Ah, shopping.

The great American tradition.

From leaving Thanksgiving dinner and busting down the doors of a Best Buy for a cheap TV, to the endless stream of Amazon boxes arriving on our doorsteps, from sea to shining sea, we love a shopping spree.

But shopping has changed a lot from the mall trips of our youth.

You don't just go to Journeys for a pair of Converse anymore.

Now every shoe brand in the world is available to you online this instant.

How do you make a decision?

Google, Reddit, TikTok, Pinterest, the group chat, all those Chrome tabs and screenshots you've been saving?

Online shopping was supposed to make things easier, but now things are more fragmented than ever.

What if you could take this overwhelming shopping experience and whittle it down to something personalized for you?

That's what today's founder is doing with her new app called Locker.

But when investors aren't in your target demographic, how do you sell a solution to a problem they don't even have?

Will our investors get over their decision fatigue and make their way to checkout or abandon this startup in the cart?

I'm Josh Muccio, welcome to The Pitch, where real entrepreneurs pitch real investors for real money.

Hey everyone, I'm Beck Bamberger, managing partner of Bad Ideas Group.

Hi, I'm Al Becherra, the managing partner at Interlock Capital.

Hi, I'm Gillian Maness, managing partner of Structure Capital.

I'm Howie Dimon, managing partner of Pure Ventures.

The Pitch for Locker is coming up after this.

What happened to you?

I got fired, I guess.

No, you didn't get fired.

He's back now.

Hi.

High five on the way in.

From Josh.

I'm Christine, so nice to meet you.

Hi, how are you?

Nice to meet you, I'm Al.

Okay, hi.

You can do a different handshake for all of us.

Hi, so nice to meet you.

Hi everyone, I'm Christine Locker.

I'm the founder of Locker, and I'm excited to be here today to share more about why I left my successful career in real estate to build the future of e-commerce and social shopping.

So as you all know, the way that we shop and consume content has fundamentally shifted.

Inspiration can strike at any time.

Maybe you saw a link two weeks ago, now you can't remember who sent it to you, or you took a screenshot on your phone, and now that screenshot's lost in your camera roll.

So our consumer journeys have become incredibly fragmented, not to mention the abandoned carts and the billions in lost revenue for the brands involved.

So Locker's productizing these unmet needs for both consumers and brands.

Locker started as a Chrome extension, and we quickly expanded into a mobile app where our users can save and organize their favorites and shop online.

There's an element of curation to the platform, so users can browse the Discover feed, and they can also follow other users on the platform to get inspired by what they're shopping for.

So Locker is equal parts utility, curation, and community.

Our 40,000 users have organically saved over one million products to the platform, and so we are raising $3 million to invest in the people and the product that will continue to capture the $1 trillion online shopping market.

Thank you.

Very cool.

How do you make money?

Okay, so we monetize two different ways right now.

The first being affiliate revenue, and the second being direct brand partnerships.

So we turned on monetization three months ago, and in those last three months, we've generated 300K in GMV.

Can you talk a little bit about the technology here?

The Chrome extension, how it works on desktop, is locating keywords on pages that have add to bag or add to cart, and so it doesn't pop up on any different image or page on the internet.

Locker's technology only identifies the product detail images, which guarantees that anything that's saved on the platform is 100% shoppable product.

Doesn't Pinterest do this?

If I could have used Pinterest,

I wouldn't be here today.

Pinterest, because its core focus is inspiration, so if I go to my Pinterest home feed,

I'm getting married in two weeks, so I see getaway cars and cakes and all these different wedding inspiration, but none of it is shoppable, or it's intermittently shoppable.

And so if you go into Pinterest, let's say you saw a picture of a woman in a dress that you were like, I like that, and you click on it, it might take you to a blog post from 2010, and you can't get to that dress because not everything on Pinterest is shoppable.

There's a lot of, users can upload any picture they want to Pinterest.

Okay, so the main distinction between you and Pinterest is that everything is shoppable.

We are 100% shoppable.

100%.

100% shoppable.

If I click on something in Locker, it'll take me to the purchase page.

Brand website.

It sounds like it's a memory bank, too, and for a consumer who can't buy everything they immediately see or hear.

Couldn't Pinterest make theirs 100% shoppable?

They've tried.

Pinterest has tried to have a shop tab, but Pinterest allows brands to upload their data feeds, so it's much more brand-driven when you go to the shop tab on Pinterest.

It's Nike putting a product in front of me, or Madewell putting a product in front of me, and so it doesn't have that element of, what is my best friend shopping for?

I would think brands would be very into this, too, because imagine if you were Nordstrom's, and you could say, oh, wow, look at all the, there's 47,000 shoes in Walkers right now, so I could see a very strong B2B play.

Yeah, let's say Essence has a dress and Nordstrom sells the same dress.

How do they get in front of that?

And so with this raise, the Discover feed will become a place where brands can put paid placement in front of their target consumer.

The conversation has led down a path of, you sound like you are Pinterest for shopping.

One, I'm curious how that makes you feel, and then two, how do you get past that and go to market with it?

Yeah, so people do call us the Pinterest for online shopping.

That's the easiest way that our users relate to us as well, and I don't feel negatively about that at all.

Our go-to-market strategy at the very beginning, since I was bootstrapping, we used influencer marketing.

One of our go-to-market strategies for post-raise is to democratize influence.

So platforms like LTK, ShopMy have gatekept who gets to be an influencer and curate and earn off of their recommendations.

And so if I can curate a collection and share it with my family or my friends and somebody buys it and I make $5, that's incredible.

And so in September is our timeline for turning on democratized affiliate.

And who is this shopper?

Is it a Gen Z out of college?

Is it a older millennial professional?

Who are we talking about?

Our core group is 18 to 27.

We skew 95% female and our secondary group is 28 to 34.

How long you been at this and what's your revenue look like?

Yeah, so we started building the platform in March of 2020.

I started as a solo founder and I used independent contractors to build the initial version of the platform.

So I put 250,000 of my own money into the company to get it to our first 10,000 users.

Then I raised a million from an angel investor who was a user of the platform in June of 2022.

And then I was able to hire my first full-time employee who is an engineer.

Revenue, we turned on revenue three months ago.

In the first month of turning on revenue, we generated 9K.

In the second month it was 11 and in the last month it was 13K.

Do you have anything you can share in terms of engagement from the Chrome app?

Yeah, so we have 2000 daily active users.

We're at 11,000 monthly active users.

Of those users, the engagement we know is that they come to the platform and spend an average of 30 minutes a day, whether they're browsing the Discover feed, their own profile, or other shoppers' profiles.

The app doesn't launch until Monday the 12th, so we've got just a half a week left until we can start doing some cohort testing and analysis on the app.

Does anyone know if that ratio is a good ratio?

40,000 users, is 2000 DAU and 11,000 MAU a good ratio?

To be honest, I don't know.

Do you have any tips for that?

Well, 25% are using it once a month, which is certainly not horrible.

The trick is, that's great, do they convert, the lower part of the funnel is where the revenue is.

I don't even care so much about the conversion into an actual purchase, but if, like Pinterest, there's people who go on there every day, four times a day and never purchase anything, but that engagement is really powerful.

For a company like this, the numbers are everything.

Does Christine have enough people shopping on Locker to get a deal done in the room?

Or will she need some retail therapy after this pitch?

You'll find out after the break.

Welcome back to the Mall of America, online edition.

Christine Locker is pitching her app, Locker, as the online shopping destination.

Big, if true.

Can she and her team pull it off?

Here's Gillian.

So tell us about your team.

So you have this engineer, he's now one of the founders of Locker, and he's been using Locker for a long time.

How does he do it?

Well, first of all, Locker is a mobile app.

You have this engineer, he's now what, is he a co-founder?

He's a founding engineer, I'm a solo founder.

And then I have a director of growth.

So it's just the three of us.

Where is the director of growth from?

She lives in New York, she's moving to LA next week.

No, I meant, I'm sorry, professionally.

Oh, yeah, sorry, yeah.

She came over from a company called Nate.

So Nate was our key competitor in this space.

They started in 2018 as a way that you could pay $1 transaction fee to check out and not have to put your information in.

They raised over $50 million and closed their doors

January of this year and laid off their entire team.

So what did you learn from that?

I've learned a lot from Nate.

Nate spent a lot of money to acquire their customers.

You could create an account on the app and you got $50.

So they got a lot of users, because why wouldn't you sign up to get $50?

I was like the PayPal model in the early days.

And Uber.

So the strategy wasn't built community first.

It was let's go pay a bunch of people to download the app and the conversion wasn't taking place.

Nate also required you to check out on the app and you could only buy one product at a time.

If you want to buy a swimsuit and it's two pieces, you have to buy the top and pay shipping on the top and then you have to buy the bottom.

Come on, who would invest in a company like that?

He sold a big dream of like this technology is incredible.

Five years from now, what does this look like?

So our goal with Locker is to be the destination that when you think about shopping, it's the place you go first.

Whether you already have an idea of what you want or you don't know what you want, you come to Locker and that's your destination.

Like you said with Pinterest, if I need inspiration for something, if I'm decorating my house, that's the first place I go.

If I'm saving a recipe, that's the first place I go.

We want Locker to come to the front of their minds.

I think democratizing the platform is going to be incredible for our retention, our consumers, our acquisition.

Really encompass an entire consumer's psychology and needs and that's our goal is to be that destination for them.

So if I'm shopping, I'm going to Locker.

Do you have any commitments on the round?

Do you have a lead investor?

Have you set terms?

We just started the round, so we don't have any capital committed.

Given the state of the market, I am not setting terms.

I'm going to let the market tell us what the terms are.

Why'd you pick $3 million to raise right now versus something lower?

It was what we need plus 50% because that was kind of what was advised to us given the state of the market.

I'll give you my informal advisor opinion.

I think it's going to be difficult to raise $3 million.

I mean, not impossible.

I mean, I've seen crazier things happen, but in this market environment, based on where you are, raising three on a 10 or 15 is going to be tough.

And so part of me is just thinking sort of unsolicited advice here.

Raise a smaller round now, like $1 million, $1.5 million.

Be super scrappy.

Be super capital efficient.

At a lower valuation, $6 to $8 million.

I'm completely open to doing something like that.

I think in terms of being a founder and worry of the market, it was if you can raise three, you kind of buck up and then you can keep building and you don't have that stress of what's the market going to be in six months, like talking about raising three and actually raising three.

And also raising three four years ago is different than raising three right now.

So I'm out and I'll tell you why.

I don't have a grasp of this category in order to add any value or be able to assess it properly.

I think you're an excellent founder.

You obviously know what you're building, but what I can bring to you is not going to be of value because I'm that stupid in this space.

I appreciate that.

So I like you a lot.

I like what you're doing.

I think you have your head wrapped around this industry really, really, really well.