The Pitch That Won SXSW: Building Elita in 6 Weeks

we made a decision in three and a half days and started building on the monday yeah so i think i think she had a kickoff meeting with south by southwest and then we had a conversation was like do you think we can build this thing in time it's like look let's you said no actually welcome to the new build podcast presented by bubble where every other week we explore how the playbook for entrepreneurship is changing thanks to evolutions in ai software and culture i'm abhinav Video producer at Bubble, and today I'm sitting down with a founder duo out of Australia who built Alita, the world's first pet longevity platform, and who recently won their category in South by Southwest Sydney's pitch competition. Paloma and Jackson will talk to me about their journey into the pet wellness space, how and why they built their app Alita Blueprint and who they built it for, as well as what it was like leading up to and during the big pitch day. Super excited for that. Stay tuned for some bubble updates at the end of the episode, as well as a short special segment that might help you level up your developer skills. But for now, let's go ahead and dive into my conversation with Paloma and Jackson from Alita. My name is Paloma Newton and I am the co-founder and CEO of Alita. And I'm Jackson Gritching, the co-founder and CTO of Alita. Awesome. Pleasure to meet you both. So the premise of this show is... There is a new playbook for entrepreneurship out there, and we want to deep dive into how people like you are launching real apps, real businesses, and getting them in front of real users and just how you and people like you are at the heart of this transformation. So I would love to just start with, I guess, a little bit of your origin story. What led to you doing your own thing? And was it always part of the plan or? was it kind of a surprise no it was not always part of the plan um what else what led us here is honestly it sounds really corny and cliche but it's true it kind of started with one dog and hopefully ends with millions but we got a dog in the pandemic like most millennials that we know of um and he became sort of like the light of our lives and at that time you know i think that the world was really hyper-focused on on health and There was probably a lot more time on our hands than ever before in the world. We both were working in a deep technology startup. And when we discovered the flaws in the healthcare system for our own dog, we got a bit obsessive about it, to be honest. And that kind of led to what is now the world's first longevity platform for pets. But it really started in a place of deep science where we kind of recognized that there was this massive gap in the market around personalized healthcare and we wanted better for Edgar. Edgar Allen, of course, our dog. And so we just started building it. So we started with a biobank. We really wanted to prove out some of the scientific thesis behind the company and the principles of what personalized medicine really looks like. We raised a bit of capital. We built a lab. We hired a bunch of scientists. We started working on this big, crunchy problem of how do we give pets more good years beyond the current status quo? And through that journey and evolution, we decided to build our first digital product, which is called Blueprint. So Alita Blueprint is a single platform that allows you to connect all the dots of your pet's health and really act in a more proactive and less reactive fashion. So vet care is, it's an amazing industry, but, you know, we often see our vets once a year and there's just so much we can do to extend the life of our pets in between that, to really focus on that proactive space rather than reactive space, which is kind of what led us to hear. you you mentioned that it started with the science and that you were noticing these gaps in the veterinary industry i i'm very curious to hear more about uh blueprint and the build and everything but first could you tell us just a little bit more about what what it was what were the gaps that you were were seeing yeah for sure so i think the first gap that we recognized was our dog is predisposed to arthritis and we just wanted a better option for that there's really no There's no real good care for an arthritic dog. And then the more you learn about it, basically every single dog is going to get arthritis sometime in their life. I think it's 80% of dogs over the age of eight. But if you speak to any vet, it's every dog. And it's probably the most de-habilitating disease like over time. It just ruins quality of life. And so we knew that early on. I'd met a dog that had gotten arthritis at around two. So I think it was also quite front of mind for me. We learned about, the first thing we actually learned about was stem cell therapy and stem cell banking, which was available over in the US and hadn't quite touched the sides in Australia yet. And so the earliest thesis, the kind of original proof point, if you go back to first principles of find one thing, solve that, and then open up the problem. We found that we built a stem cell bank and it was from that bank and from starting to collect these really high quality sources of biological sample really tissue blood everything uh that was really when we started to go quite deep and went hang on stem cell therapy and stem cell banking is a great service that we provide but the bigger problem is in the lead up to actually needing it is that we have this massive lack of awareness of our pet's own biology and what to do about it so it felt like we had this band-aid that we'd built really well um but we didn't want to just do a band-aid we wanted to uh really like reshape that industry entirely so How do you find, like, how do you find a stem cell bank? Like, I'm just coming at it from a complete place of interest. That sounds really cool. Yeah, so there's a number of different ways you can go about it. The one that is kind of the best and the easiest to scale and the lowest impact to the pet in terms of getting the sample is getting a small fat sample. right so adipose tissue and there's a whole host of different stem cells that you can acquire but the ones that we do is we take a small fat sample and from that fat sample there's things called mesenchymal stem cells that are in there that we can isolate from that primary tissue so there's a couple of different ways you can actually get that fat the one that is kind of the most efficacious is at the point of dissecting Right. So you're already going under anesthetic. You're already going in there for a minor procedure. And so the vet can kind of just go in there and take a small fat sample, five to 10 grams. And then we process that back in our lab and then bank those down in liquid nitrogen for future therapy development. Right. And so that's the that's the main area that we get them. But you can also do it from any time that the pet goes under any sort of general anesthetic procedure. It's very similar to like a small lump and bump removal. Right. We just did it for our dog when he was getting his teeth cleaned. I'm not sure if you can see him in the background, but he's a little donut on. We call it his everywhere pillow because instead of the big cone of shame, he's just got like a little traveling tourist. Nice, nice. I'm curious, do you both have like backgrounds in science in like college or no? Purely the discovery of it. Mine's a biomedical engineer. My background's in biomedical engineering. Okay. My first job out of university was actually in deep tech doing LIDAR sensors, but then kind of moved into more of the biomedical space, working with stem cell derived neurons for biological computing, which is where I got a little bit more access into the wet lab and using these primary tissues to do really complex things. And so the thing that we were trying to do in terms of just extracting stem cells for use in therapy development is actually fairly well understood and been used in human medicine for... for decades right so we're just kind of translating this really kind of mature technology over into the into the veterinary space absolutely yeah um paloma what was your background before getting into all of this i always love that question um my background is a is just an accumulation of what i've now come to understand as commercial understanding so i i ran restaurants for 10 years then i went into advertising and worked on really big brands like your bayers and your nestleys of the world and from there i kind of got bored and ended up with jackson at a date technology company building my first startup marketing department and we took that company through a 40 million dollar raise and really did a global expansion and from there i went into venture capital so um i just follow follow what is interesting and follow what i can have impact on we've covered what sounds like the original vision behind elita i would love to know a little bit more coming from this background in both marketing and venture capital and also science how did you approach your build and like what were the what were the phases what tools did you research what led you to the product that you have today i think we approached it probably in an incredibly unorthodox way which was we were building this very deeply scientific business and as we were going and talking to hundreds of customers and lots of vets and uh nearly just a lot of people we started to recognize this reoccurring theme. And the theme was that kind of as to what I alluded to earlier, we really had created a fantastic band-aid, but we needed something that was a bit more robust and a little bit more accessible on the daily. So even with things like arthritis, it's great to have a solution for it, but the better solution is actually to act preventatively and avoid it for as long as possible in the first place. The reality was that there was no real clear way for people to do that. We've got over a billion pets now in the world. So that's 50% of the world now has a pet. And yet the information that we're able to get about pet care is super fragmented and sporadic. Most people go to the vet once a year and it's about 15 minutes. And I think on average we retain 15%. And so the other thing is we don't want to just push people to go to vets because... The reality is that vet care is an incredible resource and it's quite reactive. But going to the vet when you just want to understand something is probably, aside from outside of a lot of people's price range, it's also just, it can be prohibitive in your, you know, daily job, nine to five, whatever it is. And so we really wanted to figure out how can we meet people where they are? Like, how can we bring preventative health care? And I guess... because of the genesis of our business right it wasn't just preventative health care it's not just advice we really wanted to deeply revert in personalization and your own personal biology dogs are incredible but they have this other incredible thing which is there's this massive breed variation like the same things that affect a chihuahua are not going to affect a great day and there's just so much information and it's actually quite hard to understand what is right for your dog your dog might be having skin issues because of environmental reasons, or your dog might be having skin issues because they're eating something that isn't right for them. And the only way to understand and to act proactively is actually to understand longitudinal data. And pets can't talk to us, right? It's quite different to having a kid who every time they eat chicken might have a funny tummy and tells you that they've just eaten chicken. It's really hard when you're dealing with an animal that is kind of genetically built to be stoic. And so by the time you find things out, it's often too late. That's an interesting way of putting it. I've never thought about it that way of a dog, but that's very true. Yeah. And so we had this deeply rich biological source and we started to, you know, just in the understanding of how we were building our company, we started to realize all these different levers that we could pull from just a simple tissue sample. And then it kind of went, well, what if we had, you know, a blood reading or what if we had historical clinical data? What if we were able to do advanced diagnostics? But where do we aggregate all of this to make it really simple and not make it another admin task, but have a tool that works in the background for you so you can make better decisions when you need to? And I think that the reason I say it is quite unorthodox is I think everything was pointing to us towards building a digital platform. But both of us had never worked in software. Yeah, we're pretty hesitant to go after it, honestly, because we raised a bit of money for the biobank and the cell therapies. this to the business but it just made more and more sense to go after this other piece of the problem right and so that's kind of we made that decision quite quickly and we had some punchy timelines to to try and get this thing out into the world which is why we kind of landed on on bubble right so because we wanted to once we made this decision we had about a month a little over a month five weeks in order to build an MVP that we wanted to put out into the world because we're trying to align it to some other pitch events that we had. And because neither of us are software developers, I can play around a little bit in Python and do more of the data analytics things and more of the robotics side. But in terms of web development, that was an entirely new skill set. So in order for us to hit these goals to get a thing out into the world, which for us is kind of table stakes, right? It's easier for someone to give feedback on something that they have in front of them so that we can kind of build and iterate and make sure that we're developing the right thing yeah and so that's kind of how we how we landed on bubble because that was the the one platform uh that we that we found that would enable us to do this kind of full stack development at speed so that we can get something in front of people uh to to give that feedback on as well as kind of reduce the barrier to entry for for myself to make a couple of those kind of front end tweaks while i can play a little bit more in the in the kind of back end Yeah, the crunchy deadline we had was we were going back and forth on the platform concept. And I guess there was a bit of hesitancy that we were, you know, making a relatively large strategic move. But then once we spoke to all of our investors, they were like, this is it. This is it. This is it. You've nailed it. And we had an opportunity to pitch at South by Southwest Sydney. And obviously everyone knows what South by Southwest is. I don't need to explain that one. And so, you know, from there it was let's get something out at South by Southwest because the number one thing we do know about launching a digital platform is that your success is going to be based on your speed and being able to get something in front of customers. And I think what Jackson said kind of nails it on the head, right? Even if you get an MVP, a beta, whatever you want to call it out there, it's far easier to build on top of something that exists than it is to try and get someone to imagine something that doesn't exist anywhere in the world. Before you made that leap into having a digital platform, were you... I think I'm trying to get a good understanding of... You mentioned this deadline and I can feel like there's this sense of urgency at this point. Surely some of that is coming from you and your own drive to want to take that next step for the platform. And it sounds like some of it is coming from investors. Do you have... are there i don't know if you even call them users at that early point in the journey before you have a digital platform but are there customers or or just pet owners out there who are also coming to you with with feedback or requests or or like are you starting to already hear that that engagement yeah 100 i mean that was kind of the genesis like we didn't launch the platform in lieu of the consumer desire so i think it was all we learned i mean it was interesting right like we talked to two kinds of pet owners we talked to pet owners that wish they had In the original case, it was wish they had stem cell banking or therapies, you know, three years ago because they're often too late. Or in the other side of it, it's really we're bought into the concept but had so many other questions that needed answer first. And so everything from each of those kind of customer segments was pushing us back into this. People want to know that what they're doing is right for their dog. It's actually not even good enough to know that what they're doing is right for dogs, right? Because... as we talked about before environmental slash biological differences um it's really difficult to know that one thing that is right for one dog is right for your dog and then the people that we rely on the most which is our vet uh we only see them once a year and they often don't know all the in between i don't know about you but i know when i turn up to the vet with all my best intentions often i kind of forget what's happened in the past 11 months yeah absolutely and i always have the best intentions of like next time I go to the vet, I'm going to talk about this. And the reality is I forget because I've got 400 million other things going on in my life. And so I get there and they go, how's everything been? And I go, yeah, great. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, I definitely know that feeling. And so, yeah, I think there was this, like, there was a very big groundswell of, of realization. Yeah. And we do have to be careful not to design a product just for us. I think it's, it's tricky to separate yourself, like separate yourself and not. design a thing because we're also kind of the target market and the customers yeah right so we kind of have to separate our own biases a little bit which is why we obviously go out and talk to a whole bunch of pet owners do a whole bunch of surveys and and we're like oh we're actually not that crazy of a of pet parents that are striving for this type of thing as well and want this more detailed rich information about their pet and how can they do how can you open up access to a wider group of people and make it both economical and effective yeah right because that's one of the bigger drivers in the veterinary spaces there is this almost hesitance uh to do advanced care because there's this assumption that it is expensive and unobtainable and that's the other half of the problem that we're trying to solve right how do you make this advanced care and make it easy and understandable but also cheap for the user So you've mentioned building a bubble app. You've mentioned talking to investors. You've mentioned lining up pitch meetings. You just mentioned surveys and research and acquiring customer data. I definitely want to get to South by Southwest in just a second. But before I do that, what does the distribution of work here look like? Is it all both of you? Did you reach out to coaches or... or professional bubble developers to help you with your app or what's that looking like? Yeah, we worked with a bubble specific kind of agency here in Australia. And so they have developers in-house. And so we worked pretty religiously with them. We defined a brief and that first brief was definitely wrong. And so we're now iterating on that, which I mean, if you're not wrong the first time, then you're not trying hard enough. but um we yeah we engage with them from a like distribution of work split internally you know Jackson does run a lot of the technical side of things and I run a lot of the sort of design consumer commercial aspects so um we we have a really nice symbiotic kind of push and pull there where I'm like well what if they ask this or what if they do that I do a lot of the customer experience stuff even before you know a lot of our platform is automated but before we automate anything generally speaking I am the automation for at least a month because I really want to understand like what are the pain points you know we have a vet's concierge service on our platform where when you sign up we concierge all your pet's historical data and that allows us to create really beautiful longitudinal understandings of what has their body index been over time what has their dental health been over time and we aggregate that all that data so that we can create a total health profile the first sort of 50 of those vet concierges was me restored into the vet and it's really funny because a lot of people are trying to make their automations sound more human i was actually trying to make me as a human sound a bit more automated so that it felt a little bit more a little bit more put together sure sure but the reason for that is like any time we did have a hiccup you know there was like a really small experience of why it's so important sometimes to go from manual to automated is like we were going back and forth with one vet who couldn't find the records and at first i kind of was going to be like oh well but then it forced me to look into like the code and realize that vet records have to be kept for seven years and so i was able to push and actually get that out of the archives so you just learn so much about your product by being the robot sometimes that's a great that's a great way of putting it um if we could transition now to talking a little bit more about south by southwest yeah um i agree that i think most people who are listening to this knows what knows what that is but for those who don't how would you briefly describe it south by southwest i would briefly describe south by southwest it started in austin uh in texas and it's a it's a festival of ideas and innovation and culture and art and music i think is the best way to describe it um when i worked in advertising south by southwest was the like mecca like if you worked hard enough some brand would pay you to go to South by Southwest. That was kind of what I knew. I think in the modern day, it is really where like a lot of the big tech companies will launch things, you know, Meta, Amazon, like they're all launching things every year. Australia, Sydney was the second global location for South by Southwest ever. The first time it went out of Austin. I think it's now Austin, Sydney and London. And the first year that I went was actually the first year I was working for a venture capital company in Australia and, you know, they bought me tickets to South by Southwest. Not sure if they would have done that had they known what was going to happen next. But it was actually while I was at the festival that I mentally went all in on the idea of building a leader. And it was the first time, you know, Jax and I had been talking about it for two years, I think. Yeah, quite a while. But when I was at South by Southwest, I had this kind of like urgency and drive and I turned to someone and they asked me what I did. And I said, I think I'm about to quit my job and start a company. And so it was. Wow. When I was three years ago. So then the next year I was incredibly lucky to get a free ticket to South by Southwest, this time as a pre-seed founder who had just been closed our pre-seed round. And so I, I, the next year I got to go just as a guest and, um, that was great. But then the third year, which is this past year, uh, I got the email, you know, apply to pitch at South by Southwest. And I thought, let's go. Why not? So, so from, from that moment where you told that person, I think I'm about to quit and, and start my own business to when you pitched, that was, you said those two years or three years, it was the third year. So two years. Yeah. So. i can mark my entire startup journey by how many south by southwest do you remember if that person that you you said that to was like wow or were they like yep that's how it works that's what happens it's actually a crazy story because the person that i told it to i don't know if you know who this is but it was cindy gallop and cindy gallop is a incredible woman in tech startups and also was in advertising she did a talk and um it was like just a fantastic talk and after I got to meet her and she'd been somewhat of one of my sort of business idols I guess you could say for lack of a better word for many years through many different career paths and so I met her hugged her told her I thought she was amazing and she said you know what do you do and I said I'm working in venture capital but I think after this I'm actually going to go quit my job and start a company and she just kind of looked into my eyes and said that's fantastic and gave me a hug and i was like well now i told her i have to do it yeah exactly the the flag's been planted that's that's phenomenal that's that's also a great um it's just a great example of i i don't know you hear a lot of people being like don't meet your heroes but that's just such a great example of not just meeting your hero and having a good interaction but also being able to say something so like game-changing to them that's awesome yeah exactly and i've like kept in contact and so it's just yeah it was just such a cool experience and yeah just do it i reckon do it and put a lot of pressure on yourself so you can't cool out that's the key ingredient i'll bet um so i i'm hoping to assemble a little bit of a timeline here because i think a lot of our listeners will be really keen to kind of live vicariously through you and your experience here and i i want to start even before you you show up at the event at what point i well maybe you already answered this but i guess at what point do you know at this at this year this is the year that we're going to try and uh pitch oh for the the year we pitched uh yes yeah look i think the funny story the deeper and sort of more self-deprecating part of it was that the year before when i'd been invited to be a guest i remember thinking i'll go and see the pictures and i had this sort of i'm going to call it an opinion i really thought these were going to be like super early businesses you know my first pitch kind of vibes and i went and i watched and i was like holy shoot but that is that is some cool companies um and so i sat in the audience and i watched the other companies pitch and i think the person that won that year um had a a drug that could cure cancer like it was kind of that high level right and okay wow so definitely definitely the definitely the big big yeah and i remember because a rule i kind of have for myself is i always want to be a um a small fish in a big pond so i tend not to do things if i feel like i'm just going self-gratuitously to show off about like how great i am i tend to try and if i say yes to a panel i want to be the most junior person on that panel if i say yes to pitching i want to be one of the earliest companies pitching and that's because i feel like i learned so much more from holding myself up to a higher esteem And so once I saw those, I went, yeah, I'm going to do it next year. Like, I'm definitely going to throw my hat in the ring. And I mean, the testament to that was we probably were one of the earliest companies on stage, I think. The company that won this year, obviously, we won our category and then we went on to the main pitch, which is all winners from five categories. And the person who won it outright, they had 20 million ARR. and we're raising a series a so i was like great i've done my goal of being the smallest division the biggest you're on the same stage as that i mean like that's huge uh just going back to that that second year when you were just there as a guest and seeing these other pitches can you talk just a little bit more specifically about what what was so impressive was it like the numbers was it the feedback was it there just how polished the vision was or was there like already like a ton of tangible success i think it was the vision i mean look many of them had different strengths and weaknesses right like any pitch competition there were some that had incredible numbers there were some that had amazing traction there were some that um and i i like i think traction and numbers are obviously great and that's what we all strive to but i don't i don't necessarily maybe this is a slightly contrarian opinion i don't think numbers and traction in the early years are what make a great company if i actually think about some of the companies that I am obsessed with or have been or you know are big companies in my vernacular. I think of things like Canva right? Like Canva started in five years before they actually got any funding and didn't have a product for the first three years and you know we're a Ubook company and then and had all these amazing learnings and I don't see that um I see that almost as a more sustainable business. If you've worked really hard to define what your actual product is and why you're going to be successful, then I have no doubt you're going to be super successful. And so to me, traction is not the sexy thing. I think if a pre-seed company has too much traction, I kind of have a bit of doubt about the inbuilt longevity. I think that true traction is like deeply understanding your impact, what your vision is. I don't know how to define it. I think a lot of people call it like life's work, but I think that's a bit on the nose. I think when you see a founder that is just genuinely obsessed, there is something about obsession that I don't think we give enough credit to. And so when I see a really polished pitch with someone who is absolutely obsessed, like has done some weird things in order to like. get to where they are i think to me that is the bit that gets me so excited because i am a very obsessive founder and i've also done some weird things and so seeing that back was what really made me go i want to stand up on stage and show the passion that i have um to the next group founders in the room so second year you decide you want to be at the next one um for someone who might not know do you is there an application process is there like a pitch before the pitch yeah luckily i'm in a bunch of groups of founders all chatting to each other because i totally missed the call out for actually applying because i was busy running that company so um i i had a few people send it to me and say hey applications are open the application to i probably 30 seconds i don't think i even told you that i'd applied at that point we were quite busy and um i when i got the email that we were pitching I think I also didn't quite understand how many people apply every year. I kind of went oh that's nice like we were probably part of the 20 people that applied and then I found out that thousands of companies applied. And so I look I'm a bit flippant about the application process but as soon as I got in one thing I will be very honest about is I'm not flippant about process and preparation. I think like There's nothing wrong with being a loser. And as soon as you know, you're going to do something, do your absolute best and work your absolute hardest. And I am polished because I am very obsessive about practicing, not because I am some kind of random genius at speaking. I care deeply and I work really, really hard for things like that. What would you say is the hardest part about crafting a pitch for South by Southwest or, you know, a thing like it? Yeah, synthesising a simple idea. So I think, you know, don't start with a deck. Don't start with making yourself sound clever. So it kind of comes back to that, like, don't be obsessed with things like metrics either. Like, I think that what you actually have to nail is a very defined storyline. The pitch for South by Southwest is three minutes. And so for three minutes, when you are building a biological longevity platform for pets. that has deep science diagnostics, advanced diagnostics, as well as, you know, digital... The vision that we have is quite complex in trying to bring all of these pieces together of, you know, personalized medicine, owner-centered, managing the breed variation, at-home diagnostics, like all of these kind of different pillars of the business to really make pet care really effective. We only really shifted the vision of the business probably like... Six weeks. Yeah, six weeks before that pitch event. So we were kind of trying to figure out this new direction for the business, as well as build the platform, as well as condense this really complex message into a cohesive three-minute story arc. That was something that required just a lot of back and forth between Plyra and myself. And a lot of dedication. All we did was that for six weeks. Yeah. And we were also building the platform at the same time. so that's right yeah so i just remind me real quick the the timeline of of when you're pitching versus when you are reaching out to an agency to start building this bubble app how much time is in between those two there was hardly any so probably the day that i did the first call with south by southwest about the process was we've been talking about the um we've been talking about the platform and I'd been in Brisbane that week and basically we jumped on a call and started talking to agencies that week. We gave ourselves three days to do our ROI process. We spoke to I think 15 agencies in three days. We had a really clear brief and we just had to be very ruthless. We had to kind of trust our gut intuition but also be very clear on what our deliverables were and how we were going to achieve them. Um, and so we, I think we made it, we made a decision in three and a half days and started building on the Monday. Yeah. So I think, I think she had a kickoff meeting with South by Southwest and then we had a conversation was like, do you think we can build this thing in time? I was like, look, let's. You said no, actually. It's going to be close. We'll, um, we'll give it a go. And then we kind of made the decision. We're like, all right, let's, let's, let's go. Let's go. Yeah. Right. And so then we kind of kicked off this whole process, started the scouting and understood what. what level we could get it to in the time constraints that we had, the level of quality that we wanted to get it to. And that whole process from decision to kick off was like a day or day or two, and then probably like a week to find the right partners, and then four or five weeks of the build. And the goal was to have a working MVP by the time. Yeah, yeah, beta. Look, I think like the thing we did really well was we did a very ruthless process of what does it have to have? What do we know it won't have, but it will need to have to have in the future? I think strategy is so much about deciding what you will do and what you won't do. And so we really defined like what is table stakes? What do we need to get? And the goal, we hit our goal. What do we need to get that first 100 users on the platform so that when we start to test our next features, so vet concierge being one example, right? How do we get 100 people so that we can start to effectively test the next things that we're going to build after this? So we really wanted to build something for launch so that we could increase users. Did that process, did it feel like you were down to the wire the whole time? Or was there a moment where once you saw like a framework of it working or heard, you know, some update from the agency, you started to feel like, okay, at least that side of what we need to prepare for this is working fine. Yeah. Just because we were so ambitious with a lot of these goals that the targets that we set out were quite punchy and the things that we wanted to get out were were really cool things and so we wanted to build that along the way i think we were down to the wire like i think i was you know up at 1 to 2 a.m before the pitch when we're going to launch in classic kind of founder style and because we have developers around the world we're like let's let's make it work let's pull all these pieces together and launch this thing um but i think about two to three weeks into it i was like oh yeah we can we can do this yeah when we started to see like the the wireframes come together and the the different uh kind of mock pages and things like that i was like look at the very least we'll have we'll have something that kind of matches our vision maybe 80 to 90 but because we're quite punching what we're trying to do that 99 to 100 is really what we were aiming for but yeah there was probably like two to three weeks in there when we're scoping things out it was like oh yeah this can this could work i can see this i can see this happening yeah so the day arrives and you show up how how are you feeling walking oh so anxious um how yes i mean i was really glad actually that i was first first on first session so there's five six categories for and there are multiple people in each category so i was first of first which i think would freak a lot of people out um but i was fine with that because you know okay yeah you get it out of the way and then you can enjoy the rest of the pitches right it's actually quite funny because i was backstage with the other companies that i was pitching against and i was like very obviously pretty stressed and anxious and I was pacing and practicing and they both seemed quite chill and um you know I said are you guys nervous and they're like no we've got this and I was like okay and then I won so I think that's the show that like it's so fine to be nervous I think being nervous just shows that you care right not just say that they didn't care they obviously cared and they were like phenomenal companies to be pitching against but I think like I just have no illusion I never try and play it cool i'm a lot of things i'm not cool and um i just don't care that much about being cool i care about being right and winning so it's a it's a three minute you're on stage for three minutes um you have your rehearsed i i imagine script or outline Oh yeah, I knew. I could probably say it off the dome now. But yeah, I had been practicing. I think Jackson probably knows it because we were practicing in the car so often. Yes, I had a script on my phone, but I didn't use my phone, obviously. You just stand up. They explain the rules to you. You're probably so stressed that you're blackout, so you don't really listen. You press a button and you've got three minutes. And then at the end, you have three to four investors on stage who kind of probe and ask questions. Talking about how you structured that story, because you mentioned earlier that the hardest part of this was just synthesizing such a complex idea and such a complex problem to solve into three minutes. You also shared a stat earlier. I believe it was 50% of the world has a pet. Yeah, 1 billion pets. This is such a personal topic. This is such an emotional topic for so many people. Does that help? yes in how you weave the story absolutely in a few ways so there's a couple of um little tricks that i use when i pitch and i think everyone should have their own sort of set of tricks so depending on the speed of the pitch right there's one thing i often do which i didn't do for the south by southwest one where i did it for a recent pitch competition where i ask everyone in the room that has a pet to put their hand up now that is a very tactical thing for me to do because in australia 73 of households are the pet so sure and and that demographic obviously shifts comparatively to like economic background. And if I'm pitching in a room, I can assure you that most people are at the top of that economic background and therefore it's going to be closer to 100% of people putting their hands up. But for this pitch, because it was very sharp and I didn't have any seconds to spare, I actually went with a customer story. It is, I think that it is paramount to always link, doesn't matter what your problem is, you could be selling B2B software products. At the end of the day, you're impacting a person. So like you can't sell anything to a business because it's a building. So you're always impacting a person. So always start with a human story. So we started with a story about a dog that's a customer of ours and their kind of lifestone. We weaved that through the narrative. But I think another thing that we do quite well is always being very cognizant of there's probably five or ten different story arcs in a business pitch and you've got to figure out which one makes sense for you. You shouldn't read any arc religiously, right? But you should respect the fact that there is a reason that these things are not cliched, but they're used time and time again because they work, right? And so our one obviously was what we've learnt. And so figure out what the key or the crux of your narrative needs to be and then mould the reality of your company around it. So for us it was this is what we've learnt because that is the truth, right? We started with this deeply scientific business and then we learnt that the company proposition was way bigger than we kind of originally anticipated. And so if you can root things around those known, tried and tested story arcs, you start to develop. But the number one thing is, don't worry about your slides until you know exactly what you're saying. Like, write it down. Ten sentences has to make total sense. And then you can build it out from there. You have to know what you're saying. So the three minutes are up. there's presumably applause maybe presumably you're still a little blacked out but starting to feel the relief when what when is the moment that you uh find out that you have won well actually what's really funny is even before then when i when i kind of knew that i had won as in like not been told that i definitely knew was we were being asked questions by the three judges and one of the judges said um and i think he was trying to be controversial but he said I have a Labrador named Goose. That was, I remember the dog's name. I never forget the dog's name. But I had a Labrador called Goose. But since I've had five children, Goose has really been demoted in the family hierarchy and we don't really pay that much attention to him. And the whole room basically booed. Everyone was like, I'll take Goose. And like there was such like physical outrage that this guy had like kind of. said the yeah we've got the we've got the people yeah yeah and so look we had a really great q a section with the investors and we really brought them along on the journey at the moment that we were actually awarded the win i was pretty surprised like we were up against some incredibly punchy uh companies and because we're in the biotech and medtech space you're always up against human medicine and i think sometimes you know because people care more about solving human problems you know sometimes you just you know that even if you did the best job on the day you might not win because someone's solving cancer um and so when we actually got handed the win i was actually i was very surprised i was um you know pleasantly chuffed other than winning was just looking back on the whole experience was there anything else that was particularly surprising or or like you mentioned the q a was there a particularly surprising or like challenging question that stumped you for a second I don't think, look, I think all questions always stump me just because it's so important to think about like what other people are thinking, right? You can't, you can know your business in and out. And they stump me not because I don't know the answer. They stump me because I'm always like, interesting. Like, I don't know if I would have asked. Sure. I don't think there was anything that particularly tripped us up. I quite love people probing. I mean, I've always said, not even pitch competitions, but. just pitching the business when people say no i don't really care i love when people say no and give me like five or five to ten really good things that went through their brain as to why they said no and because when you pitch your business regardless of the outcome you learn business through just the serious action of pitching um and so i think even in the leader as jackson said at the time it was really stressful that we were developing this pitch while we were also kind of transitioning the company strategy, but I think it was actually a huge benefit because it really forced us to think really quickly. It was a really good forcing function for us to like synthesize the core of what the problem was that we're trying to solve. And because we're going through this kind of transition of not just being a stem cell bank and a cell therapies business in the veterinary space, which is already quite large and complex and logistically challenging. it really forced us to be like no this is the problem that we're trying to solve and these are all the different avenues on how to solve it and clearly articulate that so it's kind of a blessing in disguise that we were kind of doing this event at the time that we were doing it because it really drove us to be like no we have to be so clear in what we're trying to communicate because we only have three minutes yeah right and it forces you to cut out all of the fluff and get to this kind of core of the problem that we're trying to solve which was yeah making making pets lives better and giving them more videos so uh were the were both of you on stage pitching together or was it it was you paloma right paloma is the mouthpiece she does the shows the brand and talking yeah i was squirreled in the back during the build oh okay no so that was going to be my question that was what was your experience but it but maybe you weren't even watching you were still trying to get the app in good shape or oh he was building from the audience no i was i was definitely still there uh watching watching her pitch uh i didn't leave it that last minute that would be sure sure i've been cutting it too fine to be in the last three minutes um but no i was i was sitting there in the stage it was just the the night before and the weeks leading up i was very much kind of plugged into the laptop working with the agency doing a lot of the back end um functions and coding myself um and so that was kind of my role in that plus just being a sounding board yeah yeah i have a um i have a handful of uh questions that i think will hopefully be um a bit quicker but to kind of like just tie this all up in a bow um just to reiterate like the premise of this show there is a new playbook for entrepreneurship out there people can like one person can ship a business and have a million users with that idea in mind for for any founders who are listening who want to do what you are doing what would be your playbook for pitching at a major competition my favorite just starts with like deep care for what you want to achieve so we knew we wanted to get on the main stage. That was sort of our goal. I wanted to do that because I wanted to prove that our business could stand up. And so once you know what your goal is, you kind of work backwards from there. So I chunk it out into weeks and then I give myself, you have to actually give yourself enough time to develop the pitch. There's no point in being like I'm going to practice every single day because you don't know what you're practicing yet. And so from there really. going back to basics like first principles writing down exactly what the story is stress testing it with your co-founder then with your team and then with a bunch of other people i iterated on that pitch probably i spent more time iterating than i did practicing so i probably iterated on the pitch for three and a half weeks and then that final two weeks i practiced every single day I practiced, I recorded myself saying it, I would record myself saying it over and over again, then I would listen to it if I wasn't speaking it, and then I would practice it in a room, then I would get people together to practice it, get people that had never heard it before to listen to it, randomly just call friends and start pitching to them over the phone. It was like doing that. getting in reps like as boring as it sounds you have to get that repetition doing it in front of different people also teaches you your natural rhythm and cadence and like where to pause where effect where to laugh etc and so that was kind of the the step one of the playbook is like know your like just so deeply and i think step two of the playbook is once you know it allow yourself the freedom to play around because you're not going to stand if you stand up there and sound like a robot then you've lost the audience. So it's like knowing it allows you to pivot and change and react to the energy in the room and kind of like almost play with a little bit. So you want to give yourself another week of basically practicing not exactly verbatim. It's kind of like any performance, right? It's like there's one thing to know the notes and the other thing to actually perform something and provide that level of color. But if you're up there sight reading, it's it's really difficult so you kind of have to know it inside and out in order for you to actually bring that color and kind of bounce off the room yeah and the other thing was like letting people ask questions right like that's another part of a playbook because once you're up there and you finish this pitch and so much energy has been expended into this like three minutes you can't really let your guard down because then you're going to get a whole bunch of questions from investors on stage i think another thing that you did really well is in that lead up kind of responding to that feedback and being humble and open to critique and feedback throughout that stage, right? Like you're doing this thing and you're putting yourself out there quite a lot, right? And it's quite a confronting thing to do, particularly when you're kind of working on this pitch in the lead up to some event. You're opening yourself up to this kind of critique and feedback and you do need to be open to changing things. And I think that was something that we did really well was once we started all of these things, you're like, this wasn't working, this did, I'm going to take this piece of feedback, not listen to this piece of feedback for other reasons, right? It's like, how can you forge your own path through all of this, through all the noise and take the big bits and kind of leave with that. You mean throughout the entire process of getting the pitch ready and everything? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think I was like changing key parts of it probably the week before. um but you can do that once you're so rehearsed you can kind of feel actually that's not working because and i mean even then even if you fall back by accident onto the thing that you know was before it's like yeah it's not that bad um this show of ours is still an experiment we're still figuring out exactly the format that we want to do you are actually our first interview um this is a phenomenal first interview um i am interested in trying out I don't know if we'll do it every episode, but I'm interested in trying out a rapid fire segment where I just have a I have a list of just a few questions. And if if you could both give me doesn't have to be one word answers, but like just like short, you know, off the cuff, whatever, whatever you think about. And we can just we can try that. And then I think we can wrap up. Cool. OK, first question. What did you want to be when you grew up? Oh, you know, I wanted to be in the MLB. honestly i i was i was a pitcher throughout my youth um i was pretty good at it uh wanted to play for australia um but yeah so that's what i wanted to be when i grew up i never knew what i wanted to be when i grew up i was not a kid that had like a definite idea of who i wanted to be i wanted to be when i was eight i famously wrote an essay about wanting to be a dog which is actually quite funny now in hindsight that's yeah wow that's perfect and i think i wanted to be an actor i wanted to i just i didn't know what i wanted to be i wanted to be everything i changed my mind every 20 seconds it's actually very on brand do you think that in some ways being a founder kind of satisfies that that box of wanting to be at multiple things yeah it's funny you asked about my background when i first would start like being a founder i used to get very sheepish about the fact that like i ran restaurants and then i went to advertising and all these different accumulative events but i actually the skills from all of those have been the reason that i'm quite good at what i'm doing i can contact them really easily i can talk to people i can also do pnl like there's just so many vast experiences that work well together yeah performing on stage there's some acting theory going on in there yeah um top three things that you need with you when you sit down to work or for time we can just say top top one thing that you want near you when you're working me is music and coffee honestly i've got my headphones on doing deep work and and i've always got a hot drink primarily coffee next to me yeah mine's a giant bottle of water and a coffee and headphone nice um based on your experience with it do you consider bubble a creative tool or a technical tool you probably are better to answer this sorry For me personally, I see it more as a technical tool. Maybe that's just because I wasn't as on the tools as on the creative side. I see being able to flex into that creativity, particularly now with a lot of the other plugins that you can put into it. But I see it as very much a technical tool, being able to execute efficiently on a vision that we have. These next two are slightly more like hot take questions. Oh, good. We love a hot take. what is something that you think other entrepreneurs are not paying enough attention to what is something other entrepreneurs are not paying enough attention to i think their customers i know that that's a real interesting um i think that there's a lot of groundswell at the moment about actually their customers or their problem. I think both of those things kind of go hand in hand, right? I think there's, it's really funny because startups and founding have become really sexy and actually being a founder is like the least sexy thing in the world. Like you're paid terribly. You have no time. Like it's incredibly stressful. It's like, it's like honestly, probably on paper, the worst job in the world. And I think there's this real obsession with like being a founder and there's nothing wrong with that. Like I think, I get it. I think building something is amazing. And like, I've never been happier than in this. shocking job um but I think you have to really it's not about building something because you want to build something you kind of have to like really care about who you're doing it for and why you're doing it and I think like with AI tooling and there's it's true there's never been an easier time to start a company that doesn't mean you should like it's you know that's probably my hot take Oh, I mean, that links a little bit back to what you were saying about, you know, wanting to see more founders who have that obsession, that passion. Yeah. A lot of people are that passion. Real passion comes from wanting to solve a problem, not from wanting to achieve an image. And it sounds like that's. Yeah, I definitely hear that. Yeah, I was talking to a few people that are like, oh, yeah, I really want to be a founder. I'm just trying to find the right problem. Yeah. And I was like, oh, no, that's going to let's. might be a little backwards yeah that's that's gonna be that's gonna be real tough because and i think on the same time like we've like anyone that's building something that they deeply care about you're gonna have copycats that come along right and sometimes like they'll say it really hurts you but then you just have to remember like the authenticity of doing something that is original because you care about it is something that you cannot replace and so copy away that like just heads down and focus on what you're doing and not the noise around it next question as ai helps us do and accomplish more things what is one skill that you think people still need to be good at um judgment and synthesization so like i love ai i'm very early i i've asked chat the other day to do a chat he wrapped of everything they've learned about me and like it was cutting oh yeah i can yeah it said some stuff that my therapist has said to me like it's it's crazy how well it knows me um But I think where we're going to fall over in the future is, it's actually a skill I learned in advertising, which is funny, is like my job in advertising was to assess creative work before it went to a client, right? So like I had to be like, is this on message? Is this on brand? Does that make sense? Is this doing what it says? We've done, you know, 2,000 customer interviews. Are we actually satisfying this like deep pain problem that the customer has identified that they want us to blah, blah, blah. And I think like interrogating work is so important. Like there's nothing wrong with getting Chachi Petita to write you a LinkedIn post. But if you don't understand your own tone or like what you're trying to achieve or like the emotion you're trying to pull out of someone and you just take that verbatim, like, yeah, of course, it's going to look terrible and boring and like a robot rotor. But like, it's like, how do you feedback sense and like really understanding what you're trying to achieve? Yeah, similar vein for me. I don't I don't know how long this is going to be the case because. you know the technology is improving so quickly and it might just be a symptom of the time that we're in but rapid comprehension and clearly articulating a vision and a feedback on an output is i think now even more important than it ever was right because yeah it's one it's one thing to be able to get all of these outputs but if it's not controlling it in a way that you think is getting the most value out of it it's kind of useless in a way Like you'll get to something that might be 80% of what you want to get, but to actually get to where you want it to be requires this iterative feedback loop. And I don't think this is, I think this has always been the case in technology where the hardest thing to actually do is write a requirements document exactly what you want, right? Like that's always been really hard, right? That's the hardest part about software development for decades has been like, how do you actually extract? the thing that you actually want to build right and there's still the problem we're going to have it's just that one person can do that and it's more a conversation between the person and the ai agent but you still need that back and forth being able to be like this is working this isn't um and be able to clearly articulate that last question what is the most memorable feedback you've ever received in your career um i mean i say this one all the time so i think i have it off the dime But one of my favorite bosses of all time, his name is Craig Davis. He was the founder of Sendal, which was like a big parcel shipping company here in Australia that done incredibly well. And he was my boss. And I was, you know, rabbiting on a million miles an hour, as I often do. And he kind of gave me the feedback that sometimes I have an unhealthy bias towards action. And at the time, I didn't know what he meant. So I was like, huh? He was like, you move too quickly. You need to slow down and think about what you're doing sometimes. And it sticks with me because I do have a very unhealthy bias towards action and I'm bad at slowing down. And it's really interesting that something that a lot of people perceive as being inherently good is not inherently good. Sometimes every positive trait that we have has a shadow side or a negative. i think any feedback that sticks with you is usually because it's true and so i think for me that was like it's a reminder when i am moving too quickly to always step back and assess is this my deadline is this the world's deadline is this the customer's deadline like who am i satisfying by running so quickly and if i slowed down even for half an hour would the impact of that be better or worse and if it's worse that's fine keep running but like learning when to pause yeah um on my side I don't remember who said it, but I think it's like knowing when something is good enough. Something that I really struggle with because when I get stuck into it, like, oh my God, like I really enjoy going deep on those types of problems. But now more than ever, now that I'm a founder, it's like you kind of have to be able to know that, hey, this is good enough and I have to move on to the next thing. Even though I get a lot of energy from going deep and building on those types of things, it's often not the most important thing. um you know sometimes i have to talk to accountants and talk to lawyers i'm like ah i don't want to i don't want to do that i want to work on this media technical problem yeah um and so that's you know ruthless prioritization yeah i i think paloma you said something earlier it was uh if you um aren't wrong on your first try you're not hard trying hard enough or something like that i i also really like the quote if you're not embarrassed by what you put out you put it out too late exactly yeah totally totally agree with that whole mentality but it's it is a it is like a journey to like be better at that because it feels so counterintuitive so so frequently and that's why i say if you're not wrong on your first time you're not trying hard enough right because to know that you were wrong means you tried harder again that's yeah right it's like constant process That concludes our rapid fire. I am going to sneak one additional question in here because my colleagues have, who are all really excited about this conversation, were desperate to know if there are any plans or inklings of plans to expand to cats or other pets. Yes, definitely. Cats 2026 is the plan. So on the back end, the biggest thing for us is like, aggregating this giant breed and um biological differences like the engine behind the actual platform is i mean it's all jackson and it's crazy um because everything has to be clinically better and scientifically better everything has to be rooted in literature evidence and then biological difference like it's a whole thing and so cats complicate that even further because cats don't have very good breed definitions so like most cats are not a breed right like most cats are a bitzer most cats are i i don't believe in buying cats i think that they are given to you by the cat distribution system which is just find them sure that's fine to you yeah um well yeah we are planning to do it next year but we really want to we want to make the really um tangible dog platform because dogs are just easier to control a lot of people buy dog breeds breeds are obviously so you know you can do embark testing you can do there's just like there's so much easier variation um but yes cats and then look i think one day all all pets ideally we had an incredible exotics vet that we worked with who used to collect hamsters so she had like seven thousand dollar hamsters i didn't even know that um and she wow no i didn't know that either she was always like when are you gonna do small animals and i was like yeah we'll get there so you know one day hopefully every animal Yeah, that's the dream. Well, this has been phenomenal. I really, really appreciate your time. This has been so fascinating to hear about and just really inspiring. So thank you so much for your time and for sharing all of this information. To kind of like end, is there anything that you want to plug? Any links or social profiles or anything that you want our listeners to know about? Yeah, look, we'd love people to sign up as beta users. We're testing out all our new features and the more variation of dog owners on there, the better globally. Globally is helpful because it gives us a better indication of where to build next. We might not be able to give all of our services globally, but we can certainly give our digital services globally. It might take a little bit longer for us to do advanced diagnostics globally, but we'll figure it out. And if we've got enough market pool, we'll definitely figure it out. um and then i always want people to follow us on socials because it really is where we kind of release early things instagram is probably our best one tick tock's a bit more unhinged if you want to go there but both of them are at alita.pet and but yeah it's just a really fun place to build community and get a lot of feedback um well thanks again so much really appreciated talking to both of you yeah thank you so much If you want to learn more about Alita, visit alita.pet to find their homepage, and you can also follow them on Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Paloma told me that she's pretty open about how they're building Alita and their founder journey over on LinkedIn specifically, so links will be in the show notes. Huge, huge thanks to Paloma and Jackson. I had a great time speaking with them, and of course, huge thanks to their third co-founder, Edgar Allan Paws. Now, before we end, I've got some quick housekeeping announcements to go through. First, if you have been looking for an excuse to start learning how to build on bubble, or if you are looking to level up your bubble skills, and maybe set your sights on becoming an official Bubble-certified developer, the Bubble team has recently made a huge refresh to our Academy page. Now you can log in, enroll in courses, track your progress to your account, and even keep a learning streak alive. The new update looks fantastic. The team really outdid themselves. And I also just want to give a shout-out. In case you don't know, Bubble's homepage, including our Academy, were all built on Bubble. by our incredibly talented dev team. So if you are curious to see what it looks like when the Bubble team builds and ships new features on Bubble, check out the Bubble Academy. Second announcement, if you want to stay up to date on all things Bubble, including product updates, builder stories, and new updates on this podcast, you can sign up for our newsletter at bubble.io slash newsletter. Last, you may have seen that Bubble's co-founder, Emmanuel, and one of the hosts of this podcast, has been hosting an AMA livestream every month. He just did an AMA for January. On the 15th, you can replay the full stream on our YouTube channel. Don't forget to subscribe so you can be first to know when the next one in February begins. Okay, that just about wraps it up for today's episode of The New Build. Don't forget to follow us wherever you're getting your podcasts from. If you liked what you heard, please consider leaving us a review. Those reviews will really help others to find the show. And real quick, before we go, if you are still new to building web or native mobile apps with Bubble, we're going to try out a quick segment at the end of each episode here that we'll just call Bubble Tip of the Week. Today's tip comes from Zoe, an engineering manager at Bubble, and I believe one of our longest tenured employees, actually. Zoe has two keyboard shortcuts for us today. The first one, instead of clicking on the preview button to view your app's preview, you can hit Command-P when in the editor. That's a classic. The second one, I don't think I actually knew this one, Command-slash to insert a dynamic expression into a text field. that allows both static and dynamic text. Just to add to that, my favorite keyboard shortcut is if you are in any number field in bubble, opacity, margins, width, or height, you can use the up and down arrow keys to raise or lower the number by one. Pretty nice fine tuning. If anyone listening has a tip they'd like to submit, please feel free to do so either by commenting under this video on YouTube or leaving your top builder's tip, trick, or shortcut in a review of this podcast. We will read them every episode. So thank you for today's tip, Zoe. And thank you everyone else for listening. We will see you in the next episode. Sorry, you can't hear our dog scratching at the door, can you? Because that might happen. Okay, good to know. If it does, we can just pause for a second. I'll just let him in if he gets really annoying. He should be fine. He's trying to talk to someone else. What kind of dog do you have? He's a miniature golden retriever. His name is Edgar Allen. Pause. Perfect. My co-worker is usually with me in my office. His name is Buddy. What's Buddy? He's a bunch of different things. We like to say he's an anxiety mix. I think we did a DNA test on him and he's part poodle, part Dotson, part... Yeah, right. Oh man, Brussels Griffin. I'll see that dot. I can send a picture later. Please do. We call that a pizza in Australia. A what? A pizza? Like a bit of everything? Yeah. Perfect.

Six weeks before SXSW Sydney, Paloma Newton and Jackson Gritching made a decision that would define their startup: pivot their entire business strategy, build an MVP from scratch, and compete on one of the world's biggest stages.

In this episode, Abhinav talks with the co-founders of Elita Blueprint about how they won their category at SXSW Sydney while simultaneously building their pet health platform on Bubble. Paloma shares her pitch strategy‌ — ‌from synthesizing a complex biotech story into 3 minutes to getting booed from the audience (in a good way). Jackson reveals what it's like building the product the night before launch. Together, they break down the new playbook for pitching under pressure.

*Topics covered*:

* Why SXSW became their forcing function for the pivot
* Choosing Bubble with zero dev experience and a 6-week deadline
* The pitch strategy: Telling a human story in 3 minutes
* What actually happens when you win (and the judge who got booed)
* Their playbook for pitch competitions

Find this episode’s full show notes here:

* https://bubble.io/blog/the-new-build-01-elita

*Links*:

* Elita Blueprint:
* http://elita.pet


* Sign up to be a Elita Blueprint Beta user here
* https://install.page/elita


* Follow Elita on Instagram:
* https://www.instagram.com/elita.pet/


* Follow Elita on Tiktok:
* https://www.tiktok.com/@elita.pet


* Follow Elita on Linkedin:
* https://www.linkedin.com/company/elitapet/


* Start building on Bubble:
* http://bubble.io


* * * * *

*Chapters*

[00:00] Introduction to the episode and the Elita founders

[01:59] The origin story: how a pandemic puppy named Edgar sparked a pet health startup

[05:59] How stem cell banking for pets actually works

[09:14] Why everything pointed toward building a digital platform — despite no software experience

[14:09] The SXSW Sydney deadline and getting investor buy-in on the pivot

[19:17] “Being the robot” — why Paloma manually handled the first 50 concierge requests

[23:29] The Cindy Gallup moment: telling a hero “I’m about to quit my job and start a company”

[30:51] The hardest part of crafting a three-minute pitch for a complex business

[36:07] Pitch day nerves and why being anxious shows you care

[40:56] The moment they knew they had won — when the audience booed a judge

[45:52] The playbook for pitching: iteration before practice, and knowing when to play

[52:57] Hot take: entrepreneurs aren’t paying enough attention to their customers

[57:47] Most memorable career feedback: “You have an unhealthy bias toward action”

[1:03:41] Bubble updates, Academy refresh, and Bubble Tip of the Week

* * * * *

The New Build is a bi-weekly podcast from Bubble exploring how solo founders and small teams are shipping real products to millions of users with modern tools. Subscribe for their playbooks — and start building yours.