Investors' Weekly Update

SHORT OVERVIEW DECK

PITCH DECK

Last week we made some slight strategic brand adjustments aimed at strengthening our appeal to younger audiences. This includes ongoing updates to our visual assets featuring younger models and refined copy that feels more current, energetic, and relatable while staying true to our core mission of civil digital discourse. These tweaks help ensure that Taout resonates across generations, especially with users who are already active on emerging social platforms.

On the growth front, we remain active across multiple channels to build awareness and community, and thus, we've crossed the 150-user milestone.:

• Alignable: Continued networking with business owners, podcasters, and opinion leaders

• Reddit: Engaging in relevant debate and communication communities

• Discord: Engaging in relevant debate and communication communities

• Substack: Published three new articles to grow our communication-focused thought leadership

• Other social platforms: Ongoing posting and outreach to broaden discovery

These efforts work together to build a strong brand identity while growing a values-aligned user base that sees Taout as the natural home for thoughtful conversation and respectful debate.

Thank you for your continued confidence and support...we’re building something meaningful, and it’s only getting better from here.

Last week we focused on expanding Taout’s reach by engaging directly with communities where our future users already spend their time. We’ve been networking across Reddit, Alignable, Discord, and Substack, and we’re seeing strong early traction, especially on Alignable, which has proven to be an effective way to connect with podcasters, small business owners, and thought leaders who are naturally aligned with Taout’s mission.

Substack remains a valuable channel as well, giving us a steady pipeline of communication-focused content that helps establish our educational voice and reinforces the future of Taout University. Discord and Reddit are more nuanced platforms that will take time to gain traction, but we're confident that over time those platforms will prove valuable as well.

With the Thanksgiving holiday last week, we also want to express our appreciation for you. We’re deeply thankful for all of our investors and supporters who believe in our vision to create a home for civil digital discourse. Your trust fuels everything we’re building.

Thank you as always for your continued support as we build momentum toward the next phase.

This week we focused on expanding Taout’s presence across platforms where our future users already gather, and advancing conversations around our technical leadership.

1. Alignable & Reddit: Meeting Users Where They Already Are

We began building relationships on Alignable, a networking platform for small business owners, podcasters, consultants, and professionals all across the country. Think of it as a national business mixer, online. It’s a strong fit for Taout because many of these users create content, share opinions, engage in discussions, and want to promote their businesses, exactly the type of voices who could benefit from bringing their conversations to Taout.tv.

We also started engaging on Reddit, which has active communities centered around debate, communication, podcasting, and issue-based dialogue. Our goal here is to participate authentically, contribute value, and gradually introduce Taout to people who already enjoy structured conversation and spirited disagreement.

Both platforms offer long-term community-building opportunities and help us tap into existing audiences rather than trying to create new ones from scratch.

2. Technical Co-Founder Update

Our initial technical co-founder candidate ultimately chose a full-time job instead of returning to the startup world. Fortunately, we quickly found another strong prospect through Y Combinator’s co-founder matching platform. We’re currently exchanging NDAs and preparing to advance the conversation next week. If alignment continues, I expect to introduce him in an upcoming update.

All of these efforts, community engagement, creator outreach, and building out our technical leadership, support our long-term strategy of expanding Taout’s reach and laying the groundwork for a sustained, active user base rooted in civil digital discourse.

A short update this week, but a very promising one.

This past week, we had a great meeting with the Associate Dean for Operations and Strategy at USC's Annenberg School for Communication, James Vasquez. James loves the concept of Taout.tv, sees it's value on a broad scale, and he believes it's very much needed in today's collegiate academic environment. His challenge, and ours, is navigating the bureaucracy of such a large institution...which was not a surprise.

James said, "I have so many ideas running through my head right now, let me do some thinking on this and how I can help you push this along." We are scheduling another call for later this week, or early next to discuss this further. This is all part of developing a relationship with USC and to develop our enterprise versions of Taout.tv.

This week, we focused on strengthening the foundation of Taout’s long-term community strategy, meeting people where they already are, fostering engagement, and drawing them toward our core platform.

1. Substack: Building a Thought Leadership Pipeline

We published three new articles on our Taout Substack, continuing our focus on helping people become better communicators, more informed, empathetic, and effective in debate and dialogue. These pieces serve multiple purposes: they reinforce our brand’s voice, seed the future of Taout University, and provide a steady stream of high-quality, on-brand content for social media distribution. Substack is also home to many writers and thought leaders whose ideas align with Taout’s mission, and we’re beginning to establish a subtle presence among them, laying the groundwork to bring select creators into our ecosystem.

2. Discord: Cultivating the Taout Community

We also launched the Taout Discord channel, an early version of our Taout Pickup Rooms. It’s a space for people to connect over shared interests, and often, opposing views, before bringing their debates and discussions onto Taout.tv. Discord already hosts thousands of users active in debate-related communities, giving us a natural opportunity to connect with early adopters who value thoughtful discussion. By linking these communities directly from our native site, we’re creating seamless bridges between discovery, engagement, and participation.

3. Strengthening Our Technical Team

We are currently negotiating terms with a potential technical co-founder, whose addition would bring substantial expertise to our product development and scaling capabilities. I expect to introduce him formally in next week’s update once details are finalized.

Each of these steps is part of a broader, long-term strategy to grow the Taout brand, strengthen our reach, and build a loyal base of users who believe in what we stand for: civil digital discourse.

Running a day behind on this update, but last week was a productive week at Taout, and I wanted to share a few key developments:

• USC Marshall Collaboration: I met with a professor from USC’s Marshall School of Business, who also happens to be a former Army officer. She specializes in analyzing business platforms structured similarly to ours and offered valuable guidance on potential feature enhancements and growth strategies. She’s also making introductions to contacts she believes will be interested in Taout, including potential collaborators and additional interns.

• Go-to-Market Partners: I met with three different companies that specialize in go-to-market strategy and execution. Each has a slightly different approach to brand positioning, launch sequencing, and audience activation. I’m reviewing their proposals now and expect to make a decision in the next few days.

Thank you all, as always, for the continued support and encouragement. If you happen to know anyone, especially in your network of investors or operators, who might be interested in joining at the Angel or Friends & Family level, I’d love a warm introduction. Personal connections have been the most effective way for us to grow the right kind of investor community around Taout.

I wanted to share a quick update on a few key developments over the past week:

• LA Tech Week Follow-Up: I had several productive meetings with contacts I met during LA Tech Week. Most were with fractional go-to-market (GTM) firms that specialize in helping early-stage startups refine and execute launch strategies. I have two additional meetings early this week and expect to make a decision on which partner we’ll move forward with by the time of my next update.

• Technical Co-Founder: I believe I’ve found a highly capable technical co-founder who can help lead Taout’s product development and long-term technical roadmap. We’re finalizing terms now, and I’ll share more details once everything is formalized.

• New Intern from USC: We’ve also brought on an intern from USC’s Annenberg School — a master’s student in public relations and advertising — who will be assisting with communications, outreach, and content strategy. It’s a great fit that adds fresh energy and academic perspective to the team.

• Cold Outreach Results: Our initial cold outreach to collegiate-level speech and debate coaches has begun. Early data shows a 5% sign-up rate, which is promising at this stage as we continue refining our messaging to see what resonates best with this audience.

Current Registered Users - 133

Last week, I dove headfirst into LA Tech Week, attending 13 different events focused on founders, investors, and startup growth. Sessions like “From Seed to Scale,” “Zero to Unicorn,” and “Sales & GTM (Go-To-Market) for Founders” were particularly valuable, offering sharp insights into scaling early-stage companies and refining distribution strategies.

Beyond the content, the networking impact was huge. I made more than 60 new connections across a range of communities: founders, consultants, military veteran MBA candidates from USC and UCLA, potential interns and connections to the faculty at USC's Marshall School of Business, and industry professionals interested in helping spread the word about Taout.tv.

As a result of connections made last week, I have two meetings scheduled this week with firms that specialize in go-to-market strategy for startups, with the goal of identifying the most effective channels to accelerate user acquisition and awareness.

The momentum from LA Tech Week reinforced that what we’re building at Taout, a decentralized podcast network with built-in accountability mechanisms, resonates strongly with founders, creators, and communicators alike. The next few weeks will focus on translating those new connections into partnerships, collaborations, and early content pipelines.

This week's update is short but important. Ads are live on the site! We will be playing around with placements and refresh times (ads refresh every 30-seconds so users see more ads and our impression rates increase) as we move forward.

I had an interesting meeting with a potential "technical co-founder" who really likes our concept. He comes from a financial and healthcare tech background, so user security is his thing. We're talking more this week.

I also spent my Saturday at "FounderCon" (Founder Conference), meeting other founders and learning more best-practices on operations, launches, and fund-raising. It was a great day of learning and networking.

Current Users: 110

This week we added the following features:

• Investors' Update Page - so existing and potential investors can track our progress as our platform evolves and grows.

• Advertising - ads will be live on Monday the 7th on several areas of our site...the live podcast pages, recorded podcast pages, my feed pages, and search results pages. We will test & evolve our ad placements to maximize revenue, but minimize user experience interruptions.

Influencer Update:

We had a very productive meeting with a low-level (29K followers) influencer, Tyla Biggs. Ms. Biggs set up an account on Taout and we are speaking again next week to discuss the next steps on how we can leverage her talents and her growing audience.

We've Added Clay.com to our Marketing Tech Stack

Clay.com is a powerful tool that helps us create and customize our cold outreach marketing efforts. It created a list of 500+ U.S. collegiate debate professors and coaches within minutes. It scraped their publicly available information to create customizable outreach emails inviting them to join Taout, use it within their curriculum, and invite their students to help us build an arena for "civil digital discourse." Those emails will begin going out next week.

Temporary Outage

On Sunday we had a temporary data synchronization issue kept videos from populating on the feed page, and allowing users to sign in. The sync issue was between Redis and Elasticsearch (data structure functions for our newly improved search feature) caused health checks to fail, making the API appear down and leading to repeated pod restarts. We have now updated our probe configurations to provide pods with enough time to sync or warm up before receiving traffic, thereby preventing premature restarts. Below is a more technical Root Cause Analysis:

What Happened

• Yesterday, the sync between Redis and Elasticsearch broke, which triggered a full re-sync.

• During the re-sync, port 3000 remained unavailable, and the /v1/health endpoint failed.

• As the health check continued to fail, the API was marked unhealthy and taken down.

• Since the /v1/health endpoint did not respond within 10–15 seconds, K3s restarted the pods repeatedly

What We’ve Changed

We are improving our Kubernetes probe configurations to ensure pods aren’t killed prematurely and only start serving traffic when they are truly ready.

Startup Probe (new):

• Checks /v1/health every 5 seconds for up to 5 minutes.

• Gives the pod time to complete any long sync or warm-up before port 3000 opens.

Readiness Probe (updated):

• Checks /v1/health every 5 seconds after startup.

• Fails after 3 attempts so traffic only goes to pods that are fully ready.

Liveness Probe (updated):

• Checks /v1/health every 10 seconds, starting 30 seconds after startup.

• Fails after 3 attempts so stuck or unresponsive pods are restarted automatically.

Expected Outcome

• No premature restarts during long sync operations.

• Traffic routed only to healthy, ready pods.

• Faster recovery from real crashes with fewer false positives.

We've successfully added ads to our platform's staging environment. Ads will appear in the following pages:

• Live podcast viewing pages

• Recorded podcast viewing pages

• My Feed pages

• Search results "view all" pages

Current Users: 100

This week week we developed plans to:

1. create a unique page for our investors, and how we can keep them informed of our progress.

2. adding advertising to our web version of our platform. We are using the service "Adsterra" initially, because they don't have any site traffic or content volume requirements. As we evolve, we will incorporate Google AdSense, as their CPM payments are more favorable.

3. automate our hubspot email list, so when users sign-up, their emails are automatically added to the Taout Users email roster.

This week we deployed some new features to the live production site as well as fixed a couple bugs:

Features:

1. incorporated a more intuitive search. Rather than just using keyword matching, we've incorporated "elastic search" which will return related topics, even if they're not a keyword match (i.e., a search for football will return all the topics/interests with that word in it, but it will also return topics/interests like Super Bowl, NFL, etc.).

2. We added mobile responsiveness to our website, which means users can now watch live and recorded podcasts on mobile devices without requiring them to download the app. The page will prompt users to download the app if they haven't done so yet, and it will prompt users to opent the app if they have it on their device.

• We also just welcomed two new "Friends and Family" round investors to the Taout Investor Family! Welcome T.G. & R.W.!!

This week we cleaned up a few features on our Admin Panel Site, cleaning out old test users so we know how many actual beta-testers we have on the platform.

This week, based on feedback from our test users, we made the "podcast thumbnail creater" tooltip linger until the podcasters click off it. This way we remind the podcasters to create a custom thumbnail for the podcast feed and recording pages.

This week we compiled feedback for tweaks to our platform. We created plans to make the following changes:

1. Improve the podcaster thumbnail trigger so it's more obvious and inuitive to the podcasters.

2. We need to make the web site mobile responsive so users are not forced to download the mobile apps to view and interact with podcasts.

3. We discussed the topics and interests search funtions on our site. The basic keyword search was too restrictive (i.e., a search for "football" would only return results with that exact word in it...not delivering related words like "Super Bowl" or "NFL"). We decided to use the technique of "elastic search" rather than an AI-powered "semantic search" because the elastic search accomplishes the task for less money. We will eventually get to semantic search when we're able to carry the additional AI token fees.

This week we got more great feedback from our beta testers and in-house testers. We made the following updates and bug fixes:

1. We fixed a bug in our user profile page cover image. The system wasn't letting users upload certain image dimensions, despite the fact that they fit within our published image sizes.

2. reduced the notification icon on the web site.

3. We began work on better search functions, including research on AI based "semantic search."

4. We tweaked a few design features on our users' My Feed filtering.

5. We discussed creating a way for me to create custom landing pages

Our updated iOS app was approved with the younger age restrictions.

Our beta test is generating great feedback.

1. One user has identified an issue with uploading custom profile cover images, despite the image dimensions are within the prescribed and posted size guidance.

2. We identified and fixed an issue where podcasts would populate in the podcasters' profile page (not in the feed) even if the podcast was cancelled by the other podcaster. This was also resolved in this week.

This week we worked on several issues:

1. Early in the week Apple approved our app for the Apple Store! ....but the age restrictions are not correct, so we investigated the issue and resubmitted the app. Apple is dragging their feet on our revised app approval, so we have set up a call to discuss it with an Apple Developer Support representative.

2. Google AdSense rejected our request due to not having enough quality content. We also were working on our AdMob (Google's mobile ad service, like AdSense) implementation plan. We are researching alternatives to Google while we beta test and through early launch phases.

3. Our team is clearing out old test podcasts in preparation for our beta testing phase and bringing on real users.

4. We've been dealing with some weird My Feed thumbnail distortions. We developed a plan to resolve this, and it is now resolved and the thumbnails look great.

This week:

1. We submitted our app to the Google Play Store and we were approved, after one simple revision request!

2. We made some Admin Panel updates regarding the ability for users to report other users who are misbehaving or violating our terms of service.

3. We improved the efficiency of adding bulk lists of topics and interests to our backend database.

4. We set-up everything to apply for Google AdSense and Google AdMob (mobile ad feed).

5. We submitted our app to Apple and it was rejected due to some odd age restrictions that don't seem to make sense. We will investigate this further.

This week we accomplished the following:

1. In preparation for submitting our apps to Apple and Google we refined and tweaked our Privacy Policiy, Terms of Service, and Cookie Policy. These are the most common reasons apps get rejected, so we spent a lot of time ensuring we get it right.

2. We began the planning process for setting up Google AdSense ads.

In preparation for submitting our apps for Apple and Google:

1. We removed our placeholder for Taout University from the page. Apparently the apps don't like to see "Under Construction" pages on your apps and pages.

2. We set-up the Apple and Google developer accounts in order to submit our apps.

3. We set up the "cookie policy acceptance/management" pop-up.