Billionaire Cashback System: I Can't Go Broke!-Chapter 37: The Presentation II

He stood at the whiteboard and it was immediately clear he didn’t enjoy presenting but was going to be precise about it regardless.

He’d done the market research — actual research, sourced, with numbers Ryan could verify — and the case was straightforward when laid out properly.

Enterprise software was a crowded market. That was the obvious objection and Liam addressed it first, which Ryan respected.

"The crowd is at the top," Liam said. "The major players — Salessforce, Assana, Mondaay, the rest of them — they’re fighting over large enterprise contracts, Fortune 500 clients, deals that take eighteen months to close. Our market is the middle. Companies between fifty and five hundred employees who are too big to run on spreadsheets and too small to have a dedicated IT department implementing a six-figure software package." He looked at Ryan. "That market is underserved and it’s enormous. And it’s the market most likely to adopt quickly if the product actually does what it says."

"Churn rate in that market?" Ryan asked.

"High with existing solutions. Which works in our favor — they’ve been burned before, but they’re still looking. They want something that works. If ours does, they stay."

"Pricing model?"

"Subscription, per seat, with a free tier that’s functional rather than intentionally limited. We make money when they grow, which means our incentive is their growth. That’s the pitch."

Ryan stood at the front of the room and looked at all of them.

The presentation had taken an hour and twelve minutes. His coffee had gone cold somewhere in the middle of it. Outside the city was unhurried and loud.

"Questions," he said. "For each other. Things that aren’t resolved."

The room shifted into something more informal.

Danny and Iralis had a focused exchange about a specific infrastructure decision that went several layers deep technically before Iralis made a point that made Danny stop, look at the ceiling, and say "okay, yeah, that’s right" with a slightly frustrated tone, he knew he should have seen it himself.

Mike raised a concern about onboarding — how you got a company to actually integrate the platform into existing workflows without a sales team doing hand-holding.

Liam had a partial answer. Sophie had a different angle on it through the design. The three of them worked through it in real time for about eight minutes while Ryan watched.

This was the thing he’d been looking for.

Not just the presentation — the presentation was good, but presentations could be rehearsed. This was five people disagreeing productively, building on each other’s thinking, arriving somewhere none of them had been when they started. That was the thing you couldn’t manufacture.

He let it run until it reached a natural stop.

"Alright," he said.

Everyone looked at him.

Ryan looked at the whiteboard. The diagram Danny had drawn, the notes from Liam’s market breakdown, Sophie’s mockup still on the projected screen behind him.

"We’re building it," he said.

Mike put both fists on his knees. Liam nodded once. Sophie closed her laptop like she was filing something under done, moving on to what’s next. Danny looked at the diagram on the board for a moment and then uncapped his marker and wrote something underneath it.

Iralis said, "Timeline?"

"Danny said three to four months for an MVP. I want three." Ryan looked at Danny. "What do you need to make three realistic rather than just optimistic."

"The additional backend engineer. And decisions made fast — no two week approval cycles on infrastructure choices. If Iralis and I come to you with a call we need made, we need it made that day."

"Done," Ryan said. "Anything else."

"Budget for cloud infrastructure in the first month. It’s not huge but it needs to be committed upfront."

"Sophie will send you the number, you confirm it covers what you need." Ryan looked at Sophie.

"Already on it," she said, which meant she’d anticipated this conversation, which meant she’d been doing her job before he’d asked her to.

"Liam," Ryan said. "I need a competitor breakdown on my desk by Wednesday. Full analysis — what they do well, where they’re weak, how we position against each specific one."

"Wednesday," Liam said. Flat, confirmed.

"Mike." Ryan looked at him. "You’re going to handle outreach. When we’re ready for early beta users — thirty days out — I want a list of twenty target companies already built. Mid-size, the profile Liam identified. Not cold contacts. Warm ones. People who’ll actually look at what we send them."

Mike nodded with the focused expression he got when something engaged him properly. "Twenty companies, warm contacts, thirty days."

"Good." Ryan looked at all of them one more time. "One more thing."

The room was quiet.

"What we’re making is significant," he said. "And I know a thousand other startups say that when they mean hopeful. I mean it in the practical sense — the problem is real, the market is real, the solution you just presented is the most coherent answer to that problem I’ve seen and makes it a significant asset." He paused. "That means the work from here is actual work. Not just startup cosplay, or building decks for investors, not optimizing for optics. We build the product. Everything else comes from that."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Then Mike said, "Startup cosplay. That’s exactly what my last company was."

A few people laughed. The room loosened.

Danny was already writing something in his notebook.

Iralis was looking at her laptop screen, back in whatever she’d been building before the presentation ended. Ryan got the feeling she’d been waiting for the decision so she could get back to the work she already knew needed doing.

Sophie poured herself more of the coffee that had been sitting on the counter and looked at Ryan with quiet satisfaction – her contribution had landed exactly the way it was supposed to.

"So," she said. "Same time next week?"

"Same time next week," Ryan said.

---

They were gone by two.

Ryan stood in his apartment in the quiet that followed — chairs pushed slightly out of position, the whiteboard covered in notes, someone’s coffee cup left on the windowsill.

He picked up his phone.

Monday was Diana.

He looked at the whiteboard. At Danny’s diagram and the word he’d written underneath the original question mark.

*BRIDGE.*

That was what they were calling it. The product that sat between the tools and the people. The layer that translated between how software worked and how humans actually worked.

Ryan looked at it for a while.

Then he sat down and started preparing for Monday.

He was getting closer.