 Good evening. I'm Bob Baldacci, and welcome to Baldacci on Business. Hopefully, you, our audience, has had a chance to see our shows from last season, and each month we would feature a main entrepreneur who will come here and make their pitch before our very esteemed panel of experts. And we continue that tradition with our new season, which we're launching tonight with Christopher Lalliman from Auburn, USM graduate. But before Chris, we introduce you and your business concept. I would like to introduce our panel. So, on my immediate left is Mr. Hugh Stevens, who's the director of the Knowledge Transfer Alliance at the University of Maine. Hugh, you've seen him on our other shows. He is an entrepreneur in his own right, owned and operated at his own business, a suit manufacturer in New York, and brings a lot to the table as an individual and on behalf of the University of Maine. And to Hugh's immediate left is the very well-known, very good friend, Mr. F. Lee Bailey, who has given so much of his time and talents to the state, to businesses and nonprofits, and has taken time every month to be here as part of this panel. So, Lee, thank you very much for all you do and have done. Don Gooding, who is the executive director of the Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development, which runs the Top Gun Program. Don is also a very active investor, is vice chair of the Maine Angels, and has a phenomenal background in the technology space. Happy fair to say, Don, and is not afraid to write out a check, as I've seen many times. And finally, our good friend, Alexander Hamilton Spaulding. Sorry, but he is a direct descendant. He is a direct descendant of the first secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. But seriously, Sandy, as I like to call him, and as friends and family call him, is a good friend, is a principal with C Glass Capital, is an advisor to many Maine businesses, former president and CEO, CEO of Hinckley Yacht Company, and currently running a yacht service called Barton and Gray. Is that correct? Barton and Gray Mariners Club. And Sandy had suggested, and I think it's a great idea, we kind of have the entrepreneur on one side and our panel on the other. And I want to just encourage you, the audience, to listen to what's being said, listen to what's being presented, and to become part of this process, to feel free to contact the entrepreneur. If you have an interest in helping him in any way, open up new markets, or even write a check. So in no way do we want to limit this to our esteemed panel, but we want to open it up to you as well. So you'll have contact information for our entrepreneur, for Christopher, and feel free to contact him. And again, this show will be aired continuously through the month, is uploaded on YouTube, and it's just a great resource. We've had people contact or sign up or register on YouTube for any number of shows that we've been running. So again, Christopher, thank you for your willingness to make your pitch to our panel. So have at it, and have fun. Go ahead. A little background about myself. I recently graduated from Don's Top Gun Program, and this is not my first foray into the entrepreneurial space. Back in 2010, my former business partner of mine and I launched dealsandme.com, which was like Groupon. If you have heard of Groupon, it was Groupon before they came to Maine, and then we partnered with Maine Today Media, who ultimately ended up buying our company and our technology. So I had my first exit from a technology company at 25, which was pretty exciting. So with that said, today I'm going to talk to you about myfilter.com. I want to talk about the product, then I want to talk about what is so great about it and what differentiates us from our competition, where we are, and then what we need to get to where we want to be. So myfilter.com is a discovery platform for the best blog posts recommended to you based on your personal interests and preferences. So what does that exactly mean, and what's the problem that we're trying to solve? Well, right now there are about 200 million blogs on the internet, and every month about 10 billion blog pages get viewed. So that is a lot. That is information overload. But it also means that there are 200 million people writing, some of them are probably writing great content, and some of them are probably writing content you would be interested in. But with 200 million of them and 10 billion pages being viewed, it means it's also probably impossible for you to find that information that's really relevant to you. So that's the problem that we're trying to solve. We want to bring the content creators together with the content consumers. We're focusing in on blogs because we see that as being the future of media and content production, creation. The shift has been made from traditional editorialized content to more homegrown, local, or expertise-driven content creation. So what myfilter does, and this is an example, though you can't really see that well, my guest. Our viewers can, I'm sure. Perfect. So this is a picture right here. This is a bunch of beer blog posts. So what I did is I went on to myfilter. I created a filter. This is what we call them. Think of these filters as stations on Pandora. If you've ever gone to pandora.com, you type in an artist's name and then they recommend music to you. I typed in some things called micro brews, craft beer movement, main beers. So I was interested specifically in micro brews and I was interested even more specifically in main beers. So I did this on our system and results came back and you might not be able to see it, but there are blog posts of reviews of Sebego's beers. There's a blog post up there for main craft beer events. There's another blog post for a Black Bear Growler review. You can't do this anywhere on the internet. You could search for, you know, main craft beer events or you could search specifically for Sebego brewing, but you could never create this dynamic list of things that you would likely be interested in based on the things that you typed in. The beauty of the product is even after you create the filter, it loads in real time dynamically based on your interactions. So as you click on different things, we recommend new posts to you. As new things get posted onto the internet, they get shown to you in your filter. So it's real time, it's dynamic and it's personalized. So that's the basic form of the product. The reason that this is what we consider very impressive and, you know, going to change the future, if you will, is there are two ways you can really consume blog content right now. There's traditional RSS, which is real simple syndication. It's been around since the 90s and it has not improved since the 90s. It's the same thing. You have to know who you want to follow. So if you like to read the Wall Street Journal, you can go there, you can sign up for their RSS and you will get every post that they publish, which is a lot. So you'll get overwhelmed almost certainly. More often than not, people who use RSS, unless they are real news hounds, stop using it because you get 100, 200 new posts every day and you just can't keep up with that. We're too busy. So the other camp are aggregators. So this would be like Business Insider, Tech Crunch, Huffington Post is actually a blog aggregator. And so they take content within an area and they try to editorialize it. They try to become a publication within themselves. So they're specific, which is nice if you have an interest in what they're talking about, but it's still a fire hose of information within that topic area. For instance, Tech Crunch is a tech blog that many people in my space read, but there's a new post every 30 minutes. You just can't keep up with that. So we call these 20th century technologies for 21st century problem. We're the solution. We are taking social curation. So we recommend only the posts that are highly regarded by everybody else. If a post gets a lot of thumbs down, we don't show it anymore. It's not good. If it gets a lot of thumbs up, it's probably pretty good. So social curation, you don't have to know the blogger because we just recommend it to you. Our algorithm picks individual posts from individual blogs and it shows it to you based on many weighted characteristics. So you don't have to know the blogger. It's socially curated and it's specific to your interests. So you don't get overwhelmed with content. So we're hitting a lot of these really important pain points that readers of blog content have. So that's the product. Where are we? After we graduated from Top Gun, we launched our public beta. So when I say we, I apologize, there's a team of three of us that have been doing this. We're doing it full-time? Part-time. Okay. We launched our public beta and it went really well. We had this great strategy that we developed at Top Gun. We rolled it out. We had about 600 people sign up in the first week which was really exciting and we had zero budget. So that was really cool. Since then, so that was in May, we have added about 600 more users. Again, with no budget. So this is one of the things that I want to talk to you about and where I'm looking for some advice and help. What we have done is we have this user base, but our product is inherently not viral. So what does that mean? It means Facebook is only good because lots of people use Facebook. If one person used Facebook, it would not be popular. Our site can be used with only one person. One person can find it very useful. But that doesn't mean they're going to tell other people about it. So it's not viral. So we're working on a lot of new things to help increase the viral coefficient and get that network effect that startups really like. One of those things we did we just launched last week is an email. This technology is actually really impressive and we're considering even just licensing this technology. Is the email sends top five blog posts. Really email is nothing new. We probably all get them. We're going to do two a week. We don't want to overwhelm people. But each email is specific to the user. So Bob's five blog posts are going to differ from Hughes. It's going to differ from Lee's, differ from Don's and Sandy's. When the user clicks on the blog posts, we track that. We alter the recommendations both on the desktop and on the future email. So this is really sophisticated and we think that this is going to help grow the site quite a bit. We did a beta email last week. We saw a 600% increase in engagement. Engagement being measured as posts clicked. So with a subset of users, we saw a massive engagement increase. So we're really excited to slowly roll this out to all of our users. That's just part of the puzzle. The reason I'm here today, so the product where we are, why am I here today, is I need help in digital marketing because we need to find better ways to get more users faster. We really want that hockey stick growth. So I'm hoping for either media contacts, press contacts, or just digital media marketing experts. And the next phase is our mobile app. Mobile apps offer a really great opportunity for fast user acquisition. Our site is responsive. It's totally mobile friendly. You can go on your phone right now and use it. But a mobile app puts your app in one location. Everybody who wants to download an app has to go to the app store. So with the right budget, you can promote yourself and you can get 10, 20, 30,000 downloads a week, which really drives that user acquisition, which then will allow us to test our revenue model. Can't test our revenue model until we have a core base of users. So we're looking to raise $75,000 to build that app with some local vendors here in Portland. We can do it ourselves, but we want people who have expertise in this who do this day in and day out and there's some really good vendors here in Portland that do that. We want to build that app and then we want to test our revenue model. We think by the end of Q1 in 2014, we can have between 50,000 and 75,000 users if we can get our app into the marketplace by December. So that is where we are. Great job. Thank you. I have tons of questions, but again, I want to defer to the panel here. Have at it. Mr. Bailey. If you attain your objective and get 75,000 users, how does that translate into income? So our site, there are several models. There are about 7 million bloggers who make some income from blogging. They don't make a lot, but they make some. Somewhere in the range of $8,000 a year varies. There are about a half a million who make over $250,000 a year. These are professional bloggers. That's 7 million all want to get into that half a million group. Our site recommends blog posts to people. Bloggers make money from traffic. So we have opportunities for sponsored posts, sponsored bloggers in general, and a lot of ways to sell tools to bloggers at low costs, but they're not going to pay for them unless they see an increase in traffic. So we need the users to justify the expense that we would be charging. Sandy. I really understood the metaphor of Pandora. You've got a filter that can grab these blog posts for my interest, but is the technology proprietary? Is there something about it that would prevent someone else from addressing the same problem that you've identified? It isn't. We discussed this early on for a while. I met with some people here in Portland who had a music recommendation service with an IP patented protected algorithm, but the algorithm doesn't much matter unless you have traction. It doesn't matter what kind of protection you have unless you have traction. Traction is what we've discussed with all the experts, the best form of protection. So somebody could come and do this. In fact, a lot of people copied Pandora even though their human genome project was in fact patented. So it's not high on our list of things to do just yet. Can you just, somebody who is low tech oriented but open to high tech ideas, describe to me the revenue stream. Very simply, so somebody like me could understand it. We're going to sell tools for bloggers to help monetize their blog. We're going to do that by sending traffic, helping them increase their traffic. And then charging them? Is that the idea? Charge the bloggers. So one of the really cool things that we have is when you create a filter we return a subset of responses, things that we think you're interested in. And so if you're on Twitter, you can promote a tweet and that will go to, you know you can be really specific or Facebook, you can promote your Facebook post. Similar to that, you can pay us to put one of your blog posts at the top of this recommendation. But the reason it's really great is it's not spamming to the user because it was going to be recommended organically. It just may have been recommended somewhere in that list. Now we're going to put you to the top. So it's somebody who is interested in what you're looking at, of what you're creating. Somebody who wants to click on it, but now it's at the top and it's highlighted. So it's the same sponsored post model that many social networks have, except we think that it's even higher value because it will always be in front of somebody who has an implied interest in what you're doing. Does that have layered costs? Yeah. If I want to drive stronger, it's a higher ticket cost. Again, I'm simple. Yeah, exactly. But to the user, it's a free app? Yes. We're doing the email and we think that that can be based on that high engagement right off the bat. We think that there could be an opportunity to say, well, we're going to send this out twice a week as it is, but if you want to have a daily email or set it to a schedule, then that's $1.99 a month or something. We're not really sure, but if it helps save time and it's high quality, we think there might be an opportunity somewhere in there. Yes. Let's say I run a blog where I report the current status of all ongoing murder cases in the United States. The evidence came in that day where the case is positioned. And I come to you and say I want you to increase my traffic. I get paid somehow by the hits. How do you do that? Yeah. So there are a few ways. The biggest is the sponsored posts. We will put you in our database and say anyone who searches crime, murder, legal cases, anybody who is looking for information like that, you will show up as a recommendation right at the top. So we can't force them to click, but we can help just like any other and it's advertising. You would be paying to advertise but you're advertising to somebody who has said I am interested in this content. And what do I have to pay you to get this benefit? As yet undetermined amount of money. It will be cost per impression. So it will be, we'll look at the models anywhere between a dollar to three dollars per thousand impressions. Per thousand impressions. Yeah. Have you looked at all in terms of the virality side of things how you might be able to leverage Facebook when people for example give a thumbs up on an article or any other methods to really get some virality out there? Yep. So we're in a unique position. Some of the popular apps that you're probably from, you may be familiar with. There's Facebook, excuse me, Flipboard. Flipboard and Pulse. Pulse was bought by LinkedIn for 90 million dollars. Flipboard has got roughly a billion dollar valuation. These are self-contained sites. They actually take the content from whatever source and they put it in their own site and they, they don't say it's theirs, they say it's from the New York Times, but it's in their platform. We, to make money, because none of these sites make money, none of those apps make money, we send people off of our site onto the bloggers page specifically. We have a, what's called an iPhone, we have a header. You can, you're still technically on our site, but it looks like theirs. The problem with Facebook is say you like it and it says Don Gooden, like this post by Mark's sister or CTO and anyone in the Top Gun program might be like I'm interested in that. They click on it. They go to the bloggers page. They don't come to our site. So how do they give up the thumbs up so you understand to increase that in your overall system? In other words, in order for an article to go up or down, the reader has to give it an up or down, right? Do I understand that correctly? Yes, that has a lot of weight. If you click on things, the article has a name that gets weighted too. But yes, what you're saying is correct. Yeah. So couldn't that trigger a Facebook post somehow? Right. And so you can do that. And we actually have that functionality. Got it. Okay. It just, it doesn't drive people to sign up. It just drives traffic. Traffic is great, but signups are what? Sandy, you got a question? Are you looking for other revenue source ideas? Always. As somebody who has a way of giving them a mail, I'll take it. It seems that a lot of news organizations are trying to drive content to their subscribers and being able to search the whole worldwide web for content that's hot, happening in bloggers. I mean, that must be really challenging. If your algorithm is that good that it can search the world of bloggers, what's happening now, I would think these news organizations might want to subscribe. That is. It's a subscription service. Perfectly. For content that they're showing on their program. So there's TV or their own websites. Do you have the staff capacity to manage this platform that you've developed? I mean, what kind of backup do you have behind the technology, Christopher? The thing is, it's very automated. We don't like to do manual work. So everything that happens is done automatically. If I went on vacation for two months, the site would work fine. The recommendations would go out as with the emails. Scalability comes into hardware costs. The cost that it takes to compute a recommendation is fairly substantial. Every blog post that we record, it costs about a half a cent. So there is hosting costs to keeping, parsing, and recording that data. But it's no different than other scalability issues. It's just, we need more server. So how comprehensive is the algorithm or the computers to get all, you know, how many blog sites are you getting? The 200 million, you know, daily blogs. How many are you sourcing or reviewing? So that's a great question. I didn't mention it in my pitch. I apologize. We only have five minutes left and I want to come up with some summary here in a way we want to go. Okay, I'll be super quick then. Go right ahead. We only recommend blog posts from bloggers who have been voted in by our user base. So we went out, we grabbed the 50 biggest ones within certain fields, because those are popular for a reason. After that, I don't know who makes, who writes a good yacht blog. But you do. So you can tell the system our users voted in if they think it is a high quality blog. So that system is also automated. And that's how we get our blogs. Right now I think we have 1600 blogs that we recommend from. Okay. So there's two filters. There's one for me as a user and there's one for you creating. You can't get in unless you get voted in. So it's socially curated. So it's only, we only recommend high quality content. This is the goal. At the outset you laid out your background and presented your business concept. You also laid out for the panel and for our viewers what you're looking for in order to move this to the next level. Yes. Restate that. And I'd like some feedback from the panel as well. Okay. And for those of you out there, you've got us contact information. Feel free to connect directly with Christopher as well. Go ahead. We need media and press contacts if we could access some of the, ironically the larger tech blogs which are, their doors are being beat down every second of every day. Digital marketing experts. There are many in Portland, but they are all very, very busy trying to put bread on the table. And so it's hard to get their attention unless you are willing and able to pay them the money that you have, that they require. We are a bootstrapped organization so that's challenging. The third thing is about $75,000 for our mobile app development and then promoting of that mobile app. All right. Any feedback from the panel? Is that a low ball number? Is that the real number? $75,000 right? Or is that... Are you ready to write a check? No. I just need to know because I might know somebody that does. Yeah. All right. We figured it would be about $50,000 and things always cost more and take longer. Of course. So I just rounded up to $75,000. Thank you. Lee, comments, suggestions? I think it's an interesting idea simply because we are becoming overwhelmed and undated and suffocated. Yeah. We are becoming more content and if someone will help you pick out the good stuff, I would think the public would go for it. I would agree. And, Don? So I think you should talk to Shannon Kinney at Dream Local because she's partnering with newspapers all across the country. So she partners with BDN here and a lot of other newspapers across the country. So she'd be, I think, extremely helpful. I can also connect you to the new VP marketing today, Media. She came up from Massachusetts, opened some innovative ideas so she might be good contact for you. Great. Don, thank you very much. Don, before we turn it over to Sandy as a member of the Maine Angels and I am as well, but do you feel that he is ready to go to the Maine Angels and make a pitch? No. Okay. Well, then explain why. I think you need to get traction. It's the chicken and egg kind of thing. I think you're still at the point where you may find an individual investor or two who is willing to take the flyer, but I think as an angel group you have to have a little bit more traction in order to be able to get the group's attention. Sandy, we just have a minute and a half left, but go right ahead. I can fill that up. I know, but trust. First of all, I just want to say how impressed I am with your delivery and obviously you're a very intelligent young man and... Cummati graduate from USM. Excellent presentation. I have really no idea where this could be financially successful yet, but obviously you have the energy and enthusiasm to probably pull it off. I don't know if you've considered crowdfunding sources. This could be something where you throw it out there and you become a subscriber or you get a t-shirt. I don't know. I mean, it's the level, 50,000 to 75,000 that crowdfunding sources do use. I've started on part of a new company called Launch Angels, which is aggregating crowdfunding deals. We'll just fall into something. Happy to talk to you about that. Guys, I think we're at the end of the show, believe it or not. It just went like that. But thank you all very, very much. Thank you, Christopher. It's been a great show and you did a great job. Thank you. Good. Thank you very much. So, congrats. And I think your comments and suggestions were all very good. You think this has some legs?