- Duration: 40 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JYMMMN3FXJXD8G9CGN4E0Z6N (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JYMMMN3FXJXD8G9CGN4E0Z6N)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: some time. I saw you grabbed I think two different time slots. So I just added both to this invite. Is that okay? [Mussa Qader]: Or did you want to keep the other one too? Or what do you think? [Michael Houck]: That’s fine. It works. [Mussa Qader]: Well, look, I think you were talking with Blake. Is that right? Blake name sounds familiar. Let me check my LinkedIn. [Michael Houck]: I think he had reached out our content and distribution offers. Wait, wait, wait, wait. [Mussa Qader]: Give me one second. I’m searching right now. Oh, good. His last name is Stuart. Yeah, yeah, I got him. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So basically, I’m the founder. And I work with Blake, he helps out with a lot of our growth stuff. So he, I think, sent me my Calendly. And I think that’s how we got we got connected here. Here. [Mussa Qader]: Yeah, I’m looking at it right now. Yep, that is correct. [Michael Houck]: Well, um, what would it help if I give some context on me and kind of on us and then we’d love to hear also about sort of your your goals and how you’re thinking about content and distribution all that too. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sure. Absolutely. That’s fine. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: So I’m Michael, as I’m the founder. I’ve been a founder for a while earlier in my career was one of the early folks at Uber helped build that business, then was a product manager at Airbnb for a bit. My last startup, a couple years ago, got funded by Andreessen Horowitz, and we raised a venture fund on the back of that. And then, fund’s still operational. And then now, I’ve built up a personal brand over the last, I guess, four or five years or so. Between X and LinkedIn, 100,000 followers on Substack, 200,000 And so basically met a lot of creators through that. And they were commenting on my stuff. I was growing and vice versa. And I realized that this would help a lot of founders if we could have creators engage with their content, get seen by more people in their niche and sort of match them effectively. And so I built a platform called Megaphone that does that. And then we had a lot of folks using it. Who were like, well, I wish my content was better too. And so we built a content agency around that. And now they’re sort of two sides of the same coin within one business. And so we have a team of folks who sort of help out with content creation, and then also the creator network, as I mentioned, to help with distribution. So that’s a very, very high level, we can go deeper on it on this call, but just wanted to also hear about you and sort of your goals here. [Mussa Qader]: Yeah, so ultimately, that’s really cool. So it sounds like you’ve made a pivot from, I guess, being a product-based founder to a service-based founder at Megaphone, right? Or am I misreading the situation? You’re not necessarily misreading it. [Michael Houck]: I would say that we’ve expanded. So our product is a platform. With this creator network that’s still active, that’s still growing. But we just had a lot of folks who were using it say, hey, it would also be great if you guys had a service. And so about a year ago, we built that out. And now it’s actually an even larger part of our business from a revenue perspective. [Mussa Qader]: So that’s two sides of the same coin. Awesome, man. All right, cool. I’ll share a little bit about me. So I’m Musica there, the founder of a company called Ujet. We primarily solve two sides of a token as well. On the front end, we’re the Uber of aviation trying to build an active platform where we can integrate operators globally into one platform so users can go ahead and get the best competitive valued rates using our proprietary custom system. So normal processes, if people want to book a jet, specifically a private jet, it takes about one to two hours, you got to call a broker, broker calls operators, operators confirm, then broker calls back the person, you do that round two to three times after one to two hours, you get a confirmation and a lot of times deals fall through. Because every operator is working with 100 to 200 brokers. It’s a very, we’ll give all our brokers 10% wholesale rate, $4,000 an hour to operate on the fixed and variable costs. And then the broker will go turn right around, sell to the customer for 40 to 60% mark up the retail rate per hour. So because as you can imagine, during that few hours, during core business hours, there's a lot of fall through and a lot of fail through on the sales and a lot of customers don't aren't able to get the flights that they want especially around holidays like July 4th for example every planes booked out 60 days in advance can't get a plane. And if you want to get a plane, you're going to be paying a 400% markup. So somebody else can cancel flight with another customer and then open one up for you. So it doesn't matter where you're going. You can go to St. Thomas, you can go to St. [Mussa Qader]: Kitts, you can go to St. [Mussa Qader]: Barts. It doesn't fucking matter. So we solved that problem through our custom charter system. People can go ahead and submit first name, last name, departure city, arrival Art Basel, you name it. I used to help people buy jets, sell jets. So I'm very familiar with this entire industry for five years now. So I know exactly where's the issue and the optimization that needs to exist. So the plane still has to fly back, but operators already priced that in into the one-way quote. So the pilot and fuels already paid for on the way back. So they're not really as motivated to do anything with their empty legs, which is why still to this day for the last 30 years, the industry still has a 47% empty leg Across the whole board. Yes It's a wide open market and nobody's been able to crack it uber's tried to crack it with uber aviation Black air all these other companies there's like 38 startups since 2005 that's tried to crack this They were all had hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. They had Ashton Kutcher Mark Cuban, Robert Herjavec, you name it. They had all these guys and the market's been primed for it since 2003. So the market's ready for it. The teams were there. The funding was there. So what's the issue? The issue comes down to strategy and business model. Everybody was a B2C model. They service the end customer at the cost of the operator. So nobody, nobody really designed the solution that solves the operator's because if you solve the operators problems, the benefactor is the end consumer. So ultimately what this comes down to is that and then the business strategy. So the execution strategy was terrible. Like for example, we have two competitors in different sides of the business. We have Sky Access, who's a competitor. In my opinion, I love using them as an example. Share my screen real quick, make it quick, simple. Look at this. I'm going to press search, done. You can specify the city, but you have flights like Los Angeles to Las Vegas as cheap as $2,300, five grand, three grand, the whole jet, not seats on the stupid empty jet. Every one of those businesses have failed. Every single one has failed, including JSX. Every business who sold seats a plane because what the fuck’s the point of flying private if you’re gonna share it like a bus right so why do I like these guys well my buddy Liam and Daniel they they run this company they’re very good I told them I straight-up told them like last week I’m like look either three things are gonna happen guys either I’m gonna buy you guys out roll you guys up into my company either we work together and on a and we make a lot of money, or I’m gonna crush you guys out of business. I told him this a month ago, and we’ve been best friends since. I’ve gotten to learn their numbers and what they do. Let me just put it like this. They gross well into the six figures, very well. How do they drive demand? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: How do they drive demand? [Mussa Qader]: Dude, you’re asking a great question. You ready? Let me show you how they drive demands. These guys are the motherfuckers of one platform and only one platform. Oh, I love that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s good. [Mussa Qader]: That’s it. So if you go here, look, sky access, they are, they are the best. I have seen them. They are the best. Social media marketing at 57 K followers and Like if you see like for example The post hot deals here on routes Burbank and then you’ll see like for example You’ll see like here The prices are good Yeah, it’s I mean like the way they do it is they do the same model we do which is the tail numbers so they get an operator we connect to their flight scheduler on their flight scheduler we have a list of their tail numbers their max the models years of the aircraft and then we usually negotiate depending on the year of the plane anywhere from 50 to 90 percent off the operator cost of the plane custom $5,000 to operate and but it's a newer plane we might only be able to negotiate 60% off per hour so the empty leg room if it's five grand per hour might be $2,000 right per hour for an empty leg and then Sometimes it’s 90% because a lot of these planes are still good on 20 30 years. That’s the nil fucking gee I like him. He’s a part German cool guy, but He’s my competitor. I shouldn’t be saying good things about him. I like him. I’m gonna I’m gonna acquire his company He’s gonna be he’s gonna be working with me sooner or later the bastards playing I like I like people who play hardball What why do I mention all this right it’s We do that on the on the on the back end with operators we connect with their flight scheduler That’s the software they use to manage their entire fleet And then we do the one thing they don’t which is what another competitor does go fly house Even though they have terrible fucking business model UI they have their own Same custom charter system that uses a reverse bidding mechanism That is really cool But holy fuck their UI and business models ass So they have the tech they have the wrong strategy. So they’re gonna fail. They have all these big shots in aviation yet They haven’t done shit I’m on their site right now sky access to say is way better. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It’s so easy Get in there and start using it dude. [Mussa Qader]: All you do is put in your phone number. That’s it You don’t need a membership. [Michael Houck]: You don’t need a user account just boop boop 724 or whatever fucking number you have that it is I’m looking at flights right now on sky access. I just had to do the phone number verification. [Mussa Qader]: That was it crazy That’s it done and they archive your profile So whenever you actually do want to sign up all those points and everything is tracked right on all your flight pattern all of its track based on on your phone number. So it’s, you can just capitalize and create an account whenever you want. It’s fucking awesome. Anyways, my whole point in saying this, yes, on the, on the front end, we’re the Uber of aviation on the backend. Um, we are, uh, kind of like a little bit of Airbnb and Expedia. Um, so we work with those backend operators. So sky access charges 25%. We charge a flat rate, 20% markup on all empty charters, and that’s charged to the operator on getting a customer. So the customer doesn’t have to pay a larger price up front. And not only that, but Sky Access’s biggest problem right now is they don’t have global distribution and they don’t have relationships to the chairmen of and my co-founders have direct relationships with three Swedish kids and three Swedish kids from Avanode and Dave at the CEO of Jet Insight. So we have distribution, we have access to a thousand operators, 10,000 aircraft. And then my external partner and somebody we’ll be working with here shortly, Bob, he has access to about 25,000 aircraft globally. [Michael Houck]: So, I guess my natural question is, if you’ve got these direct relationships with the most important folks that a company like yours could potentially have, where does content fit into that? How do you see us helping? [Mussa Qader]: Where can we add value for you guys? So, four things is missing from Ujet today. We’re looking for angel investors or looking for one VC. And we’re looking for a lead investor. This is the things we have to identify right away for the company so that way we can continue the growth pattern we’re on and finalize this MVP because we got most of it built. We need to build the front end and we still need to finish building the pricing engine. And we think probably 100, 125K of working cap. We’re raising the four and a half million seed round for this. Raising last week on on Monday so trying to figure out who the people are they’re gonna fit in this category for angel VC elite and then the other part is CMO somebody to help us do all the marketing because there’s two sides of marketing for this the one side is with customers so we have three marketing streams we employ in my go-to-market strategy we have physical marketing which is all of the, or traditional marketing, I should say, which is like TV ads, infomercial posts, billboards, stuff like that, right? This is traditional marketing leads. Then we have digital marketing, right? Which is, for example, your Instagram, Facebook ads, Google ads, stuff like that. Then we have event marketing. This is really where 60% of the budget on our marketing expenditure is going to be. That’s where once quarter we’re going to host a UJED Salon and it’s going to be with one of our partners facilities in New Haven, White Plains, Miami and Opelika, it doesn’t matter where. We’re going to be hosting it there, we’re going to have access to the entire faculty, the entire hangar and 30 plus jets and it’s going to be a nice big banger of a party. We’re going to invite 400, 500 people, high net worth, ultra high net worth people, my buddy Jordan, Hutchinson and a few others, they do this over at Jetson Capital. I’m direct friends with Jay and Eugene, who are co-founders in there. They gross around $1.2 million. They spend around $250K on the events. They take home, after all expenses, like low eights, low $800,000, and they make some pretty really where a lot of the storytelling, a lot of the marketing campaign is going to be. So it comes down to Angel, VC, lead investor and CMO or external partnership of a marketing firm that can actually bring to light the vision of Ujet and the problems we are solving. And then deploy it to those three mechanisms on the marketing side, whether that be the traditional combination of the digital and then the event marketing, because those are the really three channels that will have the highest low cost to low cost, high yield marketing employments for an industry like this that I've seen work through and through it. Does that make sense? [Michael Houck]: Or does that? Yeah, it's a super clear picture. I think look into how we can help on the investor side. We have a process that we run through where we just sort of collect some info on folks who are raising right now and we have our investor network of I think it's like 1,300 or 1,400 folks at this point. Many of whom I know others have just been referred by people who are already in and we send curated deals. [Mussa Qader]: The biggest thing is right. So this is something I've been having a lot If so, I've raised almost 100 million and in my past that previous founder and also startups that I helped raise money for Series B and series a startups. One of them was on scale. They developed on shape on the greatest cat applications that got acquired by Ansys I raised I helped them raise a series be a 67 million. I also helped raise 21 million for my crypto hedge fund I was co-founder of in 2020 founder was, oh, let's just say I'm not a bad person, just decided to transition during the investor summit and showed up as a girl. Never had that happen before. Interesting. So a lot of the investor calls after was, hey, how do we how can we trust you with this investment if your co-founder doesn't even know how to identify on Monday and then change gender on Tuesday? So as you can imagine, the position I was put in was like, what the fuck do I respond to this? [Michael Houck]: Like, that's, that's a crazy situation. I've never heard that situation before an investor, like when you're in conversations with folks, that's, that's hard. [Mussa Qader]: It was an investor summit. So everyone was there. We were getting ready to, uh, announce all the term sheets and partnerships and then close on round, um, with the actual, uh, wires the next day after. So the timing could not have been better. [Michael Houck]: Right. Um, and That's rough. [Mussa Qader]: No, no, no. Don't worry, man. Listen, it's founder life. You've been through the same bullshit. Don't be sorry for what you know is part of the game. I was raising $40 million for my manufacturing company a year and a half ago. I had a whole quantum edge. Look up my name, Mussa Qader Quantum Edge. Had a whole, here I’ll put it, quantum edge engineer. Quantum Edge, Mussa Qader. I’ll put in my website. It’s a stagnant company at the moment Holy shit, man. We were we had 150 million dollar contract at a 400 million dollar deal. I was negotiating with AT&T I was raising 40 million dollars for a machine room to so that way we could get our CNC machines that relates our tool center, etc That’s my real dream and passion is I have a telecommunications drone I built To build and maintain telecom towers all across the world for all the different telecom towers types in North America, Asia and Africa. And I also had a Sentinel drone, a defensive variant to protect high net worth properties and data centers. And then also high value targets like politicians. And so as they’re moving used for like security teams and guard assets and Secret Service teams. So I had all this done. And then principal of the project stole 35 million out of the principal accounts to use built the factories, which we found out he never built. Um, so I lost, uh, pretty much the last bit of my wealth. I had around a 1.1 million put into it and so I feel, I mean, I know it’s, it is part of the game. [Michael Houck]: You’re right. It does. The crazy things do happen all the time, but, uh, that’s particularly rough. I’m sorry to hear that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Mussa Qader]: It’s like, listen, man, it’s my, my biggest problem is this, right? It’s, I am, I used to be an angel and I used to be a VC myself when I had money, I had had quite a bit. And I was like, you know what, I’m not going to invest in the S and P 500, the NASDAQ, this and that. Um, you know what, let me go into private equity. There’s a very, very, very huge learning curve to becoming a proper angel, proper VC. Otherwise your money just gets cooked every fucking time. I’ve been screwed countless times as you can imagine. I started running out of runway to get screwed meaning my money kept getting burned. Sure I’m like, all right enough of me co-founding companies enough of me partnering with people fuck this. Um I’m gonna found I’m gonna found the company myself that I strongly believe in I used to invest in a company actually the first iterations of you Jake It’s Jetson jet me and if team came back in 2021 poured in 65 grand company failed fucking my friend Nick Scott did very good. They rebranded to jet me They brought in all these big headers in 2023 long story short. He went through a nasty divorce There was a huge fallout and disagreement between leadership and they ousted him from his own company absorbed his equity and the company hasn’t done shit since October 2023 so As you if you can get the jet But typically when I outsource my trust to people, this is what happens to me. [Michael Houck]: I mean, look, as I’m thinking through the options here, it sounds like the type of marketing that you need is a little different than what we typically do, which is mostly social media. So like X, LinkedIn, sometimes Instagram and TikTok, we have like an AI digital twin we could create for you, newsletters, things like that. Like that’s our bread and butter. It was more of helping with marketing more generally, being an outsourced or fractional chief marketing officer until you find someone full-time, things like that. I’m happy to talk about that. That’s a little different. But I do do that for some folks, too. And then on the investment side, as I said, I can take a look at it with our team and also send to some folks in my network who I think would be particularly a good fit. Think that the approach is smart of going to the operator side rather than to trying to solve the problem? [Mussa Qader]: We’re B2B2C, man. Long story short, got a grand vision, got the go-to-market strategy, I got the team, everything’s there. We’re ready to go, hit the ground running. But the Moosa Kotter bank is fucking eliminated. The Moosa Kotter bank account requires now LPs and external investors because my fuels ran out. Unfortunately, I never, ever, ever take on investors myself. I hate it. I hate it because I love self-funding everything because I’m Arab. I’m Palestinian, bro. I just like fucking Habibi money, man. I’ll just fund it myself, you know, but Habibi is broke. So, Habibi has data room, he learned how to do all this stuff. I learned how to do all this bullshit, data room, deck, two-pager, all of this. So now the biggest thing is, all right, how do I get in front of the right people, the right angels, the right VC, or maybe potentially even a lead investor experienced and has exited in deep tech or aviation before? Because the whole point is trying to position for private acquisition firm, Brookshire Hathaway, Uber or NetJets or a few others that have been fiending for somebody to succeed in this. And I’ve got the relationships. I got the network. Just got to get in front of the right people. And if you can help out with that, man, happy to figure out something a way. It’s a win-win because at the end of the day, I want to get this moving forward. The industry is primed for it. And I’ve got the relations. Joe B. Archer and all the operators out of the Amalfi Coast and Gold Coast in Australia to do, because we have a whole plan to do intrastate programs where you don’t necessarily need to take a jet from an island on the Amalfi Coast to the other, right? We work with helicopter and VTOL operators to do the same thing we do with private jets or to smaller operators to service and address, for example, These more lucrative coasts or these more lucrative areas Yeah, and also I found out last month after speaking with executives at Qatar Airways and Lufthansa It seems like they also have empty legs. They like to post in our platform like what I’m like, do you guys use the same software that uh these guys using lo and behold fucking same tech stack and I’m like Holy shit, so we could potentially have a a380 on our For a hundred grand you could just I don’t know 500 fucking seats. Just Whatever Saudi Prince wants to do that. Go ahead As long as you find the right market on the demand side that could be incredibly lucrative. [Michael Houck]: Geez, that’s crazy Yeah, so that’s that’s my biggest thing. [Mussa Qader]: So my whole question comes back to look man. Love what you guys do And I’m sure there’s a lot we can do together in the long term regarding the marketing how we can position things, right? The biggest thing I need help with is just finding either a few angels, more of a structured VC and lead investor because I’m going through my round of folks and I’m learning something. Putting all the eggs in one basket and maybe four or five people may not have been the smartest strategy that I’ve done because these people have their own goals, their own initiatives. So trying to go ahead and do the blitz strategy, we’re working with multiple angels rather than just one. Yeah, totally. He sees, you know, so I’m learning this as I go being, cause now I’m the one responsible for, I had co-founders and they had a little more experience. So now I’m the guy who’s in the seat now. I’m like, okay, I understand all this. I’ve ran a couple, I founded a couple of companies before, but they were at a much smaller scale. This one, we’re going to go for something cooler. So how do we work together, man? I see. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, let me, let me send you, it’s good. I’m sorry in advance. It’s a form. I hate sending forms, but it just it gets us the information that we need on our side to sort of take a look and see who could be a match. So let me send that to you tonight. And then when we get it in, I’ll take a look. And if there’s anyone on our network, I think it’d be a fit like I’m happy to just pass it over to them and see if they want an intro. And then they request intro with you. You tell me if you want to meet them. [Mussa Qader]: And we can connect you from there. Absolutely. And I’m happy to figure out some way of making sure you’re taken care of I’ve got Yeah, like I’ve got, I’ve got a pretty cool vast network. It’s see, this is also my problem too, right? I’m really sorry, I do have a hard stop. [Michael Houck]: So I do need to I do need to jump in here. But I actually I really do like the idea. And I like the the market. So I like you. So let me let me send this to you. And then we’ll chat more. And, and we can get this in front of some folks. And, and don’t worry about me. This is something we just do for founders and maybe I’ll jump in if there are some folks who I’ll lead, who I trust or something like that. But honestly, I might just want to jump in anyway. I’ll let you know, but let me see what you’ve got and we’ll go from there. [Mussa Qader]: I’ll fill out the form as soon as I get it, man. Appreciate it, brother. Talk to you. Likewise. Bye-bye.