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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
Matt Medeiros (00:01)
Sam Chlebowski welcome to the WP Minute.
Sam Chlebowski (00:04)
Matt, great to be connected again. Great to be on here with you today,
Matt Medeiros (00:09)
Sam and I worked together for a few years in a past career where we took two worlds. I mean, we both had agency experience. I had it from a smaller, you know, a couple person shop bespoke WordPress agency, you know, building out projects that generally took, you know, one to six months, depending on what kind of customer we were working with. Sam worked in a much more
in what I will call an intense, but he'll fill in the, he'll fill in the lines for us, a much more intense, high, ⁓ high production, and high volume web shop. And it was very interesting learning how he approached website building back then and how I approach website building back then. But Sam, for the folks who don't know you, what do you do these days? What's your title? Where do you work?
Sam Chlebowski (01:01)
So I am one of three co-founders at LaunchBay. We are a client onboarding automation platform for B2B software companies and marketing agencies. So the second piece of that, the marketing agency piece, ⁓ that is really inspired by our previous experience, myself and my CEO, ⁓ at building another... ⁓
agency called Brighter Vision, which was a WordPress development shop as well as a we had a SaaS marketing solution. So there's the other part of that in there specifically for mental health professionals. So at our peak, we were subscription based model, which was a kind of novel at the time where we were charging basically 49 bucks a month. ⁓ We built the website for you, custom built it on one of our WordPress themes. But the way that it worked is if you we provide unlimited
it's support, we provided the hosting, but if you left, you didn't get to keep your website. So it was kind of novel at the time, but at our high point before we'd sold that business in 2020, ⁓ we were doing about 350 new websites a month. So heavily focused on high volume, we're still delivering a really great quality ⁓ product and website that could perform for our clients, but it's just a fraction of the cost of what they might ⁓ go.
to a bespoke shop for it just because these type of folks often didn't have the budget so it was partially out of necessity that that model emerged for us.
Matt Medeiros (02:35)
Yeah.
One of the biggest challenges that I know my audience faces, heck, I faced it when I was an agency owner. And I still see it today, even in the age of AI and all these things that they could do is onboarding a customer, getting them to understand the process, getting paid, getting the communication, the fundamental communication down. These are all key to successful agency stuff. These are things that every successful agency needs. But before we talk more about LaunchBay, I want to talk about ⁓
that process of finding, I guess, in a world of volume, like you focused on the health and wellness professionals, was it health and wellness or mental health?
Sam Chlebowski (03:19)
Mental health primarily. So this was going to be, this would be like psychiatrists, psychologists, ⁓ marriage family therapists, things like that.
Matt Medeiros (03:26)
Do you remember when ⁓ or were you around at the agency when they made that pivot or was it always set out that way? Because I think what a lot of people find when they first start their agency, even if they're a small agency, one or two people, one, two to three people, it's oftentimes it's just like, well, let's just, whatever we can, whatever we can get in the door, let's get them in the door. Like whatever revenue we can get, let's get it. But then over time and,
Sam Chlebowski (03:49)
Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (03:53)
Sadly, it takes many years if you're operating at that level to finally go, okay, you know what? I know what kind of client I can go after. I can go after mental health or health and wellness or yoga studios, and they can kind of like finally find that niche that they can fill. How long did it take or did you just get into that business and they were already doing it? Any lessons from that of when they made that pivot?
Sam Chlebowski (04:16)
Yeah, I'm glad you asked it's a great question. I do have the backstory of this. So for me, so this was, we got to rewind way back, 11 years ago to 2015. I was actually just graduating college at the time, which seems like a lifetime ago. But at that time, the CEO and founder of this company's name was Brighter Vision.
Perry had started this ⁓ company and he had this idea, sort of an inkling of like, hey, I want to do some kind of subscription model, ⁓ a more SaaS-like model, ⁓ but for agencies.
So he had had an SEO business on one hand, ⁓ helping businesses with like really technical SEO campaigns. And on other hand, he was building some bespoke sites at the time, just him and one other person, a couple of freelancers here and there. ⁓ And they were really servicing anybody they could.
at that time, exactly like what you described. When I came on, it was right after sort of the first inspiration of that niche down. And what Perry had discovered, and he told me this story like when I was even interviewing with him, I found the posting for this job on Craigslist, if you can believe that, and...
He had said hey, we want to do this thing because I've been building websites for whoever local businesses Whatever wherever I can find them and then he built a website for his mother-in-law who had a practice down in Florida and in the process of building that site he was doing some research looking at what site design looked like and found out that ⁓ There is this one competitor out there charging 49 bucks a month
per site, but the sites are terrible. They didn't even have basic SEO. They weren't mobile responsive. So like I said, again, this is fifth, this is, you know, 11 years ago now. ⁓ but he saw an opportunity there that there's a way to really provide a much better product, a much better service than this big competitor. And that was the inspiration. It was just going deep into an industry that he had worked on for a site. ⁓ and then seeing, ⁓ Hey, this
this could work. ⁓ We can reverse engineer their model, but ultimately serve these types of businesses way better for a similar price.
Matt Medeiros (06:42)
Yeah, and obviously for folks who might be thinking about that and of course like now in today's world things are hyper competitive, right? mean, 11, 15 years ago, same thing when I was in that space. Yeah, it was competitive, but there weren't as many WordPress agencies, WordPress people out there. Now we have, you know, that 10X the competition of many more people doing this stuff plus the age of AI and like how do we compete? when people first hear, you know,
Sam Chlebowski (07:04)
100%.
Matt Medeiros (07:12)
I have two threads of thought here because like I'm also thinking even with this competition, it's even more important to find your lane and find the type of customer that you want to serve. Because still I don't see a lot of people doing that. Like I still don't see a lot of people identifying their agency with, you know, agency for XYZ. It's still just come on in. We'll still do anything for you. And maybe behind the scenes you have a perfect fit. But I think it's so important now to lead with what your expert expertise is and who you want to serve.
⁓ largely because I think in the face of AI, so here's a, here's a sub question to that largely in the faces of AI, people are going to be able to build anything. They'll be able to build any website the customer wants. The, the, the disconnect will be, I think the customer will have so many options to go to, find somebody to service them, maybe even themselves to build these things that they're going to want somebody with ⁓ a more human touch to the service, to the component. ⁓
Where I'm urging agency owners to really start thinking about their practice as almost like a community. ⁓ If I could use that or a membership where if I serve the mental health space, I am so acute and so tuned to that profession that people want to be part of this thing. And then, by the way, we'll build you a website. Like there's going to be a thing in there where it's just like, we want to be a part of this agency because they offer all this other external stuff. And then they'll build stuff for me. ⁓ That's
my sort of crazy thought of where the direction of service is going. Any thoughts on how people should be competing in this hyper competitive space these days?
Sam Chlebowski (08:50)
So I'll start this by saying I am a hundred percent aligned with what you just shared of in this age of AI, in this age of speed, of being able to do things faster, being able to do things on your own.
your expertise and the community that you're able to build becomes much more important. And I'll even give you an example of that, like from internally of some of the work we've done at LaunchBay. ⁓ We were looking ⁓ roughly a year ago to offload some of the work that we do with paid advertising. So Facebook, Google, LinkedIn ads. And when we were looking for an agency, the
first thing that we wanted was, it has to be specific to B2B SaaS. And if you weren't specific to B2B SaaS, you were automatically out of the running, like immediately disqualified for us. Because there were, we found a couple of great agencies in the space that we could go out and talk to that were specific to that. They were, you know, posting on LinkedIn. They had great things to share about, hey, these types of strategies are working for our clients. Let us deploy them for you. So I 100 % agree.
And I also think that there's a advantage even outside of just acquiring new customers and getting in front of the right people.
It's that once you start working with a specific type of client, you're able to really tailor the delivery process to them in a way that's gonna make them a lot happier with the outcomes. Because if you are delivering websites for a mental health therapist versus, let's say maybe you're in the pet care industry, so like dog walkers, boarders, groomers, whatever, there's difference between those two types of people at a...
super high level. Yes, they're all unique at the end of the day. They all have unique types of business and styles of working, but there's going to be some threads that you can pull across these different types of customers that are going to be ⁓ consistent.
within your specific niche. And it helps you really tailor your delivery process and have a better idea of going into a project, what they are going to want, what's worked well for other types of ⁓ businesses within that niche. That is at the end of the day, I think, a really powerful lever you can pull for growth because it's gonna result not just in retention, but it's gonna result in referrals and people singing your praises within their own communities.
Matt Medeiros (11:19)
Yeah, there's in the WordPress world, I think it's finally starting to evaporate, but ⁓ it still kind of exists where people are kind of afraid of like profit. Like I tell people like, how profitable are you? They're like, no, I don't run my business for profitability. I run my business because I like to serve my customers and I'm not trying to just make profit margins until like, you know, the holiday break comes and then they realize, God.
like there's no business coming in between, you know, the first week of November to second week January. And as an agency, that could be like the death knell in your entire operation, right? If you don't have recurring income and you're kind of just building a business based on, you know, the projects that you have coming in that pipeline, it can get pretty tough. The other reason why you find these ⁓ clients that you resonate so well with your niche or whatever you want to call it.
Sam Chlebowski (11:54)
Hahaha
Matt Medeiros (12:16)
is you can start to build a process that increases profitability, right? You can go to a customer that you've done a hundred times, a dozen times, a thousand times and fine tune that process so that you are more profitable. And in my opinion, the place that starts first, know, not to just hype up lunch bay, but it's the onboarding. It's the pre-sales and it's the onboarding. If you know how to
Sam Chlebowski (12:22)
Yes.
Matt Medeiros (12:45)
somebody and have that same pitch, even though that doesn't sound great on paper, like you have the same pitch, but you know their industry and you can onboard them all the same way, all in the same cadence, you can start to maximize profits and then work on the back of the house of like, how do we develop this thing? How do we design this thing? How do we ship that thing? In my opinion, everything starts at that pre-sales process and that onboarding experience. How can people start to think about Launch Bay?
solving that for them. How do you preface it with an agency owner that's saying, I need to get better at this. How does LaunchBay help that?
Sam Chlebowski (13:23)
Yeah, so I think that and even before I mentioned anything with the product, I think that there's a good distinction to make between these sort of two camps that I see with agencies. ⁓ So there is the productized agency where it's either subscription, ⁓ it's subscription, it's high volume. ⁓
and you're offering this sort of, you know, repeatable high, super high volume customer comes in, service them, great. They can make a number of requests every month or you build their website, they have unlimited support, things like that. And then there is the bespoke agencies. With the bespoke agencies, I find that there can be sometimes this tension of people saying, well, I don't want to be a productized agency. I really want to deliver this bespoke project.
That is what I like doing. That's how I've seen that I give my customers the best results and to that I say Kudos, that's amazing. I'm I love that you figure that out but Having a standardized process from onboarding to delivery to sales that doesn't mean that you are Turning yourself into a productized subscription based industry. There's a good distinction And I think that it's one that should be made more
between productization and standardization. They are not the same things. Standardization is something that can be a really powerful driver of profitability within your business. Because, yes, for the bespoke agency, every client is unique. 100%, I think that that should be a key part of your messaging, of the sales communication that you're having with clients, because it's gonna get those types of deals across the line. That said, there are...
things that you can do to standardize your processes that are going to ensure that you're not rebuilding things from the ground up for every single new customer you work with. Because at the end of the day, your customers are going to have similarities between them. You you're always going to need, if you're building WordPress sites, if they have an existing logo, if they have existing brand assets, you're going to have to ask them for those things, right?
And it's a matter of, do you want to send that in a custom email every time? Or do you want to automate that where you can bring somebody into a portal where they just upload those things? The process is already laid out. You can still standardize those parts of your early client engagements without sacrificing ⁓ your unique ability to deliver an exceptional bespoke product.
Matt Medeiros (16:08)
Yeah. And if we can make the distinction, ⁓ like LaunchBay works with your, like this is not something, it works with other CRMs, right? It integrates with other CRMs. This isn't something that, because there's a lot, I know there's a lot of competition in the space. ⁓ It's not trying to be, well, I guess we never say never, but it's not trying to be your CRM right now. So it integrates with other CRMs. Would you say it's a project management replace?
Sam Chlebowski (16:20)
Yes.
No, it's not.
Matt Medeiros (16:36)
replacement, how should people think about this in their stack of things that they manage their agency with?
Sam Chlebowski (16:43)
Yeah, yeah, it's a really great question. It's something, Matt, honestly, that's taken us a little while to figure out as well. Because at first, we went into this thing, you know, over three years ago being like, we want to be project management. What we found out, though, is that actually kind of undersells the service. Because the fact of the matter is until maybe a year and a half, two years ago, there hasn't been onboarding specific software. And we really look at onboarding as a separate category.
of tools. And now there are a couple of competitors that we have out there, but none of them really existed. All of us kind of got started around the same time. And where we look at onboarding software is, so you have a CRM at the start, the very, very start of your earliest part of interacting with the customer. ⁓
that first time you collect an email through to the sales process. ⁓ On the other hand, you have project management software. Project management software has both, has also existed for a long time. Trello, Asana, ClickUp, Monday, list goes on and on. ⁓ The issue with both of those types of tools is they were never designed for client-facing collaboration. And as an agency, that's really what you need.
And there are ways that you can hack a CRM to work with clients. There are ways you can hack project management tools to work with clients. ⁓ But neither of them do the job particularly well.
And where we first experienced this pain was at that agency I was talking about earlier is we had tried both. At one time we had tried ⁓ hacking together our CRM with Zapier, with ⁓ email marketing tools and having these really complicated detailed flows. On the other end, we would pass that data to ⁓ Trello or Asana, which we ended up using. What ultimately solved the problem of onboarding for us, making it scalable, predictable, repeatable, and
ultimately so that we could onboard customers on these really predictable timelines, get them the first draft of their website without having to just keep throwing people at the problem. The way that we were eventually able to solve that was actually by building our own custom portal in the back end of WordPress. Now, it was a cool solution and it ended up working for us. But the problem with that is it was way more expensive.
and took way longer to custom develop than is feasible for all but the upper 1 % of agencies out there to do something like that. So we took a lot of those learnings that's what became LaunchBay, was a client-facing portal that was able to connect with your project management or you can just use it for project management in its own right.
if you don't have some sort of complex existing system and be able to seamlessly connect those systems. So on the front end, your client gets this really beautiful branded login list space where they can pay invoices, sign contracts, upload files, track the status of their projects. And then on the back end, your team is set up with these, with views and reports to view the status of all of your projects.
but also ⁓ set up these repeatable playbooks that are going to automate the process from the second a customer raises their hand and says, hey, I'm interested to eventually when they are off-boarded. So that's a long answer. I know the original question was, can it be used as project management software? Yes. And we have a lot of project management functionality in the tool. I would say ⁓ like 70 % of our customers actually just ditch their PM tool.
and do all of their project management internally with us. The 30 % that maybe have some legacy systems that work really well, like ClickUp or Asana, that they're not quite ready to ditch, we integrate with those systems.
Matt Medeiros (20:40)
Yeah, and maybe at the end of the show for for the video viewers, maybe Sam can hop in and show us put you on the hot seat, Sam. We didn't talk about this, but maybe if there's something you can show us at the end, ⁓ the so the video viewers can see it. But for the audio viewers, you know, or for the audio viewers, for the audio listeners, ⁓ for the audio listeners, you know, a lot of the stuff I see Launch Bay when you were demoing it to me a couple months of.
Sam Chlebowski (20:52)
I'd love to.
Hahaha
Matt Medeiros (21:09)
ago when we were first chatting about this. I see it as something that moves the business along. I think for the uninitiated, for the people who haven't been doing this job for a while, like being a freelancer and an agency owner, it's fine right now for you because maybe you're just getting started, you have a handle on the half a dozen or dozen clients you're working with, but as soon as you become
the agency owner who is operating on the business instead of operating in the business, then you need these, and you start delegating and you start, I don't even care if you're starting to outsource to automated agents, right? In this world of AI, you need things like when do I get paid? the project, or is the contract signed? How is it getting handed off to somebody else in the team? And.
This is where a tool like LaunchBank I think really excels, at least in my point of view, because there are times that when you're interacting with a customer and if their boss's boss says, hey, what's up with this website? Are we launched yet? What's happening? As the agency owner, that's the last thing you want to hear is the boss's boss is saying, what's going on with this project? The boss's boss isn't going to want to see a Sana Trello.
Basecamp and GitHub ⁓ version control and all this other stuff. They just want to see where are we? We've paid you, we've signed this thing, or you haven't paid us and this is why things are slow. And a tool like this is that, you know, that it goes beyond project management for how do I build a website? It's where are we in the business process of this thing? That's what I like about it.
Sam Chlebowski (23:01)
100 % Matt and it's actually funny that you say that that piece on visibility because we just I just did a YouTube video because this is something that people have been asking about is ⁓ Hey, when do I need a tool like launch bay and we are very open and honest that hey if you are Just getting going if you are, know at a lower volume where you are still that owner that is operating
almost the entire business from the sales to the marketing to the delivery. You might not need something like this. ⁓ But what happens over time is as you grow, the scope of projects get more complex. The people...
So that the people that are running these processes, that's going to get more complex as well. There's just more people to be able to do the work. And you may be also operating at a higher volume. And one of the things that I ⁓ and a key piece of that video is, hey, if you don't have visibility until a client complains, it's time.
for software like this that can provide you with where are we at in the onboarding process? Where are we at in delivery? Can I easily see a timeline of all projects? And can I see what's falling behind and what's on track at a glance? Because if you can't and you're constantly having to go to your team to ask for those things, it's time.
Matt Medeiros (24:28)
Yeah. There's also a feedback component too. The next two features I want to talk about and I'm excited to talk about this stuff because I see it because I was just like thinking about my agency and I'm just like, man, if I just had this when I was running my agency, there would be so few things that fall through the cracks because like it's all automated. Invoicing and feedback. There's a feedback component to this too. Again, I know that's a competitive space.
but you have the opportunity to upload things and have your customers sign off. And I love that paper trail because so many times they were like, no, we didn't approve. We didn't approve that. no, yes you did. Yes you did. There was so many of these moments, especially in the bigger customers. Like when you and I worked together, we worked with some ⁓ like corporate or enterprise logos and there's turnover at these places. So you might be talking to some people one day,
Sam Chlebowski (25:23)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Medeiros (25:25)
And then the next day that person's gone and somebody else is filling that role. And we want to catch them up to speed and we can see that paper trail of like, here's all the design mockups that were approved. These are all the milestones we've hit. Don't worry about the project management tool, but look at this paper trail. That's important. And talk to us about the feedback ⁓ mechanisms in Launch Bay.
Sam Chlebowski (25:46)
Yeah, and I'm so glad you called this out, Matt, and it actually shows why we built this. ⁓ So feedback was one of the hardest things that we would deal with ⁓ at Brighter Vision.
web design agency we're talking about, we've mentioned a couple of times. And it was actually one of the first pieces of launch bay that we built because of how big of a problem it is. And what you just described where you are working with a customer and there is no clear paper trail of, hey, this was approved, this wasn't, or no client, I swear, like this manager on your team requested this change. Like I'll dig up the emails, I'll show you the Slack thread, like this happened.
⁓ It was a constant problem for us and what we did and what we've done with LaunchBay is so LaunchBay, think it's important to call out that our templates for onboarding or templates for delivery, the way that LaunchBay works is really all centered around the concept of tasks. So one of our tasks options gives you the ability to upload files, ⁓ videos, PDFs, images, whatever you'd like and have clients annotate those files directly within.
a white labeled login list client portal that sends them automated reminders until they complete that. The really powerful part for the businesses we serve, however, is that we have a clear versioning and approval structure. once so as a as a file goes through the feedback process, clients can not only see like what comments were left, but they can toggle between different versions of that file from B1 to B2.
up to the final approved version. Maybe that's v4 or v5. And they can easily see, and everybody else who's associated with that project can easily see these changes were requested, these changes were made, and here is when the final version was approved. And then we store that final version in their client portal. They can access it at any time as well as the previous versions if you'd like. And on top of that, and maybe this even leads into the next feature,
⁓ There's ways that you can set up workflow automations within LaunchBait to do things like, hey, once this file is approved, automatically send an invoice, if that's the way that you choose to build.
Matt Medeiros (28:08)
That's exactly what I was gonna ask. Because I wanted to cap this all off about talking about the product, about payments and tying these milestones together. And this is another thing that people are severely challenged with from an emotional level is asking for the money. Like I've made the milestone, I've done the milestone, I've done the thing you've asked me, now please pay me. And it sounds silly, but ⁓ on the WP Minute Network we also host another.
Sam Chlebowski (28:10)
Hahaha
Matt Medeiros (28:37)
podcast called Agency Action, and the co-host over there, Kurt, talks about that all the time. He's like, I hate that process of like, I did the work, now I gotta send, can you please pay me? And he's looking for like that seamless integration. ⁓ And this does it because once it's approved, boom, the invoice goes. So not only do you get over the hurdle of like that mental hurdle, like God, I gotta ask, but then there's like the clerical hurdle of.
God, I gotta invoice it. Now I have to take my brain from being a designer or a developer and then go into whatever, QuickBooks or whatever you use to invoice. Now, when you set these up in this automated fashion, it just invoices. Talk about the invoicing stuff for a moment and does it integrate with accounting software too so people feel a little bit more comfortable using it?
Sam Chlebowski (29:26)
Yeah, yeah. So our invoicing software, just to like lay the foundation, it's built ⁓ through direct connection with Stripe. So any of the things that you can do on Stripe, ⁓ QuickBooks, ⁓ for example, being the big one, ⁓ will integrate within this invoicing software. At the moment, Stripe is the only option that we have in terms of payment processing. It is the biggest, which is why we started with it. But we do have plans to add on additional options. ⁓
I think the most interesting thing that you had called out was that friction that can come from sending an invoice. And I think that the ultimate value of the way that we handle invoicing in LaunchBay is that we completely remove that friction for you as the business owner. And this flows through to a lot of other parts of the product as well, but ⁓ we're all focused on helping your team do the work.
instead of being responsible for tracking the work or doing the admin tasks that you quite frankly hate doing. And that also ties back to this idea of standardizing things. ⁓ So many of the things that you can standardize within an agency, it's my belief that they are things that honestly, they're kind of a pain to do in the first place. So with our invoicing, ⁓ even picture a world where...
⁓ To go back to the example that you had shared, picture a world that, hey, client comes on, you automatically send them a contract to sign. You don't have to send that contract in email. It's already pre-populated with all of the fields, all of the information specific to that project based on an onboarding form or data pulled in from your CRM. That gets sent automatically. As soon as the client does that, you then send them a invoice.
⁓ You don't have to, you know, pick up your hands and type anything. As long as you have that templatized within a workflow within LaunchBay, it'll be sent to them. And then on top of that, LaunchBay is going to automatically remind your client until they complete that invoice for you. So until it's officially paid, it'll send them a gentle nudge on a schedule that you can just set up in a single click and then get that payment received.
So it completely removes that friction of like, oh, what do I say to get this customer to pay this? Or, oh, I'm so worried they're not gonna pay this on time. Like I'm gonna have to remind, you know, put post-it notes on my computer to remind them to pay. Nope, it's none of that. It's all just instant.
Matt Medeiros (31:58)
Yeah.
And for the audio listener, we will take a look at this at the end here. ⁓ If you just go to the YouTube channel, youtube.com slash WP Minute podcasts, you'll find the video version and I'm going to clip out the little demo that Sam will do at the end as well. That'll be in the show notes. What major lesson have you learned from agency feedback since we since you went to Launch Bay and started, you know,
working with agency owners again, what's the biggest takeaway that you've heard that folks in the WordPress space might not be hearing as often? We kind of live in a little bit of a bubble, us WordPress people. ⁓ And I think that for the greater web development, like there's a lot of people out there who don't touch WordPress. People inside WordPress can't fathom that, but you know, there are people building websites without WordPress and there's other businesses out there that people are servicing, you know, maybe without WordPress.
Is there a lesson or some feedback that you've heard ⁓ from agency owners in this day and age about running their businesses that you think is important to Echo?
Sam Chlebowski (33:07)
think that the hardest part is profitability right now because pricing has gotten so competitive that I think you have to be, if you want to be in the agency game long term, you have to be super mindful of what is your profit margin per project.
Because if you're not, it really creeps up fast. if we are still, and this is like a sad and unfortunate truth for me to share, but if we keep hiring people, especially within the agency space, like we did pre-2022, you're gonna go out of business.
Everybody has found ways to work faster to do more with less that if you're not figuring out ways to do that as well You're going to be out of business because people are going to be able to undercut your rates And I think that that's that's the hardest thing that I've learned it like it honestly like it it makes me a little bit bummed to even share but It's true. I think it's the reality out there right now
Matt Medeiros (34:02)
Yeah.
Yeah, I put out an episode, again, this is really only, well, I mean, I say it only applies to the WordPress world, but I see people who only use Webflow or only use Wix or Squarespace, and that's like the world that they live in. And I feel like it's all relatively the same is at some point a year, two years into your business, like you.
you just gotta take it more serious. It's not just like this fun little experiment anymore. ⁓ I mean, it can be if you're supplementing your lifestyle with something else, but if you're like really trying to take the agency space seriously and like grow, I like to call it a service-based business. I like to take the agency and the design and development out of it because that's, me, that's you only have two.
Sam Chlebowski (34:41)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (35:01)
You're only looking at it through two lenses. I either develop you something or I design you something. And I am neither of the two, you know, I'm not both. So pick one, Mr. or Mrs. customer. I like to look at this as you're providing a service. How can you service these people? And eventually you're going to come into that hyper competitive state or realize I'm not growing. And why am I not growing? It's because I'm either spending too much or making the wrong decisions. I haven't focused down on a set of customers that I really want to serve really well.
And these are important choices that you have to make. ⁓ It's just the unfortunate truth of business. That's it. That's it. Especially with AI.
Sam Chlebowski (35:38)
Yeah,
I also think too, and something you just reminded me of, so we rebuilt our website, what, a year and a half ago. I actually originally built it myself on WordPress, and we were looking for a SaaS provider to help just like rebuild it, that works specifically with SaaS companies to help, know, basically just rebuild our existing site, what we had on WordPress. We could not find anybody.
So I also think that for the WordPress community, like there's also an opportunity of working within more frameworks, especially now that we have things like Claude code that can help you, you know, be able to ⁓ work within a system that maybe you aren't as accustomed to. I do think that there's an advantage because I couldn't find anybody was either they just did WordPress or they just did Webflow. What I really would have loved to though is to talk to an agency who did a little bit of both.
And that was kind of hard to find. just I don't know how much of like a nugget or advice or whatever that is, but just something I thought was interesting.
Matt Medeiros (36:41)
All right, so for the listeners, ⁓ we're going to leave them with this call to action. We're going to go do a little bit of a demo right now. Sam's going to walk us through some of the cool things ⁓ that the product can do. Where do you want folks to go who are putting their phones down and switching over to YouTube? If they're out for a run right now, where do you want them to go to check out a way to get a free account or learn more about?
Sam Chlebowski (37:10)
Yep, ⁓ go to launchbay.com slash WP minute on there. You can go ahead, ⁓ sign up for a free trial. We'll also toss a coupon on there. If anybody's interested in switching to a paid account, we can offer your 25 off your first three months with us. So nice little discount there, but we also require, or we also offer a 14 day, no credit card ⁓ required trial ⁓ to get complete access.
Matt Medeiros (37:37)
So we'll have that in the show notes as well. And ⁓ as I mentioned, we're going to hop into a quick video demo. So check out the video on YouTube at youtube.com slash WP Minute podcast. Thanks for listening, everybody. Sam, thanks for hanging out today.
Sam Chlebowski (37:54)
Amazing. Thanks for having me, Matt. It was great to reconnect.
Matt Medeiros (37:58)
All right, we're going to go ahead and go into the video demonstration now. So those of you that are still watching, here we go. We're to share the screen.
I see the Launch Bay dashboard. ⁓ I see a bunch of bar graphs and progress graphs and score graphs. ⁓ Walk us through how Launch Bay can help with this onboarding stuff.
Sam Chlebowski (38:18)
Sweet, so first of all, this is what you'll see when you log in.
to LaunchBay as a agency. ⁓ This is your project's dashboard, which is gonna show you some really cool stuff. So this is a test account I have with a bunch of in-flight projects. Some of the really cool things that you can do from here though. So it's gonna show you all of your projects, who is the owner. ⁓ Then it's also gonna give you a health score. So like, hey, how is this project progressing? ⁓ Where is it in the process? How many tasks have been completed out of the tasks that have been assigned? You'll also get
information about new activity here. Another cool thing is our message center, which I think is good to call out on a short demo. One of the problems that we had a lot with ⁓ just collaborating with clients, whether that was onboarding or delivery, was clients would always be pinging.
us via email with like a change they wanted or something they wanted to do differently in the project. What we've done with LaunchBay is we now take any comment a client leaves, any email reply, basically anywhere they could message you within the LaunchBay ecosystem, we bring all of that into here, ⁓ into our message center. So one of the cool things you can do, for example, with a feedback request,
is you'll see that this person sent us a comment on a file that we sent them for approval. If I wanted to, I could very quickly go ahead, click here, create a task within their project and assign it to one of my team members with the context of what that change was about. So a really good way to manage ⁓ those like ad hoc requests that come up, those comments that clients leave. But ⁓ outside of this, and I think,
probably the most important pieces within the dashboard. You know, you have various tabs for for forms, for setting up your contracts, for invoices. I think that Matt, your audience is pretty tech savvy, so they'll know what this means. ⁓ But one of the really great pieces about the product is you can see a really great overview of all of your projects that you're running. So this is an example of just HubSpot implementation projects I'm running. If I was running, ⁓ I could also pull up a view that was just like,
⁓ WordPress websites for example anything that's created from the same template I can get this really streamlined view to see hey are they on track? What tasks are completed and are there any tasks that are holding this up? And if there was anything holding this up, it would have a red X, but I'm doing pretty good here in this view So that's a little bit about sorry. Go ahead
Matt Medeiros (40:57)
So before you leave that,
yeah, before you leave that screen, on those templates, so ⁓ in the podcast interview, we talked about the product I serviced ⁓ and finding these efficiencies. Can you have multiple templates for multiple different types of projects? that if you have a small project that's always built a certain way or a bespoke project that's being built a different way, can you mix and match that stuff?
Sam Chlebowski (41:26)
Yes, And one of the cool things you can do is in addition to having multiple templates, and you'll see I have a ton of different ones in here. ⁓ One of the cool things that you can do in addition to having multiple templates is you can actually set up workflow automations to import services from one template into that project. So for example, let's say you are a WordPress design shop and you also offer ⁓ SEO services.
You could set up a workflow automation. Let me just even go in here to show you how to do this.
I could set up a workflow automation where if a client answered a form a specific way. So for example,
If somebody said yes to a specific answer on a form, this isn't like an exact example, but I could even import an entire set of tasks that are grouped into a stage from another one of my templates for SEO services. And then even be able to activate those tasks ⁓ right then and there if I wanted to. So this is a good example of like what you can do with sort of workflow automations.
Matt Medeiros (42:31)
Hmm. ⁓
Sam Chlebowski (42:44)
And this is something I did want to talk about before showing you the client facing view. Another great automation that you could do, I we talked about this earlier on the episode. So let's say you will always want to send a ⁓ invoice as soon as a contract is complete. I could set up a quick automation where if task signed contract is completed, then we could activate another task for them to pay an invoice.
Matt Medeiros (43:12)
Yeah. You know what I really like about this? Because one of the, another hot topic in, I guess any agency life, it's not just, ⁓ it's not just WordPress, is the paid discovery process. Because so many times, you know, if you're, the big thing is a lot of the advice, and I agree, because I used to do it too, I just never found a great process for it, is paid discovery. And I think using a platform like this allows you, it adds sort of like that value.
to what paid discovery looks like. Because paid discovery, think from the client's perspective, sometimes might feel like, ⁓ we're gonna pay you to talk to us? We just wanna talk to you about the project. And I remember being on the other side going, yeah, yeah, we'll have a free 30 minute hour long call, that's cool, but I'm not going to scope the whole project for you for free. And...
Having something like launch bay in place it could make that value feel it could just increase that value because the customer feels okay This is a process you're gonna run me through this isn't you just Spitballing on like how you're gonna build my process and then like you showed with that automation stuff is You invoice you have the timeline you have the meetings laid out then you can initiate another step that says okay, do you want to buy into the full project now and then you buy into the full project and
Boom, like LaunchBay just has that whole template ready to go for the full process.
Sam Chlebowski (44:46)
Yeah, so and I'll even I was as you were typing I was still listening to you Matt, but I was
Matt Medeiros (44:50)
I was trying to give you as much time
as
Sam Chlebowski (44:54)
I was even mocking this up for you like in
the background of like what this could look like and I actually ⁓ realized that I didn't set these tasks to, well another cool thing to call out just as we're doing this is ⁓ within LaunchBay, you are able to have ⁓ complete control over what clients see and what they can't. And this really does facilitate a natural project management space.
So in addition to being able to privately comment on tasks with your team, you also have the option to make any task that you set up a team internal task or a task that's visible to the client in their portal. But in the example of, you know, just a quick sort of template that I'm drafting for a paid discovery, I could set up this template ⁓ where I have just a couple of tasks, ⁓ you know, contract assign, market research, keyword research, ⁓
And we can also have an invoice in here just to give you sort of the full example. And I can set up a very quick workflow for this. So once this invoice is paid, once that contract is signed, we kick off these two other tasks for our team to complete and add stages, add additional tasks to this as we go through.
Matt Medeiros (46:08)
Yeah, that's awesome.
Sam Chlebowski (46:10)
One of the other pieces just to show you very quickly with an in-flight project, I kind of think that your audience is probably ⁓ most interested in this, like behind the scenes stuff. ⁓ But a big part of the reason why LaunchBay excels as a client communication and collaboration platform from onboarding to offboarding is that ⁓ our client portals ⁓ are really designed to be super action focused.
making it dead simple for the clients to come in and do the things that they need to do. So I'll just show you a quick example of a project I have set up here. And I'll have to pull this up in a separate tab. So just give me a second. I have to open this up in a incognito window because it is gonna be login list here. So, okay. So here's a good example of like an in-flight project with us where the client,
They come in, it has your branding, they're a very clear Project Progress Tracker. They can even subscribe to updates here to get additional emails about the work being completed. And then as you go through the process, they're able to see everything that's been done, what hasn't, reference ⁓ any work that they've completed previously, and then even see things like their invoices ⁓ that you've sent them, ⁓ see the files that you've uploaded. ⁓
Matt Medeiros (47:33)
yeah.
Sam Chlebowski (47:38)
with all of the associated versions. So ⁓ V1, V2, any contracts they've signed, as well as have a really nice message center here where they can upload files, they can collaborate back and forth with your team, everything and everything they might need to do.
Matt Medeiros (47:53)
Yeah, that's great. Like that's I I used a portal the other day for a sponsorship client here at the at the WP minute for me to onboard into their like paying system and their procurement system. Dude, it was a freaking nightmare. It was a nightmare for me to submit an invoice. And it wasn't even like, oh, they're asking me like a lot of information. The software was terrible. Like it was built in like 1995. I'm like, how are you guys using this?
Sam Chlebowski (48:10)
Ha ha!
Matt Medeiros (48:23)
And even my contact over there, she was like, yeah, I know. She's like, I'm just going to do it for you because it's like a terrible piece of software. It's like, how do these businesses still use software that they know is terrible, but they're not finding another solution for
Sam Chlebowski (48:36)
⁓ I mean even within our space, like the service-based ⁓ business space, we have people who know that they need a client portal.
because of the impact it can potentially make. But then they'll use something like Notion to try and create one. And Notion, like, hey, no shade there. I love it. Like I use Notion internally for my own stuff. I would never use it for a client portal though, just because it creates so much friction where the client has to create an account before they can even get access to fill out a form that I've created in Notion. And even then, like they can go in there and go crazy and like delete fields if they want to.
Matt Medeiros (49:09)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Now this is great stuff. ⁓ Any other feature you want to show off? Nope. Any other features you want to show off? Or are you good with that stuff?
Sam Chlebowski (49:25)
sorry, I was gonna go ahead and just ⁓ toggle back here to ⁓ my admin view now that we took a look at the client. ⁓ Because it is, because it has like a, I use, we have the option for password protected links, but because I have, I'm using a login list access on mine, I just have to put it into a different browser. So one second here, let me get back into here.
Matt Medeiros (49:32)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No problem.
Sam Chlebowski (49:54)
I did have just two very quick things I thought would be helpful to show off here.
Matt Medeiros (49:58)
Yeah.
Yeah, for those of you just watching, while Sam pulls this up, go ahead and leave any comments below. Any questions, you can ping me and I'll relay those to Sam, but he'll have the link to the YouTube video so he can see that as well. I mean, I think that earlier in the podcast, if you tuned into the earlier podcast, we talked about how some of the stuff that they built in the beginning stages, it was all built behind WordPress or in WordPress.
And we all start to realize the limitations of that. And having these as separate infrastructures is very important. And then you don't have to deal with the headaches of WordPress. So I'm glad you all decided to kind of just build this on your own infrastructure and let it run that way.
Sam Chlebowski (50:30)
You
Yeah, yeah, and it's become, you know...
I just can't even imagine like that system that we had once built, like how expensive, how time consuming it was because like this, you can get started. It's 39 bucks a month that set up a basic account with us and you even try it out for free. So ⁓ one quick thing I wanted to show, actually a couple of quick things to show. So basically the first thing that you'll want to do within LaunchBay when you get set up and running is create a template. This is going to...
This is going to allow you to do what ⁓ I was talking about earlier in the episode of standardizing your processes where, hey, client comes in, sign their contract, pay their invoice, do their onboarding form. But two other quick things to show you is that we actually give you, we do have the option to create, if you're just getting up and running and you want to get started as quickly as possible. We have ⁓ an AI template builder that you can actually use here. You'll see it when you create a new template. ⁓
If you have an SOP already for a specific type of project, you can plug it in here ⁓ and just have it build out the basic foundation of the tasks for you. You might have to tweak a couple of things here and there, but this is probably the fastest way to get started. ⁓ We also have an AI form builder where you can just describe your form that you want to create in a couple of seconds. ⁓ Go ahead and generate that.
And then contracts, ⁓ one of the best parts about LaunchPay, we talked a little bit about invoicing, but it allows you to consolidate maybe five or six different tools even that you're using and do it all within our platform. ⁓ With our ⁓ contract functionality, it is like true parity with DocuSign where you upload a file and then you're able to map ⁓ your fields however you'd like. You can even custom fill.
the fields in your contracts ⁓ with custom fields from a form. So for example, client completes an onboarding form, instead of asking for that information again, you can actually auto fill it using our custom fields. So a lot of this information is just pre-filled for the client ahead of time and all they need to do is go in and sign. So some pretty cool stuff there in terms of just like...
making it removing as much friction from the client experience as possible so your team can get to work. You're not busy chasing clients all day and you can ultimately get paid faster and get clients the results that they want ⁓ on a timeline that they expect.
Matt Medeiros (53:20)
Yeah, this is fantastic stuff. Sam, thanks so much for hanging out and showing off ⁓ Launch Bay for us. Where can folks go to say thanks? Where do you want them to go to learn more about Launch Bay?
Sam Chlebowski (53:30)
Yeah, just go to launchbay.com. ⁓ You can also go, we'll have a landing page set up if anybody's interested in 25 % off, launchbay.com slash WP minute. We'll throw out together a landing page for you and you can sign up for a trial there, no credit card required, ⁓ or ⁓ happy to have ⁓ one of our teams show you around on a demo if you want to fill out the form.
Matt Medeiros (53:54)
Yeah, this is awesome stuff. think if you're a freelancer agency owner, you at least want to check this stuff out. Go to LaunchBay, sign up for a trial, take a look at the software. I think if you're at that point in your career where you're feeling things are a little bit too hectic and you want something to be a little bit more organized, you're trying to learn AI, you're trying to stay ahead of this stuff, you don't want all of the chaos of what freelance and agency life can turn into. Something like LaunchBay is going to help you systemize this stuff and at most importantly,
start getting those invoices paid faster and more on time and tied to those milestones, which I think is great. Sam, thanks so much.
Sam Chlebowski (54:30)
Thank you so much, Matt. Thanks for having me.