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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.
00:01.23
Rick
What's up this week, Taylor?
00:01.50
tylerking
Hey, Rick, what's going? Nope, check shit.
00:04.33
Rick
You did that on purpose. You messed with me.
00:08.44
tylerking
you gotta You gotta start right away. I can't handle awkward silences, Rick. If you don't say something immediately, I'm filling the space.
00:16.42
Rick
What you doing in an elevator?
00:19.44
tylerking
Well, if no one's talking, I'm okay. But like if I'm in a meeting with three people and you know some people like talk, ah like I've actually heard this is the East coast versus West coast thing.
00:30.18
tylerking
I don't know if that's true, but like East coast people like reply right away in West coast. People like think before they speak, obviously that's an overgeneralization.
00:36.45
Rick
Yeah. West coast people are stoned.
00:37.00
tylerking
if Yeah.
00:38.14
Rick
Is that what you're saying?
00:39.04
tylerking
I don't know. Chill laid back. If I'm in a meeting with a West coast type, I'm, I'm playing the role of the East coast. I'm like, a question was just asked and 500 milliseconds have passed and no one answered yet.
00:49.63
tylerking
I'm going to start talking.
00:50.38
Rick
This is getting awkward.
00:52.40
tylerking
Yeah, I can't help it. ah So when you didn't come right out the gate with ah what's going on this week, Tyler, I had to talk. um What is going on this week, Rick?
01:03.22
Rick
ah you your outcasts well um It's a busy week. Uh, I'm looking forward to labor day vacation tomorrow. I'm going to take a half day. And then we're, we have rented a hotel room in the grand America, which is like a kind of the cool fancy hotel downtown.
01:24.66
Rick
Um,
01:24.99
tylerking
Nice.
01:25.88
Rick
I mean, fancy by salt lake standards. And, and so, uh, we're gonna, we've got a, basically a staycation with the kids where we'll go swimming every day and do some fun things downtown.
01:36.16
Rick
They have a lot of attractions, um, that are a little bit for, you know, hard to drive to, but we'll be able to walk too. And so, uh, we're going to do a long weekend there half day tomorrow.
01:41.99
tylerking
Yeah.
01:46.00
Rick
Um, but it's been, man, it's been a grind this month.
01:49.51
tylerking
Yeah. Is that, is there an end in insight to the grind?
01:52.55
Rick
Yes. Today.
01:54.54
tylerking
Nice.
01:55.13
Rick
Yes. Today is the end of the grind.
01:56.00
tylerking
Vacations really seem like they ah they hit for you, like like that that it's a much needed ah separation from from normal life.
02:01.02
Rick
Yep.
02:06.55
Rick
Yeah. And it's a good time for me to sort of re, uh, set my, you know, daily routines. Like, ah I mean, ideally I would be even keel, you know, on it every day, but I'm in need of a reset right now.
02:21.49
tylerking
Yeah. And I'll, I'll say from the other side of it, like there's pros and cons. I i kind of, so I generally don't even take. kind of like the mid-level holidays off, like Labor Day is not, ah like even 4th of July. don't If someone invites me to something, I'll go, but I'm not like definitely taken off a holiday like that, um which I think is good. like it's I like that my life is calm enough that I don't need the break, but also there's a ah certain seasonality to things that I think you miss if if you approach it the way I do.
02:53.62
Rick
Yeah. Yeah. There's, um, there's pros, like it's in neither way is the right way, right? It's just what, you know, which which one it does works better for you.
02:59.72
tylerking
Yeah.
03:02.21
Rick
and And I think there's, you know, there's phases, right? Like. Um, I don't think the way I'm doing it right now is something I would want to do for a long period of time, but for a few years, it's fine.
03:14.17
Rick
Um, but I think I, you know, I think also on the comm side, like, uh, you know, I liked that for a period of time, but ah then it also, I also started getting a little bit, um, Restless.
03:14.59
tylerking
yeah Yeah, for sure.
03:28.54
tylerking
I'm actually dealing with ah the ultimate champagne problem, which is I'm trying to figure out how to spend my vacation days this year. Because um I know people think it's weird that like I have vacation days since I'm the founder, but I don't know.
03:39.86
tylerking
I'm a believer that leaders should follow the same rules as everyone else. But um normally, I do like a big snowboarding trip and then a big other trip each year.
03:44.73
Rick
to
03:49.26
tylerking
And that eats up almost all my vacation, so then it's just like a few days here and there. But I didn't do the snowboarding trip this year, so I've i've just got like 15 extra days I have to figure out how to use this year.
03:59.75
Rick
Woo hoo. Do you want to, uh, do you want to come to Utah and do like a fun long weekend hiking extravaganza slash, uh, bougie, do you want to do a hackathon, a leg up hackathon?
04:00.66
tylerking
yeah
04:07.60
tylerking
Hmm. You had me until the hiking. I'm not doing outdoor shit. Uh, yeah, I should think about it. Yeah. I haven't even ah really.
04:19.10
tylerking
ah Yeah. I don't know. I need to do something.
04:20.70
Rick
If you came out, I would take time off.
04:23.30
tylerking
No, you wouldn't really.
04:24.26
Rick
I would. Yep.
04:25.84
tylerking
Okay. Okay. I'll keep that in mind. Um, yeah, I need to put some thought into it, but, uh, what's going on with, uh, with leg up health.
04:28.11
Rick
Mm-hmm.
04:34.99
Rick
Well, um, I did a, I think I updated you on this. I can't remember if I updated this. I'll pretend I haven't. Um, I did a customer interview and as the first customer interview I've done in a while, uh, cause Jay's been sort of around the show. Uh, but I think, I think this is a really important use of my time, um, and role to play because it gives me confidence to make some privatization decisions with my time. And then also like settles me in terms of what we're doing in terms of our opportunity and like,
05:04.66
Rick
a kind of ri It's reassuring in a way. kind Customer interviews can go one of two ways. You could be like, oh shit, you know like this isn't going well.
05:10.22
tylerking
yeah yeah
05:10.85
Rick
Or it's like, oh wait, we actually have a really good business. um And I had a customer interview with ah with a ah company that... like that is kind of like the ideal, not necessarily ideal, but like kind of a really cool, unexpected story of growth for leg up.
05:25.99
Rick
And so when we started leg up, I guess context is ah we we started just in the consumer market, but the primary thesis behind the business was at at same benefits where we worked and that people keep.
05:33.37
tylerking
Yeah, yeah.
05:37.84
Rick
we were very pigeonholed into one solution. And literally people would call us and say, Hey, can you do this for us? Can you just help my employees with health insurance? I don't want what you sell, but, but I like you.
05:49.76
Rick
Can you just help them?
05:49.88
tylerking
Right.
05:50.44
Rick
I will pay you. And we kept saying, no, no, no, we no, we don't, we just do this HRA thing. Um, and so one of the thesis behind, uh, starting leg up was we were going to do the insurance in addition to the employer sort of funding arrangement.
06:05.32
Rick
Um, And what what an and unexpected thing that happened as a result of that is we've got this customer, and this is not the only customer that's like this, but we've got this customer who has this trajectory of like, they were a founder. They founded a business. They were a single employee. They needed health insurance. They hired people. They didn't need a group plan. So they used what Tyler built and added their employees to the leg up benefits platform. We helped them with our health insurance concierge.
06:32.61
Rick
They're now raising money, and they're going to cross 50 employees, which is a big milestone for a business when when they start having to pay these tax penalties for not offering coverage. So group health insurance is on the table.
06:43.51
Rick
They're projecting 75 to 100 employees in 12 months from now.
06:48.87
tylerking
Wow.
06:49.49
Rick
So this is a customer who's gone from a consumer policy, which we value at $500 a year, to ah you know a 75 to 100 person group plan that is that we value at $50,000 a year in revenue.
07:03.89
tylerking
Yeah, that's incredible.
07:05.09
Rick
And so, exactly.
07:05.46
tylerking
I mean, that's a pretty significant amount of the total growth you want to see in a year just from this the expansion revenue from this one customer.
07:12.62
Rick
And so I just realized, like, if I'm thinking about, like, if I'm JD or I'm thinking about me, it's like, what's the highest leverage use of my time at leg up health? Well, it's making sure that with our customers grow, we retain them.
07:25.21
tylerking
yeah
07:25.37
Rick
And I don't know that we're talking about that in our partner meetings at all.
07:30.05
tylerking
Yeah, now i I might say like, given how good JD service is, is this like in question? Is the retention a ah thing we need to worry about?
07:39.79
Rick
Yes, I do think so. I don't think we're i think we're we're i think we're solid on the ah sub 50. If you're like a slow growth, small business, 20% company, I think we're solid.
07:51.39
Rick
But I think if you're a high growth startup, I think we don't know quite yet how to ride that horse um and because it changed the the change of pace is so fast.
07:56.55
tylerking
hu
08:00.44
Rick
And I think ah generally those types of founders are going to seek lots of information from lots of sources to make a decision and they're going to do it very fast and like in a week, like we could lose a customer.
08:12.35
Rick
So um I think like we've got a window here and we've got to figure out how to ah make sure that we're the trusted advisor here on the next phase of of growth for the company.
08:12.61
tylerking
Yeah, yeah.
08:24.03
Rick
um And I don't think we're we're so we're there we're there right now ah based on the customer interview, but but like the guys like
08:29.26
tylerking
Hmm.
08:31.65
Rick
Hey, I need this. um
08:33.91
tylerking
So what are we, what's missing?
08:36.54
Rick
Proactive education and sort of... ah ah sort of preparing to help him navigate the decisions that are coming as, uh, he crosses 50 employees. And that's something like that, you know, we just need to be proactive about it's like part education. And then part of it's actually putting a backward timelines in place, being more in tune with a headcount planning, um, and, uh, you know, different, uh, needs that will come as part of that. Like for example,
09:09.10
Rick
you know As you cross 50 employees, like there's ah there's a question of whether gusto is the best payroll system. you know Do we need to be repping a larger payroll system so that we can help them transition that as well?
09:15.21
tylerking
Mm hmm.
09:20.64
Rick
um for when you know There are 401k considerations and an ancillary benefit consideration. It becomes much more of a holistic, how am I approaching employee benefits and payroll administration ah versus like just a health insurance question.
09:34.90
tylerking
But so, I mean, some companies like that go with a PEO that just handles everything.
09:40.18
Rick
Yep.
09:40.45
tylerking
The ones that don't, are they hiring like a benefits advisor that does the whole thing for them?
09:46.27
Rick
ah Oftentimes the benefits advisors will do, um, uh, bring a lot of that like health, dental vision, life, et cetera. And they've got a, uh, platform that they're leveraging to do it.
09:57.78
Rick
Some of them have built their own. Some of them are licensing a platform. We do not have this in place currently. So it's a hole in our offering.
10:03.25
tylerking
Mm-hmm.
10:03.54
Rick
Um, Uh, usually they'll have a partner that they're bringing in for 401k. What complicates, I think these types of customers that are going from, let's say 25 employees, which is our, which we consider our ICP to 75 people is that they're on gusto today.
10:17.91
Rick
And a lot of their help, their, their benefit decisions have been driven about what integrates with gusto, not necessarily like what works on the new payroll system that they're going to be switching to.
10:22.90
tylerking
Yeah.
10:26.76
Rick
Um, and, and so like, if you go to rippling dot.com, which is, uh, the Parker Conner guys who founded Zenith fits, I think. Um, it's a really solid offering, but they're basically positioning as what you've switched to after you outgrow gusto.
10:40.08
Rick
Um, and they have a PO, PO offering, they partner with brokers. And so help, like, I think it's more complex than just saying, here are your health insurance options. It's more like, well, you know, there's actually like payroll considerations.
10:51.91
Rick
And then you if you decide to go this payroll, a different route on payroll, it opens up PO options. And like, uh, you know, the,
10:57.77
tylerking
What changes when you get bigger, like as a gusto user, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work with a hundred employees or 500 employees. What's the problem with sticking with them?
11:07.16
Rick
um I think ah that one, their health insurance offerings are not geared towards being an ALE, which is called an applicable large employer, meaning you have more than 50 full-time equivalent employees. And so it becomes more manual to comply with the ah new the the requirements that the that come when you get over 50. The second is you don't have access to a PEO through gusto. So you don't gain in this 50 to a kind of 250 employee space. Like you're you're not quite large enough to gain economies of scale from an employee base.
11:41.00
Rick
And so there's a strong value proposition of joining a PEO, um, um, less so because you're in a small group.
11:45.34
tylerking
But isn't that true for a 20 person company?
11:50.13
Rick
So there are different rating rules.
11:51.53
tylerking
Oh, you have advantages by being smaller.
11:52.95
Rick
Yeah. Cause you pull the, the, the health insurance regulations require insurance to pull their small groups together.
11:53.59
tylerking
Okay.
11:58.87
Rick
So they don't get underwritten individually because it's either 50 or a hundred. I depending on the state, but like you, would you cross a certain number and you're not, you're no longer in that small pool. You don't get rated that way anymore.
12:10.15
tylerking
If I can just pause for a second, this is the type of thing, um whenever like a programmer wants to start a business that's kind of like in ah an industry niche, ah this is the type of thing that like you you could start building health benefits software or whatever, not knowing any of this stuff. and just get completely destroyed by the realities of the market that you don't know about.
12:33.20
tylerking
Or, you know, there's all these examples of really niche staff out there. That's like, Oh, we build a software to help countertop installers and or whatever. And it's like, you got to have someone that really knows like all that stuff you just said, I've been about as close to health benefits throughout my career as you can be without actually doing it for most of it.
12:51.29
Rick
Yep.
12:51.42
tylerking
And it never occurred to me that once you cross 50 users, like ah totally totally different game.
12:56.27
Rick
Yeah, totally different game. And I think what were're what what what I get excited about ah with leg up is I It's harder because we're going to be not necessarily a simple solution, but we are differentiated in that we we are this sort of small business service provider first ah ah when it comes to health benefits versus like a group health insurance broker or an individual health insurance broker or an HRA provider. um And it's it's I think it will allow us to, if we can figure out how to ah so enable the trusted advisor component at scale, I think there's a lot of ah upside opportunity for us. and
13:30.95
Rick
like i I think we had a good business when when it's like word of mouth growth and some outbound, but like if we get this net revenue retention or expansion opportunity from customer growth, it's like, wow.
13:38.38
tylerking
Yeah.
13:42.45
tylerking
I will say I'm a bit concerned only in the sense that like knowing nothing about this company, I don't even know their name or anything, but like. They're going to churn at some point.
13:53.93
tylerking
And I say that because 95%, they either fail or get acquired. um And both of those scenarios result in us losing them as a customer. um I think it's great to ride the wave while we can, but it would really suck if 75% of our revenue is coming from one customer.
14:09.90
Rick
yeah Yeah.
14:10.13
tylerking
and Yeah.
14:11.87
Rick
Yeah. And, and I think that's kind of the beauty of our business, right? Like we're not like putting all our eggs in one basket. There's a, there's a natural div diversification when you focus on small businesses. Um, but, but what, what a cool thing to have a $500 customer turn into a $50,000 per year customer.
14:20.03
tylerking
Yeah.
14:26.58
Rick
And then, you know, if you'd retain that for one year, the, the, ah you know, the exponential value of lifetime value for that customer, assuming we can, so you know, service the customer reason at reasonable costs, um, is pretty incredible.
14:39.25
tylerking
Yeah, I think that kind of speaks to, I've said before, like what less annoying serum we'll spend to acquire a customer. And again, so $15 a month is the price per user average two and a half users per account. Let's let's just round it to $50 per account on average. You'd think if you look at most like, like, uh,
14:59.36
tylerking
you know payback period type calculators, what what should we be willing to spend, like $200, $300 to acquire a customer? We'll spend $500 to $1,000, and in some cases even more, which on paper sounds terrible.
15:13.58
tylerking
like It sounds like it can't work, and yet the business kind of works.
15:16.87
Rick
Mm hmm.
15:16.97
tylerking
um And one of the reasons is there's all these like, like yeah, our biggest customer issue is about 500 users, so they're paying us in the ballpark of $100,000 a year. ah They started as a 10 or 20 user account. um And then they approached us and said, hey, we actually have this whole customer service department of 500 people. do you you know can Can you help us with that? It's tough. You can't you can't be like, OK, therefore, we're going to go spend $10,000 to acquire every customer because like we're counting on some of them turning into that. But it's i don't I don't know what my point is here other than just like if you take a bunch of shots on goal,
15:52.96
tylerking
Sometimes these outliers make the overall numbers work, even if like on the individual level, it seems like they're not working.
16:00.24
Rick
I agree 100%. The other the other sort of niche sort of ah ah to attribute ah that is working out for us is if a customer is on gusto, that is a high signal that one, we can provide differentiated value to them and two, they're on a growth trajectory.
16:19.98
Rick
It's not 100%, but like the the the customers that are doing this, are they they are tech savvy, ah they are self-service first, um and it's very interesting to watch happen.
16:32.66
Rick
We've got multiple of these in the you know happening right now, where they're going from 10 to 20, or 20 to 50, or 25 to 40, and it's it's pretty cool.
16:42.73
Rick
ah But but it's you know it's four it's four out of, you know out of
16:43.55
tylerking
Yeah.
16:47.52
Rick
you know, 400 clients, it's, it's a handful.
16:51.60
tylerking
Yeah, but there's enough of a power law here that that, like, I wonder is, is the takeaway here?
16:54.88
Rick
yeah
16:57.20
tylerking
Like, should we be going after bigger clients or is the takeaway here? Like let's really focus on small clients and count on 1% of them turning into big clients eventually.
17:05.39
Rick
That's this it's the, it's a second. And I, and I, I, and then make sure, like, what are we, what else can we do to make sure that we're ahead of the retention um and and expansion versus like, Right.
17:15.60
Rick
Like right now I think it's happening to us versus us, uh, help make like ensuring it happens.
17:21.41
tylerking
Yeah.
17:21.56
Rick
Um, and so, but, but, uh, it's really good. The other, I'll just share one more win and then I'll, I'd love to hear your updates. Um, the gusto, uh, has a broker integration, um, that we've been sort of, uh,
17:34.91
Rick
observing and trying to figure out how to use. um And we finally got got the win on this. So um one of the threats to our business, like if you were an and a venture capitalist and you were going, Rick, your business sucks.
17:46.88
Rick
Like I would never invest in your business because Gusto is going to eat your lunch.
17:47.51
tylerking
but
17:51.59
Rick
um and And that's right. Like they they have a massive sort of advantage where where they they control the payroll and therefore if they could offer a solid health insurance service, they could do it, but Paycheck's has been doing this for years. ah you know it's It's not new. um and And the reality is is that the the main advantage they have is a technological advantage. it's not actually like their Their ability to like scale service, they have not shown their ability to do that.
18:15.04
Rick
um and so ah what And they're you know they're they're also their their domain not and you know expertise in local markets is hard to scale. So there's lots of reasons why a niche Utah provider could beat gusto on a service level. But the main advantage is a technological advantage where they serve up the plans to an employee when they join and like the the seamless experience in the payroll system. We found this integration that they have, and I don't know why they offer it. They might might be a regulatory requirement or not, but Basically for $6 extra per month per employee, the employer can turn on the ability to use all the gusto technology that they offer and if youre if you're if they're the broker. And then we become the broker with that technology. And so we've turned that on for a customer and it's really pretty cool. um And so ah and um that's ah that's another sort of like,
19:05.68
Rick
technology-enabled service that we're able to turn on that we haven't built necessarily and we don't have the ah sort of software overhead maintenance overhead, but we can position as a feature of our service.
19:12.81
tylerking
Mm-hmm.
19:17.40
tylerking
what are What is it? like Does that give us access to some kind of back end admin panel in Gusto? Or like what actually happens if we're using this?
19:26.32
Rick
We're still learning on what the broker gets, but what we do understand right now is that basically it ah it basically we we load up all the plans to the employer that we that that the employer has purchased through us and the employees and the employer can manage the plan, ah enrollment and removals through gusto. And then gusto helps us get that information to the insurance company in a seamless way. And from an employee perspective, this is really nice because I can report mid-year elections. I don't have to like go through JD and a docu-sign going through gusto.
19:57.33
tylerking
Yeah, I kind of think of, as a customer of Gusto, this is what I think of Gusto as being. It's like people I know so for who work at big companies. So for example, my wife works at WashU, which is this big university with, I think, tens of thousands of employees.
20:11.45
tylerking
um Like at that type of company, every year you get your like benefits renewal and it's, you know, it's it's like a really well-designed fully integrated experience. Gusto gives the big company experience to small companies. That's kind of how I view it. um The idea that but But yeah, the idea that gusto can't do the service and at a big company, they've got like this whole HR department that they probably suck at most companies, but at least there's like, it's not paychecks is responsibility to do that service necessarily. I mean, in some ways it is, but like at wash you, you you go to the wash UHR department and say, Hey, I have a question about my benefits. The idea that gusto isn't replacing that ah HR department. So we're really like the HR department in the the gusto model in a way.
21:00.05
Rick
Correct. Yes. Um, and, and, and that's actually exactly how they see us is an extension of the HR team where they're adding us as sort of the benefits admin into gusto. We're in, we're installing the broker integration.
21:10.84
Rick
They're paying six gusto is kind of happy about this. They're making $6 BPM extra, no insurance service overhead. Uh, and basically we are responsible for the service and we get the commission.
21:20.86
tylerking
Yeah.
21:21.47
Rick
It's a pretty cool deal. Um, and, uh, anyway, uh, we're going to turn more of this on, but the question I'd like to come back to eventually is like, can like,
21:28.86
tylerking
we We can just dive in right now if you want.
21:30.31
Rick
So so this was ah this came out of the customer interview. So the the two things came out of the customer interview. The first is like, Hey, I'm concerned about crossing 50 employees and my requirement to offer health insurance. interest Like, can you, like, that's probably my biggest worry right now. I'm like, well, first of all, you don't have to offer health insurance. Like it's a tax penalty if you don't. So like, we can help you evaluate whether it's better to continue to do what you're doing or PEO or whatever. So that's an action item. We got to figure out how to go out after for that. The second item I was like, okay, let's just say that you weren't growing and you wanted to stay on leg up benefits forever. What's the number one thing we could do to make your life easier?
21:59.36
Rick
And he was like gusto integration. I manage people through gusto. If I could just port all the people over ah and you know manage ads and deletes ah and in sync with gusto, that would save me a lot of time because that's the main reason like I spent like duplicate effort.
22:14.06
Rick
um And that'd be much easier for me because sometimes I forget to add someone to to like get benefits. and They don't get the benefit email. um And then the second piece is what the gusto integration is.
22:21.04
tylerking
Hmm.
22:23.22
Rick
It would be really nice if when when that when we ah ah approve the
22:26.74
tylerking
Mm
22:27.27
Rick
ah Cause he does receipt checking. Um, once we approve the reimbursement, it would be nice if, if we could automatically sort of send that to gusto.
22:30.46
tylerking
hmm.
22:35.24
Rick
So it gets set up on payroll. Cause he sometimes he forgets to do that. Um,
22:38.81
tylerking
So so so but both for my benefit and the benefit of the listener, what I just heard is so like right now they have a gusto account that manages most of their eight, like HR stuff. So all their employees are in gusto, but they also have a leg up health account where you have to go in and add each employee to leg up health.
22:50.72
Rick
correct.
22:53.26
tylerking
And that sends them an email saying, Hey, we can help you get your own health insurance and et cetera. And so the main thing he wants is sinking the user list between gusto and leg up benefits.
23:03.53
Rick
That's phase one, and then he he also uses the sp stipend functionality, um but it's a slight nuance but from outside of the our software. He is verifying that the stipend, has like that they purchased health insurance in some way to unlock the stipend.
23:18.51
Rick
And so, yeah.
23:18.65
tylerking
And and so but let me just explain what the stipend the stipend is. An employer can come in and say, I'm adding an employee to leg up health. and, or to, to like a benefits and I'm going to give them $200 a month to help pay for their health insurance. Now it doesn't actually do anything. It just says in like, when the employee logs into like a benefits, it says you get, you're getting $200 a month. But what actually happens is like in gusto, the employer goes in and gives them a $200 stipend. There's really no connection between them putting that stipend in and like a benefits versus anything else happening.
23:50.62
Rick
Correct, yeah, so there's like three things that we could help them with, and two that I think are universally applicable to Gusto payroll companies customers. um One that is unique to this customer, but could be interesting to other customers. The the two that are universally applicable are ads and delete management, syncing between payroll, ah and leg up benefits of employees. um The second, the third, and then you know stipend sort of reconciliation between, like pushing the stipend to Gusto. The the middle,
24:18.40
Rick
sort of edge case here is the verification step. Um, some providing him a way for the employees to submit the receipt through our system and him to review that receipt to verify, uh, uh, and unlock the stipend stipend, um, would be like the third thing, but like that's unique to him. We don't have anyone else that's doing that currently.
24:37.04
tylerking
Yeah. Okay. Um, do you think that's potentially worth building?
24:42.45
Rick
I don't know. Like that's why my question to you is like, how hard is integrating with gusto? Like I, from what I know, like one thing that we're like, I like about our current offering is it does enough to like provide value and unlock the opportunity for us.
24:56.82
Rick
Um, but it doesn't create a ton of technical overhead for you to have to worry about.
25:01.07
tylerking
Yeah.
25:01.93
Rick
And so I think one consideration for us at this stage of the business while, while you're our, our, our guy is, um, you know, is this worth the, you know,
25:12.26
Rick
forget, like not just the and initial investment of building the thing, but is this worth the maintenance overhead that that like, you know, and I don't know.
25:14.65
tylerking
Right. Yeah. I think that's the right way. That's the right question to ask because, yeah, like I'm just repeating what you just said, but I'm the only tech person at the company and I'm very, very part time.
25:28.96
Rick
yeah
25:29.12
tylerking
um I think, like, could I build it probably? But, yeah, if What I worry about, a thing we don't know. like If I can go back to what you were just talking about with like that whole conversation we started this podcast with, like one of the things I was thinking as you were talking was like how fascinating it is that Our product is what it is. Our service is what it is. But the positioning around it can be complete. Like you could imagine us being, we are the the supplement to Gusto to make Gusto's health insurance better versus we are how we're the free solution for small employers to give health benefits versus we are helping Utah consumers find health insurance. and like It's the exact same offering with completely different positioning.
26:12.62
Rick
Yep.
26:13.75
tylerking
to To connect that to what we were just talking about, like a big thing I don't think we know is like, is leg up health, a tech company first and foremost, or a service company first or I think we know it's a service company first and foremost, but like how much of a tech company is it? And I think going after like, okay, we're doing these integrations and stuff like that is, we can always reverse this decision later, but it's kind of saying like, we're more of a tech company than we've been acting like.
26:40.84
Rick
So that's a good point. um If we were going to say like the only reason to do the integration is not because it like serves the customer like from a from an a time perspective, but ah It actually helps us deliver the service.
26:56.42
Rick
Like that's the lens. I think that we should probably look at it through, which is selfish. I don't like saying it because that's the good conflicts with our value of like, you know, like clients first. Um, but like, if we were gonna like put that constraint on it, like the the reason to build the integration is to accelerate onboarding of the free offering, um, where we could go to market with, we are, uh, we are the gusto sort of, you know, uh, we are, we, for, for companies that don't offer health insurance that are on gusto payroll,
27:13.95
tylerking
Yeah.
27:24.73
Rick
we are the easiest and fastest way to start offering health insurance to your employees at zero cost. um And literally, you know, create an account, ah connect your gusto instance and start offering our health insurance concierge today in minutes.
27:30.02
tylerking
Yeah.
27:39.25
Rick
um And then, you know, secondarily consider offering stipends on a case on an employee by employee basis. And then third, as you scale, we'll be able to help consider group health insurance for you.
27:49.68
tylerking
Yeah, it is.
27:50.61
Rick
It's pretty powerful.
27:52.68
tylerking
I agree. I think like, I don't know how much the priority is to like really do as much as we can for this one customer versus kind of have a more repeatable model. I would be, in I think my reaction to this is to say, let's go prove out whether that resonates with people.
28:06.35
tylerking
Like can we get customers with that pitch? If so, then, then building that gusto integration makes sense. Um, if not, I think it's a harder sell.
28:15.95
Rick
Yeah, especially, yeah.
28:17.05
tylerking
Because like we we already offer what you just said, except the one-click part, right?
28:21.51
Rick
and and maybe And maybe what we say is like, maybe maybe maybe what we need to do is just sort of build the onboarding out um so that we we collect like sort of the payroll step. um And then we say, hey, would you like to to import, you know, you add your employees manually or would you like us, would you like to add us to Gusto so that we can help you, you know, we kind of do them this the the service version, like where it's like, oh, add, you know, so you you have two choice.
28:31.74
tylerking
hi
28:43.87
tylerking
Add a suggestion, and we'll add the employees, yeah.
28:45.41
Rick
we'll add the employees for you. And then it's like, you know, parentheses, we plan to integrate this eventually, but for now we're doing it this way until we, we you know, we, we understand the details.
28:52.82
tylerking
Yeah.
28:54.10
Rick
so
28:54.74
tylerking
And if we're doing the work, they don't need to care if we are integrated. I mean, we can even.
28:57.27
Rick
Yeah. What they're, what they're going to do is go, okay, I'll just add them.
29:00.09
tylerking
Yeah, for sure. um Yeah, I like the idea. Oh, I had a thought here. ah Oh, yeah, you said earlier, like you feel bad saying it this way because it's like you're kind of saying this is good for us, not not that it's good for our customers.
29:14.94
tylerking
But I would kind of push back on that just to say, If leg up health works in a way that like has 10 plus employees in the future, like there's a version of leg up health. That's just the three of us JD full-time you and me part-time, uh, kind of full-time job for JD lifestyle, passive income for you and me. That's one type of the business, the version of it where it's like, we're hiring people, we're scaling. its It becomes your full-time job. Eventually that type of thing.
29:45.19
tylerking
The whole business is built around, can we like it's this promise of we're going to offer really, really good service despite really, really low revenue like revenue per user.
29:52.97
Rick
Tech, yeah.
29:54.68
tylerking
And like the secret sauce has to be streamlining every part of it without reducing quality.
29:59.07
Rick
No.
30:00.71
tylerking
So that is good for customers, I think.
30:00.93
Rick
Yep, I agree. Yeah, no, you're right. um and Just like when you're saying, like let's not like consider what um helps them but not us.
30:11.82
Rick
but yeah like It just feels wrong saying that out loud.
30:11.95
tylerking
hu
30:16.07
tylerking
Yeah, for sure.
30:17.31
Rick
But that's the element, like what you're getting to is, like the, the essence of strategy and strategic constraints. Like you, you you make the, you, you, you constrain your decision-making so that you can create differentiated competitive advantage.
30:28.58
Rick
And sometimes it's like very counterintuitive.
30:31.34
tylerking
Yeah, yeah.
30:32.74
Rick
Um, tell me what's going on with you, man.
30:33.14
tylerking
um Yeah, I, uh, I don't have like a huge number of updates here. Um, I thought maybe I'd talk a little bit about like product stuff, uh, cause this is kind of the year, the year of product for less annoying CRM. Um, and then at the beginning of the year, I kind of said,
30:50.34
tylerking
Not that we're like ignoring marketing, but we're just, ah're we're kind of putting our heads down and we're we're just doing the work with marketing. We're not in the in the past several years. I think there's been this like marketing will save us type of approach of like, let's try a bunch of stuff. Let's run the traction playbook, that book that's about trying a bunch of marketing stuff. And I think like the philosophy we have now is our marketing is actually working. Okay. Like we we have a pretty good, you know, we got.
31:17.25
tylerking
I think we have about a thousand free trial users right now at any given time. That's about what we've got. like we have We have people coming in, but like that the the big issue is ah when people come in, I just think we are less competitive in the CRM landscape than we should be because we're missing some features that people expect.
31:34.63
tylerking
so that's kind of like This is the year of the product, that's but that's the philosophy behind it. um
31:39.69
Rick
Mm hmm. You talked about the van.
31:42.03
tylerking
Yeah, the cup holders in the minivan.
31:43.31
Rick
Mm hmm.
31:44.39
tylerking
um So I thought maybe I could just talk about some like specific product stuff that's going on. One thing is we've been I've been trying to put an emphasis on training our ah customer service team, our CRM coaches, on new products a little bit more, um new features that we launch.
32:03.08
tylerking
ah This isn't necessarily a big deal. But for example, like yesterday we shipped this really small but kind of like nice feature that customers have been asking for. And a thing I might not have done before but that I did yesterday is I like recorded a video of me running through it, talking about the intricacies of it, and shared it with the team.
32:20.03
tylerking
um we are I know that that sounds obvious. like You mean we were shipping stuff before and not even telling the customer service team about it? And it's not that we weren't telling them. We were just kind of like, there's a blog post post meant for customers.
32:34.13
tylerking
Go read the blog post. That's kind of like the approach you would take for a small feature in the past.
32:37.60
Rick
this is This is classic. like This is classic product overshipping and not enabling the customer-facing team.
32:44.50
tylerking
Yeah. and To give myself a little grace here, most of what we've built for the last 10 years hasn't been, it has been like. Iterative extensions of what we already have in a way that so it's like oh we already have nine types of custom fields We just added a tenth like there was a number field now. There's a currency field I don't know that there's like a tremendous amount of training to do on that um but one of the things we're trying to change now is like we're really focusing on customer perception and we're focusing on not just like little tweaks around the edges were like that trying to build like
33:15.60
tylerking
When a customer comes to us and says, do you have the core functionality I'm looking for? We want to be able to say yes. And so that requires kind of bigger changes than the type of thing we've done in the past. and Anyway, you're right, though.
33:27.68
tylerking
um But there's that um and in terms of like what features are we building?
33:30.54
Rick
So what are you doing?
33:34.66
Rick
No, like what are you going to do to like try to improve the, the customer service at like sort of. ah like understanding of what you're building. Ideally, you know, they're excited about what's being built before it gets built.
33:43.90
tylerking
Yeah.
33:46.37
Rick
And by the time it gets built, they're already like, let's go.
33:46.74
tylerking
Right, right. Yeah, so so part of it is ah it's it's a bunch of little things that hopefully create a bit of a flywheel. So one is, like once a month now, I'm sending out, I'm recording a video an internal video of, I run through the whole project management system that we have in Notion. And I'm like, I'm just going to talk about every project that's in the in progress category. I'm going to give estimates on when it might be ready. I'm going to show you mock-ups. So just like a 10, 15 minute video that I share with like mo not all the CRM coaches, because some of them are not anyone who's involved in like content creation or making help videos or that type of thing, that mixed with once stuff actually ships, we're being a lot better about communicating. Rather than like, oh, this thing shipped yesterday. it's This thing's coming up in a week. We started rolling it out using a feature gate. Here's a video explaining how it works. minor things, but just so like CRM coaches are really ready to go and it happens. We have all the customer facing help articles and stuff like that ready to go when it happens because of that video I talked about earlier. and And then I think that combines with the product strategy a little bit, which is like one of the big focuses this year is customer perception. In the past, a lot of the stuff we worked on was, oh, if you go to settings, pipelines, a specific pipeline, and then click this button, there's a new option there.
35:02.47
tylerking
And it's like, no one's ever going to find that. ah You can build it. If someone, maybe for new customers, it's nice, but like, I don't know. One of the things we're we're trying to prioritize things customers are actually notice. So like this last feature we just built.
35:16.46
tylerking
I don't know if this is two in the weeds, but the idea is you know we have contacts in companies. Very common is I'm adding a contact. It has the same phone number as the company, or the same address is probably the most common.
35:27.82
tylerking
We just built a little feature that like if, like when you're adding a contact, there's this little button that's like, use the company's either email, phone, or and or address.
35:36.50
Rick
Mm-hmm. Yep But every time you had a contact you're gonna see it
35:38.11
tylerking
But it's a pretty minor thing. and It's not like this is the whole product strategy. Yeah, exactly. and so our our hope is like and And another version of this is we did formatted WYSIWYG note editor. So when you're e and entering a note, instead of just plain text, you can bold it. You can add bullet lists. And again, every single customer uses notes. You can't miss it. there's like a like When you hit Enter, a different thing happens now. It creates a new paragraph instead of a new single line break. like You can't possibly miss that this thing happened.
36:05.30
tylerking
um So the hope is like by the end of the year, like ah all these little things have added up where people will be like, wow, things have really gotten better. That's for that's to service our current customers more than our new ones, but that's part of it. um
36:15.63
Rick
Where I just like, just a clarifying question.
36:15.98
tylerking
we yeah
36:17.79
Rick
I can't remember where, where do you, um, do you guys have like a knowledge base help desk? Is that in webflow collections?
36:24.39
tylerking
We, yeah, we're toying with, this might be a good thing to talk about real quick, because just daydream about the future. Right now, the situation is we have Webflow. And for people who aren't familiar with Webflow, you can basically create, I think they call them collections, but it's basically like a CMS.
36:39.48
tylerking
So like we have one CMS for our blog. We have a different CMS for our help site.
36:43.51
Rick
Mm-hmm.
36:43.56
tylerking
So all our help articles are in Webflow. And then we use front I don't know if you'd call front a help desk. It's not quite a help desk, but like it's a collaborative email tool that's great for customer service.
36:53.95
tylerking
We use front for our help desk.
36:56.34
Rick
Mm hmm.
36:59.56
tylerking
Front doesn't have what we want yet, but like it's obvious AI is going to change some things. And one of the most obvious things it could change is like, I don't want AI to ever send an email automatically on our behalf, but I would love for it to draft an email that one of our customer service people can review and edit.
37:19.56
tylerking
um But it needs to be trained. Front is, they don't have this quite yet. They have like things sort of like it, but not quite exactly what we're looking for. But it seems inevitable that Front will eventually be able to draft our emails for us. um Maybe we have enough history of emails in Front that they can train off that. And they don't actually need to access our help center to,
37:45.27
tylerking
do that properly, but we are toying with the idea of like should we move our help site into front for potential training data.
37:52.96
Rick
Hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
37:55.27
tylerking
um
37:55.56
Rick
I think that's a no brainer, honestly, like, and do it now, not later. Like, um, cause they have ah have, they have a help desk solution and like worst case, like they're probably are already advantages to having them host the help desk.
38:01.64
tylerking
Well, I don't know that like
38:13.42
tylerking
There are advantages to having Webflow do it too, though.
38:16.42
Rick
For SEO or like, what what are the advantages?
38:16.73
tylerking
um a the The big thing is like most people access our help site through our app, not through a public site. and i just for me I'm probably like overthinking this.
38:27.81
tylerking
like I saw a really great tweet ah yesterday that was like, I'm going to butcher what it actually said, but something like um entrepreneurship is about not sweating the small stuff.
38:38.50
Rick
Yeah.
38:38.77
tylerking
and entrepreneurship And entrepreneurship is about sweating the small stuff. And it's just like iterating back and forth with each problem, deciding which of those two you're supposed to do. like to To build a product that really delights people, you have to do some things really, really well and really put a lot of care and thought into it.
38:53.12
tylerking
And then you have to ignore all the other stuff that doesn't matter. And deciding what matters and what doesn't is is the game. I think because we serve a really low-tech customer base who uses help resources a lot, and because our help resources and our customer service are such a differentiator for us, the idea of like, click this link and we'll open up you know help.lessknowingserum.com as this like branded front website andre like versus what we have right now is like it's really integrated into the app and we're pulling all this data from Webflow. you You can search for help articles in the app. You can watch all the tutorial videos in the app.
39:28.76
tylerking
That's the article. it's not It's not that Webflow is doing something special. It's that because we we put a lot of effort into building our own little custom solution that has some UX benefits, I think.
39:37.72
Rick
Makes sense. Makes sense.
39:39.79
tylerking
um we could also do but One thing I've been toying with is doing both.
39:40.92
Rick
This is like our this is right this is our age old like argument of like building in-house versus like outsourcing. And I just default to outsourcing. so
39:49.19
tylerking
Well, we are outsourcing to Webflow.
39:50.51
Rick
yeah
39:51.31
tylerking
at like the the editing went when ah Yes.
39:51.61
Rick
yeah you're outsourcing You're outsourcing the CMS. ah You're not outsourcing the help desk.
39:57.33
tylerking
Correct, yeah. and And the thing is, 90% of the time, you're right. But if you do it all the time, you miss the 10% that gives us our our special or magic sauce. so like
40:07.48
Rick
But AI is a turning point. like ah you know Do you want to build the AI model yourself? Or do you want to like do you want to rely on a third party to be able to do that? that's a that's a yeah And they should be able to pull in the website data that's publicly available.
40:16.36
tylerking
Absolutely. but But again, we have like probably two orders of magnitude, three orders of magnitude, more content in front already than our help site has. if
40:28.28
tylerking
They should. And yes, and we've actually been toying with, could we just use Zapier or something to like, we could just copy all our content into the front knowledge base, but not actually expose that to anyone.
40:29.00
Rick
yeah
40:38.27
Rick
Yep.
40:38.46
tylerking
um So we're we're the reality is Front's AI isn't good enough to be useful for us yet. So it doesn't matter, but we're definitely keeping an eye on that. ah and We've also started having conversations like, what What do we do if 50% of our email support disappears? like now what What do we do with the team? um Because we we certainly are not a type of company that would do layoffs or anything. But like at the same time, we're also not a company that's just going to be like, well, you can just not work.
41:09.65
tylerking
you know um
41:11.16
Rick
Outbound sales.
41:12.87
tylerking
Yeah.
41:13.55
Rick
The tripling, that would just like, how many people would quit?
41:14.50
tylerking
God, they would hate that.
41:16.63
Rick
If you wanted people to quit.
41:17.51
tylerking
yeah but That's a, that's a layoff right there. That's how you lay people off is you make them be sales. Um, yeah, I think there's like op there's opportunities to do more customer service stuff.
41:29.19
tylerking
There's also like, you know, one or two people on the team might be interested in marketing, move them to marketing and just have a smaller customer service team. There's lots of options and and it's all premature. maybe Maybe this never even happens, but we're.
41:40.36
tylerking
you know It's hard not to think about that with with AI coming along. um Back to product stuff. We added an annoying little red bubble that tells you, tells our customers when we have a new feature to announce into the app.
41:54.69
Rick
Wow.
41:55.75
tylerking
ah it It goes where the intercom bubble, it's not intercom and it doesn't like chat with you. It's just this tiny little bubble that bounces up and down. It's from this company called headway.
42:06.66
tylerking
You cannot Google it. By the way, if you Google headway, you're going to find a million other companies, not this one. What is it? It's like headway app.com or something.
42:16.69
tylerking
I, uh,
42:16.99
Rick
Oh my gosh, there's so many headways. There's book summaries, there's therapist therapists. ah
42:24.17
tylerking
Can I tell you something pretty disconcerting? So yes, it's it's headwayapp dot.co is the actual URL.
42:29.84
Rick
Yes.
42:31.79
tylerking
I was trying to remember it and I typed in headway dot.app. What do you get when you go there?
42:40.40
Rick
Well, say that again.
42:41.99
tylerking
Headway dot.app. What happens when you go there?
42:43.34
Rick
I did headway. Oh, headway. I don't want to type that in now that you're asking me.
42:47.18
tylerking
It's going to, well, either I have a virus
42:49.69
Rick
It says cockroaches severed limbs. John Goodman. Oops. It took me to a bad site that thank you.
42:55.41
tylerking
It took me to Pornhub.
42:57.08
Rick
That's what it took me to. Yes. What?
43:00.06
tylerking
Good, I'm glad I don't have a virus.
43:01.40
Rick
OK. I think goodness I have a blocker on my on my tab like.
43:03.94
tylerking
ah
43:07.94
tylerking
Was I about to get you in trouble, Rick?
43:09.14
Rick
Yes. ah
43:12.81
tylerking
Anyway, hard to find, but headwayapp.co. I don't know if they're they're they're probably not our long-term solution because it's a little too basic for what we need. but basically One of the, like in the past, every time we launch a new feature or anything, we would, um, we'll like send an, uh, we'll write a blog post up, maybe make a video or whatever. We'll send the announcement to our newsletter, which is about half our customers. It's not like big enough of a deal most of the time to email all our customers. Um, what headway is nice for is there's, if there's a new feature to announce, we just go into headway, we type it up, hit save. And then like this little red bubble appears and it bounces around and then customers click on it. It'll tell them about the new feature.
43:51.32
tylerking
ah So it's like an in-app pop-up, whereas but before we would have it, it had to like code that ourselves, which was enough friction that we just never did it. um So again, just trying to customer perception, trying to get that going a little more this year.
44:05.97
Rick
The thing that i don't like I can't relate to is this would never work for leg up because no one logs into the app. um So like if you want someone to know about something, you've got to interrupt them.
44:12.20
tylerking
Right.
44:15.07
Rick
um So it's a ah it's ah just a major, like so many things but become available to you when you have daily active users. um So that's cool.
44:25.43
tylerking
Yeah. Similarly, a lot of the stuff we're building wouldn't matter. Like one of the things I find frustrating about leg up health, like my role at leg up health is I want to make the product better and it just doesn't matter.
44:31.72
Rick
Mm-hmm.
44:34.92
tylerking
Like some aspects of it do, but like the equivalent of this being able to copy company info over to contact, like little quality of life improvements. They only matter if you're in the app for hours a day, you know, it's like saving you five seconds each time.
44:48.42
tylerking
Nobody uses leg up health enough for that type of thing to matter.
44:51.30
Rick
Totally. The, the two areas, like it comes very clear, like where we should spend our technical resources right now. One is, you you know, on the signup process, like making it easier and faster and better to like get started.
45:02.10
Rick
And then the other is the renewal process, like making it easier, more scalable, faster to for JD to serve.
45:04.83
tylerking
Yeah.
45:08.54
Rick
Um, ah everything in between is just like not that high upside right now.
45:12.97
tylerking
Yeah, I do like the idea of being like JD is my customer. I'm building tech for JD.
45:16.71
Rick
Yes.
45:18.03
tylerking
ah I wouldn't want that to be my full-time job, but I think it's kind of a cool side thing.
45:18.16
Rick
Mm-hmm.
45:22.43
Rick
Side project, yeah.
45:23.14
tylerking
I actually had this experience. I was just talking with one of our former interns who he interned at Apple last summer. And I was like, yeah how was it? And he had a good time. But he was like, but I was on like an internal team.
45:34.67
tylerking
And my goal for next summer is to get an internship at a place where I'm like, I'm building customer facing software. And I had that same thing where I interned at General Mills. you know They don't sell software to customers. They sell cereal. And that was like, for me, a big turning point of like, I need to be customer facing. That's what I need to be doing.
45:51.25
Rick
Yeah, that's interesting do to say that I went fall, like I'm definitely like internal support, um, not from a software engineering perspective, but from a tooling and playbooks and that sort of thing. I think the, the main, the main difference is like, I, it does, I am forced to and like understand what we're actually going to market with but in order to build those things. So there, there is like an element of customer facing ness to it, but I definitely yearn for like interaction with the end user. Um,
46:19.39
tylerking
Yeah.
46:19.74
Rick
Uh, and I, I don't know how to like get that in my current role.
46:23.83
tylerking
It's not even for me that I want to interact with the user necessarily. I mean, I do enjoy talking to customers, but what it really is, is the type of software I love building is these small little productivity improvements. Like let's make this thing, it worked, but let's make it a little less annoying. Making internal software less annoying has zero value or very close to zero value. So I just can't do the type of work I like in that environment.
46:47.85
Rick
Makes sense.
46:48.95
tylerking
But all right, probably need to run soon here. but And then I'll also just say we've made some like just some updates on how the product's going. So we made two of these kind of smaller ah improvements I already mentioned of copying ah company data to contact records. And the formatted notes the notes one is much bigger, um both going really well. you know these These are the type of cup holder things we said like in the past.
47:16.88
tylerking
You know, we just weren't doing much of this at all. And and we we have customers writing in like, hey, it's so cool seeing all these improvements.
47:19.26
Rick
Mm hmm.
47:23.67
Rick
That's great.
47:23.73
tylerking
And then we, yeah, it it feels good. um But the the big change from how we've done things in the past is basically the whole team now is on two big projects. In the past, we would always say each developer has their own thing.
47:35.43
tylerking
So one person's doing formatted notes, one person's doing copying company data, one person's doing forms, one person's doing email. And now we're saying forms and email, which I've talked about before, like what I mean by those.
47:45.69
tylerking
like Those are the two projects and basically the whole team is on those projects and they're moving like way faster than what we would have seen in the past because of that.
47:55.39
Rick
That's awesome.
47:56.95
tylerking
Yeah.
47:57.22
Rick
That's awesome.
47:57.42
tylerking
Um, it's, I gotta say this is the first time, like more than halfway through the year where I can say like things are actually kind of going the way I it described them last January, I think.
48:08.68
Rick
Can I make a request for the next episode?
48:10.91
tylerking
Sure.
48:11.53
Rick
Can you can we do a goal update and then also um like revenue updates?
48:13.97
tylerking
Hmm. Yeah.
48:16.24
Rick
um I think it would be good to sort of like kind of reflect on growth and If the key, like whatever the three metrics that matter are for us, um, on each of the businesses, that'd be fine.
48:26.53
tylerking
Yeah, and by goal update, you mean like take the goals we set in our new year episode and and re revisit them?
48:30.11
Rick
Yep. Yeah. And I, I'm always interested to sort of get an update on like growth trajectory from like, whatever you're focused on, whether it's you know, users, ARR, MRR, um, profitability, whatever it is.
48:43.51
Rick
Uh, I think that that would be interesting as well.
48:43.90
tylerking
Yeah. I can spoil it and say August has been an absolutely brutal month.
48:49.78
Rick
ah you
48:50.40
tylerking
It has not been good for us.
48:52.07
Rick
Oh no.
48:53.32
tylerking
I think we're down 200 users maybe. Um, not that's probably, Oh my God, a centipede. Sorry. There's a centipede on the wall next to me.
49:02.16
Rick
I just ah noticed something. You're, oh no, you're not, you're at the your office.
49:06.04
tylerking
Yeah. I'm at my office.
49:06.77
Rick
Okay. I was like, what happened to the, to the, to the jungle?
49:10.46
tylerking
Yeah, I've got two different backgrounds here.
49:11.78
Rick
Tyler, Tyler usually has like a plant, like ah engulfing him in his background, but it's not happening today.
49:18.23
tylerking
Yeah. um But anyway, i I'll prep for us to talk about goals for next episode. But yeah, my the the the growth for us, just to tease it, has been great because we did the price increase.
49:29.36
tylerking
where We've got way more money than we did before the price change. But the actual user growth, which is more of a sign of the future, I think it's largely because the price increase people are turning because of that. But like I'm not worried about it, per se.
49:41.07
tylerking
But I can't really say it's been a great year for user growth.
49:45.17
Rick
and That makes sense. Well, but you're investing in the future right now, so that should turn the tide.
49:47.00
tylerking
Yep.
49:50.17
tylerking
Hopefully, but all right. Is that it?
49:52.68
Rick
Yeah, that's it. If you'd like to review past topics and show notes, visit startuptolast.com. See you next time.
49:57.73
tylerking
See ya.