Ep 15 - Strategy Session

[00:00:00] Speaker A: I don't do many Google searches these days, but I still do them. And I am, I'm shocked that it's even legal, the way they present their ads these days. [00:00:10] Speaker B: Crazy, huh? [00:00:11] Speaker A: It is you. There is nothing on the result that says pure trickery. Yeah, yeah, it's just straightforward trickery. It's just a little thing that says sponsored results at the tiny little thing at the top and then four or five what look identical to the search results and then another little line at the bottom where the, where the sponsors and end. And it is, it is just deception. Straightforward. [00:00:32] Speaker B: Super shady. Yeah. [00:00:34] Speaker A: Welcome to the off site podcast. I am your host, Jordan Gall. This is where I team up with friends to catch up on our work and just as importantly, what's going on beyond the work. As always, this podcast is brought to you by Rosie, the AI powered phone answering service for small businesses. Hello everybody. Welcome back. Another episode of the off site podcast. I have my friend Ruben Gomez with me today. [00:01:01] Speaker B: Jordan, what's up? [00:01:03] Speaker A: So this is two episodes in a row directly from the Portland Slack group. So I might need to give. Might need to give it a break. You know, stop, John. [00:01:12] Speaker B: That we start dropping on today's episode. [00:01:14] Speaker A: Yes, yes, that's right. So what I'm alluding to, Ruben and I know each other from the Internet, but also from real life when I lived in Portland. You're still there. [00:01:24] Speaker B: Yes, I am still here. One of the last few from the group. [00:01:27] Speaker A: It feels like there have been, there's been some movement. Yes, that's right. That's right. And you're, you have young kids, so they're school age. [00:01:36] Speaker B: Yeah, 12. Going to be 13 next month. Christmas too. And nine years old. [00:01:43] Speaker A: And you correct me if I'm misremembering, but you homeschool. [00:01:47] Speaker B: Yep, we do homeschool. Yes, that's going well. We like it. Yeah. [00:01:52] Speaker A: Yeah. There seems to be a lot going on. It's the first time that I think myself and others are envious of homeschooling from like an academic point of view. [00:02:05] Speaker B: Why is that? [00:02:06] Speaker A: Because I worry that my kids education is, it's not bad. I'm happy with the schools here, but I guess I get this nagging feeling maybe it's like, you know, envy of just like watching the highlights of the homeschool movement and everything that's happening there and alpha school and all that. It just seems like the kid might get a stronger academic education at an accelerated pace. There seems to just be something. [00:02:34] Speaker B: I mean, we homeschooled just because we didn't like the experience of being in public school. Right. That's what we went to when we were younger. I mean, we can afford to do private now, but back then, maybe we could have pulled it off. It would have been super tough. I. I don't know. How was school for you? [00:02:53] Speaker A: Well, I didn't know that there was any other option. And private school was like a ridiculous fantasy for my family. [00:02:59] Speaker B: When we went through school, it was like, whatever. [00:03:01] Speaker A: We used to play them in lacrosse. That's kind of all I knew. I played Chaminade in lacrosse. That was my only interaction with private school. I think it was a mess. I guess I got it in many ways. I think I got a better education in high school than I did in college in terms of, like, actual academic work and being challenged and being studious and, you know, university is almost like. Almost like too much freedom and you. [00:03:27] Speaker B: Choose to do whatever you want. [00:03:29] Speaker A: Yeah. It's more exploration than it was like this, like. Well, you know, I just think 11th grade chemistry, that class was harder than just about any class I had in college. [00:03:38] Speaker B: Okay, interesting. [00:03:39] Speaker A: Yeah. Pre calc, you know, there's like, real academics that were not easy. You were like, wrangling with these concepts. [00:03:45] Speaker B: That was just public school, standard public school. And that was harder than. Okay, interesting. [00:03:50] Speaker A: My favorite thing about public school, and it still exists here. I worry about it. In a place like Portland, here in the Chicago suburbs, the concept of, like, academic excellence is still valued very, very highly. And so, like, getting into the high school math when you're in 8th grade is seen as like, a great accomplishment. [00:04:10] Speaker B: Okay. [00:04:10] Speaker A: And getting into, like, the honors track and that sort of thing is seen as like, this very virtuous thing to goal to go after and something to be very proud of. And maybe I'm just like, you know, too buried into, like, right wing Twitter that I worry about that in other places. But you just hear the stories about, like, excellence kind of being shaved off the curriculum. [00:04:32] Speaker B: Okay, interesting. [00:04:33] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think. [00:04:35] Speaker B: Yeah. So we, yeah, we didn't think about any of that. We were just like, public school was a terrible experience, especially we grew up kind of poor. You know, I did get bused into rich schools when I was like, for a year, a year and a half or something like that. Like later on junior high or something. And then that was it. I actually never went to. Never went to high school. So I was done with school before then. Not by choice. [00:05:06] Speaker A: That was. [00:05:06] Speaker B: That was just like. Yeah, it was just a bunch of trouble and all this stuff. And then I Shortly, for like a few months, went to a school where all the, all the like, you know, pregnant girls and like people who are like, done, done, you know, like last chance sort of thing. And then that was, you know, after that, like, okay, I'm just like, out in the real world. [00:05:26] Speaker A: Okay. So when, when you have kids, you're like, I'm just gonna avoid that and. [00:05:30] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's, they're doing really good. You know, we like it. It's, yeah, it would be really hard to switch it up at this point. I think it's just working super well. [00:05:43] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure. I, I, I've heard some like, homeschool experiences where for the last like two years of high school, the kids want to get integrated into a more that more. But again, it's for the social aspect, not the academic. [00:05:56] Speaker B: Yep, yep, that's right. [00:05:58] Speaker A: All right, well, didn't mean to go off on that tangent, but I, I find it super interesting and think about it regularly because I encounter I, I both negatives and positives. I, I guess the negative sometimes is the social. I have three girls and the forcing of these kids into, they're like these forced social interactions is an insane thing that we kind of experience all the time. Like you get into a fight with a friend or someone's like talking trash about you because these are 13 year olds, you know, everything's chaotic and then you're like, cool, now get on the bus and go to class with them all day. And good luck focusing on like, you know, your history lesson that day. It's it, it feels like it's very complicated between the social and the academic. [00:06:43] Speaker B: Yeah. There are groups that the kids belong to, so they're always hanging out with a bunch of different friends for different things going, you know, usually like nature y stuff, you know, parkour that they're doing like late at night now with a group of friends and all that stuff. But the groups are much smaller than what you get, so there's some of that. But I imagine there would be way more of that. Like, you know, if they're going to a public school or something. [00:07:08] Speaker A: Yeah, but we, my wife and I, laugh about the difference between their experience in public school and adult life, where if you don't like someone in adult life, you just don't deal with them. You just don't hang out with them and don't call them and that's it, you're done. You're like, okay, well, you and I don't get along. That's the end of that relationship. And the public school is kind of like, actually, why don't you hang out for another six years around each other constantly and just deal with that forever. Yeah. [00:07:33] Speaker B: Except for jobs. Like, if you have a job and you have a co worker that, you know you, that you don't like and you don't get along with right then, yep. It is what it is. [00:07:43] Speaker A: I really didn't like my colleagues. In the one year that I worked with the outside world, what I worked. [00:07:51] Speaker B: Was that, like, finance. [00:07:53] Speaker A: It was in Finance on Wall Street. Solomon Smith, Marty. Yep. And I was so out of place, man. I was so out of place. I was in a group and the MDs, some of the MDs were cool. At least a few of the MDs were awful. The direct. The associate managing director. So basically like the, you know, the bosses of the floor of the group. [00:08:13] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:08:14] Speaker A: And the associate that I worked for. One was awesome and one was terrible, and the other analysts were not my speed, let's say. And they were constantly doing, like, practical jokes. And I was like, guys, I just want to finish this so that I can go home. That's my goal of today. It's Friday. It's 10 o' clock at night. I would like to go home. I don't care what. What is happening socially inside this office. All right, I want to ask you about your business. And as I was thinking about this conversation, I came in, I was like, oh, I'm going to ask Ruben about Seinwell. And I start to think about, what are the parallels between, you know, our experiences over the last few years? And what I realized was you did a pivot also. [00:08:56] Speaker B: Yes, I guess you can call it that. I didn't think I was doing one when I was doing it, but. [00:09:01] Speaker A: Okay, okay. Did you think you were launching a second business? Can you. Okay, I'll stop talking and ask you where you started from Bidsketch and how you went from there into signwall. [00:09:10] Speaker B: Sure. So Bizketch is proposal software. It's been around for like 15ish years, a long time. And we integrated with E Signature apps. So this was a bit of a pain as far as, like, what customers were asking for. They eventually wanted us to build it into the product. And we're like, this is a whole, you know, I did a little bit of research. It's like, this is. It looks simple on the surface, but it's a whole category. Right. And then once I started to look into it a little bit more, it was like, huh, maybe we could Do a bit of a hybrid and sit in the middle and compete in both, sort of in both categories as the next version of Bit Sketch. And that's kind of how originally, like. [00:09:53] Speaker A: So proposal software that you could just get signed instead of integrating with a signature solution, it was offered as a feature inside of its sketch. [00:10:02] Speaker B: Yeah. So all proposals apps have E Signature functionality, but it's pretty simple, it's pretty basic. Right. So the difference is with E Signature apps, that's all they do. So it's very sophisticated, you know, as far as the functionality and the E sign compliance and all this other stuff. So it was like, okay, we'll do that better than everyone else and we'll be a bit of a hybrid. We'll allow, like, uploads and then content creation and editing as well. And that'll be like the way that we position it. And that was originally how I thought about it. [00:10:35] Speaker A: How long ago is that? It's not 10 years, right? [00:10:40] Speaker B: No, not 10 years. We launched a little over six years ago. So before we even got to that point, I mean, there's so much. We're like, oh, let's rebuild bidsketch. There was just so much, you know, so there were, there were. It was a couple of years of trying to go in one direction and just like realizing that, no, this is not going to work. We're going to have to build a whole separate app, a whole new thing. And then that's when we're like, okay, so what do we build first, then the E Signature product. And really, at that point, when I started to look at building out the E Signature product, I started to evaluate it, like, maybe this will be like, forget the whole thing. Maybe it's just an E Signature app. Let me take a serious look at the market because either way, I'm going to be competing in this market, have conversations with other founders. It was kind of a similar process that you went through, because I remember seeing you go through this with when you were looking for the next thing, you're like having conversations with people looking at ideas and all that stuff. So less on the idea side because the idea was already there, but kind of like definitely having conversations with people, seeing what happened with apps that closed down and founders that, you know, weren't able to make it work and all this stuff. Growth people that exited from E Signature apps, like, I had conversations with all these people and the same thing kept coming back. Like, don't do it. This, like, category is not good. This is like, you know, this is like, way harder than it looks. [00:12:14] Speaker A: And you did it anyway because you're so brave or because you had already written half of it because you had made the decision from launching a feature inside bitsketch? [00:12:22] Speaker B: Neither. I would say. [00:12:23] Speaker A: Okay. [00:12:25] Speaker B: I don't know. You hear people say it and you're almost like, but I could. I could. But I can do it. There's a little bit of that, right? [00:12:33] Speaker A: You failed in the last four people I've talked to all failed. But I. I can make it. [00:12:37] Speaker B: And this is like, people that didn't fail, people that successfully exited. They're like. It was a grind. Like, two, like, so people that failed and then people that, you know, exited. So both sides. And it was like, I looked at the. I saw. I did some analysis for, like, okay, traffic and how do I get customers and all that. I saw an opportunity like, ooh, no one's doing this in this space. I could get a bunch of traffic this way. I saw a couple in this other way. And, you know, so I saw a couple of opportunities that I thought were just open. So I was like, okay, yeah, it was a bit of a grind for you, but you didn't do it this way. Okay. And I'm pretty good at this stuff, so I think I could make it work. And that was like, you know, why? I kind of just moved forward. [00:13:24] Speaker A: Anyways, if I'm reading between the lines, the approach to it on how to do and how to bring in customers matched with your existing skill set around SEO with my strength and free tools and. Okay, I think that's interesting because the. If you hear signature app, you think about the ones that you're familiar with. A Docusign. [00:13:46] Speaker B: Yes. Super competitive. Yeah. [00:13:49] Speaker A: Right. And like, you know, hardcore sales tactics and a big sales team and enterprise process, all that. And so you. You still saw the opportunity, because the opportunity that you saw to carve out a space in the market matched with the way you like to get customers. [00:14:05] Speaker B: Yeah. So, like, bitsketch was different. There were no. There was no proposal category or anything like that. So the challenge or the pain was different. The pain was like, do people care about this? Will people pay for it? Like, all that stuff. And then E Signatures was different. Like, clearly, people will pay for this, and there are a bunch of them. And then the challenge is like, can we stand out? Can we get customers in this market? And basically, short answer is just like, I felt like I could get distribution. That's it. That was it. Being in this now, like, six years later after launching, I completely understand why they said it was A grind and not to do it. And so if I knew then what I really know now, I would probably not do it. That said, being here where I am now after going through all that, it's a pretty nice place. Our growth is good, all that stuff. [00:15:02] Speaker A: Right. [00:15:03] Speaker B: So it's nice now. But yeah, they were right. They were 100% right. [00:15:09] Speaker A: You were right. You did, in fact, you were able to do it. [00:15:14] Speaker B: But yes, and we've talked about this, about like going into markets where it's easier, you know, hotter, better than other markets. Right. This, like if, if you put this is not like a bad market or anything like that. It's a big market, there's a lot of opportunity. But if we're talking about like a bootstrapper or someone, you know, that's not VC funded, breaking into a category and trying to get customers and build a business to a certain size, there are other easier markets to go into is what I would say. [00:15:50] Speaker A: Yeah, it must have been a pretty strange experience watching me over the last year in the Slack group, basically coming in and saying, awesome, yes, okay, okay, I appreciate that. I basically came into the Slack group. I mean everyone, everyone in the Slack group was very aware of how things were going at rally and there were some good and then some bad. And then at some point I was like, I think it's time to give up. I think I should do something else. And then going through that process of what should I build? I, I originally or not originally. One of the ideas that I went deeper into was around email marketing for SaaS. And I went to that same as you. And everyone was like, do not do this. And I listened to them because I, I didn't see an angle. And then chose AI and a growing market that is, it's growing so fast that you, not that it's easy to compete, but it's healthy. It makes things easier. I don't know, there's like a multiplier to the fact that there's a big growing market that you can jump into. I guess in many ways it also made sense from a go to market point of view because I was sitting on VC money and if I thought the go to market was advertising, then it's like, okay, well that's, there's an advantage right there. There's an angle. I can compete because I can put ads in front of people and make a value proposition and a slightly unique angle and then see if people come in. Yeah. In a similar way where you looked at it and said, well, I know how to get Traffic. And in a big growing market with an enormous number of potential users, I can compete. [00:17:20] Speaker B: Yes. So market super important. But you don't like, and I always bring this up whenever you've mentioned it, like, I don't think you give yourself enough credit, like how good your execution has been and like you always, you know, you often talk about like the mistakes or this and that, but like we all make mistakes as we're, you know, the whole point is like the stuff that you do get right and how well you execute on those things. And like I remember when you were doing the One rally basically, and like the stuff that you guys were doing to get customers, like you guys were doing, you guys were good, like doing good shit, you know, it was not, it was not like I talked to your biz dev guy or whatever and he showed me some of the cold emails and I was like, okay, you guys are not messing around. Like you're, you know, it's pretty sophisticated with what you guys were doing. And if the fact that it was that grindy, like pulling teeth so much even when you're executing at that level, I was like, whoa, okay, this is, yeah, super interesting. [00:18:22] Speaker A: That's a good way to think about it. Around the multiplier, the ease multiplier, the market multiplier, whatever you want to call that, where same execution, same team, same leader, same everything and very different results based on some external factors. You still need to execute well. And I agree, we have executed well and the product is good and the onboarding and that has been a big challenge. We do that better than others and so on. But maybe I over index on the, that multiplier as opposed to the execution. [00:18:56] Speaker B: What makes sense for you because you are who you are and you have the team that you have and you're like that the execution is going to be at the level that it's going to be. The most important thing for me is like the market or one of the most important things. [00:19:10] Speaker A: One thing I have seen over the last few months on, on your end in our conversations is more uncertainty around SEO, traffic visibility into what Google's doing, AI jumping in and starting to take traffic. Google itself introducing AI results. So that, how does that make you feel in general? If you kind of establish and build up a skill set and then that whole domain where your skill set, skill set lives just shifts over in like an unexpected way. Like, how are you thinking about that now? [00:19:46] Speaker B: Yeah, so there's a lot of overlap with where things are going. So there's, you know, that part of it feels like, okay, that's good. And by that I mean like AI visibility and all that stuff. But then there's a real effect of like, you're probably not going to get the traffic and the leads that you're going to get just off of like, you know, there just isn't just by the nature in which AI presents or doesn't present like the sources that it's talking about. Right. So yeah, on that side of it, it's, it's a mixed bag. And in general, I don't like, I'm not, you know, we're heavily diversifying on making investments to diversify and some things are going pretty good, some things are like, you know, still we'll see, we'll prove them out or whatever. But I see like I'm not an SEO, so I don't like, I'm not super tied to like, strangely as it might sound sound, I'm pretty good at this channel, but I'm not like, my identity kind of isn't tied to it. Like, this is what I am, this is what I know. It's like I don't care how I get traffic or leads. I'm going to move and shift and do whatever. You know, I've done like Biz Devi, very Biz Devi stuff, cross promotional stuff, partnership stuff, all of that. So I don't, yeah, while I don't like it, I'm also like, okay, I'll do what I can to make up for it and then the team will also work on that side. But yeah, long term wise, Google's flailing. They're like, you know, they're constantly going back and forth between like just eating up its own natural organic search results with ads. Right. And trying to monetize that, but then at the same time also like trying to introduce their own version of AI, AI mode and all that stuff. So they're struggling to kind of figure things out. And we've not been like, most people have seen some drops in traffic, so we saw a little bit of that and then we're starting to reverse that, but not as much as a lot of people have. So we're still pretty healthy on, on all sides. But like, the feeling is, you know, what if they go AI, like, you know, yes, of course, uncertainty, a bunch of uncertainty. It's an interesting place to be. [00:22:13] Speaker A: If they figure out a way to monetize AI queries, they'll move in that direction. [00:22:18] Speaker B: That's it. That's it. Yeah, they, they are moving heavily in that direction. That's where they're going. That's where things are going, period. Like, that's where it's going to end up. It's just a matter of timing. [00:22:29] Speaker A: I don't do many Google searches these days, but I still do them. And I am, I'm shocked that it's, it's even legal, the way they present their ads these days. [00:22:39] Speaker B: Crazy, huh? [00:22:40] Speaker A: It is you. There is nothing on the result that says ad. [00:22:44] Speaker B: It's pure trickery. [00:22:45] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it's just straightforward trickery. It's just a little thing that says sponsored results at the tiny little thing at the top, and then four or five what look identical to the search results and then another little line at the bottom where the, where the sponsors end. And it is, it is just deception. Straightforward, super shady. [00:23:03] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:23:03] Speaker A: And then you see their, like, AI response sometime at the top of the sponsored, sometimes in the middle, sometimes at the bottom. So I guess they're playing around with that on what the person doing the search is actually looking for. Can we get them to click on this ad before they get to the AI result? Do they need to open up the AI result to expand it and then see what's in there? And then they're clicking. This just feels like they're learning how to deceive us better. [00:23:27] Speaker B: Right? That's it. Yeah, yeah, yes. Learning how to. Yeah. Learning how to trick us better and then trying to figure out how to. How to monetize it. And they. They'll turn it fully on. The thing is that we can talk about that all we want, but it's like, for a lot of these sites that get organic, it's still heavily organic. There's like nothing. You know what I mean? Like, so the majority of it, you're. [00:23:50] Speaker A: On the first page, first few results, and that's where your traffic comes from. And that's it. [00:23:54] Speaker B: Yes. Still, I'm not saying, like, stick your head in the sand and like, but it's so for us, like, the takeaway for me is like, we can't go because a lot of companies are like, oh, okay, let's get search and blah, blah, blah. Yeah. And it's like, nah, you kind of have to do both. Like, it sucks to say that, but ideally, that's. That's where you got to, you know, be. You got to do both. [00:24:16] Speaker A: What I wonder, as we talk about this is, are there still winners? Is that is the total pie of traffic actually going down because fewer people are leaving the result page because of the AI information or they're not even on Google. They're on ChatGPT or Proplexy or whatever else. Like, is it just compressing the winners to just a very few handful that get mentioned in both organic results and in AI results? Is the total pie of just the number of visitors change at all? Is it shifting or is it literally fewer people are actually getting to these individual sites that are outside of either the AI app or the Google result page? That's the part where I don't know. [00:25:03] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's still early. So right now, like, there's a bunch of data that shows that and Google keeps talking about how, like, it's actually growing overall. So search is still growing, but a bunch of people are saying, well, some of those are like scrapers and AI actually doing the searches and not people doing, like, how much of that is, you know, so there's, there's some debate around some of that stuff. Right. I think right now it's still pretty. Even with Google doing all the, all the stuff they've been doing is still pretty, like. Sure. You know, it's pretty normal to see 40% drops. Like 40% is pretty significant. [00:25:42] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. [00:25:42] Speaker B: So I don't want to like, like dismiss it as, as, you know, but it's not as bad as it's going to get is basically. I don't know that that's like, yeah. [00:25:53] Speaker A: Okay, 40% is just, just the first. [00:25:55] Speaker B: It's like, early. Still, like, the impact is pretty early. We'll. We'll see things shift way more later on for sure. [00:26:03] Speaker A: I, I don't like it. [00:26:05] Speaker B: No, I don't like it. [00:26:06] Speaker A: I, I remember thinking months ago, okay, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be clever. I'm gonna keep pushing on the ads channel that works. And I'm gonna start investing in SEO now and later, you know, by the end of this year, they'll get closer to 50, 50. And that has not happened. And it feels like on the SEO front, it's, we run faster, the treadmill goes up a few clicks faster, we push harder, the treadmill goes. And we're just kind of staying still but doing enough work and seeing results also. And we're really strong on the AI results, but it has not resulted in the split between where signups come from to change all that much. [00:26:50] Speaker B: Yeah. And you guys are doing good work. I know the agency that you're working with, like, it's good stuff on the. So it's not like you're, you know, you're doing a poor job. Yeah. So I think there, there are a Few things at play here. Like when you're a newer site, they put you in sort of what they call the Google sandbox. So then it takes a while to break out of that, like a year sometimes. Plus. [00:27:11] Speaker A: Yes. [00:27:12] Speaker B: So you may have a little bit of that going on. Also there are certain types of searches that are impacted more than other searches. So like our traffic's not that hasn't been impacted that much compared to a lot of other sites because we're focused on like not content. So content stuff that AI can give an answer really quickly, like that's easier for like it's being eaten up by zero click stuff. And it was before by Google themselves, things where they could just give answers really quick and easy, right? Like those types of articles and that type of content. But content where it's like you can't just get it in a snippet and all that stuff is less affected. Content that's like more bottom of the funnel, like buyer stuff that's less impacted. Right now stuff from free tools depending on the AI is not like automatically generating these tools. Right. So there's this type of traffic, this type of intent that is not being messed with so much. The top of the funnel, just informational stuff, all that stuff is like the first to go and that's the more heavily impacted. [00:28:18] Speaker A: Yeah, very interesting. I have a question for you. We're starting to get in the weeds and I'm happy that you and I can go all the way into the weeds around this stuff. This is now going to turn into a consulting session for Ruben and I. One of the three levers that I feel like I have at my disposal now that we have a self serve product. The last two products I ran were not self serve. And because of that you're just thinking about it differently. You care less about quantity. You really just want to get the right people. You want to give them a good experience, you want to sell them on that this is the right solution to them. You need to have a sales process in place and all that whatever else. Now that I'm in self serve land, it feels a lot closer to what you've been experiencing because I remember asking you like what your numbers are. And it's always, it feels like you're playing with a joystick. You're like, okay, if I do this differently than this number of people end up at the top of the funnel. This many people sign up for a trial, this many people activate and so on. And it's like an optimization game for me. The single biggest frustration That I want to ask you about is we have a seven day trial in place and we don't force a credit card on file in order to create the account. We have a transition between an activated free trial and not activated. So you have seven days. But in order to actually accept phone calls from the outside world into your Rosie agent, that's when you need to put a credit card on file. So we're basically trying to get people to create as many accounts as possible and then show them the value of the product and show them the quality of the agent so they can call it themselves. And we're hoping that that convinces them that, yes, they actually should go the next step and put their card on file and put it, you know, have it answer their actual phone calls. I remember describing this to Henry Poydar and he said, that all sounds great, but you're putting the credit card before they get the actual value. The actual value is when someone calls it and it answers the phone. So you should put your credit card requirement on the other side of that. My problem is it's working well enough right now that I don't want to change it, but I want more cards on file. So on a given day, let's just say round numbers, 40 people sign up. Out of those, let's say something like 10 people put their card on file. I look at that 30 and I'm like, how do I get more of those cards on file? Let me just stop there and just ask you if I'm even on the right track in the way I'm thinking about it or if you see some flaws in the logic. [00:30:47] Speaker B: Well, I've done free, all sorts of different forms of free trials with Bidsketch and have not done any free trials with signwall where like straight freemium to like paid upgrade. But we're about to do free trials on signal. So I'm also thinking about this type of stuff. [00:31:04] Speaker A: Can you just describe where you are right now before you do the free trial? What does your freemium setup look like? [00:31:11] Speaker B: Everyone signs up to free. [00:31:13] Speaker A: Okay, that's it. Everyone starts off at the same place. [00:31:15] Speaker B: Yes. So then you will be prompted to upgrade if you hit a certain number of documents in a month. So based off of volume or if you want certain like features, more power user features and things like that. Yes. Yep. Okay. [00:31:29] Speaker A: And so, so someone can come in and use your product for six months, never pay you. [00:31:33] Speaker B: Yes. [00:31:34] Speaker A: Send two, three contracts a month for signature and then all of a sudden. [00:31:38] Speaker B: Happens all the time. [00:31:39] Speaker A: Yes, I'm sure. And the downside of that is they're not paying you and they're using your product and maybe some support. The upside of that is they're not going anywhere else and they're hanging around the rim. And as soon as they say, oh, I actually need to send this to four people for signatures, all of a sudden that becomes a premium and then all of a sudden they start paying you. So why are you considering leaving that and where are you going to on. On your version of a free trial? [00:32:04] Speaker B: We were optimizing for two things with freemium. Optimizing for, like, there's a bit of a viral component there. So when somebody uses our product, even on free, they expose our product to somebody else. [00:32:15] Speaker A: So you have marketing value action from your freemium. Okay. [00:32:19] Speaker B: I don't recommend freemium to most people, most products, unless you have a very specific set of attributes in your product market or whatever. Right. And then everybody was abandoning freemium in our market or really locking it down. So we just came in with a more generous sort of freemium for our market. So you can't, like, you can do freemium, but you want it to stand out. Like, if everybody else is doing freemium, then it's like, okay, it's either table stakes or. Yeah, it won't matter. So anyway. Right. [00:32:53] Speaker A: Or you just be more generous or have something unique about it. [00:32:56] Speaker B: Right. And you need to feed it and it just takes a long time. So we were optimizing for usage with freemium. So. And you went through this process when you were first, like, you were really focused, I remember, on making sure that people were using it before you started thinking about the whole charging, right? [00:33:12] Speaker A: Yes. We had a 25 minute, a usage based trial. You got 25 minutes for free. It was really important to me at the beginning because we were very concerned about churn and very concerned about people converting without any usage. [00:33:28] Speaker B: Yep. [00:33:29] Speaker A: And that would just lead to a mess of Churn. And because of that, we wanted to only convert people into paying customers that were fully activated and using it. And it was good for a while. And we switched to the seven day trial recently where we are now, and it's going well overall. [00:33:46] Speaker B: Yeah, so very similar. But for a long time, basically for years, it's just been like freemium and usage, like the main things, and then very relaxed on the whole upgrade. Then over time we started like, okay, let's add onboarding emails. We didn't even have onboarding emails. Right. Okay, let's start to optimize for that. A little bit less hardcore on the usage after we got usage to a good place and then, you know, now it's kind of similar to you, like layering on the, like, okay, the time pressure of the trial. Let's layer that on top of what we already have, like a really strong solid foundation. So it's a reverse trial. We will drop them back to free if they don't convert at the end of the 14 day period, I think, or seven days, whatever we're doing. [00:34:34] Speaker A: Okay. So now the entry point of new accounts will be at a paid tier. [00:34:39] Speaker B: Yes and no. So we ask them some questions and if we think they're qualified, then we'll put them on that. If we don't think they're qualified, we will just do what we're doing now, just free. [00:34:50] Speaker A: Okay. And the term you used there was a reverse trial. [00:34:53] Speaker B: Yes. [00:34:54] Speaker A: So instead of going to a trial. [00:34:57] Speaker B: And then instead of like them having to cancel, so that's even more pressure. Right. Like. Okay, like you can't even use this. It's like, okay, you have to go to free. So it's a bit of, still a bit of a softer sort of thing. [00:35:09] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah, Ours, ours doesn't really lend itself to that concept. So what we've done. What we've done is added a. When you log back in after your seven day trial, the first thing you see is a modal that says extend your trial by three days. And for now we have a credit card requirement there. [00:35:30] Speaker B: Okay. [00:35:30] Speaker A: So you can go through the seven days without putting your card on file. But if that time runs out when you come back, we allow you to extend it for three days. But we also require your credit card on file in order to do that. That's something we just put in like two weeks ago. [00:35:44] Speaker B: Yeah, that's the super issue. The thing is like wherever you put your credit card and you're not charging at the same time, right? No, they put in their credit card and then. Yes, so it's the point of friction. But you have other points of friction as well, Right? Like what is the other major point of friction before you even get to the credit card? Is it forwarding their phone or not? Not really. [00:36:06] Speaker A: Forwarding is the single biggest point of friction in the entire process. So this is where I have some doubts about how optimized we are for it. Because that point of friction isn't relevant until you have a credit card on file. [00:36:21] Speaker B: So that's after you have a credit card on file. [00:36:23] Speaker A: Yes, yes. And I don't necessarily think that's bad because the credit card on file is the emotional and financial commitment. Once you're committed, I think you're more likely to go through the friction of, well, you know, the clock's ticking. I have my card on file. I clearly want. I've decided that I want to use this. [00:36:42] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:36:43] Speaker A: And that is almost like, are they high enough up on the desire scale to kind of push them all the way through whatever friction of forwarding their phone call that they need to go through? The other way to do would be, no, let's give you the value and go forward it. And then, I don't know, put your card on file before that, before it ends. There's a real issue around telephony where if your seven day trial runs out and you don't have a card on file, the only thing we can really do is shut down the agent. And then when someone calls you, like, they're not going to talk to an AI, they're going to hear a message that says, this service is not available. [00:37:24] Speaker B: Right. Not good. [00:37:25] Speaker A: So that's not good. Yes. It might be a lot of friction or a lot of motivation to get your card on file, but that's not. [00:37:33] Speaker B: And then people are really not going to be happy. Yes. [00:37:36] Speaker A: Yes. That didn't sound like it would work out for us. [00:37:39] Speaker B: Yeah. That's so interesting because of the way you have. I struggle with the thought of separating the putting in the credit card with when they pay, like I would charge them the moment that they put in the credit card, like, because their trial starts before then. Right. So yours is a little different because you have a lot of the traffic, the way that it's coming in for you and like who they are and where like their mind is and all that and how much they know about you. Right. [00:38:10] Speaker A: We have to be gentle. [00:38:11] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:38:12] Speaker A: Right. If someone. So okay, as I say that I'm not, not confident in what I said. So what I said was we have to be gentle because the traffic comes, a lot of it comes from advertising. So if you're on Instagram and you see an ad for ROSU and you click on it, my argument to myself was if the first thing I see is a credit card form, that's a bit too much friction for where I came from, from Instagram. Clicking on that and the first thing I see is like, boom, a giant wall of ads. I didn't like that. There's too much. Then I downloaded a native app, a mobile app, and they did such a good job of getting the credit card form in front of me. I was inspired. It Was really, really well done. And they were aggressive, but with all these little escape hatches. So it didn't feel coercive. It was really well done. [00:39:06] Speaker B: Interesting. What's one of the escape hatches? What do you mean by that? [00:39:11] Speaker A: Okay, so you download this app and. Okay, good. You put whatever you sign up in some way Google. [00:39:19] Speaker B: Okay. [00:39:19] Speaker A: The very first thing you see is a paywall, but it pushes the value forward. This is what you're going to do. This is all these amazing results that you're going to get from it. These are all the amazing features. This is the five stars. And then it's put your card on file. It's basically choose a plan. [00:39:36] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:39:36] Speaker A: And then. But right below that in the small text, it's or wait till later. [00:39:41] Speaker B: Right. [00:39:41] Speaker A: Or do this later. [00:39:42] Speaker B: Okay. [00:39:42] Speaker A: So you kind of move on. So you get you. It's almost like, why wouldn't you offer it to the people who want to put their card on file, but then allow the people who don't? And then it allowed me to come in and then start using the app. And then as soon as I got to a point where the app was really impressive. This is like an AI, I think it's ad creator. So you just put in a little prompt, you choose a model, you choose a voice, you hit go and then boom, it creates an ad for you. And then it allowed. Allowed me to do that. It allowed me to feel how impressive it was. And then I was like, wanted to share it in Slack with my team. Like, oh, my God, look how good this app is. And that was a gated feature, so it just did a really good job of do you want to put your card on file? No, keep going a little further. Do you want to put your card on file? That's okay. Get more value out of it, be more impressed. So it was kind of scattered. [00:40:30] Speaker B: Do they charge you when you put your card on file? [00:40:33] Speaker A: Yes. [00:40:34] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:40:34] Speaker A: So it was choose a plan and not choose a trial. Choose a plan for 29 bucks. Pay your 29 bucks. Now you're on that plan. [00:40:42] Speaker B: Yeah, this is what I mean. Like, I would not have those decoupled in this way. Not unless you're doing credit card up front, which we still do with bit sketch, like right from the beginning. But at that point, then the website and your product, like email and all this stuff, like, is doing a bunch of selling and convincing before they get to the sign up. And then. Right. Because you're moving all the friction to the front. So it's like, it depends on how well, you're doing how good of a job you're doing at convincing them that, you know, this is worth like doing or trying. Right. [00:41:16] Speaker A: Are they sold before they click? [00:41:17] Speaker B: Yeah, pretty like how close can you get them to that point? I feel like based off of your funnel. Yes, it's cold. But then by then, by the time they've experienced, they're doing the test calls or whatever and they're kind of experiencing like, whoa, this is pretty crazy. It can do a great job. I feel like it's worth, I would 100% test that, like charging them right at that point. [00:41:40] Speaker A: Yep, yep. [00:41:41] Speaker B: And so you lose all of that, you know, friction once and then maybe later on, you know, some of those, which is a separate thing, some of those charges don't go through or whatever, right? Oh, yeah. [00:41:54] Speaker A: A lot of fun around that. You know, I think the single biggest objective point of data that, that supports your argument there on charging is that a ridiculously high percentage of the people that put their cards on file and their seven day trial turn into customers. It's. They've already made the decision. It's basically everybody, right. Effectively everyone that starts the trial becomes a paying customer. It's like, we didn't really need the seven day trial. We should have given you the opportunity to see the product for yourself and be impressed by it. But when you choose to put your card on file, you're choosing to become a paying customer. [00:42:31] Speaker B: It might even be, now that I'm thinking about it more, it might even be preferred, like if I'm going to give you my phone number and you're going to, I want to make sure that that works. I don't want to have to remember that there's, I don't know, I put in my credit card and all that stuff, but that billing failed or something. I want to 100% lock it in because I'm going to be using it. My customers are going to be calling this thing. It's less fuzzy just because of how to me, I don't know, your customers may think of it differently, but it kind of is almost an argument for like. Yeah. At least testing it, you know. [00:43:11] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I find that anytime we make an argument for being softer, kinder, gentler, it's actually worse off for both sides, for the business and for the customer. [00:43:23] Speaker B: I don't know if you've, you've done several SaaS now, so I don't know if you've noticed this, this thing and if there's a difference, you know, that you've seen but like with Bit Sketch, everything that I did with that business that was, that added friction. Just as long as the friction was the right type of friction. Like, you know, oh, you have to go through and you have to view this proposal sample first. You have to go through like you get more emails and all this stuff, like more upfront friction resulted, often resulted in just more conversions later. Like, it was good. Almost everything that I've done with Signwell is the opposite. Like any point of friction, you know how like everyone's like, oh, remove friction and all this stuff, you don't want any friction. Like that works with signwell, it doesn't work with Bidsketch. It's almost like the opposite. I don't know if you've, you've had any. Like, you've noticed, like the makeup of the business is a little bit different in product of how the market and the customers and like that whole flow works. [00:44:19] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think this is like the other side of the coin of that. Like if you're trying to be nicer and trying to be gentler and trying to be more accommodating, it's almost like if, if we're making decisions from a position of fear, it's worse off than when we make it from a position of confidence when we say to ourselves, no, this thing is amazing and you don't need a trial and you don't need to go through a whole, you know, eight, eight steps of onboarding to get you to a place where your agent is amazing because your agent is kind of 90% there. As soon as you give us your Google business profile and we should just put your phone number on step one of the onboarding and the next step is put your card on file. It's like every time we lean toward that more confident approach, it's better. And I would say that that was also the case in the other SaaS in Cardhook. I think this is a rel. It's a pretty normal arc to go through. You start your business, you have nothing, you have no customers and because of that you have no confidence in your product and your customer base and your revenue. And you do things from this position of fear of, oh, let's do a 30 day trial instead of seven day trial, let's make it cheaper instead of more expensive and then over you get more expensive and you get more aggressive and at the same time the results are better. And could you take that confidence and front load it and bring it all the way to the beginning and say no, no, no, this product's amazing and we're just going to be as confident as we would be in a year if it succeeded over this next year. [00:45:47] Speaker B: Yo, with Carthook, you have like this form. People are like, ah, you got to get approved to even get access to our. Yeah, that was pretty gangster. [00:45:58] Speaker A: That was gangster. Everyone thought it was like a gimmick. Everyone's like, apply to work with us, you know, and of course, 100% of people get approved. And for us it was like 50%. And people were like, but I don't understand. I just want to use your product and pay it. And we were like, no, man, you got to go to this other competitor that's cheaper, that's better for you. And people were like, I don't know if you remember that we got the feedback once and support when we told someone to go elsewhere and they called us choosy little bastards and that. And that. That's what we printed on T shirts. So everyone at Cartel had choosy little bastards T shirt. And that works. [00:46:30] Speaker B: I don't remember that. Okay. That's amazing. I love that. [00:46:33] Speaker A: It was just a position, like. [00:46:35] Speaker B: Right. [00:46:35] Speaker A: It was five times more expensive than the competitor and it had this process and I just would never have done that in the beginning of the product. It took the confidence in the product and the revenue and everything. [00:46:47] Speaker B: Yeah. To get to that point. Yeah. Yes. Yes. [00:46:53] Speaker A: So we're starting to run out of time. What are you up to now? How many people you have on the team now? [00:46:58] Speaker B: 15. So I brought in a CEO. So I'm no longer CEO of SignWall. Yeah. So that's been interesting. Like training. There's so much. Yes. So we're at this whole new stage where things are interesting in a lot of different ways than I'm used to. It's good. You know, that's. Yeah, that's kind of the focus for the moment. That and growth. Always growth. [00:47:25] Speaker A: Do you see that as like you're still in the day to day but not the driver? Do you see it as like transitioning to owner instead of operator? Or is it like chairman or. I don't know what the right terminology would be, but it's just not CEO, at least for that position. [00:47:41] Speaker B: Yeah, it's like transitioning more to owner. I'm still involved in pockets. Like, you did it the way that you did with Carthook and I don't know why it was so easy for you to do it that way. Seemingly because you brought in a CEO and then you switched to rally. [00:47:58] Speaker A: Yes. [00:47:59] Speaker B: Right. [00:47:59] Speaker A: Yes. That was like. [00:48:01] Speaker B: How was that so fast? Oh, man, what am I doing wrong? I mean, the CEO I brought in is great, so it's been working well, but there's been just so much training, so much work, and you just did that like this. It was so fast. [00:48:16] Speaker A: You know, we're gonna have to turn the recording off to get fully into that one. No, but that was. That was strange because it was. It was involuntary. Well, okay, it wasn't involuntary. I just. It felt involuntary because I could not stomach the idea of being the CEO at Cardhook with the Shopify shackles on after we transitioned from, like, this external app to being in the App Store and being told what to do. And I was like, absolutely. No way. So I'm not doing this. [00:48:45] Speaker B: You do that. [00:48:46] Speaker A: Yes. Like, you've. You know, she was already, like, the director in the company, and everyone knew her and she knew the business, and she just transitioned to a different role, different people reported to her, and then she reported to me. So it wasn't like a big, crazy transition overall. [00:49:00] Speaker B: Got it. Yeah. I hired coo. He was that way for six months or so, and then I was like, okay, you're CEO now. You know, some training, hiring people. So it's basically just putting people in place that are replacing me in a bunch of different areas. Okay. [00:49:16] Speaker A: And you can see what your salary really should have been when you combine all those salaries together. [00:49:21] Speaker B: Yeah. But, you know, they're in. It's. You're moving also to, like, a little bit more specialist people that are better at these individual than, like, me just being a generalist and, like, having how much time? Yeah, yeah, Good enough. [00:49:34] Speaker A: These four things. [00:49:35] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. [00:49:36] Speaker A: Cool. [00:49:36] Speaker B: And feeling guilty about, like, not spending enough time on, you know, all the sorts of stuff. So. So, yeah. [00:49:41] Speaker A: Cool. Well, you and I could go on this forever, but I got a boogie. It's Friday. I gotta go pack. I'm going away for the weekend. So thank you very much for coming on. I appreciate it. [00:49:51] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for the invite. It was fun. Cool.