All right, we're back. We're playing Shoot Your Shot, where we take founders and business owners from the audience who get to sit in this chair right here, pitch us their business. We have founders all the way from a million bucks to hundred million businesses. So, let's do it. Let's bring out the next founder.
Dude, first leather jacket on the pod. What's your name?
Yeah, I'm Rishi. I'm one of the founders of Hot Plate and we powered over $100 million of sales for independent food entrepreneurs.
Okay, so the big number is 100 million in sales. Unpack that. What does that mean?
Totally. So Hot Plate is a platform that lets anybody sell food online. We work with like small pop-up bakers that like sell food at their house all the way to like this guy who's an ice cream maker in Minnesota.
Have you seen this? It's Airbnb for food type of thing, right?
Type of thing. Yeah. Yeah. So we're starting right now as a tool that lets a seller who has like an Instagram following sell food directly to their audience. A lot of times those sellers are using like, you know, spreadsheets, Venmo, DMs, like a hodgepodge of tools or they're using a platform like Square. Shopify just isn't built for like pre-order.
But will they stay small? Is it like for the person who wants to stay as a small business?
It's a really good question. So a lot of people think that like, oh, you guys just work with like really tiny pop-ups that eventually go to a brick and mortar. We actually have tons of six or seven figure businesses that are doing drops and selling food directly to their audience.
I bought this uh there's this dude who's real jacked. He's like a bodybuilder who does cookies. Have you seen this? I've talked about him like four years ago.
Yeah. He he does these drops of like cheat meal cookies. They're insanely huge. Way over the top. But like he sells out in seconds and it's all just through his Instagram presence cuz he builds up a lot of trust. So first of all, Hot Plate.
Thank you.
And this was totally like a co thing a little bit. I remember like Have you heard of Pop-Up Bagels?
So actually we powered Pop-Up Bagels.
Oh, really? Listen to this. So, Pop-Up Bagels was they actually started in West Connecticut where I used to live and there was a bunch of companies that did this where it was like a husband and wife couple like I'm going to make this and sell it to my apartment and we'll drop it out of the windows when people come and whatever. And these guys did that with bagels and they like you had to have an appointment and you could only get it by the dozen and now they've since raised a lot of venture capital and they do hundreds of millions and their product is amazing. I love it.
So, you powered them at the beginning. We powered them in the beginning um you know as they scaled to like the multi- to your point almost billion dollar empire that they are now and so we work with tons of pop-ups across the country that are kind of like the next pop-up bagels in a way too.
How much revenue do you do?
Yeah, so we're uh we're we do like hundreds of thousands of revenue a month.
Um and yeah are just growing very quickly. Honestly, most of the hundred million in sales has been the last two years.
Yeah, so we've raised uh a little over $4 million total, but we're actually profitable. So, we've been profitable the last almost a year and been running the business profitably, which has honestly been amazing.
So, wait, what does your product actually do? You make the app that the consumer uses. You make the thing that lets them have a storefront for their Instagram.
So, we started and what we are today is that storefront for them on Instagram. So, right now for for chefs and bakers. Exactly. So, right now we're the platform that a chef uses to put that link in their bio so that they can streamline their order management. Right. But as you're saying like the end state and kind of the dream for Hot Plate is that anyone can go not just to sell food independently but also to buy it.
Who would I go to? Like what's like
So in SF there's a bakery called Butter and Crumble. It's like one of the most popular bakeries in SF. So if you want to order from Butter and Crumble, there's a three-hour line every single day. If you want to skip the line, they do drops on their Instagram and they use Hot Plate. Um they have a, you know, almost 20,000 person waiting list.
So she's got 83 83,000 followers. And okay, I go order from here. It's like a ticketing system for her to fulfill orders, but you don't do anything beyond that. The pickups and all that stuff, they coordinate themselves.
So, we we do a lot of like once you order as a customer, we send you like automatic text message reminders about the pickup and we do a lot of the like the logistics coordination, but right now it's kind of crazy that you're pointing it out that we are a pre-order pickup platform for like pop-up chefs and we're doing like millions a month in sales. Like we are truly like still on day one of what this can be and we're
Are you Are you scratching the surface?
what's a founder going to say now?
Yeah. We we we fully tapped into this.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
This is as good as it's ever going to get. Well, we were talking to a guy's got a TMJ pad. He's like, I got to expand.
But like like I'm a buyer of these products, but I'm like how many crazy people are there that make in their apartment or these small mom and pops?
It it's a good point that like right now I think the the market that we're in is still really niche, right? It's like still like there's, you know, maybe tens of thousands of sellers in the US that are selling food this way. The real opportunity for us is that we think we have an opportunity to not just play in an existing market like you were saying about B2B SaaS, right? There's so many companies that are just playing existing markets. We have a rare opportunity to actually create a market and make this market mainstream. And I think consumer is the way that's going to happen in a way that like only a handful of companies the last 10 years have been able to do. If you look at like Call of Sheep, Polymarket, Whatnot, like I can count on my hand the number of like consumer trends and categories.
Good is it?
Hey, I want to tell you about something pretty cool. We have a database of all of the business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast. So, hundreds of episodes the team at HubSpot went through. They pulled out all the simple, relatable, interesting, profitable uh ideas that we have brainstormed and they're all available for download for free. Just click the link in the description below. Thank you to our friends at HubSpot for sponsoring this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys. Back to the show.
Like I don't want to be like
it's all or nothing.
Yeah. I don't want to count on one hand how many companies have been successful.
I think it's consumer is hard. I mean like if I know I think really I really like think about what we're doing kind of like Substack, right? Like Substack made it that anyone can start a media business without having to like run one, right? And I think in the same way Hot Plate lets anyone start a food business without having to open a brick and mortar, right? It's like right now the traditional way you start a food business is I have to take out a loan, spend hundreds of thousand dollars just to like open a brick and mortar where the the business is not proven out. The rent goes up, the labor could go up, the ingredient cost goes up and you're susceptible to all that.
How did you get this idea?
Um, so me and my co-founders actually started in at UT. Um, we, you know, I've always been obsessed with food. Worked at a, you know, food delivery company for a little bit. Honestly hated it cuz so much of food has been really consumer first and really consume centric. And one of my buddies and I were during co we're like what you know we want to open up a food business. So we actually rented an apartment in our like campus and opened like a Thai restaurant in that apartment um we ran that for a few months and then kind of realized
the old big man on campus playbook open up a Thai restaurant. How'd that do for the social life? Was that actually like amazing? People were like,
"Yeah, it was really fun." And then co happened and it's like, "Okay, you can't have people showing up to your house to like eat Thai food cuz like you can't even see people, right, during co?"
So, boring question, but is that legal to just open up a restaurant out of an apartment?
Yeah, definitely not. 100%.
there's things called cottage food laws that let you sell food directly from your home. And what's really cool is also recently like Texas just expanded their laws. They're called food freedom laws. So, you can actually sell almost anything out of your house now. And in for example Arizona, the dairy laws have really opened up to now people are starting these like there's like this huge trend of like home cafes that are starting in like Yuma, Arizona where like we have tons of like these home businesses starting in Arizona.
Coffee shop in their house.
Coffee shop in their house. It's actually insane. And like people Arizona is so hot,
but not in the cool insane way.
Yeah, it's it's um it's insane. We have like businesses like a Toz Crearyy who's in Hopkins, Minnesota, who's running one of the largest like ice cream brands in Minnesota right now doing six to seven figures a year in revenue on like 40 to 50% profit margin which like is unheard. That's like a s that's a SaaS company, right? But like the reason he's able to do that is because it's a team of like three or four people. He does he uses like Instagram and Hot Plate as a storefront and doesn't do walkups, right? and is able to like streamline all that in a way where he has like way more demand than supply and is able to sell out every single week and have people come and pick it up.
What do you guys do? SaaS plus fee or
Yep. So right now actually it's all fee. So the way our business model is kind of cool to the chef. So our our mission at Hot Plate is that we're a chef first company. And so we take that to the extreme. We're like as a customer when you check out from a Hot Plate vendor, we charge the customer a small fee at checkout and the chef only pays payment processing. So the beauty of that is that I as a chef can start. There's already so many fixed costs in food as it is that being able to like eliminate some of those on our side has made us really attractive to vendors outside of like a traditional platform.
Yeah, I would assume people are not that price sensitive when they're checking out cuz it's like I've been watching this on Instagram. It's a drop. I got to get in. Is a really, you know, unique product. So my this extra buck or two or whatever it is is less of an issue.
I always say there like two kinds of businesses. They're like food businesses that do marketing and they're marketing businesses that sell food. And if you're a marketing business that sells food, you have no price. Like to your point, elasticity, right? Like you can really just sell and people are willing to buy. Like people don't blink at anything that you buy from Butter and Crumble. They're just trying to get at.
What are the constraints right now?
Um I would say the constraints are definitely like I honestly think the biggest constraint. So you know we were talking about co I actually think there's been a resurgence in this in the last few years which is why we've been really growing recently and that like you know people are quitting their jobs in like tech like a lot of our actually what's crazy is a lot of our vendors in SF and the bay are people in tech that are leaving their jobs start
I mean there's a guy who remember the guy down the street who like made it big on Facebook and he created like dandelion chocolate or something.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And those always start small and then expand right over time. But what's so cool is like we work with this baker named Michelle who runs Metchip Bakery. She was a engineer that quit her job to start u making you know baking goods. We have another guy who worked at Google named Mason who runs Piscore literally started like the most popular brands you know pop up in New York and you know his line is he quit Google to sell fish on the sidewalk question.
Yeah it's Christmas. What's the constraint?
The constraints but I tell you what's awesome.
My thing is the constraints are I think people just don't know this exists. they don't know how to go about like doing it operationally.
Really, what you're saying is it's just getting vendors to use you.
Getting vendors to use you and helping them get demand because I think at the end of the day like the biggest problem still is like a lot of people don't know how to market. They just make
how are you going to do it?
So, I think consumer is the way we go about doing that. There's two ways actually. There's like building the app that to your point that people go to to like discover these vendors, but doing that in a way that actually like works,
but you basically need to like create inspiration for people who have a dream of becoming a part-time chef,
right? which is like pretty fun content. That's like pretty that's very doable if you get a couple smart people.
So when I went to Twitch, we got acquired by Twitch and I sat down with Emmett the first day and I was like, "Hey, like okay,
Michael's actually one of our investors. We did YC in 2020 and he was our partner and like
well he said an insight that I think will work for you guys which he he goes yeah they focused on the streamer only like the way you're focusing on the chef. They look at the marketplace. They said we're we're going to go for the creator and solve their needs. But the second thing he said he goes we realize they need four things.
So they want money.
Yep. He goes, "And it's a surprisingly small amount of money that it took to get them like to feel like this is worth doing with their time." So he's like, "For example, when I thought it was money, I thought I'd have to replace their job. Actually, if I could get somebody even like a $10 payout,
they felt validated for what they were doing and it kept them going for way longer."
Uh, so it goes money, fame, love, and inspiration. So those are the three. So he's like, I got to get you fame. I got to give you like an audience.
I got to let you feel the love from the audience that they they actually care about what you're doing. And inspiration was the big one which is how do I tell you the creative things that other people are doing so you kind of know when you wake up today like oh I should be doing that totally and so that was like he architected his entire strategy around those kind of four things money fame love and inspiration in order to so all the products you had to kind of map it to like which one of those levers are you pulling so similarly for you it sounds like you got to be telling the stories of
the guy who quits his job and sells
fish you guys have like a huge audience
we have I mean hundreds of thousands People buy from Hot Plate Chefs every month.
But what about on social?
we yourselves don't have a big audience.
Yeah. I mean we have like 23,000 followers on our Instagram.
Well a company like uh Okay. So Gold Belly.
Gold Belly for Explain what it is. For the listener, it's basically like if you uh Gray's Papaya is a New York City uh really old hot dog shop. It's only local. They didn't have a website. Gold Belly made it really easy, particularly during co where you could go and buy Gray's Papaya hot dogs from any part of the country and they'll help you ship it to them.
They did a good job of like teaching me that I can buy Junior's cheesecake on Gold Belly and they did a really good job at that. What's Do you have like a Gold Belly version where it's like you're going to create Hot Plate Instagram where you're going to show off like all the cool like at home moms who make the best sourdough.
It's like local discovery, right?
Yeah. Or you're like going to like get like
No, you got to make them famous, right?
You got to make them famous. Yeah. You got to be like check this out. There's this Amish lady who does this thing and like it's the best and it's like some kid in San Francisco, New York.
Create an award system like Michelin star.
What's the Michelin star of this category, right?
So then you recognize the people, right? Money, fame, love. That's love one, right?
The more you promote that, that helps them with the fame. The fame is what drives the money. The inspiration is hearing about, oh, she has the best those. Well, actually, my whatever popcorn I make, I'm that in my c I'm that my how do I get my name out there? Oh, let me watch what content they do. I'll do the same, you know, get people to to to to do that. You you have to make them famous,
right? Something that we're working on right now that's really exciting is that we already have some sellers that are super, like I said, uh demand supply constraint. They have so much demand like, you know, Butter and Crumble or like we have Sam Makes Pizza in Salt Lake City. 20,000 people. Dave Portnoy and I blew him up and now he has 20,000 people trying to buy like 50 pizzas, right?
But that's not your constraint,
right? So what we're doing is building like a recommendation systems. Now let's say that guy sells out, here are other vendors you can buy from and those are more up and coming vendors, right? So doing that along with discovery means that we're anchoring like the the up up and coming sellers. If they clear certain bars, now we're showing them to an audience of people that want to buy like this kind of food.
Are they mostly shipping or pickup?
It's all pickup. All pickup. So local.
It's all local.
On your team, do you have a content creator or someone who
We do. Yeah. Yeah. Oran. She's amazing.
It's going well. Yeah. I mean, we have been able to like There's a guy in SF, Boieri, who makes you guys got to check him out. Sicilian style pizza. Truly like the some of the best.
I feel like you should be the content creator.
I I'm uh I'm working on that. It's uh I I do do videos. Um I've actually been told that before, but I appreciate it. But yeah, we've been able to like help people like him who are like have the sauce, right, really blow up. And now he's like, you know, went from like not selling out his pies. Now he just sold out in like 5 minutes like the other day.
If you had one question, meaning like let's say we were hired gun helpers for you for 24 hours. All we're going to think about is Hot Plate. Yeah.
What's the one question you'd want us focused on?
Really, the thing that I'd like your take on is like the cultural. Like I think in order for a new consumer trend to work, you need to like tap into culture, right? And I feel like on our end, we have a good sense from like the product standpoint of how you would go about building this. The biggest issue again, sorry, two seconds, is a lot of people have tried to build like a home-cooked food marketplace. The problem is you don't know who these chefs are. You don't know why you should care. And so you kind of just leave. DoorDash is gonna always win on convenience, right? We have people who have like who make the best in their category. But the and but the question I have is like how do you from a go to market perspective infiltrate culture in a way that makes this like culturally relevant?
I don't think c it's necessarily cultural relevance but basically like have you have you heard of Huckberry? So Huckberry is a clothing company where the way they started was they created an email list. This is how I knew them because we were both in the email game and there was just an email list where they would just show off cool brands and sell the cool brand stuff and take a small cut. And they got really good at telling the stories of like this bag was made by a guy who was in Vietnam and he noticed that the parachutes were really strong and he actually made this bag. So it's a V it's a parachute bag or like you know I'm like oh that's pretty cool and like they told stories about it. So I fell in love with like the story behind it. If I'm you, I would hire I would probably hire more content creators. And it's like my whole job here is to use Instagram to tell stories about the vendors and what they're doing and make them look like superstars,
right?
I would take your top 50 chefs.
And I'd be like, I have a mission. I need to make them aspirational for the next 5,000, 50,000, 5 million want to be them. So, it's not about making everybody get discovered. It's about taking the 50 and really making them so aspirational that everybody will work their ass off to to be like you featuring them on lists, you making content about them, them talking about their business side, how much money they're making doing this, how they quit their job doing this, the human interest story of the whole thing, you know, all that stuff. That's what you That's a way to do it.
And the cool thing about food is actually Huckberry has a food channel on YouTube, but there's so, you know, there's like the Anthony Bourdain, there's uh like Top Chef, there's so many of formats. I would just find which format do I think I could pull off. copy that format, do that a ton a ton a ton, try this other and you just have a v and like if I'm you, I'd be like, and this is like a cliche thing to say, but I believe it's really true with you is like
we're a media company now.
Yeah.
And so I'd become a food media company and I would just look at all the formats of food content that works
that work and just either first party or you could basically farm it out. So like, you know, we were talking about uh Jack's Dining Room or whatever. Basically, there's already content creators who are really good at these formats all around the world. And are they blowing up your chefs,
right?
How do you make it easy for them to know that they need to go to Salt Lake City to they got to try these pies from this person? And did you know the crazy backstory of these pies and why the pies are so special? Get that influencer to do it cuz they're already better than all of us at creating food content. So, if you can arm them, every content creator is always like basically needs more interesting content. And so how do you make it easy for them to have interesting content?
Yeah, we're seeing that in SF like play out locally like some of our top vendors are now getting featured by these like food like food Instagram reviewers or like that have like hundreds of thousands of followers and are kind of becoming more mainstream here. And so you're to your point like I think is a good question that or a good point that we need to like kind of replicate that with our top sellers in every city or like in every like kind of the major cities that matter. You also need language like uh you know Twitch streamers you know vine viners like what are the
hot like the Hot Plate
or is it just a category like like so Twitch it wasn't just what it was like there's something called a live streamer right a streamer and they this is what they do and so for example like is a home chef the category is it what what are you going to call this that makes it seem cool new and interesting they're trying to be on a team
they want to be a part of a tribe they want to be a part of a movement that's cool that represents something to your question about culture I think you got to give them start with like language and then give them a bunch of cool examples and then give them some like what this is all about versus the old way.
No, it's a good point. I mean, right now we we say like chefs and bakers and then we get some people being like, "Oh, but like you're not a chef. Like you didn't work at like, you know, this restaurant."
I think that's a less than good term.
Yeah. Because it's already means something to everybody.
Okay.
Right. Like I already know what a chef is. I think it's somebody at a restaurant and you're now you have to do all this work to get You should start by the slightly surprising term that makes me kind of Oh, yeah. I guess that is a thing. Oh, it's a thing. Yeah, dude. It's a big thing. These people are making a million. This woman makes a million dollars a year at home baking her own cookies, right? Well, I have a good recipe for that. You know, that's what you want.
Rishi, thank you for doing this, man. With the RZ,
I appreciate it. No,
I'm super grateful for the opportunity, guys. You guys are awesome. Thank you.
All right, who we got next?
Oh, dude.
Hey, dude. How are you? Nice to meet you,
dude. I met this guy like 15 years ago in San Francisco. Right when I moved to San Francisco
showed me around. You were like he was in YC. He was doing a bunch of cool stuff at the time.
That's true. You're dating me now. You know, I'm definitely uh Yeah, a lot of gray hairs.
Can't even remember originally, but you tell me.
I think I was just trying to meet cool people. You had a cool company at the time. You're really young.
We were both doing social networking stuff. So like
my company is called Family Leaf. Uh it was a private social network for family. It's like an early social app but like before mobile apps were like a big thing to be honest. So you've been starting startups for for 15 years.
Yeah. Left left left college to do that and basically 15 years ago. Yeah. Something like that, right? Yeah.
Yeah. 12 13 years ago.
So this the stick we're doing here.
Okay. Absolutely. Yeah. So with uh the app that I'm working on now with with an awesome team of folks, Tolen, we have over 100,000 paying subscribers to our iOS app.
Wow. That's not easy to do.
That's amazing. What's it do? What's what's companies
what are they paying for?
Yeah. So, Tolen is a it's an app where you basically get to meet and customize your own friendly guide that is powered by magical AI to help you with whatever it is that you're going through in life.
I feel like you chose the word guide there specifically, but I don't know what that means. Is that like a therapist, but you don't want to say therapist? Is it a friend? What are we talking about?
This is a great question. I mean, honestly, it's it's partially our attempt to uh define that a bit because like you just said, people use it for all sorts of things, right? I mean, friendship means a lot of different things, right? So, sometimes a friend is like someone that you call uh because you're going through something. Sometimes a friend is someone that like kicks you into shape and and tells you what you need to hear. People talk uh to life coaches, people talk to therapists, people talk to all sorts of
Can you show us one? It's like this little kind of friendly looking character.
Yeah, totally. Um so here's a Tolen. Um so there are these little aliens. Um yeah, so this is mine. This is custom to me. My Tolen's name is Swami. We everyone has their own Tolen. You get your own you so the way the the app works is you download it. You talk to this character that we have called the Oracle. Uh they're sort of like this magical godlike character that basically asks you questions about yourself that's just like hey like what what are your what are your hopes and dreams like what are you what are you into what do you care about what are you stressed about you know things like that
who's using this teenagers adults obviously it's a mix but like what's the main sweet spot
so like it it is truly like every type of person you know like like with any I think like larger consumer product or like AI product like it it attracts people from every walk of life truly but the main core demo which is something that shocks us honestly is roughly like 35 to 45 year olds and roughly like moms like Yeah. Like mostly women. You think so?
That's not shocking.
I would have thought Street character.
I thought it was like all women in the Midwest. I mean that is literally our audience. You nailed it. Yeah, you nailed it.
As a knower of many Midwest women like this seems like I mean I'm from the Midwest. This seems like a very Midwestern women thing.
You're so right on. It's crazy. Which I we did not predict that by the way. And that is totally what it has ended up becoming.
No, it's like people who are like oh he's acting exactly like a Gemini. It's like people who like say things like that.
The horoscope market.
Yeah, that's such a Gemini There's overlap for sure. We have personality tests in the app that people love to use to kind of understand more about themselves.
Okay. So, so I understand things best if I look at the ad first. So, what's the ad I see that makes me want to click and download this thing?
Yeah. I mean, honestly, what was worked best for us there are like what we think of what I think of as like authentic product demos of just like people using Tolen in their daily lives. So like some of the most I mean we've had content that's gone super viral that's like you know uh a woman like cooking and trying to figure out the best way to cut open like a kabocha squash which is like hard to do and you know the Tolen says well warm it up you know like let me see that okay like let's see you slice into it okay that worked and then it kind of shows them like providing value in some way that's what that's what works the best I think people are kind of thrown off a little bit by seeing this like somewhat cute alien that they can talk to and it speaks back and it speaks back really intelligently too
but it's the thing like but do you want to actually make a squash Why are you even cooking for this man who doesn't truly love you?
Is it functional or is it emotional guidance more so that they want I think the most valuable thing that we do is honestly the combination of those two things which is kind of a copout answer but I think it's true because basically people will talk to their Tolens about what's going on with them right like their their emotional state what what they're busy with or whatever but that always connects to like well you know I'm feeling really stressed because I haven't figured out the kids summer camp this this summer like you know and your Tolen will remember that why are you eating why are you making so many cookies well it turns out it's like this thing how many how much money are people spending or how much does it cost
yeah yeah yeah so we have multiple price tiers. Our main most popular one, most of those subscribers are on $25 a month for Plus.
Uh I can't $100,000 times $25 million a month.
We also have a lower uh we have a lower price subscription tier. So it's a mix of things. So it's not quite there.
Yes. Yeah, the retention's great so far. I mean, we we uh you know, it's changed a lot. How old is the company?
Two years.
Two years. You're doing more than 10 million in revenue. You didn't say that, but math it works. So, you're doing more than 10 million in in sort of either revenue or run rate. And you've got people just basically, it sounds like what you did was, and I don't mean this to trivialize it, just to simplify it. You take what ChatGPT can do in terms of like the intelligence, but you added the the warm feel of a character who's yours with a name with a different wrapper where it's going to be it feels different to talk to than just a completely functional utilitarian thing called ChatGPT like literally an acronym you know.
