Investor Hub

Lows

We have a 2 month ($30k min) funding gap. We're looking for any more options!!!
We have been doing relatively well with our cash management (more on that below) but we have a gap we desperately need to fill for Nov, Dec and Jan. I can't rely on sales like I was hoping to to cover some of our OpEx through January. Many of the people who are interested in funding Abi have pushed their funds to the New Year and we get to re-engage with them then (you can see the discussions we are having in our opportunities sheet). At this point, I’ve reached out to a little over 140 potential investors. From the people who are interested and responded, the two most common responses we are getting is people have either been sitting on their money till after the election/holidays OR we are too early but they are interested as we get more traction.

Our sales to SMB's are not performing.
We are finding that business owners aren't a big fan of mirrors. In order to make sales work with SMB's, we will need to improve our content/engagement funnel (improves trust) and increase our value proposition (moving to more downstream support). We did a "feedback" campaign to see why we weren't getting more traction and the feedback was mixed. Some leaders just don't want a mirror. Others don't know why the data is important and others want the data but want downstream support on taking action. We have a solid plan to address these issues I will cover below. The analogy we are using on the team is “we are trying to sell the engine while we build the car”. There is a way to make it work but the market for people who buy engines is very different than for people who buy cars. There is a lot of utility for us to go through this process, hit walls and learn how to adapt. We also just can’t let this stop us from getting to the car.

We've had some stalled partnerships

We are running into a barrier with some of our partnerships where they want a more developed tool than our current GRM. Essentially, they want it automated and we can't offer that yet. We had around 10 partnership opportunities tell us to re-approach them when the tech is a little more developed. 

We are behind on getting the backend code for V1 finished and up on AWS.
Candidly, Bryan and I are just behind. I expected to be more available for him but fundraising has taken me away from product work with him. He's been making great progress considering it's just him and he's underfunded. Our two next barriers to solve to get a fully functional platform are A: a few more key AI integrations need to be solved and B: The report dashboard needs to be built. I'm including some screenshots of the backend in the resources sidebar just in case you are interested to see what some of it looks like (it’s not built for looks so it looks rough but the math is all working out). 


Highs

Partnerships side sales are growing
We are working on quite a few really cool partnerships right now. These partnerships are important because it gives us live settings to work on product development. Dummy data/scenarios are not great for building tech so (with human quality/oversight) we will be offering some services that are augmented on our side by the tech we are building. Some of these partnerships will require us to add in the "dealflow" tool faster than we expected and do some live product development but they will push us to do good work. 

Here are some of the partnerships we have built/are working on right now:

• Sandbox - We are working on the deal analysis tech side of our dealflow tool to be able to assess and prioritize the best opportunities for their portfolio. Since sandbox is coming in as an investor, we are also releasing some of our monthly support tools sooner with companies in their portfolio. 

• Gratia Equity - We are not only offering deal analysis, but we are also offering due diligence to their sell side acquisitions, finding buyers and also finding other companies for them to acquire. Gratia is interested in coming in as an investor but wants to go through our due diligence process first. 

• NeoTerra Capital - We just got our first list of opportunities from Chris and are optimizing the dealflow tool to nurture data from available sources rather than gathered data/forms like we normally do. This work will allow us to expand the tool capability. 

• Glenn White - We are doing a traditional partnership agreement with Glen but it's coming with discussion around us helping some of the organizations he's involved in. We will have more details over the next month. 

• Gary Leeman - IOS implementer - Gary just started opening us up to his client list to map clients he thinks needs to see a "mirror".

New tools being launched in Jan
We have taken the feedback from all of the people/firms we have talked to and are making some product adjustments to the GRM to increase its value. All of these changes are in alignment with Abi's capabilities so they will just give us the option to test some new tech sooner. Essentially, we want to convert over to a monthly cost so we are going to release a few tools that will help us do that. Some of the new features are:

• Location data for franchise health. 

• Increased capability to find vetted vendor options beyond the GRM.

• A functional business agent that can answer questions and help find additional solutions for mapped clients. 

New development approach
We restructured our development approach and it's going to allow us to move faster and be more effective with our resources. We are adopting some of the rocket manufacturing thinking from SpaceX into our dev planning. This block based structure will allow us to be more agile and adapt to market changes more effectively. Because of this block structure, we rebuilt what the team will look like as we grow. I'll have it in our GTM shortly. 

We increased the raise to $1M.
After a fair amount of consideration and advice, I've decided to increase our SAFE round to $1M. I want to get Abi done faster and the extra $500k will help with that. We have been building a really strong set of funding options. We not only have a handful of firms interested after the New Year, but we also have a handful of firms interested when we hit certain milestones. You can see a lot of these in the funding opportunity doc

We are building signups for Abi

There are a handful of businesses who did not want GRM's who are interested in getting Abi. We are going to keep working on building an interest list for when Abi is launched.

We have a new advisor: Jano
Jano Banks is now on our advisory team. He was kind enough to give us some incredibly valuable feedback on our product/raise and I realized he is exactly the kind of voice/expert I want speaking into what we are building. He was an engineer at Google, Apple and Amazon and he has a rich history of working on large scale engineering projects. He knows what it takes to lead work on complex technologies and as we scale up, I'm going to need that type of wisdom. 

Our burn rate is low. 
Currently at around $10k a month (needs to be $25k). This is self explanatory. We've mainly just been spending money on Independent Contractors, Software/tech, some desk space, Legal, some marketing and a lot of coffee. 

We are incorporated in DE! 
We are now Legendary Business Intelligence, Inc.! That step is done, now we just need to get the agreements we've made transitioned over. We’re also switching almost all of our corporate management over to Carta. This will help us keep our act together as we raise more money.

It's that time again! We have some exciting updates this month! If you don't do anything else in the update, go sign up for our Outliers email!!!!

We're funded....ish

We are excited to let you all know we are looking at partnering with Sandbox Fund on finishing our round. They are a great group of people and we feel really great about our values alignment and the environment they will provide for us as we move forward. The only caveat is the funds won't be available till January, which presents a bit of a logistical problem with making sure we have the cash till then. With that said, now I'm looking for a bridge of about $150k to keep product development going till then. We have some sales coming in but the majority of that money will go to OpEx and further marketing. Honestly, any cash outside of the investment we get is going right back to keeping the people on our team running so for the next few months, any revenue will be eaten into OpEx and People resources.

Yes, we are looking for a bridge if anybody has any options. I would prefer a convertible but I'm open

I have a handful of other options that will fund as we get a little more revenue if we need it. I also have about $2.5M in soft commitments in a paid round if we needed to change up our entire strategy. As for now, the goal is to still get the $400k in and try for $2M-$5M in grants or revenue. I included an investment report if you want it. 

Product Dev update!!

Bryan will have a live version of our SaaS platform available on AWS in the next few weeks! We're excited to get it up so the team can start working on design/UI. Bryan is still working on translating the algo's but is almost done there. The dashboard pages are next. I think he's doing the best he can with being partially funded. We're definitely making it work. We're looking at switching to Cursor AI to help us with dev (https://www.cursor.com/)

Shiny new assets

Thanks to the investment funds we've received so far, Ben, Matt and I have been able to build a strong presentation on our sales/marketing. We've all but finished our first push on our website but more importantly, are about to launch our Outliers content and community. We have been looking for ways to increase the credibility of our sales along with offering more methods of engagement (social, email, etc). We are excited to announce not only the Outliers content channels, but in the next few weeks, will release The Arena. This will give us an additional MRR opportunity. We essentially are segmenting off the highest performers from the GRM and giving them access to an exclusive community of other Outliers. People they know are going to push them to be the best. We will have the opportunity to build a strong community along with curating a really valuable set of referral partners we can give people who go through the GRM. Essentially, we are kicking off air traffic controlling partnership and vendor referrals that will be suggested through the GRM/ABI products. Between the content, resource access, mappings and stewarding relationships with our clients, we hope to build a lot of value and inspire them to create amazing businesses.

Go signup for the Outliers email. You'll love it! 

Sales Updates

This last month, we obviously did a hard push on sales and our sales ecosystem. We have made some great progress. Most of the business in our pipeline right now are partner sales. We have around 15 firms going through our pipeline. We are offered test mappings for Millennia Ventures, A People Brand, His Kingdom Resources, Liquidity Club, OPN, and Portola Valley Partners. The goal would be to have a structure for those partners for either due diligence OR mapping their investments. Fun sales side note: We had a call with an EOS implementer. He's excited to recommend his "harder" clients to us. His goal is that he could have a third party also show them a mirror in hopes they would become more open to his EOS suggestions. We are going to test a campaign to consultants/business services as a "challenging client support" mechanism. The team is enjoying finding new ways the product solves challenges in the market. 

Some new sales partners

We would like to introduce Joe Odell and Matt Hugg! They are outside consultants who have agreed to help us (in their own way) to get some traction on our sales. 

• Joe is a baller fractional COO who is excited to get the GRM into the hands of business owners. He has been running for a little over a week and already has stacked sales meetings. 

• Matt is a certified Exit Planner. We're going to do a "sell your business" campaign where we are running the GRM product and Matt will support clients with Planning services from that data. If this test goes well, we won't officially offer Exit Planning but we would promote it as a market for the GRM. 

Again, if any of you have questions, comments or want to chat, let me know! 

We've been moving fast and I'm a little late on my mid-month update . As usual, we will dive in!

We have mockups!

We have a first pass at our dashboard for Abi. To build a great architecture, we need to have some of our core functions worked out. Since we are integrating with Unity Engine as well, we need to have some clear ideas of what we are asking it to do visually. Also, 2D mockups are not the best format for interaction. The entire Abi design will rely on touch and 3D functionality and 2D mockups aren't a great representation of usability. But it should give you an idea. 

These designs are not final branding or function.

We have a lot farther to go and a lot to work out but being able to start playing around with the functionality has been allowing us to build some new vision for the platform. For instance, one of the features we are adding to Abi Gen1 is a "target analysis" that gives quick and easy interaction points between the user and why a KPI might be off in a certain area of the company Essentially it's a summarized root-cause analysis on each target KPI. Again, it would normally be really early for us to start working on mockups of the system but since what we are building relies on interaction so deeply, working through what we want on functionality gives us some better clarity on technical function. 

Progress on the Saas platform

Despite not being fully funded (more on that in a bit), I had Bryan start moving faster on Dev of our first version of the Saas platform. We have just been focusing on translating the algorithms I created in RegEx over to the Saas system. The data transformation will be the hardest part of getting our Saas spun up so we decided to start tackling that. The screenshot below is pretty basic and isn't pretty but just an example of us moving. 

Progress on the raise

We have $70k in and about $10k-$400k in soft commitments we are working through. There have been a handful of firms that have paused their funds but are interested in investing in Abi when their funds are open. Candidly, I took the last 4 weeks off the raise to focus on our sales engine (more on that in a bit) so I have not been pushing hard on the raise. We have reached out to about 45 angels/firms and about 20 responded. A handful with no's but a fair amount with either interest or are connecting us with some investors who may be interested. I have a list of about 15k investors we could reach out to if we need to open the throttle on our raise. You can see our progress board here: 
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iaiR41978MA8udZ-n9tiDzUI7jUgG07J5GTThAPJE2s/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Also!!! We have really been dialing in our deck. If any of you are interested, here you go: https://legendaryat.work/invest

**Shameless plug: If you know anyone who may be interested in investing, send them our deck & intro!

Sales. Sales. Sales

We took the last month to really focus on building and testing our funnel. We have been working on content, assets, tool setup, design, etc to start opening up sales of the GRM prototype. The goal is that while we are working on Abi, we are using the GRM to build the muscles (and partnerships) necessary to make an amazing push with Abi. Market data, customer responses, customer management, sales funnels, branding, core messaging, etc is all important to us getting really solid revenue really fast when we really open the throttle. We know the GRM is not going to have the same viability as Abi but we will use everything we have with the GRM to improve our position for Abi. In July, we had about 1000 people engage with our ads, emails, etc. Out of that, we have 4 hot leads in the pipeline right now. That's not great but we think we can eventually get that down to about 1 out of 100 with better targeting, conversions, value creation etc. We haven't landed those sales (the sales cycle is about a month) so we will see what our final CAC is and put that in our next update. 

Along with that though, we have 4 free mappings coming up from equity financing firms looking to use us for due diligence. We want to see how our tool stacks up against their tools. If any of those convert, we would be used to assess potential investments or previous investments. 

The good news is the testing is working and we are dialing in some solid offerings. When this first run of customers/partners is finished and we can see our close rates, if they look good, we will open our next round to 126k companies and 26k equity investing firms. 

Our branding isn't really pretty or perfect yet but it will all get better as we keep moving:

https://legendaryat.work/grm-4

https://legendaryat.work/due-diligence

Small strategic shift - generative apps

We just added generative dashboards/apps into our timeline over the next few years. Essentially, we think that in the next 3-4 years, we will see the slow decline of SaaS companies due to development "sandboxes" that will allow companies to use generative AI to develop hyper custom tech solutions on the fly. We are adding this into our development timeline so we can continue to adapt to the ever changing AI market. There are some tools that are experimenting with this (albeit, on a very simple level). You can see an example of some of that experimentation in https://websim.ai

The tech is super rudimentary but it's early. It will be shifting everything over the next few years and we want to be on the wave. 

You can see a bit more about our GTM and roadmap here: https://legendaryat.work/abi-plan

AI leadership forum

We have formed a partnership with a new organization called the "AI Leadership Forum". This group was started by Tara, the AI engineer from Deloitte who is helping us with our architecture. Her and Pedro have access to thousands of AI professionals and have agreed that as we grow, if we integrate the AI leadership forum into our recommendations for business owners, then they would help us with architecture and talent. They have access to some of the best AI talent and will help us find the right talent/tools as we get traction. You can see more about them here:

https://www.ailforum.com/

Lawyer

We are excited to say we have signed Mark White and their firm in the Bay on as our legal coverage. They are a great firm with an amazing pedigree. If you have a term sheet with us, you will see a letter from them so we can move our incorporation over to the Delaware C-corp. You can see more about Mark and his team here: https://www.white-summers.com/team/mark-cameron-white.

https://legendaryat.work/about

Those are the majors for the last month. Again, feel free to poke, question, challenge or help. We are not always going to get it right but with your feedback, we can at least not get it too wrong. 

Customer Highlight - 
https://vocalvideo.com/v/legendary-reviews-jordan-west

On a personal note. With my life savings invested in this and a mission that every drop of me is committed to, I'm all in and we will win! Thank you for giving our small team the belief and runway to go after something profound. We are so excited to create value for such a great group of people. 

From Ben, Kyle, Matt, Bryan, Jenni and I. Thank you all!

For no reason at all except fun, here is the latest song about Abi: https://suno.com/song/1dd02e4e-bdbe-46d1-9ff2-bf1c56a5eaf4