YouSaid · the spoken record

Blake Scholl

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40
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2025-09-30
most recent
2025-09-30
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1
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  1. “But realistically, they might not. So I wish you continued success. And we'll see everybody next time on this week in Stardums. Bye bye.”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Find all that information at founder. And we give all of the folks who aren't incorporated yet or they're just one or two person team, we give them the option every week. Check a box. I would like a 25K check. I'd like 125k check. And we review the progress and we decide if there's, you know, if we could be helpful and we think it's a good investment for our LPs. And hopefully that 25k helps you get into an accelerator. That's my wish for you. So you get into Y Combinator or you get into R accelerator or Antler or any of these great ones. TechSARs. The only pair has a good one. Pair VC has one over the summer. The only problem is you need a co-founder really to get in. So a lot of these programs will not accept a solo founder in my experience. They may not say that explicitly.”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “But you need to go to a next, I would go to a, I would try to go to an accelerator, yeah, and keep things going. If you can add 10 paid users a month, 20 paid users a month at this stage, and then let's say you add 20 a month and you churn three or four, people are going to look at the business and go, oh, okay, he's figuring out product market fit and go to market. But, you know, the challenge for you will be you're so busy building the product that where's the time for fundraising going to come from? Where's the time to go to accelerator going to come from? Where's the time for your go-to market strategy going to come from? It's just going to be hard. So I wish you the best with it. Great job. And you're off to the races. And for background, for people who don't know, we have founder. University. We do it three times a year here in the United States, but anybody can go anywhere around the world. And then we just launched our MENA, which will be in Saudi starting in the first week of November.”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, so you got our check from Founder University. When you go on, I would definitely go to, which we like to do. We give this 25K check to try to get people started and help them incorporate.”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And then I think going for a seed round and maybe trying to find an anchor seed fund who will put in 250 to a million. They would typically do 500K. They put in 500K and then you can pass the hat with other Angel investors for 500K and then deploy that with the goal of I'm going to deploy a million dollars. I'm going to build the team out to five people. And then we're going to get to 10,000 free users and a thousand page users. And with 1,000 page users at 20K a month will be close to break even, whatever it is. And you can explain that use of funds. Going for 2 million at this point with a two-employee team with not a lot of growth and a very small number of paid. It could be easier for you. Have you raised venture before?”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “People do have a bias towards it. You did a great job. I think you're probably going for too much money. I think it's going to be hard to raise $2 million. I never want to tell a founder not to try. I think you should go to an accelerator first, go to Y combinator, TechStars, launch. God, there's so many that could then help you find a co-founder or maybe answer some of these questions around how do we convert more of the thousand to paid.”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Perfect. So I think here you could just put, I'm a solo founder, just own it. And this is our first engineer. Boom. And so you get that credit for having your founding engineer. You could call them. And if they say, what's the difference of founding engineer? It's, oh, he has X% equity, right? So when co-founders, when solo founders don't have co-founders, they can do, or I advise them to do the founding team. So founding engineer, founding salesperson, founding growth person. And you can just explain, you know, I didn't have a co-founder on this one, but I did build a founding team. And these folks each have on average 4% equity if they stick around for five years. So then they feel like, oh, there is a little bit of a team here if something happens to you, the company doesn't shut down, which is their fear for early stage companies. When a company gets bigger, you know, if you've got a solo founder, it's not the end of the world. But in the early days.”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah. So solo founder is always a weakness. You know, two or three co-founders to kind of spread out the work. Did you have any other full-time employees or is it just a one-man show at the time?”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So, if I create one on the drive AI, it puts it in my Google Drive. If I create something new on Google Drive, it will sync over there. So you're a backup service as well. Yeah, see, that's an interesting one, too. If you were like, I need to have a backup. We invested in a company back Uppify, I think, yeah. And they let you log into your services like Twitter or Gmail or GDrive. And they just use the APIs to back all your stuff up in case you lost your Gmail account because people would get their Gmail hacked and there's no recourse. It's not like you're a paid customer if you have a Gmail account. And then here this slide, you're a solo founder, is that right?”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “What's interesting about that is you're thinking big. You want to be the full stack solution. I get that. But if you had a Chrome extension that did all this or you made a browser that did this or a wrapper or something like that, then you could have people try it on their existing ones and be able to run these tools on the existing ones and then let them port over if they want to. It's just something to consider because when superhuman did their email product, they let people keep their Gmail address, their Google Docs, and their Outlook and they just became like a layer on top of those and interface. And people said, oh my God, it's never going to work. You have to be full stack. And I kind of felt that way too. Turned out I was wrong. People just love the interface and they like having their Gmail interface available as a backup. So there is something to it, but you'll make that decision as you go. Let's go to the next slide”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Perfect. So I think explaining that is more important than some of the vanity metrics, right? And let's go to the next slide. So this is pretty good. We're going to be business to business at some point and we think we can get to 2,000 people who are. And this is where like maybe having a persona, the people who want our product are the top 5% of drive users. They don't get this out of their current drives. And then there's going to be a question, why don't you build a layer on top of Dropbox and Google Drive. What's the answer to that question? I'm curious.”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Doing a conversion where when you hit this many files, it prompts you to convert. So you get your first 10,000 files and your first 5 gig for free. After that, you have to pay. Is that the business model, consumption and tier pricing on consumption?”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “So, what I did here is, I just looked at all your stats. And what founders do is they try to look for the biggest numbers. And what investors do, they try to look for the most important numbers, the most accurate numbers that will let them understand the footprint of the business. So the cumulative files uploaded, if it was a cumulative chart, obviously it only goes up, but we could start to see slopes and we could start to see how people are using it. And then if we talk about those 13 years, here's the 13 users who decided to give us their money. Boom. And you explained who they are. Then you could also talk a little bit about how you're converting them.”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “$20 a month. And let me tell you about those thousand users. And then you go to the next thing for the thousand users, they've uploaded 90,000 files. And you show the number of files uploaded cumulatively.”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Okay, great. So you want to lead with like the most important numbers. You understand when you're talking to VCs, they're going to double click on all of these. And so when they see vanity numbers versus real numbers, credibility can go down. It's much more credible to say we have a thousand daily users currently. Of those thousand, 13 have converted to paid and they're paying $50 a month. How much are they paying?”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Okay, fine. So it's a small number. So that's going to be an issue for folks of why did that convert. Now, of those 20,000 users that sampled the product, how many use it every day? 200, how many daily active users?”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Perfect. So I would get rid of the LOIs because that lowers. Lowers your credibility. Because you're like wasting time on getting people to give you a letter that they might use your product. We got 20,000 free users. How many paid you have? 100, 1,000. And when did you turn on paid?”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Like, I think it's much better to take the B2C folks. And are any of them paying yet or are they just all users, unpaid users”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “So I'd say, here's our 16 month cumulative user chart. And then here's, you know, our, and you can get rid of the B2B letters of intent because people in our industry call them letters of nothing.”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “This slide, you probably don't need if you type it out, it can do it. You kind of showed that already. So back to show, don't tell. And then here, traction was very interesting. But again, very text heavy slide. What I'd rather see you do here is show a cumulative user slide, an active user slide, something like that, a chart. So how many months has the product been out?”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Okay, so say that. He did it in under a minute. So he went from an hour of work to under a minute. And this is what he said to us. And then you do boom, full screen the quote from him, this incredible testimonial from your customer. I can't believe this doesn't exist. I would pay any amount for this, whatever his amazing quote is. You just ask him, can you give us like a Yelp-like quote for our presentation deck when we go raise money? Then if we go to the next slide here, you do some more demos. The next slide, and you maybe did maybe too many of them and maybe too fast. So I think slowing down and just showing maybe one more. Here's another example, whatever. Let's go to the next one.”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “So you should say that. This is a real user. His name is Ken. He is at Edmonton Unlimited. He's a vice president. You just need to know two things about him. One, he currently is very frustrated with Box and Dropbox and Google Drive. And two, he wastes hours and hours and hours doing the following. Then show it. So this is a very simple rule of presenting. Show, don't tell. Show don't tell. So here you told us he creates ten folders. He invites team members. He sets up permissions and he uploads templates. This should be a screen. You should say, and you can even, you know, put it on the left, or you could just show it really quick. I'm speeding this up, but what you're seeing here is an hour of his day and you speed it up, you know, and you show it in a minute while you're talking. So you definitely want to show that”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Where an AI first file management system, whatever it is, we're an AI first version of Dropbox or box.com, something so that people understand what you're doing. Now, when you go to the next slide, this is an incredibly text-heavy slide. So I'm going to give you a couple of just general tips because you nail it on the next slide. On the next slide, you show your product and you do a product demo. That's great. On this one, you're trying to queue up An actual user. Now, is this a real user or is this one you made up?”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Okay, well done. What's great about this is you have traction. We need to do a better job showing that traction and what it means. And let's go back to your first slide here. We'll do a little some tips on presenting. So you said the drive AI. World's first Agentic workspace. That's generally word salad. When you use buzzwords and you say, oh, it's the first and it's a gentic. It's kind of not as evocative or as powerful as just saying it in plain English. At the end, you had a different tagline, which was the only one you ever need or something to that effect. And then you had another tagline that you said before it. So I want you to work on just a really simple sentence that explains the value proposition to investors. The drive AI.”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I'm great, and I'm really excited to see your pitch built in Gamma.app. Let's start. I'll give you the big countdown. Are you ready? Three to go.”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Confi and Mircha. It's C-O-N-F-Y. And what's your domain name? So we can give you a shout out. Tech, another great crossover there.Tech domains. I love those. All right, we'll see you all next time. Bye bye. Next on our pitch competition is Bijan from the Drive AI. How you doing, Bijan?”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Close to where the last one happened now. My last thing is your design is mid, like maybe a five out of ten, a 6 out of 10 in terms of like UX, UI, the pitch deck itself. One thing is people do judge books by their cover, design matters. So I would think about investing a little bit in getting the design from what I would say is a five out of 10 to maybe a seven and then, you know, struggle again for a couple of months, try to get it to an eight and a half, and then a year later, maybe you can get it to a nine and a half. If you look at the journey that Uber went on or, you know, Facebook or et cetera, like a lot of them were janky apps at first or when they were also mid five or sixes out of 10 and they just invested over time and they built that muscle. You've obviously got the data muscle in this organization. I'd love to see you add the designing UX muscle to it next. Great job. And I wish you.”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yeah, I think you have a lot of great ideas, a lot of data, and then building this into an elegant, seamless product is the last piece of the puzzle here. I think you're on the way. And it seems like you're getting some early science of product market fit. So I think you're going to be successful here. I love the idea of there being an API for this or a white labeled service. For example, at the all-in summit, we had 3,500 people there. I'm not sure what event software they used or if it even has this type of features. But we run bird of a feather dinners and that kind of stuff. It would be great to have a white label service where we can just pay $1,000 a month or $10,000 a year, whatever it is, $5,000 a year to put everybody in and then have them just do that matching or some AI matching service. It's really clever what you're building.”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Yeah, so that's great. This concept of lead enrichment, it exists. We have a company lead IQ where investors in, and there's many companies that do similar things where you give an email address, a URL, a domain name, or just a first and last name in a city. And it will go and try find a Twitter, an Instagram, a LinkedIn, a blog, an x.com account, whatever it is, and lead enrichment is also very powerful. I think you're off to the races. I think you'll know you'll have made it when the event people start to get upset about your existence, or you actually are a competitor to some of these other services. And I think there's an opportunity to just make a matchmaking platform and have an API. I wonder if, are you building all this technology with an API in mind or no?”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Yeah, the matchmaking piece of this AI matchmaking for events in and of itself is really interesting. So I wonder if going after your go-to market is to find the attendees and get them to use this or go to the event providers and get them to do it. Go to marketing.”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Yeah. So I think explaining the go-to market works two different ways. One, you can Use existing data sets that you scrape, ingest, et cetera, or we're building APIs into those. Are any of these people letting you build an API into them or do they just see you as competitive?”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Got it. Yeah. So I think showing the apps of these other ones and just slowing down there to explain the problem, this is a salesperson. They go to this event, right? And they see this, right? So this slide is great. They now have, and this could be like you could scroll through this and show the app and how meaningless it is with a video. So videos are more convincing than pictures. Pictures are more convincing than text. So each time you replace one of those objects with the next most convincing object, your pitch is going to be received even better. So here, John logs into the app. He works and he's looking for attorneys who are at this event who work in specific litigation. This event has $10,000 attorneys. He needs to find the litigators. Boom. And here we go. So here you have this video. And now this is your app here.”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “We're not going to rip out the existing software. We're not going to try to displace them. We're just going to make a tool that people are willing to pay for, whether you're an attendee or a sponsor that helps you get maximum value and do AI on those specific data sets. Correct? Do I understand the product?”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Yeah, so these are these platforms tend to be expensive and they're not great. And the problem is you get that app and you're like, okay, there's now a list alphabetical of all these people. Like, how am I supposed to use this? Are people even on the app? It's just a disaster. And so it is a real problem and it would be really nice if there was an algorithm inside of these that could help you sort through them. So what you're saying is as an attendee or as a sponsor, we're going to give you some tools, some weapons. We're an arms dealer. We're going to give you some weapons so that you can do this independent of the platform. So whether you get a CSV file from the planners that has all the attendees or you have to scrape it by going to the website, we're going to help you figure this out. Get them into your CRM or your AI-based CRM. And we're going to do AI matchmaking. So you're saying, hey,”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “All right, great pitch. I didn't like the tagline at the beginning. I'm going to talk to you about that. So let's go back to the first slide because it's always great to go through these. But I do love The problem you've stated, everybody now has apps for their event, right? That's like now become kind of a standard. The all-in summit has an app. I went to the Kotu conference. There was an app. And in these apps, The two complaints I have with this app software, and there's one big app company, I forgot the name of it. What's the big 800 pound gorilla that does these event apps now?”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Okay, coffee. Got it. This is the problem. We misspell names, but you got the nice confy.tech domain name. We love a dot tech. And I can see here that you're optimizing data for better business at events. And I'm really excited to hear your pitch. I'll give you the three, two, one. Are you ready?”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “One of the great challenges of running a startup is getting your business and engineering teams on the same page. It's almost impossible to build the sleek, effective product your customers need if these teams aren't communicating well. If this sounds anything like your company, you need to check out DevStats. DevStats integrates your dev work and your business goals into a shared language that everyone can understand. One team using DevStats was dedicating half of their dev time to low impact bug fixes and other internal busy work. And none of this was improving their product, or more importantly, delighting their customers. But after using DevStats, they were able to revise their allocations and workflow and start actually moving the company forward with impactful updates. So it's time to start focusing your team on the work that actually matters. Check out DevStats today, and we're going to give you 20% off plus access to their dedicated Slack channel.”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “There are some amazing AI tools out there that will absolutely make your workers faster and more productive. But having a large team using all kinds of different AI tools sanctioned or unsanctioned can actually pose some pretty serious privacy and security concerns for your data or your customers and partner's data. This is shadow AI and it could be costing you millions of dollars and it could be exposing your company to risk. But there's a solution. It's nexos.ai. Their workspace gives your team a secure browser-based environment where you can work with the latest and greatest tools and models while giving your admins and security team full visibility and oversight. What if somebody on your team says analyze all this compensation data and then it winds up training a model on those people's compensation in your company? You want to be compliant with all your policies. You want to protect your data. But don't believe me, try it for yourself.”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Running a company is not just about working hard, it's about working smart. And that means delegating tasks you don't have time for and that aren't essential for building your product or service. Take it from me. I got a lot of people working for me, but I don't have time to worry about payroll benefits, offer letters, HR, taxes. I need a partner, and that partner is Gusto. They are the online payroll and benefits experts with a product that's built just for small businesses like mine. It's all in one. It's designed with remote offices in mind, and it's so easy to use. Now, you can hire onboard and support your team from anywhere with just a few clicks. And like all great companies, Gusto is constantly upgrading their platform and making the product better. Gusto just introduced Instant Pay and same day pay. Now, if you're running a little behind, you can get your payroll process in hours instead of days, allowing you to get your people taken care of right away. 24 by 7, 365.”

    2025-09-30 · This Week in Startups · Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source