Shark Tank Meets TikTok: How Elie Bouzaglou Is Rewiring Early-Stage Fundraising

GM, GM. Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they built. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome a young prodigy, not even 20 years old. His name is Elie Bouzaglou, who is the founder and CEO of FishTank. So if you didn't know, FishTank is a platform that connects innovators with capital and creative talent they need to bring breakthrough startups to life. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Elie, learn about FishTank, and how it helps you as a founder start raising capital through content today. All right, let's get into it.

Hello, hello! Welcome to the show, Elie. I am ecstatic to have you on today, man.

That was a great intro.

Thank you, thank you. Yes, I practiced it. I'm glad you liked it.

I feel like I should have brought something too now.

It's all good, man. It's all good. Yeah, really ecstatic to have you on. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy day to come chat with us. Really excited for our audience to learn about FishTank and your story and background as well, as you have quite an inspiring one. But yeah, I guess I'll let you take the mic. Would you like to give just an introduction about yourself?

Yeah, thanks for having me, first of all. Yeah, so FishTank started because I was trying to raise capital for a smaller project I built. I knew it wasn't fit for venture dollars, so I turned to crowdfunding. And then I just realized how broken isn't even the right word for it. It's so outdated and so old, and the only people involved are like people over 60. They don't understand anything about how the new generation of founders work. And that's why when you go on any of these platforms, you see that you'll never see someone who's probably under 50 that's a founder on those platforms. And like, they're building the boring things, you know, the things that people don't really care about. And if you're asking someone whose job isn't like a VC or an angel investor—you know, crowdfunding, it's not meant for people who that's their job, it's meant for regular people—so if you're asking regular people to take money and put it into a company, it better be a pretty damn exciting company, right? And if you're saying, 'We're building a cement company,' that doesn't interest me. Maybe it interests you, but it's just not interesting. And so these crowdfunding platforms are so boring. Oh, and that's just on a higher level. Go deeper down. Okay, fine, something poked your interest, you know, you like the logo or the tagline, you click on it. What's next? Read a 15 to 30-page pitch deck? Who is doing that? I know I'm not. And well, the numbers show it clearly. I mean, I'm honestly surprised at how these companies are still functional. I'm surprised that people actually invest into these companies on these platforms. But I mean, we're coming and we're going to make it a whole lot better, because it really is very, very broken.

Yeah, certainly a lot of the old guard is hesitant to switch to new ways of doing things. And I think it's natural; it can be said of almost things. Once you develop a habit, humans usually don't want to divert from that unless you kind of train yourself to do so. But I mean, as you mentioned, you're forging a new way for people to start raising funds through things that they are already doing on social media anyhow. But before we get into that, I'm very curious to kind of dig into the origin stories around how you just became a founder overall. As I understand, you started a couple companies, or at least one, while you were in high school. And yeah, just curious if you can speak on that and what drove you to do that.

Well, depending on how far we want to go back, that's how long we're going to be here for. If you want to call my first real company or my first, you know, like everyone, every kid and their lemonade stand... For me, it was in camp. I was at sleepaway camp, and we had canteen. The drinks were only available at 12:30. From 12:30 to 1:00. That's when you could buy drinks, and that was when people were eating lunch. But at 3:30, when sports was over, that's when everyone was thirsty. Canteen was over, people were forced to drink water. So what I did, I bought a bunch of cans, sold them at 3:30, and pretty wildly, I scaled to eventually buying a fridge. Now, 'Oh, you bought a fridge.' I was pretty sure 11. So for me, that was a pretty big deal. I was able to afford a small mini-fridge that I bought from another kid at the camp. And then there was visiting day, so parents brought their kids to Walmart and brought back packs of drinks and gave it to their kids. I would buy it because who wants warm drinks, but I have a fridge now! So eventually we even did a play, if you want to call it. It was horrible, got shut down by the administration. But yeah, that's the first thing I ever did. But the first real company, if you want to call it, would be WebNix. That was basically... started off as just a web agency. I liked code, it was interesting. I started building websites for whoever. Eventually, AI, AI, AI... It wasn't too known. So I was like, 'Oh wow, I could do so much more with so much less time.' So I decided to say, 'Okay, my job is now... I'm going to stop working in the business, start working on the business.' So I brought in a couple of people that I knew. They were just cold calling for me. And the way it worked, they would cold call—I'd give them a list, all that was done through scraping the web—and they were given a list, they would cold call these companies, and as soon as one was interested, they would send them a form, a Google Form. That form was sent to a workflow I set up in n8n, created a prompt with OpenAI, sent it to Lovable, got the website URL, it waited three days—because it can't sound suspicious if you get a website in three days—so it waited three days, 'Hey, we built this,' gave it back to the salesman, he showed it to the prospect. They liked it, Stripe invoice, salesman would get 20%, business would get the rest. Eventually we got to around 15 to 20 salesmen. It was great because if they didn't perform, they wouldn't get paid because it was on commission. And yeah, so eventually I was like, 'Okay, I got everything happening, I'm getting bored, right?' So I said, 'Okay, how do we optimize this? How do we get the salesmen to make even more sales?' Well, if you've ever been in sales, you know that it's basically like putting a blindfold on and trying to shoot basketball hoops, because you never know what you're doing wrong. And so I said, 'Okay, how can I fix this?' And I built an internal tool called Prospector, where they could upload their calls that they've had, and the AI scans it, says, 'Okay, this is most probably where you messed up. Here's what you should have said.' And then it says, 'Okay, now let's get on a call.' And then you could basically get on a call with the AI, and the AI will roleplay up until that moment, and then at that moment is where, 'Go. Fix what you did.' And then you get rated on that again, and you keep going over and over again. This way you see where you're shooting, and then you keep going until you score, and you could practice actually instead of just, you know... maybe he might have hung up because the guy doesn't need a website because he already has it, but he hangs up, and then you think your pitch is bad, and then you change it, even though the pitch was perfect. You don't even know if it went in unless you get the sale. So I built that, I showed it to the team, they absolutely loved it. They managed to basically convince me, 'Why don't you try to bring this to market? It shouldn't be too hard, right? It's already built.' Funny thing about that... so it turns out that running cold calling and high-ticket sales is much different than a consumer product, because one, you could cold call people and be like, 'Hey, here's a big offer.' Number two, it's very different as a consumer. So I said, 'Okay, personally I don't like watching ads. I don't know about you. But a format that was coming up at that time—and I'm sure most people know what it is now—is called UGC, user-generated content. And I said, 'Okay, this is our go-to-market strategy. We could basically build a mode called Jordan Belfort and have it like 'Sell me this pen' or something, and that's instant virality right there.' And so I said, 'Okay, we need money. This isn't a venture-backable company because, I mean, this isn't a billion-dollar company, hopefully it's a million-dollar company. So let's see what crowdfunding can do for me.' So I turned to crowdfunding. I started with Republic, they rejected it. Then I went to Wefunder and all these other ones, they basically all said the same thing: 'No, I'm sorry.' Why? That's what I asked myself. Why wouldn't they? And then I put myself in their shoes. You run one of the most boring websites in the world, and you also want to take money from people. You probably want to keep it... if that person who is very bored eventually falls on it, you want it to be like a big... not just an idea. You want it to be like, 'Oh, they're selling concrete, but they also have 100 employees, so it's viable.' Not 'Hey, I have an idea, it's cool, but it's still very early.' And so I understand why they do it. But that's putting a band-aid, that's not actually fixing the problem. That's putting a bouncer in front, not fixing the issue, and the issue is it's just too boring. And so I said, 'Okay, people don't want to go through a single pitch deck, but they'll go through 10,000 TikToks or whatever.' Why can't we just do it like that? I mean, building in public is already exploding. You see Reelit raising $12 million off a product that he outright said, 'By the way, me and my friend built this in two weeks.' What does he have? Distribution. Content. And so why don't we judge founders based off of that, which is A) more exciting, B) it actually shows more signal because a pitch deck doesn't mean anything. And then after that, then you could look at a pitch deck, you know? And it also attracts better founders, it attracts more investors, it's more exciting. And it's just a whole lot better.

Yeah, definitely. I would also say people's attention spans are much, much shorter than they were maybe 5 years ago, or 2 or 3 years ago, whatever it is. It's very short, and you basically have, I think, the first 2 or 3 seconds of whatever video you have on social to grab a person's attention. So, and as you mentioned, who has the appetite to go through a 30-page pitch deck? If you have 30 pages of a pitch deck, I think your pitch deck is too long. 10 pages max to get your message across. But yeah, I think you've landed on a very hot topic these days in building in public. And seems like that's one of the core values of your platform. Just curious, can you take us through how somebody would use FishTank and put themselves out there?

All right, so I'll give you the vision. Now, this isn't day one launch, but more the vision because it's more exciting and sounds better. So here's the idea: you come up with an idea in the shower, wherever it is. You're like, 'Okay, this is really cool.' You come to the platform, you look it up, see if anyone's working on it already. Someone is. Okay, do you have value you could provide? Great, you can apply, see if they're hiring or if the founder's looking for a co-founder to join them. Two, you don't have value to provide? Okay, you invest. Case three, no one's building it. Okay, validate the idea, start posting on it, see if people like it. If people validate the idea and like it, then create a campaign, start looking for co-founders on it, and basically go from 0 to 100 all in the same place. And that's the vision.

Amazing. And as I understand it, you basically raised your first VC check kind of going through using your own product, your own methodology. Just curious to double-click on that.

Yeah, so it's actually even more interesting than what you said, because you said it was through our own platform—it wasn't! We basically validated if the format works before even having the product built. We started posting on Instagram, and it fell into the right person's feed. By the way, it wasn't just that person. I'd say I probably got over 30 messages from people asking to invest. Most of them weren't accredited, so we couldn't accept it, because unfortunately the platform isn't live yet and we don't have a Reg CF offering live yet. A few of them were actual VCs. It didn't go anywhere, but out of that, one of them we spoke, it was a fit, and a week later the wire hit. And it's just... very like, 'Oh wow.' Because now there isn't even like... people are willing to take the video part seriously. Because that's technically, if you had to say what's the biggest risk, it's maybe people won't take a video so seriously. Now I'd say 5 years ago that was a valid concern. The only people on TikTok or Instagram were kids dancing, whatever. But now you have the President of the United States on it, because people are realizing it's a massive tool and never in history were you able to pull something out of your pocket and potentially reach millions of people like that. Normally that would cost you millions of dollars. And yeah, people are starting to realize it, and it took out one of the biggest risks, which was maybe people won't take it seriously because these other crowdfunding platforms make money and it's so broken. So yeah, that was very exciting.

Yeah, I can imagine. Was this while you were still in high school or right after?

That was right after high school. Well... no, no, no, it was before final exams, so I know I was still in high school.

Geez! So while still in high school, prepping for final exams, you just go out and raise a VC check just so you have a nice exit here. Excellent, man! Major props to you. A lot of people are pretty scared to take that step and start a company, but you at such a young age having the bravery to go and do that is really inspiring. Kudos to you, keep it up. I see only bright things ahead.

Coming back to social media here, you obviously proved that your formula worked, and that became your social proof that this is a viable product. Did you use kind of the same methodology to help scale your team out as well, to gain interest and bring people along to build with you?

You mean like for hiring?

Yeah, did you expand your team through social media as well or did you already have a group of people from your prior companies come on and help you build, or are you solo building this?

Everyone on the team besides for the lawyer was discovered through either Instagram or TikTok. Or LinkedIn as well, but yeah.

Nice! So you're certainly using social media to its fullest potential. From your perspective, as someone deeply entrenched in social media, what do you see in the current state of it, and do you think there's anything wrong with it or something yet to be launched as a feature on social media to evolve it? Because it seems kind of stagnant with a lot of copycat platforms.

All right, so this is going to get a little controversial, but this is fun. Okay, so there were rumors not too long ago that Meta was trying to basically open their own Polymarket-type of thing. Now, that's a horrible idea, BUT there's one thing they can do that would be insane. What's one thing that in the past two years has been like... okay, this is what proves that it's actually very important, and if you're not on social media, not only are you not gaining something, now you're actually at a loss. What would you think that would be? Just one special thing that happened recently that now social media is a lot more valid?

Off the top of my head, I would say the rise of AI-generated content, and people not being able to tell if it's human or AI.

That's not what I had in mind, but what I had in mind was politics. Politics is all over social media. If you would have told me 3 years ago that TikTok would be where most people get their political stances from, I would say you're ridiculous, it's for girls dancing! But now, it's everywhere. You have YouTubers basically telling you who to vote for, and people really get involved in this. You have debates that are crazy right now. Imagine if—there are two ways they could do it or both—one, me and you are having a debate, there's an AI fact-checker, and the first one to make a false claim loses the bet, whatever it would be. Number two, the audience could bet on who's going to win the debate, and it happens like a live prediction market. The AI or based off supply and demand, it changes: 'Oh, he just messed up, stock goes up/down!' That would be insane. That is how I think Meta kills Polymarket. That would be absolutely insane and the next evolution of social media. Also, I think that is a major competitive advantage for Meta against TikTok, because I'm pretty sure if they would do it quietly, there's a very long regulatory time, and by the time they launch, other social media companies follow, they're going to already have most of the market share. They could also kill Kick and all these live streaming platforms just with that. Obviously, if you're watching this, this is not legal advice, I'm not advising you to build this because I don't know if this is legal, but if it is, that would be insane.

Interesting. I'm not sure around the legality either, but we're starting to see it as well. Truth Social is trying to do a SaaS model where if you pay $100k/month you get political announcements earlier than the rest of social media to play against Polymarket and Kalshi.

That can't be real.

You'd have to verify, but I saw it a couple times on the feed.

As we're approaching time here, I wanted to pick your brain to see if there's anything you want to share alpha-wise around some of the things you guys are doing the rest of this year, if there's anything you can share?

I've got to be careful because there are some things I could get in trouble if I say... But one of the things we're launching on the side is a Chrome extension for founders who are filling out the same form on different websites all the time when applying to funds and accelerators. So we're launching a Chrome extension that basically syncs to your company profile, understands what you do, understands what the question is, and fills it all out for you, so you just review and submit it.

Awesome! How can people watching today get involved with FishTank? Is there a beta sign-up?

Yeah, fishtank.vc/beta, or just fishtank.vc, you'll see the big blue button that says 'Join the Beta'.

Beauty! Excellent. All those resources are in the description below. Elie, thank you so much again for coming on the podcast to chat with us. Wishing you nothing but the best going forward, keep on going, man.