Short answer: Sam Nadler says Offsiteio quotes a price that never changes, so every cost must be planned. His estimator replaces an elaborate spreadsheet and flags pitfalls like food and beverage minimums and AV costs before the client is quoted.
Watch this answer from Episode 38 (starts at 1:50) · Episode 38 notes and transcript
From Episode 38: We Built an AI Tool That Replaced a Week of Work, starting at 1:50.
Sam Nadler [1:49]: Cool. So just as I get the screens ready, just a little context. So one of our portfolio companies built, Pre AI is a corporate travel company. We help plan off sites and other type of corporate events for all different types of startups. We do them from anywhere from, I would say, 20 people to 200 people, if not more. And there's a lot of little moves moving pieces that go into planning a large off-site or a conference, whether it's the food and bev minimum, whether it is, AV setup, conference room fees, making sure every everyone has an individual room, etcetera. And one of the kind of value propositions of Offsiteio, the portfolio company that we're talking about, is we once we quote a price, that price never changes. So it is really important for us to have every single cost element identified and planned prior to quoting a price. Otherwise, we could find ourselves underwater where, maybe we quoted, just to make the math easy, a $100,000 for a 100 person off-site in, Austin, Texas. If that off-site ends up costing us a 110,000 or a 105,000 or a 120,000, we're upside down on that event, which would be a big problem.
Sam Nadler [3:20]: So prior to AI, and, we did a lot of this in evolving spreadsheets, and our spreadsheets became even more and more sophisticated. But, with the invention of AI, I built a little tool that allows us to do this very, very quickly. And I call this the again, I'm not that great with names, the Offsiteio estimator. So just to walk you through it, this is a demo one. This is not real data. It's not a real client. But, basically, can choose a new estimate, and you go in and filling out all the information for that potential estimate. One really cool and I'm not gonna do this. I'm gonna go back to a current estimate we already have completed just to because it shows exactly what you know, we could go into this Hilton grande estimate in Buenos Aires. And so it pulls out one is you go in and just, like, add all the necessary information you get from the potential bids. This could include meals. This could include different activities. This could include meeting space, AV, and it just really helps you in a very structured and organized way and make sure you have all your pieces lined up. But the really important thing is that it flags potential pitfalls like food and bev minimums. There's certain there's a lot of little things hotels, if you're not totally used to negotiating with them, that they can kind of sink their claws into.
Sam Nadler [4:45]: One of them is the food and bev minimum. Other is AV cost, etcetera. So we built this tool in a way that will flag, if certain costs haven't been considered. So we lock them in with the hotel prior to communicating the cost with the client. So this is you know essentially replaces a very elaborate Google spreadsheet that we've you know, used over the years to perform this exercise in a very structured and easy to digest way.
