Portalspaces Team Size (2022)

hello everyone my guest today is kyle zappatel he went to the university of michigan where he studied computer science and philosophy during which he dropped out to work on his company portal spaces full-time before that he worked at microsoft on both xbox and windows and has always invested his time in moving whatever idea he's got in his head into reality all right kyle talk to us about portal spaces what's the company doing how do you make money yeah nathan um how do you make money well that's a good question so we're figuring that out right now uh but essentially what uh we've gone through this exploratory process of we've created a product we've tested it validate invalidated uh in that you know users didn't really exactly love it um and so we started out with kind of this idea of a virtual reality workspace work within virtual reality problem with that people didn't want to have vr headsets on them all day so then we moved to okay what do people do for a small part of the day when they're working and that's meetings and so we're like okay it's a great space to collaborate maybe people want to collaborate within virtual reality um and unfortunately we found that that was a bit of a hard sell also one of the major problems with virtual reality is just early and so when you try to pitch someone on your software they say okay well you know can i use this with other people if they have a vr headset which not a ton of people do yet and so we had a very hard pivot and now what we're actually focused on is and i don't even know if you can call this a pivot is an augmented reality um treasure hunt app and so it's just an app you download on your phone you find clues around your local city and then you find the treasure and you win 100 and so that's what we're focused on right now so what do you care about in terms of metrics like how many people are playing it or how many installs or what yeah yeah um active users throughout a game a giving game uh so it's it's live and so what we like to pay attention to is hey uh for this game in la how many people played for that game and that's that's our main metric because ultimately what we will do and what we haven't started doing yet is we will charge businesses based off of how many users are playing a given game and how many users end up going to locations i.e starbucks or uh whatever it might be i don't understand the tie-in for that from the game to the to the actual location so walk me through a game that starbucks might launch to get people to go into their starbucks la location totally yeah so uh they'd come to us and we'd create a game for them and so their game would start uh so all the users have to go to the starbucks um at the start of the game and that's where the first clue is so it's all location based so they actually have to physically go out there go into the starbucks be in this starbucks uh at the start of the game and then maybe we have another clue or even the treasure um at a starbucks um and so we're physically sending people to these locations that's where they have to be to find these clues what's the incentive there better be a really strong incentive that people win if they win the game otherwise you're not going to get people showing up at locations on treasure cash yeah okay and so they they win the game they win 100 and so the games only go i mean they go for as long as um until somebody finds the treasure but the incentive is hey like i can win money this is exciting and it's fun you know it's cool to go out with your friends and go search for this treasure in your city so last month like over the past 30 days how many games were played on your system so we we actually this is new this is very new so we had users for our previous product uh but we kind of cut them out we said hey like this isn't working for us you guys keep asking for features that don't um that aren't really involved in the mvp which is a classic signal like hey maybe people don't actually want what we're building um and so three weeks ago or four weeks ago we actually started building this product we just finished up the mvp we just got it approved on the app store and so we're running beta tests our first treasure hunt will be this saturday very cool okay so do you have any idea in terms of if it's going to fill up or not how many people have like pre-signed up yeah yeah so far we have 10 people um and you know given that it's only been a day or two uh that we've had the event posted uh we're pretty happy with that we really aren't shooting for huge numbers at first it's it's really just an exploratory period of hey let's get some users using this what's the sign up what's the url um so that uh it's a facebook group so we we don't have a website yet but um if if you just search in facebook scavenger colon uh delray beach is going to be our our upcoming one so that's a little town that's my hometown hence why like i know it so it's easy to create clues um then you'll be able to find our facebook group um and then in that in each group for each city we'll have events that are beta tests um and so the next two cities that we'll be at are la and new york and so those will be our next test after the smaller test in delray beach okay so i i see it so you're gonna get 10 people to go to like the starbucks and you're you're instinct and everyone's signed up because they whoever finds the treasure first wins 100 bucks so you have economics here right if you get a thousand people playing your cost per player goes down because the price stays at 100 bucks um so let's say you drive you know 10 of those people so 100 people into starbucks well the first clue is your your your think starbucks will pay you to be included in like your scavenger hunt because some portion of the hunter that show up physically will buy a starbucks drink yeah yeah exactly and so um based off of that you know it's obviously not like true that 100 of the people who will be in that starbucks will buy a drink um but just based off of pushing people into their store i mean that's a huge barrier for them like if you're trying to acquire customers you just want to get them in your store and once they're there uh a certain percentage of them will will turn over and buy a coffee and convert and so uh that's actually of huge value to any to any storefront it's just getting people in there and so we're offering that and um from that you know we'll extrapolate i mean we're looking at maybe 50 cents per per customer um is what we're trying to do something around 20 to 50 cents and so that's per player that would end up going to your location yeah that's interesting per player to your location so they're gonna have to physically count how many people show up the day that no we we have all the metrics on it you know whoever shows up there whoever collects that first clue we know how many people there are and then we build them yeah really yeah that's interesting this is like a pokemon go like a b2b pokemon go yeah yeah in a sense so pokemon go actually follows the same kind of business model yeah in that they have poke stops at mcdonald's and then they charge uh per user that shows up to mcdonald's and plays at that poke stop and ideally mcdonald's hopes that all these people playing pokemon go will buy a big mac yeah that's so funny okay talk to me about founder so what's the team look like today is it just you yeah so it's me and one other um person uh his name's harry and he's working part-time i'm working full-time and so very very light team very small team that's what it kind of allows us to just test ideas really quickly how do you pay the bills how do i um saved up money and freelancing on the side yep got it that's what i was gonna ask right it's like like this is you're at a beautiful moment which is like the brand new start right which like a lot of people like i don't want to talk about it but actually everyone has to start there so it's the best thing to talk about no doubt so you're doing side gigs like what coding projects on top towel or what yeah exactly so i'm i'm building right now an app for for a client and um i mean it pays well you know you can get a part-time job as a developer and definitely pay the bills uh just doing some freelancing and then i have the entire rest of the time that i'm not doing that to to build my app and build the company yeah so okay how do you in the co your your other part-time person how do you guys have the equity conversations have you guys had it yet are you waiting until you get contractions a little bit um so so the way we kind of see it is we're just doing it by um hours but we also you know recognize that hours doesn't always matter like sometimes it's just impact and so we're kind of seeing how much impact we both have over based off of this new idea so i actually kind of latched him on uh when i was later staged in in the old product um and so we didn't really have an equity conversation was more he was an employee like helping me out and like i'll give you shares as i as we as you do work and so then i started working on this product and i'm like hey i'm starting from ground zero like we're both starting from ground zero um you know we're both participating in x amount i'm probably participating at full time um maybe 2.5 times what you're participating in for so from that we can kind of extrapolate what the what the percentages are going to be yeah that's interesting super interesting well very good man you're out you're at a pleasant spot now have you bootstrapped this are you guys raised no we're just bootstrapping right now yeah we you know an ideal world i actually just an investor reached out to me and i told him i'm like hey um ideal world we don't want to ever raise but we're always open to listening to you and have a conversation but you know we'll see what happens yeah that makes good sense all right man let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um gosh well i don't i don't know everyone probably says this lean startup i don't know that's okay number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um elon musk so like very generic and sorry okay number three is there a favorite online tool you have for building your company oh that's a good one um i love airtable actually yeah me too i'm a huge air table fan yeah me too i feel like a developer when i use air table and i'm not a developer i'm a marketer like so no no i mean it's such a powerful tool yeah you're using it right what's your favorite favorite block my favorite blob in air table they have blocks inside of sheets oh oh i actually don't even use the blocks really oh i don't i don't use any questions yeah all right number one i mean i have like i have a countdown timer there you go there you go all right number four how many hours i sleep every night um i shoot for eight but probably six and what's your situation married single kids single okay no kids running around that you don't know about no i have a dog okay there you go and how old are you um i'm 21. 21. last question take us back a year what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh how to build a startup guys there you have it he's pivoted many times from portal spaces to where he is now it's basically b2b pokemon go bootstrapping the company again hoping folks like starbucks will pay him money if he drives you know 100 people that are playing his game winning rewards in any physical location uh if he gets them all to show up at their location the prize is 100 cash prize so obviously it's economics as more players turn up increase kyle we're rooting for you man good luck awesome thank you i appreciate it