Todd Katcher is the Chief Product Officer at Digital Dealership System and founder of Zoney Digital Signage. He started out running a small network of ad screens in Nashville bars. A single conversation with a regular pointed him toward car dealerships, and that became a 12-year business serving thousands of dealerships.
In this episode, Kyle and Todd talk about how one conversation can change a company’s direction, and how Todd’s team builds its own tools when off-the-shelf software covers only 80% of what they need. That approach produced Zoney, Convert It, PriceAlerts, and an e-signature platform. Todd explains how he decides what to build, what to keep internal, and what to take to market, including why building their own CRM didn’t make the cut. They also take an honest look at AI: where it saves real time, where it still needs a critical human eye, and why managing expectations matters. The conversation closes on Todd’s biggest lesson: making the product is rarely the hard part. Getting people to buy it is.
Key Topics
- Moving from a bar ad network, where advertisers pay, to a dealership managed service, where the venue pays
- How one conversation or introduction can change an entrepreneur’s path
- The “80% solution” test: when to buy software, when to build it, and when to productize what you built
- Why Todd put building their own CRM on hold, and what a migration really costs
- Using AI across marketing, hiring, support, and “copy-and-paste” development as a non-coder
- AI hype vs. reality: dictation as a thinking tool, and why no single prompt gives you a finished product
- How AI is changing interfaces and speed to market more than the products themselves
- Go-to-market as the real challenge: “The best product doesn’t win”
Links from the Show:
What is Prodity: Product by Design?
Fascinating conversations with founders, leaders, and experts about product management, artificial intelligence (AI), user experience design, technology, and how we can create the best product experiences for users and our businesses.