It’s a Tyler episode

In this episode, we dive deep into Less Annoying CRM’s new marketing strategy.

What is Startup to Last?

Two founders talk about how to build software businesses that are meant to last. Each episode includes a deep dive into a different topic related to starting, growing, and sustaining a healthy business.

Rick (00:00.715)
What's up this week, Tyler?

Tyler (00:02.274)
Yo, Rick, I got a lot, I got a lot to talk about today. Yeah.

Rick (00:04.809)
All right. Woo. Well, I can start with like a quick update on my coding journey. Cause like I actually did use Claude coding and it is really, really cool. Like I basically am rebuilding my personal website and I'm doing it all through a chat interface. And I have a GitHub account now that's pushing to Versal. Is it Versal or Versal? Versal. And it is such a better design and loading and AEO SEO like

Tyler (00:22.2)
Nice.

Tyler (00:26.018)
I think Vercell, I think.

Rick (00:34.057)
I cannot wait to push it live. I'm definitely like going through a lot of QA right now. You're all redirect stuff, but like it is crazy. how quickly you can move to a real website that is so much better looking, so much more valuable. with like in the, in the time, so, so little time, I can't believe it. So I'm blown away. The way I'm structuring this is basically I'm gonna do my website first, move it to Ver, Vercell, push it live. And then I'm going to connect, build an app.

Tyler (00:49.368)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler (00:55.118)
Yeah.

Rick (01:03.989)
that connects Vercel to my notion publishing so that I can basically push new it right now, like the, my articles and notes are Markdown files that I can just drop into a folder. The next step, once I get this all live is I'm going to replace the Mark, Markdown drop, drop manual drop with a notion integration that basically pushes the Markdown file in.

Tyler (01:13.592)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler (01:23.598)
Okay, it'll still, at the end of the day, it's going to be Markdown files. Do you know, like a crazy thing about using clog code is you might not even know the answer to this, even though you built this website. Is it reading the Markdown files in real time? if I'm a user and I go to ricklinquist.com and click on a blog post, is it pulling in the Markdown file in the moment or is it like compiling them to HTML before that?

Rick (01:48.236)
I believe it's compiling to HTML before it. I need to confirm that, but that is my understanding, because I've been very strict about like, hey, this needs to be good SEO. Like I can't have SEO constraints here. So I believe Versel is doing that as part of its job.

Tyler (02:05.166)
Cool. That's great. I've been like saying for, yeah, you did. Good job. Are you in flow state? Are you like, this is awesome. I guess, are you doing chores? Are you eating your vegetables here or is this just fun?

Rick (02:07.105)
Yep. So are you impressed? I made progress. Thank you.

Rick (02:25.527)
I've wanted to do this, improve my website for a long time. The amount of effort required to to move it to web flow manually, like it's a week long project, like maybe even longer. I, I don't have that. So like, I was able to do this in a few hours of work. Like, yeah, I guess I'm having fun and eating my vegetables, but maybe this isn't like the most important vegetable. Maybe it's like,

Tyler (02:53.646)
But like, you wanna, are you like, I have a free moment, gotta pull up Claude, I can't wait, or, yeah, okay.

Rick (03:00.853)
Yes. Yes. It's always open now. I'm like, the next, like, I'm at the point now where I'm starting to think through a URL redirects for going live. And it's like, I need to stop and like actually find a couple hours to where I can actually think through that. Like it's ready to go live. Like, I have copy editing to do on like it made, it made the, some of the language choices it made on some of the homepage. Like it doesn't, it's not me. So I just got to edit that, but

Tyler (03:10.542)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler (03:25.08)
Sure.

Rick (03:30.293)
Yeah, it's very addicting.

Tyler (03:30.646)
Yeah, even that doesn't have to block you from shipping necessarily. I get, it's your personal website.

Rick (03:39.063)
It doesn't, it doesn't, but like it's like, it's like, I'd like it to be reflective of my brand and personality versus AI slop and slop. It's just like ego.

Tyler (03:48.303)
That is the worst part. When you're just like, can push this button and it'll build something for me. The language is definitely the part that you just can't accept.

Rick (03:58.966)
Yeah, and it's like Rick ego. It's like, I am the best, most thoughtful person in the world.

Tyler (04:04.014)
I mean, why have a personal site if it's not you?

Rick (04:08.351)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But like if I extrapolate this into like a larger coding journey, like what I love about this, thank you for pushing me to this is the solution. I did not know that it would take me down this path. I thought I would be building a CMS or something. I'm realizing, no, I don't need a CMS. I can do this through cloud code. I can do this through editing markdown files on my computer. I can do this by connecting notion as a next step. And then I'm going to replace convert kit as I'm going to build my own email newsletter.

So I stopped paying convert kit 50 bucks a month and that's going to be my coding journey for the for the next little bit

Tyler (04:37.602)
Nice. Yeah.

Tyler (04:44.118)
Awesome. I like it. One of the things that has kind of been a recurring topic prior to you starting this is like the word Claude is very confusing right now because one person means Claude web chat and one person means Claude cowork and another person means Claude code. What are your thoughts on now that you've experienced it like Claude code versus Claude chat?

Rick (05:08.785)
the, just like, I think what, what code helps a non coder experience is all the things that need to happen on the desktop in order to produce. Programs, computer programs that, that, that provide value of any kind, or websites or any, any like. Think like useful artifact. And I don't think that is apparent until you like.

You can do a lot with the chat app from a non like desktop perspective. Here's an example use case. Sometimes like in my, you know, at windfall, like people will have like lists of companies they want to go after and they'll like paste it into Slack. I'm like, Hey, I found this list on this website. I now have a bot like from Claude that I literally point Claude at that bot and then Claude through the web chat, not, not on my computer goes and connects to Salesforce and HubSpot.

Tyler (05:41.784)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (06:05.227)
finds what those companies, puts them in a table, finds the companies that don't exist in Salesforce, puts them in a table, links them to the Zoom info listing page, and pushes a Slack message back to that person. That is a very useful thing in the web chat. Very, very useful. But that doesn't like barely scratch the surface of what it can do on your computer for you. And so that's the unlock I think that you're talking about. I still don't quite see

Tyler (06:20.694)
Mm-hmm. yeah.

Rick (06:34.091)
I don't do much on my computer for myself, tech, like for myself, everything's web. I do open browsers and go do things like order groceries, but like I don't really use my computer. all in the web.

Tyler (06:47.502)
Well, I think that's a big question on a lot of people's minds is like, does this mean we should shift everything? You don't use your computer because for the last 15 years, it's been more powerful to do stuff in the cloud. Is that going to shift back or, you know, there's no reason you couldn't, they actually have cloud code in the cloud or whatever. I've tried it's useful for some things, but not as good. I wonder if this is just a temporary blip where for right now running it on your computer on your local files is the way to do it.

but eventually we're going to get back to everything being web based or is this like a whole new shift and we should start moving all our notes, all our, just like start using real files again.

Rick (07:26.027)
Yeah, I don't know. And I, I think there's probably some middle path hybrid where it's like, I feel like all of my files are synced to get through get to GitHub. Now, like, it's not like they're not on the web, right? Like, there's what is the I guess the question I would ask is like, why haven't we already solved this problem coding wise? Like, why are we still working on a local dev system and storing

Tyler (07:40.386)
Yeah.

Rick (07:51.521)
files on our computer versus this all being web based? Like that's the question, I guess. I don't know the answer to that.

Tyler (07:55.107)
Yeah. And there are a lot of people who like SSH into a different machine and do their development there, but it's not, think the people who are kind of a desktop local file purists and have been for this whole time, but they would say is, well, the problem with all these web systems is they're too limited. Like, yes, they're very powerful in some ways. They're really easy to use, really to get set up. can, you don't have to sync data. There's a lot of convenience factor, but if you want to actually control what you're doing,

Notion, like yeah, Notion is super powerful. Doesn't give you as much control as a Microsoft Access database does. And when you're coding, you need all that control. Whereas when you're taking notes, I think you can say, you know, yeah, Notion leaves some things to be desired. I wish I could change the line height or whatever, but it's fine. And it's like, I'll take all the conveniences of it being web-based and deal with the limitations. But you're not going to do that when you're building custom code.

But yeah, I guess there's no reason you couldn't have that same type of environment in Vercell.

Rick (08:58.647)
What's the advantage though? don't understand, I guess, why have that? It's faster.

Tyler (09:02.776)
Well, because every company wants to be a walled garden and they want you to use their API instead of giving you direct access to everything. There's also like security and permission stuff. you can't, unless knowing CRM, if a customer was like, hey, I would like to be able to do database queries directly. I don't want to have to go through your API. I'd be like, no, that's a security nightmare. Absolutely not.

Rick (09:23.127)
So there's security considerations, there's processing, like cost considerations, there's speed considerations, like it seems like that's what, yeah, lock in.

Tyler (09:31.886)
And there's lock in, think. think that's just a good business decision to be like, no, this, are not just a dumb, like there's no margin in it to just be a dumb server. The margin is like, we have this proprietary system that is really good in some ways, but also you have to pay. I don't know. I'm just.

Rick (09:50.813)
I mean, do you ever see a world in which like the local machine is not needed?

Tyler (09:56.717)
Yeah, maybe I, I, I, I've been a big web booster my whole professional life. I, back in, want to this, think it was at Zane benefits days, like 2008 or so I actually built an online code editor that would like automatically push to a host and it worked. The problem was it only worked for me, right? And like every developer has their own weird little workflow and this version of PHP and this version of my SQL and a million other tools like this have come up, come out.

through the years where it's like you can code online, it'll put it on the server, all this stuff. But then it's like, well, if you want something a little bit, well, I need a queue, I need a load balancer. Well, our system doesn't have that. And then ultimately you move off to a generic kind of commodity server and do it yourself.

Rick (10:42.295)
Well, I guess like kind of coming back to code and co-work, like the reason that it's so effective is the speed at which it can manipulate files on your computer versus go through APIs to hit a web system is the differentiator, right? Like, and the accuracy of doing so. It works where there's all sorts of things that have to go right on a web-based system for it to work. And that's why like even these

queries I'm doing across HubSpot, Salesforce with the web chat. Like sometimes it doesn't work because the call, like the API is down. One of the 15 APIs that called to make that thing done is down or overloaded, or it wasn't quite right. So I'm going to go try it again, you know, and so it's costly.

Tyler (11:26.658)
Yeah, that's definitely a big part of it. Yeah, okay. I've got more than we're to be able to cover today. It's been a month since we talked and I had a whole set of things to talk about. Then this last week, I went off on a different tangent, so I'm going to do the more recent one first. First off, someone on Blue Sky requested an update on the Form Builder. Perfect timing. It's been about a year, not since it launched, but since we actually got analytics for it.

Rick (11:29.143)
All right, tell me what you're up to.

Tyler (11:56.717)
logging traffic somewhat correctly and stuff like that. So I have almost exactly a year's worth of data here. So just thought I'd give an update on that. So as a reminder for people, this is like a Google Form style form builder that we built into Lesson on CRM. And we built it with the hope of getting viral growth from it. Not like real viral, but there's a powered by link. People fill out a form. They see powered by Lesson on CRM, click on it, and eventually sign up for CRM.

Rick (12:02.824)
I'd love this update.

Tyler (12:24.876)
The actual signup path is not expected to be that linear where they literally fill out a form, click the link and then go sign up immediately. It's more of a brand recognition thing. They see our name and then eventually come back. So mostly it's not measurable. If someone signed up, what is measurable is how many people are filling out forms. So that's kind of been our metric that we look at. about a year ago when we started, when we kind of shipped this analytics, internal analytics thing for this, we were getting about

700 form submissions per week. We're doing this weekly. And that was after, I think, think forms launched about six months before that. So about six months in, we were at about 700 forms submissions per week. And that was after a big push to like all of our 25,000 current users. were emailing them. We were mentioning it in the newsletter. We were saying, go use forms. We were like, we will migrate it from whatever other system you're using for free. Like.

going as hard after it as we could. And then we kind of hit diminishing returns on that effort. And so we stopped pushing it as hard, but especially new users signing up, start using forms and it's grown since then. So I haven't said what the update is, but any questions about the setting the stage there? Yeah, so basically I'm looking at my little spreadsheet of like a chart showing form submissions each week.

Rick (13:40.673)
Nope. Nope.

Tyler (13:51.713)
It's just been a very, very linear growth this whole time. Aside from the holidays, no one uses business software on Christmas, but aside from that, it's just like up and to the right and more or less has doubled. We're at about 1500 submissions per week right now. So a little more than doubled. Yeah.

Rick (14:07.927)
per week?

Tyler (14:12.046)
Now, you could also look at form views, by the way, like someone seeing a form versus filling it out. That number is we've had 15 million views since over the last year. think 95 % of that's probably bots and stuff. So that's why I'm not looking at views. You can filter out a lot of it, but you're still left, like the orders of magnitude are so off. It's like, even if you filter out 90 % of bots, it still might be the case that the majority of your traffic is bots.

Rick (14:26.517)
Is there a way to filter that?

Tyler (14:42.19)
So I don't want to rely on that, but the form submissions, we have like Google Captcha, the invisible ones, and no one has to like click on the Captcha, but I think it pretty reliably filters out bots from submitting the form. So I feel pretty good that these 1,500 are real submissions. So yeah, now.

Rick (15:00.663)
That makes sense. But but brand impressions is a good like other metric to here, but I guess you could probably just back into like, I'm gonna assume X percent is is bought and like, we're gonna basically assume, like some impressions perform that are real. Which which is cool.

Tyler (15:05.953)
Yikes.

Tyler (15:16.59)
Yeah, exactly. Now, so it a little more than doubled in the last year. I don't think the takeaway here is it's going to double every year. It's not going to go from 1500 to 3000 to 6000 to 12,000. I think it's going to go from, if this pace continues, it would go from 1500 to 2200 to 2900. Like we're on pace to add 700 submissions a year, not to double every year.

Rick (15:40.759)
per year, per month.

Tyler (15:41.966)
Uh, per year in one year, went from 700 to 1500 per week. And sorry, there's like a lot of denominators going on here.

Rick (15:47.96)
Okay. All right. so, so basically you think that this will double again next year or you'll think it'll like grow 50 % 50 % or so. Okay. That makes sense. Is that is that if you don't do anything different, that's just like you do nothing.

Tyler (15:54.767)
I think it'll go up by another 700. Yeah, 50%. Yeah.

Tyler (16:04.204)
Yeah. And we're not, we're not really pushing it now. mean, we're, we're using it anytime we need to survey customers internally. We use our own tool. it's pretty prominent in onboarding. Like when we're go the initial onboarding video, which is just a couple of minutes. Skips a million of our features, but it's like, go, go use forms. but we're not like running ad campaigns or anything like that for forms. the basic conclusion a year ago was these numbers aren't big enough to be a real.

meaningful marketing channel, at least not... We can just sit back and wait, but the effort we were putting in was not moving the needle enough. And even at our current growth rate, I think we probably need to be 10x this size before it's really a real channel. Yeah.

Rick (16:48.043)
This is going to be impactful. Do you, couple of questions, like is there a significant, is most of your growth coming from new users who are discovering the forum during onboarding or is this spread out pretty evenly across the user base?

Tyler (17:00.782)
I think it's mostly new users, which is to say the first 700, the 700 that we already had a year ago when we started measuring this, those were existing users that we got on board. But then we kind of picked all the low-hanging fruit. Like I'm sure there are still gradually some of those old users coming online, but mostly the ones that were going to use it already started using it, I think.

Rick (17:23.211)
And have you experimented with marketing forms like AdWords and trying to bring people in at a reasonable cost per conversion?

Tyler (17:33.665)
Yeah, we did back a year ago and pretty much decided it's a no. It's a much more indirect sale. Like if someone's looking for a CRM, we're a CRM. If someone's looking for a form builder, they have to also want a CRM. But so it's not like a big win. We've decided not to go. The next version of this, if we were like, this is amazing. How do we do more of it? We would be building a, like a Calendly style scheduling tool. We've decided not to do that for now, but

Rick (17:37.803)
not worth it's not worth it.

Rick (17:46.741)
Yeah. Okay.

Tyler (18:02.466)
I do think that probably 10 years from now, forms will be a nice cherry on top of whatever other growth channels we have.

Rick (18:10.871)
Makes sense. do you you anticipate like, I guess what sort of customer feedback are you getting from the users of this? Are you getting a steady sort of, hey, I need this feature or I'm having this bug or like any sort of negative or positive feedback from the usage?

Tyler (18:27.896)
question. The main thing we get is people want to take off the powered by link and we're like, well, that's the whole reason we built this. No, there's a million other form tools out there if you want that. So we just say no to that.

Rick (18:38.079)
Yeah. Why don't you say, yeah, it's 20 bucks more a month.

Tyler (18:42.764)
We've toyed with that. volume is too small for like, okay, now we're making a hundred bucks a month from those five people. not worth it. We, that's the most common thing we hear, but it's not like we're hearing it a ton.

Rick (18:53.343)
Are they going to another form builder as a result of you telling them no? Okay.

Tyler (18:56.908)
Mostly no. And yeah, that could come eventually. don't know. I kind of like our simple pricing right now though. And then, yeah, know, every once in someone has, they're like, can you do this? Can you do that? And our answer is, just go use another. Like form builders are the easiest thing to connect via Zapier or API. Like it's not a back and forth sync. It's just a very direct.

push this submission into the CRM, it's really easy to set up a Zapier. So it's a pretty easy thing for us to just be like, we don't have the appetite to keep making it better. And 95 % of people are just like, great. I did customer interviews when we first launched it, and I was hoping to get all these insights, and I learned nothing because everyone just set it up. And I was like, any thoughts? And they were like, what do mean? I have a form. What kind of feedback could I possibly have?

Which I think is feedback that it's doing its job pretty well. but very simple, of course. Yeah, for sure. and then one more thing. So the next topic I'm going to bring up is going to be very like metrics. Like I went down a deep marketing analytics rabbit hole with Claude. Part of that was related to forms. So I'll just share that part right now. so we, even though I said like,

Rick (19:58.2)
Yeah, I agree. I agree. Keep letting it run. Let it ride.

Tyler (20:20.278)
We don't expect very many people to directly click through powered by and then in that same session sign up such that we can attribute it to forms. But there are a few. And I had a query, like I just run this database query every once in while to see how many and it was showing like five to 10 paying users over the last year coming from the source. But then I realized A, we have a number of bugs with our attribution, like our analytics for how we're tracking this and B, setting aside the logging of it, the query I was using to get it back out.

also had a bug in it. And I went through this every time I go into analytics, it's such a roller coaster because the first thing that happens is I was like, no, the number's not 10. The number's a hundred. have a hundred paying users over the last year, which even that's not a huge number, except this is only capturing a fraction of it, right? All the people who see our brand and then Google us later, they're not getting captured by this. A hundred would be a lot. And that would make me think, great. We've got something real on our hands.

Rick (20:51.066)
yeah.

Tyler (21:18.542)
Then I dove into it and so it was like a 25 user account, a 15 user account, like a few bigger accounts that made up most of this. What had happened is they signed up for a live demo, meaning they don't have to sign up, enter their email, they're just using like a test account while they're evaluating us. They made it their own form and then filled out that demo form and then signed up right after that. So like of these...

Rick (21:40.983)
So you're cutting, it was a loop of them using it and referring themselves basically.

Tyler (21:46.775)
Yeah, exactly. Obviously, now that I know that's a flow, our analytics can block that from counting as a conversion. So for a moment there, was like, I don't know. I think I'm saying 20 is probably the real number, which is not nothing. Again, how many more has it generated that aren't counted there? I don't know. But yeah, that means if we could get 10 times as many submissions, would that be 10 times as many conversions? Possibly.

Rick (21:54.699)
What's the actual number?

Rick (21:59.992)
Cool.

Rick (22:06.327)
You

Rick (22:15.991)
Well, regardless of like new leads, like it's clear that the form testing is helping you close and convert trials to paid.

Tyler (22:24.29)
Yeah, yeah. It is, it's a little tempting to go build the scheduler, but it's a bigger project that probably has less virality, is my guess.

Rick (22:36.673)
There are so many, there are some, like Google has scheduling links now. It's like what, yeah.

Tyler (22:41.868)
Yeah. Well, no, yeah, no one would sign up for us because we have the best scheduler, but it just gets our brand. Every person who like we already have 25,000 people, you know, 1 % of which would use it. Yeah. It wouldn't even be that, but yeah. Yeah, exactly. and our customers want it. Like the, the bigger surprise about all this form stuff than everything I just said is it ends up being one of those features that you're on the phone with a customer and you're like, man, how did we get any customers before we had this?

Rick (22:52.311)
If 7,000 people use them, yeah, 7,000 people use it, it's worth it. Yeah.

Tyler (23:12.042)
It comes up all the time in demo calls and stuff like that.

Tyler (23:18.226)
all right, maybe I'll move into the marketing stats deep dive here.

Rick (23:23.211)
All right, is this more Claude Analytics?

Tyler (23:25.59)
Yes, there's a, Eunice, our marketer and I are working on kind of figuring, she like wrapped up our new homepage. Go to www.lessonknowingserum.com. Enjoy what she vibe coded there.

Rick (23:38.763)
Did she vibe code it and is it on Webflow?

Tyler (23:41.662)
Yeah, it is. It was not fun getting it on Webflow, it was she vibed coded as like a standalone HTML, CSS, JavaScript page, and then had to convert that into a Webflow site manually.

Rick (23:43.073)
Okay.

Rick (23:54.69)
Can I just like rabbit hole this for a second? So like, do you think Webflow is worth investing in or should you just have a vibe coded website?

Tyler (23:57.006)
Yeah, sure.

Tyler (24:04.078)
I would not start with, like if we weren't already in Webflow, I would not sign up for it today. But I don't think this is, it's like a hundred, I think we pay 150 bucks a month, which for a business our size is not much. And it would just be a huge project to move off of Webflow. You know, we have thousands of CMS items in there.

Rick (24:22.113)
So high level, she built a new website using cloud code or something. And then she worked with cloud code to convert it into webflow.

Tyler (24:29.634)
Yeah, so she has to make all the blocks, the HTML elements are made in Webflow. And then she's giving Claude that URL. And then it's like, can you make the CSS work with the HTML that Webflow generated to make it look like this other site? It involves quite a bit of trial and error, but yeah, I think it worked well enough.

Rick (24:49.803)
Yes, if it works, like it's just basically figuring out how to take the custom site and make it publish in Webflow format. But like then it's like, okay, well, what's the advantage of being on Webflow? Is this because you're on it?

Tyler (25:00.46)
Yeah, it's just because we're on it. The main thing is like the CMS. If this was just 10 random pages, like static HTML pages, yeah, we would have just migrated off. But we do have other people on the team that contribute to the blog. The whole reason you use Webflow instead of coding your own thing even before AI, yeah. So Webflow still, again, I wouldn't migrate to it, but I don't think it's worth migrating off of it. That's my agreed.

Rick (25:18.871)
Collaboration.

Rick (25:26.807)
Thanks for indulging me, thank you.

Tyler (25:29.996)
Sure, I'm right, by the way. We'll move off it eventually. I would hate to be Webflow right now. Okay, so now Eunice's time is freed up because that's done. What's going to happen next? I'll kind of go into more in just a minute, assuming this next segment doesn't take up all our time. But to prepare for that, I just kind of did a deep dive with Claude because it can write really complex SQL queries that it would take me a long time to figure it out.

Rick (25:31.115)
Yeah. Yep.

Tyler (25:58.637)
It can do it very quickly. So I just had this back and forth kind of let's run some queries and figure out more about our product. What are the trends looking like this and that? It was a long, I spent multiple full days on this. I don't even remember the bulk of what was covered because, but, I can talk about kind of what the takeaways were. The biggest one is that, so I've said for

five-ish years on this podcast that were plateaued. And we are, as in what I mean by that is the number of current paying users has basically not changed in five years, aside from a little churn when we raised prices, but that's to be expected. Here's what actually happened. We were growing nicely. In 2020, we raised prices from 10 to $15 per user per month for new users. That significantly hurt

two things. First off, the number of new free trials signing up and second off, the conversion rate from trial to paid. Very attributable that those two things both got worse like right when the price increase kicked in. And then we've just been plateaued since then. Basically our growth rate dropped to exactly canceling out churn and we've just stayed the same. But what it helped me realize, what Claude helped me realize is what's actually happened since then

Rick (27:10.347)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler (27:27.298)
We've always had two, like most of our traffic has always been what we call unattributed or organic, which is just someone comes to our site. We don't know where they came from. We don't know. We don't know. They just come to our site. They sign up, they pay. And then there's all these like attributable channels, like forms we were just talking about advertising being the biggest one historically affiliates, various things like that at our P.

Rick (27:51.48)
I like this language. I like this attributable versus unattributable. Like I'm following. I really like, I like how you're bucketing this.

Tyler (27:56.815)
Okay, great. Okay, some interesting things we learned. So at our peak growth, two thirds of our new signups were unattributable and one third were attributable. Now, 85 % is unattributable.

So the percentage of all our new signups is skewed much more heavily towards unattributable.

Rick (28:19.201)
So you're attributing.

Rick (28:24.085)
And so your attributed channels are not converting as well as they used to with the price increase since the price increase fundamentally.

Tyler (28:30.764)
Yeah, it's less conversion and more total volume. don't, the price increase led to an immediate downturn, but they've been getting worse and worse and worse since then. think just due to normal competition at Google AdWords way more expensive, Capterra CPC way more expensive. Everything's getting more expensive. Everything's performing worse. There's more competition. So basically all of those channels suck now. What that means though, so that sounds bad, but the good thing about this is that means for us to have stayed

steady while all of our attributable channels have basically died, they've almost gone to zero. You can infer the next part. That means the unattributable stuff has been growing steadily. And if you look at the chart, like prior to the price increase, our whole history from 2010 all the way to 2020, it was going up and up and up at a certain slope, very steady, very consistent acceleration. Then we took a hit.

The slope of the line since then is basically exactly what it was before.

Rick (29:35.393)
So just, yeah, you basically just lost a source of traffic and you're basically regrowing from this new base. Cool. So you're growing.

Tyler (29:40.323)
Yeah. So we're growing kind of. The thing is like the stuff that's going to zero, it can't go below zero. Right? So obviously it'd be nice to have both. It'd be nice to have advertising and affiliates and unattributable going, but eventually that other stuff will die. And if the trend keeps up, we should start growing in the next year or two is basically what the numbers say.

Rick (29:49.772)
Yeah, yeah.

Rick (30:04.713)
Is there, okay, so this, I assume you have this on the list of things to talk about, like, there, are there attributed attributable channels that you should be exploring that you aren't exploring today? That's one question. And then the natural other question is why is unattributable growing and can you affect it?

Tyler (30:21.068)
Mm-hmm. Right. I'm gonna start by answering that second one in part, and then if I forget to get to the other stuff, bring it up again. So what is unattributable? That's obvious, I mean, who knows? That's the whole thing. But I was like, hey, Claude, can we figure this out? And it kinda did, more or less. So you can't, I'll just skip to the end. The answer is it's people doing branded searches on Google. That's all of it.

It's people typing less annoying CRM into Google and then going to our web page. There's a separate question of why. Yeah, basically. Well, yeah, so like.

Rick (30:54.647)
So you need to buy billboards. So that's what you're saying. ads, billboards, like magazine ads.

Tyler (31:03.862)
Yeah. So yeah, what is that? So why does someone Google less knowing serum? It's either direct word of mouth, like my friend told me to do this, or it's just general brand. Like I get, I heard about you somehow, right? That's the, we can't directly connect that. We've surveyed some customers and stuff, but.

love this. Like I've always felt like advertising and stuff like that. It's always felt rented. It's always felt like we're in someone else's property. We don't have any, it's not real. It's just how much money can we pump in and can we use weird marketing shenanigans better than someone else? Whereas this type of thing feels much more substantial and much more defensible as like people love us. And that leads to more people hearing about us eventually.

Rick (31:48.824)
Yep. And don't stop. Don't get in the way of that. Like at the end of the day, protect that. Is there a way to accelerate it?

Tyler (31:50.663)
yeah.

Tyler (31:59.053)
Yeah. Well, so, and you said earlier, is there one of these other channels we should be exploring? So the next question for me was is like, okay, with everything I just shared, is the takeaway from that great, we've got this base that's kind of growing automatically. Let's go try and find another channel to supplement it like we had in the past, or is it now we have a better sense of what actually is this base of traffic? How can we accelerate it? Which of those two feels more right to you?

Rick (32:25.579)
I, I would say that you've got a large target audience for brand recognition that probably don't you don't have brand recognition with. And that can be accomplished more efficiently than ever before. And that would probably be where I'd try to focus and just like bet on that. I'd bet the whole company on my like one that this will continue to grow as long as we keep sticking to the basic core principles of our business. And then I would

spend all I would probably redirect as much marketing money, money and growth and budget to expanding brand recognition with our target audience as I possibly could.

Tyler (33:06.04)
Yeah. Okay, this is, so I fully agree, but here's, there's one thing you said, like pull all the money away from the other stuff. What's hard to know is, is that other stuff leading to some of the brand recognition already?

Rick (33:17.751)
Yeah, that's a good point. Well, you could turn it off and find out.

Tyler (33:21.646)
Kind of, but it takes so long. And I do think in the past, we've done this like in 2015 to 2020 era, we would be like, there's like, we're spending this money on this thing. There's no, we can't attribute any benefit to it. And then we turn it off and years later, we were like, I think maybe.

Rick (33:22.485)
Yeah. Yeah.

Rick (33:36.35)
that, you know, you're right. You're right. so like, okay, maybe, maybe don't mess with the channels that are, that are sustainable. and, but I do think there's this whole other thing of like running lots of experiments to try to figure out how to increase the unattributable, which could be spending more on paid ads, and attributable channels. could be, spending more on like, I mean, I'm just thinking like, if you had, if you picked a geographical area,

Tyler (33:49.645)
Yeah.

Tyler (33:58.393)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (34:05.877)
or an industry like some segment. And you said, we're just gonna blow this thing out of the water in terms of brand recognition tactics for six months. And we're gonna track like our volume from that industry or that segment, unattributable. And you just have like basically a, what do you call it? Like a suppression. You do like basically cohort analysis to say, how much like do we assume based on the lift? Like lift analysis is basically what you would do. And if it works, you repeat it.

Tyler (34:05.922)
Yeah. Okay.

Tyler (34:35.628)
Love that. That's exactly what I'm thinking as well. Let me put some language to what you just said for like why, and it is the concept of the S-curve, right? Which is the idea that when you're trying to, when you're thinking about how easy is it to get the next marginal customer, when you're really small and you have no presence at all, each customer is really hard to win because no one's ever heard of you, you're starting from scratch. The more market presence you get, the easier each incremental customer gets because you've already got some momentum with them.

until eventually you've started saturating the market and then it starts getting harder and harder because you've like each incremental customer is probably a worse fit for you because you've already got the good fits. This is a we've talked about the S curve before I feel like right.

Rick (35:17.067)
Yep. Yep. Yep. If I toes, got to self self reinvent, self disrupt.

Tyler (35:20.736)
Yeah. So the reason going after a niche, like you're suggesting makes sense is because if we say our target audience is all 20 million small businesses in America, you have to get a ton of customers before you start moving up the S curve. But if you narrow it down and choose a smaller market, you can move further up the S curve faster and start getting the benefits of scale.

Rick (35:42.091)
Yep, and you also know that it works faster so that you can repeat it on a different micro curve for lack of a better word.

Tyler (35:48.279)
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so this is the plan. Eunice and have a big meeting tomorrow to finalize this. So what I'm going to talk about now is basically both of us went off and did our own Claude brainstorming to put a marketing strategy together. And then tomorrow we're to meet and merge the two together and see where it ends up. But the plan is to go after insurance agents. It is the biggest... So when someone signs up for less knowing serum, during the signup process, we ask them what industry you're in.

Insurance agent is the we have the most customers, but something I didn't realize until this marketing stats deep dive I just did the trial to paid conversion rate varies dramatically between industries. had never looked at this before. 45 % of insurance agents pay us after a free trial. Compare that to, for example, marketing agencies, it's 25%. Anyone that identifies as a tech company, it's 19%.

It's like pretty big differences in conversion rates between industries. So both it's the highest volume we've got and it's the highest conversion rate we've got. I think what this comes down to is there's not a lot of competition in that industry.

Rick (36:57.855)
is do you know what kind of insurance agents they are? Like, okay.

Tyler (37:00.31)
Yes. Good question. We're talking health primarily, independent health, and a lot of them sell Medicare supplemental and life as kind add-on products versus like we're not talking auto insurance or whatever. And I think we're primarily talking the type of insurance that your background is in, like why am I blanking on the term, but Obamacare, individual

Rick (37:29.047)
Obamacare, Marketplace, Marketplace and Medicare. Consumer, consumer focused agents.

Tyler (37:30.22)
Marketplace marketplace. Yes. Consumer selling selling. That's not 100 % of them, but most of our insurance customers. They're almost all in health and they're primarily selling to consumers, not to businesses. I got some answers as to why we don't get any other types of insurance and apparently like auto and other insurance categories. There's like agency management software that acts as a CRM, but for whatever reason, apparently health insurance doesn't really have that.

Rick (37:43.543)
Very interesting.

Rick (37:59.916)
We have there are lots of attempts at this. But like, like, for example, health trippa is an enrollment tool that's plays in Medicare plays in Obamacare. And they kind of have this but not really it's more on the quoting and enrollment. And then you're like, but like what, how do I track the opportunity? Like it falls short on the CRM side. Then there are CRM sides that like are very specific, like, like Agent cubed, or I think there was another one like, I can't remember what was called.

Tyler (38:04.046)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler (38:13.517)
Yeah, not really.

Tyler (38:18.914)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler (38:27.81)
Yeah, that's Agent Kibb did the main one that kept coming up. Yeah.

Rick (38:29.589)
Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, okay, well, now I have like very specific quotes and this sort of thing, but it doesn't integrate with my enrollment tools. And now it's really complicated. And it's like more than it's like, look at your more than a spreadsheet less than a CRM. It's like two, it's like for call centers, basically. So this independent agent is in the like no man's land.

Tyler (38:48.94)
Mm-hmm. So yeah, seems, you know, that could change obviously. There's a different type of competition here, which is not HubSpot comes along and beats us at this market. It's an AMS, I guess it's called, an agency management system comes along and makes it so they don't even need a CRM. So there's still competition, but it's less competitive than any of the other markets that I was exploring.

Rick (39:10.017)
That makes sense. This is great. I love this. This is a real marketing strategy. This is marketing. Yeah, it's great.

Tyler (39:11.862)
I'm excited. I know I'm pulling my head out of the Sandrick. so yeah, like, then the question is, okay, if we just say, so the kind of high level goal is going to look something like we want every, I'm not, I don't have this pitched down, but every like independent consumer health, like all the qualifiers we just talked about, we just want them all to know who we are. That's in a couple of years. That's basically the goal.

Rick (39:42.005)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Tyler (39:44.59)
So then the question is, how do you do it? And I've got like, again, a draft of a plan put together, but since you're in this space to some extent, you're much more on the like tech, you're more sophisticated than our typical customer, of course, but like, where would you start, do you think?

Rick (39:52.886)
Yeah.

Rick (40:00.395)
Well, I mean, the first thing you start is you try to get in the shoes of the insurance agent and you go, where are they spending their time, energy, money? Generally there's going be two things that are true. They're using existing tools that are tangential to the CRM and they have what's called a general agent or relationships with a master agent or an insurance company. like your, your top down distribution is either through insurance companies or their master journal agents. They could go downwards on. Yeah.

Tyler (40:27.064)
Can I pause you real quick there? So I've heard you say general agent before. Claude kept saying FMO.

Rick (40:32.981)
Yeah, field marketing organization, same thing. They're all the same thing.

Tyler (40:35.086)
If we're talking to a person about this and we don't want to look like a fool, is a general agent the better term to use or is FMO, yeah, what do think?

Rick (40:43.799)
I don't fully understand like why we've created these two terms. This I'm sure like, yeah, master general agent, just think of it as like multi-level marketing, like the field marketing organization, I think is designed to say, we're in GA, but we also do marketing for you and we will help you in the field. But it's all the same concept. I am a independent sort of partner of insurance companies. You come to me, I'll get you appointed with everything that you need to get appointed with.

Tyler (40:48.412)
and then there's S-G-A-M-G-A-N-M-O-N-M-A-I-M-O.

Tyler (41:01.336)
Mm.

Rick (41:11.639)
will help you grow your independent practice. And that way you don't have to deal with the insurance company, the insurance company doesn't have deal with you. We deal with the insurance company on behalf of all these insurance agents. And we handle your commissions. You get one commission check from us and we collect them all and do it all for the accounting. So like we help you with your licensing, we help you run this stuff. And one thing that they could say is, and we have a partnership with Less Annoying CRM to help you manage your customer book of business.

Tyler (41:39.704)
Yeah, so that's definitely where I would love to end up. We're probably going to take a swing at that now, but I think more realistically, we want to build up a little more credibility in the industry before I assume these organizations are getting pitched all the time by companies like us.

Rick (41:56.214)
Yeah. And so I would put that more like in the affiliate, like there's, there's sort of an affiliate play through GA's and like tangential tools, like what like, okay, most likely every insurance agent is paying for some tool to help manage their licensing, or software to, you know, do continuing education. So like, there's just like these

Tyler (41:59.695)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (42:20.279)
If you go through the journey of an insurance agent throughout the year, there are things that they are inevitably going to have to do. They are going to have to renew their insurance license. They're going to have to work with some sort of appointment process and renew those appointments. They're going to have to take continue education. They're most likely reading some sort of industry publication that you can market in. Anyway, that's how I would think about this. would go through, I'd map out their journey and I would say like, where are the places that we could pop up for them?

Tyler (42:41.774)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (42:48.401)
and be a memorable brand. They do attend conferences, but generally, I would say that the super independent people are not traveling across the country to go to these conferences. Those are more like bigger agencies than independent agents.

Tyler (43:04.942)
So this is one of the things that this is all consistent with what Claude is telling me. There are regional conferences though that get a lot more of the independent agents. we're definitely toying with the idea of going to, guess Minnesota has a conference that's kind of the main like, so sorry, yeah, there's a thing, N-A-B-I-P is like the main association of insurance agents, I guess.

Rick (43:30.423)
I think Nahoo National Association of Health Underwriters, I haven't looked at this in a long time, but

Tyler (43:33.748)
Okay. Okay. But like their conferences are like in Washington, DC and they're like policy and lobbying and stuff like that. That's not what we want. But then there's these kinds of smaller regional ones that are the actual attendees are just independent insurance agents. So we found a couple of those that we might consider. And then, yeah, you mentioned, yeah, trade publications, podcasts.

Rick (43:39.639)
Yeah, yeah.

Rick (43:50.328)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it would be it'd be like very like local, the local chapters of these large insurance agencies, those stations would be a great way to play. And generally, you can, you could probably do like a one like anyway, there's a lot of things you could do that are more that are both brand recognition, like ad space, conference sponsorships, booths, or it could be more like I'm gonna pay for you to sponsor a webinar for me that I'm going to talk about how to

properly store sensitive PII information and it will be eligible for continued education. Like these are the things you could do.

Tyler (44:25.794)
Yeah. Yeah. And we've never, we've gone to conferences before, but it's always been very transactional. It's like, we send someone, we give everyone a code, sign up with this code so we can track that you came from this conference. And then it's like, well, how many people signed up from this conference? Not enough. We're not going back. this idea of just like, let's put in a solid year of, so, so the, here, let me run through the quick plan. It's a lot of it's what you just said. It's first survey all our current insurance agents to try and confirm what I've said, just to make sure I'm not wrong.

Rick (44:48.353)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (44:55.809)
Validate, validate your hypothesis with survey.

Tyler (44:55.822)
Validate. Customer champion program. So find something like 10 of our insurance customers that love us and would like go to conferences with us, on a podcast, go speak, that type of thing. Case studies. And then it's like in-person events, sponsorships and ads on podcasts and industry publications, that type of thing.

Rick (45:08.631)
Case studies.

Tyler (45:20.93)
Building out a much more robust section of our website focused on health insurance agents, which would hopefully help with like chat GPT recommending us and stuff like that. And then the final thing is what you mentioned, like the parent organizations, the GAs and so on. Again, I think the more success we have with the first, the earlier things, the easier it's going to be to get, to go up to a parent organization and say, five of your agents are already using us. You want to, you want to talk about this. So.

Rick (45:49.441)
I love it.

Tyler (45:50.498)
We've never really done a real marketing campaign like this before. I'm excited.

Rick (45:54.945)
Yeah, we've talked about like segment verticalized ideas, but we like this full like, I'm going to try to juice unattributable signups from a segment over a long period of time and really commit to it like this vertical, I think it's a really good idea. It's really repeatable to across other verticals if you figure it out.

Tyler (46:12.302)
Cool, glad to hear that.

Right, if it works. I do need to keep in mind, this is probably the, like, it will work worse for every other vertical, probably. But just in the sense that this is our highest converting and our largest industry. But yes, I fully agree. And one of the reasons I feel like the luxury of having this patience is because again, that unattributed number, it's kind of going up on its own. So I don't want to count on that. It could stop at any moment, but I kind of like...

I think we've got a better business here than I realized. I think in a couple of years, our growth probably, it's going to be modest growth, but I think we are likely to start growing again. And this is just putting a little extra fuel on that fire as opposed to like, have to go figure out a channel that like from scratch, you know? So cool. I have more topics, but I don't think we have time. So anything, any closing thoughts?

Rick (47:03.511)
Totally get it.

Rick (47:10.271)
No, I have a great job. I look forward to continuing the conversation next in a couple of weeks.

Tyler (47:16.845)
Yeah, all right. Well, I will talk to you later. See you.

Rick (47:19.594)
See you later.