Years aren't equal. Some people have a lot of years where nothing very much happens and nobody really grows very much. Alan Jones Imagine translating, dubbing, and captioning a full video course in multiple languages, automatically, in minutes, and at a fraction of the cost. That’s exactly what Ben Radcliffe and his team at Braiv are building. In this episode of Pick My Brain, Ben shares the journey of launching Braiv’s AI-powered multi-language video platform, how they’re helping online educators reach global audiences, and why their pitch has evolved dramatically after just two months in beta. Alan Jones breaks down Ben’s pitch with sharp advice on cutting the buzzwords, leading with traction, and telling a story that makes investors lean in. They also unpack the power of getting paid early, experimenting with Google Ads, and why startup decks should create curiosity, not explain everything.
Chapters 1:37 Ben’s pitch: The AI-powered platform breaking language barriers ▶ 3:25 What makes Braiv’s multi-language video player a world-first ▶ 5:16 Alan’s pitch feedback: Less jargon, more real-world examples ▶ 7:00 Why investor decks should lead with traction, not theory ▶ 9:57 $2K in beta revenue and a paying customer found through Google Ads ▶ 12:56 The real value of paid growth experiments for early-stage startups ▶ 13:53 Knowing your true customer persona (and how fast it changes) ▶ Resources 🙋🏻♂️ Ben Radcliffe - https://www.linkedin.com/in/benrad/
🎥 Braiv - https://www.braiv.co/
Transcript Synced · select any line to jump ▾ 0:02 Alan Jones: Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes. Hire anyone, anywhere. Get visas handled fast and get back to building. Visit deel.com/dayone. That's D-E-E-L dot com slash day one. 0:23 Ben Radcliffe: At Brave, we've recognized huge advancements in AI technologies for creating accurate captioning for accessibility needs. Really great machine translation and also AI dubbing as well, which is really cool. 0:36 Speaker C: If we can bring that forward to, you know, what we're doing is we're helping people who would love to reach a broader audience, but the cost and time involved in translating into multiple languages is just too hard. We've got the world's first platform that automatically translates, automatically dubs, automatically captions in multiple languages, cutting that time from 20 hours down to 20 minutes. Boom, boom, boom. I think that'd be a great place to start the story from. 1:00 Ben Radcliffe: You know, the journey that we've been on through our 2 months in beta, we have learned a lot about our customer persona. In fact, this pitch has changed remarkably over the course of the last 2 months. 1:13 Speaker C: Welcome to Pick My Brain. We're coming to you today from the Gadigal land of the Eora Nation. Let's take a moment to pay our respects to the First Nations leaders and innovators past, present, and emerging. 1:24 Ben Radcliffe: You're listening to a Day One FM show. 1:28 Speaker C: Welcome to another episode of Pick My Brain, the show where we help startup founders learn how to improve their pitch to potential customers, co-founders, and investors. My name's Alan Jones, and I'm an ex-startup founder and angel investor. We're joined today by Ben Radcliffe from Braive. Ben, do we spell that B-R-A-I-V? Just want to make sure I've got that right. 1:50 Ben Radcliffe: We do, yes. B-R-A-I-V. We like to be different. 1:55 Speaker C: Fantastic. Ben, go ahead, give me your best pitch. 1:59 Ben Radcliffe: Certainly will, Alan. Thank you so much for the intro and for your time. The co-founders of Brave, myself and my co-founder James, we have between us about 40 years of experience working in education. And through that experience, we have a vision and we like to imagine a world where every bright mind across the globe has access to all the knowledge that they require to make a positive impact in this world. Unfortunately, despite online education booming as an industry, for about 70% of internet users, this reality simply is not possible because of accessibility needs and also language barriers. At Brave, we've recognized huge advancements in AI technologies for creating accurate captioning for accessibility needs, really great machine translation, and also AI dubbing as well, which is really cool. But all of these solutions are fragmented, they are complex, and they're also very costly, which currently means that online educators are hindered from being able to seamlessly leverage these technologies to scale their knowledge to global audiences. So to solve this problem, at Brave, we are building a video hosting platform that enables our users to completely automate the process to caption, translate, and dub their video content into any language. But most importantly, for both our customers and their audiences and students, we can then deliver all of that translated content through a single video in what is the world's first multi-language video player. This means one video, multiple languages, single-click away, or in some scenarios, completely automated language switching. so that viewers can view and hear the content in whatever language they require. What this means is that we can take the time it might require for a course creator to translate a single course into a single language, or would otherwise take about 20 hours, we can do in half an hour and at a third of the cost. And better yet, we can do that in multiple languages as well. So we see this as our first step towards bringing serious positive global impact into the e-learning space, which is expected to become a $1 trillion industry globally by 2032. We released our MVP in beta just 2 months ago. And since then, we have racked up $2,000 in revenue from our initial beta customers. And we're about to turn on our full SaaS model later this week. We've also attracted vast interest from leading online educators across the world, One of which is actually an angel investor who is willing to, wanted to come into our next pre-seed round. And also we have gotten a lot of interest from some large B2B and enterprise organizations who, because this is gonna be published, I won't name drop fully, but we have some New York Stock Exchange listed SaaS vendors on there who need to have their customer training in multiple languages and they need to make that as seamless as possible. And also an Australian-based unicorn as well. Whoa. Who take localization of content extremely seriously. So with that, we are very proud of our problem-solution fit and of course the traction that we've made so far. This is just the start, and it is worth noting as well to finish off, we have just opened up our next pre-seed round for investors. We have a few angel investors already on board and obviously looking to invite others as part of the opportunity. 5:37 Speaker C: Thank you. Great, Ben. Thanks very much. That was a great pitch. I appreciate your time. 5:42 Ben Radcliffe: Thank you. 5:43 Speaker C: I had notes. Yay. It's a great pitch. Let's, let's see if we can explore some ways that it could be even stronger still. There's a thing that happens for many of us when we're going into our pitch where we adopt a vocabulary which is not our own. And it's not always a good fit. It's usually not a good fit, right? So when we start talking using words like, like hindered, early in the pitch there, you were talking about severely limiting and scaling. And the first couple of minutes of the pitch were kind of, as you were describing the problem and the scale of the problem, it was kind of buzzword heavy and kind of industry-specific jargon heavy. And that puts a lot of distance between the problem and the customer and the audience that we're pitching to. makes it all seem sort of highfalutin and abstract. And like what can often work better in a face-to-face pitch is to give a very concrete example of the problem that we're solving. And really, although a Brave customer has a problem, a Brave customer has a problem solving a problem for their customer too, right? So, you were talking about your customer's customer's problem and how big that is. And maybe we could get to that towards the end of the story rather than at the beginning. And at the beginning, maybe we could talk about a very concrete example of maybe one of your early enterprise customers or maybe one of your smaller media, you know, one of your emerging content creators who absolutely loves your product and hear about how much of a concrete difference you've made to their business since you launched your early version. 7:23 Ben Radcliffe: That's some great advice. 7:28 Speaker D: As a startup founder, you're juggling multiple priorities from the expected, like finding product market fit, to the unexpected, like customer requests for SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification. But achieving compliance is time-consuming, and time spent on it is time away from the needs of your business. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta is the all-in-one solution for startups to become compliant quickly and build a security foundation with ease. With a combination of automation, an extensive partner network, and a security marketplace, Vanta provides the necessary tools and expertise for startups to achieve compliance seamlessly, no matter how urgent your needs are, and at every phase of growth. Over 10,000 leading companies, including Cipherstash, Handle, and Indetted, trust Vanta to automate compliance so they can focus on growing their business. Listeners of the show get 10% off Vanta at dayone.fm/vanta/brain. That's dayone.fm/vanta/brain. And now back to the show. 8:33 Speaker C: You also mentioned earlier in your pitch about, about you and your co-founder. And I think it's a mistake to say, and between us, we have 40 years of relevant experience because years aren't, aren't equal. Some people have a lot of years where nothing very much happens and nobody really grows very much. And, you know, I've certainly had years like that. 8:55 Speaker D: You know, there've been organizations I've worked with, or startup ventures that have gone along. 9:00 Speaker C: I don't think that's a really good metric of anybody's capacity to be an amazing startup founder. I think what works better is if we can say, you know, my co-founder achieved this very concrete thing, right? I don't know, managed to get away 2 PhDs in a 6-year period or won this coding competition or was recognized by this publication as an emerging leader in this area. So if we can get some very sort of concrete achievements that you've done. Another way to go is tell us a bit about your relationship, right? Because one of the things that can kill a startup as well is when co-founders haven't known each other for very long. So if one of your superpowers is the two of you have been best mates since high school and, and see each other on the weekends as well as during the week, that might be a nice way to tell the story of you and your co-founder. But you kind of brought your co-founder into the story. But it wasn't clear to either of us, you know, who's doing what in the business and, and, and what's the force that's really gonna make sure that the two of you stick together forever and, and, and whatever you achieved. We do get sort of at about the minute and a half, uh, point in, in the story into specifically what you're doing, right? You caption, translate, and, and dub content multilingually, and then the secret sauce is it'll automatically switch languages. You do it once in your language and off it goes. At that point in the story, when I understood what it was you were doing, I'm probably, I may be one of 3 people in the room who's still with you, right? If you've, if you're telling that, that story to a group, or if you're pitching to somebody who's, who's not actually an active investor right now, or, you know, who's thinking, oh, this is an edtech startup, but I don't really invest in, in edtech. If we can bring that forward to, you know, what we're doing is We're helping people who would love to reach a broader audience, but the cost and time involved in translating into multiple languages is just too hard. We've got the world's first platform that automatically translates, automatically dubs, automatically captions in multiple languages, cutting that time from 20 hours down to 20 minutes. Boom, boom, boom. I think that'd be a great place to start the story from. 11:06 Ben Radcliffe: Yeah. 11:07 Speaker C: A couple more things. It would be really good. To understand a little bit more from an investor perspective on where your beta customers came from. Because investors are always looking at, you know, oftentimes early beta customers are people kind of part of your friend or your professional network. I know, I know that's not the case for you, but that's often the case. So if we can say to our investors, this is where our beta customers came from, this is how we recruited them. Ideally, if we can show, you know, there's, we have more demand to get onto our beta platform than we can actually currently service right now. Mm-hmm. This is how many people we have waiting to join that have already signed up to join. That can be a really powerful mechanism in our story. And then I think investors would love to know what the pricing model is for the full SaaS version of the platform that is about to launch. This is how we think we're going to, going to charge for our product. And then finally, you've got the courage, and I think this is so important to say, and we're opening a pre-seed round right now. We have some interest from couple of awesome angel investors. So help that investor out that you're pitching to by helping them understand, is it a SAFE note? Is it convertible note? Is it a priced equity round? And how much money you're raising? And you know, if it's a SAFE note, how high is the cap? If it's a convertible note or priced equity round, you know, what's the pre-money valuation? If it's a priced equity round, what do you think the minimum investment should be? Maybe just a little bit about that. 12:30 Ben Radcliffe: Appreciate that. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you for the feedback. It's interesting. I definitely trialed a few new things today, including starting with the founder and I and our years of experience. And the feedback is, can be worked upon. So I appreciate that. 12:47 Speaker C: No worries. 12:49 Ben Radcliffe: And yeah, it's interesting. You mentioned being a bit more specific on where our beta customers come from, because I obviously am aware from my journey that a lot of startups just get their friends and family to hop on board. Onboard and trial stuff out. We're very proud of the fact that our largest paying customer so far, don't know him from Adam, lovely gentleman. I should say I know him quite well now because we communicate quite regularly because we take his involvement so seriously. We found him through what was essentially now we know as being quite badly organized Google AdWords, but he came through the door and signed up as a beta customer. We let him on board and he's now— He's about 250 videos uploaded to our platform for his online courses. 13:33 Speaker C: Fantastic. 13:34 Ben Radcliffe: Yeah, really exciting. 13:35 Speaker C: Look, I'm stoked to hear that you're already experimenting with Google AdWords. Organic growth is something which is out of our control. By the very definition, it grows as fast as it wants to grow. Sometimes we can find levers to make it accelerate a little bit, but there will always be a cap on any organic growth. Mechanism, the sooner we can start to experiment with paid acquisition, that means then we are in charge of how fast our business grows. And then our job just becomes, okay, how do I raise more money from investors? Because I now know what marketing channels get me the right bang for buck. And so I've spent a small amount of money to figure that out. Now I can go out with confidence and raise money, more money from investors to fund our mission to grow faster than all of our competitors. 14:22 Ben Radcliffe: Yeah, that makes total sense. And then, you know, I'm not afraid of saying that the ad words we did previously was just badly done. You know, the journey that we've been on through our 2 months in beta, we have learned a lot about our customer persona. In fact, this pitch has changed remarkably over the course of the last 2 months because of the realities that have come aboard in terms of who our primary customer persona is. And it is those online educators, There's still space for marketers. We have some marketers on board. I've got some big property developers on board, as well as, as I said, global SaaS vendors or those with global customer bases that have customer training. Longer sales cycles. I've got a decent chunk of enterprise sales backing me. So come prepared for what those sales cycles might look like, but you get a big name and you can slap it on the homepage. That's never a bad thing. Yeah. As well as obviously the scale at which those opportunities can potentially become. 15:19 Speaker C: Fantastic. 15:20 Ben Radcliffe: No, that's awesome, Alan. Did you want me to comment on any of those, the questions that you provided or your comments or? 15:28 Speaker C: You're welcome to take that away and adopt or not adopt any of it that makes or doesn't make sense, Ben. You go for it. 15:35 Ben Radcliffe: I certainly will. 15:37 Speaker C: Thank you. I wanna make sure the listeners know where to find you. So it's braiv.co. Rave.co. Obviously we'll have a link in the show notes. Ben, it sounds like you're onto something. Best of luck with this round and with the growth of the business. See you out there in the startup community, mate. 15:56 Ben Radcliffe: Absolutely. Thank you so much for your time, man. I really appreciate it. 15:59 Speaker D: Thank you. 16:00 Speaker C: No worries. 16:03 Speaker D: Thanks for joining me for this and every episode of Pick My Brains, the advice podcast for every startup. 16:09 Speaker C: Out a founder. 16:10 Speaker D: Never mind the "don't forget to like and subscribe" bullshit that every podcast host goes on about. Instead, please take a moment to think about someone you know who could use some of the advice I've shared and tell them that they should listen to it. I don't know, maybe they'll choose to like and subscribe. Anyway, I'm not a lawyer or an accountant, and what you've heard today is not intended as financial or legal advice. You should always seek that from a qualified professional before making the big decisions. And I'm not a superhero either, so Don't forget that sometimes I'm fallible, and very occasionally I might even be wrong. Please let me know when you think I might be so I can get better at this too. Just reach out to me on any of our social channels or email the show at [email protected] . Speaking of startupfoundercoach.com, that's where you might sometimes find show notes, transcripts, and bonus bloopers if I have the time. The Pick My Brain podcast is produced, edited, and being directly to your ears by the hardworking and understaffed team at Day One, the podcast network for founders, operators, and investors. Find out more at dayone.fm. Thanks for listening. Thank you. 
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