EP 40 - Amigo AI - V2

Dollars Exchanging Hands 0:00 Validation is dollars exchanging hands. I can go talk to 50 of my friends and be like, what do you think about this idea? And it was like, they're wrong offend you. Like, oh, that's a great idea. 100%. And so I was like, no, no, no, no, no. None of that is real validation. You know, we had 47 no's straight before our first yes, as an example. Like, it was a lot of like, no, no, no, no, no. And then by the end of the journey, it was like, hey, uh, yeah, I'll wire you the money without meeting you. It's like, I have heard through the grape line that you have a term sheet or multiple term sheets. I've heard sort of what you're doing. Where do I wire the money? If you cancel the first two million yourself, like, first of all, how are you gonna attract the world's best AEs to come work for you? The world's best sales team is not gonna respect a founder who can't do it themselves. If you're gonna bring on an AE and say your one quota or target is a million, a million and a half. If you yourself haven't done that in six months, you don't have a right to say this is possible. You have the ability to do this. Basically, we double the company's revenue overnight with one new customer. And we're like, oh, great, yes, we have such a good fit here. Let's go and focus only on that. And then we did the hard decision of actually churning everybody else. Fully refunded them, found them a new home, like made them whole, but we stopped working with what percent of your revenue was that at the time? 100% of our old revenue we churned. Everybody. We started from scratch on the revenue side of things and rebuilt from the ground up, but we crossed our previous high within two months and then like 5x that, and then 10x that's product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I called it the product market fit question. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I mean, the name of the show is product market fit. Do you think the product market fit show has product market fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take up your phone, you have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests. Thank you. Ollie, Lightning Strike Product Market Fit 1:49 what's up, man? Welcome to the show. Thank you. Good to be here. So you've built, I mean, everybody's talking about AI agents. You've built a platform of AI agents for the healthcare sector. You've raised over 15 million, almost 20 million uh so far, just raised the series A. So we're gonna get into all that, what happened, how it happened, all the pivots, all the all the shit you have to go through to build something like this. But to start off, because this is the product market fit show, when did you feel like you'd found true product market fit and why? You know, where were you? When was it? What happened? One of the biggest deals we ever signed, which was our very first deal, which was like a multi-six-figure contract, got signed in 16 days during Christmas and New Year's, right? When the world is asleep, when the world sort of shuts down, generally speaking. They came inbound and that felt to me like we had sort of struck lightning. Because it like very clearly indicated that a fairly larger company, relative to us at the time, cared so deeply and has such a big hair on fire problem that their execs were wanting to work through Christmas, through New Year's, in a very short period of time and sort of go through this process with us and take a bet on a fairly early stage company. That was the first moment, I would say. And then the following three to four months, that feeling of we were closing larger and larger enterprise deals. Well, what kind of ACB are we talking about, more or less? We're talking um 150 to 300K. Okay, meaningful. Yeah, meaningful, exactly. As in, like, you know, we're looking at CEOs are only signing off on this, like, this is not bottoms up, there's no PLGs, pure play. You know, what at the time for us especially was considered quote unquote enterprise. We've now moved even more up market. But at that moment, that first 240k deal was the largest deal we had ever signed in the history of our company. And we had done it in like sub-20 days through Christmas and New Year's. Every few weeks, then we were signing deals like that. And that feeling of like the market is pulling the product out of you versus you are pushing it into the market, that feeling is very distinct. And I started feeling that over and over and over. And that gave us the signal that we were on the right track and that we had sort of struck a nerve in terms of the product and platform and infrastructure we had built with this really good match in terms of the pain points that a lot of our customers were feeling. Everybody will tell you that there's no number that indicates product market fit, like when you hit a million or two million or whatever. But when you're signing 100K plus deals consistently, you know, and especially fast paced and you're just getting through cycles and it's a high priority, it's almost impossible to not feel like you have true PMF because it's just it's real money. You know, nobody's spending that money unless they feel they really need that product, which leads me to that question. Like, tell me a bit more about that product at that point, because I know it changed before. We'll get to that. But at that point, what was the product that you were selling that was resonating so clearly? Yeah. The Healthcare AI Agent Platform 4:34 So we were very focused on and still are. We think of ourselves and have had sort of framed ourselves as an infrastructure and platform layer to build healthcare-specific agents, especially those agents that were able to perform tasks and works generally that is has high risk of failure, right? In healthcare, there's a lot of back office administrative functions, there's a lot of rev cycle type of building that's happening. We started our journey being focused on patient-facing agents, patient-facing agents in what I call subclinical use cases. Think like med adherence and side effect management, think like post-discharge, post-surgery recovery, et cetera, et cetera, where messing up and like cost of failure is extremely high. And we had built and have built sort of this entire infrastructure deep layer to be able to build and train and quantify the performance of those agents performing that type of work in the world. And these were voice agents like that you would call or text or email? How did people interact with them? All of the above. So multi-channel, voice, text, email, and then inbound and outbound. So we're reacting, and then patients are talking to us, we're responding, or we're proactively sort of, you know, identifying certain signals that we should be reaching out to those patients. And then multimodality, right? Voice and text. So like multiple channels. We could be over a phone in a web app, in a phone app, whatever the case may be, multiple modalities, and then both proactive and reactive. And so we sort of think of us as the training, the simulation engine, the orchestration engine, memory management, the underlying data platform layer. And then on top of that, you build these agents across the interaction layer. So think of that as the sort of full deep stack. That's what sort of everybody was gravitating towards. Because most people at that point were also like, I want to own control over how the system gets trained on what is in scope, what is out of scope, some of the sort of clinical workflows, the clinical intelligence that's taking place. They did not want to just buy that off the shelf, given the nature of the use cases that we had started off with. And so there was this really good fit at that moment in time where our customers were like, look, I care deeply about how this agent is trained, what the scope is, how it reasons. I want control over that. I want ownership over that. But I'm not going to build and maintain all of the underlying infrastructure to be able to sort of create that. And so it was a really good fit in terms of, you know, everybody talks about an enterprise build versus buy, build versus buy. We landed in this middle ground, which was like you customers should build at the right layer, but buy a different layer essentially. You know, you won that because of customization and control. But what would you say was like the number one reason why these customers even wanted AI agents in the first place? Like what for them was like the obvious problem that this would solve? I mean, we know in healthcare there's a massive labor shortage, right? So a lot of them had way more demand than they could handle. They could not hire and train really high-quality clinical staff fast enough in order to provide the sort of very personalized hands-on care that they wanted their organization to be able to deliver. And so there's this big gap that they were trying to solve for. And for them, is that like more revenue for them? Is that like what's the business ROI? It ends up being better clinical outcomes for them. So a lot of value-based care organizations want to be able to drive and deliver and prove some of those things. It ends up being more revenue for certain organizations or preventing revenue leakage in some cases. That's sort of where a lot of folks are focused on. Or it ends up being more revenue in the form of being able to handle, you know, 2x the volume of patients without 2x the volume of staff, right? Like, as we know, a lot of these organizations are very labor-heavy, labor constrained, and like ops heavy. And so they're saying, okay, can I increase the demand side without having to go and find, which what we know is really hard to do so, really high quality clinical staff that is trained up. And when was this? You meant you mentioned it was like December, what year? So December, January of last year, basically. 24, 25. Okay. And when did you start uh Amigo AI? Uh the January prior. So 12, this is 12 months into our first round of sort of fundraising in capital. So tell me about the origin story. Now that we know that moment when things started to find click, there was a year before that where presumably it wasn't clicking yet, right? But maybe just start with that, like just a little bit of not maybe your full background, but right before you start, Amigo, what were you doing and why did you decide to start this business in the From Upwork To Starting Amigo 8:37 first place? Yeah. So I started my career at Google, spent time there, and then went to a company called Upwork. I was at the internal incubator there, building sort of net news year-to-one product surface area, sort of like new bets for the business, new ventures. And obviously, a lot of the focus upwork, like world's largest labor marketplace, we started thinking through what does it mean to be able to deliver high-quality sort of knowledge work through the form of agents? Right. So a lot of my sort of thesis and initial thinking was in that space. I left to start Amigo, which initially the thesis was similar in the sense of is there really high value labor or knowledge work that is super expensive, super hard to find, supply constrained, that we can build and train these agents for that can then go deliver that quality of work, right? So it wasn't healthcare only in the beginning. That was the more generalized thesis. You know, that was the wave. I mean, end of 22 is Chat GPT, 23 is people figuring out what AI really is. And 24 is when the wave was actually just starting, I would say, for AI agents. Is that what drove you to say, I like I gotta get in on this wave? I got to, I gotta do something with AI agents. It's too big to ignore. For me, it was a month after Chat GPT came out. I started raising the alarm bells saying, hey, what happens to a company like Upwork that is very labor heavy, right? That is a labor market. That was all I was doing all day long was thinking about that problem space, right? And so Feb of 23 is when I actually quit my job. It's very interesting. Like you're literally at the place where it's probably most vulnerable because it's that extra work that you don't need to hire a full-time person for you, like throw it to Upwork, throw it to Fiverr, throw it to these places that just get it. It's the first to go. Exactly. So I started seeing the writing on the wall, like within the month that Chad GPT came out. You can imagine like at the early on, there were companies like Jasper that were doing copywriting. If you remember, that was like the very first sort of like application layer of how I started that raised a bunch of capital. And you could then start saying, okay, well, that's like copywriting as a category, right? And I was like looking at books, like sort of labor marketplace. I'm like, okay, copywriting, a lot of work is like software engineering, coding work, a lot of work is design work, a lot of work is, you know, there's a lot of consulting happening and so on and so forth. And so I just started saying, okay, like each of these categories is gonna get picked off one by one or the next five-year window, let's say. And so it was very, very clear and obvious, at least to me at the time, because it's what November 22, right? Chat BT comes out, Fed 23. I quit my job and I was like, I'm gonna go build a company in this space. It was very obvious at that point. And so then I spent the remainder of 23 basically formulating, talking to a lot of organizations, understanding how they're thinking about at the enterprise level, how those technology changes, how they complete work, how they do work on a daily basis. And so zigged and zagged in the early days and found my way to this concept of, okay, we're gonna go and create these agents, this platform to allow anyone, solo printers included, right? I.e., like those who are doing on Upwork, for example, or other marketplaces like Upwork, like Fiverr, who are like going and trading their time for money that are services heavy. That's where the initial thesis was. Can we take somebody who's delivering a services heavy type of product or value? Can we allow them to train an agent that they have a lot of control over, where the cost of fillery is high, they care a lot about their brand, their reputation, and can we allow them to deliver that same value, but at a much lower price point and increase accessibility on the demand side? So that was sort of the obvious problem that I set out to start. And then raise money in Jan 24 off that and then started horizontally, right? And then over the course of the year, we started feeling a lot of pull and thinking through okay, as the market evolves, as the world evolves, as the technology gets better, where is there forever going to be this sort of concept of services heavy, huge constraint on the supply side, infinite demand that is very expensive, right? You can start now seeing why healthcare became the obvious place for us to go land in and like really narrow narrow end and focus on. I also had a lot of personal experience in the space. I have four sisters, they're all in healthcare. One's an MP, one's a pharmacist, one's an RN. My partner's an RN. I saw, I lived with her during the pandemic and like witnessed her life. A third of her floor, like all the RNs and MPs were quitting every six months, right, during the pandemic. And so I had also experienced firsthand through my family, through my significant other, the life of somebody who is a clinical person delivering care. And so that's when like sort of two and two sort of hit me in the face of like, okay, we've built this really strong technology that allows us to capture expertise and train these systems and these agents in a very nuanced way to then go deliver high-quality services at the time. Let's go and focus in on healthcare only. And that's when we then felt the what I was describing of like December 24, January 25 of, oh, we've hit the spark, like such a good fit in terms of the market that we were in that it started, we started focusing on, where then the rest is sort of history. Perfect. And we're gonna go through, I mean, we're gonna talk, use communities to get your first million in ARR past that. So we're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk actually about how you raise that first round. Is it 100 pitches in 10 days? But before we get to that, I want to zoom in on that. Selling Before Writing Code 13:30 You skimmed over this part, and I get why you would do that. The, you know, from February 23 until you find this first idea, right in January 24. We call that research mode. This is like before you're actually in startup mode, you're building anything, you're doing even the MVP stuff, you're literally just researching. I've done it. It is painful. It's painful for a founder to be there because like you want to start a business. That's why you quit. You want to build something, you want to sell something, and you're like doing research and trying to, and people ask you, hey, what are you up to? And you're like, I don't really know. Yeah, you know, like I'm just tell me more about those nine months. Maybe what did you do? Does any conversations come to mind? Anything you remember from that? Because it's critical to do that right. Yes, you'll pivot, but where you start matters, right? You started broad and then you honed it in. If you'd started somewhere else, it's hard to imagine that you would end up with the amigo you have today. Yeah, those are the the insane days of just being by myself as a solo founder who, you know, and I'm I'm come from a non-technical background, so because of I was in growth and marketing and product. And so because I was in an engineering, I was like, okay, great. Like what's the only real skill set that I should have is like being able to sell, right? Like navigate the market, understand demand, um, and being able to sell. And at the time, if you're if you think back to there's no clot code, there's no, there's no lovable, there's no coding agents, there's no like ability to prompt your way into a prototype. This was like old school stuff, right? And so my entire thesis early on was true validation of demand of an idea is dollars exchanging hands. This was like a very, very specific intentional thing I did. I can go talk to 50 of my friends and be like, what do you think about this idea? And I was like, they don't want to offend you. They're like, oh, that's a great 100%. And so I was like, no, no, no, no, no, none of that is real validation. Validation is dollars exchanging hands. So I was very anchored on when somebody pays me for something, I know that this is a real problem that they have that they're willing to pay for. Like seems very obvious and simple, but I know a lot of like early stage founders, even friends of mine, get stuck in the trap of like, this makes sense to me. So let's just go build it. Or like I talked to seven people and they said this is a good idea. So it must be a good idea. It's because psychologically you just, and I know exactly what you're talking about, you want to go. You don't want to like, you want to let's go, let's sell, let's build, like, let's get started. And slowing down, the problem is if you do that and you get it wrong, you will spend years pushing a boulder up a hill because you never really got to the moment that you're about to talk about. But but yes, it's extremely common. Exactly. So I'll just tell you the full journey basically. I left and like I had this concept of okay, agents, quote unquote, that are gonna deliver some sort of service. But like, where do we start? Right. Because like again, I come from a background of like upperquin horizontal. What category should I begin? Should is it copywriting? Is it is that too late? Is it like Jasper's already done that? What is next on the docket? I started by just going to a lot of my smart friends and being like, what are you using ChatGBT for? Very classic, right? Um, to get a sense of like what are interesting use cases that are that seem very odd at first, right? Because I'm like, it's so early on. I don't want to just want I never was like, yeah, copywriting, copyright. I'm like, okay, cool, what else? And I had a couple of people tell me that they were using it for coaching, like personal coaching, leadership coaching, personal development, health coaching. They were using it for motivation, et cetera, et cetera. And I was like, oh, interesting, weird, but interesting. Okay, let me pull on that thread a little bit. That became a huge category, by the way. Interesting. And I was like, oh, okay. And so then I was like, so who is delivering that service today? Right? What humans are delivering that pain point? Then I started saying, okay, let me go talk to consultants and coaches generally, like executive coaches, leadership coaches, personal coaches, health coaches, and so on and so forth. So let's go. Now I've figured out, okay, there's this weird use case that people have for Chat GPT. That the time was like very niche. Who are the humans delivering this service today? Let's go talk to them and understand their pain points and is there something for them to be built. And so then I just started going and called DMing coaches on LinkedIn. LinkedIn at this time had this thing called services where you can like hire people, it's almost like upwork-esque type of thing. Um, I just like filtered for executive coach and leadership coach, et cetera, et cetera. And like DM'50 people, being like, hey, I'm building this AI thing. You can like build an AI coach for yourself, train it, et cetera, et cetera. Nobody replied to me. Okay. Like one out of 50 replied to me. And then what I did was the my next batch of 50, I added a PS. At the end of my cold note, I would say, PS, I am also looking for a coach myself, potentially. I'm a new founder. And then the next batch of 50, 30 replied to me. Nice. I have you on the call now. And in the call, I would just start pitching, like, hey, you know, I've built this product. It doesn't exist, but I would frame it off to say, I've built this thing, it works in this way. Is this interesting? Does this solve the pain point? Yada, yada, yada. And they're all like, oh, yeah, this is cool. Some of them are like, this is creepy, this is weird. What do you mean, this AI thing? Like, get it away from me. You know, this is again still early on. And some of them are like, oh my God, yes, this makes total sense, et cetera, et cetera. I was like, oh, cool. One of those folks from one of those conversations, they're like, Well, you're gonna be in Florida in two weeks for the world's annual largest coaching conference, right? I'm like, yeah, of course I'll be there. He's like, Oh, great, I'll see you there. I'm like, perfect. What was it called again? And I'm like in a new tab, like figuring out the name, buying flights, booking hotels. So I'm like, all right, let's go. So I book a one way to I book my flights, buy the ticket, show up at the conference. And at the conference, it's all coaches, and they're all much older than me. And they're all looking at me at every table, like, who are you like who are you? You're pretty young. Are you even a coach? What are you doing here? And I just started being like, oh, well, you know, I built this company is for coaches. It allows you to create like an ad coach of yourself and you can train it. There's a lot of like control built into it, yada, yada, yada. And instantly I started seeing eyes light up with like, oh, that's interesting. I would want that, I would want that. And they're like, How much is it? And I'm like, I don't know, like a hundred bucks. Like, oh, done. Okay, easy. Like, oh, sweet. Next conversation, 200 bucks. Next conversation, 300 bucks, and so on and so forth. And you're closing them on the spot or you're getting like interest from them? I'm just getting interest. I'm like, I'm like, I have a I have a wait list, sorry. Cause like there's nothing built by the way. Yeah, exactly. You're not ready. Nothing exists. And I'm like, oh, sorry, I have such a big wait list. Like, I'll get you on there and I'll onboard you in two months. I had one guy follow me around. Every time he would see me for the rest of the two-day conference, he'd be like, How about this? Pull up your wait list, show it to me, and I want you to see, I want you to put my name at the top of that waist. So like I'm gonna stand here and show it to me. I was like, all right, fine. So I like went and did it. I had like a fake list, a fake wait list with like 40 people's names on it. Um and so anyway, conference finishes. And I'm like, okay, but still, I don't feel it yet. I don't feel the validation. I feel the excitement, I don't feel the validation. So I did what everybody does, or I think everybody should do. I went, created a Stripe account, and created a one-time product on Stripe for $499, one-time deposit to build your AI coach on Amigos platform. And then I sent that out. And three people paid me. So I was like, oh shit. And keep in mind, right, $500 for a solopreneur is a non, like it's not $10, $20. It's real money. This is for them real money, right? This is like they're gonna think twice before ever putting their credit card in without seeing the product, without seeing a demo, without seeing anything, just physically me being there and having a quick 20-minute conversation turns into a stripe link from a stranger in which they put in their credit card and pay me $500, each of them. That then I felt like, okay, I have something here. This is real now. I did the same thing in parallel with a larger enterprise y coaching organization that was like, hey, we want to like build an AI coach. We don't have the technology, we don't have the engineering infrastructure. I was like, oh, don't worry, you can white label my AI coach. I got you. And then they were like, all right, cool. Can we see a demo? I was like, yes, of course. And then I went, and to what degree I want to say this, I don't know. I fully faked it. Okay. Like I went and I had basically somebody, an engineer, and go like create like a local single system prompt that I send in the single system prompt. I said, record your screen and like put in these in back and forth coaching conversation about dealing with a conflict with a with a colleague. Then I went to YouTube, grabbed the voice clip of the head coach at this organization, went to 11 Labs, cloned her voice, put in each of the snippets that's from the video screen one by one, went to Sony Vegas Pro, stitched all together and sent it over as a demo. You can be jaded about it, but the reality is now you can 100% do it. And by the time these people wanted it, you probably could have done it, right? So it's like, how do you just get your way to them seeing what you already said? Exactly, right? Now you could do this in literally two minutes, but I was like stitching it together in like six hours with this manual process, send it over to them, then went to their leadership team to present and be like, hey, here's what we do, here's who we are. And the person whose voice I had cloned was like in love. She was like jaw dropped. She's like, this is the craziest thing I've ever seen. When I played the demo and I heard my voice, I was like, oh my goodness, this is the future. And I was like, all right, cool. They're cool. We want to do a pilot with one of these large organizations, like a very large Fortune 100 organization. I was like, oh, okay, great. Sounds good. And they're like, we'll pay you, you know, $1,000 for the pilot, and then we'll do sort of like a Rev share model. And I was like, $1,000? No. Like you're a larger organization. How about and I just like you pay me $20,000 for a three-month pilot. And they're like, $20,000. No, no, no. You're too unproven. Yada, yada, yada. But we'll pay you $10,000. There you go. Done. Here's the wiring information. And they wired me $10,000 the next day. So now I had basically a quote unquote enterprise contract that was like, we'll buy a thousand seats as X dollar value, yada, yada, yada, yada, which is like worth seven figures at full scale. I've got a $10,000 deposit for a pilot. And I've got four solopreneurs who have paid me $500 each. So I've got $12,000 in revenue. And I have not written a single line of code, nor do I have a team, nor have I fundraised, nor do I even have a co-founder and CTO at this point. That to me was the early days of like, okay, now I have built a conviction. I am solving a real pain point for people who are paying me real dollars. We have revenue in the bank with nothing to show for it other than just me talking to them. That's what then I went and spoke with a couple of, I was having already conversations, and I convinced my brilliant co-founder and CTO now to leave his job at Databricks to come join me. So he quits. We meet in September of 23. We work together for four months. You know, I give him this entire journey, this experience. We start iterating and building for those early customers. Jan first he quits. This is Jan 1. Now we're in what, 24? Now we're in Jan 124, precisely. Okay. He joins me full-time. Now basically, we start going and fundraising. Fundraising Sprint In Ten Days 23:24 Jan 15th, we kick off our fundraise and we pitch 100 investors in 10 days flat. You love this show. You don't want to miss the next episode. Why would you? So hit that follow button. Trust me, it's in your own best interest. We're gonna break that down. But I think one of the things I just want to point out is so nine months effectively invested in true validation. And I think the way that you did it is, I mean, it's it's in a sense, it's like textbook classic, but it's also for some reason, I think it's just because it's hard. Most founders are still these days, today, right, don't do it. Like lean startup is an old idea, right? Like you think people will be doing this, but still many people I think don't do it. And this is also what, like, you know, bootstrapping is typically when you don't do it funded. But this to me is bootstrapping in the sense that you kind of like fake your way to the first thing so that you can. How do you get a great co-founder? Like you show them some traction, right? And how do you get capital? You show a team and some traction, right? And then once you have those three, you use it to get more traction and you create this virtuous loop, but you have to get the things spinning. And, you know, getting people to buy in and validate the real dollars is to this day. I mean, it's just it's the best, it's the most proven way to know that you're gonna build something that people want, which is the foundation of startups. Exactly. And that Feb 23 to December 23 journey was purely focused on that. Um, and even all my founder friends today who like recently have quit, to your point, still got into the trap of like, I talked to 10 people, they love the idea. Let's go, like, I should go raise, right? I'm like, no, no, no, no, because the opportunity cost is high too. It's like, yes, everybody's like, yeah, let's go raise and like get some capital. Okay, sure. But like if you truly, truly inherently don't feel that there is value in building this and you don't like care about like sort of this type of opportunity, et cetera, et cetera, it just becomes a lot harder. All the struggles you'll deal with, it's a lot easier to give up. And your opportunity cost is enormous, right? I'm gonna invest a seven to nine month window in validation so that the next five years exactly. Because the most dangerous mix is something people don't really want with a founder who's tenacious, relentless, won't give up. You may get that, you get five years away. So you get a bad founder, a weak founder, they'll give up in two months, so whatever, no big deal. But that mix is deadly. So let's move on to to now we'll we'll do the two segments. The first one you already alluded to a hundred pitches in 10 days. Let's start at the beginning of that. Like, first of all, it's a pre-seed round. How much are we trying to raise? Like a lot of people for pre-seed specifically, they'll just meet like five VCs and and you know, get a million bucks and call it a day. Like you, you made this a process. How did you think about it? From the beginning, it was the specific partner that I wanted. Um, and how do I go find that person? Right. And to your point, everybody is like in the camp of okay, cool, let's just talk to 10 people. If like this thing is real, they'll give me capital. Like, no, that's not at all how it works. Because a couple of things. One is the partner that you're looking for, you might not meet them until pitch number 60. But that was actually the case for us. Um, I did not meet the person who I was like, this is the person who I want to be on my cap table. I want the first check for. You didn't know, it's not like you knew I wanted this firm. You're just like, I'm gonna meet a lot of people till I meet somebody that clicks. Precise, exactly. And everyone does the thing of like, here's my spreadsheet, here's all the firms, here's what I really, my dream firm that I want to raise from, et cetera, et cetera. But like I think at early on, it none of that matters because all the if you're crushing it and if you're real and you're growing, all those firms will want to write checks into you eventually anyway. The most important thing that matters is like who are the early folks who are betting early, who are betting on the team, who'll stick with you as you pivot, right? Because again, they're betting on that team more so than anything, who you have a really strong relationship with and the connection is there and aren't just like, you know, yeah, cool, I like this space. So I'll dump like a few checks into this space and like see what happens, right? Because then when you pivot, it's like not a good fit anymore if you end up pivoting, which most companies end up doing to a degree, right? And so yeah, for us, it was a couple of things. One was I wanted it to be concentrated in a short period of time because the core business is actually going and getting more customers and like building product, et cetera, et cetera. So I did not want to fundraise for four months straight. I wanted to do it in a very short sprint. And then two, I don't come from a world of like really strong connections. So I'm not like I spent two years at some VC firm. I then went to a Stanford NBA, and then now all my friends are at this firm. So it's like easy for me to go and have the 10 conversations. I come from like, you know, I'm Canadian. I'm not even from the States, right? So like coming down to San Francisco and working here was like a new experience for me. It's good because it's it's more uh, you know, sometimes I talk to founders sometimes, it's like, oh, I raised a $10 million seat. How oh, well, I already knew like 10 VCs from my passion. I'm like, all right, like I can't learn anything from that. Nobody can learn it, so this is much better. Precisely, exactly. I effectively did not know anybody uh in the space. And so I was like, oh, great, like what am I gonna do? I did what I did the first time around when I was like validating my ideas of let's go talk to folks, but talk to them in a very concentrated period of time with a well-scoped thing, with a good sense of like, here's who we are, here's what we're building, here's a long-term vision, here's why it's exciting for us, and like, do we have the alignment or not? Right. And so we went through the sprint, flew to New York, stayed at a tiny, tiny like bunk bed style situation. Cause again, my father and I were like, we haven't raised anything at this point, right? And basically just spent 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. pitching, 5 p.m. to midnight building. So like we'd like continuously would take the day's feedback and learnings of like what are interesting demos to showcase some of what we're saying, right? John and my CTO would basically like start building after dinner. I would pitch all day and we'd talk essentially. It was like, you know, 14, 16 hour days with no sleep. And we just went through the cycle for two, three weeks straight. At the end of which we then went and got multiple term sheets, uh, ended up with a partner that we really, really wanted, our top choice partner. We got a really good fit with them and then started. And then once we closed that round, uh, we ended up then like everything that said and done, legal, all that good stuff. The round closed five days before my one year anniversary of quitting my job. So it was like a full, like almost end-to-end one-year journey from the day I quit. And I actually, you know, I'm I have an immigrant dad who was like, What are you doing? Why are you quitting? You know, you're on a visa, we're gonna lose your, you know, TN visa in the States. And are you kidding me? Like at the time, if you also remember FAP23, like layoffs happening, interest rates rising post-verp era. Um, it was like a very chaotic world. Even my my two previous managers were like, Are you insane? This is the worst time to quit. What are you doing? And I was like, No, no, no, I'll figure it out. Don't worry. What's the worst case? In a year, I'll go back and try to get another job. Like, okay, no big deal, but I want to take this thing right now. And so I told my dad, I was like, give me a year. If in one year I can't figure it out, I'll think about what's next. Am I in the wrong space? Am I like fit out, cut out for this? You know, have I spent the time validating the thing I want to build? If I don't get to conviction on something, it's fine. You know, I'll try to get another job. It's like not the end of the world. I've done it a couple of times now. And so that like five days before the one year is an important milestone for that reason because I had mentally given given myself a year to like ide it and come to conviction. And I already had some initial signals based on my previous roles. But yeah, we when the when the wire hit for that first pre-seat five days before the one year, I went on a dad with my on a walk with my immigrant dad. And I was like, look, it's real now. It's crazy how uh the power of deadlines. Tell me, uh, you know, we'll go through a few kind of deeper questions on the fundraiser process. Warm Intros And FOMO Momentum 30:20 The first one is the hardest part I find of trying to run a tight process is in the first place, just getting the meetings, right? It's easy enough. Obviously, you go online, you find a bunch of firms. Today you ask Claude, it'll spit out 150 names. That's the easy part is building the list. Did you go cold? Did you get intros? Like you were really well networked. How did you do those initial reach outs to whatever 100 firms or however many was? Um, I would say it was 80% through warm connections. And so, yes, I personally didn't have the network, but I had built enough of a friend group, a network, a professional network where I could ask, and I had built enough trust and credibility with those folks who were then willing to make interest for us. And how did you do that specifically? Did you just go out and be like, hey, who do you know that you can introduce me to? Or did you do the work of saying, like, I see you're connected on LinkedIn with XYZ firm? Can you make the intro? It was a lot more of like, here is the people that I want to go meet. Who is connected to those people that I know, either through first or second degree degree connection? And then, you know, giving them doing all the hard work of creating the blurb for them, forwardable emails, yada, yada, yada, having a spreadsheet, mapping things out. Like tactically, of course, that's just baseline, right? We did all that good stuff and then used a lot of sort of like, can I get in front of somebody? Again, I don't personally know them, but part of it is this, right? Just as a founder CEO, you're selling. That's your only job. You're selling to candidates to come join you, you're selling to investors into believing in your vision, you're selling to customers. And so part of that is like finding the right way into those conversations where you come into them with some level of trust and credibility built built up, right? And so I found that doing it this way was much better than cold out on it. I'm a big believer that these, especially these early rounds, but potentially all fundraising rounds are fundamentally about FOMO. Like that is just the number one driver of getting around done fast, on good terms, and ideally with people that you like and believe. And whether you build relationships before or not, you still need FOMO to just get that deal done quickly. And if you come in cold, it's just gonna be hard to get the response rates you want, get the attention level, even if they respond, maybe it's in three days, maybe they put you out in two weeks. You know, you're not prioritized. Whereas if you come in warm and ideally in a perfect world, the person making the intro is saying, not just, hey, here's somebody raising, but like, hey, I know Ali, he's a really solid founder, you should really meet him. They're putting that social cred behind you. It's just way easier to kind of build momentum and get a hundred meetings in a week or two versus in a you know stretched out over two months. Yep, exactly. Um, yeah, the FOMO thing is real, by the way. The second we had our first term sheet, everything else fell into place. Like many people came. The the craziest thing I'll say is I had people cold, like investors cold DM me on LinkedIn saying, Hey, I heard you got a term sheet. Um, I will also contribute 150k. This is for your pre-seed round. This is not for my pre seed round. It's the power of FOMO. Like, I just want to point that out. You are at this point an unproven founder, you have basically no traction, and VCs are DMing you. Like, please let me into your round. And they're saying, I don't even need to meet you, by the way. It's like I have heard through the grape line that you have a term sheet or multiple term sheets. And you know, I've heard sort of what you're doing. Just I don't need to see your debt. I don't like just I'll where do I wire the money? It was insane to me. As somebody who was like at the beginning of the fundraiser is like, I don't really know anybody that well. Like, how am I gonna be able to do this? You know, we had 47 no straight before our first yes, as an example. Like, it was a lot of like no, no, no, no, no. And then at the end of by the end of the journey, it was like, hey, uh, yeah, I'll wire you the money without meeting you. 180, yeah. Like, wait, what where were you two weeks ago? What has possibly changed in the two weeks? Nothing other than to your point, follow. Well, you know, I just just to in to kind of give some of the perspective of what's happening here, because it's easy to just read this and say, wow, VCs are pretty dumb, like lemmings, you know, but and there is maybe some truth to that, but but what's happening, you know, behind the scenes is as a VC, not getting into the thing that becomes huge is so much costlier than than losing the 150k that you would have put in than that going to zero, because you really need these outliers. And at pre-seed, frankly, there's just not that much, like you haven't every pre-seed has no revenue, and so you don't have that many signals that you can like you can't DCF it and make your own first principles analysis, not that easy. So, for better or worse, when something gets hot, that becomes a signal in of itself, and all of a sudden it becomes well, if other people like it, maybe it is really good, and and then you you kick that FOMO in where it's like, shit, if I don't put in 100k and I miss on it, and it becomes a huge thing. I've lost out on so much money, and you get that kind of FOMO tailwind, right? So the other thing I wanted to ask actually about was because we've talked a lot about fundraising with many many different founders that come. Finding The Right VC Partner 35:06 Obviously, process is always the thing, FOMO's a thing. But what as as you go and you have these hundred conversations and you mentioned 47 no's, I'm sure you iterated and changed it over time. What are some things that you feel like you learned when it comes to pitching VCs that maybe if you would have known like on day one of doing this, you would have gotten only 20 no's up front. You know what I mean? Like it just would have made the conversion a bit higher. Yeah, I mean, this is the challenge, right? So, like I actually think there is this thing of like VC product fit or VC company fit quite a bit, where there were some folks that I was pitching where they have written off a certain space in their mind. And it just does not matter who you are and what you've built, if they don't have any thesis or any goals or any desire to invest in a specific space, it really doesn't matter. You can start disqualifying some of those before meeting them. So, like you can turn the 47 no's before you get your first CS into 10 no's, maybe, right? Because there's a bunch of them in the middle that would have said no, no matter what. And can you sick identify those signals early on? Can you and like a lot of VCs nowadays will like write, you know, Substacks or on Twitter and they'll tweet things that are like I have this thesis in this space, and like here's what I believe is happening, et cetera, et cetera. And so like if you can find those people who already believe that there is a big company to be built in the space, then that makes your job much easier because now you just need to convince them that you are the right people to build that company. Whereas in some cases, I was having to first educate the VC. Here's let me tell you about the space, why this is an interesting space to invest in right now, why it's massively going to change right now. When I say services being delivered as software, what does that actually tangibly mean? What is insights that I have? Like there's a lot of education that you can end up doing on things before you even get to like, here's who I am and here's what company I'm building. If you can skip those, if somebody comes in being like, Yeah, I know there's gonna be a massive company in the space, just tell me why it's you. Very different conversation. So there's sort of this like fit thesis piece that I think a lot of people, or at least early on in the first time I had fundraise, I was not doing at all. After that, I started doing a lot more and it just made our life a lot easier as well. Perfect. So that's the the fundraising kind of Communities That Drove First Million 37:12 segment. And then the other thing we were gonna talk about was you got your first million in revenue through communities. Tell me about that entire like the thinking behind the strategy, and then we'll get into the tactics of how you build communities and make that kind of drive sales for you. Yep. So once we sort of narrowed in our focus and realized sort of we want to go all in on healthcare specifically, where there's a lot of opportunity, my co-fund and I care a lot about the space. And so we're like, okay, let's go do this. But again, the challenge we had was we don't come from a healthcare background, right? And so we're not like XMDs who spend five years at City Block as an example or one medical or whatever the case may be, to then say, look, we already have such a strong network of other healthcare operators, founders, you know, C-suite execs at hospitals, et cetera, et cetera, that we could just go sell to them. And so what I then ended up doing was I basically joined a couple of healthcare-centric communities with the goal of saying, hey, I'm here as a newer healthcare founder to learn about the space everything I can. And I have a thesis and a vision, and I am building a company, I'll be up front and transparent with you on that front. Um, but I want to understand and hear from you what I'm building, does this make sense for you or not? Sort of what I did with coaches early on, but through specific communities this time around. And oftentimes then those conversations then would say, wait a second, I'm a founder of a healthcare startup, or I'm working at this heart health system, whatever the case may be. Um, what you're describing, like we have a need for it. And so then it was almost like I wasn't being very salesy or pitching them by this product. I was saying, I'm newer to this space. Here's my current thesis. Help me formulate and like see are there blind spots in my vision? That then wouldn't translate into actually, I have need for your product. Are you ready for me to buy? And then that's where we got our first million of revenue. And that's also another signal of like, you know, everyone else is like, you're pushing a boulder up a hill. Eventually the market starts pulling it from you, right? Like I could feel the market pulling the product because I didn't need to be salesy to get to our first million. Folks were like, I need that thing. How do I sign up? Where do I sign up? How much does it cost? The conversations went in that direction from them asking it versus me forcing it. So maybe give me like a like an example, let's say, of, you know, because I think building through communities, I hear a lot of founders talk about it. And I think very few founders actually do it properly, like make it work for them. Tell me maybe an example of like a community that you saw, like how you actually penetrate it, how you post consistently, right? In order to drive traffic. It's easy enough to go on Reddit, find a forum, and like make a post, but that's one post, right? Like, how do you make this something that you can do recurringly and then get a million dollars in revenue versus just like one or two customers? Yeah, we focused on um like paid communities. So we did not do something like, and I don't mean like Reddit or subreddits, et cetera. I mean like closed paid Slack channel communities or things like that. Mainly because we found that if you're paying to be part of this community, there's like a higher bar to cross to join. And people will also be more responsive and active if they're actively paying for it, right? And like the community, the first community I joined was like $20 a month subscription. And this is a community of who, for example? This of just healthcare operators. It's like very specific to the to the audience that I was going. And you just go, you just search like healthcare communities, whatever, you just look through them, start finding them, or you ask people in the space what's really good. We asked people exactly. Like at DMU and I was like, Well, are you part of any communities? Do you what newsletters do you read? What do you what media do you consume? Right? Because I'm like, where do my people hang out? That's basically what I'm trying to understand. And I came across a community that was like 20 bucks a month, paid community. It was a Slack channel. I was like, okay, cool, let's go join it. And in there, I introduced myself, started DMing a few folks, working on interesting things, and then basically went and started having the conversations there. Like some of the folks that I closed that were in that first million dollars, I initially met through there. And then I, you know, I invited them to a conference that we were hosting or sponsoring two weeks, two months from then. Um, and then I was posting on LinkedIn. And so, like, let's give you, I'll give you one example. That founder then bottom ego. Uh, it was like a 200k plus deal. And again, it will we didn't go at it as like, hey, buy my thing. It was purely like you're building something cool, we're building something cool. Let's chat founder to founder. Because they're building what? They're building their practices when you say they're building something cool. They're building practices or like the consumer-facing digital health company. Gotcha. And so I was like, okay. Or so I had the first conversation, and then they came to the event and they saw me speak as on one of the panels. And then they saw a couple of my LinkedIn posts that popped up and like brought me back to top of mind for them. And then finally, a month later, after like three months end to end of like multiple engagement, like touch points, we met them at two conferences, had two virtual conversations. They saw two of my LinkedIn posts that resonated with them. Did they actually purchase? So it's not like, hey, I'm just gonna cold DM, have a conversation, and we're done. It's more like you still have to do the relationship building, but the initial entry point that came in was hey, I'm in this community, you're in this community. We would say it explicitly. I found you through this paid community that we are part of. It's not like a random cold DM. I saw what you're building, I think it's interesting. I'm building something interesting, would love to pick your brain. That specific was the campaign that we ran from this one community in a very non-salesy way that led us to eventually close a million dollars of revenue. And the total cost was literally $20 a month. This is what all the like, whether it's the community or the events, any of these things are just a way to help them filter out, right? Like if you run a cold email outbound campaign of which you can do, and I just had like a founder on here, that's how he got his first million, but it was half a million emails for 1% response. I mean, that's what you and so if you have unlimited, like if you're a horizontal product, and in his case it was like customer success, right? It's like, okay, you can run that, you can do that. But if you have any sort of verticalization, you just can't afford to have only a 1% conversion because you'll run out. So, how do you get it to 10%? And the way you get it to 10% is if you think about it on the receiving side, is you have to make yourself jump out somehow. You've got to just be like, oh, it's not just another cold thing. There's some sort of filtering. So just being able to say, I'm part of this community, that you know, from the universe of whatever infinite number of people, you've gone down to the thousand members in that community, right? Like you've you've filtered a lot. You show up at an event at a conference, same thing. Like that conference is gonna have hundreds, maybe thousands of attendees, but not tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands. So you've just you're just helping them, you're just trying to find ways of how do you filter out for your customers so you're not competing with everyone, you're just competing with a subset, and then your conversion rate will dramatically improve, assuming that, of course, you validated and and you're solving a problem that's actually, you know, that they want solved. Exactly. Like when we did the to give you an idea of si scale and numbers, right? This community has like 2,000 people in it. When we filter down to the folks who we actually wanted to speak to, it was like 200. That's it. It was tiny. It was a tiny group of people. And so, like our conversion rate could not be like 1%, right? Like it needed to be much higher, but it was able to be much higher because it was so targeted, so focused, and things like that. And nowadays everyone's like, you know, like. AISDR, basically, right? And like you can't really do that at scale and enterprise and land where relationship building is so important, especially you can't do it when you have no brand, no credibility. Like, you know, you're fighting your first set of customers to make a bet on you. It just needs to be done in a very thoughtful, intentional way. And it has to be done by founder and CEO. Like I've told also all everybody I've spoken with, you should sell the first million. In my case, I sold the first two million myself personally. If you can't sell the first two million yourself, like, first of all, how are you gonna attract the world's best AEs to come work for you? Right? You the world's best sales team is not gonna respect a founder who can't do it themselves. If you're gonna bring out an AE and say, you're, you know, your one quota target is a million, a million and a half. If you yourself haven't done that in six months, you don't have a right to say you, this is possible, you have the ability to do this. It's very different when founder CEO does it, and it's very important that founder CEO does the first X million themselves before then building out a team. Because also you lose all the learnings, what resonates, what doesn't resonate, like those first batch of conversations that result in the first million of revenue is the foundation on which you set your vision, your story, your product roadmap, the way you, your narrative, your entire GTM engine, the people you hire to sell, everything comes off of that. So it just becomes so, so, so critical beyond just like, yo, look, I've had not a million dollars in revenue. It's like, no, no, no, I've built a foundation to get to 10, which will then get me to 100, which will then get me to billion. It's all systems building, right? Plus, it's it's a place in in like, you know, the head of sales is the first one to go, and it's the most turned over position. Like it's the one place you need to be able to say, I know this person's not doing it right because I've done it, versus always being guessing, and then it's just you wasting months and quarters and you don't know. Is it the product, is it the marketing, is it the sales? You just have no idea because you haven't sold that million yourselves. Precisely. The Pivot That Churned Everyone 45:47 One thing that we didn't touch on is we talked about the beginning, you were kind of horizontal play by product market fit. You were focused on, you know, the healthcare, and we mentioned pivots, right? What tell me a little bit? Because I know that there was a big kind of pivot moment. Tell me about maybe the before, during, and after of that story. Yeah. So it was a couple of things that caused us to do this. And like, and this is the other thing is like, is this even a pivot or is it a narrowing of focus? But slightly different, right? Like pivot, you could say, like the Slack story of like, oh, we were trying to build a video game and then we're like, hey, we're gonna be. Yeah, that's the big, big pivot. This is like a small within pivot, yeah. This is like the core thesis of hey, we can build AI systems that capture really good expertise that can go and deliver service, service-heavy workflows in the form of software in a with a high degree of quality. That thesis foundationally stayed. Initially, we were serving both solopreneurs, SMB, and enterprise, right? So we're like serving a very different set of customers. And then we were layering out a second layer of complexity, which was doing leadership exec coaching. We were doing consultants, marketers, we were doing a little bit of health stuff. So it's just like all over the place. And so we then said, okay, a couple of things happened. One was I saw the path actually to 10 million of ARR in that old world. I stopped seeing the path to a billion run rate. And so it was like, I felt like we were climbing the hill, and the top of that hill wasn't the end state we wanted to land in. And we were like still a baby of a company. So like we could have kept going. It was working, it's not like it didn't stopped working. You were doing how much in revenue, more or less? We were doing just under three, two, three hundred K of revenue. Yeah. But like fourpreneur, like, you know, ACVs are five, 10K, right? Um, and so we were just like servicing that archetype of customer, generally speaking. And we're like at a few hundred K. We had raised our seed round. Um, and we're like, okay, cool, you know, let's go get to two, three and raise an A, and then we'll try to get to 10 and so on and so forth. But again, going back to like if my co-founder and I lose the conviction that this is a 10, 50, 100 billion dollar outcome, um, we need to instantly change direction. Even if there's still a lot of room to go, right? Even if like we're at the beginning of a hill, it's still a hill. As soon as you see that end state being 10 to 15 million of revenue, not 500 million or a billion of run rate, then now it's opportunity cost. Now we're wasting everybody's time, we're wasting our time, we're selling a story to the world, we're sharing a story to the world that we don't no longer believe in, right? And so that obviously was like a very big moment. The other thing we started realizing also was we had just built a more enterprise great platform that a lot of our earlier customers were only taking advantage of 10 to 20% of the actual machinery we had built. It almost felt like at some point we started selling the tank to somebody who wanted a bicycle. And we're like, why don't we just point our machine to people who want to buy a tank? Like essentially exactly what we have actually built. And so that's sort of where we were sitting was we looked at our customer base. We're like, this tiny sliver actually is the future of the company. And we can build a large business here that is like interesting, that we care a lot about, that we personally have a lot of deep conviction in, um, that a lot of our team members have a lot of deep conviction in, that we have personally seen the pain points consistently around. But the core thesis is also consistent. It's not like we're full 180ing. The core thesis of service is heavy, supply constraint, high quality is important, high risk of failure. Like let's go build AI systems or agents. None of that. Was there a customer or conversation in healthcare that you saw that was that was like telling you that that was the one and not the others? Uh yes, a lot of health coaches started coming to us. And then that customer that, you know, bought us um during that Christmas break. That 10K enterprise, yeah. That that went to that was a 240k deal essentially. The first that would be like basically we double the company's revenue overnight with one new customer. Um, and we were like, oh, great, yes. They see the long term, they see the we have such a good fit here. Let's go and focus only on that. And then we did the hard decision of actually churning everybody else, fully refunded them, found them a new home, like, you know, made them whole, but we stopped working with what percent of your revenue was that at the time? Um, well, 100% of our old revenue we churned. Everybody. We started from scratch on the revenue side of things and rebuilt from the ground up, but we crossed our previous high within two months, and then like 5x that, and then 10x that. And so, like, we started the bet that we had made the hard decision worked out very quickly. And again, that's when I started feeling the pull from the market, was when we narrowed the focus and went to enterprise. Was that hard to sell? Like you and the founder to you and your co-founder to align it. Was it hard to sell to investors? Was what was the hardest part of having to churn out, like, you know, today you're like, well, it's 200k revenue, whatever. But at the time, like it was 100% of your revenue or 80%. It's, you know, it didn't come easily. You know, I'm really, really fortunate that it was not hard with my co-founder. We were very aligned very quickly. We were just like in sync instantly. We did not even have to debate too much or argue too much about this decision. We were like very quickly, like, yeah, this makes a lot of sense. Um, and we were very open with our team as well. We were very open and very transparent with our team around here's what we are thinking right now. Here's what's working, here's what's not. We actually did like a 45-day sprint to make a decision on a pivot. Like we did it very openly. And we, again, fortunately had to have a really strong founding team who all believed in us as leaders and understood the nuances and the pros and cons and how we're thinking about things. And investors, again, we were lucky because they were just like, we bet on YouTube. That's the whole reason why we bet on this company is we bet on YouTube. So if we if you truly believe this and you we understand the logic and how you're thinking through this, we're in. So it was not actually quite hard to do this, which was the very, very fortunate part, I Final Advice And Closing Prompts 51:22 think, for me. We'll end it there. I'll just ask that one last question we always end on. What would be like your number one piece of advice for a founder that's kind of in the you know, pre-seed, seed stage, finding product market fit? Validation only happens when dollars exchange hands. Period, full stop. It does not matter. There is no other explanation or excuse other than that. That's one. Two, your co-founder is so, so, so important. I went and lived with my co-founder in a tiny studio, had breakfast, lunch, dinner, spent 24-7 together for a few weeks, worked together for a few months before we went all in and made the decision. From CEO to CTO, like the way I think about it is your CEO needs to be able to sell anything your CTO can build. Your CTO needs to be able to build anything your CEO can sell. And as long as those two things are true, there's a really good match and you can go build them as a company. And I think that's like becomes very important as you think about who is your co-founder, who's gonna be there 10 years from now. Perfect, man. Well, dude, thanks for sharing the story. I think a lot of value is transferred to founders here. So appreciate it. Of course. Thanks, Pablo. Take care. So picture this it's months from now, years from now, and one of your founder friends, a really close founder friends of yours, guess what? Their startup went bankrupt. And it turns out if you had just shared the product market fit show with them, they would have learned everything they needed to to find product market fit and to create a huge success. But instead, their startup has completely failed. You have blood on your hands. Don't let that happen. You don't want to live like that. It is terrible. So do what you need to do. Tell them about the show. Send it to them, put it on WhatsApp, put it on Slack, put it where you need to put it. Just make sure they know about it and they check it out.