This episode of My First Million features hosts Sam Parr and Shaan Puri interviewing student entrepreneurs from Stanford University who are pitching their startups for a $3,500 prize. The students present innovative solutions ranging from wearable subtitles for the hearing impaired to a platform that democratizes college admissions through data and AI.
Topics: Entrepreneurship, Startups, Stanford University, Pitch Competition, AI, EdTech, Accessibility, Venture Capital
Introduction [00:10]
Sam Parr: All right, we’re back. We had a little technical difficulty. We accidentally let the kids from Stanford Community College in. Now we got the real Stanford in. Their computers work, their internet’s good, they use Google Chrome. Those other guys were on, you know, using Android or something like that. But we’re ready to get started. First, a word from Bobby “Firehousel,” as I call him. Your nickname is Fire because last time you came in with absolute fire. We almost couldn’t tame you as you were on the podcast. But go ahead, give us the intro for this.
Bobby: Hey, what’s up? I’m back. I’m the guy from the Michigan episode. We built our entrepreneurship community from Michigan to Stanford since we saw you last. At the called Entrepreneur Power Hour, we’re changing how college founders meet. We’re changing how angel investors meet these college founders. We’re changing the game entirely. We got a non-steer, who’s our community lead over at Stanford. Things are moving. We launched a syndicate. We’re hyped. But today, we’re moving away from Michigan and we’re meeting the Stanford killers. And so I’m hyped to pass over to Anant, who’s going to get us rolling and introduce the [inaudible].
Sam Parr: Bobby, I got a question for you. Is it true what they say about the post-My First Million bump? Like for college kids, like you know, are you getting kisses on the cheek around campus? Are you uh, do you get free lunch in the cafeteria? What’s what was life like after the [inaudible] life?
Bobby: It was insane. My girlfriend was starting to get jealous. She’s like, who who who who’s this? The female founders are coming out of nowhere, coming up and saying hello.
Sam Parr: Yeah, okay. We need the we need the Conor McGregor clip where he goes, “It’s red panty night when you sign to fight me. You call home, you call your wife, you say, Conor McGregor made us rich, baby. Break out the red panties.” That’s that’s what happens when my first million comes to your college campus. “Baby, we done it.” Sam and Sean coming to our campus. We done it. Bring out the red solo cups, baby. We done it.
Bobby: I don’t know who to worry about more.
Pitch 1: TranscribeGlass [02:14]
Sam Parr: All right, so let’s get started. Go ahead. Go ahead. Let’s kick it off.
Bobby: Yeah, well, cheers. Thanks so much. Seems like we’re putting this business podcast on the Angel Business podcast. Nice. Yeah, I mean, we got a great group of Stanford founders over here. Bobby’s an absolute killer. Love that man dearly. And I hope that you’re going to love the founders we have. Got a great community we’re building it out. So, if you’re interested in learning more, you know, feel free to reach out to me. I don’t want to spend too much time re-entering, so I’ll introduce our first guy, Tom. Tommy P, as I like to call him. He’s a hardware dude. He’s actually the old head of the group. He’s actually a master student doing a lot of cool stuff, but I don’t want to steal Tommy’s thunder, so I’ll kind of let him take things from here.
Sam Parr: How old is old?
Bobby: I’ll let Tom answer that because I actually have no idea how old, but 20 plus.
Sam Parr: Yeah. He’s going to be he’s going to be 22.
Tom: 24, you guys. Oh, great. You’re a real grayblush, my friend.
Bobby: I know. I know.
Tom: Well, um, thanks and yeah, thanks for the intro, Anant. Super pumped to be here. Um, should we dive right into the pitch or?
Bobby: Yeah, the five minutes or two?
Tom: Yeah, I think we have Wait, wait. What’s the timing on these? So, two minutes?
Bobby: I think we did three last time. So we’re like zero five.
Tom: Three, Bobby saying? Let’s do three. All right. Here, here’s the deal. You got you got three minutes. You got one where we’re not going to interrupt you. But after that, we can just jump in at any time and interrupt you after that. Okay, so let’s let’s do it.
Tom: Okay, keep that in mind. Cool. So, um, okay. Uh, so hi, Tom here, uh, TranscribeGlass, and we’re building wearable subtitles for the deaf part of hearing. Essentially taking your Netflix or YouTube captions and putting them heads up. Um, hearing loss is a massive issue. Uh, I mean, you should be pre-med, so, uh, I could see you med stats at you all day, and that’s what I’m going to do. Uh, it affects close to half a billion people. It’s twice as common as cancer or diabetes, and it’s growing. By 2050, one in 10 people will have a disabling hearing loss. It also is comorbid with a lot of things, including dementia. You’re three to five times more likely to get dementia if you have hearing loss. Despite everything I just said, hearing solutions today are affordable. They’re really expensive, $2,000 to $8,000, often out of pocket for hearing aids because insurance like Medicare doesn’t cover them. The biggest killer thing for me though is that 75% of people who could actually use hearing aids use absolutely nothing. If you talk to anyone who has a hearing loss who’s tried a hearing aid, what they’ll probably tell you is, “Hey, I bought it, put it in my ear, hated it, put it on the shelf, never used it again.” Now, there’s a really cool medical reason why, you know, people hate hearing aids more than glasses, but we don’t actually have time for that. So, what we do know about the deaf part of hearing people like myself is that we love caption. And what’s not to love? They’re really, you know, cost-effective, uh, incredibly accurate, uh, sorry.
Sam Parr: Keep going. I like it. Keep going.
Tom: Incredibly accurate, uh, and, um, you know, intuitive. People know what captions are, they know how to use them. Uh, in fact, deaf part of hearing people love captions so much that we actually sued Netflix, uh, and now Netflix has to caption all of their content. So, if you’re watching your foreign film with captions, you know, thank your local deaf part of hearing person, you know, make sure to enunciate so they hear you. Uh, but, yeah. Um, grow chip. Um, we knew that captions were incredibly valuable, but we needed a way to get them off your devices and into the real world where you needed them for conversations. Uh, and we looked at all the AR players. We, you know, tried a whole bunch of AR headsets, uh, to bring those captions into your field of view. We made this really fancy chart and we realized one thing. People don’t actually use AR glasses today. No one uses them. Uh, no one’s wearing them in this room. I don’t see them around the campus except me. Um, there’s a lot of reasons why AR adoptions have been so shitty. Um, but, um, the fundamental trade-off in our P&A, in our thesis, is this trade-off of fully immersive content versus true wearability. At TranscribeGlass, we’re focused on just critical information like text and captions. As a result, we built the lightest AR product with all-day battery life and a form factor you actually want to put on your head. Now, into the immediately you describe this describe the product, what it looks like for the listener because a lot of people aren’t watching.
Tom: Oh, yeah, for sure. Uh, so it’s a wearable device. I actually have a demo video. I’d love to play it after. It just shows what it looks like through the insides really quick. Uh, but it’s a lightweight AR product. It’s designed in a retro fit manner, meaning it attaches to your glasses. A lot of our users are older who’s here who already use glasses. So it can fit onto any glasses and work straight out of the box. You have numerous features like, uh, focus adjustment that are catered to the deaf part of hearing. Um, and it has an all-day battery life and it’s incredibly light. People tell us they don’t notice when they’re wearing it. You look through it and you see subtitles, uh, text floating in your field of view. Uh, and you can position it anywhere you want. Is that is that helpful?
Sam Parr: So to to to clarify, I don’t know if I’m too sci-fi here or if this is your product, but I’m talking to you and it would be transcribing what I’m saying right there for your eyes, right? So it’s just live transcription of anything you’re hearing.
Tom: It basically just looks it uh for for the listener, it looks basically like Google Glass, but it turns any set of eyeglasses into a Google Glass looking device. So, so sorry, go ahead.
Sam Parr: And you’re you’re at the end of your time here. So so let’s wrap the pitch.
Tom: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. So, yeah, that’s that’s the product. That’s what we’re building. Um, users love it. Uh, we have over 700 pre-orders, uh, completely inbound from awards we won, we won, you know, for social good, Indian Presidential Gold Medal, we won the health category of Stanford’s largest startup competition. Uh, we also have a tremendous inbound interest, uh, from cinema halls and B2B. They’re all required to provide these accommodations. Uh, and we recently signed an NDA with one of the largest media companies as a way to put captions into your field of view. Uh, now is also a great time to do this. Hearing aids have been deregulated this year, which is crazy. You you no longer have to go to a doctor to get them or an audiologist. You can buy them over the counter. So our product can be right there right next to hearing aids at Best Buy. First time ever that this is possible. And finally, last thing I want to hit is, you know, we built a really cool product, but the immediate thing is like, hey, why can’t someone else build this? You know, you have Fitbit and you have 30 other versions of Fitbit. Hardware, especially consumer hardware, is inherently commoditizable. The thing is, what we’ve done is our revenues do not come from our hardware sale. They come from the recurring subscription revenues that we get, um, uh, on this product. Um, and you know, that scale is really heavily. Um, so I can talk more about that, but just want to wrap it up. Uh, we’re running a pilot trial at Stanford this quarter, officially, if you want, I can connect you to them, uh, and you can try out this product. Uh, that’s also a picture of my co-founder in the corner meeting the President of India. Um, for this work.
Sam Parr: By the way, here’s a picture of me with Drake. Um, all right, so that’s a great way to end a pitch. So you, um, two questions. How does it actually do the live transcription? Is this software you guys are writing or are you using some open source tools that are using AI? What are you doing?
Tom: Yeah, so we’re right now using, um, third-party AS automated speech recognition services. We’re source agnostic, meaning right now we support three, Google, Microsoft, IBM. Their automated system that, you know, stream the captions and display them here. Um, we are also, uh, able to do subtitle files. If you walk into a movie theater, you can load the subtitle file and display it, uh, or another thing called, uh, card interpreting, um, where you can, you know, a person types and then you can stream the captions to your device. We’re moving towards a standalone device model that’s Wi-Fi agnostic, uh, and can work anywhere as these models improve and get better and decrease in latency. Things like Whisper.
Sam Parr: Two questions. Question or point number one. You’re in luck. I am a student to be hearing aid wearer and Sean has someone in his life who wears one too. I have a hearing loss, so I’m I’m actually in the process of getting one now. Okay. Um, the biggest thing with my hearing aid, or why I have a hearing my hearing loss is not watching TV, it’s when I’m out in public, I can’t hear the difference between you talking to me and the background noise of the restaurant. It’s it all sounds like one thing to me, so I constantly have to lean in. So I want to know about that. And number two, um, the whole dementia thing, I learned about that and I don’t I I remember uh reading a little bit about it, but but from my understanding, dementia, the reason why it’s you why hearing people have hearing loss gets dementia is because that part of their brain isn’t working and so they like part partially get a little funky. I think that’s what it is. How does this actually solve that if I’m still not using if I’m not hearing, I’m just reading.
Tom: Yeah. Okay, super good question. Let me hit the first one first. Um, so yeah, uh, hearing loss, the biggest complaint with people who actually use their hearing aids is high noise settings. I hate bars and I hate clubs as a result of the well, actually, everyone has a hard time hearing, but I have a much worse time hearing. Uh, what we’re building here is adding directional microphone so you can isolate the speaker of interest. Uh, so we’re targeting both through the model, right, the ASR model, voice reduction through software, and also hardware, uh, pointing directional microphones at the speaker of interest. That may be able to improve, uh, the situation, uh, a bit. But it is a it is an inherent challenge. Um, Right. The other, uh, the other to address your other point was dementia. Um, yes, the the part of the brain isn’t being uh stimulated, but the there another thing is just the social withdrawal that you get. Uh, you just as a deaf part of hearing person, if you have hearing loss, you hate going out. It’s really hard and sounds sound weird. Um, so you you lose the quality of your social interactions and that withdrawal, the lack of stimulation, that really triggers dementia and a host of other depression as well is actually very comorbid uh as well with hearing loss. Um, And wouldn’t this thing be more more embarrassing to wear than a thing in my ear that no one can see?
Tom: Exactly. Like you like like I don’t know man, you take those glasses off, I might want to hook up with you more than without them.
Sam Parr: That’s uh that’s an honor. But uh, um, so, um, yeah, uh, you know, on our website we say you can use this on dates, so you can use it on dates. But uh, our It won’t it won’t work, but you can use it. You can try. Yeah, I think I hit the move off a bit, but um, so yeah, Welcome to the pod, my friend. Our our goal, our goal is to integrate it fully into the like glasses. You know, we this is that early version of the form factor is was built on, you know, exclusively grant-based funding, uh, that we’ve gotten uh by the US State Department, Government of India. Um, but we’re moving to an integrated form factor in your glasses. Um, we also built it in a retro fit way, meaning mounting because most of our deaf people part of hearing users actually already have glasses. We wanted to work with their existing solution. I agree. I’m going to give you my I’m going to give you my I’ll give you my reaction to this, right? So, I think you did a great job on your pitch, especially at the beginning. Uh, the problem section, you did a fantastic job. You outlined it’s a problem, it’s a bigger problem than you think, and it has all these knock-on effects. So you nailed the problem part. On the solution part, you’re clearly a smart guy and you are building something that’s cool and useful, but I don’t think it’s realistic for two reasons. Number one, like Sam said, I think that the thing looks a little dorky and people are going to have an aversion to wearing it right now, right? So you’re like, well, this is V1, this is the this is the equivalent of the big giant cell phones that we used to have before we got the cool like sleek ones. And I believe you, but you’re in an arms race against Google, Facebook, Apple, all all these companies that basically everybody wants to build AR glasses. Yeah. It’s like the hottest thing outside of AI is AR glasses. And whoever gets AR glasses, that’s the new phone. You can put the screen on your eyes. And so they’re all going to put billions of dollars in making the most lightweight um glasses that have a computer in them basically. And so you’re going to be trying to slim down your form factor using grant funding and all the stuff. And Apple and Google and Facebook are going to be doing this with everything that they’ve got. And they’re going to get there first, most likely, as to having the the the lightweight form factor. And at that point, captions might just be a feature or an app on top of their thing. And so you’re going to waste a ton of money, I think, doing trying to get the hardware to work when you’re not going to be the one who makes hardware for the masses to wear on their their their uh as as like smart glasses. The big companies are going to do it. So I think that’s the problem. Now, the one thing you said that I’m just going to call out, which is that you said, uh, hearing weights hearing aids have been deregulated this year, so for the first time ever you can sell them without, you know, going through a doctor. That was the big light bulb moment for me of, oh, there’s a business opportunity here. It may not be the thing you want to build because you’re like, sounds like you’re trying to do good in the world by like changing the world and, you know, helping people, blah, blah, blah, you know, that good stuff. But there’s somebody out there that’s going to be like, oh cool, D2C hearing aids, going to do that now. Like, you know, that that’s now more possible than it was before because I don’t need the telemedicine component in between. Um, and so I think that’s actually the real business opportunity out of all the things you said. And I think you’re on the right path, but I don’t think you’re going to be the one to do it. I think the big companies are going to make the glasses and then the captions are going to be a feature on top of those.
Tom: 100%. Uh, could I hit that point real quick? Um, yeah. So, I completely agree with you. Uh, Facebook is spending 10 to 15 billion a year right now on their AR product, you know, all of the Apple wants to come out with AR glasses, hopefully in 2024. Um, we want them to validate the AR market. Um, we’re not the thing is was, you know, let’s say Facebook, for example, they’re building an AR headset. They’re not going to validate it. They’re going to own it. They’re going to own it, man. They’re not going to validate it for you to go own. They’re going to own it. 100%. But they need an immersive AR headset to run what is the metaverse. They want to build an headset that can support their existing platform. Mark’s, I mean, Zuckerberg’s vision is, you know, the metaverse, this immersive reality. That cannot run on TranscribeGlass. And as a result, that cannot run on this lightweight form factor, all-day battery life, wearability setup. Uh, so we can much more quickly build a wearable product because we’re focused on captions and critical information for the deaf part of hearing. Uh, that that is, you know, the the core focus of our product. It’s building for wearability uh and form factor right now for a core use case of people who clearly need it, not that broader vision of multiverse multiverse content. Yeah, but there’s other companies. Snapchat wants to Snapchat’s doing it. They just want to put a camera on there to snap a photo. Right? That’s the only use case they care about right now. Google wants to put your notifications and your text messages and your email on it, right? Um, you know, so so everybody’s got a different vision and so it’s not just Facebook who’s trying to do this, who try to build a a whole multiverse of metaverse or whatever the hell. It’s like, you know, everybody’s trying to make the thing that consumers will buy that turns their glasses into a phone basically. Yeah. And um into some version of a phone, maybe a lightweight version first. And so I I I don’t buy that and uh yeah, so for that reason, for that reason, even though I I think you’re you’re good intention and you you’re a smart guy, I don’t think this is an investable product. What do you think, Sam?
Sam Parr: I agree. But I do want to give you kudos because uh I think you creating something hardware-related is ballsy and I think it’s awesome that you’re you’re going this route. As it is now, no, I I don’t think it’s it’s the way it is. But I have a feeling that if you keep going down this route, you’re going to find a better solution soon. And I actually think you should continue to pursue it, but you’re going to find a you you’ve come up with some interesting technology. I also like the fact that there’s like an inflection here, which is that uh hearing aids are now uh Yeah, deregulated. are deregulated and I think that those are always good inflections when you can pounce on those things. But I don’t know if this is the right solution, but it is interesting technology that I think is actually going to be used for something else.
Sam Parr: Cool. Um, yeah. And this is coming from a half-deaf guy. So like I would not want to use this as it is now, but I I think it’s a cool problem you’re trying to solve and I think it’s cool technology. I just don’t think they’re aligned.
Sam Parr: Cool. Right on. All right, thanks Tom. Thanks so much.
Tom: Yeah, thank you guys.
Sam Parr: Best of luck. Our next one is going to start with the big D, democratizing. Oh no. Whatever I see, whatever I see the big D, uh uh I I’m curious. So what do we got?
Bobby: Yeah, from Gandalf the Grey, we go to Frodo the Young. So home is the freshman of the group. Um, he’s an absolute killer, one of my close friends. Um, he’s got a pretty sick startup, so I’ll I’ll leave the rest to him. So home, it’s all yours, bro.
Bobby: So home, come come democratize us. What’s up, Sharks? My name is Soham. I’m the founder of AdmitYogi. We’re on a mission to democratize college admissions using the power of big data and artificial intelligence. But before I can tell you a little bit more about the business, I first kind of want to start with a personal story about myself. I went to high school in one of the largest public high schools across America, down in good old Round Rock, Texas. My class had over a thousand students, including myself. And although our counselors were incredibly hardworking and supportive, they were also massively under-resourced. So when it came time to apply to college, we were always at a disadvantage compared to these far wealthier, privileged students who could shell out literally thousands of dollars for these private college consultants. And this is a nationwide problem. You see, today, if you want to get into one of these elite schools, you’ll need insider strategies. But for the longest time, they’ve been maintained and gate-kept by this mafia of $6,000 $6,000 college consultants. Now, when I was applying to college, one of the strategies that I found the most useful was getting to read through some of my older friends’ applications. Reading through some of their essays, extracurriculars, and awards was really meaningful to me because I got to see how they told their stories. So in turn, I could learn how I wanted to tell my own. Now, with AdmitYogi, I want to ensure that everyone from rural Texas to the bustling Big Apple can experience that same feeling of magic. We’ve built this platform, this database of over 5,000 real applications that were accepted to elite universities like Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. And these applications are the real deal. We’re talking essays, awards, extracurriculars, SAT scores, GPA, you name it. The whole damn enchilada. Sharks, we’re a feast. And we are a startup in 2023, so we’d be remiss without mentioning AI, so. We use an AI-powered algorithm to match high schoolers with students at their dream schools who were successful. Let’s say there is an Indian student in Texas. He wants to study computer science at Stanford University. He can read through my applications, which I spent hundreds of hours working on, for literally the price of a cup of coffee. And what’s really cool is as we start to kind of stockpile this massive data mode, we can start to use artificial intelligence to extract really high-level amazing insights to demystify the admissions process, turning it from this confusing black box into a precise science. And then we can always become this digital private consultant, giving high schoolers personalized, instantaneous, and affordable recommendations.
Sam Parr: So home, I I got a question. Yeah. Um, can you skip to the two parts about the business? So I want to know uh how this makes money and I want to know are you uh if you’re raising money, how how much are you raising and what and what’s your valuation? I’d like to know those two things.
Soham: Absolutely. So we started this business in September of 2022 with $0 of outside funding. We’re on track to finish our first year with $130,000 of revenue, currently 85 in the bank. Uh, we’re growing at a Wow. Congratulations. So, so you started this in Nove uh so you the 2023, your full fiscal year was 180 grand. Oh, around yeah. 180 by the end of 2023. Oh, okay. All right. All right. I got you. Yeah, so uh from September 2022 to August 2023, we’ll have made $130,000 in revenue. And what’s really exciting is we’ve actually helped over 11,000 high schoolers with their college applications and we think that that impact is enormously meaningful coming from a team of students who all went to public high schools. So what what do you charge? How do you make money on this? Yeah, so college students upload their applications on our database and high schoolers pay to unlock them. So if I’m a high schooler, then I’m paying for every person’s application that I’m reading and we call it low profiles, which include multiple applications, essays, awards, activities, you name it. Gotcha. And uh so you charge uh how much to unlock one one one application? So it ranges between $5 and $10 per application. And why are the college kids uploading their thing? That’s a great question. So we pay college students to upload their applications onto our service. We’ve actually built out this direct integration with the common application platform, which is the largest national platform for applying to college. And it takes literally 30 seconds for a college student to upload everything from their extracurriculars, their essays, to their activities lists. And we have over 5,000 applications on our service and a lot of these are coming from schools across the country. Wow. And how’d you get the the customers? How’d you get the people to hear about this? We think that distribution is really important in 2023. So we have a TikTok of over 61,000 followers, all organic, and 30 million organic social impressions. We think that really marketing to Gen Z is super important today because there’s not a single college consultancy out there that can really say that they can access 61,000 minds of 17, 18-year-olds at any given instant. So I’m shocked that like we haven’t made a joke about like is the upsell if you’re applying to Harvard like to tell you not to be an Asian person? Like has that have why haven’t we made like this joke yet? Why has this not happened? I we’re we’re off our game. So are you raising money right now? At the moment, we’re not raising. We uh we’ve never had a need to raise since we’ve always been profitable since day one, but in the future, we are open to exploring. Ah, I only want to invest more now. You did it. Yes. Great pitch. The perfect answer. Yes, that was the perfect answer. Awesome job. Awesome progress so far. This is very, very cool. But by the way, I was going to shout this product out next podcast anyways. I saw you on Twitter and I saw I saw AdmitYogi on Twitter and I was like, oh, it’s a great idea. They’re getting college students. Once you don’t need your essay anymore, they’re paying you a little bit for it. You already did all the hard work, so yeah, whatever. Who cares? Put it in the database. And now they have this database of of college like admissions essays and like the the the stats and the resumes and all that good stuff. So I thought that was really smart. I was going to bring this up anyhow. Um, it’s it’s funny that you’re that you’re here. I got to give you props on two things. Number one, you did two things really good in your pitch. I want to call out. The first is you said at the beginning, you go, you know, before I tell you, you know, I’m the founder of AdmitYogi, here’s what we do. Then you go, before I tell you about the business, I got to tell you a personal story as to like, you know, why I came up with this idea in the first place. And that’s a great way to do a pitch. Once you have somebody’s attention, like if you’re in the meeting, um, and they they can’t really leave, that’s a great way to to to start a pitch. Um, because it it shows your, you know, founder fit with the problem, but also people just want to hear a story. So uh you you get them from going into kind of this transactional like analysis mode to storytelling mode. And so I think that was really really well done. And uh and then the fact that you actually have traction is the the second good part of your pitch. Like this is not a theory. This is something that you actually have in motion. Now, Sam, give me your take of uh would you invest in this? Why or why not? Would I invest? Uh, if I were to learn like if you’re taking this as a serious company, I mean, you’re only what are you? 19 or 20 years old? Like you’re you’re a freshman, you’ve only been working on it for a year or less than a year. You’ve got great traction, I think. Uh, the fact that you’re only charging $5, that’s like a meh. I don’t love that. I think it’s really hard to build a big business on $5. Um, so I would I would I would want to know about what your average revenue per user is, but I think that you are a very investable person, so I definitely am interested. Um, I’m totally, yeah. Can you touch on that a little bit? Yeah. Yeah, so our average customer spend right now is $130. So people pay to unlock these profiles in bulk, anywhere from 1 to 50 profiles at once, and people on average want to unlock 26 profiles of someone at their dream school. And all three of us are really committed to this, so we’re actually considering taking a leave of absence to drop out, work on this full-time instead. How many students uh are applying like how big is the customer base for this? How many students are applying to college um or let’s say, you know, in like kind of this the serious colleges where they’d be willing to pay, you know, for for something like this. How many students is is that per year? Yeah, so in America, there’s 2.2 million students who are applying to college every single year. But if you just narrow that to maybe the most elite colleges, then you have around 400,000 to 500,000 students every single year that are coming into this market. And so how does this get huge given given that what you just said, right? So let’s say it’s 500,000 and let’s say even 20% of that market was to use something like this. So $100,000, or sorry, 100,000 customers, uh that would be like, you know, the absolute like you guys are dominating the market at that point, right? Like So what’s that 5 million? Absolutely. That’s a great question and that’s something we’ve actually thought about a lot at AdmitYogi. So, Sorry, just to do the math. If 100,000 people did it, you said about they spent about 100 bucks each, that would be $10 million in revenue if if that was the case. Right. So, yeah, and and we’re going to we’re going to define big as like 50 million in revenue. We’ll say that’s like the threshold of like things get really interesting. Sure, yeah. So, currently the college admissions market is around $10 billion, but that’s just spending coming out of the top 1% of Americans. We think that by providing more affordable services, we can reach the other 99% and not only capture that massive initial market, but also create a new one entirely and be the biggest player in that space. I think that sounds good. That that sounds good because it’s democratizing, but in reality, what’s going to happen is you’re actually just going to try to take that same 1% because the 1% care the most, have the most money, are the most obsessed, and maybe you expand that to like, you know, the 1 to 9% uh of of the most competitive, you know, willing to pay type of customers. Uh and it’s actually never the the the other 99% that uh that you get to be your customer because the other 99% just don’t have the problem in the same way or don’t have the budget in the same way. And so, you know, it’s it’s very hard to capture that customer versus the person that’s taking test prep, that’s hiring a college consultant, that’s, you know, um, you know, really, really stressing about what colleges they’re going to go into. They’re the ones who are willing to pay for a new solution too. That’s that’s really interesting and that’s actually the initial hypothesis that we had as well, that we’re going to target these 1 percenters who are traditionally paying for college consulting services in the first place. But actually, with this most recent round of early decision or regular decision applications that came out just two weeks ago, we received floods like hundreds of emails in our inbox from these students who were traditionally underserved. Like, we’re talking an Annie from rural Mississippi, first-generation college applicant, never knew about traditional consultants. I mean, they were too expensive for her, but AdmitYogi wasn’t. So, Right. we initially thought that hypothesis too, but as we started surveying our customers, really collecting the data on this, we realized that that actually wasn’t the case. What happens when Harvard’s like, you’re like, oh man, we’re getting all these robots, uh, you’re or you know, and then the the universal college application, I forget what it’s called. Like can they ban you? Uh like can they pull API access? Can that can it work that way? Uh so we integrate with the common application, which is agnostic to university. So let’s say the Harvard University admissions department doesn’t like us for whatever reason, we’re not sourcing any kind of data from them. We’re sourcing it from this national uh national standard. Right. I think what Sam’s saying is if could the common app shut off your access? Yes, that’s what I’m asking. Okay. Uh if the common application wanted to, they could theoretically turn off API access. But again, college students can still upload their applications manually. So it might take five extra minutes to onboard a new application on our service, but fundamentally high or college students own this data, so they’re in the they have permission to upload it to whatever platforms they want, including AdmitYogi and we own the data. Here’s why here here’s why you kind of make me all hot and bothered. Number one, well, typically people are usually really good at getting traffic to their website, so marketing or getting like hype and things like that. And a lot of times the people who are great at that aren’t amazing at creating products. And a lot of times the people who are amazing at creating products suck at marketing and like getting eyeballs. I’m I’m I’ve been toying around your website right now. It looks cool, it looks appealing, it looks well done and you’re saying that you’ve got all these customers early on. I think that that is like very, very, very attractive like from a founder’s uh perspective. So I think you’re really fascinating. The there is like I I’m not convinced that it could be a huge thing, but I am convinced that you could find upsells that could potentially make it big. I think if I’m in your position, I wouldn’t raise money and I think that by the time you’re 30 years old, you could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars because you own a business that makes uh 30 or 40 million bucks that potentially you could sell for $100 million or something by the age of 28 or something like that. But like just the fact that you’ve pulled off the the because it’s a marketplace a bit, because you’ve already kind of cracked that code, I find that to be incredibly impressive. Mhm. Thank you so much. Yeah. I uh I really like this. The one thing I would do is I kind of feel like you’re using the last business model instead of the next business model. So I think what like if somebody came to me today with this trying to solve this problem of how can I help people apply to colleges in a way that helps them be more successful, I would say, oh, fantastic. This should feel like chat GPT. So basically, I should basically be able to go to go to some uh bot that’s going to basically set uh help me with my application with my essay, write my essay or edit my essay, uh with my my application, the you know, the information I put on my application, how to structure it better or or present it better. Um and it should learn off of these successful applications. So it should take a data set of successful and unsuccessful applications and then it should just do it for me. versus a marketplace where I need to go pick and choose, okay, Jasmine got into Stanford, should I pay $10 to unlock her essay? Okay, and then I unlock it. Now I need to look at her essay and I need to compare in my mind how to make her essay, how to make my my essay more like her essay. No, no, no, no, no. I’ll pay you 99 bucks, just help me get into college, right? Like give me a you know, give me a 2X shot at getting into my dream school because you have a chat GPT that’s trained on successful college applications and it will write your essay and structure your your application and even do the application and just let you click submit and go to all these schools. That’s what I think the like if I think about how how somebody going to do this in the next three years, that’s what the solution looks like. Yeah. Sean, it’s really funny that you mentioned that because actually that’s the exact vision that we had for AdmitYogi. We actually tweeted an MVP of this chat GPT like chatbot that can answer any question about college admissions and it’s like fine-tuned on this proprietary data set we built this massive data set of college applications and we actually tweeted an MVP about it a couple months ago, but we really think that with big data and artificial intelligence, especially with generative AI, we can provide students with these hyper-personalized specific recommendations for literally, like you said, 100 bucks. Yeah, because you know, the college application process, first you got to figure out what school should I even apply to? Where do I want to go? And the chat back and forth about like, well, where do you want to go? It’s like, well, what do you care about? Do you care about weather? Do you care about being near home? What do you care about? Oh, cool. Then we recommend these schools and okay, can you help me get in? And and then you’re comparing to like how much does the college consultant cost? Mhm. College consultants charge $6,000 on average. Cool. So you say instead of $6,000, pay 99 bucks once and get into your dream school. And like that’s the pitch that now that that that I think is is really, really compelling. So if you were doing that, I would invest because I think that is a very, very big idea. We should we should go to the next one, but dude, this is wildly impressive. I saw uh Sean, but what you’re saying reminds me, I saw this tweet, this lady was like, uh, it just warmed my heart today that people were doing things in the old school way. I was on a train and I saw two kids copying each other’s homework in their notebooks and it just brought me back to better times before kids were using chat GPT 3 to to to plagiarize one another. Uh and so like I don’t know if that would I don’t know yeah, I I think that that’s like weird to see how kids are going to be doing that in the future, but Brother, you’re impressive. Congratulations. Don’t raise money by the way. Just own the whole thing. So, before you go, can you remind everyone just how how old are you? There were some speculates. I’m 19 years old. Wow. You’re ahead of the game. You are ahead of the game. You should take your leave of absence, but you should just stay right next to the campus and just recruit smart kids to come work for you for free basically while you’re while you’re building a company while they go to class every day. You should 100% bail by the way. You should 100% bail. Yeah. Yeah. If you need help talking to your mom, I’ll I’ll I’ll call her and uh help you out. Appreciate that, Sean. Thank you. Cool. All right, see you. All right, who’s next? So, next up, we got Zane and Matthew, Electric Column, two twin towers, they’re absolute menaces, they’re building out Candid. Um, they’re they’re a love them. So, I’ll let them take it away. Just a bunch of beauties. American Gladiator or Shark Tank? A little bit of Blazer and Blazer. Blazer. What a bunch of beuts. Let’s get them up here. Oh, the twin towers. Look at them. He wasn’t lying. Uh okay, cool. And we got to go a little bit faster because I think we’re taking a little too long on each one of these. So let’s try to hit the points. Just here’s what you got to do. Say what you’re doing, say why you’re doing it, tell us if you have any traction on it, and then tell us if you want money or where you’re at with the business. Sound good? Sounds good. Let’s do it. I’m Zane and I’m Matthew. So we’re building Candid. At Candid, we apply generative AI to blog-based social videos with the goal of helping users get in touch with their mental health. All right, but pause there. I didn’t understand any of that. So, what? It’s generative AI to help me get in touch with my mental health through vlogs? What what does that mean? Give me an example. look like. So essentially, we ask users to record daily highs, daily lows, and then respond to a thoughtful question which we source from psychologists and therapists. Then they can choose which of any of these videos they want to share with friends. And from these these videos, we do topic detection and sentiment analysis um to present patterns to users to help them get in touch with their mental health. So more specifically, so you vlog and we give you insights into what’s going on in your life and help you make sense. Okay, so like an almost like an AI therapist. Exactly. It’s like soft soft therapy, yeah. Like the call. Soft therapy. Okay, love it. None of that hard therapy Sam’s been doing for the last few years. Yeah. All right, carry on. Yeah, and before we jump in, we’d like to tell you a little bit about the problem and and and what we were facing. So, both of us grew up seriously struggling with mental health. I grew up in Thailand and Uzbekistan and didn’t have access to traditional therapy and traditional resources. And Matthew grew up in San Diego and didn’t practically seek out those resources. Now, I tried a couple of things and the thing that worked best for me was journaling. But the problem with journaling was that it took three or four times to start. It’s a hell of a hard habit to to get to stick. So when we started ideating around Candid, it was with the idea of making journaling more accessible and more engaging to users. The problem’s a lot bigger than us, though. Last year, 40% of students were in college experienced depression, and most of them didn’t go out to see out help. Our vision for the future of consumer mental health is that they’re products that don’t seem and come off as mental health products, but have a back-end component that’s strong mental health focused. Yeah, so like I was mentioning at the beginning, what does that actually look like at Candid? Users record videos like they would maybe on a on another type of social media, specifically highs, lows, and reflective questions. They can share these videos with friends, and then we use simple AI techniques to present patterns to users. So we do three things for them, right? We transcribe the videos, we extract emotions, we extract topics, and we do three things. The first is we identify patterns in people’s lives. So let’s say you’re stressed about the college internship search, right? Um and we we play that back for you and help you observe and help you come to your own conclusions about that. The second thing we do is we allow you to smart search through your memories, so you can search for emotions and topics associated with the event you’re trying to look at, right? And then the last thing we do is we build this aura for you every week, which is a generative AI visual um for what your for what your week looked like emotionally. And it’s a color scheme built and tailored to you. Yeah. And so is this an idea? Do you have cust do you have users? Where where are you guys at with this? Right. So right now we’re in test flight. We have about 50 users. We just closed our pre-seed. We’re in dev and in development mode right now. We’ll be launching on the App Store in two to three weeks and we’ll be focusing specifically on Stanford to really get that product market. And we have a lot of How are you going to get customers? Say again? How are you going to get customers? Right. So we’re going to launch at Stanford in the next in the next month and that’s going to be a hard launch and we’re going to use all sorts of distribution strategies that that that are And how much did you raise? You said you raised the seed round or something like that? Yeah, we raised a pre-seed of half a million dollars. Wow, from who? Uh a variety of VCs uh in in the Silicon Valley area. Uh Reach, OVO, Z Fellows, uh Starx. Uh yeah. Okay. And Gsr and Gsr Ventures. And so you uh you’re going to launch that at Stanford, cool, and you can kind of brute force that because you’re there, you got friends, you’re you’re on campus, that sort of thing. What happens after that? How do you get this to like 10,000 users or 100,000 users? Yeah, absolutely. So we really do at first want to take a very controlled approach. So we’re going to go campus to campus. We’re starting at Stanford like Zane said. We’re going to really lock in the method that works the best and then we’re going to take a few similar universities like Harvard, Caltech, um maybe some some universities in in Los Angeles and take that same approach and then grow from there. So we’re looking at high stress environments and we really don’t want like massive rapid growth. We don’t want half a million users tomorrow because we really want to test especially the ethics behind this. Um and ensuring that this is something that’s scalable and like we’re not doing any active harm to users. All right, so so Sam, let’s let’s pause the pitch here and I want to get your reaction to to ideas to an idea like this. Uh how do you think about this either as an entrepreneur or an investor? What do you what do you think? As an investor, I I I don’t understand how it’s the same thing as before, like when you just do the math, getting to venture-sized scale companies, which I don’t know what that is, 50 or 100 million in revenue, something like that, or a nine-figure exit, it’s very, very, very, very, very hard when you’re only making $100 or something like that a year per customer. It’s just you just it’s a very it’s a it’s just a math problem. Uh it’s very challenging to do that, particularly when it’s like a a social-ish app. So as an investor, I don’t think it’s awesome. As someone working on it, I think you guys are in the best case scenario because you have $500,000 and if this dies next next year, then it’s like no big deal. You’re young, you did something amazing and you’re going to have another swing. So from your perspective, I think this is the greatest thing ever. From an investor’s perspective, I’m not it doesn’t it doesn’t tickle my fancy maybe because I don’t see the math on how it becomes huge. Do you agree, Sean? We have a friend who um has an app she uh called Rooted and it’s basically around panic attacks. It’s similar space here. And what she found was she didn’t raise any money because she’s not saying this is going to be a billion-dollar company. But it was a problem she had and she wanted a solution for it and she knew that other people have this problem around panic attacks and it was too niche for like a a huge outcome. But because she built the company in a way that suited how big that market is, she’s going to be really, really successful with it, right? She’s got seven figures of revenue. She bootstrapped it 100% herself. She’s the only employee. It’s profitable and it serves that niche. She acquired most of her users. She has 2 million users, by the way. And and it could it could be a $10 million a year business with four or five people. Right. And so she and she got she’s getting the growth through basically being the top ranked search for if you search for panic attacks like in the App Store. So she she had a strategy around ASO, right? Like SEO, like ASO, App Store optimization uh to be to be the top ranked term here. And so, um what I hear this idea, I think these guys, you know, first, good for you for for even doing entrepreneurship at this age. That’s the first thing. Uh second, good for you for chasing um like a problem that that matters with, you know, cool new tech. So you’re going to learn a bunch about this problem, you’re going to learn a bunch about this tech. Um good for you like Sam said for raising some money, so you know, you’re going to have the ability to take a shot at this. If it doesn’t work, no harm done. You just got your first lessons under your belt and you’ll you’ll do you’ll go on to have your second company, third company, fourth company and one of those will succeed. The thing I don’t like about this is that it’s a lot of work. And what you know, I think a lot of these solutions look really good in PowerPoint, but when they go when they go into the real world, people will simply not do the work to help themselves. It’s like the guy who’s you know, the very first pitch, he’s like, people get hearing aids and then they get annoyed with them or the battery dies and they don’t plug it back in, right? And then it sits on the shelf. Like adherence is a really big problem. They’d rather get dementia than charge their their their switch the battery out. Um and and that’s and so you know, customers go for for typically like the the low friction solutions. And so I think what the the challenge here is that you have built something that doesn’t really tap into human behavior the right way, meaning you’re saying, do the right thing, it’ll help you. And unfortunately, people just don’t do the right thing and help themselves. And so I would love to see you guys slim the product down into something that is simple, easier, a little more addictive to do and has some variable reward that’s like, you know, worth the the work that you put in. If you’ve ever read this book, go go read Hooked by Nir Eyal. Uh have you guys ever heard of that book? Yeah, I’ve read it actually. It’s a great book. It’s about habit formation. It’s a great book and I would basically say, how can we make this a more habit-forming product? Because right now, I would suspect that the work that you’re asking them to do, which is basically proactively go on video and share what’s on their mind is going to be way too much friction for the average person. Um like you know, so so I think you got to find something that’s simpler, um if you want people to actually use it. I think simplicity is at the at the crux of what we’re trying to do. I definitely think, you know, we need to distill it even more. But really what we’re trying to get at here is tapping into people’s existing habit cycles of vlogging. I think the inflection point here is that our generation is the first generation that’s like super comfortable with just getting in front of the phones and just like, you know, spewing their shit, talking their truths, right? Um and that’s what we’re really trying to And you should you should make it detect you should make it detect off of what they’re posting on social media then, so there’s no extra work. If if they’re already vlogging or if they’re already posting stories about stuff, I wonder if you could read that and give them some insights. And then that would hook them to to pour out more maybe after that because then you’d have a zero work solution uh potentially. Like I I don’t know the exact solution. I just know that I have made this mistake. The reason I’m saying this is I have made this mistake. I put in a PowerPoint deck what would be an awesome product and I didn’t let reality into the room and the and when I let reality in the room, it was, yeah, users aren’t going to do all that work at the beginning so then so they’re never going to get the benefits. And um and so that’s that’s a challenge I’ve had in the past and I suspect this reminds me of of mistakes I’ve made in the past. I mean, I might be wrong. Are you guys Are you guys dropping out? What are you going to do once you have your 500k? Yeah, so we’re actually taking a leave of absence right now working full-time on the product. Smart. This is amazing, man. Like look, my my trip my my belief is that this is not going to work as you guys have it set up. I think that that’s still a massive win for you. Um and my like big takeaway is like you we we say this a a bunch. There’s like levels to this game of like building stuff that makes money and products that people like. You guys are like just this conversation, you’re very clearly at the top of the top. Like, you know, luck’s still going to play a role and you could still fuck all this up. But just the fact that you are where you are now, even though Sean said he’s not a fan and I said it the same thing, we’re fans of you and you’re going to win. It’s just a matter of is is it going to be this one or the next one or the next one. But this is really amazing what you’ve built so far. This is a classic thing of like, I can’t wait to see your second company or your third company. Um because you know, I had my sushi restaurant as my first thing. Sam had his thing as his first thing. Like your first business I had a hot dog stand, guys. You guys are doing like you guys are way way better. You use generative generative hot dogs. He Sam would generate them. Yeah. I put them in the bun on my hand and I handed them. They were very generative. You have to be artificially intelligent to eat them. The the um the other thing I would say is um you should stop calling it a leave of absence and start calling it a leave of excellence. People like that shit. It sounds more provado too. If anybody at Stanford wants to take a leave of excellence and come work with me for for a year, come do that. You can email me, Sean at Seanpuri.com. How old are you guys? We’re both 21. Wow. Well, congratulations on your success and uh thanks for doing this. Thank you so much. Thanks so much. Good to meet you. Awesome, guys.