 back to another episode of Adventures in Commercialization. Today, we have a very special guest. It's a young entrepreneur, someone who has pivoted already and is already trying to do a lot and a little amount of time to raise some money. So welcome, we have Lyman Starmer. Hi, Lyman. I'm good. I'm good. Thank you for having me on the show. Yeah, thanks for coming here. So tell the audience a little bit about yourself and a little bit about your background. Yeah, so my name is Lyman. I'm 19 years old. So I started a company called Perspective, which will kind of dive in to when I was 17. I started another company I was 16, but then COVID hit and I could no longer go on with the plan I had put in place. Yeah, so I'm trying to think where we should start. Yeah, so I started a company in high school. I switched high school, so I used to play lots of basketball. I was recruited by D1 teams and then Perspective, which we'll go into after this, came to mind, which was the company that I started first. And I was like, Hey, this is what I want to do. This is my calling. I've always wanted to do this. My family's extremely entrepreneurship minded. My mom started the company. My mom and my dad both went to college and dropped out for or to create a business. And so I kind of ran with that spirit and that took me where I am now. So that's awesome. We did have, if our audience knows from some of our past episodes, we have had a counterpart and co-worker employee of that came onto the show of Vince Kavin that we did talk a little bit about Perspective. But can you just give a little bit of a brief recap of what Perspective was about for us? Yeah, so what perspective would you want me to explain it and kind of go into the pivot? Sure. Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah. So what Perspective was, was it was a social discussion platform geared to increase bipartisanship. So kind of a competitor to Twitter, Facebook medium. And I'll kind of describe how that was the issue with Perspective. But there was an algorithm on the back end that would understand a point that two people who normally wouldn't agree with, agree with, and it would promote that. So it was kind of a reverse business model of something like Twitter that's focused on interaction based. So I raised around $350,000 on that idea alone. And actually the idea came, I was sitting on a porch and this was during the election, Donald Trump and Biden. And I'm sitting on my porch and my dad had just deleted Facebook. I had just deleted Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. And I was like, well, why hasn't there been a platform that's prioritized bipartisan content? Because people can agree and people can agree on different perspectives. So why can't they do that in a digital sense? And so I ran with that idea. I hired three developers. We went to it and we focused on the idea, how are we going to accomplish this? It's a large algorithm. And when it comes to networks, you have to focus on network effects. So the more people there are, the better the outcome is of the platform. And so moving on with Perspective and thinking about all the use cases, there were two things that came to mind. First was subscription based model. And once we were kind of coming out with the product, there was the looming or session in people's minds. And it's hard for people to pay a subscription based model when they're balking at the price of gas. So that was the first thing that was in my head. And the second thing that was in my head was just the utilization and the creation of the algorithm. It was such a large algorithm. It never had been done before. There's things such as like GDP3, which is kind of an MIT licensed algorithm, which can understand syntax, diction, sarcasm of how someone speaks. But when it comes to this, you had to include things called bag of word algorithms and just understanding the true emotions of someone. So that was using a lot of now technology, AI, and things like that. And that was the second thing that was in the back of my head that was, all right, well, a lot of this capital is going to go towards this. And so Vince, when he came along, it was maybe around six months that he was with the company. We went down to the villages, which is an active adult community. There's around 130,000 people who live there. And it's located in Ocala. And we were pitching them about perspective, trying to understand their ideas on the product, what they currently use, how they currently use it. And while we were doing it, they loved perspective. However, we started to notice that there was another product that could be created that was really serving the pain points that they were addressing. And that was kind of a platform where they could discuss in a community. And so as I say that, you should probably think of something like Nextdoor. But Nextdoor, if you've used it, if you haven't used it, it's turned into kind of a chaotic abyss. And you can agree with me on that. But it's turned into a very chaotic, messy platform. And while polling these individuals at the villages, we started to understand that the reason why they use perspective, or not perspective, but Facebook, was to understand what their family was doing. But besides that, they didn't like using it. It was very confusing. And for an active adult community, with over 130,000 people, there's there's over 3000 groups in these communities. And that's like beach volleyball, RC cars, RC boats. You can think of it and they have it. But the administration of the community wasn't, they weren't the ones organizing it. They were kind of throwing it on the individuals. And so these 80 year olds, 70 year olds had to be, they started to have to pay for a WIC subscription, which was either $47 a month. A lot of them didn't know how to use it. And so they transferred their knowledge and they had to pay for Fiverr or pay for someone to come help them on Fiverr. And so at the end of the day, they were spending $50 a month on something they really, truly didn't understand, had to get their grandkids to explain it to them. And so we noticed that need. And we said, okay, if this is happening at the villages, and they have an extremely archaic digital infrastructure, you know, around this place, and it's a known brand, let's go to all these other communities and pull them as well. And so that's what Vincent and I did, we got in the car, came back to Jacksonville and just called, emailed, visited as many communities as possible. And we started to see a repetition of this pain point. And I said, and like I said earlier, with those two things in mind about perspective, I went ahead and said, all right, let's do it, let's pivot. And so I let my investors know, which were all on board, thankfully, and excitingly, and we transferred to Peer Life. Okay, that sounds like you found a little bit more of a niche that is definitely necessary. And I can give you a couple of examples. One, I do think that in some places next door has become a brain dump of information that is a little bit hard to organize. My grandfather recently decided that he would no longer be on Facebook. He did post and say, you know, I'm done. I'm not getting my value from it. I'm not seeing the grand babies do all the fun stuff anymore. It's just memes everywhere and political statements. So he decided to do that. So that's another one on your side there. And then recently, after purchasing a condo myself, my HOA is in a very older group of housings, not an old community, but just a lot of people who live there are retired and like to live at the beach, but they have an HOA and they were even struggling to figure out how to do a Zoom for me to be able to attend because I was out of state. So I can see where there's a need for something like this. Everything that you stated thus far, I'm totally in line with. So what is like your next milestone? So now that we've decided and we have investors on board, we're going to work, we're with Peer Life now. So if we can take a look at the website and just see, totally different from the last episode that we've seen of what you've done. So we've done a lot of work in two years. I'm going to say that. But what's your next step? Yeah. So for the next step, let me quickly describe what Peer Life is. So Peer Life is a social network for active adult communities. And active adult communities are any community with an age population of 55 plus. And so what a lot of these communities are lacking is the social piece of their infrastructure. So the communities such as the villages on top of the world, Cypress Village, Babcock Ranch, and these are just Florida-based communities that we're in talks with, they have a really, really robust physical infrastructure. And so when I say that, I mean the tennis courts, the beautiful roads, the beautiful housing, and et cetera, they're just missing the digital infrastructure to go along with that. So just like Disney brought in things like Genie Plus, Magic Bands, and the app to kind of bolster their physical infrastructure, what we're doing is we're bringing that to these communities as well to infuse a digital infrastructure that they've lacked. Or if they do have one, it's usually organized by seven to eight different websites in a very archaic manner. And so that's the basis of the platform. It's a SaaS platform for the administration and a social product for the residents of said community. So with that being said, really the biggest thing that we're trying to do is, and it's a numbers game. So Vince and I are in the office 16 hours a day. There's no joke about there were 16 hours a day, day and night calling as many individuals as possible. And it's really about focusing on that niche. So you have the active adult communities we're trying to focus on, but then you also have residential communities that are also interested in this, but we can't spread ourselves too thin because we really have to focus on the people that actually need this, the underserved, the underserved market that active adult community. And so really dialing that in and then understanding what the residents need, but also understanding who the potential clients, which who were selling the SaaS platform to is the administration understanding their needs. So one of the biggest things for them is data collection. But for us, we don't want to sell them a platform and say, Hey, you know, pay a specific amount per month, but then you also have to hire two people to manage this. So it's really for us to mitigate the administration burden. And so that's a really big milestone for us to get over. But in terms of launching that that's also milestone that will finish in December 22nd. And the good thing about that or bad thing about that, it's you, you and I both know it's hard to sell a product in December with the holidays. So we're going with those pilots that we have in place in January. And so when we talk about pilot, again, we are talking about 55 plus, what type of platform are we doing? Is this a website? Are we talking about an app on your phone? We're talking about the community aspect of it? Yeah, so currently, what we've shown on the show so far is the landing page. So a lot of our clients will go towards this. They'll sign up right now. It's only sign up because it's pre beta. But once it is in beta for the residents as well as the administration, it's going to be a responsive website because considering the demographic, a lot of these households share phones and they don't necessarily use the phone as much as you think. And so a lot of them get details, write it down in a pad and then go home and use the desktop at home. And you can you can relate with me on that. I even do that too. But a lot of them go to the desktop, write that down and kind of in the night, write in front of their desktop. And for the administration, it's hard to do those kind of understanding the data on a device or on app. So it's right now, it's a browser based website. Wonderful. And I, Lyman, I can totally attest to that. I did just speak with a member at the app that I currently work at. And we had to discuss that we do have a landing page. They can go there. They could do everything right there. And she's just like, thought it was a God sent. She's like, you know what, I'm going to give my thumbs a little break from the app portion of it. And I'll be right there. So I think that's great that you're looking at both sides of it. When we talk about you were talking about the administration fees. How does that work? Are the members of the community going to be paying for it? Or would the administration be paying for it? How does that work? So in many deals, it's a hand or in many ways, it's a hands off deal. So we go to these platform or we go to these communities, such as the villages. And we sell our product as a SaaS platform. So like I said earlier, pure life is a SaaS product for the administration, social for the residents. So I came at this not wanting to charge the residents because to assimilate in these communities, I think it's much better to go for the whales. And so not the fish, as I call it, which are the residents of these communities. And so by going to the whales, we price it per head. So a lot of these communities already have payment options and payment portals already in place. Some communities are already charging $8 a month for emails or $9 a month for this or our service fee. And so the good thing is, is once we come in here, we can say, Hey, we're going to price this community at $2 a head. And some communities only have 5000 to 10,000 people. Like I said, the villages is kind of out of the ordinary with 130,000 and growing. But the average is five to 10. And so sometimes we do a revenue share on advertisements. So if they want to involve advertisements in their community, we'll do a rev share and bring that price per head down either to $150 or $1 depending on the average size of that community. So that's how we're flexible and customizable to the different communities we work with. And then kind of going to the, what we're trying to do is we're trying to be a scalable yet customizable platform that truly understands the communities we work with, just as they want to truly understand the product they're paying for. So that's the biggest thing we're trying to go going forward. This is definitely something I would pay two extra dollars on top of my HOA fee to get, I'm sure. Yeah. And if it does trickle down to the actual resident, I think that it's, if it's that small to have such a great platform, I think that it's really going to be beneficial. And one of, just so I can say one thing, one thing is a lot of these communities have problems with, I mean with active adult communities getting to the heart of it, there are people lose their loved ones. And so when you lose your loved ones, you're kind of stuck in your house and there's no way to get out. Or there's no way to go meet your neighbors when you really have no opportunity to do that. And so once you have kind of a digital infrastructure to do that, you don't have to do it back in the old days where you bake a cake, go to your neighbor, say, hey, I'm lineman, you don't have to do it that way. You can do it in a very simplified way that can help you get out more and can help you increase the belonging that you feel towards your community. Because at the end of the day, it's all about your belonging and for the administration, it's about the retention. If they can, if they can have you in the community, if they can increase that communal zeal, they'll do anything they can to do that. So, yeah. And so the big question, we're still talking about money. We are pre-product right now. We said we're coming out with some pilots. Hopefully, we'll see by the beginning of next year. But what, how much money are you still looking to raise before that time? Yeah. So we're looking to raise $500,000 and complete our safe round because our seed round is going to be tremendously larger, significantly larger in the millions. But currently, we need the $500,000. Half of that will go towards completing the first iteration of the product, which I can kind of discuss the timeline. We'll have a prototype version. Well, we have had an MVP and that was to raise what was already in the safe. We did away with that MVP because it kind of did its course. And the scalable prototype version will be done October 12. But once that goes out, that's when we're going to sign up three or four pilots. We've already got two in the pipeline that I will probably sign next week. November is when we'll have the initial version, which we'll probably do an internal QA. And then December, we'll have it. It'll be finished and we'll sell it January. We'll run those pilots, which we'll run it up a month long rate and we'll run those out and see how that does. I mean, I know we'll do, I'm excited. We'll do great. But it's really just understanding the community, like I said, so they can understand us and we can understand them. So half of that capital is going to go towards the actual development on that. And the other half is going to go towards the sales team. Like I said earlier, it's a numbers game. And you have to be very cordial and charismatic with these communities because it's a very long relationship that we're going to be instilling with these communities because we are that platform for these communities so they can connect their integrations, the third party integrations, something like SNAP nurse or different medical integrations they use, collaborative integrations. So far, they've had nowhere to put that. And so by providing a platform like that, that's how we start to engage in that long form or relationship with them. So that all goes towards our sales reps. And then we're also getting trying to get a CTO on board too. All right. Well, hear that anybody if you're interested, they're looking for a CTO. So if we had say like, I know that COVID was really difficult and for you to be able to, let's say, market yourself and during your pivot. And again, just being able to get some FaceTime with investors, how did you manage to market yourself? Where we had some people on the show who really found a way to do things virtually and found that that was easy for them. We still have some people who go to investor meetings and really try to pitch. What kind of strategies did you have? Well, I mean, you're much more likely to get money or even get a conversation when you know someone who knows that investor so you can become vetted. And so as I said, when I was 17, when I walked into a room, it was very young. And so I had to or I was very young. So I had to aggregate a team of gray hairs as I call them, the more gray hairs I have in a room, the more successful I could be. And so I came up with a really robust advisory board, industry specific people who have started and grown and sold a company before. And I learned from them and I think investors understood that and were like, okay, I'm going to back this. I'm going to back this team because 65% of companies fail because of team-oriented problems. And so that's such an important thing that investors really focus on that. And another thing is just hard work at reaching out to them. I still write handwritten letters. For example, there's one investor, there was this Van Gogh experience coming to Jacksonville and I bought them tickets and I wrote a handwritten letter and said, hey, you and your wife, please experience this. I love it because it's really sharing that relationship with them because they're not only writing a check but they're also helping you write your future in a sense. And so it's really developing that relationship with them and having them trust you but in a non-artificial way because with your angel investors and even your VC investors, your relationship is going to be extremely long and they should trust you and they should understand you like they're inside your head. So always communicate and this is what I did. I was always communicating to them what my story was because the story is extremely powerful. Vince sometimes jokes since we raised a pretty significant amount of capital. He said, promises over product, that's a book I should write. But now we're really focused on actually creating a product and we always were. It's just really focusing on the story but also the product as well and investors will understand that. I mean it's just human nature to go along with someone they trust and to go along with someone they think will lead them to a positive end. Well that's great that you've created such a robust advisory board. I think that that's super important is having some great minds in your back pocket that again will lead the way towards success and people who have failed and succeeded before so that they can teach you kind of the ways not to go. So I think that that's fantastic. I think that you're doing a great job and yes people do invest not only in a product but they have to invest in the person who's creating it and see that there is a problem and that you have a solution for it which I think that has been very clear here today. So if we have you right now I know Lyman you are in Florida, Jacksonville, Florida which sounds like a great market for this product for peer life. So if we were to think about some other markets that you would like to branch out to what would be like your top three states? Yeah so if you think of it from a macro point of view and just active adult communities alone the market value is around five hundred and sixty five hundred sixty five billion dollars and a lot of that is you know attracted to different types of products but there's not really something focused on communal behavior when it comes to creating a platform for that and like you said Florida is the you know center of that. So obviously we're going to focus on Florida but also the Carolinas and around California. So around California, Arizona they have you know communities if there's Delweb in Florida but there's Sun City over there so really focusing on those and really focusing on active adult communities who don't lease out or find third-party managers. The ones that really have in-house managers are the ones willing to like I said it's a long-term relationship so they're the ones willing to pay for the price or pay for the SaaS product but also stick around and learn from us as we're learning from them so those active adult communities but like I said California, South Carolina, North Carolina where you're at now and there's just and it's also close to us as well which doesn't really matter I'll go anywhere in the state but like I said we're focusing on that niche active adult communities but it can also be expanded to residential communities as well because there's a few products similar but they're really focused on the corporate brand so working with IBM or or any of these large companies they're really focused on the corporate structure of it but there's nothing focused on communities so once you go into residential communities it's pretty broad you can go out to nationwide. But they do have infrastructures that are kind of already set in place so it's a little bit I think it's a great area to be able to tap into and to create that more value for because I do think since we were in COVID we all got a little isolated we all kind of like crawled into our little cocoons and stayed home and it's been really difficult for people to branch back out and find that sense of community. I know that we've had a lot of people who have lost businesses have lost jobs who are starting new jobs but we just work from home full-time and really just trying to figure out like where we belong in our community again again when was the last time we heard about somebody walking next door and handing a cake like you said like people don't even do that anymore. So I think that that's great I think it's really great to find a way to promote clubs within a community you know social needs again for people and just the need to get back out and be a community again. So thinking about your community of peer life how many people do you currently have working in your company? So it's myself and Vince Kavan he's a co-founder as well as kind of a COO role very very good to have on the team very good and on the technical side like I said we had those three or four developers that we were using however it was getting to the point where they were it was taking them longer to research the problem than they actually fix it and so we went away with that and we went for the scalable and faster option so we're using a development firm called Micro One there's around 10 of those individuals that we're using and then once we have that first iteration like I said in December they'll do a little bit of maintenance for us but then we're going to start hiring in-house developers probably around three and then a project manager and like I said the CTO kind of a doer type so right now that's our team right now so Vince and I are always in the office calling collaborating understanding all right how are we going to attract this community how are we going to find clients in this state and every Thursday and Friday we're always talking about the development or every day really and just taking what we've learned from phone calls and in-person meetings and throwing it over and understanding on the development side hey what are we going to do now how are we going to make the scalable yet customizable for the community? I'm sure our Think Tech Hawaii people were a little bummed when they didn't hear Hawaii on your top three list but hopefully we'll be there soon about that in a couple years down the line. I have one last question for you before we cut off from this show I really appreciate you coming on here and letting us know I'd love to one day bring maybe you and Vince back on to discuss your progress and like where we've gone in like a couple months from right now because you guys have already done so much in the short amount of time since we've seen both of you so my last question that I'm going to have for you that we always ask on this show is if you had any advice and for this one I might ask specifically for young entrepreneurs out there like yourself what what what advice would you have for them? So this might sound semi unhealthy but work work work work and some you're going to hear podcasts and you're going to listen to podcasts that talk about you know work-life balance but you really and and I'll explain it like this you really have to love what you're doing because once you once you love what you're doing you love the problem you're trying to solve it's not work so when I say work work work work it's do do do do do something that you love to do and do it with passion and and many ways the more work you do the more likelihood that that's going to be a successful product because the universe starts to work on your side and that's just you know simple manifestation and I've really focused on that and I think that's brought a lot of success to the company but also me as an individual and once you manifest something and you think of the finish line and I learned this a lot of sports so like let's take basketball for example if I'm sitting at the free thorough line and I think that I'm going to make the shot before it's like a 30 more likelihood that you'll make it and so by applying that to entrepreneurship it's like I said it's aggregating the team to do it and it's aggregating the thoughts for success and you'll have a much higher likelihood to do it so do do do do and and really think about what you're trying to solve and think about the excitement within yourself about what you're trying to solve. That's great advice I think that passions are the projects that we're here to discuss on this show so we have Lyman Starmer thank you so much for coming on this show and for everybody else out there if they would like to hear more about peer life just go ahead and check out more on their website and we'll see a lot more to come from them by next year so thank you so much if you'd like to learn more about how to turn your passions into projects and turn those projects into your career and make a little money then come back and watch us again on Adventures in Commercialization I'm Zoe Heaney and thank you for being here. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook Instagram Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at ThinkTechHawaii.com Mahalo