Transcript
The Brief Interviewer (00:18.382)
welcome everyone to a special episode of The Brief. The following interview with Jay Bean of GotYou was filmed live at our invitation only Olivon Advisors Spring 2025 conference in Austin, Texas. Let’s get started. Jay, you have an interesting background. What prompted you to start GotYou?
Jay Bean (00:41)
It’s a really good question. I’ve spent the last couple of decades in and around the small business space, having created other technology companies. A couple of years ago, I was trying to solve a problem and I ran into some blockchain technology that would allow us basically to reach more Americans. And so I’m like, if I can reach more Americans, what would I do with those? And it was a direct connection into kind of this local space. And so as I looked at more of the local space and kind of what’s happening right now from an advertising perspective, we found that there’s zero attribution between kind of the digital marketing that we’re all accustomed to seeing now and the actual person that’s walking in the local store. And we found that we could utilize modern technology to actually bridge the consumer and the business together, bypass big tech, and move billions of dollars back into our local marketplaces. And so that was kind of the foundation of what we started to build a couple of years ago.
The Brief Interviewer (01:40)
It seems like a lot of companies have tried to crack local marketing. Why is GotYou’s offering superior to what’s come before?
Jay Bean (01:49)
Yeah, think building, altogether building a two-sided marketplace is very difficult because you have to get the merchants and the consumers. The hard side of that marketplace is the merchant. We’ve had a long history either through partnerships or directly selling into the small business space where we’ve been very effective in getting into small businesses. But as far as the two-sided marketplace, you can’t start broad. I think that that’s what happens a lot of times is they try to reach the entire market. But we found that we can actually do this whole thing around micro markets and it’s taking a city and taking a five block radius around downtown focusing on getting the merchants and then the users activated there and then it actually spreads out. So during our pilots we’ve actually seen tremendous success in that and so now we’re actually going to go expand that more quickly but using that same small business micro market approach to help us be effective. And we’ve already done this and had successful exits. So we have a team that understands this space probably better than almost everyone.
The Brief Interviewer (03:01)
Obviously, local merchants still represent a large part of the shopping landscape. How large is your addressable market?
Jay Bean (03:10)
Yeah, like our local spending as consumers is about $7 trillion in the US 80 % of our purchases are made locally. average consumer is going to make about 650 local purchases a year. So obviously the amount of advertising that’s going in is about 172 billion dollars, so it’s a lot. So we look at brick and mortar kind of restaurants, retail is where we’re starting. That’s still a 78 billion dollar space today. So that’s kind of the long-term target, but really we take a small slice of that, the little hanging fruit. And we’ve already found kind of our go-to-market through local partnerships is working really, really well. So we will not do any cold selling with this platform at all. We’ll always go into merchants with a warm introduction. So it helps us solve the hard side of the problem. And then you just incentivize the users by giving them free gift card or something like that to go into business for the first time and actually gets that.
The Brief Interviewer (04:20)
At what point in terms of MRR do you reach cash flow break even? What kind of revenue forecasts are you hoping to achieve over the next 12 and 24 months?
Jay Bean (04:31)
Good question. mean, like our goal right now is to reach 100 million in revenue within three years and we build a model that allows us to get there probably quicker than three years, which is a pretty audacious crest of coal for any business. But in the near term, we’re moving right now from around a $20,000 a month level during our pilot to around six or 700,000 by the end of this year. And we’re not going to do that by just spending lots and lots of money on marketing. We’re going to take our proven model that we already have and take that into 60 new markets this summer, which we already have those partnerships and the customers are being onboarded right now. So this year getting to that $7 million, $8 million run rate by the end of the year is well more than doable, which puts us on that pathway for future growth over the next couple of years, reaching our ultimate goal.
The Brief Interviewer (05:33)
Is your long-term plan to grow the business and manage it to an exit via an acquisition or do you envision an IPO or another type of exit?
Jay Bean (05:43)
It’s a really good question. I’ve already had two previous exits in a couple of my other businesses. One of them eventually through an IPO. The other one was through acquisition. This I think that there’s a couple of different options. What we’re building. Essentially it’s what Amazon understands about the online customer, we’re going to understand about the physical customer in their neighborhood. So we’ve probably become really interesting to a lot of players as we move forward. But also if you can kind of reach those numbers, it allows you to have opportunities for IPO or acquisition or a combination of both. But very much we’re not going and creating a new market. The market is already there. All we’re doing is going in and capturing it and it’s ripe right now. Community, people are more interested in their communities. I think the number two thing is the economy is pushing pressure on consumers. So they’re looking for savings and merchants are always going to move more quickly when their budgets are tight. And right now, if they don’t know the value of a social ad or DoorDash or Groupon, it doesn’t really matter what they’re doing. If there’s pressure on those and they don’t know the long-term value, they’re willing to shift dollars quickly. And so the timing is right now for us to actually go do this and build it quickly.
The Brief Interviewer (07:11)
Tell us about your current offering.
Jay Bean (07:15)
So our current offering, we’re raising $1.25 million. We’ve already closed out on 750 of that. So there’s about 500 left, $12.5 million cap safe. And that’s, I don’t know, it’ll be taken up pretty quickly, but that’s the offering that’s out there right now.
The Brief Interviewer (07:37)
Thank you for joining us here at The Brief by Olivon Advisors. For more information on our presenters, please visit olivonadvisors.com/companies. Want to join our mailing list? You can by signing up at olivonadvisors.com. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode of The Brief.
