Before Yodle sold for roughly $342 million, it was just me — Nathaniel Stevens, a broke college kid with a whiteboard and a “pay-per-call” idea I was defending in front of a skeptical investor.
I was still an undergrad at Wharton when I gave the pitch in the video below. Watching it back, the delivery is rough — but every piece of what became Yodle is already there: the problem, the model, and a willingness to take hard questions in real time. If you’re a young founder wondering whether you’re “ready,” this is my honest answer.
My original Yodle pitch, presented to a VC while I was a student. It’s featured on the Rising Talent Podcast.
The problem I couldn’t unsee
I grew up around my family’s car dealership in Connecticut. Watching local businesses try to get found online, one thing was obvious: they were great at their craft and invisible on the web. As I put it in the pitch:
We have traditional advertisers, local businesses who have really used and relied on Yellow Page and newspaper advertising… usage has really stalled in these mediums.
They didn’t have the time, the money, or the expertise to run search advertising, and the tools were too painful to manage. That gap was the whole company.
The idea: pay-per-call for local business
My answer was to automate the advertising for small businesses instead of handing them tools they’d never use. Rather than selling clicks nobody understood, we billed on pay-per-call — a business only paid when we delivered a real phone call.
In the pitch I walk the investor through a dental office in Philadelphia: we build the site, drive the traffic, track the calls, and send a monthly report. I still believe in that discipline — describe one real customer, not a market-size slide.
Taking real investor fire
The best part of the video isn’t my pitch — it’s the Q&A. The investor pushed hard on margins, customer-acquisition cost, and whether my segments were simply too small. He nailed the hardest question in the business:
If you’re essentially buying a keyword for a dollar and it’s really worth two dollars… what happens when that keyword becomes two dollars and fifty cents?
I didn’t dodge it. I answered with the data: a proprietary bidding algorithm and a learned-targeting dataset that drove our cost-per-call down the longer a client stayed. I didn’t have every number perfect that day. You don’t need perfect answers — you need to engage the hard ones honestly.
The team and the ask
I laid out the team — me, having taken the semester off; an operating advisor; and my co-founder Ben Rubenstein running our DC office — and made a clean $5 million ask to commercialize the technology and expand into new markets.
Big outcomes start with small, specific asks. That one did.
What I’d tell a younger founder
If I could talk to the kid in that video, I’d tell him he was more ready than he felt. Start before you’re ready, solve a problem you actually understand, and put yourself in rooms with people sharper than you.
That’s also why I respect what Dennis Yu and the team behind this blog do — giving young people real, paid reps instead of simulations. I got mine as a broke college student. A few years later, that pitch was a nine-figure outcome.
Where I am now
After Yodle was acquired by Web.com, I founded Punchey, a payments and business-management platform for local companies. I invest in early-stage technology through Stevens Ventures, and I still help lead the third-generation family business. You can see everything I’m building now on my site.
Your move
Watch the full pitch above, then be honest with yourself: the pitch that changes your life is usually the one you feel too unready to give.
What would you have asked me in that room? Tell me in the comments.
Nathaniel Stevens is the founder and former CEO of Yodle (acquired by Web.com) and the founder of Punchey. He invests through Stevens Ventures and helps lead Stevens Auto Group. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
Watch the full story: Dennis Yu and I go deep on all of it in the complete interview on the Rising Talent Podcast — see our full conversation.
More from BlitzMetrics: how Dennis Yu builds systems to create a million jobs.
