#118 Uncovered: The Business of True Crime

It’s a late night when I walk in The Pitch studio. Something seems amiss …. like someone’s … been here.

The neon pitch sign is flickering even more than usual. My acaí bowl is missing from the mini fridge. And there’s a floppy disc labeled “case file” on the desk. What is this?

I pop it in my Mac Mini and press play.

Jim: Good morning.

Elizabeth: Morning.

Jim: Hi, I'm Jim.

Erica: Nice to meet you. I'm Erica.

This is a pitch. On my show. What is this?

Jim: Hi. I'm Jim Brown, founder and CEO of Uncovered, and we're bringing together the most passionate true crime enthusiasts to help solve real world cold cases.

Cold cases??

Jillian: you could be the murderer and putting in misinformation. I would, if I was the murderer. 

Martin: MISDIRECTION

JILLIAN???

Jillian: but no I’m not a murderer

All of a sudden, everything shuts off. The neon sign. The mini fridge. My Mac Mini. And when it reboots, there’s a message on the monitor… 

Can a media company produce venture scale returns by…solving murders? 

Guess we’ll find out. I’m Josh Muccio, and this is The Pitch, where real entrepreneurs solve real cold cases for real money.

Erica: Hi, I’m Erica Wenger, and I’m general partner of Park Rangers Capital

Elizabeth: Hi I’m Elizabeth Yin, general partner at Hustle Fund

Jillian: Hi, I’m Jillian Manus, managing partner of Structure Capital

Charles: Hi I’m Charles Hudson, managing partner, Precursor Ventures

Martin: Hi I’m Martin Tobias with Incisive Ventures

The pitch for Uncovered is coming up AFTER THIS. And if you want to watch the video of this pitch, go to pitch.show/youtube. New video episodes premiere on Wednesdays at 7pm eastern. 

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The information provided on this show is not intended to be investment advice and should not be relied upon as such. The investors on today’s episode are providing their opinions based on their own assessment of the business presented. Those opinions should not be considered professional investment advice. 

Jim: Jim Brown. Pleasure.

Elizabeth: Hi Jim. Elizabeth. Nice to meet you.

Charles: Charles.

Jim: Charles. 

Jim: Hi. Jim Brown.

Jillian: Hi. I'm Jillian. [footsteps]

Jim: Hi. I'm Jim Brown, founder and CEO of Uncovered, and we're bringing together the most passionate true crime enthusiasts to help solve real world cold cases. Let me ask you a question - who's the person in your life that won't shut up about the latest true crime podcast, or Netflix documentary they've been binging? Did you know that if you're murdered in this country, there's only a 57% chance that your killer is found? And if you're an Indigenous woman, a person of color, or a member of the LGBTQ+ community, it's even worse. To date, we've built the world's largest public database - of cold case information and tools that enable the massive true crime community to turn their interest into advocacy. And it's working. I can tell you all about the 175,000 people we had on our site last month, the 26,000 email subscribers, or the 200 paying customers. But, last January, our community solved its first case, that of a North Texas man who had been missing for nine years. And later, in October, with new public information in a 62-year old cold case, we petitioned a judge in Ohio to have a body exhumed and a bullet was found. That's the power of doing business for good. and that's why I'm here today kicking off a 1.5 million dollar seed round. Here's what I'd like to ask you to do now. go to Uncovered.com/cases. This is the most used feature on our site. It's a map of all of the cold cases that we have in our database. 49,000 cases. 

Erica: Uncovered.com/cases?

Jim: Slash cases. Yep. 

Erica: Okay

Jim: what we see everyone do, the user behavior is they immediately start zooming in on that map to their hometown or where they live, that kind of stuff. You can see the cases that are in your neighborhood. 

Jillian: So this is like crowd solving for cold cases?

Jim: That's exactly what it is. So you know, this is not meant to be a political statement at all, but law enforcement doesn't have the resources they need to solve present day crime, let alone cold cases. And so the cases that we work on are a minimum of three years old, so that we don't get involved in an active investigation or interfere in it. 

Elizabeth: How does the community end up being able to help? 

Jim: So the first thing is like let's think about discovery of the case. What happens is you listen to one of these podcasts or you watch a documentary, and as soon as you've consumed that content, you then go to Google and you search for the victim's name because you want to learn more. So Uncovered is - like, the individual cases are coming up in the top rankings of Google for that, we're driving people there. We've got a full narrative on the site, you've got a timeline of events so that you can see it, you can see a map that correlates to the events, so you can see where they took place. So we ground all of that for you. And then we list out all the sources that we have. Okay, but then let's say you want more information on that case, and you - if new information comes out, the 'follow' button was one of the first things that we created. And so now you can come to our site and follow a case. Then we launched our community contribution program. So this is where you see something about Jean Benet Ramsay, and we don't have that on our site. You can add that information to our site very easily through a toolbar. We ask for the URL and then we can put that into the case file.

Jillian: But that also might be misinformation. You could be the murderer and putting in misinformation. I would, if I was the murderer. 

Martin: Misdirection 

Jim: Are you interested in true crime? Is this a thing that -

Jillian: It's very weird and it's a longer story. But no, I'm not a murderer.

Jim: Well, I ask that question because killers do stay very close to the crime.

Jillian: Sure, they always do.

Jim: They follow it. And so we do believe that the killers will come and become members of Uncovered and we'll track their IPs and we'll give that information to law enforcement to help solve these cases. But your original question, we do verify manually every piece of information.

Jillian: You try. You try.

Jim: We try. 

Erica: Who's uploading these cold cases? Are you guys hooking up to something that the government provides? Or are these like individuals of family members and friends that want to upload?

Jillian: Yeah. How do you get the data?

Jim: It's a combination of all. So the first level of our database is all publicly available information. So we've gathered information from news sources, from podcasts, from databases, things like that, We also have podcasters, all of the content creators that are constantly putting new information into our database as well. We hear these stories on the nightly news, or on the podcast or in the documentaries, etc, but that's not all of the stories. Most of the stories aren't getting told. There's actually something known as missing white woman syndrome, where the media loves to cover attractive white women missing cases. Gabby Petito was an example of this last fall, right.

Jillian: Yes. 

Jim: So that's a thing. So first level of the database is all publicly available information. Second level of the database starts to bring in law enforcement connection and family information. It's been very interesting the reception that I've got from law enforcement. There are those that are more on the conservative side that see this as their data, their investigation. They told us to go pound sand. We don't want your help. Then there's those on the more progressive side that have said, hey, this might be the future of policing. And the way we're doing things isn't really working either, so maybe we help get out ahead of this and work with your community and teach them how to do it so that we can still prosecute a case if it comes to the court system 

Martin: You'd mentioned you had quite a bit of traffic on your website, but only a couple hundred paid users. What's your monetization strategy? How are you gonna make money on this? 

Jim: So how we're making money today, we've got three revenue streams. The first one is we have programmatic ads on our website. Our second one is paid sponsorship of our newsletter. And then we have our paid membership. So that's what we have currently. There is a law enforcement play for this, as we go into the future. There's 17,985 law enforcement agencies in America. So I'm like, hey, why don't you give us your data, we'll clean it, store it, and keep it updated, and then give you an API feed to go back. But then also give them almost like a CRM, if you will, to say, hey, public, we need your help on this case, or we have DNA in this case, or something along those lines. 

Martin: So it sounds like your current model is mostly a media company.

Jim: Today, yes.

Martin: And so with this money you're raising, what are the KPIs you hope to achieve in sort of six, twelve months.

Jim: So the first does still start with the media company. That is the business model that provides the other things for us to go, right. The KPIs that we're looking at is absolutely growth of the traffic to the website. We expect that we're gonna be able to - in the next 18 months - get to over 10 million visitors a year to the site. And then growing that paid community. And I'm still gonna leverage - the newsletter. Because I think we can get that to well over 100,000 and continue to sell that for more, but the paid community itself, I think we can get somewhere in the neighborhood of 5000 paid members in the next 12 months on that.

Jillian: Can you speak a little bit about the technology. How are you building that tech stack, in order to be able to solve these mysteries?

Jim: It's a fantastic question. And when we were first getting started with this, the idea was, like, let's just gather all the data and so we can start to find things that humans wouldn't actually be able to see in that data stack. To date, we have not built anything for that, because we haven't found the use case for it. In order for me to invest the resources to build the tool to sell to them, there's gotta be a customer on the other end of that.

Jillian: So is it wrong to say this is more of kind of an entertainment sort of amusement with some benefit to society, rather than truly building like an AI engine that consumes all this data and able to analyze and create some transparency into past crimes.

Jim: Front end, yes. Back end, no. Back end is exactly what I want to do. But we're not there yet. 

When we come back…the media mystery continues…. But first…as a media company ourselves, we must share a message from our sponsors

[break]

Welcome back to the true crime pitch. The case remains open. And the investors have some interrogating to do. Here’s Erica. 

Erica: I just have a quick question on - I don't know this - but if someone solves a cold case, is there some sort of like - I use the word 'referral' cos I'm in tech - bounty, I don't - whatever the word is? Some payout for -

Martin: Reward.

Erica: Reward. Thank you. But if there was this potential big payout, like I think a lot about like you know affiliate marketers and that stuff. If they could work really hard for this potential reward that they split with you guys, it'd maybe a revenue stream for you all, it would maybe be worth someone paying for access to the community cos they felt, oh, if I just solve one case over the next five years, I pay myself back and then some. Is that even a thing? Or did I just come up with it?

Jim: It's yes and no. No. It's absolutely a thing. Not every case has a reward, but lots of them do. However, this community is not influenced by money. It's very much altruistic. We've tried to like offer that as a concept. It's just not something that they're interested. They want the case solved. As I've dug into it further, though, the percentage of those rewards that are actually ever paid out is abysmal. It's big carrots dangling, and they're never paid out for some stipulation that happens. 

Elizabeth: May I ask you what your revenue is today and what your burn rate is?

Jim: Yeah. So we - year to date, we've made $18,000. We made $13,000 all of last year. Burn rate is currently about $20,000 a month. 

Charles: Where else does this audience hang out online for entertainment content? Like what do you think is sort of their media universe? 

Jim: Facebook and Reddit. There's a subreddit called r/UnresolvedMysteries. It has 1.4 million members to it. And at any given time, there's 100,000 people online in that community. The other's Facebook. There's a Facebook group for almost every missing person's case or murdered case But people have told us, like, they don't want to be in there, for a couple different reasons. One, you don't know who anybody is, you don't know the information they're bringing to the table. If you're on Facebook, they don't want to see pictures of their friends' kids and dogs and vacations and then a murdered person. Right. It's just not something they want to do with that. That's where this community is spending their time. Then there's Netflix, there's the podcasts, there's all of that.

Jillian: True crime is a huge category.

Jim: It's the number one category of entertainment.

Jillian: Yeah. Yeah. 

Erica: What are people paying you for that they can't get elsewhere? So whenever I hear like, number one, content bucket, I think, okay, they can consume it as a podcast, they can consume it in Netflix, they can consume it on - you know, a newsletter, whatever. What are you - like what's enough for someone to come and pay you money?

Jim: So the thing that people pay us money for is the community itself, access to being together. 

Erica: So is that 200 people? Or is that more people that are in that community?

Jim: So, all of the tools on our website, if you wanna help contribute to a case, research cases, bookmark cases, get case updates, it's all completely free. If you wanna connect to the community and bring in the guest speakers and things like that, that's what you're paying for, which is $11 a month or $97 a year. This is an interesting community, cos I can tell you all about our target audience. It is women, 25 to 45, they have their own events called like Wine and Crime. I literally had a lady say -

Jillian: This is so disturbing! I can't - but good. But bad. But good. But bad.

Jim: I had this lady tell me, she's like, yeah, me and my girlfriends literally just did a staycation, we rented a hotel room, bought a couple bottles of wine and just watched true crime documentaries all night. 

Jillian: Oh. Okay. 

Jim: It's a thing. Yeah. But those groups of women are not actually that often together. And you don't just go to work and talk about crime and like murder and death or with your spouse, right. So they seek people that are like them that doesn't make them seem weird or strange. So that's one of the reasons why they do come together on the site. 

Erica: I love it. 

Elizabeth: I think it's very impressive that you've built this site to, you know, 26,000 subscribers and you have people paying you paid memberships. My background is in ads and media companies. And one of the things that I have learned in building these two companies is that there's often so many things to do. There's selling ads, you're selling memberships, now you're talking about selling API access potentially. And it is often really hard to get growth and do all of these things with a small team. I have felt that personally. The crux actually in building a successful media business is around focusing on just one or two things. But just given all that is going on in the business, I think for me, I'm gonna sit out. I - I know that you will just need so much focus in order to get to the next level.

Jim: I totally appreciate it. 

Martin: I understand what you're building, I understand the stage that you're doing it, and I understand the way that you're doing it. You're trying to, get the community going now and you're monetizing it the way that you can. Unfortunately, I invest in B2B software companies, and I like to see traction on that B2B type of thing. So I would love to hear when you have more of that kind of traction and this round's not a fit for me. So I'm out.

Jim: Absolutely. Totally appreciate that. 

Charles: Just in thinking about some of the things that Erica brought up too, I think - it's really clear to me that there's a big audience -

Jim: Huge.

Charles: - for true crime. And Jillian's mentioned too there that might be some issues with that. I just think in every business there's an easy way and a hard way. And I think just listening to you talk about this category, I'm like, podcast seems like an easy way to grow your - pretty cheap to build, lots of ways to distribute, pretty well established advertising and monetization regimes around those. And I guess what I keep coming back to is like, I'm not sure that there's a straightforward way to monetize a more community-oriented approach here. So I'm out on this one, more just because relative to the other things that are happening in the true crime sort of community, this one just feels like a hard way to build a big business.

Jim: I appreciate that, Charles. I really do. 

Erica: I think for me, when you said they were not influenced by money, that was something that was kind of like, yeah, I think that's the thing that I'm missing. I talk a lot about community-led growth. I love community building. That's like my whole thing. And I think ultimately like that community has to be excited about money in some way, otherwise I go to non profit. I go to working with government. I go to you being an amazing brilliant content creator and having your own business as yourself, versus like a venture scale business. So for me, I'm out. I believe in community-led growth as a way to build a business. But I'm just struggling with this exact audience. 

Jillian: It's a crime that this is happening, that so many of these murders are not solved -

Jim: 5000 more every single year go unsolved.

Jillian: Yeah. It's just sad. Personally, I like investing in big tech, something that you could really build an engine to solve these p roblems. And the other thought is - it might be good to do a crowd funding for your company with this fanatic community of true crime lovers. I think that's a terrible - it's like an oxymoron.

Jim: Yeah, it's a really unfortunate - yeah. 

Jillian: Yes. Right. I'm out.

Jim: I appreciate that greatly. 

Jillian: Thank you so much.

Jim: Thank you all. Really appreciate your time.

Erica: Thank you.

[thank yous] 

Martin: I loved your idea of maybe making this into some sort of AI detective or whatever to - because if you've got all this data, an AI or something could surface connections -

Jillian: Correct.

Martin: - and potential leads that humans would find hard to by analyzing all the data.

Jillian: Absolutely. I mean, we talk about -

Martin: And people would pay for that. 

Jillian: Absolutely. I think that this is, you know, a data play. We're all talking about AI. This is a very interesting application for that.

Charles: I've met him before, yeah.

Josh: Yeah, we were talking behind on what would fix his pitch and we thought, if he said - if he never said media and if he inserted a bit more B2B SAAS and some AI -

Charles: So, everything.

Elizabeth: Well, I think - I think the issue is he has too many audiences.

Martin: He has too many audiences.

Elizabeth: Like there's the audience of people who are lurking for entertainment, there's the audience of people who actually wanna have these crimes solved because their loved one was murdered. There's the law enforcement, and are we trying to sell them a new tool? You know, like, there are too many audiences and there are too many things happening. I feel like - any one of those has a business in it, but when you try to do all the businesses, then you - you really struggle.

Martin: Don't do any of them.

Josh: This is one we're you're waiting for the pivot. Cos there could be something interesting -

Martin: And you're being asked to fund an interim business model towards the pivot.

Elizabeth: Yes. That's the - that's the issue.

Martin: Which is just too hard.

Jillian: That's it. It's an interim business.

Elizabeth: He wants to fund the media company, which doesn't have that venture return, to be able to pivot into one of these other things that doesn't yet have clear direction. 

Jillian: But that was fun, in a weird twisty way.

The case may be closed for these investors. But we still have some questions of our own for Jim. 

So we called him up a few months after the pitch. And our first question had nothing to do with his fundraise.

Josh: I really just want to know more about the exhumed body. Why did no one notice the bullet the first time there was an autopsy on the body?

Jim: Well, it was nearly 70 years ago that it happened. And so the scientific methods weren't nearly as what they are today. Um, and so the, the, the problem with this case specifically that the body was exhumed on is the police lost the case file. 

Josh: What?!

Jim: Yes, it's crazy. This is the stuff that happens. Um, detectives will take the case file home and they'll lose it. They'll put it in their garage for storage, for safekeeping, if you will. And it never makes its way back to the police office. Like this is the stuff that caused these cases to, to go cold. And so anyway, almost 70 years later, it's a brand new sheriff, obviously. And he's like, look. If you can help me get more information, I would love it. And, um, through, through some notes and previous conversations he had had with the previous detectives, there was the thought that there might still be DNA available on the body. Because again, 70 years later, advances in DNA technology have changed. We worked with a local not for profit that works with governments to be able to petition judges to do exactly this. And that's what made it happen.

Josh: Ok, interesting. We have been wondering about that for months. Well, Jim, how are you? 

Jim: Wow. That might be a little bit of a loaded question. I'm here. I'm present. I'm, I'm feeling good. 

Josh: Yeah? How's the rest of your fundraise going? Have you found any VCs to cut a check?

Jim: No. Um, and timing of our conversation right now is very ironic. Um, the largest strategic partner that we could get acquired by, I've been in talks with for an acquisition or a large investment and literally 10 minutes ago, they said, no

Josh: [sigh]

Jim: it's been tough. It's been a very stressful couple of months. 

Josh: Man, that's frustrating.

Jim: Unfortunately, just with the capital, uh, situation that we're in and, and the, in the economic conditions that the world is in right now, it's just not our time. It seems like. 

Josh: Do you think you're just too early, Jim? 

Jim: I think that we, you know, I have, I raised, I raised just shy of a million dollars two years ago, enough to last 18 months, right? I've now stretched it two years, but I did assume that capital would still be available. And it just changed. the economic conditions changed. And so I don't know that it's necessarily too early other than just the world shifted on us a little bit, and I'm not trying to make an excuse. We still need to build a real business, but I think that that's part of it. 

Josh: How are you able to keep the business going without raising additional capital? 

Jim: Cutting expenses. Um, you know, the, the majority of our, uh, burn is people, it's humans. And that's, that's what stinks is I'm having to let go of wonderful people. Um, now even those that I am unfortunately having to let go from a full time capacity. They're still staying on. They’re, they're just like, Hey, well, you know, we'll volunteer some of our time to keep this thing going because they believe in it. Right?

Josh: Yeah. 

Jim: Um, so I'm willing to continue to invest some of my money for a period of time because I want this thing to be successful and what success actually means. It's not just successful for investors. It's successful to the world, to society. We owe it to society to solve these cases. 

Josh: Yeah, I think what you're describing parallels with so many companies, and I think we feel this some too, you know, we're building a media company. I think the investors definitely saw Uncovered as a media company. And I think that's something you obviously ran into on our show. I mean, they seemed like they might be interested if you came and pitched the AI version of Uncovered. Like, that's what they wanted you to be, right? As an AI crime solving machine. 

Jim: Of course. 

Josh: But they didn't really have any interest in the media company. that will then someday, hopefully turn into a software company. Do you think that's where your pitch has fallen apart or is struggling? 

Jim: I think so. And when I first set out to build the company, I was trying to build that. What I learned while trying to build it though is that's not what the. the, the customer wants yet. 

Josh: Mm-hmm. 

Jim: I do believe that we can lead them there, but if we just start there again, given the, the money that we do have and build the things that people will pay for, it will eventually on its own fund the things that we want to build. In the event that we can't get more investment into the company. 

Josh: Have you changed your pitch at all to make it sound less like a media company?

Jim: Short answer is no. Uh, having done a startup before and raised money and failed, um, the absolute last thing that I want to do is, one, fail again. Uh, but two I don't want to make it look like it's something that it's not.

Josh: Yeah 

Jim: And to me, it's a rational decision to make to preserve capital and only invest in things that are going to make you money. And look, I I'm originally from the Midwest. That's how we think about the world. Like, how do you make money from day one? Um, but the further West you go, especially the Valley, it's like, don't worry about money today. Like what's the big opportunity later. And maybe it's just small thinking, uh, on, on my part that I'm not pitching a much bigger version of what this could be. Maybe that's my fault 

Josh: Are you continuing to try to go out and fundraise or have you hit pause? 

Jim: I've kind of hit pause, um, but we have a plan, uh, with the existing team to continue in almost like a, just beyond survival mode, right? Like cases still need to get onto the site. Cases still need to be updated. The community still needs to be nurtured. So we have a plan to just do that in perpetuity. It's just not growth. It's just like I said, just above maintenance mode. 

Josh: Right. 

Jim: So we're gonna, we're gonna give that a go.

Josh: Starting a company is so hard. It's so hard.

Jim: It's why most fail and it's why most of us that try it or are crazy.

Josh: Lisa did you want to pop in

Lisa: Yeah, just as we're talking about this. It made me think of something that Charles Hudson said to me. We were at dinner at one of the recording events and he said something along the lines of like, there's a fine line between entrepreneurship and insanity. 

Josh: We're not calling you insane, Jim. To be clear

Jim: It's what I, it's what I'm hearing. 

Lisa: I'm calling all of us insane.

I eject the floppy disc from my Mac Mini. Wow, these things really are floppy. But the message on the monitor remains. Can a media company produce venture scale returns by…solving murders?

There’s not enough evidence to say beyond a reasonable doubt.

Which means this case has gone cold.

Next week on The Pitch… a PGA tour for amateurs

Dan: I was hustling parking lots. I think I'm the only Ivy League educated Jewish parking lot hustler in South Philadelphia sports history. 

Jillian: [chuckle]

Dan: Who's ready to tee it high and let it fly?

That’s next week in The Pitch Room. And if you want to watch the show, check out our Youtube channel @ the pitch show. See you next Wednesday!

Applications are open for next season of the Pitch! We’re gonna be in Miami this time. There will be 18 startups and a ton of really great investors. So if you or someone you know is raising pre seed or seed, go apply at pitch.show/apply. And if you’ve applied before, go ahead and apply again. See you in Miami in January.

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This episode was made by me, Josh Muccio, Lisa Muccio, Kerrianne Thomas, Anna Ladd, and Enoch Kim with casting help from Peter Liu

Music in today’s show is from Joey Kantor, Greg Jong, Onders, Breakmaster Cylinder, and The Muse Maker.

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The Pitch, Inc. and their respective employees and affiliates do not provide investment advice or make investment recommendations. The information provided on this show should not be used as the basis for making investment decisions. Listeners should conduct their own research and consult with their own investment advisors before making any investment decisions.