Two founders talk about how to build software businesses that are meant to last. Each episode includes a deep dive into a different topic related to starting, growing, and sustaining a healthy business.
Rick (00:00.92)
What's up this week, Tyler?
Tyler (00:02.808)
Well, it's been a while. It's been another, we've been, I think it's been three weeks since the last recording, but we've seen each other surprising to me since then.
Rick (00:12.662)
Yeah, I went to St. Louis for a surprise party for Tyler.
Tyler (00:19.918)
So, yeah, the backstory being at Lesson Knowing Serum, we generally celebrate five year anniversaries with the company. So five, 10, 15. Last year was my 15th, nothing happened. I wasn't like, I was like, they're planning something, but it got converted into a sweet 16 party. So I thought I was going to this bar to meet up with a single friend and the whole company's there, Rick's there, whole.
Sweet 16 theme pictures of me when I was 16. It was a huge, huge shock to me.
Rick (00:50.638)
He was very surprised and got to taste some really terrible St. Louis food. I got the everyone I've told about that pizza place that knows St. Louis is like gross.
Tyler (00:57.666)
Hey, hey now.
Tyler (01:03.553)
Emose pizza, yeah.
yeah, it's very, it's kind of, St. Louis has some very controversial pizza. I wouldn't expect an outsider to enjoy it, but you know, it's got its charm.
Rick (01:13.742)
And then fried ravioli.
Tyler (01:17.89)
Yeah, which I think every city is this way. So every city has like they're kind of the not the stuff they're famous for nationally. Like we all know New York pizza or whatever, but the stuff where you go there and you're like, only the locals know about this. And almost by definition, that stuff all sucks because it's really old and people didn't like good food a hundred years ago. And if it was that good, it would become a national thing by now. So like you go to Chicago and they're like, this really soggy roast beef sandwich with no toppings. And it's like, that's.
You're excited about that? Like that, that Chicago, I'm sorry people from Chicago, but your roast beef sandwich sucks. I'm St. Louis. We think our crust, our frozen custard is amazing. It's just frozen custard. It just tastes like everyone else's frozen custard. All these local gems are overrated. That's my opinion.
Rick (01:57.966)
He
Rick (02:05.256)
Bojangles is not.
Tyler (02:07.352)
Well, but that's an example of something that's going national. cause it's, I actually tried it. I thought it was mid, but, but like people love Bojangles and so it's actually, it's not just a local thing anymore.
Rick (02:19.649)
it's the best.
Tyler (02:21.698)
You like it more than, what's the other one, Zaxby's? Is that the other Southern Fried Chicken thing? Ugh, you're not a Southerner anymore, Rick. I've never had Zaxby's either.
Rick (02:24.098)
I don't even know, I've never had Zaxby's.
Rick (02:29.24)
I don't think Zach, well Bojangles originated in North Carolina as did Krispy Kreme. So those are my two, like, you know, we the best donuts and the best fried chicken.
Tyler (02:35.436)
Okay.
Tyler (02:39.916)
You know I'm a fast food connoisseur. went to Bojangles twice when I was in Asheville last time. Their breakfast was the saltiest thing I've ever eaten in my entire life. And I love salt, but that was pushing it.
Rick (02:46.434)
You told me.
Rick (02:50.08)
What?
Rick (02:54.574)
Well, they just came out with a new, I think it's a waffle and whatever they call their blueberry biscuits, bowberry biscuits. So they now have a waffles and bowberry biscuit order, which is a brand new item. Can't wait to try it. I am flying to North Carolina today and I can't wait to have Bojangles.
Tyler (03:07.95)
All right, I'm back in.
Tyler (03:12.428)
wow, I'm back in. You sold me that, that sounds like an appealing gimmick. How about work stuff, what's going on?
Rick (03:21.44)
not much, pretty busy with the day job, but, you know, I think we've, we're in a pretty good place at leg up in terms of, like run rate of monthly recurring revenue. And also I think JD, we had a partner meeting a couple of weeks ago. and one of the things that was really clear is we needed to clean up our employer pipeline. Like our plan this year is basically to like start running the business like a real sales.
machine type thing focusing on employer growth. And the way that we've tracked that historically is very useful from like a task management perspective, but not useful from like a what's our pipeline? You know, are we on track to hit? What's our forecast? Do we have enough pipeline? What's our sales process? Is it working kind of thing? Like it didn't work to answer those questions. And so I've actually been really impressed with the work JD's done over the last couple of weeks to
take, he had, I don't know, 70 deals in his opportunity pipeline of various like stages. And now it's down to like what, 10 that are legit deals. And it went from having 70 and going, I'm not really sure if we're gonna close anything this month to 10 and like three are committed. And it's amazing, I just wanted to like, it's amazing how important it is to have a clean pipeline in sales. Because if you get a messy pipeline,
It's so easy to either get fooled into complacency or you actually don't know what you have.
Tyler (04:57.038)
Yeah, I agree. I do think, like, as an observer of this process that just happened, I think it was 50 % cleaning up the pipeline and 50 % giving him...
tools, like you've, you've got a lot of experience kind of putting this together and kind of saying like, why don't we know what the next step is with this person? Or like, we skipped this step with that. Like we skipped, we right to the third step in the pipeline, but we never hit the second step. It's, looked to me like a combination of cleaning stuff up, removed the clutter. and then also giving like specific suggestions on like, here's what you do with this exact person to move them along.
Rick (05:34.558)
Exactly. Yeah. Like that's another thing is when you're trying to work like there are literally 70 deals in that pipeline. If you're trying to work 70 deals, it's just checking boxes. Like you're not actually thinking about a sales process. You don't have the brain capacity to do it. Like it's too many, too many things to context switch between. But like when you, when you work in 10 deals, it's like, could be really methodical and thoughtful about, we had our first call before. Like I'm going to be thinking about the next step and really working these deals the right way. And all of a sudden the win rate and like,
the way that they're being worked goes way up to your point about like the basic, you know, things you do when you're working a sales process. I'm super excited about this because it gives me visibility into like the state of the pipeline. I can start tracking trends. I can start, you know, quickly understanding if things like are working that we're doing from a demand generation experimentation perspective. And so I'm very pleased.
Tyler (06:29.218)
Yeah. Can I, can I do a little meta commentary on like just some, cause I'm in the CRM business and that whole meeting was spent or not the whole, but like that part of the meeting was spent sharing pipe drive. And I learned, I had some realizations about CRM stuff and I was like sharing them. think I was frustrating a little cause that's not what you're trying to talk about, but like everyone who like, there's often a question of what, what's up with less knowing serum? Why would anyone use less knowing serum as opposed to.
Rick (06:31.406)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Tyler (06:55.778)
more robust CRM. And I think I got my answer to it in that meeting, which is that the way JD was using pipe drive is how people use less annoying CRM and the way you want to use a CRM. Like, like why is Salesforce what it is? Everyone hates using Salesforce and yet it's the CRM every, every company buys what's going on there. And I think the answer is like the, the Rick in this story is like, let's call it the CFO is like, I need reporting. want forecasts. I want to.
You know, be able to project what's going to happen by the end of the quarter. mean, leg up health is small, but at a bigger company that becomes more and more important, small businesses do not do that at all. Right. A small business is like, I want a task list and JD was using the pipeline as a task list, which is how all of my customers use pipelines. You wanted JD to use pipe drives task feature as his task list. And the pipeline isn't for JD, the pipelines for you. And I think that's just like a huge.
Like maturation of a company. Cause I've talked to hundreds and hundreds of companies that there is no you at my customers companies. Does that make sense?
Rick (08:03.95)
That makes sense. The only thing I would just dispute of what you said is or clarify or say and to is I think JD is getting value out of the new pipeline approach as well. It's not just for me. It actually will help him work the deals better.
Tyler (08:21.102)
I think that's fair, like, just so the listener can visualize this, there were like three statuses at the beginning of the pipeline. They had just like tons and tons of cards and none of those people were really qualified or anything. And then there were later statuses to, I don't know, I don't want to speak for JD, but to like my typical customer, that's fine. Those first three statuses, that's their task list. I think what you cleaned up that's really helping JD is there were a bunch of cards in those later statuses where it's like, oh, six months ago, this person expressed interest and I'm just leaving them here.
I think just cleaning up the later statuses would have worked for JD's purposes is my guess, but not for yours.
Rick (08:56.078)
That's fair. Not for mine. Yeah, that's true. Cause I wanted to know, like what I want to know from a, a marketing perspective is how many new opportunities did we create that are legit? Like that actually like mean something like they're not just like ideas or potential deals. They asked me in something and the way we've defined that is, we've secured a meeting that they've, they've expressed enough interest that they've agreed to meet with us. Well, that could be a zoom meeting, an in-person meeting, a phone call. It doesn't matter, but they've agreed to like, know,
converse and that's that's not necessarily a qualified deal but it's like it's a deal and so if I now because we have that in place that definition in place which we did not have before the meeting I can run a campaign let's say I'm a re a remarketing email campaign to our database and JD can say I booked ten meetings I created ten opportunities and then we can track those ten opportunities to see how many got qualified and ultimately how many got closed to track the effectiveness of that campaign
we could not do that before. and then, you know, the, think the other thing that I, that I'm just thinking about now is like, it's so easy when you're just getting into task execution and sales, and this is true for founders, I think. You can't do that. You have to actually think about where you're trying to go. The goal of a, sales process is actually to get a decision. It's not to just like, have this open ended conversation and it's actually better to get to a no today with the next step to follow up in six months.
Tyler (09:57.102)
Yeah, yeah.
Rick (10:24.184)
than it is to have an open deal for six months. A clear next step, whether that is a, know, I'm gonna close this out and re-engage later, or let's have a call next week to discuss the proposal, is the goal. And if you can do that consistently, like, things start moving.
Tyler (10:43.182)
Yeah. Yeah. In terms of the, I said there was, it was 50 % like how you like clean up the pipeline and 50 % tactics. The big tactic was yeah. The book of meeting from a meeting BamFam like always having that thing. Yeah. Definitely. I don't have any way to apply that. Like I just don't do sales really, but I felt, I feel like I learned a lot about, uh, yeah, just how to take a kind of working sales process and just tighten it up a lot in that conversation.
Rick (11:08.908)
Yeah, and JD knows all this. He's done this before at last companies, but it's so easy when you're like, he's running the he's doing everything right now. It's so easy to get complacent about this stuff.
Tyler (11:14.838)
I mean, it, it, yeah, it, really highlights the, we've talked before about whether coaches are valuable or not. And like, I've never hired a business coach or anything. And I think there's things I'm skeptical about with it, but even if the person doesn't really know more than you just having someone being like, Hey, there's some basic concepts that we all know, but you're like, you're in the weeds and I'm not, I'm just going to point point out to you what's going on. can be really.
Rick (11:40.174)
That's great point. Like that's exactly what happened. It wasn't necessarily me teaching JD anything. It was just Morbii going, let me show you a little mirror here of what I'm seeing so you can see the world through my eyes. And he was like, oh my God, I know I could do better than this. like literally like two weeks, was like, this is like, we've done a complete 180. That's a good point. Coaches can do that for you. Even if you know what you're doing. That's all I got on that one. But I thought that was an interesting little progress update on like a
Tyler (11:46.711)
Yeah.
Tyler (11:53.134)
Heh.
Rick (12:10.348)
What's going on in world?
Tyler (12:12.41)
yeah, let me start with my normal topic of the, the form builder marketing stuff. so yeah, not, like I don't have any earth shattering reports. We're getting to a point where it's like really roller coaster-y ups and downs. Cause you know, each week we look at the number of form submissions we're getting and we're using that as the proxy. We are working on better attribution stuff, which we'll talk about in a second, but right now, how many submissions do we get as the number? And it's like three weeks ago, bad or two weeks ago, bad.
Rick (12:17.486)
Hmm
Tyler (12:41.558)
last week really, really good. Or I'm sorry, no, three weeks ago bad, two weeks ago good, last week bad, this week's shaping up to be really good. So my mood just changes week to week based on like, did one of my customers send out a newsletter that got 50 form submissions that day or whatever?
Rick (12:59.374)
Can you smooth it out with like a last 30 days metric or something or last 14 days?
Tyler (13:05.804)
Yeah, I mean, I'm doing last seven days. I look at both last 30 and last seven.
Rick (13:11.502)
Is it getting better on the last 30 bases?
Tyler (13:14.208)
Last week was the first down week on that basis. Previously it had gone up every week, but it'll go up again this week. We're still small enough numbers that one user having a really big week matters, but it's still trending in the right direction. I'm gonna talk a little bit more about specific marketing, like one of our listeners.
Rick (13:23.192)
Nice.
Tyler (13:37.999)
kind of wrote to me being like, you keep talking about your marketing, but you're not saying what you're doing, which is a fair point. So I'll talk about that in a second. Um, but one other thing I wanted to mention on form. So there are a handful of still, think, fairly high impact improvements we want to make before we completely move on from it. Um, one of them is we just shipped a redesign to the public form. Uh, it looks a little nicer and the colors are more neutral. it like, if you embed it on your website, it fits better. But one of the big differences is on a, if you're on like a
Rick (13:41.902)
Mm-hmm
Tyler (14:06.444)
wide enough screen, like a laptop or desktop, we move, we, instead of the powered by less knowing serum being at the bottom of the form, like you have to scroll down and it's at the bottom. It's now just like sticky in the bottom right corner. in a way, obviously that's more obtrusive, like in our customers, there's maybe a separate topic here. Some of our customers are kind of like, they want like, some of them are like, I want to get rid of the branding. And we're like, well, the whole reason we're doing this is for the viral thing. no. So that's a whole conversation going on.
Rick (14:16.846)
Hmm.
Tyler (14:33.25)
but it looks a lot nicer than it did before, so I don't think our customers are mad about it.
Rick (14:36.874)
Why aren't you offering them X dollars to upgrade or remove the branding?
Tyler (14:40.566)
Okay. Let's talk about that. Well, okay. Let's go into that right now. We've talked about that. think that I'd be open to it. it makes sense why. So we're in this weird middle zone to most products like this. would be a standalone form builder and there's a freemium tier with branding and there's a paid tier without branding. Right. That's the normal model. We're in this weird zone where it's like, well, all of the people using this are paying us for less annoying CRM, but they're not paying us for the form builder. like, if you think of the form builder as a feature of the CRM, you think.
they're already paying, it should be unbranded. But if you think of the form builder as a separate feature or a separate tool that we added, they're all using the free version. So should we charge even more to take the branding off of that? So first of all, that's like just kind of getting to that level of understanding with these customers that write in takes a second. This is a dilemma I've had before. Let me give a little announce. Sorry, I'm winding all over the place.
We technically have a limit to the number of files you can upload or the total file size you can store in the CRM. It's either 25 gigs per user or 50. I forget the exact number. We say this when people upload files, we show them what percentage they've used. Don't tell anyone this. This is a secret. But if they hit that limit, we don't do anything. We don't stop them. They can just keep going up. And we say we will charge them more. And even when they hit the limit, we do email them and we're like, one day we might charge you more, just so you know.
But the work it would take to calculate what they owe and charge them more, there's only like 15 users that are over the limit. And so it's like, do I want to spend a month building like metered billing on file usage to collect 200 bucks a month from people? Like not really. And I feel that way with these forms where it's like 5 % of forms users might be willing to pay to get the branding off of it, but is it worth building all of that just to get
a few thousand dollars a year. Reaction?
Rick (16:40.206)
I like money and when someone wants to pay, yeah, when someone wants to pay me more money for a feature, I figure out how to collect that money. Now, I do want to have conviction that it will be repeatable. So maybe that's what's holding you back. And you know, the file upload one, I could see like maybe that's not super repeatable. It's a super low upside, but this seems different.
Tyler (16:44.524)
I like money.
Rick (17:07.756)
Like your initial hypothesis was, maybe this can drive word of mouth. And that's still true. But the fact that this can drive additional revenue is even better.
Tyler (17:15.86)
If it's meaningful revenue, yes, but to be like, okay, now on our pricing page, we have to explain this. We have to build the ability to actually hide it. We have to build the syncing, the information to paddle so that they can charge correctly. We have to put in the UI a way for people to actually choose which it is, which complicates the UI.
Rick (17:31.8)
How much money would you need to charge to make this worthwhile based on what you know today? that's where you start. And if people are willing to pay that, charge it. If not, maybe you hold off on this for a little bit longer.
Tyler (17:37.378)
Yeah.
Tyler (17:43.79)
Right. So I think that's where I'm at. If a lot of people were beaten down our door. Yeah. Well, let's see how much total revenue would we have to make to justify all of that? And I don't know, like 10,000 a year, maybe.
Rick (17:46.914)
No. Well, how much would this person have to pay you?
Rick (17:54.029)
That's good.
Tyler (17:59.651)
Which is not, you know, that's even that's like such a small amount. Cause the thing is this isn't like a building block that turns into something bigger. Whereas if we go build Kanban or we go build mobile, it's like there's compounding. makes the pro like the user experience better. This is just, we get the money and that's it.
Rick (18:19.17)
But what I worry about with this particular one is the utility of the form and the usage of the form could be limited by the less annoying brand being on it. Like I'm not gonna necessarily put my form on a website if it has the less annoying brand on it. I'm gonna go get a form filter that lets me do that once I realize forms are useful to me. And then I'm gonna connect it via Zapier to less annoying CRM. So, okay.
Tyler (18:45.59)
Right, which is what we tell them to do. And the thing is they don't, they still use our form tool. So that's another thing is I'm like, would you actually pay? I don't know. Cause you have the option of paying right now. You just pay JotForm instead of paying us.
Rick (18:56.75)
Why don't you, but like, couldn't you do an MVP billing solution here where it's like, hey, like we're gonna do a pilot for a year. You can pay us to remove the branding for $1,000 this year. Are you interested?
Tyler (19:09.166)
there's no way anyone's paying.
Rick (19:10.858)
Okay, you just give them the option and then you could just stripe bill them for a year and we can revisit in a year. It's no cost.
Tyler (19:13.603)
Yeah.
Tyler (19:17.774)
That's fair. This is the type of advice if you're talking to someone, if you're talking to HubSpot and giving them advice that makes sense. Like our customers pay us $15 a month. They're not paying a thousand dollars a year to take branding off.
Rick (19:28.91)
$100 a year. Okay, so like, but like that's worth like testing to see if they'd be willing to pay it and then sitting them a stripe bill. You don't need to do that through battle.
Tyler (19:30.402)
Yeah, they might pay that.
Tyler (19:39.001)
Well, except, well, yeah, we still have to build the ability to hide it. It's minor, it's a few, yeah, but it's a distraction. This is not our business model. making $100, okay, Rick, you could go out and offer to clean someone's house. Why don't you go do that? Like every dollar of revenue, it is.
Rick (19:43.788)
That's so easy, Tyler!
Rick (19:49.026)
Making money, is that your business model?
Rick (19:55.182)
That is not the same. But here's the thing, I think that I would, there's two things I will say about this and then I will let you do what you do, which is probably the right decision by the way, because you know your business and your customer much better than me. One is, it's proven that a feature of forms is hiding branding for extra money. That is so proven in the market already and you could charge money for that.
that people will pay it, that it's a desired feature, like you will build that at some point. Second, I worry that the goal of getting form usage is being potentially hampered by, potentially, like I don't know, the people that may be asking for this are going, I'd use this more if I could hide branding. I don't know if that's true, but like that could be true.
Tyler (20:40.792)
you think more people would use it.
Tyler (20:51.948)
Yeah, that's fair. I don't care about form usage if our branding's not there. Right, the only value to us is the $15.
Rick (20:57.694)
But that's, I would say you do, like you would if people were willing to pay for it. Like there's two ways to make this form builder a success. You either make more money by charging more for access to the form builder or you get word of mouth. But ideally you get both. And I think I'm starting to see you have the ability to get both.
Tyler (21:16.376)
Yeah, yeah, I'm just, sorry, yes. I'm just saying with the current setup, the value to us of people using forms is the viral thing. So the more people who use it, the more virality there is. In a world where there's no...
Rick (21:26.614)
Not the value, the potential value, the hypothesized value.
Tyler (21:31.382)
Right. Yes. Sorry. All of everything we're talking about here is hypothesis. So what I'm saying-
Rick (21:33.538)
Yes. Yeah, yes. But so it's actually saying, can I remove the branding and I'm willing to pay you, which is actually like hard money.
Tyler (21:39.503)
Right, right, right. Right. But hang on. I'm making a point different from the pricing, which is if you take the branding away, we don't get the virality anymore. so usage is not tied to this hypothetical upside anymore. We get the, we get the money. So it converts this potential viral benefit for this potential money benefit, but getting more usage from users that don't have the branding does not align with our growth goals.
Rick (21:43.361)
Okay, alright.
Tyler (22:10.05)
We just want them to pay the money. Does that distinction make sense? Okay.
Rick (22:11.81)
Yeah, I hear you. No, I agree with what you're saying. I just don't think it's... I think you could do both.
Tyler (22:20.492)
Everything you're saying, agree with. Like I brought this up because this is on my mind, right? But with all these things, there's a million little ways. People all the time tell us, I'd pay a little more for that. I'd pay a little more for that. We get this at least every day. Someone asks if they can pay to do something, to customize something or this or that. You can't take every single one of those.
Rick (22:24.449)
Yep.
Rick (22:39.916)
And you're battling complex, like part of your value proposition is simple pricing, simplicity. You're battling that on the positioning front, who you are. Like that's a huge piece of this. Also the objective of this experiment is word of mouth. And there's low numbers here to like validate any of this being worth the investment. like that's the fundamental issue.
Tyler (22:50.284)
Yeah.
Tyler (23:01.902)
Yeah, if it's like, we know these 20 people would pay us and they'd pay us X dollars and it's worth it, then yeah, I think it is probably likely that we add this at some
Rick (23:12.514)
The only question I would say in these situations that is worth asking is, is this likely to be something you regret not going ahead and doing later? So like sometimes I feel like Leg Up Health in particular, like we've known we should have done something and we're like, we don't know enough to do that yet based on learning, but it's like, we know it based on common sense. We know it based on historical context. We know it based on conviction and we still don't do it. And I just wonder,
Tyler (23:40.771)
Yeah, I don't think that's this. It comes out of priorities. If we had no other ideas on what to build, this would be worth building, but it would come at the expense of Kanban and mobile and automations, which thousands of people have requested as opposed to like five people, know? I do think, Brecon and I have had the conversation of like, if, so we're okay. We currently have two main.
Rick (23:41.71)
You don't think that's the case?
Rick (23:58.19)
There you go.
Tyler (24:09.902)
Sorry, let me back up. 2020, we raised prices and our growth almost immediately goes down. might, it might've been macro economic stuff or whatever, but I think it was almost entirely the price increase. We never really recovered from that. We went from like growing steadily to plateauing basically. Since then we've tried a bunch of growth stuff. We tried the traction book where it's like, there's all these different channels, go try them. We tried the talk to sales stuff. We tried different marketing, different advertising channels. We tried a bunch of stuff. Right now.
Sorry, just to belabor that we also tried product led growth in that by which I mean we did the Zapier thing. We built out API two to try to get integration partners. Lots of experiments happened. None of them worked. We currently have two main hypotheses for what can lead not, just make a few extra dollars, but actually get us back on unlike a real, a different growth trajectory. One is the viral thing. And the other is what we call car play for people who don't know that buzzword. won't.
bore you with it, but basically building features that, our competitors have that w we just clearly there's a gap between us and our competitors and we need to reach feature parity with our cheapest tier.
Rick (25:19.054)
so that your pricing advantage plays.
Tyler (25:23.884)
Yeah, like I think we already have the differentiators, great customer service, good positioning, but our product doesn't do what the customer needs and lower pricing, right? But our product isn't useful enough right now. So those are our two hypotheses. Bragg and I have had the conversation of what if neither of these works? Like what's next after that? And I do think what you're saying at that point, I don't think forms is the big opportunity, but figuring out
Rick (25:28.93)
Low and lower pricing. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.
Tyler (25:50.191)
If we could just make a second product and sell it to 10 % of our customers for $15 a month, and we could do that every couple of years, that's enough growth for us to be happy with. So that might be the next thing if neither of these works.
Rick (26:05.154)
Yep. Or you could buy something.
Tyler (26:09.022)
Buy a separate SaaS product and then cross sell it to our customers.
Rick (26:12.526)
Yeah, ideally you could find a product that's upstream from your product that feeds the top of the funnel. That's a whole nother conversation. Do you want to talk about Adam's questions?
Tyler (26:20.246)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yes, sorry, can I keep dominating this right before I move on? So one, I...
Rick (26:29.132)
Yes, please do. This is fun. I love arguing with you on a podcast. It's like, like I might. My day was like meh midday. Now I'm having a great day. You're not saying stupid stuff, you're saying it's just fun to argue with you. We've argued with each other for two decades.
Tyler (26:36.718)
Are you having a great day? All right. I'll try to say more stupid stuff so we can fight about it. Yeah. Yeah, no, I agree. Yeah. I mentioned we moved, we, we stuck the powered by lessening serum link. Like it's sticky always on the page for desktop, not on mobile. Anyway, only have a week of data, but the click through rate on that powered by link has more than doubled. It seems.
from about 1 % to something like two and a half percent. So that's cool. like that's, that's the big thing with virality, right? Is how many people are clicking on that? And so this, this redesign had a huge impact on that. So I'm feeling really good about that. Yeah. Assuming it keeps up. We'll see. yeah. Yep. We're, we're working on it or are we, we'll find out in the next topic, but one more thing first attribution.
Rick (27:21.71)
That's awesome.
Rick (27:25.964)
More impressions.
Tyler (27:36.011)
I have said on this podcast before, one of the really hard things about this is attributing, like someone fills out a form. How many people are realistically going to fill out the form, click the powered by link, sign up for a free trial all in one go where we can track that session. Most people it's like they'll, they'll fill out a couple of forms. They'll see our name and then like six months later when they need a CRM, they'll just type in less annoying serum or whatever. what I had not pieced together, I was having a meeting with Eunice and we just had this realization.
Basically every single form a user creates has an email address field on it. Everyone who's submitting a form is giving our customer their email address. Now, private, don't want to be too snoopy with privacy, but if we just hash that email address when they fill it out and just make a database, it's basically just a little, have you filled out a form before? Then every person who signs up for a free trial, we can just tell if they've ever filled out one of our forms.
Rick (28:34.03)
Great idea. Duh.
Tyler (28:36.706)
When that hit, it was like, what? We were so over-complicating this. Yeah. Uh-huh. If you're a much bigger company, this doesn't work. Cause like everyone has filled out a HubSpot form at some point in their life. So you can't, if you then go sign up for HubSpot, you can't be like, well, it's cause they filled out the form that one time. Yeah. Yes, maybe. But like what's great with less knowing serum, we're so small. The odds that someone filled out a form within the last year.
Rick (28:40.546)
And this will work for Calendly too, for appointment scheduling.
Rick (28:56.054)
We could say it was influenced.
Tyler (29:05.671)
and coincidentally found lessening serum on their own. It's small enough that I'm not worried about it at all.
Rick (29:10.19)
What's funny is like, just went every time you start talking about talk to sales, I always go to your homepage to look at what's going on. And then I clicked on book a demo. It actually doesn't go to a LessonLang CRM page. goes to a Calendly.com hosted site. But here's the thing, like I clicked on that and I was like Calendly. know, like Calendly. I was thinking about Calendly when I went to LessonLang CRM and now I'm thinking about Calendly. It works.
Tyler (29:23.426)
Yeah, well, cause we don't have that yet, yeah.
Tyler (29:28.822)
yeah.
Tyler (29:33.923)
Yep, it does. It really does. Yeah. I want to build appointments scheduling too. So, okay. we still need to implement the hashing of the emails and comparing it when someone signs up. But I think we're to have really good attribution here. I'm excited about that too. sorry, I am dominating here, but let's move on to, listener Adam wrote in basically, yeah, just asking for specifics on what we're like. I keep saying, we're trying to push it. We're trying to market it. What are we actually doing?
So thought I'd ramble about that a bit and welcome your thoughts. I will admit before saying any of this, I think we're sort of running, we have picked a lot of the low-hanging fruit. So I'm not sure, like at this point, we're mostly just waiting for like snowball effect. We're doing some things, but a lot of it's already been done.
Rick (30:20.438)
Can you do a quick overview of who has access, who has this feature enabled? Does everyone have this enabled currently? Okay.
Tyler (30:25.356)
Yeah. it's fully launched now it's out of beta or it's this thing. Yeah. Practically speaking, it's fully, fully launched. we, every user should have heard about it through the newsletter or, well, yeah, let's talk about it. So when I say we're marketing forms, there's, two types of this. One is like treating forms as a separate product. So instead of just people looking for CRMs, find us people looking for a form builder, find us.
If you go on G2 or Captera or whatever and search for a form builder, getting us on that list, that's the less interesting part of this. Cause the reality is no one's going to use us as a standalone form builder right now. That's not the place. So we are doing that stuff. Cause like, why not? But when I say we're like pushing forms and marketing forms, what I mean is we are, we've got 26,000 users. We are just trying to get as many of those people as possible to use it as well as the new people signing up, like an interesting dynamic. It's hard to get old users to switch behavior.
Rick (31:02.338)
That's not the play.
Tyler (31:23.246)
But every month, know, 400 or so old users cancel and 400 or so new users sign up. Getting those new people to use it is probably easier to do.
Rick (31:31.88)
Can we just clarify a couple of things? I would imagine that an account, a customer that might have multiple users, there's probably one user of forms, right? So the opportunity is at 26,000 users, it's 10,000 accounts. And so what I think you're saying is all 10,000 have access to this feature and it's enabled on their account, but they may or may not.
Tyler (31:48.014)
Yeah, it's closer to 10,000. Yeah. Yeah. Good point.
Rick (32:00.46)
the users at that those 10,000 accounts may or may not know that this functionality exists.
Tyler (32:05.484)
Yeah, we're promoting, we're pushing it to all of them, because we don't know who that one user is. So we're saying 70 % of our accounts are single users. So a huge chunk of our user base, it's one in the same, but yes, we have a 400 user account. We are certainly not thinking of it like let's get all 400 of those people using forms.
Rick (32:07.95)
Hmm. Hmm.
Rick (32:22.06)
And then can you just remind how many users have actually done one form?
Tyler (32:27.8)
Good question. Let me pull that up real quick. 1100 have now that that counts people who are on, hang on, that counts people who are on free trials and never paid. I don't have the query handy to filter them out. So that's not necessarily 1100 paying people, but yes, that's how many people have created at least one form.
Rick (32:33.974)
Wow!
Rick (32:47.362)
Wow, free trial people are using this feature. That's interesting. I bet that's a higher percentage of people than customers.
Tyler (32:54.03)
Yeah, it's interesting. What we're seeing is a much higher percentage of new customers are trying it compared to old. But if I filter by, uh, here, I'm just going to do like over the last week, the people who have gotten the most submissions and when they signed, when they signed up as users, uh, 2016, 2023, 2024, 2015, 2021, 24, 24, 20. But the point is the highest volume users are almost all older, but the, get a lot more.
new users trying it. The hypothesis there has to be, the optimistic hypothesis there is the new people who are first signing up, they don't have like the workflows in the customer base yet to get the high volume. But if they start using it now, hopefully we have seen more and more submissions from the same users over time.
great, great questions. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. So like, even if it looks like a bit of a dud six months from now, it's possible five years from now, we're like, wow. Kind of without us really pushing this much more, it's snowballed into something. That's the hope. so yeah. what are we actually doing to get our users to use it? I think so, one is we're trying to make it prominent within the app.
Rick (33:45.518)
It's all about getting embedded into those workflows early and often.
Tyler (34:13.452)
And the main way we're doing that, anytime you want to create anything in less knowing serum, there's like an, there's a navigation bar. There's a thing that says add. And if you mouse over it, pops out. Like, do you want to add a contact company task event, whatever we turned that into a two column pop out. The first column is what I just said. And the second column is this, big graphic that says, hello to forms. well, I forget what it says, but it's like. Get data, like a new way to get data into your CRM or something like that. So we basically put an advertisement inside less knowing CRM.
in a place that people pretty much no matter how you use it, you have to interact with that a lot. Once you've created your first form, the ad goes away and instead it's replaced with direct links to all your forms to just kind of remind you that they're there. So that's one thing we've been doing. We do a bi-weekly newsletter. Not all of our customers are on it, but about 50 % are.
The form builder has been like the main thing. just every single time we send the newsletter out, it's here's a new feature with forms. Here's a workflow you hadn't thought about, you know, that type of thing. We are building it, we've built it a little into onboarding. I don't know. You know, back in the day, it's like someone signs up for a SaaS and you have to put them on an email drip campaign. Is that, does that still work? I kind of feel like the day's.
Rick (35:33.612)
Like, what do mean?
Tyler (35:34.702)
I feel like everyone just ignores all those drip emails now, because we get so many of them. We still send them. Yeah, they are.
Rick (35:39.914)
They're so annoying. Yeah. Um, I don't know. Good ones. Like really? Like there are a couple of companies where I'm like, Oh man, I say like I save every single one of the automated emails because I don't have time to do it right now, but I don't want to lose the great content. Those are good drips. Um, HubSpot does a good job of that. Um, a H refs does a good job of that where there's just so much value in every single drip email, but it's just too much for me. Um, I wonder, but I don't know if that's
actually worth it, but I can recall those because I'm like, I still have this flag from like three years ago. But I don't know that that led to any behavior change for me, which is the goal.
Tyler (36:17.944)
Yeah. so saying we built forms into onboarding, we have an onboard, like a drip, we got rid of one of our other drip emails and replace it with like, Hey, we have this form builder thing for new users. there's probably more we could do there. and we, added it to our instruction. have like an instruction guide where it's like, when someone signs up, we're kind of like, here's all the topics, contacts, tasks, events, and you, some people just watch each one's a video you watch top to bottom. And we added a form builder video in there.
We're pushing it and support interactions, basically just trying to make sure our customer service people. Forms can be used for tons of workarounds. like, Hey, I want to enter data. then I want, like, we don't have automations right now. Well, if you fill out your, if you make a form for yourself and fill it out, instead of entering the data in the CRM, you can trigger actions from a form submission. So things like that, we're just trying to get people like every time there's a workflow that can involve forms. We're trying to, mention that to people.
so yeah, I'm sure that's not all we've done, but that's kind of the big stuff that stands out to me. I'm reading through my notes to see if I missed anything. Any thoughts while I'm reviewing this?
Rick (37:27.084)
No, I mean, that's like you said, he picked over the low hanging fruit. So I don't know. What is the, what is left?
Tyler (37:35.629)
Yeah. so sorry. I did miss one thing here. The, we keep, when you're doing a beta test thing, think the name, at least my instinct is like every time you keep improving it, it's not like a new feature. It's just like, it was never finished in the first place. Now that this is shipped, we, we have three or four or five big improvements to forms that are going to drip out over the next couple of months. So we get to keep pinging people. Hey, it's not a, it's not, Hey, go use forms. It's like, Hey, we just added a new feature.
which people tend to not get as annoyed by.
Rick (38:08.086)
Yeah, and the technology adoption curve probably applies for a feature like this where it's like there's probably people who saw this and they're like, yeah, I'll check it out once it's been beaten up by the early adopters and the innovators. And I'm happy to be an early majority, but I don't know. You've got to tell me when it's ready, Tyler. I'm waiting on you to tell me that.
Tyler (38:12.334)
Mm-hmm.
Tyler (38:28.322)
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Rick (38:30.094)
The other thing I was thinking about is like, you done any sort of like, do you guys have like a webinar cadence or like office hour cadence where it's one to many and it lets people who wanna start playing with these features but maybe feel a little intimidated to get started, get trained on it?
Tyler (38:49.442)
We have done that in the past, but it's been years. We should probably do this again. I think I've said on the podcast before, I don't get the psychology of someone who does, who I agree these people exist, but it's like we have unlimited free phone support. Why don't you just get a one-on-one demo? Why attend a webinar? but yeah, those people do exist. We promise. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.
Rick (39:10.958)
Well, there's couple of things you can do with the webinar. One, you can do FOMO. So we're doing this event and you can outline content and don't miss out or have like, there's only a hundred spots. There's like a time, a deadline. But I also think people kind of enjoy the class setting. It's less intimidating. They can be like.
off camera under an alias, and not have to interact and learn behind the scenes without identifying. there's this like hit.
Tyler (39:42.691)
Yeah, but then why don't they watch our video? It's so weird, like, we have all of this recorded already and available, and we'll do one-on-one calls with you. I don't get the psychology of a person, like, you're right about the FOMO, it works for marketing, it just shouldn't work. But...
Rick (39:57.418)
Yeah, well, yeah, I agree. Like it's like classes like you can teach yourself pretty much anything with the Internet. But if someone emails you something you really want to learn and they're like, hey, I'm going to condense everything you need to know into like a 45 minute session and I'm going to accelerate your learning. That is value. Like you don't expect that out of a video. like there's something you can and it's something like live course interactions different than a video. You can interact.
Tyler (40:20.6)
Yeah.
Rick (40:26.68)
There can be poll engagement, unmuting, depending on how formal or informal you want to be. I think that could work, not just with forms, but as you're investing more in the product, that could be a good way to get more one to many education on new features and training.
Tyler (40:45.09)
Yeah, so I just added that to the list. I think that's a good idea. I will say back when we did webinars in the past, we would get one to three people. If we did a weekly webinar, like one to three people would sign it. that's still, we're willing to scratch and claw to get anything we can in terms of usage here, but I don't think it's like a hundred people are gonna join. We'll see though. We'll give it a shot.
Yeah, in Adam's message, I also just want to mention he kind of suggested the pushing it to more support interactions. I know I already said we were doing a little bit of that, but his email did act as a reminder we should be doing more of that and.
Rick (41:20.076)
Like when someone requests support on X, introduce Y.
Tyler (41:24.204)
Yeah. And I think in particular, just making, making sure the CRM coaches, like, are they pushing this as much as they can? and we've got like a cultural thing here where they're not, it's not sales and et cetera, but yeah.
Rick (41:37.944)
Can I ask a question about just support in general? So like when someone calls in and they're like, I have a problem. Do you just focus on solving that problem and saying, good day, Or are you like, while I've got you, are there any other key initiatives at your company that you're trying to accomplish that let's know I can help with?
Tyler (41:56.441)
That's a great question. I think so the answer for inbound phone calls is definitely we just help them with the question. there's like inbound phone calls, which are more transactional and there's like scheduled demos. The demos. think we do more of what you just said, although I have, I, I, I would be very surprised if anyone does it in quite a, as a businessy and mature of a ways, like what initiatives is your business working on? It's probably more like, cool. What else? Like what else do want to talk about here? You know, probably more generic like that.
Rick (42:25.518)
I have an idea. Think about this for the next episode. I'd love to talk to you about this more because I think this we could spend an hour on this. But perhaps like to Adam's point on, I don't think just pushing forums is the way to go with your culture. I think it's too salesy, but I do think that there is a consultative service. Like you could up level your coaches to be less transactional support and like helpful. No, no, not less. Continue to do that, but also kind of get into this consultative, proactive.
search for more workflows to help with, which will have two opportunities. One, introduce new features, which will increase usage of different things. Forms sometimes, but other features other times, which will increase retention, like word of mouth, it's still service, it's not sales, you're not selling anything, you're just trying to help the person, which should fit really well into the role. And then the other factor is there may be something, there may be ideas that come for product that
that you're missing because you're not asking that question enough to find like, I doubt it, but like, there could be some other stuff in there where it's like, man, we could help with this. And it should be like feed the engine that you're trying to build between word of mouth and the carplay.
Tyler (43:30.424)
Yeah.
Tyler (43:39.375)
I like that a lot. That's really consistent with, like one of our big kind of focuses on the customer service side, for the last, I don't know, six months or so has been, being more at like more concierge, more personalized. I basically what happened is back in the day we used to be this way when it was like, I was the only one doing support. This is why founders doing support is great. You just do this naturally. Then we hired Michael and I think he did that naturally. Right. Right.
Rick (44:05.974)
What else can I help you with? What else are you doing? Is there another feature? How can I charge you more money?
Tyler (44:11.266)
Well, and you talk to them as a peer, opposed to, think like the natural, if you're a customer and you call in, the phone rings twice and someone picks up your natural instincts. Like this person is beneath me. That sounds shitty to say, but that's how most people behave. over time, as we brought on more.
Rick (44:26.53)
funny thing about less than like CRM is that most of the coaches probably make way more money than the client which is which is not typical.
Tyler (44:30.99)
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, and sometimes I'm the one picking up the phone. So yes, no, that's true. But what happened over time is we built a bunch of policies that were meant to protect customer service CRM coaches from bad uses of time. So for example, we will run an import for a customer and this is great for a new customer who's signing up for an account and like, it's good for us. It's good for them. We'll get them activated.
But some customers would be like, I buy a lead list once a week. I'm going to send that to you every single week to import. And so we put a restriction place where he said, we'll do three imports for you. And then like after that, we'll teach you how to do it. We'll even get on the phone with you and walk you through it. We'll record a video, but you have to do the rest yourself. that's just one example, like multiply that out across all the different customer service interactions we had. We built all these ways to protect against customers that were kind of using customer service in a sort of exploitative and like low value to us way.
that then got calcified and became the norm where it was like, this, this big 20 user account wants to sign up, but they've got four import files. Sorry, we only do three. but you know, that type of thing. And so as soon as we realized that, like over the last six months or so, we've really been trying to break the calcification and say, those are the, the, the, policies are things you can use if you want to, you don't have to.
You can do whatever you want to help the customer, basically.
Rick (46:00.202)
They're tools, they're not rules.
Tyler (46:02.914)
Yes, exactly. So there's a lot of different versions of that, not just the importing thing, but what you're saying I think fits really well of it's tempting to be like, well, this customer only needed a 20 minute call. So let's get off the phone and start answering emails. But you should say, well, we actually booked an hour long call here. They use 20 minutes of it. Can we get some value out of the remaining 40 minutes here? Yeah, I like that a lot.
Rick (46:25.112)
Yeah. Or a chat conversation or email conversation that is transactional can be turned into a consultative asynchronous conversation.
Tyler (46:36.128)
It's harder with inbound phone because it's so hard staffing phones where someone's actually there to pick up. Cause it's like, you'll get three calls all at once and then no one will call for the next hour. So it's like, if you want to pick up all the calls, you have to have three people sitting there doing nothing.
Rick (46:50.816)
Yeah, for phone calls, what you could do is say, Hey, you know, know I'm on phone calls today. We got to prioritize, you know, hang out, now that we're having a conversation, I'm going to shoot you a quick email. Would love to continue the conversation asynchronously on how else we might be able to help you. There's a lot of new features we're building.
Tyler (47:00.588)
Yeah.
Tyler (47:06.744)
Yeah. Okay. I like that a lot. Michael, I know you're listening. You mind jotting all this down and I like that a lot. This is also great. back to the customer service in general, one of the reasons it's so hard to do it well is you have to just have tremendous buffer. You have to have way more people than you need. Because when things get busy, you have to be able to handle that capacity, but most of time things aren't busy.
Rick (47:11.47)
Yeah
Rick (47:22.798)
Mm.
Tyler (47:30.786)
What I really like is things that you can kind of scale up and scale down. So it's like, if we're busy, we're not going to send that follow-up email. And if things are slow, send the follow-up email and try and book another demo.
Rick (47:39.95)
I just want to summarize customer service. If you want to have excellent customer service, you basically have to do the opposite of what everyone else does. You have to pay more. You have to pay it like it's sales. You have to create buffer, which is like overstaff it. Well, not overstaff it, but properly staff it, I should say. Yeah. Yeah, and then you have to empower them. If you call most customer support teams, they're understaffed, they're paid like crap, and they're not empowered to make any decisions.
Tyler (47:53.122)
Yeah, it's like not efficiency, right? It's the opposite of efficiency.
Rick (48:09.238)
And so like do the opposite of that.
Tyler (48:11.33)
Yeah, I think that's a great point. I think we were already doing the opposite in most ways, but yes, we could definitely be more proactive about the consultative thing. I think that's awesome. And yeah, they shouldn't be like specifically pushing forms, but yeah, customers do say all the time like, Hey, are there other features I'm not using? When they, when they, you know, throw you a softball like that, you gotta hit it. You gotta say, yeah, well, forms is this really cool feature that you might consider.
Rick (48:34.262)
What, one of the themes of this episode has been sales. kind of started out with a pipeline. one thing I'm learning at windfall where we're going through a training, segment with a company called winning by design, which is really interesting. and they they're bringing, at my last company, it was a very transactional sale with a small business. And it was, we did this thing called standard training, which is the frameworks are really interesting, but the way that it's taught is super cringe in terms of like salesy,
backing your person into a corner where they can't say anything but yes. What I like about the winning by design framework is it doesn't feel like sales. It's more like I just want to have a consultative conversation and earn the right to advise you, which naturally leads to sales and transaction. it's so much more pleasant and value add to the customer.
And I have, I'm still early in it, but I think that framework, their approach could like work well. I'm like a mini version of that. they call it like solution, consultative solution selling, I think is the, the generic term. but like you probably could piece that together and have like a mini framework for customer service on this. This is new to me. I, I've always seen sales as like Sandler, like hard clothes.
Tyler (49:49.4)
Yeah, interesting.
Tyler (49:55.193)
So sorry, you said there's a book you're reading. How do I learn more about this?
Rick (49:57.484)
Yeah, this is a consulting firm called Winning by Design. They have a bunch of books. The books are for SaaS companies that are, it's primarily geared around enterprise selling. But I think like there is, the core principles that they're applying could be pulled out and applied to your customer service approach in a way that I think would work really, really well and provide you guys a framework.
Tyler (50:24.11)
How would you suggest I learn those core principles?
Rick (50:28.738)
There's a book called Revenue Architecture. Man, I don't know. Let me think about that one as a next step because it's a lot of content.
Tyler (50:34.67)
Are you gonna write notes on this and I can just steal your thoughts?
Rick (50:39.148)
I I should, because I have to do this anyway and yes, I probably will. Yeah.
Tyler (50:45.55)
Okay, if you do, I'll read yours, but awesome. Yeah, that's really helpful. This is exactly the type of stuff we've been, you you do a little bit of this and you're like more concierge stuff and you're like, okay, that's great, but we're kind of out of ideas on how, what you're saying is obvious. Like anyone listening is gonna be like, how did you not think of that approach? But yeah, we should do that. Yes, it was Adam and then I think you yes anded it. So cool. Well, we probably need to run here, but good talking to you.
Rick (51:03.854)
Well that was Adam.
Rick (51:09.304)
Yeah, exactly.
Rick (51:14.882)
You too, if you'd like to review past topics and show notes, visit StartupToLast.com. See you next time.
Tyler (51:19.481)
See ya.