3 millionaires reveal their super niche businesses

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, we're back, we're playing Shoot Your Shot, where we take founders and business owners from the audience who get to sit in this chair right here, pitch us their business. We have founders all the way from a million bucks to $100 million businesses. So let's do it, let's bring out the next founder.

**Shaan Puri** (0:14)
How are you styling?

**Sam Parr** (0:16)
Dude, first leather jacket on the pod, what's your name?

**Rishi Talati** (0:21)
Yeah, I'm Rishi, I'm one of the founders of Hot Plate, and we powered over $100 million of sales for independent food entrepreneurs.

**Sam Parr** (0:27)
Okay, so the big number is 100 million in sales.

**Rishi Talati** (0:29)
Yeah.

**Sam Parr** (0:30)
Unpack that, what does that mean?

**Rishi Talati** (0:31)
Totally, so Hot Plate is a platform that lets anybody sell food online. We work with small pop-up bakers that sell food at other house, all the way to this guy who's an ice cream maker in Minnesota.

**Shaan Puri** (0:42)
Have you seen this?

**Sam Parr** (0:42)
It's Airbnb for food type of thing, right?

**Shaan Puri** (0:44)
Type of thing, yeah, yeah.

**Rishi Talati** (0:45)
So we're starting right now as a tool that lets a seller who has an Instagram following sell food directly to their audience. A lot of times those sellers are using spreadsheets, Venmo, DMs, a hodgepodge of tools, or they're using a platform like Squarespace. It just isn't built for pre-order.

**Ajay Mehta** (1:00)
But will they stay small? Is it for the person who wants to stay as a small business?

**Rishi Talati** (1:04)
It's a really good question. So a lot of people think that, oh, you guys just work with really tiny pop-ups that eventually go to a brick and mortar. We actually have tons of six or seven figure businesses that are doing drops and selling food directly to their audience.

**Sam Parr** (1:14)
I bought this, there's this dude who's real jacked. He's like a bodybuilder who does these cookies.

**Shaan Puri** (1:19)
You've seen this? Yeah, we talked about him like four years ago.

**Sam Parr** (1:22)
Yeah, he does these drops of cheat meal cookies. Insanely huge, way over the top. But he sells out in seconds and it's all just through his Instagram presence because he builds up a lot of trust. So first of all, Hot Plate, incredible name.

**Rishi Talati** (1:37)
Thank you.

**Ajay Mehta** (1:37)
And this was totally like a COVID thing a little bit. I remember, have you heard of Pop-Up Bagels?

**Rishi Talati** (1:42)
Yeah, well actually we powered Pop-Up Bagels.

**Sam Parr** (1:44)
Oh, really?

**Ajay Mehta** (1:44)
Listen to this, so Pop-Up Bagels was, they actually started in Westport, Connecticut, where I used to live. And there was a bunch of companies that did this where it was a husband and wife couple were like, I'm gonna make this and sell it to my apartment and we'll drop it out of the windows when people come in, whatever. And these guys.

**Sam Parr** (1:57)
Because COVID made it like, hey, just do a weird pick up on the curb.

**Jonathan Baer** (2:00)
We're sitting at home, let's just make food.

**Ajay Mehta** (2:01)
And so these guys did that with bagels and they like, you had to have an appointment and you could only get it by the dozen and now they've since raised a lot of venture capital. They do hundreds of millions and the product is amazing. I love it.

**Sam Parr** (2:13)
So you powered them at the beginning?

**Rishi Talati** (2:14)
We powered them in the beginning as they scaled to like the multi-tier point, almost billion dollar empire that they are now. And so we work with tons of pop-ups across the country that are kind of like the next pop-up bagels in a way too.

**Ajay Mehta** (2:26)
How much revenue do you do?

**Rishi Talati** (2:28)
Yes. So we do like hundreds of thousands of revenue a month. Got it. And yeah, are just growing very quickly. Honestly, most of the 100 million in sales has been the last two years.

**Ajay Mehta** (2:37)
Did you raise funding?

**Rishi Talati** (2:38)
Yeah. So we've raised a little over $4 million total, but we're actually profitable. So we've been profitable the last almost a year. I've been running the business profitably, which is honestly been amazing.

**Sam Parr** (2:48)
So wait, what does your product actually do? You make the app that the consumer uses, you make the thing that lets them have a storefront for their Instagram.

**Rishi Talati** (2:56)
So we started and what we are today is that storefront for them on Instagram. So right now, for chefs and bakers, exactly. So right now, we're the platform that a chef uses to put that link in their bio so that they can streamline their order management, right? But as you're saying, the end state and the dream for Hot Plate is that anyone can go not just to sell food independently, but also to buy it.