Show HN: Largest collection of pitch deck, videos and memos to fund my education

[mrayushsoni]

Student debt is troubling so many recent graduates that we decided to graduate debt-free from the university. We launched FundingFyre - a database of startup pitch decks, pitch videos and investment memos… all together 1,500+ items. You can filter the resources by funding round, size, etc.

Many of you might be raising Seed or Series-A funding and these resources would be immensely helpful.

We kept it a paid service to earn enough to pay our tuition fees and cover living expenses. But for the HackerNews community, we have a 50% discount, please use code “HN2022”.

We’re four students (Grade 12 to 1st year engineering), we’d love to get your feedback on the tool.

[saaaaaam]

Unless you’ve got permission to commercially exploit other people’s copyright material, this isn’t going to fund your education - it’s going to get you sued.

Copyright violation has a statutory penalty starting at $750 per violation so you’re immediately looking at $1m+ in liability.

Wilful violation - which this would likely fall under - is $150,000 per violation. Congrats! That’s nearly a quarter billion dollar liability.

If you’ve actually cleared the licensing on these then congrats! You probably don’t need the education you’re trying to fund.

[mrayushsoni]

Thanks for sharing your concerns.

We do not own the rights, however, all these decks are open sourced by the companies that own them. They have made these decks available for free to use.

If any company objects, we would be happy to remove their deck. Our intention is to make it easy for entrepreneurs to browse these decks at one stop.

[philip1209]

"Open source" does not mean that you can reuse the deck for commercial purposes. A lack of an explicit license means that you cannot assume you have any specific permission to use the content, especially for commercial purposes.

Just because they are published does not mean that you can host them, potentially modify them, and sell access. That's like the same thing as scraping Medium.com and re-selling access to all of their articles on your own site.

[mrayushsoni]

Hi Philip1209,

Thanks for your response, we are considering your response and of others who have pointed this out, we are in process of legal consultation and we will act accordingly. Thanks for your response, really appreciate it.

[valbaca]

> We do not own the rights

!!!

> they have made these decks available for free to use.

Free to use, but have they made them available for you to charge for?? Given that you're college students, I'd imagine they allow you to use under the "education and non-commercial" use.

I am Not A Lawyer...but y'all need a lawyer asap.

[mrayushsoni]

Hi Valbaca, thanks for the comment, we are operating under the assumption that freely shared resources can be shared further, and we are only charging for the platform and the features we are providing like filtering, accessibility, ui and real time availability and updates, plus we will be adding more resources and features, that's what for which we are charging a fee.

But we will carefully think and act on this by consulting our lawyer. We really appreciate your comment. Thanks.

[fleetwoodsnack]

> we are operating under the assumption that freely shared resources can be shared further

Disabuse yourself of this and contact your lawyer ASAP. There is a non-zero chance that the audience of this site shares members with employees and owners of the startups from whom you’ve repurposed these materials.

A cease-and-desist is among the milder responses you can expect, and in the event you are sued you will be compelled to provide a legal response which will mean hiring a litigator.

If you truly are students struggling to pay for your education this an extravagance that your alleged financial situation does not have the means to support.

[mrayushsoni]

Hi fleetwoodsnack,

Thanks for your advice, you are correct as that financial situation could be a huge problem for us.

We are getting in touch with our family legal advisor and based on their response we will take necessary action.

Again, thanks for your advice, appreciate it

[RyEgswuCsn]

What kind of "open source" are these --- the "GPL" kind, the "non-commercial" kind, or the "do whatever you want with it" kind?

[mrayushsoni]

Hi RyEgswuCsn,

I think these resources are not exactly open source, these are more like freely shared resources, as we are students, we didn't knew enough about legal stuff, so we have decided to consult a lawyer, and we will act on this, and make sure we do not break any rules.

Until then, we would really appreciate if you can upvote and share about us with early stage entrepreneurs who can benefit from FundingFyre.

We really appreciate your advice, thanks a lot.

[freakynit]

My suggestion: don't wait for lawyer'ing up. Take the hosted content down right now before it's too late. I know you folks must have put in a lot of effort, but it's nothing compared to what legal stuff can get you into.

For alternative revenue options, check my other comment starting with "Here are 3 alternative ideas that you can work on to make some money"

[RyEgswuCsn]

TBH I think you are mistaken if you think they are here to heed the legal warnings.

It might be just me, but it would appear they are banking on 1) no individual start-up is going to bother to sue them over a slide deck because it's expensive, and 2) those who do notice the infringements would recognise that suing a group of debt-laden students/graduates won't amount to anything (hence the emphasis on "doing this to fund education" aspect).

[saaaaaam]

Not sure what you mean by “open sourced” here.

Just because they have made them available that does not mean that you can sell them.

[freakynit]

Here are 3 alternative ideas that you can work on to make some money:

1. Provide summaries of each deck/video

2. Provide search engine that links to these decks/videos in their original locations

3. Setup a "video event" where you teach potential enterpreneurs what you yourselves have learned reading these decks/videos. Try to target college/school goers mostly since you folks yourselves do not have any real-world experience.

None of these might fetch you as much as you planned to do by selling decks/videos directly, but, are better than nothing. Not to mention, you yourselves would learn a lot.

And yes, don't be saddened. First time is generally the hardest and most error prone :)

[mrayushsoni]

Hi Freakynit,

Really appreciate all your advice and support on the post and thanks a lot for sharing your thoughtful responses. These are great alternative options and we will certainly consider these alternatives and think on them. Thanks again :)

[freakynit]

[Edit] - Since hackernews was not allowing me to delete my comment regarding website vulnerability, here's an edit. Hope this doesn't show edit history to everyone.

[mrayushsoni]

Hi Freakynit,

Thanks a lot for pointing this out, we are on it and we will fix this very soon. In the meantime, we would really appreciate it, if you can remove this comment and commands, as we accumulated these resources with a lot of efforts, and we are trying to charge little fee for the efforts and features to search, filter and sort resources on the platform.

So if you can please consider this request of ours, it would mean a lot to us.

Thanks

[freakynit]

Done. Edited, since delete button/link was not available.

[abhishek_soni]

Hi Freakynit, I am Abhishek, one of the co-founder of FundingFyre.

Thanks for pointing it out and then editing it from public view. I and our whole team is really grateful to you for all your support and advice and also, we really wish you great success in whatever you do!

Also, we are always available and happy to chat at [e-mail] or you can hit me up at [e-mail] for any support regarding fundingfyre.com or for anything.

Cheers :)

[voisin]

I am not sure why the use of the money you earn from your service is relevant. It isn’t a charity or a non-profit. I find the whole discussion revolving around why you did it extremely off putting, no different in my mind than if you said “help me buy a yacht by subscribing to my new SaaS startup”. Either the product/service is worthy of payment or it’s not.

[fleetwoodsnack]

They’re not all actually students. Based on a simple google search and the information that one of the co-founders posted here, they’ve already graduated and this is their way of “getting out” of the debt they already have, not will have to take on to pursue their education.

Pretty sure this doesn’t constitute doxxing as I got the information from a publicly available LinkedIn and from the posters themselves who use their full names as handles, but here’s some more background on at least two of the people behind this:

https://in.linkedin.com/in/abhishek-fundingfyre

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayushsoni1001/

The misrepresentation of their backgrounds, and the fact that this site is potentially illegal (based on comments in this thread) sends up some real red flags for me. Buyer beware.

HN mods, please let me know if I’ve broken any rules and I can remove the direct links.

[abhishek_soni]

Hi fleetwoodsnack,

Ayush and our other co-founders are high school and undergraduate students, except me, I am a recent grad and we have also clearly mentioned this in your about page on fundingfyre website and our LinkedIn profiles. (About page link is in header on FundingFyre.com)

I am the only one trying to get out of debt, and the rest of the co-founders are trying to make enough to pay their tuition fee.

We are not trying to hide anything, we have very clearly mentioned it on our website and our LinkedIn profiles as well.

Though, in this post Ayush made a mistake and forgot to put in my background details, and then there was no edit option once posted, so he couldn’t update it.

There is no misinformation, and we are more than willing to show documents proving our background details, if the community want us to show.

We understand the comments in the post here are concerning, and we are in talks with legal advisor, but for the most part, on basis of their first inputs, we are not breaking laws here, and we just need to be make some structural changes, and clearly share our offerings, and what we are charging for, and the decks are owned by their respective owners.

Though we are really thankful to the community for pointing these things out to us.

Also, we really appreciate you putting effort into adding our profiles, and making your point, but with due respect, I want to assure you that we have clearly shared who we are, and we are not trying to hide anything, it’s just Ayush made a small mistake and forgot to add my background, for which I apologise on behalf of our whole team.

Thanks a lot for understanding.

[saaaaaam]

Your legal advisor is incorrect I’m afraid.

You are charging for access to copyright material. You can try to dress this up as “we are providing a service and we are charging for that service and it just so happens that part of the service offering is access to copyright material” but this is quite literally the argument that music file sharing services attempted - and which bankrupted them. Look at the history of mp3.com and Napster - they tried the argument of “we are a technology platform and if people happen to infringe copyright by accessing copyright protected material then that’s not our fault”. Because they kept a database of copyright protected content and their service provided the means to locate that content they were found to have facilitated copyright infringement. It put them out of business.

You don’t even have the safe harbor defence of UGC companies - because you are apparently selling access to copyright protected material directly. You’ve located these files, downloaded them, created copies and are selling those copies from your own site.

You could argue that Spotify or Apple Music is a technology platform that happens to offer a lot of value and that this is what you’re paying for when you subscribe to a service like this.

In fact, that’s absolutely true. A big part of the value proposition of a service like Spotify is their technology. However the other - far more significant element - is the complex and commercially valuable licensing deals that Spotify has done with copyright owners to allow access to their content as part of a paid service.

If your “lawyer” is advising you that you can charge for access to material protected by copyright then they are very likely wrong.

The only way you can avoid infringing copyright in this situation is to make all the decks available before your paywall, not after it. Putting them behind your paywall and “saying that they are owned by their respective owners” does not change anything.

[fleetwoodsnack]

Agreed on virtually all points. Based on my research this is a bald misappropriation of copyrighted material that is likely to persist due to the fact that the jurisdiction that these individuals operate-from is largely outside the practical reach of United States law.

They’re able to deliver these seemingly bizarre and largely incorrect legal opinions because they’re practically immune to lawsuits originating overseas (which for most of us means the United States).

This is strikingly similar to foreign bootleggers who once ran amok with American and British intellectual property in the form of copied PC games and DVDs. They were arguably simply copying and selling “access” too. The wares are simply being hawked online rather than on the sides of streets this time around.

[abhishek_soni]

Hi Voisin, we understand your point, and our intentions when we built the tool and also now is to create value for the users, and that’s what we want to make money from, nothing else.

We shared the story, because we wanted the people to know that we are real people building a real product and who we are, so our users can connect with us at personal level, and also that as students and recent grad, we are full of energy and we will be building a great value product.

The idea of sharing our story (which resounded with us) came from talking to some early testing users, and they shared that in a product where we are providing lifetime access, it is needed that we open up our story to people and let them know who we are.

From your point, I understand it might not exactly sound that way to everyone, and we need to improve our messaging more, but our intentions are to sell the product not our story.

We hope you understand and we would love to have you on fundingfyre.

Also, thanks a lot for your response, really appreciate it.

[voisin]

> we wanted the people to know that we are real people building a real product and who we are

I would encourage you to think more deeply than platitudes like this. Every product is made by real people, and by “real product” what are you even talking about?

[fleetwoodsnack]

A note on some of the comments you’ve left elsewhere: “open source” is not an intellectual property designation recognized in United States copyright law, and will not constitute an affirmative defense in the event you are sued for intellectual property conversion.

Tread lightly and ensure that you’re prepared for the legal consequences of repurposing others’ work.

[thesausageking]

Do you own the rights to all of these decks? How does the licensing work?

[mrayushsoni]

Startups who owns the decks own the rights. However, they have opensourced all the decks and made available to use for free. Thanks

[freakynit]

That "made available to use for free" is "to consume", most probably not "to sell". You should get in touch with each of the companies for which these decks/videos belong and ask for their permission.

[freakynit]

Unable to signup.... validation failed error message keeps coming up... Im actually trying to pay you guys for this

[mrayushsoni]

Hi freakynit, we would love to have you on FundingFyre, I checked from backend, and came to know that the error happened because of a slightly weak password, so I would request you to please try with a stronger password.

Also, thanks a lot for your trust in FundingFyre and us, and we will work on this issue, and improve our error messaging.

Thanks a lot :)

[freakynit]

Worked... but do tell signing-up user what is actually going wrong.. else, you might miss out on a lot of leads, and probable purchases...

[mrayushsoni]

Yeah Freakynit, thanks for your input, we will certainly update this, and recheck all your error messaging if there's anything lacking clarity. Please try the code again.

Thanks a lot for your trust in FundingFyre and us, and we really appreciate you joining, and would try our best to give you a delighting experience. We hope FundingFyre will be helpful in your startup fundraising journey.

[freakynit]

Now the promo code(HN2022) is not working :(( https://imgur.com/lVGOwQ6

[mrayushsoni]

Please try the code again. Also, you can reach us out through our live chat, or personally reach out to me at [e-mail] We will be more than happy to help you!