Our Cake and Eat It Too

[00:00:00] Speaker A: So right next to that is a Twitter post I saw from this guy Jared that I follow, who started a striping business. And he posted last week a picture of his wife holding his baby at the zoo. And he said, I'm at the zoo with my wife and kid. It's Saturday. And I've answered the phone three times so far. So I immediately DM'd him and I'm like, my man. That is why we built this. Welcome to the Off Site Podcast. I am your host, Jordan Gahl. 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 podcast is brought to you by Rosie, the AI powered phone answering service for small businesses. Welcome back, everybody. Another episode of off site. Mr. Henry Poyder, welcome back. [00:00:44] Speaker B: Thanks for having me again. [00:00:45] Speaker A: Jordan, we're back here. It's Friday. Where are we now? It's the middle of September. It's now getting toward the end of September. I don't know how that happened. I think last time we spoke was, I think in August, a few weeks ago. [00:00:55] Speaker B: Was it August? Yeah, it was summer for sure. [00:00:58] Speaker A: Yeah, it was in. It was in the summer. What do you got going on? What's your week like? [00:01:01] Speaker B: Well, you know, there's work and personal stuff. [00:01:05] Speaker C: Right. [00:01:05] Speaker B: Off site, I guess on the, on the personal side, I am an empty nester now because I have twin boys and they are, have been dropped off at their respective universities for their college experience. And so my wife and I are trying to thread that needle and then on. And business just continues to, to be a thing that occupies most of my time. So more of the same, I guess, right? [00:01:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I guess. But it's a pretty big difference. So last time we spoke in the summer, you were preparing for your kids to go off to school. First of all, can I just ask, I very clearly remember being dropped off at college. This is a pretty searing experience. Yes, I remember the hug. I remember the words shared, the look from my dad. I remember it. It's clear. How was that? [00:01:57] Speaker B: As the parent, I have a memory of that too. And my drop off was like a half hour, right? So, you know, my parents came and I went to school about a half hour from my house, so I went to Tufts and I grew up in Massachusetts, so I wasn't that far away from home. So there was like a, it was a little different experience for me, but it was a drop off. They put my stuff and then I brought it in. But I remember thinking like, I Can't wait for these people to leave. So, so that was in my mind when I was doing my drop off. [00:02:29] Speaker A: Okay, that's fair, that's fair. [00:02:31] Speaker B: You know, because I was like sort of ready to get on with my life and my, my new experience and. [00:02:37] Speaker A: Okay, so you weren't, you weren't overly dramatic about, about it in general? [00:02:41] Speaker B: With my parents, I wasn't overly dramatic about it this time around with my kids. I cried like a baby. I gave them the hug. I mean, it's a wonderful thing. It's a privilege, right, to be able to have this experience and I'm grateful for it. But you know, it's a part of my life that's over now and so. Wow, that's tough. You know, you get 18 summers with your kids. Right. And then. [00:03:02] Speaker A: Yeah, and the first four or five are such a blur. And then if you have more, four. [00:03:06] Speaker B: Or five are just logistical and physical. [00:03:08] Speaker A: Yes, yes. [00:03:09] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:03:10] Speaker A: Yeah. My, my 13 year old now feels, I mean it feels like a blink between here and there. I have an 11 year old and a 9 year old. So in many ways I end up looking at the nine year old as like, you know, wherever the youngest is. That's where you currently are on that. [00:03:26] Speaker B: I've said this a few times over the last couple weeks to people who are in your position, who have kids who are still in the house that, that, you know, everybody tells you it's going to feel like it went by in a blank and then it happens to you and it really feels like it went by in a blank. [00:03:40] Speaker A: Is there anything to do about that? Right, right. So you know that, but that doesn't necessarily guess the ideal is that it, it affects behavior in some sense. Like, I cannot stand the mindset of like, here's how many days and weeks you have left in life. Like I, I, I don't like that. [00:04:00] Speaker B: Like the, the, the week calendar. [00:04:02] Speaker A: Yes, yes. And it's going away and like you must do this before this and you only have this many times that you're going to see your parents. Like I, I, I hate that. That feels very strange. Feels very cold. [00:04:12] Speaker C: Yes. [00:04:13] Speaker A: But with the kids, sure. Okay. You know, it's going to change pretty dramatically when they're out of the house, as it should. Yes, that's right. That's right. It's for both sides. [00:04:21] Speaker B: They're going off into the world and we're starting a new chapter. [00:04:23] Speaker C: Right. [00:04:24] Speaker A: So yes, it's okay. So, so let me just ask about that for a sec. The new chapter, does that feel like more freedom. Does it feel like you can focus on yourself more? [00:04:34] Speaker B: Yes, for sure. I mean, you know, the last couple years, you know, these are adults now, they're 18 years old. [00:04:40] Speaker C: Right. [00:04:40] Speaker B: And so they're fairly self sufficient before they left. I mean they obviously need our funding support so there's that. But I don't know, like the notion of. It's like I almost didn't give myself permission to actually deal with it until I had to deal with it. So now I'm processing. [00:05:00] Speaker C: Right. [00:05:01] Speaker B: I was like so focused on listening to everybody's advice and savoring the moments and enjoying them and I'm glad I did that. But I certainly postponed the processing part and so here, any, any reckoning. [00:05:12] Speaker A: Yeah, that sounds about right. [00:05:14] Speaker B: And that's I think good advice. Like I think you should postpone the, you know, you'll have plenty of time and I have plenty of time. Like just drink in the moments there. [00:05:21] Speaker A: It's, yeah, it's, it's true. The, the transition is not from you caring for them, doing everything for them and them not being independent at all to all of a sudden not living with you. Maybe that's, maybe that's boarding school if they go away at a very young age. [00:05:37] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:05:38] Speaker A: But it does feel like a more gradual transition. [00:05:41] Speaker B: But I think, I mean you and I both made some choices though, right? Like you know, meeting at microconf all those years ago. I mean we decided to go down an entrepreneurial path for precisely this reason, you know, to have the optionality in order to kind of enjoy those moments. I mean I wouldn't say that I work less hard than a banker or a consultant or management consultant or something like that, but certainly I engineered it so that I was working all the time, but I was still able to enjoy the, all the things like I went to everything. [00:06:12] Speaker A: Yeah, it's amazing how much we're around compared to if we worked a very different job at a very different time. Just the sheer number of hours of presence is incredible. It's so different. [00:06:27] Speaker B: Yes. [00:06:28] Speaker A: I always looked at it as refusing to think of it as a trade off and just saying no, I'm going to have my Akina too. I'm going to be incredibly successful and make a huge amount of money and I'm also going to be there and, and, and it wasn't or for me at all. [00:06:43] Speaker C: Right. [00:06:43] Speaker A: I don't think that's really the case. I do think that there's a choice between career greatness and a focus on family where I'm at right. Now is that I would definitely be more successful if I gave up more family time for sure. Financially, career wise status, whatever. You. All those things combined and I'm much more okay with that now. I'm happy with that trade off as opposed to pretending like there was no trade off and I got to have my cake and eat it too and everything else. [00:07:18] Speaker B: Yeah. It's interesting that you use the word trade off there because I don't know if that's the case. Like, I think deciding that you're gonna have a balance and kind of like go hard across the board on a lot of these things, that's a choice too. And I think. [00:07:34] Speaker A: Yeah, but you're shaving off the. [00:07:36] Speaker B: But that's the case in anything like, you know. [00:07:39] Speaker C: Right. [00:07:39] Speaker B: You want to go crazy parent in the world. I guess if I didn't have a job and I just focused on parenting and, you know, maybe homeschooling and being around them all the time, I don't know. Or like I would make the most money possible if I never saw my family. I guess those are the extremes, I'm saying. But, but I'm saying like the balance is a choice too. [00:07:58] Speaker A: Yes. I think I used to need to feel like I could have my cake and eat it too, to be okay with it because I wanted to be ambitious on both ends of that, you. [00:08:08] Speaker B: Know, But I think, you know, I. [00:08:11] Speaker A: Don'T think it does matter. [00:08:12] Speaker B: We're having our cake and eating it too. [00:08:13] Speaker A: Yes, that's right. [00:08:14] Speaker B: That's right. [00:08:15] Speaker A: That's right. [00:08:15] Speaker B: Like there's a lot of misery in the world and doing pretty good. [00:08:19] Speaker A: Yes, that's right. Whatever this balance is, it's working out. [00:08:24] Speaker B: I'm grateful every day. I mean. [00:08:26] Speaker A: Yes. Let's get into some work. [00:08:28] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:08:29] Speaker B: Yeah, let's do work. [00:08:31] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:08:31] Speaker B: Well, tell me what's going on. Tell me what's happening. [00:08:34] Speaker A: So we, we made a really big change this week. And so what we did is we switched from a usage based trial of 25 minutes to a seven day trial time based. That requires. It required a lot of different. It touch. It touches everything. So it touches the marketing, it touches the advertising, it touches the signup process, it touches how we work with billing. A lot of this came out of our focus on redoing our onboarding. [00:09:00] Speaker C: Okay. [00:09:01] Speaker A: And we redid the. The first half of our onboarding, which is the setup process. So when you create an account, you come in and you set up your agent to work properly for your business. So we did that and we took a breather for A week. And we said, okay, that part's now a lot better. We measured it clearly has improved. Great. Then we started focusing on the second half of onboarding, the activation and launching of your agent so that it picks up the phone from real callers. When we did that, we started to really. You know, when you just stare at these things, I talk about this regularly, about what hiring a consultant does is not just get the work done, but it forces everyone to just really focus on it. Right. You're paying the consultant, you're setting up calls, you're thinking about it. You assign one or two people inside the company to focus on it with a consultant and you end up thinking about it a lot more. It's kind of poisoning. It focuses the mind in these different places. [00:09:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:10:01] Speaker A: So when we did that, what we realized was something. I don't know if it's surprising, but it elevated the importance of urgency as an element in our onboarding and activation. So what we did with the 25 minute trial is extremely user friendly. Basically, take your time, get fully set up and you don't start using your trial until you launch. And people actually call your agent and then you only convert if you continue to use it through those 25 minutes, which can take the average, I think was like six days. And then what that really means is that everyone that converts is a very active user that's actually using the product to the point that they're comfortable with live callers calling their rosy agent. And that led to a great customer experience and a good experience on our side in terms of who's converting. But what it did is it, it removed all urgency. In many ways. It actually created negative urgency because you are incentivized to take your time and make sure your agent works really well and test it a hundred different ways and only when you're fully comfortable, then you launch. And that's when your actual trial minutes start burning out and staring at this onboarding process. That is what came out of it as something to address. And so this seven day trial, we had a few problems with it. To get it right. We didn't want to require a credit card in order to create the account for several reasons. One, because we want people to come in and try it and see and be impressed. Second, because a lot of our trial traffic comes from advertising. So when you see an ad on Instagram, you click on something and the first thing you see is a paywall with a credit card that's going to. That's wrong. It's like a mismatch of traffic to offer. So what we did is we ended up with a seven day trial that begins when you create your account. You do not need to put a card on file to create an account. You just create an account, then you come in and the seven days is now ticking. [00:12:05] Speaker C: Okay. [00:12:05] Speaker A: And then in order to launch, you can do whatever you want inside the product. And now in order to launch your agent to take actual real calls outside of your few testing numbers that you can use, you need to put a credit card on file. [00:12:18] Speaker C: Okay. [00:12:18] Speaker A: So what that does is it creates urgency toward. Well, we got seven days now. We're. [00:12:23] Speaker B: Now. [00:12:24] Speaker A: Yes, let's. Let's get live as soon as possible so we can have as much time as possible with the agent in a real setting. And so we launched that this week on Wednesday. [00:12:34] Speaker B: So I'm in my trial and I don't have minutes. [00:12:37] Speaker A: No unlimited minutes. That's right. And our pricing plans have unlimited minutes. So it now much more closely matches. We had like a 25 minute thing, but then it was unlimited minutes in the actual plan. It's not too big of a mismatch, but it was a little bit off on just messaging minutes rollover. [00:12:53] Speaker B: Do they like how does that work? [00:12:56] Speaker A: There's just no minutes. Unlimited minutes. Use how many ever minutes you want. We don't want people to focus on minutes. Minutes are a commodity. Minutes are how much am I paying per minute? So they roll over all the questions that would come up. This is an employee that you're hiring for 50, 1, 50, 300 bucks a month. [00:13:10] Speaker C: Okay. [00:13:10] Speaker A: That handles the phone. Right. So that value. [00:13:12] Speaker B: We want to pricing page for a while, but, but are you. Yeah, so, so maybe I missed it. Are you charging by the minute or you're. [00:13:18] Speaker A: No, we don't charge by the. [00:13:19] Speaker B: It's by the month. [00:13:20] Speaker A: It's by the month and it's by the feature set. So for 50 bucks a month, this thing will answer your phone and take calls and take messages and send them to you. For 150 bucks a month, she'll send appointment links and do scheduling and transfer the call to you and do a warm transfer to make sure you want to take the. So it's like a functionality step up. [00:13:40] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:13:41] Speaker A: And then at 300 bucks a month, you can start to upload training files with pricing and your policies and everything else. A different thing. [00:13:47] Speaker B: Well, I think one of the most important things to do in a trial, you're fulfilling the promise. [00:13:53] Speaker C: Right. [00:13:53] Speaker B: And that's going to happen. Like I, I saw an offer, I clicked Through. I started a trial. And so table stakes are, you got to deliver that. But I think the other interesting. I mean, the other thing that makes good trials work is by creating needs. [00:14:07] Speaker A: Creating needs. Okay. [00:14:09] Speaker B: Creating needs. Like, what if there was a connection to your calendar? What would the world look like with that? And then they connect their calendar and it's like, now they need that. [00:14:17] Speaker C: Right. [00:14:17] Speaker B: Okay. So, you know, going back. Back. Backing out of the trial becomes a harder and harder thing to do because you've created more needs than even the one that they wedged to get them there in the first place. [00:14:30] Speaker A: I think we do a good job of that accidentally. [00:14:32] Speaker C: Okay. [00:14:33] Speaker A: So we. We reveal these premium features during the trial, and we allow people to use all the features during to decide what's right for them. I think the key need for us is as soon as you no longer are responsible for answering every phone call. That's the critical moment. So there are two critical moments when you call the agent and you either overcome your skepticism or it doesn't deliver on that skepticism. Like, this is good enough for me to have. Answer the phone for me. And then when you launch and you have it actually pick up calls, that's the. That's the closer. [00:15:04] Speaker B: But the closer doesn't happen until I put a credit card down. [00:15:07] Speaker A: The credit card step happens in between the two. [00:15:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I know. Yeah. [00:15:10] Speaker A: So you overcome your skepticism for free. But then if you want to accept real calls from the outside world, that is where. That's an interesting point you bring up, where if it's seven days, then it's seven days. So getting the credit card on file is another topic that I have for today, which is just upping our marketing game in general. But let's stay focused on the trial for a sec. [00:15:33] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it sounds like that there's this moment that they're not going to go back from. That would be an insta buy. So why putting the paywall before that happens? I don't know. Just. [00:15:44] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:15:45] Speaker B: Drive by observation. [00:15:47] Speaker A: Yes. [00:15:48] Speaker B: Ten minutes into a podcast. [00:15:49] Speaker A: But it's amazing how complicated this stuff is around pricing when you actually get into it and you actually try to figure it out for your business. I have a lot of conversations with friends when another company changes their pricing or we just someone identify someone's pricing as interesting. And it's so easy to criticize. Oh, yeah, you could be like, why would they ever make this change? This is ridiculous. And then you go through the process inside your own company. You're like, this is so hard to do. It's so hard to get right. Yeah. So that's been live for two days. So we're going to give it some time before we consider making changes. But it's great to hear feedback around that. Well, if so, what you're really saying is the ideal is to allow that big moment to happen without a credit card on file and ask for it on the other side of that. So the testing is what we see right now is this critical thing, but more critical is the relief, effectively the outsource. The actual hiring of this new employee happens when Rosie picks up the phone. [00:16:52] Speaker C: Right. [00:16:52] Speaker A: Because we can get people to that as much as possible without a credit card. Just get as many people to that as possible. [00:16:58] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, do you, in your marketing, Are you saying, are you talking about the value metric? Are you saying Rosie costs 1/10 of a full time employee or full time person? Do you use like the replacement? [00:17:11] Speaker A: AI we don't do the replacement. We just kind of what we do, lead with the price. If you go to our homepage, H1 is, you know, starting 49 bucks a month. [00:17:19] Speaker B: But, but I mean, is it couched within like, you know, a cup of coffee a day or for the price of a cup, like the price of. [00:17:25] Speaker A: No, no. Do you, do you, you like that? Do you like the. [00:17:29] Speaker B: I've been thinking about that because I get that advice all the time and it's in a bunch of pricing books everywhere. And I, you know, I think about it around the value metric. Because you're saying the value metric is, is the agent itself. [00:17:41] Speaker C: Right. [00:17:41] Speaker B: It's not the minutes, it's the age. The minutes is the commodity and the, the value metric is the agent. [00:17:46] Speaker A: That's right. What we really want to put forward is stop missing opportunities just because you can't answer the phone. [00:17:52] Speaker C: Right? Right. [00:17:53] Speaker B: Yeah. So. So full time, 247 opportunities, coverage. [00:17:57] Speaker A: Right. No more. Answer the phone whenever you want. Roy's gonna do it 24 7. Or you can answer the calls. It's kind of like that is up to you. But it's unacceptable to send people's voicemail. [00:18:06] Speaker C: Right. [00:18:07] Speaker A: Those are just missed opportunities. Don't do that to yourself. [00:18:09] Speaker B: So in terms of like the story arc which we talked about in like our last call, like the hero of the story is this person who's running a, an H Vac business or something like that. [00:18:19] Speaker C: Right. [00:18:19] Speaker B: And they're running around doing the actual work and maybe they have somebody in the office answering calls, maybe they don't. And it's a problem for them. The problem they're trying to overcome is missed opportunities. Is that the, like, the biggest pain point for them? [00:18:31] Speaker A: That's the biggest pain point. [00:18:32] Speaker B: That's the heron higher problem. It's like, okay, I'm missing work. [00:18:36] Speaker A: It's that. But you cannot discount the emotional impact and psychological impact on that person that this relieves. [00:18:43] Speaker B: Yes. [00:18:44] Speaker A: So. So right next to that is a Twitter post I saw from this guy Jared that I follow, who started a striping business. So, like, parking lot striping. [00:18:52] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:18:52] Speaker A: And he posted last week a picture of his wife holding his baby at the zoo. And he said, I'm at the zoo with my wife and kid. It's Saturday. And I've answered the phone three times so far. And I look forward to. I look forward to not being the one answering the phone. [00:19:06] Speaker C: Right. [00:19:07] Speaker A: But for now, this is what I got to do. Right. So I immediately DM'd him, and I'm like, my man. That is why we built this. Literally. That's the. That's the emotional, sympathetic element of the software that. Don't. Don't do that to yourself, you know? But a lot of small business people are like, no, I have to. And so that is right next to not missing opportunities. Those are almost equal. It's almost like you lead with one, but you actually mean the other. [00:19:31] Speaker B: Well, well, in the. In the story parlance, we would say that, you know, our hero has this problem, and the problem has, like, a utilitarian dimension. [00:19:39] Speaker C: Right. [00:19:39] Speaker B: Like, I'm missing opportunities. I can trace that back to money. And it has an emotional component, which is like, oh, I'm. [00:19:46] Speaker A: You're stuck. You don't have any. Good choice. [00:19:48] Speaker B: Confident. I'm out of control. And I'm like, I'm trying to juggle a kid in a. In a phone call and a text message. And then it has, like, the. The philosophical component, which is, why is it like this? Like, there should be a way to. For me to solve this. And so then Rosie come. [00:20:03] Speaker A: Obi Wan Rosie. [00:20:06] Speaker B: And Rosie comes, and here's the plan, and then, you know, here's what your life looks like with Rosie, and here's what it looks like without Rosie. And so I think, like, coming back full circle, like, the job of the trial is to put both of those things in front of their face and get a conversion that way. [00:20:23] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, look, the truth is, so far, so good in many ways. I don't know how you experienced the turn from summer to fall, but as soon as September hit, everything got better in the business. [00:20:34] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:20:34] Speaker B: I mean, everything got more energized. And active than people. Okay, Yeah, I would say that for sure. [00:20:39] Speaker A: Well, let's turn over to you. What are you focused on middle of September? What are you working on now? What are the big initiatives? [00:20:46] Speaker B: Yeah, so. And we're in a, we're in a pricing, not a conundrum, but we're trying to work through how we do this. And you know, I think of the going back to the story, like the hero's journey for us is there's a, a person who's a rising digital team leader. They might lead a team or they might lead a team of teams at some sort of knowledge organization, maybe an engineering org or a product org or something like that. And they are being squeezed by executives on, on, on the top, like hey, you got to do more with less because we're not hiring any more people. That's the way the world is right now. And make AI work, whatever that means. And they've got pressure from the bottom, from the people they're supposed to manage because it still takes humans and human knowledge and judgment to do most things in a knowledge based environment. And the other big thing with this Persona is they always want to stay in control of their story. [00:21:33] Speaker C: Right. [00:21:34] Speaker B: Because when you are, all you're doing in a knowledge organization in a management position is kind of telling stories. You, you are telling a story about what's happening on your team to the managers, to topper management up and stakeholders. And you're also telling a story to your contributors about vision and where we're going and what we're building and all of that. And I mean story, not in a live way. I mean a story could just be fully transparent mission, vision, strategy. But you want to be in control of that. And I think what's happening is there's a lot of press around. We don't need middle managers anymore, which I think is entirely false. And there's a lot of press around like, well, you just need a dashboard. You don't need a story anymore. And the problem with that is like if my stakeholder is just looking at a dashboard of KPIs, they're never getting the context in the story and I never have that opportunity to shape. [00:22:22] Speaker A: Yeah. Recipe for. [00:22:23] Speaker B: So there's a lot of skepticism around AI's role in that. [00:22:27] Speaker C: Right. [00:22:27] Speaker B: Because, oh, wait a sec, am I going to implement this thing and then, or this tool or this AI solution or this agent and then lose control of my story? And everybody sort of feels that. I think contributors feel it and then this management Persona feels so that so that's, that's the Persona and the problem they're facing on top of all of that is that 53% of our time is just spent on work about work. [00:22:50] Speaker C: Right. [00:22:50] Speaker B: And that's not my, I think I've said this before to you, like that's not my opinion, that's facts from peer reviewed studies from Asana and Lassian. And so we're in this coordination overhead hell trying to, with meetings. And I'm tapping Jordan, I'm saying, Jordan, what's the story on what's happening here? And so that overcoming that problem is what we're trying to solve with Steady. So this, our hero has a problem and what Steady is doing is our agents are basically an AI co pilot for teamwork. And so they are taking that, all of that coordination work about work off the plate of the managers and contributors work for them and then leaving all of the room for actual human teamwork and judgment calls and all the proactive thinking instead of reactive thinking and all the things that make a peak performing and a high performing team. So that's a big idea and a big thing. And so, you know, thinking about how you price that and thinking about our roots in our product, which with our previous product, which is called Status Hero, which was a virtual stand up replacement tool which solved a very narrow bit of that problem. And now we're saying we're an AI copilot for teamwork, like how is that priced, how is that marketed, how do we talk about it? And so we think a lot about that. But one of the conclusions that we've drawn over the last few months is that a user based value metric is not the right thing. Because what we're doing is we're empowering teamwork and we're the outcome for our customers are high performing teams. [00:24:21] Speaker C: Right. [00:24:22] Speaker B: And who are performing at peak performance. So that's the value metric. How do we price around that? [00:24:27] Speaker A: Right. Not necessarily linked to how many people are on your team. [00:24:30] Speaker B: That's right. And also the per user pricing misaligns incentives because it's like, okay, well I mean steady gets more valuable the more people use it. And we're like, as soon as you put somebody on, we're going to hit you with a true up or we're going to okay, your credit card's gonna get hit or whatever it is. So we wanna disincentivize people from adding people to a team. I mean, you know, we'll have guardrails and stuff because you know, it starts to get not as useful. And you cram too many people on a team. But the nice thing there is that because the way steady spreads within an organization is team to team, because you have a team, we solve the problem for the team. And then there's always organizations across team dependency. [00:25:12] Speaker A: Okay. [00:25:12] Speaker B: Steady will solve, too. And so I called Jordan. I'm like, we, you know, we. We have this. I have this dependency. You got to use steady, too. And that, you know, you. Then you get the benefit spreads. [00:25:22] Speaker A: So do you go toward per team pricing instead of per person pricing? [00:25:25] Speaker C: That's right. [00:25:26] Speaker B: So we're thinking about per team pricing and then we're thinking about pilots versus trials. [00:25:31] Speaker A: So I want to back up for just a sec. If I think of previous experiences around. Well, let's go focus on pricing now. Yeah. As a team, it usually comes out of either optimizing, meaning the pricing is working, but we're either not charging enough or not quite charging at the right way. I think that was Carthook's problem. We were charging 300 bucks a month, and then we were watching people go from doing $500,000 in revenue with our product to 750 to a million to 2 million a month. And we were not participating in that, even though we had an enormous impact on that. [00:26:10] Speaker C: Yes. [00:26:11] Speaker A: So we realigned, we optimized, and we said, let's add on a transaction fee and justify it by taking fewer people on being able to focus on fewer people and crushing it for them, and then we participate in the upside with them. And people were okay with that because we did a great job for them. We actually raised the price from 300 to 500 bucks a month. We required a demo. So we were serious about, we're going to work with fewer people, and anyone that's too small or doesn't like it can go work with a competitor that's working with thousands of people. And that's their model. [00:26:41] Speaker B: Right. [00:26:41] Speaker A: Okay. I think about that as an optimization. [00:26:43] Speaker C: Yep. [00:26:44] Speaker A: At Rally, we needed a pricing fix. We had the pricing wrong and people were not buying and the price was not helping in that situation because it wasn't right for the way they thought of their checkout. They thought of it as like this technical purchase, the same way they thought about their front end or their landing page software or their ERP model. [00:27:08] Speaker B: Was it per checkout transaction or something? Or was it. What was the. [00:27:11] Speaker A: We went in thinking it was going to be something similar to Cardhook. And what we realized was that's not how people want to buy, because enterprise customers don't Want to know that we don't know how much the price is. It depends. They needed to just know. I'd rather just pay you 100 grand for the year and just know it's 100 grand. Then I get approval for it and I'm done. So we had the pricing wrong. What you're doing now, does it feel like you are fixing pricing that's wrong or are you optimizing to better align or better monetize? [00:27:39] Speaker B: Yeah, two things. I, I do think we're fixing pricing that's wrong. Okay. Because again, we are optimizing on the, you know, we want steady to spread within an org. We never sell like a thousand seat steady contract out of the gate. It's never happened. It's always spread team by team and we've always done an MSA or something like that and it's got a true up in it. And then, you know, retention and expansion has been the name of the game. That's how we grow within these accounts. So we're optimizing against the problem that you're talking about. A procurement person is like, well wait a sec, now I'm getting this thing every quarter, this true up thing. At the beginning of the year you told me it was going to be X. [00:28:16] Speaker C: Right. [00:28:17] Speaker B: I got to try and sell bigger at the beginning of the year. But like, you know, the, the, the business sponsor is not ready for that. They're like, I don't know if this is going to work yet. So we're trying it with these three teams. And so going team by team means that we're able to kind of eliminate that problem. Because predictable. It's like, okay, well every team that you know, it's, it's, we're still going to expand but the, the, the sponsor is, is our champion at the team level. And so the budgets are coming from them and you know, at the end of the day we're trying to, trying to find that, you know, this for that thing that we talked about before. Steady is cheaper than buying lunch for your team every week or something like that. Like I don't know what it is, the price of a cup of coffee a day or something, but. [00:28:57] Speaker A: Right. You're trying to hold up, look how big of a problem this is and how inexpensive it is to improve that problem, solve that problem. [00:29:05] Speaker C: Right. [00:29:05] Speaker B: But I will say that I think the way we're looking at this now is a transition. So I didn't mention this before, but one of the things we're thinking very hard about is and in a lot of our renewals and enterprise conversations. We produce scorecards and we talk about the before and after and we talk about roi. Now ROI is a very tough thing to measure sometimes across all these different industries. We're not focused on very specific niche because we're solving for velocity and productivity eliminating meetings. So that problem we're solving for work quality because teamwork and predictive results results in first time write rates being better. So there's some core quality metric that's usually industry specific. Yeah. [00:29:48] Speaker A: And you can show usage and adoption. Right. That's almost like the negative, the pain version of it. Do you want to rip this out when everyone's using it and used to it and likes it? [00:29:58] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:29:59] Speaker B: Yeah. So productivity quality and engagement of team members, that's another thing we're solving for, which is squishy too, which is kind of like a key people retention rate kind of thing. [00:30:10] Speaker A: Okay. I love how much better your vocabulary is around this than mine because you think about it and have to deal. [00:30:16] Speaker B: With it, but it's still a complex sale and it's still like. And so when I think about self serve and studies, root and self serve and trials and copilots and how to get people to wrap their heads around the value we're, we're creating and I think there's a thing we're doing in the meantime which is to focus on the team value metric and price around it and talk about pilots per team and things like that. But I think in the future where we want to go is somewhere in like the Kyle Poyer like outcome based pricing world. Now that's like a very hand wavy thing right now. And I think a lot of people are failing at it right now. So I don't want to jump the gun on that. But we are building things. We're building the notion of a coordination score. So that's kind of like puts a wrapper around productivity, quality, engagement of your employees and so, so and showing the before and after like you said. So it's okay. So we did an intake assessment. We assigned your coordination score. By the way, this is a thing that's approved by, I don't know, the Project Management Institute or something like that. We'll find some third party credibility there and make it transparent. I mean it's a thing, it's not not hand wavy. So showing that improvement and then connecting that with the, the buyer to roi, I think is, is the key to outcome based pricing. But, but then, I don't know, then what, what is the levers? I mean I, I Think your point is a good one. That no matter what you're doing, when you're selling to these bigger businesses, and probably small businesses too, they, they need predictability in, in the pricing. [00:31:44] Speaker C: Right. [00:31:44] Speaker B: Like it depends. Another reason we didn't like minutes way to do it. And I think we're seeing that all over the place right now with, you know, the backlash with Claude and credits and, and all that stuff. And it feels like a rug pull kind of. It's like, well, wait a sec, I thought I was, I thought I was unlimited and I'm now right. [00:32:00] Speaker A: If you're going to subsidize my Uber rides, do it for a few years, not for six months. [00:32:04] Speaker C: I know, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:32:07] Speaker B: Subsidize my vibe. Coding. [00:32:10] Speaker A: Yes. So it sounds like you're. The challenge is aligning multiple things. How people think of it, how they buy and get approval, how you price it, how that aligns with the value they're providing and then how you can align with proving the value but still being able to expand. [00:32:26] Speaker C: Right. [00:32:27] Speaker A: Yeah. That's why the stuff gets complicated because it's so many factors and you can't leave out. It's, it's like a battle plan. You are going to confront the enemy at some point. You can't, it, you can't just make it in a lab exactly the way you want because then you got to go out and get someone to say yes. [00:32:44] Speaker C: Right. [00:32:45] Speaker A: And that's the actual feedback you need. [00:32:47] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:32:48] Speaker B: And no, you need somebody to say no too, right? [00:32:51] Speaker A: Yeah. No, can't do that. Yes. [00:32:54] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I will say like, there's no better superpower than co creating this stuff with your customers. And so that's been a real, A really great thing for us is just thinking about these problems and then, you know, I'm lucky enough to have relationships with all of these people and I can slack them or pick up the phone and, and ask them. [00:33:13] Speaker A: It's a huge advantage. I think that's something you do exceptionally well is develop those healthy relationships with your customers. I feel like most companies have a pretty cold relationship with their customers and it's really the, you know, top 10%, whatever, small slice of companies that have these very healthy open conversations. I think we have a pretty good version of it for a self serve company that doesn't talk and doesn't do demos and doesn't build up relationships before closing the sale. [00:33:43] Speaker C: Right. [00:33:43] Speaker A: And I'm not 100% sure why that is, but I know every time we send out a survey, we get like 15% of our customer base responding, which is a lot higher, much higher than I ever, ever experienced with anything else. So I don't know if it's pmf, if it's need, if it is demographic. I don't know what it is exactly, but. But you seem to have that with larger customers that you really can ask very honest questions. [00:34:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. And I think that's probably from the. The bootstrapping roots, right? Like, you know, I did a thing and I built a thing and I had to get my first 100 customers and so that I had to talk to people and I, you know, did. I did that. You know, scaling up those relationships is obviously harder. I mean, I don't want to be. We want to be a much bigger business than we are right now. Right. [00:34:28] Speaker C: So. [00:34:29] Speaker B: But I, you know, I still think it's a great resource to have a customer advisory board and of sorts, and to lean on it all the time. It's a sampling at least, right? Even as you scale? [00:34:41] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. I guess with our model, with, you know, over a thousand customers, in many ways, support and customer success are the gateway to those insights because they have their hand on the pulse to a much greater extent than I do. So I regularly go to them and kind of defer. You are the expert on the current vibe and temperature. Where are people? What does this mean to people? How much does this come up? What about this feature? Should this be next? If I have made the decision to not be the type of CEO that does support and every weekend and knows everybody like I made that decision, then the only thing to do on the other side of that is to defer, at least to some extent. [00:35:27] Speaker B: So this is really interesting. Like now, I mean, now we're talking about, like, operations. Are you. Would you ever consider using agents for that? [00:35:36] Speaker A: We have, and we still do, but to a much lesser extent than we used to. Intercom drove me nuts with how much it cost. It was a strange experience. I like Intercom as a company. I like the founder. Very strange experience. As a user to pay 800 bucks a month and just look like I don't know how much it's going to be next month. I don't know what a real resolution, if it was a quality resolution or not. So it's very strange experience. So I think maybe that experience led us to being more aware of it and more attentive because it makes you constantly think, is this worth it? Because it's not 100 bucks a month, it's 800. And the next month it's 1100, then it's 400. What we found is that the majority of the either prospects that had not signed up yet, they just needed a little answer. They just needed a little tiny thing clarified and then they would sign up. And the agent wasn't great at that and people were better at that and that just led to more successful conversion. That's it. Straightforward. And then on the other end of it, the agent's really useful for like, how do I find information about this integration? Boom, here's the, here's the doc. [00:36:45] Speaker C: Right? [00:36:46] Speaker A: Really useful. But when it's like, can you help me figure out call forwarding with my Android? The agent's useless. And then the satisfaction that comes from a real person answering is so, so high that, that, that's the majority. So we have a full time support person and she just does an incredible job and makes everybody happy and churn goes down. So. [00:37:06] Speaker B: Okay, it's a differentiator too, right? I mean, because I think everybody's sort of trying to scale up with these, with the agents in these support settings. And as you're pointing out, it's kind of not a great customer experience in a lot of. [00:37:18] Speaker A: Yeah, it's, it's almost like a necessary customer experience if you're at such a big scale that you, you simply cannot hand and even if you do, it doesn't do a good job. So it's like, well, let's pay less and do a bad job as opposed to paying a lot and doing a bad job. [00:37:31] Speaker C: Right, right. [00:37:32] Speaker A: I want to ask you about, was it MIT that came out with a study recently? The guys in the all in podcast talked about it. The percentage of AI pilots that are failing in the enterprises. [00:37:44] Speaker B: Yes. [00:37:45] Speaker A: You mentioned that you're going toward pilot as opposed to trial. How are you dealing with that? I know that number was like dramatic. It was like 95% of pilots are failing. But it wasn't that big of a number of actual pilots. And it was like mega, mega companies. So I took it with a grain of salt. It wasn't like, oh my God, everything's failing. How are you dealing with adoption? [00:38:05] Speaker B: So there's a couple, a couple of things to unpack there. You know, there was a study that came out from gartner before the MIT study and it said, it said something like 40% of all agentic AI experiments are going to be failures in the next two years. [00:38:22] Speaker A: Okay. Which would be bad. But 95% is completely, completely different. [00:38:27] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think what they were also saying, and I Think the MIT study did this too. A lot of it is, I'll use the term agent washing. So there's not a great, there's not a great definition of what an agent is and what it isn't. [00:38:40] Speaker C: Right. [00:38:41] Speaker B: And so like we used to say agents for teamwork and now we're saying copilot for teamwork. And the reason for that is people kind of know what a copilot is. It's an AI assistant. It's something that does work. [00:38:53] Speaker A: Yes, that you work with you. [00:38:54] Speaker C: Right. [00:38:55] Speaker B: And copilot is an augmentation term. Agent is a replacement term. And like, okay, in our environment, they don't want to hear we're going to. Our hero doesn't want to hear that AI is going to take their job. [00:39:08] Speaker A: That doesn't sound good. Also doesn't sound realistic that it's going to succeed. [00:39:11] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that, that's too. And these are skeptical people. They don't think that. So talking, couching it as a copilot is one thing. So, so back to the agent washing and a lot of, you know, I think like HubSpot has like an agent, like agents.com or agents AI or something like that. And they're all basically like things you talk to. And that's maybe a slice of what an agent is, but a true agent, AI agent in my, in my opinion is software that's running in the background in your behalf. So the what, Rosie, is an agent like me popping up a chatgpt. That's not an agentic experience in my, in my opinion. But a lot of, a lot of experiments are couched that way. So. And I think that the MIT study could be correct in the ways that you slice the data. [00:39:53] Speaker C: Right? [00:39:53] Speaker B: Because there is not a developer on the planet right now who's not somehow playing with these AI tools to some extent, or making a call to an AI API to some extent, or trying to do some kind of rag thing and pass the context window or do a cool tool call or open up NCP or something. [00:40:14] Speaker A: Right? We're past the early adopter. Everyone's doing something with it. Unless you're, you know, I think we're. [00:40:19] Speaker B: Still very early adopting and figuring it out. And that's why 95% of them fail. Because like, okay, it's. Everything's an experiment. So when we talk about pilots in our sales conversation, we're not talking about like a, we don't couch as, as an experiment and we're talking about a pilot. We hardly ever use the term agent at all in a Sales con. I'm using it in fundraising. In the sales conversation. They don't care. They have a. This hair on fire problem. They need it solved. They've got the. I talked about our hero and the pressures they're facing. And the purpose of the pilot is to create a business case for our hero to take and buy the software. Okay, that's it. [00:40:56] Speaker A: And you use the word trial, you use the word pilot. What's the difference there? [00:41:00] Speaker B: The pilot is paid. [00:41:03] Speaker C: Okay. [00:41:04] Speaker A: Which I think is far preferable to either an unpaid pilot that no one has the motivation to get off the ground. And up until now you've positioned it as a trial. [00:41:15] Speaker C: Yes. [00:41:15] Speaker A: Like try the software for a while, then decide. And now you're saying that's not how we want you to think of it. We want you to get results like, well, what's the difference? [00:41:24] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. And by the way, we're trying to do like an unscalable thing right now too. Like, I think there's a lot of parts of our pilot that are manual right now that will be automated at some point. And the purpose of the pilots too is, is to shake out what those things are so that we can scale them. Like whatever emotions are happening in these pilots. The kickoff meeting, the, you know, the midpoint check in, the creation of the business case, how we handle, support, all the things that are happening, configuration, set up those kind of things. You know, there's a lot of automation to be had there, but we need to do them kind of manually at first, I think. [00:41:58] Speaker A: Do you then roll the price of the pilot into the annual. Right, that's. I feel like that's a great way to do it. Where it's low risk, it's not no risk. You are putting some skin in the game. And then there really isn't that much downside because you're not losing that money anyway. And I'm assuming you don't look at the revenue from the pilot as that meaningful. [00:42:22] Speaker B: That's right. We don't look at the revenue from the pilot as meaningful. It's there to align incentives. We've done it a couple ways. One is we roll it into the cost of the, of a team or we'll do a money back guarantee. So whatever we're trying, all we're trying to do is take risk off the table for them, but also get them to do the thing right. [00:42:39] Speaker A: But it's almost like just carving out the pathway that leads from your company all the way to accounts payable is so important. Just creating the first footsteps along that path that hopefully gets well trodden over the next few years. But just going through it the first time is so hard. [00:42:59] Speaker B: Yes. So I mean the pilot is actually the way we kind of price the pilot is. It's designed to fit on a credit card so you can get it done in the same way that you'd get a free trial one or the same way that we used to grow with Steady, which was the way Slack grew, which was kind of okay, there's a bunch of teams and there's a bunch of pilots and they're running steady and they're on a bunch of credit cards. [00:43:21] Speaker A: And they're using the cards that they're allowed to use under the budget. [00:43:24] Speaker B: Now we're, now we're, you know, begging for forgiveness rather than asking for permission. And I think that's the key to any enterprise sales. You got to get in there and it's got to, by the time the IT procurement people show up, they're papering a deal. They're not, they're not, they're just doing. [00:43:38] Speaker A: They'Re doing what their job is, which is sure, you want me to set up a payment for this company, tell me how much, send me the contract. [00:43:44] Speaker B: Yeah. And I, but I think the dream is that we crack the nut on this coordination score, which is really kind of like an outcome. Trace it back to roi, have a business case and then use that as the level. Like we're going to take your coordination score from 10 to 97 over the course of a six week pilot. And if we don't, you know, money back guaranteed, we'll risk off the table, whatever it is. [00:44:04] Speaker A: Right. [00:44:05] Speaker B: No action for everybody. But that's what we're going to do. And then, and the other thing we're doing is team by team referral. So you basically when you over those cross team dependencies, if you're not, if you're going through this sort of like rogue kind of like referral thing like instead of get, when you get the other team on, you're getting credits on your team. When the renewal time comes, you're like. [00:44:27] Speaker A: Incentivizing at the micro level, at the individual team level. [00:44:32] Speaker B: And then the other thing we're doing is we are giving away free teams, free executive teams or leadership teams. [00:44:39] Speaker A: Okay. [00:44:40] Speaker B: So because that's a common pattern with Steady is that, you know, there's four or five teams adopt it and then there's like some sort of leadership team that's not going to be using all the features of the software but they are a team. They're going to communicate in some little way. They want access to the rest of this incredible coordination data set that we've accumulated. [00:45:00] Speaker A: If you can win over that executive team, everything becomes easier. [00:45:03] Speaker B: Well, we give it to them for free because what they're doing is they're accessing the stories that are being told by the digital team leaders. Right. Because they're able to shape that within Steady and that's what they want. So it just aligns incentives all across the board to do that. And then we're not, you know, putting up a paywall in front of people getting results. [00:45:25] Speaker A: I hope people listening can hear between the lines on all this stuff that's necessary and all these things get built up over time and understanding. It's like, well, what's the, you know, the test? You put the dye inside of the veins and then you can take an X ray of it and see all the like. That's kind of what you need to figure out all these different patterns and all these individual motivations and map them out and address them. Otherwise you're leaving it to luck. [00:45:55] Speaker B: You are leaving to luck. You have to map it all out. And there's a journey that your customers are taking and they have different incentives, different kinds of customers, different incentives. And yeah, it's hard. It's. [00:46:05] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a different skill set. [00:46:07] Speaker B: I don't think I have the answers, by the way. You know, I'm just telling you what we're trying right now. [00:46:11] Speaker A: Right. We're catching you not at the beginning of the learning process. [00:46:15] Speaker C: Right. [00:46:16] Speaker A: And not in its fully formed calcified state. On here's how we do it. We're oracle. This is how we've been doing it. It's how we're going to continue to do it. Not there either, but somewhere between the two. [00:46:26] Speaker B: I think you're catching us at the point where we are injecting. Steady hasn't crossed the chasm yet. We are with early adopters and I think AI for teamwork, an AI copilot for teamwork is still like a brand new thing and we have to cross the chasm. And we haven't done that yet. And I don't think anybody has, by the way, in this space. Nobody has. I think there's big up and downs. And by the way, one of the nice things that we're doing is, which is great from a pure business perspective, is that our agents are running in the background. And so we don't care about latency that much. [00:47:04] Speaker C: Okay, Right. [00:47:05] Speaker B: So like A cursor or something is like a context window being shuffled back and forth in tokens all the time. And it's incredibly expensive. And that's why there's all these problems. Whereas we can kind of like stick with SaaS business metrics. And the way we're making our AI calls is not like just gobbling up our whole. All of our budget. So keep these margins. [00:47:24] Speaker A: So, yeah, that's. That's a difficult thing to deal with on. On top of just getting adoption. [00:47:29] Speaker B: That's right. So. So, yeah, So I think, yeah, we're. We're trying to figure it out. We're trying to figure out how to align incentives and price around value and, and hopefully price around outcomes. [00:47:40] Speaker A: It's such a. Such a big difference. The things I think about day to day. Right. Like what I would talk about next exists in a very different level of the Internet. It's kind of like one layer deep. Right. What you're talking about is there's a website up here that talks about your software, and what you're talking about is many layers below that. And in some ways, a lot of what I need to focus on is really right at the interaction layer on the web where people have a problem and they come across a screen that has words on it that talk about the problem, and then maybe they go a layer or two deep into your product and into your onboarding, but it doesn't go into a complex layer of people and incentives and roles and all that. I think I like this version better. I didn't enjoy the rally version of what you're doing. I think partly because I can't understand the corporate version of things. It's partly why I don't do well in it and haven't done well in it and really just had one year of experience with it and ran away. Like, this makes no sense. Even though they were paying me a crazy amount of money as a banker. You know what I mean? I still was like, I don't. I can't do this. I don't get it. [00:48:58] Speaker B: Well, I think there's. I was just going to say that I bet you there's mornings when we both wake up and wish we were doing it right. [00:49:05] Speaker A: For sure. For sure. Yeah. Some of it seems insane. [00:49:09] Speaker B: Like, like, like the payoff is like, oh, someone just wrote us $150,000 check. Awesome. You know? [00:49:15] Speaker A: Right. All the complexity you described leads into multiple years. You get to enjoy the personal relationships because you respect the people that you are working with. They're smart, they're Interesting people. It's just a. Yeah. [00:49:28] Speaker B: And sometimes I wake up, I'm like, oh, I wish I was just adjusting. Like, yes. You know, an onboarding. [00:49:33] Speaker A: Yes. Looking for quiz software like I did this week on how, you know, do you really need an AI agent to answer your phone? [00:49:40] Speaker B: I miss that a lot. I totally miss that. And yeah, and I'm definitely. This is. Yeah, you're. You're totally right. It's me. It's just a, it's just trade offs and we're both making them. That's okay. [00:49:51] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:49:52] Speaker B: I mean, I don't miss the days either though where like, you know, I'm getting nickeled and dimed on whether it's, you know, $3 a month or four or something. You know what I mean? [00:49:59] Speaker A: Like, yeah, I think I enjoy being a bit removed, a bit removed from the emotion around the sale. I think maybe that's, that's a big part of it because the, the conversations with larger customers and that process. You're pretty deeply engaged personally and emotionally and you're making the sale and are they going to say yes to me? Are they going to say no? We're going to have this call. I'm going to be nervous for it. It's going to, I'm going to feel amazing. Like all this stuff is very intertwined. [00:50:30] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:50:30] Speaker A: And I think I like the one step removed. Slightly colder. I'm a business person. I'm deploying capital and I'm this lever and that lever. And this feature is going to make people's lives better in this way. And we're listening to them, but it's, there's like a gap and if someone cancels, I'm like, damn, you know, there goes 50 bucks a month. That sucks. And when someone signs up, it is also muted. It's, oh, this is cool. I have never spoken to this person. They sign up for the software now they pay us 150 bucks a month the last six months straight. And every time I see them in support, they seem really happy. Isn't that cool? But I don't have like love and that connection. But I think the self serve thing is right for me at this moment where I, I want a little bit of distance. [00:51:13] Speaker B: I always found myself hard. It was hard to disconnect in any of the situations emotionally. Like Even with the $50 a month count cancels, I'm like, what the fuck did they cancel? Like, what's going. Why? They got a lot of value out of it. Like, what am I? [00:51:27] Speaker A: Yeah, you got offended. [00:51:29] Speaker B: Not offended, but Just like, why? You know why? What did I do wrong? How did I screw this up? Like, you know, Yeah, I think you're going to get the emotional swings no matter what. I think you just get better at dealing with them maybe. Like, I think that's kind of what you're talking about because I think in sales, too, you do enough enterprise sales, you're going to get plenty of no's and plenty of people who ghost you and all that. That's just part of it, right? [00:51:50] Speaker A: You're just looking at it as a funnel. [00:51:51] Speaker C: Right. [00:51:52] Speaker A: Here's the percentage of people in the funnel that are going to say yes. [00:51:54] Speaker B: Yeah, and you'll have great conversations and somebody won't call you back. And that's just kind of the way it is, you know? [00:51:59] Speaker A: As September hit and as things started to get better, I also started to have, like, my experience around focus also improved. And I am determined to get to up our marketing game, so to speak. I think we've been coasting a little bit on, I don't know, some combination of demand or product market fit or whatever, but we don't do enough. And oddly enough, you know where my inspiration came from. It came from SimpliSafe. Okay, so two things. First, I had this experience where I'm a mentor at Tiny seed at their SaaS institute, which is for companies who have gone through Tiny Seed that have hit over a million ARR and need, like a different set of conversations and a peer group that's dealing with similar things at that stage. So I'm a coach for that and it is an amazing experience. It's fun and I get to learn and I get to share. My most common thing is, Jordan, you got a lot of war stories, man. I'm like, I have gone through so much pain and messed up so many times that that's actually what I end up talking about a lot. Like, the. The victories and Successes are like 10%. The other 90% is like, oh, we tried that, and that didn't work at all. And here's how you got to set up your product process, because otherwise the engineers do this thing and. But one of the new students in the SAS Institute is a great marketer and he's been really inspiring for me. I've been getting, I think, more value out of the conversations than he has. [00:53:28] Speaker C: Right. [00:53:28] Speaker A: And what he made me realize is like, you're kind of at like, ground level on your marketing. Like, you have a good homepage and you run your ads to your homepage. You don't make any Offers, you don't have any funnels, you have no liquidating offer. Like the ability to collect money right at the time of sign up, you know you've got some email marketing in place. Yes, we do a lot of things right. We've got retargeting, but we're still like at level two out of five kind of thing. And that's been on my mind. And I'm in the market for a new alarm system for my house. I think my ADT sucks and the contract ran out and I'm like, I could go and get like a $10,000 really professionally done. And I'm like, I don't know if that's the right thing. And so I start looking around and I come across Simplisafe. And this is like a more modern like a ring ring type alarm system. But if you go to their site, they're marketers, man, they are good. As soon as you get to the site, boom. Offer 50% off, ends at midnight. Enter your email. And I start scrolling on the page and it's like, figure out which one's right for you. Then they have a little quiz software. House, apartment or a commercial. And I start going through that and I'm like, these guys got my email, they made me an offer, they called me, they're in my inbox every day. Like, and I just bought Simplisafe. I just bought it. Like I got marketed to properly. They created urgency. I'm like, what am I doing here? I gotta step it up. I've been talking about this for a few months, but how do we make an offer, right? I hesitate around, like discounting. I'm like, no, I'm doing it. So this whole week I've been like, quiz software. What offers are we making? What does the email campaign look like? How do we introduce it into the admin itself? Right, so you get to that page where we ask you for your credit card, what should we do there? Right there, where there's friction, do we say, you know, put your card on file in the next 24 hours and get X? So I'm like swimming in marketer mindset. What offers we want to make? What triggers do we need? What psychological elements do we need to introduce? What lower actions can we allow people to take on the website other than just signing up for a trial? Some of this feels very basic in many ways. We just didn't need it to get, you know, we're now well beyond a million ARR and we didn't need any of it. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. It's like if we want to get to 5 million ARR, we got to get better. So that's kind of where my focus is right now. [00:55:52] Speaker B: Why are you focused on this? That's my question. Like you sounds like you have the answer. You went to this awesome coaching group and there's a person there who knows this stuff cold. That you are learning from. [00:56:03] Speaker A: Yep. [00:56:03] Speaker B: Like isn't your job as the, as the founder and CEO to go find somebody that you're. That make this happen like that? I mean, why are you starting from scratch? [00:56:13] Speaker A: Right. Like knowing and, and wanting to address it as a priority is my job. [00:56:18] Speaker C: Right. [00:56:19] Speaker A: What I have found is the people who really know their stuff. Basically the. The info marketers, the people who sell courses. The. One of the conversations I had with Spencer, the. The student. [00:56:31] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:56:32] Speaker A: There are people who are really good at marketing and people who are really good at software and they rarely come together. [00:56:36] Speaker B: That's right. [00:56:36] Speaker A: Or forget people. There are companies that are really good at marketing and companies that are really good at software. [00:56:41] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:56:41] Speaker A: And every once in a while they come together and they click. I think of click funnels. Russell Brunson, unbelievably good marketer. He teamed up with someone, Todd, who's really good at software and that team. [00:56:51] Speaker B: Together, by the way. [00:56:52] Speaker A: Okay. Amazing. Just spectacular success. [00:56:54] Speaker B: Great, great company. [00:56:55] Speaker A: And I look around, if I'm being honest, we're much better at software than we are at marketing. And when you start to go look for the marketers, you can't just hire these people. The knowledge is there. And so I guess I've taken it upon myself to just start banging my head against the wall to figure it out. And I'm sure I will hire people, find people to augment and to help. But just identifying what we want to do as soon as possible and when we want to do it I think is my job. And some of this stuff is so attainable that I think I should lead by example and just work at night or during the day or whatever and say here's our first quiz and then hand it off to the team to put it onto the site. And I'm not writing the email campaign that comes after the offer on the website. But it is my job to identify. No, I want to experiment with this. I don't care about discounting. I want something on the site as soon as you get to the site. When you see an ad, act today, offer ends at midnight. Get 50% off your first month. [00:57:50] Speaker B: Okay. Well, so it sounds like you're making a concerted approach. Right. Like you're saying there's an overall strategy which is we need to up our marketing game. [00:57:58] Speaker A: Yeah. More marketing, more reach. [00:57:59] Speaker B: I mean, you probably have to, you probably need to think about the strategy a little bit more. Like, okay, what's the reach? What's the goal? What are the KPIs, all that. I'm sure you have that. And then it sounds like the, what you're doing and the things you're talking about are you're going to run some experiments to see what the tactics are that work to, to hit that strategy. And that's. I guess that's. That sounds like the right thing to do. I. All I'm saying is that, you know, I, I fall. [00:58:21] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:58:22] Speaker B: Don't be a bottleneck victim to this all the time. Like, I just want to. I just do stuff, you know, and like, okay, well, maybe I shouldn't just be doing stuff. [00:58:29] Speaker A: Yeah. I, maybe I do default to not doing the stuff myself. And maybe on this one, for some reason, my gut just says lead by example. Just don't talk about it. Just, just go, go, go. Just start. Start doing stuff. [00:58:40] Speaker B: Yeah, Well, I think. Yeah, experimentation is the right thing to do at this stage because I don't think anybody's got it figured out, is what you're saying. Like, it's like it's kind of still the wild west for marketing this kind of thing, you know? [00:58:51] Speaker A: Yeah. I just think we should apply pretty traditional Internet market tactics to our software. And every time we've treated our audience and our prospects as consumers, we've done better when we run ads like, like they're a consumer, so. Right. They're B2B, but they're small companies and this feels like more of the same. [00:59:15] Speaker C: Okay. [00:59:16] Speaker A: You know, do the things that. That triggers. That triggered me to give SimpliSafe my email address. Do that. [00:59:23] Speaker C: Do that. [00:59:23] Speaker B: Yeah, Yeah, I understand. I wonder about the partnerships too. It sounds like there's stuff to do there. Like, you know, there's. I'm running my H VAC business. I've got my agent to answer the phones. I've got my truck coordination software, whatever it is. I've got my, you know. [00:59:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I do see that as, as next. So we worked on the agent quality for a while. Then we improved onboarding. Then we changed the trial, we change pricing. I feel like now we up the marketing game to just have more entry points and more offers, and then the next thing after that is integrations and. [00:59:58] Speaker B: Partnerships and Are you focused at all on, like, specific use cases of Rosie? Like I said, H Vac or something like that, or you just are SMB. [01:00:07] Speaker A: It's still pretty wide, but we do see patterns, and those patterns are helping inform our thinking around partnerships and integrations. And we sent out a survey about what scheduling and CRMs people use. We see a huge number of small law firms. So of course, that makes me look at the integrations around law firms. So we're, you know, a little combination of leading and also following what our customer base is already doing and who they are. Yeah. So combination. [01:00:37] Speaker B: Cool. Sounds fun. [01:00:39] Speaker A: Henry, thank you very much for joining. That's it, everybody. Thanks for listening. [01:00:42] Speaker B: Thanks. [01:00:46] Speaker C: SA.