47°
A 23-year-old Westchester native where he was high school quarterback has the answer with his new app, aptly titled "Beulr," that allows you to do just that by using a "bot" to attend that meeting for you.
The best part? You can watch Peter Solimine pitch his app for some cash on the Friday, Nov. 5 episode of "Shark Tank" on ABC at 8 p.m.
On the popular show, Solimine will be pitching Beulr, which is an app that was originally built to skip early morning classes. Hence, the name.
He became involved in computer software when he was a freshman at Mamaroneck High School and his teacher Jigar Jadav encouraged him to keep going because he had a real talent for it.
So while playing quarterback for Mamaroneck High School, he learned to code and a new world opened for him.
As for Beulr: "I came up with the idea in my dorm room because there was an 8 a.m. class I didn't want to attend," he said with a laugh.
In addition to attending meetings, Beulr also records and transcribes them — allowing users to be in multiple places at once.
After building Beulr in his Tulane dorm room, his friends started asking to borrow it. After installing it on a few computers for $50 each he realized there might be a scalable business opportunity.
A few weeks later he launched a public website - Beulr.com.
After a few social media posts, it started to go viral - two weeks later he had 11,000 users on the site from word of mouth alone.
The young entrepreneur then dropped out of Tulane and his internship at Goldman Sachs, and dove into Beulr full time.
At first, his parents weren't too happy about the venture, but he was able to convince them and it's been full steam ahead since then with a few rough times thrown in.
Fast forward another few months to March of 2021, one year after launch, and times were tough. Solimine had maxed out all his credit cards paying for server fees and was struggling to make ends meet.
An advisor to the company at the time, Ben Chappell (now head of growth at Beulr) had a colleague in San Francisco who was hiring software engineers.
Solimine took a loan from a friend to buy a car and started driving to San Francisco. He lived out of his car for a few weeks before saving enough money to rent a bed in a hostel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District.
After six months working in San Francisco, the opportunity to go on "Shark Tank" arose. Solimine, without a second thought, moved back into his car and began working on Beulr full-time again.
Beulr, who is currently in Austin, Texas, has since closed a $650k pre-seed round of financing at a $12m valuation from a number of early-stage investors (and maybe a Shark or two - but no spoilers!).
The team has grown and the product -- with a current 100,000 users -- has begun to evolve.
He has even received interest from Zoom who are currently looking at his application to fill seats at large meetings.
The funding has also allowed Beulr to give away the product for free.
Instead of charging money for Beulr, the company is laser-focused on growth. “We’ll figure it out later,” says Solimine.
About his appearance on "Shark Tank," the young hotshot said he wasn't nervous at all, and the whole experience was "surreal."
Click here to follow Daily Voice Yorktown and receive free news updates.
