The current system is broken. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. These are our legacy tools. I think it's important to remember Facebook, Instagram, these things have been around for over a decade, if not longer. And so it's an aging suite of tools coupled with a really difficult macro picture for marketer. Sam, thanks for taking the time to join the episode. I'm excited for this one. To understand how your startup claim is gonna change advertising forever. Wanna start with your personal story.
What would be the earliest piece of context that I would have to know about you to understand the person sitting in front of me today? Yeah. Well, first of all, Seamus, thanks for having me. I'm really excited about this opportunity to spend some time with you and talk a little bit about the Shamus story. So I grew up, in a family of, my parents and my younger brother who's 3 years younger than I am.
And what's important to know is I had the tremendous opportunity to explore and create during my childhood, but also see 2 particularly strong role models in my parents. And to me, they embodied tenacity, grit, and teamwork, and they really espouse that through athletics. And so we grew up on the road a lot. And by that, I mean, we would travel the world and my parents would race.
And my mom was a college swimmer at Stanford turned national champion and then competed doing Ironman triathlons around the world. My dad marathoner competed at the world level and do Athhelons, which is running and biking. My younger brother ended up going to Stanford. He walked on to first the crew team, or, excuse me, the cross country team, and then the crew team, and then became a naval officer afterwards. And as kind of the athletic runt of the family.
I did have the opportunity to see what, effort looked like, what passion looked like, and to see that on full display through the hard times of kind of seeing the pain on my parents' faces as they were going through these grueling physical activities. And that definitely shaped what I think hard work looks like. So I would say that that kind of from the earliest, I would say precognition or preconsciousness level that has pervaded kind of who I am as a person from the earliest stage.
And do you learn a lot about hard work when you were younger what are some of the ways that at that younger age, you decided to work hard and and and was a hard worker? Yeah. So I I would say the entrepreneurial bug was kind of placed within me at that young age, and I'll give you a couple examples. I was probably 11 or 12, just entering middle school, 6th, 7th grade.
And my friend and I decided we wanted to you know, kind of put our studies, quote, unquote, on the back burner, and instead try to build a company. So we researched what we could. Again, this is probably 2005 ish, 2004, maybe. And we built a computer integration company. So We called it hailstorm PC inspired by the famous Pacific Northwest weather. We went out and bought a number of parts off things like Newegg.
We assembled those computers, and then we marketed them publicly, mostly on Craigslist. And the price point for us at the time, we thought it was high end. We, we would sell computers for 800 to $1600. They'd be Zeon based, you know, workstations or gaming rigs, and we poured our heart and soul into that effort for what came to be very little financial return.
But certainly it was it was the first time I realized, wow, it is incredible to try to build something from 0, build something from scratch. And, boy, does it require a lot of hard work? The funny part is we'd show up to deliver these computers. And, you know, to be completely honest, there weren't more than a dozen or so that we ended up selling. But we'd show up to deliver them.
And I'm not sure exactly what the customers thought at the time about these 2 middle schoolers delivering their $1000 PC. But I'm hoping that they thought that, you know, this company was scrappy and hired cheap delivery, for what was assembled by professionals. So that was kind of one. The other example I'd offer from kind of at the entrepreneurship intersection with hard work is late middle school, early high school, I started building a, freelance web design company.
And, again, I think this is a good example of hiding behind a keyboard with the internet in the early to late, 2000, but people didn't know I was fourteen teen years old. And I fell in love with Illustrator. I fell in love with Photoshop, fell in love with HTML. And I would build these sites and deliver them to customers and It's amazing how much cash flow you can generate as somebody in late middle school, early high school when you're fortunate not to have to pay rent.
And so I would pour so much time into these 2 endeavors. And, again, it kinda reinforced this cycle to me, this virtuous cycle that with enough kind of tenacity, you can find your way within uncertain times. Now web design, building computers, far less certain, far clearer road map than what we're doing with claim now, you know, some decades later, but definitely the first kind of twinkles that I experienced at that time.
Yeah. Your journey with web development and building computers kinda reminds me of when I was in 9th grade when I started a a phone repair business. When I started to learn about how to repair phones and computers, I just went on YouTube and watched this guy named Hugh Jeffries, who who does a lot of phone repairs. And that's how I learned. But, I mean, back then, YouTube wasn't even a thing, really. At least they weren't, doing tutorials.
So How did you learn how to work computers and repair them? I had a a partner in crime. We launched that hailstorm PC company I mentioned. We both were Geeks. You know, from a hardware perspective, we try to figure out what worked, you know, nicely in the sandbox together. From a software perspective, we were hacking around bios the registry editor in Windows, you know, we were just learning as we went, and it was very much a trial and error process.
I'm so thankful for YouTube now, by the way, I love spending my time when I'm not looking at a screen, you know, working on things like snow machines, snowmobiles, dirt bike engines, aircraft. And, boy, it would be a lot harder to learn now without YouTube. Before we get into the backstory of claim and what you're doing today, I wanna delve into the problem first. What's wrong with advertising today? Oh, boy. Here we go.
So so let's let's attack this both from kind of a consumer lens, as well as the merchant or kind of advertiser lens. Let's start with the the merchant lens first. I actually think that most people don't realize how difficult it is to be a marketer today. There are a few reasons for that, and then I'll kind of aggregate those up to the picture of of how we see the world. The first is that the cost to acquire a right now is more expensive than ever, and we see this in the data.
The cost per acquisition CPA and kind of marketing parlance has overall tripled over the past 8 years. So that's number 1 is it is very difficult to make your P and L really pencil right now, given the cost that it takes to go reach and get that customer in the door for the first time. So that's one.
The second aspect is actually figuring out how to attribute where that customer came from is more complex than ever, and we see entire industries, $1,000,000,000 industries developed around multi touch attribution and assigning value to where that customer came in the door. And unfortunately, It's becoming more and more opaque, especially for the end user here who is the marketer. It's kind of a fool's errand in a way, and so that's complicating the picture.
And then lastly, these kind of industry wide developments with good intent, by the way, the phasing out of cookies from a Google perspective. Apples do not track or, anti tracking technology in the iOS system. These further complicate the ability of the marketer to say, How do I find the right customers? How do I reach those customers? How do I bring them in the door? And how do I know how I brought them in the door? And so marketers being put in this impossible position.
Again, this is kind of the sum total of that difficulty right now where they're being asked to grow top line by their leadership teams, by their investors, by their shareholders. They're being asked to cut marketing spend, being asked to grow gross margins and operating margins. And they're given kind of a legacy set of tools to to do so. Things like Google AdWords, which reinvented were rather invented early advertising on the internet, things like Facebook, instagram, TikTok.
These are our legacy tools. I think it's important to remember Facebook Instagram, these things have been around for over a decade, if not longer. And so it's an aging suite of tools coupled with a really difficult macro picture for marketer. Why is this so difficult to figure out where consumers are coming from on that merchant lens? Yeah. So we'll talk kind of attribution 101 here.
The earliest version of this probably goes back to, like, the Madan men days, if not sooner, right, where you're seeing a a billboard or a television ad, and that's what we kind of call today awareness marketing. And so can you really tick and tie somebody who watches the Temu Super Bowl ad to somebody who makes the purchase? You you really can't at the end of the day.
And so this whole industry of performance marketing that's worth tens and tens, if not 100 of 1,000,000,000 of dollars per quarter, really arose to answer that question. So If I click a link on Instagram, can I track through from seeing that with my eyeballs through making a purchase on the website? And the answer is Kind of. Provided that you make a lot of assumptions around where do ascribe trust and authenticity within that system.
And so performance marketing to me is inadequate in its current state, for brands because It is nearly impossible to know. Is it because you saw this one ad? And that ad drove you to make this purchase? And that's going to only get harder and harder, as I mentioned, because of tracking being pulled out of the system by sort of thematic regulatory constraints. Yeah. I think it's also extremely difficult to gain attention now because of how much, content is already out there.
And for Bryce, I think that traditional advertising markets like this are gonna break in the next few years. If we continue down the trend of chat, GPT, LOMs, sat over saturating the market. I mean, if if a if an LOM right now is able to operate at some nontrivial percentile of of human cognition, then it's going to be harder than ever to know whether the eyeballs air quotes that Saan had were truly human than not.
And that's gonna throw a wrench, in terms of the generative capability of of advertising for attribution in the next few weeks. It's interesting because I never thought of it like that. I always thought about, you know, chatty PT and AI being used to create content. I think for the most part, that ends up creating lower quality content depending on what it is.
If I didn't think about it, on the other side is if if they're actually viewing it and to actually know if somebody who's viewing it as a person or not, it's an interesting, perspective.
And I think that's a perfect segue, Shamus, into the consumer side because what we're talking about now is that consumer attention is at an all time low, which is, again, feeding into kind of the vicious cycle of CPAs or cost of acquisitions being at an all time high because we are absolutely inundated with advertising all day on our screens in real life. And the net total of that is Personally, and this is part of the inspiration for claim, disillusionment.
But if anything, it's desensitization, to these brands that are trying to grab our attention when we're not, you know, we're not on Instagram to be sold things. We're not walking down the street to be sold things. So it's a root interruption, in our day, which I would argue as an economic drain on our society as well. So how are you guys solving this problem through claim?
We've mentioned your new business a couple of times, but let's dig deep into what you guys are doing to actually fix this issue. Yeah. So so maybe helpful to kind of fill in a little bit of the picture here on on what inspired us to to start claim. We'll start with kind of the disillusionment aspect that that I mentioned. I grew up with Facebook, at the end of college, I wanna say 2013 ish, I deleted my Facebook entirely, not deactivated, but deleted, because I felt 2 things.
1, the sort of dopamine loop is real, and I felt myself getting dragged more and more into checking Facebook often at the expense of real world relationships and time better spent elsewhere. But 2, I got tired of the 4th or 5th direct to consumer company trying to reach me on Facebook. When again, I was not there to be sold to. So I deleted Facebook, and I never got an Instagram.
I think it's kind of a funny, Paradox in a way that we have a consumer internet advertising founder who never had an Instagram. And so it's a known blind spot. And I'm able to fill that in with really talented folks on our team, but it speaks to my belief that the current system is broken. And going forward, we've built claim almost to be the anti Instagram and the anti direction that A lot of these platforms are going, which started as true connections.
They started as, what are my friends doing today? Much like B Real still is. And they've expanded in scope to not what are my friends up to, but who is this influencer who's trying to market to me? What is this celebrity doing? And the density of those networks has become more diffuse. And so I'm glad that I'm I'm not on Instagram, frankly. So that's one. The second aspect of starting claim came from this feeling that a lot of our digital interactions are more transactional than ever right now.
There's a story that that I tell with my my cofounder where He did something really great for the company. He shipped a feature way ahead of schedule for us, and it was a step change for the company. I thought about what I could do to thank him, for doing that. And I kinda considered 3 options. I could go downstairs. I could, you know, recite his favorite coffee order by heart, get him that coffee, at the coffee shop, bring it back up and give it to him. That's one.
I could, you know, hand him a $5 gift card to that coffee shop. As a second way of thinking him, or I could just slap $5 down on the table in front of him, and all of those would have the same monetary value, but, like, we all realize that there's one right answer in that sort of decision matrix, and it's get him the thing that he loves because I know him.
And I feel like so much of our digital interactions in the past decades have been reduced to bits to ones and zeros to transactions on things like Venmo, Cash App PayPal and the like. And we've lost some of that emotional connection, and there's something about that that is deeply human that were missing. And so we wanted to bring back that sort of emotional connection through interaction, through authenticity with claim.
And then the last aspect of this and why I think claim will become kind of a generational company, on the consumer side is we were looking around at the world, a few years ago when we were saying, wow, there are some really interesting things going on here that we're seeing in places like web 3 in gaming, etcetera, around digital ownership of private property. If you think about the way that our society functions in the United States, it is very much dictated by private property ownership.
And so I don't think it takes a massive leap to believe that in the future, if private property ownership were you know, essentially sacrosanct on the internet, that would transform how our society functions, perhaps by multiples because of the distribution of the internet. And so Part of the inspiration from claim is early tests around what could private property ownership on the internet look like.
And, of course, claim is definitely you know, course corrected and made adjustments over over time, but that sort of ethos still underpins a lot of our work as a company. Those were kind of the 3 epiphanies or or moments, when we started clean. And how did you and your co founder How did you and your cofounder meet and why did you decide to go into business together? Yeah. I love this. It's so central to our story.
There was an admissions officer in the undergraduate admissions department at Yale, who decided for whatever reason to put my cofounder and I together as roommates. And it was a stroke of luck because we really clicked, and we ended up living together all 4 years in undergrad. We kind of set our goodbyes. He went off to go work in the Bay Area, after school, I went to go work in New York. But we always had this thought that one day we wanted to start something together.
And I think part of me in my mind always held this place of admiration for my dad because he started a company with his best friend back in the 1980. And when he did, he did something that I thought was really powerful. He said, I'm gonna write a letter to you being his best friend, and here are here's what I value about you as a person.
Here here are all the things that I admire in you and why I'm so excited to, intertwine our lives even further in an uncertain venture, but here are the things that are non negotiables for us. And and here are the reasons that we need to maintain our friendship in the face of know, adversity as a business. And so I knew that I wanted to go start a company, and I wanted to do so with my cofounder. TAP. And so that ended up changing my life for the better. I I wanted to go find TAP.
I knew I needed to poach him for whatever he was up to at the time. He was in business school at Harvard doing a a joint degree between the engineering school and and HBS. And so I I applied there. I was really fortunate to to get in. And then we did the whiteboard thing in our dorm room. We lived together again. And before we took the leap of faith, I wrote him a letter. And You know, my dad actually brought out the letter that he wrote not too long ago, and it was kind of amazing.
It makes you think about nature nurture a lot, but the same themes were present there. In the letter that I wrote tap saying, here's what I admire about you. Here's why I'm so excited in the letter that was dated in 1982, from my dev. And at Harvard Business School, what are some of the startup ideation ideas that you were brainstorming at that time? Oh, man. Okay. Tripped down memory lane. We had a whiteboard in our room. We overbuilt this matrix to evaluate different ideas, which was silly.
It's kind of a saying in in in business school that there are 4, horsemen of the NBA apocalypse. Meaning, what are the ideas that rear their ugly heads every single MBA class? And yet, every single MBA thinks that they are world changing ideas in no particular order It's an alcohol delivery app. It's a dating app. It's an English tutoring app. It's a meetup or or networking app. And, I will lie. We evaluated some of some things in those, 4.
The 2 that we ended up exploring more, one was a take on streamlining the immigration system, the skilled immigration system in the US, it's appalling to me that we have a country that doesn't support bringing great people here, highly skilled laborers, the H1B system, going through it now for one of our teammates. It's it's broken. Whereas you look at our neighbor to the North Canada, and they are welcoming, skilled immigrants to Canada.
And and in fact, I I think it's kind of a global competition issue for the United States, but without going too deep down that, because that's a certainly rabbit hole. We didn't feel like we had a good founder market fit there. And so we moved on to a second idea that we spent more time on, in the computer vision space. And that one, we felt was really mission driven.
The idea was how can we equip, lower skilled technicians, meaning nurse practitioners physician's assistance at the highest level or physicians in rural areas with better capabilities to identify, disease, things like lung cancer, things like breast cancer, etcetera. Again, the reason that we ended up letting that idea go aside from business model considerations was founder market fit.
My cofounder had great expertise in computer vision, but We certainly didn't have medical expertise, and it wasn't something that we felt that we could personally speak to. Interesting. I liked the personal backstory behind that. And how that led to claim. I think to understand how you guys are solving the issue, I wanna bring back or or touch on something you previously said How do you bring back that emotional connection, through claim? Yeah. Awesome question.
I think part of it starts with, a consistency and design that feels opinionated and consistent. So what do I mean by that? If you play with claim, it should give you nostalgic vibes. The logo is inspired by Nintendo, but it is a very clear and consistent departure from what I call the 2010s fintech UI stack. So it feels like you're you're kind of having this different experience as 1.
Secondly, your friends are already on the platform, and we'll talk about growth in a minute of its of interest, but we've launched in really dense social networks. On purpose. And so with authenticity being kind of the key word here, when you use claim, you're seeing what your friends are up to actively, where they are shopping, where where they are discovering new things. And it's done in a non transactional way.
And I think that is kind of the the beauty at the heart of claim is, you know, we, if we're talking about shopping and customer acquisition and brand discovery, the heart the beating heart of that is transactions. It's the ones and zeros and the dollar signs that I mentioned. But we've managed to rip out the feeling of transactions from the platform. And one of the ways we do that is by pushing numbers under the hood as much as we can.
And we ran a number of AB tests and and kind of interviews around this, And there is a very different reaction to if I put a brand in front of you and the opportunity to try that brand and we say iced coffee, then if I say 20% off, a $5 off. In a way, it gets you to react more emotionally to something. You can picture it in your mind. It feels like it's yours. More so than it feels like, oh, here we go again. I'm operating the left brain.
So the combination of a dense social network plus treating objects or brands as discrete things, not numbers as part of the secret sauce with claim. That's really interesting. It's something that I actually wanna break down. So For example, let's say I'm at a student at 1 of the universities that you currently support. I download the app. Sign up. One of the first things that I'm seeing and I'm interacting with on the platform.
Yeah. So we'll drop you on to the activity feed, which, you know, talking to the early folks at at Venmo A lot of people ask, why Venmo had an activity feed? Like, why do I need to see my friends paying each other rent or or paying each other back for pizza? And at the beginning and and still today, that's to really drive home the point that there is activity happening here. This thing is real. It is credible. It's trustworthy.
And so in the same way, we drop you on the activity feed on claim, and you can see the pace of interaction that's occurring on the platform. Today's Thursday, which is claim drop day. We can talk about the mechanics later, but if you open up the app right now, you're seeing hundreds of activities happening on the platform per minute.
And what's cool about that is you're kind of immersed in this world if this is there's there's some moving and shaking going on here, and among my friends, which is the the key point. So that's one. The second kind of aspect of what we do is focus on these moments. I just mentioned drop day. That was partly inspired by be real saying it's time to be real.
By HQ trivia, there's really something special about timed internet functions and kind of conditioning people to expect timed internet to occur. So what do I mean by that? We send a text to everyone at 11 AM Eastern on Thursdays, and we say the drops here. Come grab your claim. And people look forward to that. I mean, I've I've had, you know, students tell, tell me that claim is a bright spot in in their week. They look forward to this.
It's Not only an excuse to to try a new brand, but go with a friend. And I think that experience bringing back that social experience of trying something new together is really powerful.
Whether it's online and you're you're you're buying a a new tea together on a, you know, a website or if it's your you know, going and trying a a new restaurant for the first time, when you associate that with a social experience, you tend to value it higher Not to mention if you do work, you're going to value that experience higher. It's kind of the classic IKEA effect in in consumer psychology.
And given that it's harder than ever to reach consumers nowadays, especially college students, how did you get your first 100 users in each of these campuses? Yeah. So huge, kudos to Caroline who who runs growth for us. And what we've done is borrowed a lot from our predecessors, companies like Be real, gas app, Tinder, what are the growth marketing or field marketing strategies that were used there, but also Venmo.
And so what we do on a new college campus is first, we identify the right college campus we wanna launch at. We look at student population. We look at the dynamics of that Shamus? How dense is it? Where do students live? What's the quality of food on that campus? What brand partners are proximate to that Shamus, what e commerce companies want to market to that campus. And once we've identified the campus, we use kind of a 3 pronged strategy We hire college ambassadors.
Nothing, you know, particularly new there, but we use them to gather on the ground intelligence. And we give them 5 to 6 discrete tasks to help us with. Hey. Introduce us to, you know, 10 sorority fraternity or student group leaders on campus. Tell us about the places that people love to meet up tell us about the restaurants that people love to go, try with their friends. And so we have that kind of on the ground knowledge We then launched partnerships with key organizations on Shamus.
At Harvard, it was, the undergraduate women and business organization in the automotive society became kind of our key partners. We may or may not financially incentivize that group, depending on the organization. But what they end up doing is the student group leaders will say, hey. You know, to our members try claim and and our invitation will get dropped into group chats, and that helps us spread one to many very quickly.
We also work with either paid influencers or micro influencers on campus, or we get a lot of organic content on Instagram and TikTok about the sort of delightful experience that claim brings. And so those are kind of 3 strategies we use we also have a wait list, again, looking at what companies like gas app have done in the past. We've had several students try so hard to get on to claim.
I know 1, you know, University of Nevada, Las Vegas student, for example, in the last week has tried 62 times to sign up with her email address. And UNLV is in the school we currently support, but the wait list shows us essentially where there is student appetite to go next. And so we can reach out to those users. Hey. Wanna become an ambassador? Do you wanna become one of our launch partners and launch with kind of, a friendly welcoming party on these campuses?
But to be honest, Seamus, It's scrappy. It's feet on the street. It's boots on the ground. If there were a a silver bullet to capturing The majority of a college Shamus, I think we'd see a lot more companies do it. We've just started to build our own replicable playbook over time. We spoke a little bit earlier before this call. And you told me that you only need, like, less than 10% of students at a university, or college to sign up for the platform before it starts going viral.
Why is the number so low that you need it and how you're able to go viral after just having a small students up front. So this is, this obviously varies. The 5 to 10% number, though, at a large university is still a a fair number of students. If we're at a 50,000 person university, that's 25100 to 5000 students on the platform. So it's not a non zero number of folks on the platform before things start to rip. I think the reflection for us is 2 things.
1, We see this all the time in consumer, and we probably experience it ourselves. It takes multiple impressions, or exposures to a new app or a new opportunity before you get over the fence and you try it. You know, in kind of business school parlance, this would almost be like crossing the chasm in where you have some early adopters who are willing to try anything, but how can you actually get kind of the early majority onto the platform? And to us, the 5 to 10% is the early adopters.
The early majority is the next 20 plus percent. So it takes your friend trying this thing, having that magical experience of unwrapping a brand for the first time going and trying that brand often with a friend based on the games that we build on the platform and then getting a Venmo back for that sort of loop to want to download it yourself. So it's multiple exposure, and then it's trust and brand recognition.
And we borrowed a lot from be real on this as well in their playbook for launching on college campuses. But it it takes enough of your friends having a positive experience and seeing claim, fulfill its obligations to reward you for brand discovery. To be able to download the app. And part of that is, around the data privacy work that we do.
The reason that we can be so powerful both for our consumers and brands is because we're able to on a transaction level identify places you haven't been before. And a lot of our consumers think, oh, is claim going to sell our data? And and the answer emphatically absolutely not. We are not selling consumer data at all. Full stop.
We only use that to find places that you haven't been before to see that you've actually shopped at that place and to find new places that you're gonna like going forward. And so that trust aspect, which is so core to attacking some of the problems from the marketing perspective around attribution, is something that we look to build on these campuses. If we see that tipping point around 5 to 10%? You mentioned games. What are some of those games that are helping with engagement on the platform?
Yeah. Let me offer 2. So, for Valentine's Day, we launched what we call half heart. And, basically, we gave everyone on the platform either a left half of a heart to go get a coffee with somebody else. It was worth about 5 to $6, I wanna say, or a left half or a right half of art. Excuse me.
And so it created this virtual game where whether or not you wanted to go with a friend or or maybe a crush, which is kind of our ideal you had to trade around to make sure that you had the complimentary heart. And so I didn't mention this earlier, but when you get these sort of Claims we call them these cards to go try a brand for the first time based on your past spend, you can trade them on the platform. And that creates a lot of interesting consumer behaviors.
It's a killer feature for us, but we wanted to use trading to create a world in which people were actively talking about and finagling for these hearts so they could go together with somebody. So that's one. What we did on Tuesday, actually, is essentially launch Pokemon Go for brands, for brand discovery. And so what that looked like is we'd send everyone a text. The drops here go to this point on campus and unwrap your reward with other people that are there. We did this in Boston.
Our team was on the ground there. And we saw these groups of students looking at their phones. It's how we could identify them. We see them tracking towards the radius. And then there'd be these audible moments delight where they'd be yelling at each other what they got. Hey, did you get this? Did you get this? You wanna go? Let's go. We had one student clear an entire flight of stairs. To make it into the radius to kind of check-in and unwrap, his claim at that time.
And so these are some of the The games were testing in terms of blending single player with multiplayer in terms of blending digital with, you know, IRL or physical world, that all come back to kind of the key theme of brand discovery and brand discovery is best done through your friends? I wanna touch on the actual the other side of the marketplace, which is the branch really quickly.
I've noticed over time that changing behavior, changing consumer behavior, basically any type of change of behavior is pretty to do. How do you convince brands to go from those legacy platforms like Google ads, Facebook ads, to then your platform claim? Yeah. I would say an indirect conversation that we have is around friction. Friction to getting a consumer to try a new thing is really high.
We can actually price it in a way because, we know that it's going to be a higher value required to get you out of bed in the morning to go walk across town and try a new place. So it's friction for the consumer, which I think a lot of marketers understand. And then for us, It's a question of how can we reduce friction to a brand partner trying claim for the first time. And let me kind of describe that. What we do for our brand partners is we say, Hey.
What are you willing to pay for a new customer? Let's get some benchmarking done on your status quo. And a lot of our partners will tell us Hey. Look. We are beholden to Facebook. We are beholden to Instagram. The algorithm is Capricious. We are looking to diversify a way these are our current cost per acquisition numbers. We say, great. We're not gonna charge you anything up front.
We're gonna go out you know, with your blessing and bring a lot of great new customers through your doors or through your checkout flow for the first time.
And then afterwards, we'll report back on the customers that we brought in, the number of customers, the value kind of delivered to The brand, again, I'll I'll note here from a consumer perspective, no personal information's ever shared with the brand, but we're able to on a very data driven level provide that sort of proof to brands that they lack because we have the credit card transactions to prove it. They can't get that on any other platform with that level of sophistication.
And so there's really no downside to brands working with claim. There are no integrations. We don't require any technical lift, no staff retraining. We're not touching checkout flows. We're not touching physical lines and processes in person. We've just been really excited by Marker's willingness to try a new thing, see the results, and then refer their peers in the industry to claim. And today, how many users are you signing up, on the platform on, like, every week or every day?
What what's what are those numbers breaking down to be Yeah. Every day, we're in the thousands at this point. High hundreds, low thousands is kind of our our run rate. For us, it's not a growth at all costs question. We have an invite channel in Slack, which is actually fun because I know Shamus, when I go back to this after the episode, it'll be kind of gratifying to see the the register come in. But if we were trying to make this as large as possible, we would do probably 2 things.
1, we would expand to more campuses. We would allow list more.edu addresses. We also probably would consider moving off of college campuses if we wanted to really get as big as possible. And, again, I think that separates us from platforms of late, be real laps, most recently. Obviously, the the big legacy incumbents But our goal is not to get as fast as possible on the consumer side. Our goal is to reach critical mass on these different campuses.
Be able to take that captive audience of of great Gen Z consumers, allow brands to access those Gen Z consumers, and start to let this marketplace balance over time. And so I I do imagine the next few months, we're gonna take the guardrails off more and more. But for now, we're pretty excited about the the pace of growth. Why is your goal not to grow super large at first instead do it in stages. Why is that?
Yeah. This is the the blessing in the curse of being, something in between a consumer social company at a in a fintech, right, is consumer social company, the the road map is get big quickly, figure out monetization down the road. For us, we have the benefit of of monetization earlier on.
But until we figure out essentially the unit economics or the company equation and we really refine that company equation, if we grew to 10,000,000, you know, students or users tomorrow, I'm not confident that we have perfectly figured out the math there to account for that as a company. And I think we will you know, in in the near future. But until we do that, I think we're better served by a velocity of learning in this sort of constrained environments than we are of growth at all costs.
And I would note that in any marketplace, You know, a company needs to prioritize one side or the other. We call it the shifting bottleneck. Is the bottleneck for us on the consumer side, or is it on the merchant side of this platform? And you can look at great companies like Airbnb who emphasized one side or the other towards becoming a stabilized marketplace.
For us, our thesis right now is if we're able to get to enough consumers and build a consumer experience to people's love, then we're going to bring the right brand partners onto the platform, which will then start create the flywheel of 2 sided network effects that we're looking for. And you mentioned monetization there are some apps that have, you know, grown super big like Clubhouse had millions of users. And then the they just realized there wasn't actually a business model there.
How what's your business, Wanna? How do you guys make money? Yeah. I mean, this is where we have a ton of prior art to pull from, and we can play to the the very Madan reliable and dated business models of the giants. Right? So we don't monetize consumers. We want consumers to use this platform we want consumers to feel safe and know that we're not selling their data. We're trying to build a better advertising Madan.
And so if I'm a brand, the way I think about this is if I have a dollar, my status quo is I can buy ads. Or you can essentially give it straight to new customers on claim. It's taking that ad, you know, a brand would have bought an ad. They're instead giving that value to a customer, you can think of it almost as a virtual free sample in a way.
And when they do that, it gives the customer the chance to directly experience the brand, experience the product, and everything that that brand manager or that CMO is obsessed over, which is a better experience for the customer. They've now had that full experience, a better experience for the brand because they have higher attribution and frankly, usually more efficient. Outcomes, it's a better experience for claim to really be that sort of distribution mechanism, that exists.
And again, I I would just harken back to The reason claim matters is because advertising is broken and consumers are more disillusioned than ever, with advertising, with influencers, etcetera, they didn't grow up with these things, especially our gen z folks. And so they're looking for a new more authentic way to do things together. And that's what claim provides as a newer and more authentic way to do things together.
And so to answer your question, Seamus, on monetization, we structure our partnerships such that brands are paying us for new customers in the same way that they pay the incumbents for new customers. We're just doing it in a more authentic, and reliable way. Got it. And this might be going a little off track, but I am curious to do this, you, in the higher top talent, you obviously need some level of capital, which you raised, through venture venture funding.
So you raised at the peak of the VC market a couple of years ago. And more recently, when the market was in a trough, you just raised some, a seed round by Sequoia. What has been, like, the most important lessons that you've learned in that fundraising process to lay to raise money when capital is flush, but also when capital is more limited.
Yeah. I would say at the outset, what I what I kind of tell other founders who are are thinking about raising capital is first understand what kind of business you want to build and what are the pros and cons of of various sources of capital. In the venture world, when you do raise the top of the market or or a more frothy, you know, capital rich environment and you raise it the the other end of the spectrum, you do learn some some hard lessons.
And so, to me, I I think it's Finding the right investors who are values aligned and vision aligned is more important than ever. A lesson that I learned is It's going to be hard, if not near impossible, to convince an investor who doesn't believe or have overlap with your view of the world or your thesis. That your company is best suited to attack that problem.
They might not even believe that that problem is worth attacking due to, you know, scar tissue or skeletons in that closet or their own lived experience, and that's totally fine.
But what I think you want to be doing or at least our experience was being hyper targeted finding investors that have an existing thesis that have worked with other great companies adjacent or similar to yours or that have attack hard problems with a similar level of uncertainty or new categories, are the best conversations. And I could often find during the fundraising process that within the first five minutes, I knew whether this was going to be a good conversation or not.
And that's no disrespect to, the person or people that I was speaking with, but You can you can tell if you can you and the investor can start dreaming together early on. Hey. Have you thought about this? What about this? You know, have you considered this? That's very different than, you know, what is your current down mouth? You know, tell me about cash burn. You know, the the typical questions that should come up in any diligence process. I found to be back weighted in good conversations.
You've raised your seed round from Sequoia, just recently. Know Sequoia doesn't really do a lot of consumer investments. How did you get inside the table there? Yeah. Certainly, certainly, not recently. Obviously, Sequoia's incredibly storied, fund who invested early in Apple, Google, you know, WhatsApp, Instagram, the list goes on, so very fortunate to to work with them.
And, you know, candidly, when we walked into their office in Menlo Park and you see the big Sequoia tree and you see all the the term sheets of the first investments they made in these, you know, iconic companies. It was a little bit of a imposter syndrome or or pinch yourself moment. And so I I would say that, you know, going back to the the fundraising tactics that we mentioned, we found true, true, truly values aligned and vision aligned partners in Josephine Chen and Jesley at Sequoia.
And from the first conversation, it was dreaming It was understanding what are the dream scenarios? What could we build here? How could we transform? How consumers interact with one another? How brands and consumers interact? Is very much a a generative energy giving discussion. The way that we were introduced to Sequoia, as I mentioned, was we were able to find somebody who would vouch for us, say, hey, this company's worth your time.
Maybe you should just spend a little bit of time hearing what they have to say Madan since then it's been a partnership that's blossomed, but especially in the last year or so, you know, we truly understand how fortunate we are because capital is expensive right now, and and capital is difficult to come by, and certainly from, top tier venture firm. And that's why We're working our hardest to to go make the future that we're building together a reality.
You hyper target, your investors how do you do that? What do you do to hyper target investors? Yeah. I mean, that there's there's a classic strategy when you're running a fundraising process where you want to be targeted because you don't want the opportunity to feel like, it's being shopped around everywhere. And so there's a sequencing element of it of, hey. We wanna go for these firms first.
Get their opinions you know, rope them in, hopefully get some traction, hopefully get some term sheets, and then go to the next to kind of wave and end up with a hot round or a competitive environment a hot round in, you know, 2022, 2023 is a little bit less common than a hot round in 21. But the way that I would look at it is Hey. Who are investors that are writing actively about the space?
Even if it's not aligned with our view of the space or who are investors who have a, enduring thesis about social commerce, for example, or about advertising or about consumer social finding those people and then crucially finding, a warm introduction to those people. I think most investors will say, hey. My DMs are open. You know, on Twitter or or the like.
The reality is that an investor at a tier 1, VC these days is getting exposed to thousands of pitches per year is evaluating actively 100 of companies per year and is only making a handful of investments. And so The networking aspect of this is real.
You'd be much better served taking the extra time to figure out if you can get just a warm intro via email or whatever to an investor because in their mind, I would bet you that they would place incrementally more weight on the conversation that you're going to have. And therefore, the sort of luck surface area that you're creating in a way is increasing, and therefore your probability of getting a good round done is increasing.
I guess to wrap it up, we have a couple of last questions, that we like to end with. One is what's the best piece of advice you've ever received? Yeah. Good question. It's happened a couple times, including one recently from a friend. But essentially, the advice is take a step back and and have some perspective. And what I mean by that is every founder, every entrepreneur, whether it's a small business or a venture backed startup, feels the grind, feels the uncertainty, feels the stress.
I certainly have been quite stressed out candidly. And that's okay because what these friends help me do is realize the context for what we're doing. It's a tremendous opportunity to wake up, go to work, you know, today with the claim team, you know, a team of really passionate, curious, vibrant smart people, and get to work with those people every day.
That's 1st and foremost, to be able to attack, $100,000,000,000 plus opportunity, and create a generational potentially, you know, world changing company. That's pretty massive, to have really great investors, on our side, like Sequoia, like Sousa, like box group, is a great honor to have students who love our app so much to have brands that love the platform so much to have that sort of traction.
And so, essentially, what it helped me do, this advice was to pull myself out of, you know, I wouldn't say a dark place by any stretch, but certainly a a place of stress and realize What a great opportunity we have. And and, you know, maybe zooming out one step further, Shamus. What a great opportunity we have in the United States? As well to have the the liberties, the freedoms, the potential for economic mobility.
Obviously, there are a ton of horrible things going on in the world, and there are a ton of horrible things going on in the United But what a blessing? What a privilege it is to to be a founder and go try to make your mark in some small way on the world. And and I think that for me was, a sobering and important reminder, and it makes me more thankful every day.
And the one question we like to close it with is if I slid you over a phone and you could call your eighteen year old self, would you call And if so, what would you say? Do a lot of people say they wouldn't call? Is that a common answer? About is 5050. That's fascinating. I don't know. As a quick aside here, when I try to make decisions, what's worked well for me is to minimize regret regret minimization.
It's how I made decisions about where I went to school, big life decisions, personally, etcetera, etcetera, company wide decisions. I I know it's it's kind of a a fun exercise, but I regret not taking the opportunity to grab the phone from you and and call my eighteen year old self. So therefore, I would do it what I would say is, this is personal, but I'd say, hey, don't drink. And and and let me explain more.
I think the world, you know, whether it's Huberman or, you know, various other commentators, scientific literature, I think we're understanding more and more how bad alcohol is for us physiologically. It's it reminds me of smoking. And sure. I I socialize in college business school, whatever. I quit drinking a year or so ago entirely for no other reason than than health and and mental clarity, and I feel the best I have ever felt in my adult life.
And so I would I'd call my eighteen year old self and say, hey. Look, you know, try to push the peer pressure off. Find another way. Find another outlet to socialize. You don't need alcohol. Because I wonder I wasn't a heavy drinker, but I wonder what it would have been like. There are so many other ways to stretch your mind, stretch your creativity. Why would you poison it? Awesome. Well, I think that's a great way to end it. Thank you very much, Sam, for taking the time to join the show.
We'll have a link to claim, in the episode description. If you happen to be one of the support campuses. You can download it and check it out. And thank you very much, Tim. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Seamus. This is really fun.