Mar 3, 2025 · 32m · the-pitch
#42 How Much Do You Trust Your Barista?
Cody Candee · 10m spoken Josh Muccio · 5m spoken Jillian Manus · 4m spoken Michael Hyatt · 2m spoken Nicole Verkindt · 1m spoken Charles Hudson · 1m spoken Phil Nadel · 1m spoken
0:00 / 0:00
▶ Watch on YouTube →
gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Entrepreneur Cody Candy pitches Bounce, a decentralized luggage storage startup, navigating intense investor skepticism regarding safety, unit economics, and app architecture to secure pivotal investment and strategic advisory support.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Josh holds 23.7% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Josh as informed peer 2.5 Guest teaching 3.5 Guest disagreement 2.2 Josh pushing back 4.0
speaking balance: gold is Josh, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 17:47 Refusing to leave the room after all investors pass
Instead of accepting four passes and exiting, Cody immediately pivots to pitching their enterprise retail acquisition pipeline with Kmart and UPS to keep the deal alive.
Hardest push from Josh ▶ 9:53 Michael Hyatt's disbelief at non-mobile launchMichael Hyatt strongly rejects Cody's reasoning for starting on the web, expressing astonishment that a young Bay Area founder would not build a mobile-first product.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 10:04 Explaining the strategic speed advantage of web deploymentCody reframes the lack of a mobile app by explaining that web development bypassed app store delays and proved demand with zero friction before committing engineering resources.
Josh holds their own ▶ 13:43 Phil Nadel grilling Cody on unit economics and CACPhil aggressively interrogates the math between customer acquisition cost, store onboarding expenses, and average basket sizes to expose potential unit economic flaws.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Josh as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Josh pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cody's Minimalist Inspiration and the Bounce Concept | 2 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Cody introduces the concept behind Bounce based on his minimalism experience, while the investors and host clarify the core storage mechanics and future logistical moving vision. | |
| Addressing Security Risks, Illicit Goods, and Business Model | 3 | 4 | 2 | 6 | Investors aggressively challenge Cody on liability, drug trafficking, and security risks with third-party store partners. Cody remains composed, explaining the $6 pricing split, store vetting autonomy, and insurance guarantees. | |
| Operational Growth, Partner Vetting, and the Web vs. Mobile Debate | 3 | 5 | 3 | 6 | The panel expresses disbelief that Bounce launched as a web app rather than mobile-first. Cody defends the decision as a deliberate trade-off to test and iterate rapidly with minimal development friction. | |
| Investor Deliberations, Passes, and Jillian's Conditional Offer | 4 | 5 | 4 | 6 | After Charles, Phil, Nicole, and Michael pass, Cody refuses to concede and pitches his retail expansion pipeline. His resilience and counterintuitive thinking persuade Jillian to commit $100k. | |
| Investors' Post-Pitch Debrief and Reflections on Founder Potential | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | The investors conduct a post-pitch debrief assessing Cody's quirks, product acumen, and whether his long-term delivery vision is realistic. The host remains in a passive narration role. | |
| Post-Show Update, Fundraise Momentum, and Final Takeaways | 3 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Josh interviews Cody on his fundraising momentum, revealing that Michael Hyatt and Airbnb's general counsel also joined the round, while discussing how Cody handles investor pressure to narrow his vision. |
Statements from this episode (21)
Candee: Bounce has 65 partner locations in NYC and San Francisco
“We have 65 store locations between New York City and San Francisco.”
Candee: Over half of Bounce users buy from partner stores
“Our customers, we estimate more than half of them buy from our small business partners.”
Candee: Bounce charges $6 per day, sharing half with store partners
“So basically we charge six dollars per bag per day with the current model. And we give three dollars now phasing that to two dollars per bag to the store partners.”
Candee: Bounce insures up to $2,500 per stored item
“We do offer an insurance policy, 2500 dollars per item stored and we're actually increasing this later this year.”
Candee: Bounce is growing 50% month-over-month since February launch
“We've been in product development mode, came out of that in February, and since then we've been growing 50% month over month.”
Candee: Bounce personally vets every partner store location
“So we started out going into every single store. That's the process we use right now, just to make sure we can, someone can walk in and they know that if it's a bounce location, they'll feel safe and secure.”
Candee: Bounce will be incredibly well positioned to do delivery
“Yeah, so I think we're going to be incredibly well positioned to do delivery.”
Candee: On-demand delivery failed by prioritizing immediate over scheduled timing
“What the on-demand economy got wrong was it takes so much scale for it to work. What we realized is people don't always want things ASAP, they want it at a scheduled time.”
Candee: 70% of Bounce traffic is organic; Google CAC is $12
“So on the consumer side, 70% of our traffic is organic search. We've also looked at Google AdWords. We could get customers for about 12 dollars there. The average transaction size is 15, and we share up to half of that with businesses.”
Candee: Bounce was profitable last month, storing over 1,000 items
“So in terms of the unit economics we basically were profitable last month. We're storing over a thousand items a month, and this is pre-mobile app.”
Candee: Bounce will expand to 10 cities in a year
“We have extremely low overhead, and I think that's the beauty of this model. We're able to scale this. We'll be in 10 cities in a year with very minimal costs. And so we could take this really big, really fast with not a ton of capital.”
Manus: Reverses her initial pass to invest $100,000 in Bounce
“I'm gonna reverse, because everything we've brought up, everything we've hit you with, you're, you've seen all these different issues, I'm gonna go in for a 100,000.”
Hyatt: Cody Candee has strong product instincts and counterintuitive thinking
“He's just quirky and strange enough To be onto something with his counterintuitive thinking. And his answers are very good. He's a product guy at heart.”
Hudson: Luggage delivery is an unnecessary complication for Bounce
“I just think moving the stuff around is an unnecessary complication too.”
Manus: Candee will abandon Bounce's delivery vision once storage scales
“I think that if he sees that there's a scalable business in just this first part of it, he's going to come to that place himself, but I'm also going to make that part of this conversation.”
Candee: Airbnb's General Counsel joins Bounce's funding round
“And, ah, one note there that I'm really excited about actually is Jillian put me in touch with
The general counsel of Airbnb.
he's actually joining our round, and he put me in touch with the head of insurance.”