Aleoop: Show Me The Sales!

Welcome to the pitch where startup founders raise millions and listeners can invest. I'm Josh Mootcio. And I'm Lisa Mootcio. And on the show today we have Megan with Allie Upe. She's raising one million dollars. All right. Let's roll play. Okay. Who do you want to be? Do you want to be sales or product? Oh my gosh. Okay. I'll be product. I'm sales. Okay. Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah. We're building a company. Company name is Wangadoodle and we are building an AI fountain pen. This is my dream. This AI fountain pen basically reads the dock for you and red lines it and then signs it for you through osmosis because you're just holding this pen. That's awesome. I've been talking to customers and they really, really love that feature. But they also want it to sign the documents on their computer. Oh, no, I don't think that's a need. No. And then they really, really want like every signature to be on the blockchain. And they're telling me they will pay millions for the blockchain feature. I don't think so because really what I see is that Gen Z and millennials are really back into this like kind of retro time period where they want things that they can touch and feel like paper pen. No, you're not wrong. But I'm talking to the customers. I'm in sales. I know, but this is my dream is to build this company that uses paper and pen. If only there was a way to resolve this dispute. Only. But wait. There's Alupe. Megan Scanlon is building Alupe, which brings data into the picture so that sales and product can make informed decisions on the product roadmap and stop fighting. Wingadoodle to the moon. The pitch for Alupe is coming up after this. And if you want to join us for the live taping of season 16, we are going to be in Tampa this April. Learn more about our upcoming show at pitch.show/tampa. And if you're a founder, apply to pitch at pitch.show/apply. Bare walls, clear surfaces, the minimalist aesthetic is having a moment. And for some, it's a form of resistance. Being a lot of people have a sense that we live in this very consumer society and feel kind of a desire and need to push back against that. Welcome back to the pitch for Alupe. Let's meet the investors. Elizabeth Yinn with Hossel Fund. Can I ask you a very direct question? Jesse Middleton with Flybridge. I am so sick of people that are building stuff for building stuff sake. Laura Lucas with Latitude Ventures. You are everything I am looking for in a founder. And Mike Ma with SideCut Ventures. Come on guys, what kind of risk are you looking for? You don't want to overthink a deal. Alupe. Thank you. Goop. Alupe. Alupe. Goop has a service. Confess the service. Hi everyone. Hello. Hi, I'm Tanya Yual. A Megan Scanlon. Nice to meet you. I'm a Mike. Hey Mike. Hey Elizabeth. Hi. Nice to see you. Nice to see you. Hi, I'm Laura. Hey Laura. Good to see you. Nice to see you. Yeah. Well, again, my name is Megan Scanlon. I am the co-founder and CEO of Alupe. And I've been in sales my entire career. And so I wanted to start our conversation by regaling Yual with one of the most heartbreaking sales losses of my professional life. And it's ultimately the reason why I'm in front of you all today. It's two years ago. I'm an enterprise sales rep at a large payments company selling to big corporations and sales cycles are brutal. But life was good in this moment because I was closing in on my biggest deal yet. So I was working with a large streaming company. And after 18 months of selling, momentum was perfect. So the CTO was aligned on our proposal. We had head of growth, back channelling to the C-suite, contracts for emotion. So I was super excited. And on a routine scoping call, we're presenting some of our reporting capabilities to the CTO. And he stops us and is like, oh, that's not going to work for us. I didn't realize Yual did it this way. A couple of minutes later, we're going through some more functionality. And oh, I didn't realize Yual could not for this. Our current provider has this today. And so this theme went on and on for the next hour by the end of the call. I'd uncovered six really fundamental product gaps preventing me from closing this opportunity. And I sound the alarm internally. So this is like, do you have tickets? A bunch of slack messages, escalation meetings. But something didn't make sense. We had a ton of perspective on how to win in the streaming sector. We had tent poll customers already using our offering. And so I started talking to sellers and account managers. And what I learned, the gap that I uncovered, has been a problem for many years across many deals. And the kicker, folks like product and engineering and leadership, had no idea this was costing us billions in revenue. They didn't have the same information the sales team did. So fast forward now, I'm catching up with an old colleague. I'm telling him about the sales loss, my inspiration for building Al-Yup and Adam starts laughing at me. And he's like, oh yeah, I lost that same deal probably two years before you I guess you never saw my notes. And so if we zoom out, there's 170,000 B2B tech companies competing in really crowded spaces now. 30% of their deals are going to be lost to competitors. And the number one reason is because of product gaps. So that's why I built Al-Yup to turn everyday sales insights into proactive product intelligence. So no one else spends the next 18 months chasing a deal that was doomed from the start. So I'd love to show you what we're building so far. Any questions so far? No, let's see it. Okay, awesome. Yes, so this is our platform. And so the homepage is our signal queue. So we are running unstructured sales feedback from places like gong, slack, gira, salesforce notes, email through our proprietary machine learning models. So we're taking like a ton of data that's really messy. We're running it through something that's really purpose-built to be able to spot and flag signals. And so what you're seeing here is like what we're calling our daily digest. So this is where a product leader, a product manager, maybe even like an ops function would come in and understand what's going on in the field. And at the very bottom here, you're seeing the affected deal. So this is tying back to the CRM records. So from day one, we're dollarizing this information. For the labels of where there may be blockers, is that something that the company is sort of creating tags around? Are you guys are creating tags around? Yeah, so I, right now we're starting the labeling process. So our machine learning models spit out these insights. And then we actually run it through an LLM to say, "Okay, what is this?" What I've been hearing like ten out of time times over is, "We don't necessarily want to know the feature that needs to be built." "Oh, hey, we need multilingual capabilities." Or we need this ERP implementation. But we want to know more of like the root cause analysis. Like what's the customer actually saying they need? And so that's something that we're looking to incorporate. But we get it started and then we give them the opportunity to edit and relabel. Where does this data, all of this that you're showing in the dashboards are? Where does it live after someone's used value? Knowing how difficult this is for engineering or product and how it stacks up from prioritization. Does that all get pushed into Gera and Asana? Like is that the sort of loop? Or do you expect over time that product people, salespeople, like who lives in this application versus where does the rest of the data live? Yeah, so how I'm seeing this is like almost like a middleware, like a connective tissue where we read information in and then we push it out to the sources that, especially enterprise customers, like they're already deeply embedded in some of these like larger software solutions. So being able to write that back and kind of embed that into what they're using. I think it's really important. Today though, Jesse, like right now they would log into Allure. And just to talk a little bit about our customers right now, we're really focused on the series B series C, which I know that's like a broad swath. B2B tech companies, 100 plus employees, at least 10 million in revenue, and they found product market fit. But we know we want to sell this to publicly traded companies some day. I want to sell this to my alma mater stripe. We're going to have to get this back into systems. Let me just, I can tell you where I see this. I've been a CRO recovering CRO as well, like fighting with the CTO. It's like, no, you need to build this. Like, no, it's just software. And then we have this argument, which turns into a stupid contest. To me, the valuable part of this and my experience has been like, all right, well, this is what the data say. So it comes down to try and like depersonalizing some of these very hard product traction decisions. Do I have this right in terms of how you understand it? 100% and I'll just add objective business cases. So now when you're in that, you know, that squabble with your CTO, you can look at the dollars. You can look at the revenue at risk. And there's also like a wrapper in terms of how I think about these business cases, which is, hey, if the company is really ambitious about net new logo acquisition versus, you know, maybe mitigating churn with existing customers, like, how do we layer on some of those strategic priorities in OKRs at a user-specific level? So it's not just like the raw dollars and cents in the pipeline, but it's a little bit more like North Star. We've all been in these product meetings. Like, it's science and art, right? And this, the part that's been missing in these is somebody's the science part of it. Definitely. Yeah. And this is meant to be the co-pilot. We're not getting rid of the product team today, but we're giving them the backbone to understand, like, how do we de-ress this roadmap? Like, hey, we've got some big bets. Like, this is almost like an insurance view. It's a free-fronted number of proofs of concept, and so sitting down with the head of product, and actually going through some of these signals, and it's like a lot of smiles and a lot of like, "Huh, I didn't realize that was still an issue." Or like, "Oh, he's-- - Yeah, that integration's been missing for quite some time. Like we're tracking it, but not in a way that we probably should be. But what I've been hearing a lot of excitement around is the attribution against a product and engineering is working really hard, releasing a number of new capabilities over a given quarter. How are those showing backup and sales conversations? So you've been tied business impact back to engineering. - So I guess speaking of pilots, where are you in the process of customers and pilots and looking? - So today we've worked with five customers all in that like series B complex sales cycle. So just to share a couple of sectors. Right now we're like pretty industry agnostic. I have a bent toward FinTech, but we'll see what happens. So we've worked with the crypto analytics company. We've worked with two HR tech companies. And most recently we've run a pilot with legal software. Five customers today, we have three that are in the onboarding phase. All of them are unpaid today. And so how I'm thinking about the sales process and I'm leaving the sales conversations is providing a free POC to be able to demonstrate value early, providing a static report and really showing how this technology works. Getting that validation that product leaders would find this to be valuable and then transitioning to paid. And I should say our machine learning models went live in July. So we didn't have fully functioning technology that could actually do this until maybe six weeks ago. Have you suggested paid contracts with anybody? Yes, absolutely. Every time. As a sales person. As a sales person, a sales person. Yeah. How big is the bread box? What's the ACV? Yeah, ACV $15,000 today. $50 per user per month. We're looking at a minimum of 25 users per cohort. And I expect that to double, intriple, and quadruple as we look to move up market when we get to an organization that let's say there's, you know, it's straight or 400 sales reps that I sat alongside. So like, that's where the prize is. What has the reaction been to the 15? Good. Actually, very good. I think as soon as you are able to correlate, like, we can directly tie back to revenue gains. Like, we can show you how you're winning more deals faster and how you are building valuable products as a result of this tool. It's a really fun conversation to have. You mentioned the seats you're tying to sales. People are tying to product people. So I'm open to feedback on that right now, both. So anyone who's accessing the reporting and like, actioning that information definitely will be charging them. And I also think that anyone that we're ingesting records from will also have a seat license. But I think that part of the secret sauce in terms of our distribution is that salespeople don't have to be in this tool at all. And I actually, like, product folks, like love that as a former sales person. I heard some of my feelings sometimes. But they're like, this is great because it's undoctored. And then we can kind of make the analysis. We see this source of truth. Right. And so is the product team of driver of decision-making on this or the sales team? So I'm seeing it very cross-functional what product is at the helm. So product has to be championed. You have to be pumped about it. What do you assess the competitive landscape to be in this area? It's not an area I normally invest in. But as a recovering CRO, I feel this problem. I think so. You're recovering. So in terms of competitive landscape, I categorize it in two buckets. One are the massive players, like product board, aha, with the exclamation point, even like sales force, you know, Gong. Of all the big billion dollar businesses, we're watching Gong on the closest. And right now, they have one in the sales coaching space. And I think it would take a lot to then kind of pivot to a whole different offering, which is now extracting product insights for product teams. So I think we're okay there. There's a bunch of startups that are doing this. So I would say I'm watching the early entrance. I have friends sending me links. But we're all the same page right now. Just to follow up on that. Your intuition is a salesperson. What is the account plan to convert free to this 15K? If it's so easy and it's favorable, what work has to be done for you to get that? Yeah, definitely. Get the paper. I would say when the head of product and I are reviewing the signals, and they're like, this is all very valuable. We would like to track these things. I feel like that's enough of the quality check that we need to then talk about what an always-on solution looks like and converting to paid. But were you looking for something more specific than that? Well, I mean, two sales people. My question I would say is like, what metrics make this a no brainer for you? Oh, absolutely. And then great, whatever the answer is, we put this on paper. You put a paper, I'll sign it, you sign it. So I'm just trying to get some understanding of, because free is always scary. Free scary, yeah. I don't want to be understanding what you're doing. So I'm just trying to get, especially since you're in the craft of sales. Yeah, what is preventing you from getting signed contracts today? A salesperson selling a sales tool to sales people, but she doesn't have any sales. What the investors think of that coming up after this. (soft music) Hey, Cara Swisher here. I want to let you know that Vox Media is returning to South by Southwestern Austin for live tapings of your favorite podcast. Join us from March 13th through the 15th for live tapings of today, explain. Tuffy Talks, Prof.G. Markets, and of course, your two favorite podcasts, Pivot and On with Cara Swisher. The stage will also feature sessions from Brane Brown and Adam Grant, Markets Brown Lee, Keith Lee, Vivian Tu and Robin Arzhan. It's all part of the Vox Media podcast stage at South by Southwest, presented by Odo. Visit voxmedia.com/sksswpregister and get your special discount on your innovation badge. That's voxmedia.com/skssw2register. Really, you should register. We sell out and we hope to see you there. (silence) - I'm just trying to get to what-- - Is preventing you from getting signed contracts today. - I think it's just showing how the product works. I think there's a little bit of skepticism, like, okay, we've run some stuff through chat, CBT and it's kind of nonsense or it's too generic or we've tried the gong keyword extraction and that's like not actionable. So let us see if we can actually use this as our future discovery pipeline. So that's the purpose of the POC. - Well, I mean, you've had pilots for a little bit now. - Yes, pre-ML models though. - But it sounds like if I understand, like, right now, you have only just kind of started the model part and so you don't have the data quite yet. - No, not yet. So you're hoping maybe getting a month of data and then maybe in September you're closing, is that what I'm hearing? - That's right, yeah, that's absolutely right. And I have just so you know, because this is like, you know, in the sales person. So like, if I'm not doing this right, then we've got serious problems on every call. Okay, we're doing this free period for four weeks. If you like what you see, if you find this valuable, here's the per se cost. So everyone's aware that there's this transition period. We're just right at the cusp of like getting those folks signed. - But I guess what we don't know, just to clarify is, we don't know if they find the value yet. So first, so good with the POCs. Tone of value so far. Like, we're having weekly calls to continue to layer on more data. But not enough value to sign. - We're like, so we're kicking off that process. - Yeah. - Okay. - We're right there. - Okay. - Right there. - Yeah. - I get exactly what you're scratching at. There's no delays. It's just like we're at that point in this process. - I get it, you know, kind of basically added the functionality you need in July. - Yes. - And here we are in mid August. So it's like, - Like I wish I was pitching in September. - Yeah. - It's like, you need just maybe a couple more weeks to kind of say. - That's right. - Yeah. - Exactly. - Exactly. - So the five customers that you have, are they the customer suite that you want? - No. - Two of the five. So that's who we're still actively working with and we've disqualified three. And then three more that are coming. - And those three more are at the suite spot that you want to be here. - They all are. - Yeah. I've started to get a lot more rigid about those types of customers. - Do you use Oliu on Oliu? - Absolutely. - Yes. - Can you tell me what is at the top of the board on your own Oliu analysis? - Yeah. - So we need to launch that attribution tracking that I had talked about. So having an ability to see what product teams are releasing and then listening for those signals to be able to attribute dollars to them. So that's one, two, we need to become sock two compliant. Like we can't serve enterprise customers without sock two compliance and a level of regulatory rigor. So that's like. - Her whole pipeline. (laughing) - Yeah, exactly the whole pipeline. - On the three that you're onboarding. - Yeah. - So that was going to be free. Free for the POC period. And then after that we're done. No more free. No more free work. - What are you raising and what you hope and to learn with that? - Yeah, yeah. So we absolutely need to hire an ML engineer, a full stack engineer. And then once we have enough of a customer base, a customer success ops person. So raising a million. Today is like the kickoff of the pre-seed raise. I've raised $165,000 prior. And I'm eager to see what the market has to say in terms of the terms. - Cool. I would love to run this by a bunch of our companies that are series B.C. It feels like a no-brainer problem solution set. I struggle to think about sort of how this becomes massive on its own, like the sort of middleware comment that like eventually, but that may be okay. And so I'd, pending that. Like I'd love to dig in on this. - Yes. - Thanks, Justin. - Appreciate that. - So, I'm still rocking my brain over. (laughing) 'Cause I've been in your shoes, I've actually been in sales for a long time. - You were in sales force. - Yeah, I was in sales force. But I'm trying to figure out, like, at sales force, all the things that we were going through and how this would fit in that. I struggle with, you know, the free stuff. And I know you're moving into paid, but that just, like, that breaks my heart because I'm like, you need to get paid. (laughing) - For the value. - Thank you. - And I'm like, girl, you need to get paid right now. I see more women doing free stuff and you need to get paid up front for all your stuff. - I appreciate that, and I think, I wanted to make sure it worked first. Like, I wanted to make sure I could bring value. And now it's like, I have the confidence, like, we've gotten a couple reps and we're transitioning out of that. - So, I'm gonna know for right now, but I'm happy to continue talking because I am interested, I think it's an interesting problem. I've been in your shoes. I know what you're trying to solve, but I'm just trying to, going back and forth on how to figure this out. - Definitely. - Yeah. - And maybe the next conversation we have, I'll have some dollars in the door. - Yeah, maybe it looks a little different. - We should be at 100K by the end of the year. - I think for me, I mean, I absolutely love people with sales backgrounds. I think that in this day and age, like, being really focused on revenue is really, really important. And kind of struggling with this onboarding sale cycle thing, which is, I kind of think you should be charging for this onboarding even if they're not paying for the POC, but like, you are spending cycles on it. - Absolutely. - And you should cover your costs. And I don't actually know if I've conviction that these people are necessarily willing to pay 15K. I mean, I think in theory, everybody's willing to pay 15K if the moon moves, but since you, I don't know, you're in this sort of weird interim period and I just like on gut feeling or whatever, I don't know if I have that conviction that everyone you take POC with is gonna convert. So unfortunately, I'm out, but you seem amazing. - Thank you, Elizabeth. Likewise, for the question. - Thank you. - Yeah, this has been a pleasure. Thank you. - Let me, I'm just exposed my biases and tell you what I think so far. I think you're solving a big problem. And I think you have an amazing background. Like, Fintech is an incredibly hard place to sell. So I definitely credit your stripes. (laughing) - No, it's hard. - That's not true. (laughing) - Dad jokes. - That's really good. - Thank you. I wrote that one down. Those are merits. Here are the risks. - Yes, yeah. - I'm not sure using your own product theory on yourself. I wrote down, if you knew Sock2 compliance had 100% thing, why are you building anything else? And then the question, the go-to-marie is like, well, why are you picking that? If the number one thing in building this is just getting usage and knowing that you're solving a problem the world needs, I almost will leave it to you to see if you wanna have another meeting. We're impact investors. This is a little out of thesis. We do a lot of work. I have a different point of view on your go-to-market around this. We only do one and two out of this 30-day rig-a-mural. So it's like, we are not a fast check. It's highly improbable. However, I feel the pain of what you're building. - Yeah. - First hand. So it's almost back on you as the arbiter of your own time. Is this a good use of your time to have a second meeting? And I'll leave that back to you 'cause we will dig into your product and we'll challenge your questions on this. And if that's a conversation you're up for, I would say yes. - And so just a question. First of all, I'd love to take a second meeting. So just to kind of close the loop there. But what would you wanna see on the go-to-market side? - I feel like I need to lightly miss the mark. - What are you optimizing for? Are you optimizing for revenue? Are you optimizing for usage and data and building the product? I mean, there's a part of the Venn diagram you can do both. But I struggle with which one you're trying to do. - Yeah, I would say in terms of that Venn diagram, certainly if it was possible to optimize for both that would be ideal. But I think right now I'm hungry for case studies. I'm hungry to be able to say, hey, after 90 days of using Allieu, there were five unknown product gaps that were identified and prioritized on the roadmap. And that's like a faster time than ever to get from discovery to future planned or $100,000 was saved. Or we were able to speed up sales cycles by 20 days. So that usage and data to that latter point is really what I'm hungry for today to have the proof points to be able to sell this time and time again. So I'd love to have a second conversation. I think, I mean, I've learned a lot today. I'd love to continue. - Awesome. - Awesome. - Then I'm a guest from that, great. - Great, awesome. Well, thank you all. It was really nice meeting you. Thank you for taking the time. - And I like the name, Allieu. - Good. Oh, great. Yeah, I am. People sometimes ask, oh, did you play basketball and like, in the middle school? But yeah. (laughing) Every sale I found needs that great assist. And I think this is gonna be the assist product to you. - I love that. - I love that. - Thank you guys. - Thank you guys. - Thanks to you Elizabeth. - Thanks Laura. - Yeah, the feedback. - Thanks Jesse. - Thank you guys. Bye. (clapping) - I told her, I feel like this is too early. I feel like you should come back next season. And she was like, no, we're gonna have enough learnings. The tension of what you guys needed to hear was like exactly what I was worried about. - I think 30 days or so now, she would have walked in and been like, we had five pilots. - Yeah. - We rolled out three, but we converted the two of the match. We have three more that are coming. The two that matched her now paying 15KH, the rest of our days, and they're going to. - The January session would have been. - Yeah. - Yeah. - I love her. I mean, I see her in New York, so. - We'll see her in New York. - That's right, that's right. - All right, thanks guys. That's a wrap. - See you tomorrow. (upbeat music) Megan walked out of the pitch room with interest from Jesse and a second meeting with Mike. When we come back, we catch up with Megan to find out what happened after the pitch. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Ambassador Rahm Emanuel served as President Obama's chief of staff in a administration that had to deal with its fair share of global conflicts. He dealt directly with Israel's Prime Minister and thought plenty about the threat from Iran. But Emanuel told me that the pace of action from this President in the Middle East is giving him whiplash. - In 15 months, this President has taken military action against eight countries. I just, just in 15, now we got three more years to go. In 15 months, Iran's twice, but you have Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Venezuela. I'm losing Nigeria. - Today explained, in your feed every weekday and on Saturdays, too. - Welcome back. A few months after her pitch, we caught up with Megan to see if our salesperson finally got some sales. During your pitch, you said, "I wish I could have pitched a month later in September." So I guess the big question is, what happened in September? You had two pilots that were about to convert. - Did they? - They did. Yes, so our first paying customer came online in September. So truly like within that 30-day window, we have nine live customers stay either in like a fully onboarded, like paying a month-to-month subscription or in like a POC proof of concept period and of those nine five are paying. - Awesome. So I think you were targeting 15,000 for your first pilots. - That's right. - Is that what you've been able to hit so far? - We're a little shy of that if I'm being full transparency. We have been extending some of these proofs of concept to really ensure that we're bringing value to our customers and so like the iterative feedback loops that we're getting from our users in terms of like UI changes and integration needs have been really beneficial. So we've held back on charging that full freight price point until we get to a place where we're really comfortable being able to command that. - So going back to September, you were talking to Mike. - Yes. - He in the pitch room kind of offered a second meeting, but really put that on you. - Yeah. - It wasn't quite the full like Foxhole, but like he told you you could decide if you wanted to have a second meeting, which you obviously said yes to. - Dead. - Yes. - What was that meeting like? - That meeting was pretty intense. I felt like I saw the inklings of the Foxhole. We talked quite a bit about our sales pipeline. He went really deep in terms of how we would use funds. - How did you come to the conclusion of what you would want to double the ML and BI hours for? What customer requirements are driving that? What are you looking to build? What is the market telling you? And I'm gonna push a thread here as far as I can go. If you build X, that will make you 100K how? - So I would say these all feel fundamental to every customer we're serving. These feel like table stakes. Do you buy that? - Sure, I buy. The answer is I buy it for the fidelity that I'm entitled to have on this. It all seems reasonable and that makes sense to me. The quintessential danger is this. I know what the requirements are. I'm just gonna build it. - Yeah. - And there's a fine line, right? Between product vision where you feel this way and the other spectrum is like overbuilding the product in your head, not with the market once. But at the end of the day, sister, you gotta believe your own bullshit. And the question I almost put it back on, do you believe it? - Yeah, I do. Was it fun to spar with another salesperson? - Yes, absolutely. It was. Mike's really smart. And so with his questions are very pointed. I feel like he's already kind of seen around the corner. So yes, it was really helpful. And I feel like it was all in the framing of like I want to be helpful. Mike ended up coming on as an angel investor, so it's been incredible working with him in that capacity. - Bellway. - Yeah. How much should he invest? - Mike invested $5,000. So like he wrote an angel check, but you didn't get a check out of his fund, side cut. Did he say why he wasn't able to write a check out of the fund? - The investment thesis, Miss Match is what I heard. - Yeah, he's more impact focused. - He's more impact focused, exactly. That's what I like to tell myself Josh. I mean, there could be more to it than that. (laughing) But you never know down the road, especially like Mike and I are gonna hop on tomorrow. I should mention to talk a little bit more about like some ideal customer profile hypotheses that I'm testing out. And one is definitely serving more healthcare tech adjacent companies. So who knows, maybe we could end up kind of side cutting our way into, thanks Lisa. - Nice. - Thank you so much. - Into this investment thesis. That's right, yeah. - So Jesse Middleton in the pit room said he was going to share Al Yupp with some of his portfolio companies. Did anything come of that? Unfortunately nothing came of that. I was able to see Jesse at your live event and we got to catch up. So that was great. - Yeah, at the New York live show? - That's right. - Where you're like, "Hey, well, give's me." (laughing) I've heard for me in a while. - I think I played it cooler than that. (laughing) - Just reflecting on kind of the general sentiment in the pit room, everyone seemed really bullish on the problem that you're solving. But they couldn't get the conviction they needed to invest without you having any sales. Now that you have the data, how's it going with theses? - Excellent. We actually, yeah, we've got some good news just in the last week where we've received two new wires. So two new investors joining the cap table. - Nice. - Yeah, thanks. Yeah, starting off 2026 on like a really great footing. Dave Smith is coming on as a strategic angel and then we have Rogue Ventures. - Ah, you got your first check from a VC. - How much did they invest? - In total 200,000. Consistent with the terms that like, you know, might came on at so a four million post money cap. - Got it, got it. So from what I understand while you were in Napa, you met someone else, Yev at Backblaze. - Yes. - And he also angel invested in your company. - Yev is awesome. I am such a big Yev fan. Yev is so great. So when we were in Napa in August, gave the pitch, you know, came out, took a big breath. And he's like, hey, that was really great. I was like, oh great, nice to meet you. And he's like, you meant if I get a demo? So like literally five minutes after we did our debrief, I'm giving him a demo. And then we just continue the conversation. And it just felt really organic in terms of, you know, him digging in deeper to the business and getting conviction to invest as an individual. And then also to make some really nice warm inroads to folks who are closer to the prioritization and planning at this like large company. So backblaze is like an incredible POC win for us. And all thanks to Yev and his leadership find out. - So they're a customer of yours? - They are a proof of concept customer. - That's awesome. - That's been great. What a win coming out of the pitch. I mean, Yev and Mike. - Love that, it's been great. - Yeah, those are some good guys. - Yeah. - You guys have good ones. - Yeah. - How much did Yev invest? - He invested $10,000. - Nice. - Do you think that your sales background has helped you in fundraising? Or do you feel like fundraising is a different skill? - Yeah, Lisa, I do feel like most of it's really helpful. Yeah, like I'm comfortable asking for meetings. Like I'm comfortable networking early on, you know, at this like pre-pre-sage level. I think you're really selling yourself. Whereas I think in my sales career was very much like the product or service that I was selling. - Right. Yeah, that's a big difference. - It is. Yeah, and it's like a, at times awkward because you know, you wanna share all your accolades and like how great you are, but not over do it. - So I have to ask, we told you before the show, I said, Megan, I like what you're doing, but I think you're too early. - Yeah. - For the VCs on our show. - No, you did say that. - And then, and then you sales me. (laughing) You wrote a really great email basically saying, why I was wrong. Do you think that was the right move? - Yes, definitely. And I kind of assumed I'm like, am I gonna get a little beat up in the room like maybe? (laughing) You know, for lack of a better word, like, but I'll worth it. Oh yeah, and the fact that like, you have in Mike and like obviously, we have this great relationship now, so nope, no regrets on my end. - I just, I had to ask. - No, I appreciate that. (laughing) - Well, congratulations on all the progress you've made. Since the show, it's been cool. You've been one of the founders who's been most on top of keeping us updated. Always appreciate those communication techniques. So, whether they're sales tactics, or you're just being a great human, either way. - Can they be both? - They can be both. - Yes, they can be both. - Yes. Well, thank you. That means a lot. And I'm really honored to be in this season. As you guys know, like being a long time listener of the show, it's, it's really special. So, thank you. - Yeah, you're welcome. We're excited to see what happens next. - Yeah, me too. Thank you. (upbeat music) - You know, I know she's not regretting that she came on and pitched, 'cause like she got some early momentum and customers and some angel checks. But I can't help but think like what could have been. If she would have waited and pitched this year instead. - Yeah. - Not just like have sales, have customers, but like have the data to be able to pitch this business? - Yeah. There's some irony in that, right? That she didn't really have the data she needed. - Little bit. But it also makes sense like you need to have customers before product like Alupe is going to yield any value. - Yeah. There's just something that's different about a founder who has that data when they pitch. I was speaking just the other week with a founder that we spoke to like last year for this event in Napa. - And I was, I said no, like you're really early. Let's just circle back in a few months. - Circle back. - I know. But then he got on the call and blew me away with his pitch because he has data. Customers have been using the product and I told him, I'm like wow, your pitch is way different, so much better. It's just a different feeling when you get that pitch from a founder and there's like so much less skepticism, I think too. - Yeah. - And so you can buy into the belief that this product is really gonna work and grow. VCs get a bad rap now because they don't back founders that are pre-revenue and super early. But I think having revenue, having even just a few early customers just allows you to give such a more coherent pitch. - Yeah, I would be interested to see what her pitch would be like if she was coming to this next event in April. - The original plan. - Yeah, such a stronger pitch I think. We can still check it and see how it's going then. - I'm sure Michael tells us everything that's going on. - No offer to invest in Allie Upe is being made to the listening audience on today's show, but you can invest with us by becoming an LP in the pitch fund. To learn more, go to thepitch.fund. Next week on the pitch, robots. - Well, it's been like the most impressive thing you've seen a robot do using your technology. - So I hope I have like a cookie field in the robot, which is attached to my desk and while I'm quoting it, it feeds me cookies. - No way. (dramatic music) - That's next week. Subscribe to the pitch on your favorite podcast player so you don't miss future episodes. And remember, you can watch full length versions of every pitch over on our Patreon at the pitch uncut. And if you're a founder raising a pre-seed or seed round, you can apply to pitch on season 16. We'll be taping in Tampa, Florida this April. Send us your deck at pitch.show/apply. We'll see you next Wednesday in the pitch room. (upbeat music) This episode was made by Josh Muccio, Lisa Muccio, Annalad, and me, Inak Kim. With deal sourcing by Peter Lu, John Alvarez, and Phoebe Sun. Music in this episode is by the musemaker, break master cylinder, the firmware rebels, boxwood orchestra, joy can tour, shaky faces, cassette, land of legs, Peter Jean, and the runaway queen. The pitch is made in partnership with the Fox Media Podcast Network. (upbeat music)