- Flavor Cloud is a B2B SaaS platform that makes international purchases on retailers' websites easier, faster, and friction-free.
- They handle shipping logistics, customs, duties calculation, and documentation for retailers.
- They help retailers tap into the growing cross-border commerce market, which accounts for a significant portion of e-commerce purchases.
- Flavor Cloud integrates with over 100 carriers worldwide to find the cheapest and most efficient shipping options.
- Retailers using Flavor Cloud can save up to 80% on shipping costs, increasing their conversion rates.
- They also provide a customs engine to simplify the classification of products and reduce paperwork.
- Flavor Cloud started as a marketplace and later pivoted to a SaaS platform.
- They have around 300 brands using their software and have processed around $100,000 in shipping volume.
- Their main competitor is Pitney Bowes, but they believe their technology and industry experience give them a competitive edge.
- Flavor Cloud has already raised $1.2 million in seed funding and is currently raising another million for the next 9 months.

- The founder is currently in the second round of fundraising, aiming to raise another million dollars over the next 9 months.
- Flavor Cloud is a platform that simplifies international shipping for online merchants, handling customs and determining the best route and price for shipping.
- The current process for US merchants to do international shipping is expensive and time-consuming, involving hiring consultants and dealing with issues like lost packages and customs delays.
- Flavor Cloud aims to solve this problem and cater to merchants who want to sell goods worldwide.
- The founder has 10 years of logistics experience and deep knowledge of the delivery industry, giving the company a competitive advantage.
- They are looking to raise a million dollars at a valuation of $10 million, with the funds going towards expanding the engineering team and operations.
- The founder is open to further discussion and will send the investor the pitch deck.
- The investor is interested in the potential of the business but suggests the founder be more concise in explaining what Flavor Cloud does.
- The founder acknowledges the need for a clearer one-liner to describe the company's services.
- The investor advises the founder to confidently ask for funding during investor meetings and emphasizes the importance of aligning with the right investor.

Rathna Sharad pitches FlavorCloud - http://flavorcloud.com/ - to Holly Liu, YC Visiting Partner, at our Seattle Female Founders Conference.

Adora Cheung, YC Partner, then repitches FlavorCloud to Holly.

Read the transcript here - https://blog.ycombinator.com/pitch-practice-with-flavorcloud-holly-liu-and-adora-cheung

So the next thing we're going to do is bring up Flavor Cloud, who is going to pitch Holly, who is the investor here, and then go from there.

So I'm going to be an angel investor, and I've done some angel investing in the past.

So I've only heard a little bit about what you do, and so we're just kind of going to mock what I would end up doing as an angel investor.

Holly, fabulous to meet you and I want to tell you all about Flavor Cloud.

What we do is we make international purchases on any retailers website as easy as shopping on Amazon.

So cheaper, faster and completely friction-free.

So what retailers would do is use our service in their shopping cart and they can just instantly ship to 220 plus countries around the world.

So help me understand because I've never worked at Amazon or places that serve retailers, so if I'm a retailer, like maybe I own like a Shopify store, you guys are, I would go to you to buy my raw materials.

No, we do the shipping logistics and customs and duties calculation for retailers so that if you're an end consumer, If you purchased from an international website, 1 of the difficulties that you have is that the shipping costs can be huge.

And then the other issue that you can have is that the customs and duties are things that you find later on when you actually get the product.

And in addition to that, you have to do additional documentation.

And finally, let's say you actually got the product.

And now you're not happy with it, and you want to return it as a consumer.

You're pretty much left to your own devices.

And so what we do for retailers is say that you figure out your marketing strategy to get to these, all shipped to all these different countries, And what we'll do is the underlying plumbing to make that happen

It seems like you're making shipping up there's another 1 So I own an online store and I want to ship it to somebody in Wisconsin I would use you guys that's right

This is the international shipping, right?

So if I want to ship it to Australia, somebody in Australia had bought my shoes that I designed and loved.

today is that most retailers in the last 2 years have seen that because of Amazon and because of social media, like Instagram and Snapchat and all of that, consumers are directly finding these brands and they're like, okay, I want to go buy this.

And then the retailer says, I'm not equipped to ship to you because you're located in China, or you're located in Sweden, or wherever it is.

And it used to be that 10% of a retailer's business was international.

In just the last 3 years, what has happened is that it has become a 1 in 3 e-commerce purchases are cross-border, right?

So if you don't do that, you miss out on 40 to 60% of the international traffic that comes to your website.

If you go to like China or EU, it's well over 60% of the traffic that's international.

So currently like how many dollars does that translate to?

That's a trillion dollar business by 2020, serving a billion consumers worldwide.

Okay, so how, I mean right now then I feel like it's DHL that I get international packages from or eventually USPS

certainly I could get it in 3 to 5 days if using DHL and then like 21 days is like the slow boat express.

Like how are you guys set up to be able to compete with those?

And I have to pay like $25 as the end consumer.

So what we talked about was the consumer experience of how hard it is to do international.

But what we do is we're a B2B SaaS platform.

We have a suite of services that you can plug in.

There's APIs and plug-ins for Shopify and merchants.

So what we do for these guys is 3 things.

1, we integrate with 100-plus carriers around the world.

We have an algorithm that goes across that network of carriers and says, what is the cheapest, fastest, most efficient way to move this product from point A to point B, which is across country borders?

And it takes historical performance for that route, and also specific to the product, to come up with the recommendation.

Just right off the bat, because we have these contracts with these carriers, and it's a volume-based play across a whole suite of retailers, you're looking at like 80-plus percent savings on shipping.

So imagine if you go as a customer today on this website and you have a shipping cost of $60.

If you go with us, you have $10 shipping and you're like, okay, that increases your conversion rate right off the bat.

The second thing that we do for retailers is we have a customs engine.

So let's say you have thousands of SKUs or even millions of SKUs, right, if you're an enterprise retailer.

The real nightmare with international is that you have to classify every single product and come up with this weird code and that defines what the duties are and the paperwork is a massive pain in the ass and so what happens is you have to as a retailer have a logistics team that understands the inherent details and that's a huge cost that most retailers don't understand.

So we actually started with a vertically integrated marketplace in 2014.

That means we enabled, through our marketplace, small and medium-sized businesses sell to consumers worldwide.

I started that because as an end consumer, I had problems purchasing from these international websites.

And initially, it was 3 markets, US, UK, India.

And then we started experimenting with this.

And we figured out, with 300-plus brands that we scaled, to 100-plus countries worldwide.

And we found that this anywhere to anywhere logistics infrastructure that we had built became the 1 that they were most interested in.

And we started getting requests for brands that didn't want to be in the marketplace but still wanted to use our technology.

So then what we did was we took the back end and said we're going to create this SaaS infrastructure and make it such that you can simply plug and play so you don't need to worry about any of these other aspects of international.

So you have about 300 brands on your site using your software.

And last year we made the pivot to the SaaS platform, that was in the summer.

And then before the holidays, we started onboarding customers through our Shopify plugin, and we have a dozen customers

So I have 2 quick questions, like how much shipping volume have you done through your platform?

So we did about 100K GMV through our shipping platform for the external customers.

6% commission, so basically on order value.

So that's been our revenue outside of the marketplace.

It's been really great, the feedback that we've gotten.

So we're looking at 10x in the next 4 months.

10x, okay and sorry I lied It's actually 3 questions total.

guys are the ones that are gonna be able to beat them?

Yeah, so the competitors, this is kind of a greenfield space because cross-border commerce has grown in the last 2 years and we've seen the trends happen in the last 2 years.

The biggest competition is a company called Pitney Bowes.

It's a 2.5 billion dinosaur company, but it's also dinosaur technology.

It is geared towards, it's something that customers hate and it's geared towards a market by market kind of implementation, which is very prohibitive for the smaller companies.

And your other question was about, so basically what makes us better in this sense and why we are best equipped is I actually spent 10 years in supply chain logistics, working with carriers, UPS, DHL, all the guys that you mentioned.

I built customs integration solutions, but I also built route optimization solutions, but more so from the other side of it.

So I inherently understand the problems, and then with my co-founder at Microsoft, I built enterprise SaaS solutions.

And sorry, very last question, which I usually ask, is how much are you looking to raise and at what valuation?

So we've raised 1.2 million in 2 rounds, seed rounds so far.

My second round is halfway through and I'm raising another million for the next 9 months and that's my new issue.

It's 10 million right now, valuation cap.

Flavor Cloud is striped for international shipping.

So online merchants in under 5 minutes, can they just plug it into their online check out flow, and voila, they can do international shipping and deal with customs and everything.

So does that mean you handle the payments and yeah, just payments too?

We just, so how it works is the merchant will send us through our API the customer's address and then we automatically, real-time, determine the best route and the best price to ship it to them.

So right now, well 1, if you want to do international shipping as a US merchant, typically what you do is you hire really expensive consultants who spend weeks, if not many months, many, many months, charging hourly rates.

Trying to figure out all the different combinations for first mile, last mile, customs, customs is the worst, for all these types of countries.

And even when they finish with that, typically there's still issues.

So I think the problem is anybody in the US, any merchant who wants to sell goods to Anyone in the world will be using us very soon.

So we launched in 2014, and the reason why we started working on this is because we launched as a marketplace for all sorts of brands and retailers who were selling through us.

And what we realized, while they were selling goods through us, which was great and it was going well, their major problem was international shipping.

And so we decided we would solve that problem for them.

And then as a result, we just decided to work on that problem itself because it was big enough.

So I'm gonna ask the elephant in the room, like what about Amazon?

They have shipping locations all around the world.

So, I mean, Amazon's a great way to distribute your product but I think every merchant, a lot of merchants actually don't work through Amazon, but I think every brand for sure wants to have their own site.

And actually for Amazon, it doesn't actually cater to all international customers.

And so In fact, if they use us, we have a bigger distribution than them.

Yeah, because we cater to everybody in the world.

So what other competitors are there outside of Amazon?

Like, I can see, retailers may not want to go over here, but there's got to be somebody else that's cracking this.

Yeah, I mean, so There are a few other startups that are taking a crack at it, but what we do well is we aggregate everything.

So most of the startups are taking a very fragmented approach.

So they can only ship to 1 country, or they're trying to build up some things.

Are you worried that they're going to do what you're going to do, and what makes you guys kind of, what competitive advantage do you guys have?

in logistics, working at UPS and other various places.

And so what I know very deeply is I know the people doing the delivery, the companies doing delivery, I know how to talk to them, and we've developed many algorithms to put this all together.

So how much are you looking to raise and at what valuation?

I am looking to raise a million dollars, and our valuation's $10 million.

What are you looking to use with that money?

So right now, our team is very, very small.

And so we need to expand our engineering team.

And we're looking for people to help on the operations side.

Well how about this, why don't you go ahead and send me the deck.

Are there any references that you can give me as well?

Yeah we have customers, we work with over 300 brands already, so you can talk to them.

What do you think, how interested are you in this?

Well, so I'll be honest, I've never invested on a shipping logistics type company, so I don't really have as much of a background on it.

But what's very interesting is this is like could be a very big business when I could get a piece of that.

So usually I'm looking for something that can give me greater than 10x returns.

My check sizes usually range from 100K to 250K.

So I'll want a certain percentage of the company as a result of that.

And I want to be able to keep ProRata right since I go further.

And so we expect to close in about 2 weeks.

So I'll send you the deck, and hopefully we can chat further very, very soon.

Yeah, I think my biggest point of feedback is probably just shortening the explanations of what you do.

I can see you have a huge, huge vision for this, which is great, but I think just being a little bit more succinct, like your 1 liner.

But you know, even if it didn't have to like sometimes A for B doesn't totally work.

I said Stripe for international shipping.

That's 1 of the things I have a problem with in the sense that I've said, depending on whether they know it, I said Flexport for B2C e-commerce, but that only works with some folks.

And I hate to say Uber for international shipping.

I mean, you could just say you're an API.

I mean, the stripe analogy There is an easy easy like 5 minutes takes 5 minutes to put on your checkout flow Easy and you're doing a ton of work in the back, but no 1 else sees it

Yeah, I also I was a little tripped up on like I kind of knew you were selling to retailers, but for me, I just personally couldn't figure out what it was.

That's why I spent a ton of time just like, OK, what is this thing?

And that's mainly where just more the bulk of it.

And then once I could figure out the thing, obviously I had a ton of questions afterwards too.

Yeah, and this is a reminder for everyone.

Actually you asked the question, which I was hoping you wouldn't ask the question, But a lot of people actually go to meetings with, to investors and don't ask for money.

Like you just end with it without asking.

And I mean the worst they'll say no is, but you'll take all these meetings anyway, and a lot of people will say no, so don't worry about that part.

And I will say this, a lot of times what happens, and I didn't probably mock it too well, is usually the first question I ask for is like, how can I help, is usually what I ask that person?

And then so it's true, the entrepreneur has to guide it to, I'm asking for money.

And I think what Adora did, on the founder side, definitely ask what the investor is interested in.

Are there any investors in this audience?


Speaker 0: So the next thing we're going to do is bring up Flavor Cloud, who is going to pitch Holly, who is the investor here, and then go from there.

Speaker 1: Yeah. All right. So I guess we're going to be sharing. Sorry. So I'm going to be an angel investor, and I've done some angel investing in the past.

So I've only heard a little bit about what you do, and so we're just kind of going to mock what I would end up doing as an angel investor. So tell me about Flavor Cloud.

Speaker 2: Holly, fabulous to meet you and I want to tell you all about Flavor Cloud. What we do is we make international purchases on any retailers website as easy as shopping on Amazon. So cheaper, faster and completely friction-free. So what retailers would do is use our service in their shopping cart and they can just instantly ship to 220 plus countries around the world.

Speaker 1: So help me understand because I've never worked at Amazon or places that serve retailers, so if I'm a retailer, like maybe I own like a Shopify store, you guys are, I would go to you to buy my raw materials.

Speaker 2: No, we do the shipping logistics and customs and duties calculation for retailers so that if you're an end consumer, If you purchased from an international website, 1 of the difficulties that you have is that the shipping costs can be huge. And then the other issue that you can have is that the customs and duties are things that you find later on when you actually get the product. And in addition to that, you have to do additional documentation. You didn't expect that. And finally, let's say you actually got the product.

And now you're not happy with it, and you want to return it as a consumer. You're pretty much left to your own devices. And so what we do for retailers is say that you figure out your marketing strategy to get to these, all shipped to all these different countries, And what we'll do is the underlying plumbing to make that happen

Speaker 1: It seems like you're making shipping up there's another 1 So I own an online store and I want to ship it to somebody in Wisconsin I would use you guys that's right

Speaker 2: So no not Wisconsin. This is the international shipping, right? So this is cross-border commerce.

Speaker 1: Oh, okay. So if I want to ship it to Australia, somebody in Australia had bought my shoes that I designed and loved. So currently, what would I do now? I would just force the consumer, right? I mean, that's what I would imagine.

So the problem

Speaker 2: today is that most retailers in the last 2 years have seen that because of Amazon and because of social media, like Instagram and Snapchat and all of that, consumers are directly finding these brands and they're like, okay, I want to go buy this. And then the retailer says, I'm not equipped to ship to you because you're located in China, or you're located in Sweden, or wherever it is. And it used to be that 10% of a retailer's business was international. In just the last 3 years, what has happened is that it has become a 1 in 3 e-commerce purchases are cross-border, right? So if you don't do that, you miss out on 40 to 60% of the international traffic that comes to your website.

In the US it's about 40%. If you go to like China or EU, it's well over 60% of the traffic that's international.

Speaker 1: So currently like how many dollars does that translate to?

Speaker 2: That's a trillion dollar business by 2020, serving a billion consumers worldwide.

Speaker 1: Okay, so how, I mean right now then I feel like it's DHL that I get international packages from or eventually USPS

Speaker 2: And

Speaker 1: certainly I could get it in 3 to 5 days if using DHL and then like 21 days is like the slow boat express. Like how are you guys set up to be able to compete with those?

Speaker 2: Yeah, Great question.

Speaker 1: And I have to pay like $25 as the end consumer.

Speaker 2: Right. So great question. So what we talked about was the consumer experience of how hard it is to do international. But what we do is we're a B2B SaaS platform. We have a suite of services that you can plug in.

There's APIs and plug-ins for Shopify and merchants. So what we do for these guys is 3 things. 1, we integrate with 100-plus carriers around the world. So That's our logistics platform. We have an algorithm that goes across that network of carriers and says, what is the cheapest, fastest, most efficient way to move this product from point A to point B, which is across country borders?

And it takes historical performance for that route, and also specific to the product, to come up with the recommendation. Just right off the bat, because we have these contracts with these carriers, and it's a volume-based play across a whole suite of retailers, you're looking at like 80-plus percent savings on shipping. So imagine if you go as a customer today on this website and you have a shipping cost of $60. If you go with us, you have $10 shipping and you're like, okay, that increases your conversion rate right off the bat. The second thing that we do for retailers is we have a customs engine.

So let's say you have thousands of SKUs or even millions of SKUs, right, if you're an enterprise retailer. The real nightmare with international is that you have to classify every single product and come up with this weird code and that defines what the duties are and the paperwork is a massive pain in the ass and so what happens is you have to as a retailer have a logistics team that understands the inherent details and that's a huge cost that most retailers don't understand.

Speaker 1: So how far along are you? Like how are you set up?

Speaker 2: So we actually started with a vertically integrated marketplace in 2014. What does that mean? That means we enabled, through our marketplace, small and medium-sized businesses sell to consumers worldwide. I started that because as an end consumer, I had problems purchasing from these international websites. So we created that.

And initially, it was 3 markets, US, UK, India. And then we started experimenting with this. And we figured out, with 300-plus brands that we scaled, to 100-plus countries worldwide. And we found that this anywhere to anywhere logistics infrastructure that we had built became the 1 that they were most interested in. And we started getting requests for brands that didn't want to be in the marketplace but still wanted to use our technology.

So then what we did was we took the back end and said we're going to create this SaaS infrastructure and make it such that you can simply plug and play so you don't need to worry about any of these other aspects of international.

Speaker 1: So you have about 300 brands on your site using your software.

Speaker 2: That is through our own marketplace.

Speaker 1: Through your

Speaker 2: own marketplace.

Speaker 1: It sits

Speaker 2: on top of our infrastructure. I see. And last year we made the pivot to the SaaS platform, that was in the summer. And then before the holidays, we started onboarding customers through our Shopify plugin, and we have a dozen customers

Speaker 1: from that. So I have 2 quick questions, like how much shipping volume have you done through your platform?

Speaker 2: So we did about 100K GMV through our shipping platform for the external customers. 6% commission, so basically on order value. So that's been our revenue outside of the marketplace. And we have a pipeline of customers. It's been really great, the feedback that we've gotten.

So we're looking at 10x in the next 4 months.

Speaker 1: 10x, okay and sorry I lied It's actually 3 questions total. Any competitors? Yes, and

Speaker 2: what makes you think you

Speaker 1: guys are the ones that are gonna be able to beat them?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so the competitors, this is kind of a greenfield space because cross-border commerce has grown in the last 2 years and we've seen the trends happen in the last 2 years. The biggest competition is a company called Pitney Bowes. They have a solution called Waterfree. It's a 2.5 billion dinosaur company, but it's also dinosaur technology. It is geared towards, it's something that customers hate and it's geared towards a market by market kind of implementation, which is very prohibitive for the smaller companies.

And your other question was about, so basically what makes us better in this sense and why we are best equipped is I actually spent 10 years in supply chain logistics, working with carriers, UPS, DHL, all the guys that you mentioned. I built customs integration solutions, but I also built route optimization solutions, but more so from the other side of it. So I inherently understand the problems, and then with my co-founder at Microsoft, I built enterprise SaaS solutions.

Speaker 1: And sorry, very last question, which I usually ask, is how much are you looking to raise and at what valuation?

Speaker 2: So we've raised 1.2 million in 2 rounds, seed rounds so far. My second round is halfway through and I'm raising another million for the next 9 months and that's my new issue. It's 10 million right now, valuation cap.

Speaker 1: I'll get back to you. Thank you. Can you send me the deck?

Speaker 2: Yes. Oh yeah, very nice meeting you. Thank you.

Speaker 1: Thank you. I'm going to

Speaker 0: switch that place. Does she stay there or? Hi, I'm Ruthna.

Speaker 1: How are you? I'm Holly. I

Speaker 0: see you're the founder of Clever Cloud. Cloud, sorry.

Speaker 1: Flavor Cloud. Oh, Flavor Cloud. Tell me a little bit about Flavor Cloud.

Speaker 0: Flavor Cloud is striped for international shipping. So online merchants in under 5 minutes, can they just plug it into their online check out flow, and voila, they can do international shipping and deal with customs and everything.

Speaker 1: So does that mean you handle the payments and yeah, just payments too?

Speaker 0: No, we don't do the payments. We just, so how it works is the merchant will send us through our API the customer's address and then we automatically, real-time, determine the best route and the best price to ship it to them.

Speaker 1: So how big of a problem

Speaker 0: is this right now? So right now, well 1, if you want to do international shipping as a US merchant, typically what you do is you hire really expensive consultants who spend weeks, if not many months, many, many months, charging hourly rates. Trying to figure out all the different combinations for first mile, last mile, customs, customs is the worst, for all these types of countries. And even when they finish with that, typically there's still issues. Packages still get lost.

Everything still gets stuck in customs. And so it's just 1 big hassle. And that's if you can even afford it. So I think the problem is anybody in the US, any merchant who wants to sell goods to Anyone in the world will be using us very soon.

Speaker 1: That's a pretty big market. So where are you guys?

Speaker 0: So big I can't say it.

Speaker 1: So How far along are you guys?

Speaker 0: So we launched in 2014, and the reason why we started working on this is because we launched as a marketplace for all sorts of brands and retailers who were selling through us. And what we realized, while they were selling goods through us, which was great and it was going well, their major problem was international shipping. And so we decided we would solve that problem for them. And then as a result, we just decided to work on that problem itself because it was big enough.

Speaker 1: So I'm gonna ask the elephant in the room, like what about Amazon? Why couldn't they set this up? Because you know what they have? They have shipping locations all around the world. They're just going to Australia too.

Well,

Speaker 0: oh, okay. So, I mean, Amazon's a great way to distribute your product but I think every merchant, a lot of merchants actually don't work through Amazon, but I think every brand for sure wants to have their own site. And actually for Amazon, it doesn't actually cater to all international customers. And so In fact, if they use us, we have a bigger distribution than them. Really?

Yeah, because we cater to everybody in the world. That's a good point. Even if you're in Antarctica.

Speaker 1: Have you shipped to Antarctica? So what other competitors are there outside of Amazon? Like, I can see, retailers may not want to go over here, but there's got to be somebody else that's cracking this. Or what, yeah.

Speaker 0: Yeah, I mean, so There are a few other startups that are taking a crack at it, but what we do well is we aggregate everything. So most of the startups are taking a very fragmented approach. So they can only ship to 1 country, or they're trying to build up some things.

Speaker 1: Are you worried that they're going to do what you're going to do, and what makes you guys kind of, what competitive advantage do you guys have? So I have 10 years of experience

Speaker 0: in logistics, working at UPS and other various places. And so what I know very deeply is I know the people doing the delivery, the companies doing delivery, I know how to talk to them, and we've developed many algorithms to put this all together.

Speaker 1: So how much are you looking to raise and at what valuation?

Speaker 0: I am looking to raise a million dollars, and our valuation's $10 million.

Speaker 1: What are you looking to use with that money?

Speaker 0: So right now, our team is very, very small. And so we need to expand our engineering team. And we're looking for people to help on the operations side.

Speaker 1: Well how about this, why don't you go ahead and send me the deck. I'll take a look at it. Are there any references that you can give me as well?

Speaker 0: Yeah we have customers, we work with over 300 brands already, so you can talk to them. What do you think, how interested are you in this?

Speaker 1: Well, so I'll be honest, I've never invested on a shipping logistics type company, so I don't really have as much of a background on it. But what's very interesting is this is like could be a very big business when I could get a piece of that. So usually I'm looking for something that can give me greater than 10x returns. My check sizes usually range from 100K to 250K. So I'll want a certain percentage of the company as a result of that.

And I want to be able to keep ProRata right since I go further.

Speaker 0: OK, so definitely up for discussion. Our round is half filled. And so we expect to close in about 2 weeks. So I'll send you the deck, and hopefully we can chat further very, very soon.

Speaker 1: All right, thank you very much. All right. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2: I'm taking that check.

Speaker 1: So,

Speaker 0: Yeah, I think my biggest point of feedback is probably just shortening the explanations of what you do. I can see you have a huge, huge vision for this, which is great, but I think just being a little bit more succinct, like your 1 liner. I forgot what it was.

Speaker 1: You said Stripe for logistics. I'm lucky enough to know what Stripe is. But you know, even if it didn't have to like sometimes A for B doesn't totally work. Oh, that was me. Oh, that was you.

Speaker 0: I should have asked you. I said Stripe for international shipping. And I assumed you were a tech investor.

Speaker 1: Thank you. So it did take me a while.

Speaker 2: That's 1 of the things I have a problem with in the sense that I've said, depending on whether they know it, I said Flexport for B2C e-commerce, but that only works with some folks. And I hate to say Uber for international shipping.

Speaker 0: I mean, you could just say you're an API. I mean, the stripe analogy There is an easy easy like 5 minutes takes 5 minutes to put on your checkout flow Easy and you're doing a ton of work in the back, but no 1 else sees it

Speaker 1: Yeah, I also I was a little tripped up on like I kind of knew you were selling to retailers, but for me, I just personally couldn't figure out what it was. That's why I spent a ton of time just like, OK, what is this thing? And that's mainly where just more the bulk of it. And then once I could figure out the thing, obviously I had a ton of questions afterwards too.

Speaker 0: Yeah, and this is a reminder for everyone. Actually you asked the question, which I was hoping you wouldn't ask the question, But a lot of people actually go to meetings with, to investors and don't ask for money. Like you just end with it without asking. And even if it's awkward, just ask it. With confidence.

And I mean the worst they'll say no is, but you'll take all these meetings anyway, and a lot of people will say no, so don't worry about that part.

Speaker 1: And I will say this, a lot of times what happens, and I didn't probably mock it too well, is usually the first question I ask for is like, how can I help, is usually what I ask that person? And then so it's true, the entrepreneur has to guide it to, I'm asking for money. This is what I'm looking for. And I think what Adora did, on the founder side, definitely ask what the investor is interested in. This might not even be their domain.

You might not even want them. You might be like a bad investor. What is their check size? What are their expectations? How fast can they move?

Do they need to talk to somebody else?

Speaker 0: But overall you did really well. She's raising money. Are there any investors in this audience?

Speaker 1: Yeah, that sounds really cool.

Speaker 0: There we go. 2, 3 over there. Okay. All right. Awesome.

Cool. All right. Thank you

Speaker 2: so much.

Speaker 1: Thank you. You

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Pitch Practice with FlavorCloud, Holly Liu, and Adora Cheung