of the company. That's.

00:43:54 - Robbie Hardy
Well, the cap table is.

00:43:55 - Scot Wingo
At least you've had that conversation.

00:43:58 - Brian Watson
You know, we, we go to the same church.

00:44:00 - Michael Jones
We.

00:44:01 - Brian Watson
It took five years for us to meet. We actually met down in Ecuador. But like at this point, we're. I don't know, two. What is it? You're almost two years into this. We're. We're like an all married couple. We're fine having those stats.

00:44:13 - Scot Wingo
But if you disagree, you can go to your minister.

00:44:15 - Brian Watson
I'm sure he'll be like, wait a.

00:44:16 - Michael Jones
Minute, what's an invite exactly.

00:44:18 - Brian Watson
Anyway, we're nobodies from nowhere, we like to say, but at the end of the day, we're like peanut butter and jelly. You combine us and it's a superpower.

00:44:26 - Scot Wingo
So.

00:44:27 - Robbie Hardy
All right, go for it.

00:44:29 - Brian Watson
Yeah.

00:44:30 - Michael Jones
That won't last, by the way. No, I'm just going to say it as it is. At some point in time, you have to know who's going to be the final decision maker, period. And then I'll leave the rest of it alone.

00:44:39 - Robbie Hardy
I'll start working on it.

00:44:41 - Jason Caplain
So out of the 35 customers, I'm sure you've had some churn along the way. What have you guys learned? What are the takeaways from the customers that have left?

00:44:48 - Brian Watson
Good question.

00:44:49 - Paul Davis
Yeah, I think one of the biggest learnings is, and I know it's early.

00:44:54 - Jason Caplain
Too, since launch, it is early.

00:44:56 - Paul Davis
But one thing that we've known from the beginning is that people are going to send less calendar invites, then they're gonna send sms, then they're gonna send emails and we're okay with that. I think that one of the tasks that we have at hand is giving people reason to use it. So oftentimes, if you're a brand that maybe is focused on the larger scale, holidays, maybe there's less use cases that they know of. So how do we educate and provide playbooks for them to use it multiple times in different ways? Like I mentioned, the unengaged audiences or someone recently used, they had invite for a shipping cutoff for Valentine's Day. By the time, if you order by this time, then it will show up. So it's providing value in that sense and making sure that they have ways to use it. If anything, when we've had churn, it's because they just put it on pause and they're going to come back next month for that next big sale. And they just didn't want that recurring aspect which we're already in discussion of changing up pricing in a way where there's a platform fee plus usage based. So we're always kind of thinking through what that might look like. And it really depends on the size of the brand as well. A smaller brand with a list of 10,000 versus a brand of a million. There are going to be extremely different use cases for that still to this day, not too much churn. We'll see what that looks like at Critical Mass. But I think if we have those playbooks and that educational aspect in place, it's going to be a lot easier for them to find ways to use it, especially with results from other brands and templates.

00:46:51 - Scot Wingo
And we're at this point we're just going to talk a little bit about what you thought about the pitches and liked and, and anything, maybe even a little feedback to folks when they watch like what they could have done better or anything like that, or what you liked about the pitch for folks that, that kind of are out there being founders thinking about pitching. Go ahead, Robbie.

00:47:07 - Robbie Hardy
I liked both of them. I, I was impressed that they all had, they sort of had command of their business. I mean, they could answer questions. They weren't hemming and hawing. They weren't bullshitting. Sorry. They were, you know, they were, you know, they were just very forthright and didn't seem to be rattled by anything, which is, which is nice and comfortable in some cases saying they didn't know which is the right thing to do or just instead of making it up, delivery. I understand it, but I am not in that space like you guys. So I had to bow to, you know, the knowledge of what does it take to put all that together. I know enough about it to be dangerous, but not enough about it to really, you know, dig down, invite jet. I was like, what? When we started, when I first saw it, I was like, I don't want any more crap in my, you know, inbox or anything. I don't need that. But as they explained it and their experience and they come from different. I mean, they have their co founders but that's you, you know, that's a whole different issue. But they come from it from, you know, different ways, but all with great experience. So I, it was. I think it's a tough one to choose.

00:48:20 - Scot Wingo
All right, mj, what are your thoughts?

00:48:23 - Michael Jones
Yeah, I mean first I'll. I'll echo some of Robbie's comments, which is I remember obviously not in this kind of setup that you've done, but back in the day pitching people like Jason and others.

00:48:34 - Robbie Hardy
What's your ten year plan?

00:48:35 - Michael Jones
Right, right. I've still part of that. I haven't figured out the 10 your plan yet. I will say this.

00:48:41 - Brian Watson
It.

00:48:41 - Michael Jones
You know, I felt like I always continually learned like every pitch and you're always honing it to get better and better. And I feel incredibly confident in this statement. The people that we watch pitch today were probably better than I ever was. So I'm like actually very impressed.

00:48:56 - Robbie Hardy
I agree with that. Not for you, but for all of us.

00:48:58 - Brian Watson
Yeah.

00:48:58 - Michael Jones
I also thank you.

00:48:59 - Scot Wingo
Probably strong, right?

00:49:01 - Michael Jones
Exactly. You were.

00:49:02 - Robbie Hardy
I mean they were just great.

00:49:03 - Michael Jones
I also agree that they had a really good handle of any questions that you asked. So they clearly understood not only their business, but had actually talked to me about how they would answer questions and one that had two folks there. What I also find interesting, not just the space, maybe this is an unfair comment, but when I think about both companies, it becomes kind of obvious to me that both get acquired by someone attempting to do something that they want to do and that they've kind of built up. And it's also interesting to me that they both have sort of thought that way already that that's kind of likely an outcome which is pretty mature and pretty rare as well.

00:49:41 - Jason Caplain
I think for, for me, like, yes, I agree with the people, the pitch, all great. I think the other thing here too for both companies is like the capital efficiency is. Is really strong. And I look at a company like Delivery or invitejet, I mean they both gotten pretty far for raising a small amount of capital. What's your term? You call it? Scott Seed Strapping. There we go. So I think it's. I was really impressed. Invitech and the 35 customers with like a small amount of capital in is absolutely outstanding and I think best of class. So I think that's kind of the thing that stood out for me here.

00:50:25 - Scot Wingo
30 years ago you would not have seen this quality of things coming on. And so it's really neat to see that happen over an arc of time. But gotta write the check here, Jason. We do this last name by alphabetical so being a C, you're up first. So you gotta pick delivery or invite chat. What are you going with?

00:50:44 - Jason Caplain
Invite chat.

00:50:45 - Scot Wingo
Okay. All right. And then H is next.

00:50:49 - Michael Jones
I love you're going through the Alphabet right now. Live in your head.

00:50:52 - Scot Wingo
What?

00:50:52 - Robbie Hardy
It's okay.

00:50:53 - Scot Wingo
I keep thinking it's wrong for some reason, but I. I don't think it is. Yes.

00:50:56 - Robbie Hardy
H. Invite chat.

00:50:58 - Scot Wingo
Okay, so you going.

00:50:59 - Michael Jones
It makes three. It makes three.

00:51:01 - Scot Wingo
All right. You name us. Okay.

00:51:02 - Michael Jones
All right.

00:51:02 - Robbie Hardy
I mean, these guys just all did their work. I mean, they rolled up their sleeves. I mean, this is what you like to see. You know, it's sort of like when they're bootstrapping it and they're figuring it all out and they're not hiring a bunch of people to do stuff for them and then they don't know what they're doing.

00:51:15 - Scot Wingo
So the no CEO thing didn't slow you guys down? They're all.

00:51:18 - Robbie Hardy
Or they'll sort it out. They'll sort it out.

00:51:21 - Michael Jones
They'll sort it out.

00:51:21 - Scot Wingo
They do go to church together, so.

00:51:23 - Robbie Hardy
Well, there you go. There's help.

00:51:24 - Scot Wingo
I don't know.

00:51:25 - Michael Jones
I will say this though. I feel like in things like this, when you see other companies, it's usually pretty obvious to you who you pick. And I know the three of us just picked one company, so it may seem like it's a. A no brainer. I feel like that delivery company, it's going to do well. Oh, I really like. There's a. There's absolutely a future there and a good leader and there's no doubt in my mind that that will be a successful company.

00:51:48 - Scot Wingo
So congrats to invite Jet and delivery. You did an awesome job as well. Just maybe a little bit behind on the customer success and that kind of thing, which is like hard part of this early stage. It's just little gradients there and things make a big difference. So thanks guys for your time and everything you do for the community. We really appreciate it.

00:52:05 - Michael Jones
Absolutely.

00:52:05 - Robbie Hardy
Thank you.

00:52:06 - Jason Caplain
Thanks, Scott.

00:52:12 - Announcer
And just like that, another company moves one step closer to a $25,000 investment from the Triangle Tweener Fund. The competition is heating up and the Fabulous Four is next. Who will rise, who will fall? And who will claim the ultimate prize? This episode was edited and produced by Walk West. Want to follow more of the action? Visit tweenermadness.com and follow us on social media for updates, behind the scenes content and more ra.