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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.
00:00.00
tylerking
What up what up what up Rick I worked hard on that. But.
00:02.14
Rick
Oh that was a good one I liked that intro. Ah yeah, thank you? Um, not much. Ah, we just switched the time of the podcast and so now we are. We are kind of both not organized. Um because we're doing this recording. An hour early.
00:19.84
tylerking
Yeah, so we also don't have a full ah hour like we normally do. But we also don't have an hour's worth of content. It looks like so works out.
00:27.81
Rick
Cool. Um, yeah, so the main thing that I just wanted to update you on is we had a partner meeting a couple weeks ago at Legup Health um you were in that meeting with Jd and ah one of the takeaways we had was that. The biggest bottleneck jd is facing day-to-day is that he's having trouble conveying um the a the value proposition of of the software platform that you've built um, which we want to charge $20 per employee per month for to small businesses and fundamentally like what that. Platform promises to do is basically without group health insurance. Um, let lets a ah company offer health insurance by by helping employees get their own health insurance directly from insurance companies and we we have software and service. Basically that makes that attractive. Um, and so we we identified that that wasn't easy for for any of us to pitch um and we spent some time brainstorming it.
01:23.29
tylerking
Yeah, what? well and I think especially, it's not.. It's not that the value isn't clear that it's that legup Health also has a free individual like an individual can come sign up for leg up health and get really good concierge service for free. So I think like differentiating. Why pay the $20 if if they can just come to you directly and get it for free is that's what I heard one of the big challenges was.
01:49.26
Rick
Yeah, yeah, oftentimes what's happening is we're We're generating a lead through our consumer service which is a marketplace concierge Free marketplace concierge service where we become the agent make money as the agent and then they're like a business owner is like. Whoa This is great for me. Um I have 10 employees that I'd like to offer this to and we go great. It's $20 per employee per month and it's like what? yeah so we've got to we got to figure out how to tell a story there and and and set up. Um, why? why it makes sense to to pay for for.
02:13.86
tylerking
Um, yeah.
02:23.29
Rick
For more than just the free service. Um, and anyway like ah we we we made some good progress on that this week so I'm excited to see where where that what that turns into um and I also impromptu demode the software today. Ah I don't i.
02:26.27
tylerking
Um.
02:40.45
tylerking
Um, who just like you bumped into someone or.
02:43.80
Rick
A lunch call with someone to catch up with and he's someone that's in the space working with insurance agents and I literally just like logged in and started demoing the company platform. He's like oh this is great. Um, because why don't you sell this to agents.
02:53.83
tylerking
Um, not cool that part has crossed my mind.
03:02.43
Rick
Ah, so I didn't have a good answer for that other than what yeah, it would be distracting.
03:04.73
tylerking
Yeah I I Almost just said. Yeah, Why don't we sell it to agents then I was like wait. No, That's not what we're doing right now. But I it's something I'm struggling with working with you on leg up Health is like it. It would be so much fun to do a bunch of brainstorming and talk big picture and all that and. The only thing that needs to happen right? now is J D needs to go out and sell and and so it's probably yeah I could give the argument. Well let's also brainstorm so that we have a vision when the time comes, but it's kind of like even talking about it probably runs the risk of distracting J D Even if even if he's not in the conversation if he listens to this.
03:37.56
Rick
It's a distraction it is It is yep and it's a distraction for me to think about it. Um, and um, yeah, like it's I need to help him. You know, do.
03:42.89
tylerking
Here's the 2 of us talk about it. That's probably a distraction.
03:55.40
Rick
Like right now we've identified that ah making it easier for him to put a a strong pitch of this. We were you know, kind of funny thing that that I took away from the partner meeting is we were calling it. Ah the stipend program and like that was a big like positioning mistake because that's not actually what people want to.
04:07.80
tylerking
Yeah.
04:14.95
Rick
But we're we're charging money for um and ah and so yeah.
04:15.69
tylerking
Yeah, so kind of context for the listeners on what what you mean by that employers can say okay I'm not going to offer group insurance to my employees but I'll give them a stipend I'll give them and like a monthly allowance to to buy their own insurance and so we were saying like if they buy our software and use our services. They might also give a stipend. Hence it being called the stipend program. But again the same question. Why am I paying you for this because a lot of these employers are already. It's It's literally just like I'm adding it to payroll we we add no value to the stipend itself right.
04:44.11
Rick
But yeah, it's It's not about the stipend management at all and so the biggest change that we've made is just we're calling it. The non-group Health Insurance program. No, but it's but it but it's it forces a different perspective like.
04:52.29
tylerking
I Don't like that name either I Hope that's a a work in progress.
05:02.25
Rick
Talk track and explanation than the stipend program was forcing. Um, but anyway it's it'll it'll be interesting to see how that that evolves coming out of our meeting. Um, but I'm really enjoying this stage of the business and how we've got now that we've got this this because of J D's leadership.
05:04.57
tylerking
Yeah.
05:21.49
Rick
This daily outbound machine that generates meetings and opportunities predictably. We're now pitching and and and and because we're not talking about like how do we get meetings. We're talking about how do we close meetings and that's a much more interesting conversation to have than oh it's crickets.
05:33.84
tylerking
Um, yeah.
05:36.78
tylerking
I Feel like the theme like if if at the end of this year we have to say like what line from this podcast summarizes the theme and I feel like it's you can't optimize nothing from a few episodes ago that that since since we had that realization. It keeps coming up that it's like yeah if you're doing something.
05:48.22
Rick
Um.
05:56.60
tylerking
There's so much more energy. There's It's so much. It's so clear what to work on when you're trying something and it's failing as opposed to when you're planning something and but you haven't been able to tell what what works and what doesn't yet.
06:08.10
Rick
Exactly exactly. So um, yeah I we have I feel like ah you know, kind of update tears. We've we've got a sales coach for Jd that they're meeting. Ah I think they're doing 5 sessions over 6 or seven weeks um and that's leading to like. More discipline around pipeline management. Um, and and just ideas around outreach and then we're doing. We're doing our weekly marketing coach meeting with Garrett that's still like he's adding more he's he's kind of getting in into the groove too with our newer execution approach and um and helping out. So um, it's a.
06:41.70
tylerking
Um, yeah, awesome.
06:43.10
Rick
It feels like we're just getting better every week. Yeah I I don't have much other to else to say like and then you know that's cool. What's cool is like Tyler built the software like it was a no-code app that I cobbled together and and now all of our consumer customers use the app that tyler built um, and so we're almost getting a daily signup now. Um, yeah, you don't get those notifications I don't think I think it's too noisy for you but like we're getting referrals from ah cut from employers. Ah, people keep referred one.
07:03.74
tylerking
Um, early now. Yeah.
07:10.18
tylerking
That has nothing to do with the software though right like something else changed to cause more signups. Maybe it's because J D is doing all these calls and stuff I guess. Okay.
07:20.49
Rick
Yes, yes, yes and I also think he has more confidence in the software and knows that like hey if I I want to get people through this because um I know that I have someone who will help me improve it if they hit a roadblock um and so there's like this momentum building on on.
07:34.84
tylerking
Um.
07:38.25
Rick
Consumer synapse as well. So I feel really good about the business right now I'm scared about the open enrollment season. But um because it's just like so kind of like make it a break it. But um.
07:39.60
tylerking
Um, cool. That's awesome. Yeah, that's great.
07:50.30
tylerking
Yeah, yeah, that is definitely a challenge with the business that a month and a half out of the year is really all the matters. Um, so I've already mentioned this but the wheel like I mentioned the plan. But now we're actually starting to do it and that is.
07:57.41
Rick
Um, what's up on your on your end.
08:07.53
tylerking
Ah, in the past we've had basically 2 devops people um by devops I mean developers who work on infrastructure. Not who like not actually building our app and we have 6 software engineers or devs. Whatever you want to call them. Um, one of whom is still training. So really, we have 5 people who are like actually shipping code. Um and the devops team has just kind of operated in its own little bubble for a long time and I I don't really know why there's all these things where when you're in a company for long enough if you just like take a step back and look at how things are operating you realize like. Why in the hell did we set things up this way and so we did that with the devops team and realized a two out of h total people is that's overweighting devops like devops should not have 25% of our technical work going towards it. Um, and b. It just it. It didn't make any sense to separate them and to to spend so much time on devops. So basically we're merging the 2 teams together and like today literally today is kind of when we started changing like I made a bunch of you know, new meetings and started moving project management stuff from one notion board to another and I announced started announcing it to the team. So I'm filling a lot of energy here because. Um there's a lot of good stuff to come out of that and especially I'm looking at the team and I'm like we have 5 somewhat you know from between probably like junior and senior at level devs and we're about to have 3 more kind of in the next few months entering junior level ish.
09:38.77
tylerking
Like the team's about to get a lot bigger without us hiring anyone and I say three because we already hired this one Dev who's been training for like six months like learning to code because she was on the customer service team. We've got the 2 devops people coming over and also I'm spending time coding for the first time in a long time. So we're kind of adding like. Three and a half devs to a 5 person team.
09:57.80
Rick
Are we about to have our regular conversation around growth. Ah software priorities like are we about to talk about like appointment scheduling just teasing. Ah.
10:04.84
tylerking
What do you mean why? because we feel like I'm going in circles is that what's going on here. Um no I actually also I feel really good about our our. Dev priorities as well. Um, like a big part of moving the devops team into the dev team is like when you have 2 devops people you say? Okay, what are the best devops projects and you make up projects you're like I guess let's upgrade our database from mysql 5.7 to Mysql whatever and it's like. Is that really a priority for the company right now. No, but we had to make up devops projects now that they're kind of pulling into the bigger umbrella I get to be like oh I'm I get to pick. I get even more influence over what the priorities are and we get to move even faster and the things that are our top priorities. So I'm I'm really excited about this.
10:53.53
Rick
And can you recap what? the type paras are right now I think that one of them was like like like last episode we talked a little bit about how you were going to prioritize a pretty big project that wasn't the most impactful from a gross standpoint but doing it sets up something like.
11:10.19
tylerking
Yeah, so right now we're we're in the we're at the end of 2 big projects redoing our Api. Um, and ah the the redesign we already launched both of these but we kind of launched them half finished and so we're we're finishing them then we're doing what you just described. Bulk actions is the feature. Um, that is like far and away what our customers want the most like our product when customers like get a year in and everything goes to shit and they become unhappy. It's because we don't have this like their data is messed up basically because they you know when you when you sign up for a Crm you don't.
11:39.26
Rick
In.
11:47.18
tylerking
Necessarily know like which custom fields should I set up and should I make this ah should I put this on the contact record or the company record. Um, and basically it's just really is incredibly tedious to correct those types of things right now because you have to do it one at a time bulk actions will allow people to. All at once do certain actions which will the thing serum coaches hate dealing with is things that will be solved by this so. It's actually it's a great feature. The reason I say it's not a growth. Feature is nobody runs into this problem until they're already pretty deep into the crm. It's not something people encounter during their first month normally
12:25.74
Rick
Interesting and then what's the next set like what let's we get this done What like what is this? what I guess what I'm trying to get it is you've got your your you've got more dev resources than you've ever had. You're aligning those Dev resources. Ah.
12:27.16
tylerking
Um, yeah.
12:40.73
Rick
What is this going to turn it. What's going to what's this going to lead to from an Ar perspective.
12:41.78
tylerking
Yeah, it? Yeah um so the two the after that the 2 projects are forms which really forms as the whole that's the whole bet right now is that and it could be forms. It could be document signing. It could be ah. Invoicing but some kind of feature where if our customers use it they will put it in front of their customers. Our hope is that that that's not going to by itself like make us take off like a rocket ship but our hope is that we get some exposure from that and it supplements our other marketing efforts and gives us the boost from like. Mediocre growth to okay growth. That's what we're hoping for there. Um, and then we have another basically not all of our developers can contribute to that just because of skillset and expertise so we have another project that the ones who can't contribute to forms will be working on but it's less growth focused. Um.
13:31.10
Rick
Interesting cool. Yeah, that's I in on the invoices thing would you guys become the payment processor or would you outsource that to like a stripe. Oh yeah.
13:42.31
tylerking
I mean honestly I don't I think it's unlikely, we do invoicing partially be that it's a feature. It seems really simple and then what at one point we like dove into it and started planning it out and realized like there's a million little things like that. But ah.
13:56.91
tylerking
It's tough Stripe has a tool I Forget what they call it but we can basically like um provision customer accounts for stripe and like it's invisible to our customer that they're using Stripe but Stripe is doing it all does that make sense.
14:12.96
Rick
Um.
14:13.13
tylerking
Like we can tell our customer hey give us your bank account and we'll transfer the money into it but actually it's going into stripe. The problem is it's like it's it's it would be cheap to do this if our product was fifty bucks a month but it's like a couple dollars a month or something for each of these accounts and at our price point.
14:16.83
Rick
Yeah, it makes sense.
14:32.38
tylerking
It would be very difficult to make that that math work out. Um, yeah.
14:35.10
Rick
Yeah, interesting What about well I won't get into that I'm interested in this payment stuff because of of leg up. Um, so I'm I'm biased to you figuring out payments at less annoying. So so.
14:44.84
tylerking
Oh yeah I I did look at Stripe The same thing could let leg up health use it and the answer is no like it doesn't do what leg up health needs.
14:53.57
Rick
No yeah, what about the treasury like new treasury system that that we've talked about no from um, ah, federal the federal program. Do you know what? that's called fed now. Yeah is that real.
14:59.66
tylerking
From stripe oh the new. Ah, yeah, fed now fed now is that it. Yeah I guess it launched. So for anyone who hasn't heard of this well for anyone not in the us there's a thing called ach which is how most money moves in the Us. . ah it's very slow and complicated and I think it's from like the 80 s basically and then yeah, the federal government just put out fed now which is like a new version that I guess every other country on earth already has this which is like instant money transfers with no fees base or small enough fees that it's negligible.
15:32.60
Rick
So do do you think that we'll be able to leverage fed now for leg up at some point.
15:40.30
tylerking
My understanding of how it works is ah we would not so you know in the Us like nothing can be truly run by the government because that's socialism or whatever. So It's a protocol but banks integrate with it. We don't integrate with it and. My understanding is both sides of the transaction have to work with fed now. Um, so it's like the customers bank and our bank both use fed now instead of using ach. But I don't think we.
16:03.30
Rick
Um.
16:10.12
tylerking
Exactly I don't think we like connect directly to the federal government's payment system and can initiate a transaction that way. That's my understanding.
16:15.45
Rick
Um, so how do how does this work. How does this like proliferate.
16:19.70
tylerking
I Think that all like basically there are some partner banks that like launched with support but the hope is that more and more banks start supporting this to the customer. It will be invisible like if you use Venmo or cash app or whatever you're already transferring money. Nobody knows it's via ach they just think money is moving. It'll just move faster and nobody will know why I think it'll be completely abstracted away from the customer and yeah, the way the way we could use duwaa to move money via Ach I think we would still use a duwaa type service but it would just use fed now and it would be Instant. That's.
16:44.14
Rick
So there'll be some service that we can sign up for at some point.
16:55.52
Rick
Should we build that and like playing Jeff Bezos like should we build that four leg up and then license it.
16:57.41
tylerking
That's. Um, yeah.
17:07.73
tylerking
It might be worth looking into. Ah yeah I don't know what it's I think you might need to be a bank or sorry sorry you're saying yeah God There's so many levels here. There's like fed now and then the banks integrate with fed now and then duwaa integrates with all the banks.
17:13.19
Rick
Um.
17:21.72
tylerking
And then we integrate with dwaa I think that's the stack right now. Okay, so we wouldn't be the bank. We would just have to build a million integrations with the banks that exist that seems that seems like a challenge for a funded company to me. But yes I think so.
17:25.60
Rick
Um.
17:30.46
Rick
Really hard. Yeah, that's that's where venture Capital makes sense all right? Well never mind then.
17:42.70
tylerking
Um, but I I should probably take another look at it's been I last time I looked at it was before fed now actually launched. Um, yeah, it's so complicated I watched like a little screencast on it and there's like this flow chart with.
17:47.83
Rick
Yeah I can't make sense of the website I was looking at it while you're talking And yeah.
17:57.56
tylerking
There must have been forty things on it like first this you know the request goes from here to here and then it gets processed and then there has to be a handshake deal between both ends and then but but it was so complicated. Um, having said that though I do think like as as entrepreneurs, a nice. For people who don't have a business yet. A nice thing to do is to say like what is changing about the world and is is it like is now the right time to do something whereas a year ago wasn't and a year from now won't be and normally to time something right? It's really just like what's new and important. This seems important like it's not going to fail. It's the federal government's main payment system like it's going to work and someone's going to make money off of it I don't know how but it's probably worth looking into if someone's looking for a startup idea.
18:44.85
Rick
Yeah, that's fair.
18:49.65
tylerking
Um I don't I don't remember how we got here. But yeah or hey, right, right? right? Ah anyway I'm I'm very excited about the Dev team correct and.
18:54.46
Rick
We're talking about a Dev resources and invoices so team. What one one development team. No no devops team anymore.
19:05.72
tylerking
This won't matter for like if we were if our growth issues were a big like oh no, we're not going to survive. This is not the right approach to take because a we're building that bulk actions thing I talked about which is something can take a month or 2 probably once we can put all the devs on it but still. But then also these 3 new devs are going to have to like get trained up. It'll be months before they're really contributing meaningfully so in the short term nothing changes really but like six months from now I think the velocity on the dev team and is going to be a lot higher and they're going to be working on like really high impact growth projects. Ah. But it'll it'll be a while before we really start seeing anything there. Yeah yeah, yeah, and it you know I look back and I'm like man we should have done this two years ago like every single one of all 3 of these devs works at the company three years ago um
19:47.65
Rick
That's cool though. That's this this is good. Do this now before you have to.
19:59.67
Rick
Well.
20:03.29
tylerking
I Mean one of them is my brother. He's the co-founder. He's been here this whole time. Ah so it on the one hand I'm really excited I'm also kicking myself like why did it take us this long to do this? Yeah, the actual answer is it's because when we hired fair as the other devops person.
20:13.85
Rick
Hindsight is 2020
20:20.30
tylerking
When we hired the second devops person. The servers went down all the time we had like devops was our biggest problem at the time and hiring someone made sense then but we just devops has been under control for a couple years now and we never adjusted.
20:21.65
Rick
And.
20:33.13
Rick
It's it's it's interesting like I I do rev ops for um, my main my main job and a lot of the stuff that I fix like if I'm doing it right? doesn't It's more monitoring the job becomes more monitoring than like firefighting. Um, and so it's like what do you do.
20:44.81
tylerking
Um, yeah, yeah.
20:50.90
Rick
After that. Ah, and so it's interesting like but there is you in like monitoring. Um.
20:51.57
tylerking
Yeah, well this makes me one of my topics here is so you hear about big companies and like we all do an eye roll when we hear this of like oh it's a reorg and now I'm like. Holy shit. Is there like a ton of value to unlock from doing a reorg at a company because if you've got a company with a thousand employees and like you just said like okay we were putting out a bunch of fires we needed a big team but now all these people are in this department that could be a tenth the size that it is. You could just like create 50 new jobs out of thin air without increasing costs at all that sounds pretty powerful. Maybe I shouldn't roll my eyes so much when I hear about company reorgs.
21:32.81
Rick
Yeah, well I think most times Reorgan there's 2 types of reorgs. There's actual reorgs and then there's we just fired a bunch of people.
21:42.79
tylerking
Yeah, yeah, that's so I mean more that. So yeah, there's the layoffs I mean more like a very common thing is like a new Ceo comes in or a new executive and like they're part of the company shifts around or like I know on the on the product side. There's kind of an ongoing debate of. Do you say. Okay there's like a frontend team and a backend team and a devops team or do you say? Okay, this feature has its own team and they have frontend backend and devops there and like you you get a new leader a new cto and they switch to the other one and then you get another cto and they switch back. Um.
22:10.29
Rick
Prods. Yeah.
22:20.47
tylerking
I I Assume there's a tremendous amount of waste here. But maybe there's more value to unlock than I realized.
22:26.34
Rick
Yeah I mean a lot of times when a new Ceo gets hired. There's a reason that a new Ceo got hired and if you don't do a reorg like what are you doing because that's your main lever is like where people are deployed. Um and so um, but yeah, like the question does come up though.
22:36.73
tylerking
Yeah.
22:43.60
Rick
Is is should you do reorgs more often and is there another opportunity to do this? um at lessnoing crm. Even.
22:48.83
tylerking
Yeah again I think so we're not going to do what I'm about to say but like I've said before I like the exercise of if a private equity company came in what would they do and the answer is they'd lay off three quarters of the customer service team. But I'm not going to do layoffs. Obviously what. So if if you put that constraint on then then they'd say okay, well we're going to take three quarters of the customer service team and have them do something else I think that's the reorg that's sitting there but customer service would go to shit and I'm not interested in that. But yeah I think like if it was just let's design a company that.
23:18.20
Rick
Um.
23:25.10
tylerking
Is effective at lot like the most important things I don't think you'd pick ah 8 out of our 20 people being on the customer service team probably interesting. You say that so we I mean Alex we say he does biz dev but recently he's more sales than Biz Dev um
23:31.82
Rick
Wendy are you going to create a sales team.
23:43.77
tylerking
So he's basically full time on sales right now and then Ruth one of our serum coaches has been I talked about like the sand projects versus rocks projects with you. So basically when our customer service team is overstaffed. We are so.
23:51.76
Rick
In.
24:00.80
tylerking
Pre-booking as much time as we can for other projects so we only have the amount of time we need on customer service and 1 of those projects will be a sales one so one of our serum coaches is going to join Alex doing sales. But that's only going to be max one day a week. It's not It's not a team like you say I I don't think we can. Ah, we charge $15 a month. We can't make outbound sales work. So let me rephrase that we can't like scale. It profitably.
24:29.61
Rick
What's so cool though is that you have an online motion that works if you could just like pay people to drive more qualified traffic with like non-scalable outbound. Um activity either. That's through like referrals like do it like trying to replicate what. Alex has done over time and um, it seems like that would work even if it wasn't like Necessari necessarily quoted people like they could be you know just momentum builders by like kind of like gospel. You know, less knowing Serum Gospel ah speakers.
24:57.49
tylerking
Um, how would.
25:04.94
tylerking
Um, what do you like? Obviously you haven't put a real plan together here but like give me some example like specific examples because that's that's generic enough I'm having trouble I think picturing what you mean.
25:15.97
Rick
Um I don't know like you probably there's a bunch of tools around like built with like you know what built with this? Okay so built with is a ah scraping tool that basically goes and looks at people's websites and tries to ascertain what? what.
25:22.94
tylerking
No I don't.
25:33.67
tylerking
Um, okay, sorry yeah.
25:35.30
Rick
Ah, their tech stack is and so there's actually a lot of outbound sort of ah data that you could use to build a prospecting database for potential customers that you want to introduce thoughtfully to the less annoying Crn Brand not necessarily with like a cold pitch but like. You could invite them to events. Ah you could um offer free services. You could um, try to you know, just nurture them over time and and and help them. Um and and so like there's like it just seems like there's this like snowball opportunity with just like data like.
26:04.47
tylerking
Um, yeah.
26:13.55
Rick
Data like prospect database building that you just thoughtfully nurture over time and it's not sales I shouldn't say sales. But it's outbound. Yeah.
26:18.93
tylerking
Yeah, it's it's outbound marketing I Guess yeah, you're I'm sure you're right? this works It feels so icky.
26:31.19
Rick
It feels icky to tell people that they're that that there's another solution out there. Um, that might help them not be annoyed.
26:37.18
tylerking
Yeah, sorry I know I know we like to make up excuses for it to justify doing what we want to do but it's still annoying. Even if you're right? Even if every salesperson thinks their product is going to help the person they're calling and it's still annoying getting. A bunch of fucking spam calls that you never asked for you know or emails. Whatever like every time I get one of these emails I market as spam I Fucking hate these emails.
26:57.73
Rick
Well, you don't have to call them you well, you don't have to do the emails you could like if you had this database of like truly icp prospects. You don't have to like ever contact them. You could upload them into. Ah. Google and do target you know targeted marketing to the audience. Um, you could do Facebook marketing um, much more highly targeted. So like there's like lots of ways you could ah attempt to reach that pool if you knew who the pool was on a targeted level.
27:17.26
tylerking
Yeah, that's fair.
27:31.28
tylerking
That's fair, we are doing a little bit of this right now because we we buy Leads. We Do you know, pay per lead like software advice type stuff and a lot of them. You never get in touch with and so we are taking this a relatively new thing. We used to just sell to them and if we couldn't sell to them. That's it now we're taking. The ones that we're not getting in touch with and retargeting and stuff like that. So we're doing a little baby version of what you're talking about.
27:53.51
Rick
Yeah, yeah, but like what what would like a dedicated person focused on just like I mean would that would that be a bet worth investing in.
28:05.32
tylerking
Well I mean if you're saying someone did a dedicated like what' this dedicated person doing if this isn't sales This is building the database which mostly means buying a database I think and then uploading it to.
28:18.33
Rick
My guess is you have a pretty solid database right now right? like you've got all the people who were customers in the past and all the people who who haven't converted and then you've got your existing customers which you could like do look like some sort of lookalike scoring on and then you could.
28:24.37
tylerking
Um, yeah.
28:34.72
tylerking
Um, yeah.
28:38.23
Rick
Use that to like basically say hey these are people that we should reach out to again who have interacted with us before that would be like the first version of this. Um and that would be yeah.
28:46.73
tylerking
Yeah, and we're we're kind of doing that. Not probably not as aggressively as as you'd want us to but we're doing some of that. Yeah um, but yeah, that's probably yeah, a 100000 people or something.
29:00.75
Rick
Yeah, and then what if someone with like their 20% project which is referring to like ah extra credit project for someone else in the company like was like had a goal of like identifying 100000 more people that are great fits um that you could do.
29:13.74
tylerking
Um, yeah.
29:18.53
Rick
Not annoying things with.
29:20.18
tylerking
Okay, that's Interesting. Let me let me think on that a little and I'll I'll bring it up again if if I get anywhere with that. Although you actually just said something Else. We're doing um the ah so one of our rock projects so to speak is this sales thing and then the other one is we are. Doing a little content experiment right now. Um So one of our serum coaches as her 20% project. She's building a chat Gp nocode app um with bubble that our cm coaches are going to use to generate account customizations. So basically. If you're on the phone with a customer. We say tell me about your business and the customer tells us and then we're like okay here's how I would customize your account this type of call happens multiple times a day but some of these businesses are like extremely obscure. It's like you know I run a gift wrapping concierge consulting service or whatever like. Things We've never heard of before and so this tool will basically you type in a description of the business and it's going to spit out a perfectly formatted here. The pipelines custom fields. Whatever the serum coach can always Customize. You know we're going to have a human look at it and make adjustments. But it's just kind of a starting point. But the nice the thing we realized about this is we're going to have a database of all of the weird fucking industries people tell us and we're going to have content about what types of customization would be good for Them. So Basically we're just going to start turning those into blog posts not not blog. We're going to make a separate section of the site. But um.
30:50.90
tylerking
I have no idea if this will work but we'll be able to put out dozens of pieces of content per week this way. Yeah, um.
30:51.49
Rick
that's that's ah it's a no brainer. Yeah that's great. What what it would you do that? Would this make you uncomfortable what if like you had someone who just was like the less annoying crn party thrower. And they traveled from town to town once a month um in msa in like small business areas and said ah and basically you invited you. You basically did an open bar for um I don't know an hour.
31:22.77
tylerking
Um, yeah, so we've.
31:23.30
Rick
And you and you and you reached out to people who had no interaction with your brand before and he said hey we're less annoying crm um, ah come come to the bar first 100 people to rsvp get entry otherwise you get add to the waitlist. We just want to introduce you to our brand would you call to email someone that.
31:39.94
tylerking
Ah I mean any kind of cold cold emails wrong in my opinion if it's personalized. It's not wrong if you're like I have actually looked this up and I'm writing this email to you personally I have no problem with that here's the problem we have actually tried this before. Um. We couldn't get it anywhere close to profitable I mean it was orders of magnitude too expensive because the problem was so the thing you've got with like up health that's amazing is everyone needs health insurance and everyone has to buy it every year but many people do not need crms and even if even if you need a serum that doesn't mean you're actually buying a crm and so. You have to talk to 20 icps to find one. That's even potentially going to buy and then they still have to buy use. You probably have to have a hundred icps to whittle down to that one person and now you're making $15 a month like it is hard to make that work versus like the market that that's on say you need a hundred.
32:28.26
Rick
Yep.
32:33.40
tylerking
Leads to convert it into 1 if you're doing inbound with inbound. It's like all hundred of these people are buying a Crm right now because they searched for some kind of crm related keyword.
32:44.34
Rick
Yeah, with the with the cold prospecting database doesn't do is figure out intent Now there are there are ah new products out there that you can layer over your prospect database that signal someone and ah with intent. Um, that.
32:55.60
tylerking
Are both.
32:59.93
Rick
May not be hitting lessnoying crm or may not be converting on lessnoing serum that you don't know about and you could potentially trigger ah like prior to prioritization of those leads. Yeah.
33:09.33
tylerking
That's interesting. Um, we actually so another thing so we buy leads from software advice. They're expensive because the way software advice works is like they talk on the phone to every lead and then they kind of like personally pair the lead with the right people to sell the leads to. So very qualified I think we pay you know one hundred and fifty bucks per lead or something like that. There's we're running a pilot next month with 2 other ones that just do a very simple form qualification. The the leads are like twenty bucks instead of 150 so we can potentially buy a lot more volume. They will be less qualified but they are all buying right? These are people who went to a website and filled out I'm looking for a Crm pair me with the right one. So that's another like we've been thinking of them as sales leads but maybe like combining it with your idea of saying these people may need like more of a. Low touch marketing nurturing type of thing. But ah, they're cheap enough they could work $20 by the way is what you have to pay for 1 click for someone searching for a serum related keyword on Google so we're going to get like a person's.
34:08.60
Rick
Um.
34:17.56
tylerking
Full contact information and them opting in for us to contact them for the same price as one click from Google seems like maybe we should just buy like buy a lot of these although.
34:28.81
Rick
Yeah, exactly that that was a fun conversation I like talking about the top of funnel stuff I like I'm Im I feel more educated now on that like I was out of the game for a while. Um and now I'm getting back into it both for leg up Health and for my day job and ah, it's.
34:40.58
tylerking
Um, yeah, yeah I'm I always relisten to that our episodes and I know I'm going to relisten to this and be like damn it I have to do some of this don't I.
34:46.12
Rick
Good.
34:56.60
Rick
I Don't think you do? Yeah yeah yeah, be really interesting. Um, very interesting. There's probably some really interesting things you could do with the data just leveraging the data that you already have and building lookalikes off of it and then layering in like.
34:57.80
tylerking
Or I mean we have to I don't want to is the thing but I think we should.
35:13.84
Rick
And like if there is if these intent companies actually deliver on what they're doing like crm is ripe for intent like people like they know if people are searching for serm.
35:20.94
tylerking
Yeah, do you know? do you have a specific one of these that you could name off the top of your head.
35:28.76
Rick
I haven't looked into like there I have like 3 or 4 of them. Um, ah Zoom info is starting to play in. This is like the kind of the enterprise level version of this. Um, there's ah ah.
35:37.87
tylerking
They've been spamming me so much I Hate Zoom In. I Say as as I try to get a database to Spam. No I'm.
35:45.60
Rick
I get yeah let me let me see intent intent buying intent company. Let me just see oh 6 senses like the really popular one. It's called b two b buyer intent data uncover hidden demand and identify accounts that are ready to buy.
35:53.79
tylerking
Um, six cents okay
36:02.54
tylerking
We're also using ad role for retargeting and they claim to have something like this. It's all very mysterious like how how do they know you know, but um for people who don't know ad roles one of these like you know here's a list of. Customers or we can put a pixel on our website and then anyone on that list show them these ads on all these different properties but they say that they have some kind of intent lookalike tool I'm very skeptical but that is 1 thing we're exploring because to one of the things I mean this was always true but you you helped clarify like I can say this more concisely now than I could have.
36:27.78
Rick
Yep.
36:34.58
tylerking
Beginning this conversation I am comfortable showing ads to people much much more so than I am comfortable doing cold outreach to people.
36:44.50
Rick
Yeah, outreach is um and you don't it makes you incredible interrupt people.
36:48.30
tylerking
Yeah, like there's going to be an ad there either way they're going to see an ad the fact that it's our ad does not make their life any worse and now there's 2 We're we're not removing a different email by sending them one.
36:56.67
Rick
There's going to be an email in but in their inbox.
37:01.62
Rick
Yeah.
37:07.67
tylerking
I I get it I mean you got to do what you got to do I I hate it I what I wish was I wish it was illegal. Um, so no one could if no one could do it because this is a 0 sum game. It's competitive if all your competitors are doing this I get why many businesses are like. What choice. Do we have I've got to be annoying here because that's how you get customers if no one could do it. It would be a level playing field without the annoyance I wish that's what what it was.
37:30.58
Rick
I I don't I I Just think yeah, there's there's a but binary here and I don't think it's binary I Think there's a way to reach out to people. Um, thoughtfully without being annoying. Um, and I don't think most people do that. Ah, and so I just.
37:47.14
tylerking
Um, right.
37:49.38
Rick
I Think the challenge that that you have with that is that the the funnel economics and the volume is so is so kind of disjointed that in order for that to work. You've got to figure out how to identify both the highest probability people in terms of like fit but then also a timing.
37:52.67
tylerking
Um, yes.
38:07.20
tylerking
Um, yeah.
38:08.80
Rick
Ah, so that you know that they're actually going to potentially turn into money at a much higher rate than what they do at the of or the general population.
38:16.12
tylerking
That's exactly right? and and we have done and still do tart like cold outreach to For example, we've tried doing like influencer marketing where it's like let's reach out to people who talk about crms on Linkedin or wherever let's reach out to them and see if they want to give us a review. But in that case we do the kind of high quality personal type like you're talking about. So yeah, I'm not opposed to that. It's exactly what you said that to get customers that way the the math just wouldn't work out but you're right that if we could if we could be better if we could pre-qualify people before doing the outreach then maybe we could justify. Sending the right kind of cold outreach. Yep okay, you've given me some stuff to think about. Thank you.
38:52.90
Rick
Um.
38:57.35
Rick
And this is what I dream about with with leg up like that transitions nicely into our air cover ah topic which um, so so 3 oh 3 Well I'll I'll be brief basically like the project that I really really won't want to work on when I have time which I don't have and once.
39:02.77
tylerking
I I do have to go in 3 minutes by the way.
39:15.30
Rick
Like this is the right bottleneck to focus on is like basically taking what Jd is doing which is is like he's building this database of icps and figuring out how to recycle the people that he's not converting into a programmatic ah sort of pre. Pre prescriptive like nurturing and either that by by reserving them to him to reach out to or so nurturing over time to try to reengage. Um and and and then simultaneously trying to figure out how to get him like if you if you look at what he does like there's like 3 components to what he does. The first is. Is getting it into like identifying sorry the first is identifying a a company that fits our icp criteria and then second is is identifying the people at that company that we want to reach out to um and then also securing contact information for them. And then third figuring out how to get that into our system and then fourth doing the actual outreach and so it. Ah, if if we can figure out how to like systematize and increase volume on the the first 2 um and then also like once he's done with them like done his outreach like.
40:16.54
tylerking
Um.
40:30.18
Rick
Continue to nurture um on the backend like we we amplify what he can do from an efficiency standpoint significantly.
40:34.50
tylerking
Yeah, that seems like like if you one day were full time on like up that seems like a great one two punch of you building the systems and automation and all that and then him doing the like once someone hits a certain part of the funnel doing that kind of follow up. Yeah.
40:50.93
Rick
Yeah, and then man and managing people to do that as well and it's um so yeah, that's like ah that's I'm excited about that but it it takes into account all these things like there's data tools on the on the top end. There's data tools and the mid at the mid end then there's um, sort of.
40:53.87
tylerking
Yeah.
41:06.10
Rick
Serms and serum features that we could leverage for this and then there's marketing that you can layer in programmatically to um, but I'll leave I'll leave with this one thought which is I was talking I told you I had that call today and he looked at our software and he was like he does this guy does a um, a seminar. Ah, regularly at conferences and his his main pitch to agents is stop spending all your money on marketing to people You don't know stop marketing to strangers and start marketing to your customers. Um, and he pointed out that like most people spend all their marketing budget on marketing to strangers instead of marketing to people that you already have a relationship with.
41:33.78
tylerking
Ah.
41:42.46
Rick
Um, and so that's something that I'm going to focus on with this air. Cover plan is we wasted a lot of money this year on marketing to strangers and I think there's a lot of opportunity marketing to people that we have some sort of affinity with and even spend money on getting more getting more bonded with our customers.
41:53.12
tylerking
Um, yeah.
41:57.73
tylerking
I Just add that I want to talk more about that next episode and talk about how less knowing serum could do that too but all right good.
42:05.15
Rick
Cool. Well if you'd like to review past topics and show notes visit startup to last dot com see you next time.
42:12.24
tylerking
Searic.