Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (00:00)
In this episode, we talk about a push to find more high-quality affiliates for less annoying CRM. Let's go.

Rick (00:25)
What's up this week, Tyler?

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (00:27)
What's going on? yeah, not a whole lot. I I feel like I'm still catching up from that conference, even though it was three weeks ago now. But we had the fellowship end, so like kind of summer interns leaving. I had like a bunch of stuff I had to catch up on, doing follow up from the conference and so on. So anyway, yeah, I feel like I'm finally back in just normal kind of day to day mode. How about you?

Rick (00:48)
Yeah, same. I I it's a the cost of traveling and and being away from day to day, it like you you need a day almost just to say, Hey, I my an extra day of travel just to catch up on all the things that I didn't do while I was traveling. It's

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (01:02)
Yeah.

Rick (01:03)
not like the travel creates a ton of work, but it's just like the back you get behind in life.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (01:09)
Yeah. What's weird is then like earlier this summer I went to France for two weeks and I mean there was some ca I feel like I had the same amount of ketchup from two weeks in France as I did from two days at this conference. I guess it was

Rick (01:20)
Hmm.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (01:20)
just a busy two days, I don't know. you see one thing I it's been a while since we've chatted about just like random current events. did you see that Airtable got acquired?

Rick (01:33)
I did. pretty low valuation, right? And not a great outcome.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (01:36)
Yeah, like less than they raised, yeah.

Rick (01:38)
But I think they spun I think I saw that they spun out an AI business for so like they sold the core business and then spun out an AI business with the same investors. so like the investors got s I my my my kind of interpretation was the whatever the deal was like was like minimizing downside.

And then there's upside still on the AI AI business.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (02:04)
Yeah. How how messed up was the valuation of Airtable when they raised a billion and a half dollars or whatever it was, such that they sell it for less than that, and that's that's factoring in, Bending Spoons, the company that acquired it, they're gonna lay off all the employees like they're gonna make it way more profitable. Like that's their whole MO. Even with that, like all of the horrible things Bending Spoons is gonna do to make it more profitable, it's still worth

Less than the total amount they raised. That just suggests the original valuation was bonkers and stupid, right?

Rick (02:41)
Well, mean, I think the original valuation was pre AI. So I think this is the

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (02:45)
Yeah, sure.

Rick (02:46)
this is a casualty of what's happening w in the AI space, more so than like

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (02:51)
That's fair.

Rick (02:52)
like if AI didn't come through, Airtable was a very powerful solution. Like it was the it was the back

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (03:00)
Okay, fair enough. Like

Rick (03:01)
it was the spine of a lot of like n

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (03:04)
No code.

Rick (03:05)
no code stuff.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (03:06)
Yeah. I guess I've been thinking of it like SaaS in general has lower valuation. Okay. HubSpot, Salesforce, their valuations are all down, but their their revenues up, all their metrics are up, their their valuations down. I guess I was grouping Airtable in with that as just like another SaaS company that got hit by a valuation crunch. But yeah, what you're saying is true. They are much more directly hurt by AI than HubSpot is.

Rick (03:30)
I think so. I think so. But I I I haven't used I stopped using Airtable when when chat GP like what once we don't need no code tools anymore, you stop using The the the that's true. That's true. But I would have stopped using it. Yeah.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (03:41)
Well, you stopped using it when I joined, but you would have stopped using it, yeah.

Rick (03:47)
So yeah, I mean, it's very interesting. poor guys. I I was a huge fan of the they

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (03:54)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (03:55)
they brought a lot of innovation to the space at the time and it's a bummer.

I hope I hope their AI whatever they're doing on the AI spin out is is successful.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (04:04)
Yeah, I hadn't heard about that part, but and then like, yeah, Bending Spoons, what a what a villain narrative they're developing here. 'cause, you know, they just went public.

Rick (04:11)
I don't know anything about them.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (04:14)
So I b the first time I heard about them was probably a decade ago or so when they acquired Evernote.

Rick (04:22)
yes. I remember the downfall.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (04:23)
And Evernote was already,

I think Evernote started in Shittifying even before Bending Spoons acquired them. But like Evernote is a story of a once loved company that went to shit. And now it's just like it's them, it's Vimeo, it's I think Eventbrite, I want to say, or one of those companies,

Rick (04:43)
Yeah, meet up.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (04:44)
meetup.com, yeah. And they're just like

Rick (04:47)
AOL!

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (04:50)
yeah, I forgot about that.

But they just lay everyone off and like they are all private equity is or almost all private equity is in shitifying, like that's the business model. But I feel like Bending Spoons is doing it like on hyperspeed.

Rick (05:05)
Wow. Wow. interesting. I didn't like they basically buy products that are getting destroyed and try to make it work. And you know, like it's basically they're kind of playing the we're gonna we're gonna be the we're not gonna we're we're going to operate with innovators dilemma in mind and not be held by the prior sort of assumptions of valuation and just like milk the thing. That's basically their

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (05:32)
Yeah.

Rick (05:32)
business model. That's brilliant.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (05:34)
I mean, I think most private equity works that way, but yeah, they're doing it with these I think most private equity does it with like dentists' office and really like boring businesses. This

Rick (05:42)
Yeah.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (05:43)
is like we're gonna acquire a world famous brand that not that long ago was considered like a really high growth tech startup and yeah, d run that same playbook.

Rick (05:52)
Wow.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (05:53)
And they're based in Italy, I think. So a rare case of kind of a European

Europe is doing to America what what America normally does to the rest of the world.

Rick (06:05)
interesting. wow. and they're and binning you said binning spoons went public?

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (06:11)
Yeah, earlier this year I think. I I didn't follow how it went, but yeah, I believe so.

Rick (06:17)
Incredible. I had no idea that this company existed. but I now do and now I'm interested. It's very smart. I'm the

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (06:23)
Yeah.

Rick (06:24)
villain is like I I agree like villain could be one sort of narrative, but also smart genius.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (06:34)
Yep. Absolutely. And I mean my my read on this is like, yeah, if you go raise a billion dollars, you're gonna end up in you're gonna end up where Air Airtable is right now, one way or another. There's just no way to run a like like you know, the name of our podcast, Startup to Last. They were running the opposite model and that's what you get. even if they had succeeded and gone public, still eventually employees start getting squeezed, eventually customers start getting squeezed. This just

moved the timeline forward by two decades. Anyway, thought that was an interesting headline. yeah, what's going on with you?

Rick (07:11)
I am I have not made any progress on my coding journey, so nothing to talk about there. I have been writing a little bit more, but it's really easy. I just feel like I just got rid of Squarespace and don't miss it at all. So I'm just using Claude as a Claude code as an interface to update my website now. it's crazy. I

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (07:33)
I've been thinking more and more about ditching Webflow. Like it's it can't it there's no way it makes sense as the priority for us to work on that, but man, every time we have to use Webflow for anything, it's like, why can't I just ask Claude to do this?

Rick (07:45)
It well

you probably can. Have you tried connecting Webflow to Claude?

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (07:48)
I looked at that a while back and understandably Webflow does not want to be in that position. Maybe they've given up by now. I I have not checked recently.

Rick (07:59)
No one wants to click buttons anymore.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (08:02)
Well, yeah. But like before the okay, the my my sorry, I'm kind of hijacking your topic here, but my whole my my like journey into Webflow was I coded our lesson knowing serum's original website in PHP, like part of our normal code base. A lot of people at the time y called me crazy, like use WordPress or whatever, you know, in twenty ten. but like s it was so advantageous to be able like, I'm logging every hit.

The session that exists on in our app exists on our marketing site. So for example, we know what currency they pay in and we can adjust all the currencies. And like all I mean, that's a minor example, but there's like more major examples too. What if you know what industry they're in? What if you know how many users they have? Or that assumes someone has already signed up, which maybe is not the main use case, but it goes the other way too. Everything they do on the website, when they sign up, with with no additional work, you just know everything about what they've already done.

And I loved that. And I could experiment super fast. I built my own A B testing framework that was way, way better than anything that a third party can sell you because they're not hooked into your back end. But then you hire somebody and it's like, well, Yunus doesn't have access to our code base, or she doesn't know she wouldn't know what to do with access to our code base. So we moved to Webflow so that Unis can manage the the marketing site.

And

now Eunice can manage the website again because Claude lets her. She she literally our whole website, we just redesigned it. She coded the whole thing in Claude and then painstakingly went into Webflow and tried to recreate it u using their visual editor. Like it it seems barbaric at this point to do it.

Rick (09:37)
Yeah, I mean it's in the the the question that I've seen a few like older people who went through the original SAS boom ask about Claude is like are like you mentioned like I I built this like internal tool for myself, but then I hired someone and I became the bottleneck, so I stopped, you know, doing that and we we bought a tool. Is Claude just transferring that problem, like to Eunice, where she built she builds this custom thing and like now

Now she's the bottleneck when we when you hire someone or is it like do do you

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (10:07)
You don't think so.

Rick (10:08)
see there's a world where we can collaborate like across people and and Claude to to maintain sort of this this this this this unique custom thing?

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (10:20)
Yeah, that's my instinct is that let's say they get hit by a bus scenario, always a bit morbid, but like there's no opportunity to train a new person or do a handoff or anything. Eunice gets hit by a bus, she's the only one who knows how the site works. Well, Claude knows how the site works. So the next person comes in, probably not as good at it as Eunice, almost certainly, but like can they get up and running? Yeah, like the old days when I was the bottleneck, someone would have had to learn how to code.

Learn how I code, understand our full tech stack before doing a single thing. Now they can just go to Cloud and be like, Hey, hey, can you change the H one on the website to this? Go. And then they can verify if it worked or not. Like I don't think it's the same thing.

Rick (11:02)
Yeah, it's just yeah.

Yeah, I mean if it's fundamentally if this if yeah, I see your point. we're all just gonna become con contributors to a code base. it's just gonna

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (11:13)
Yeah.

Rick (11:13)
be a micro code base and s certain people have access and Claude, you know, gets you up to speed as much as you need to know.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (11:20)
Yeah, I think there's still rakes you could step on, right? Like, Eunice doesn't know coding best practices. And so I wouldn't say to her, like, go code this up from scratch. Like, for example, giving Claude direct access to the production database, especially if it's the same database that all our customer data's on. First of all, HIPAA violation, boom. second of all, it's just a matter of time before someone's vibe coding a marketer is vibe coding something very low stakes and accidentally, there's this function that

Converts currencies. I'm gonna use that to display currencies on the pricing page, but I need to make a little change to it. And now our billing system breaks, right? There are plenty of areas where someone could mess stuff up, but I don't think if if I just had a little oversight in the architecture of it and then Eunice led the charge of actually coding everything up with Claude, I don't think it would be a problem to avoid that stuff.

Rick (12:12)
Cool. And hypothetically, you could basically say you you could probably have a skill and claw that basically you run against anything that's built by a person to check against the security holes that you would

check, you

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (12:25)
Yeah.

Rick (12:25)
know, like it's it's there's probably like a s a skill or clawed f you know artifact for that that could or plug-in that could could just do that for her. Yeah.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (12:36)
It could help a lot. I still

I still think you wanna set it up. For example, the example I just gave assumes that Eunice is writing the marketing site in our main code base. Like you wouldn't do it that way. R like you can put

Rick (12:46)
I see. No no, you'd you'd have it

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (12:48)
up guardrails so that even if Claude messes something up, the the blast radius of that is limited, you know?

so anyway, we probably won't do it just 'cause like that's not our marketing priority right now, but every time I have to do something in Webflow. And I'm I'm doing a lot of like analytics and like kind of a marketing data deep dive right now. And it's just like I miss the old days when we had all the data. Like we can't do that with Webflow because it's a static site hosted by someone else. Anyway. sorry, I hijacked your topic about writing.

Rick (13:20)
Yeah,

that's it. I mean, I don't have much else to say other than like I've been I'm still just kind of staying in my lane on Claude with coding with with my personal website. I would like to do more, I just don't have the time or energy to do it right now. The you wanna you know, kind of switching topics for a second. We had our partner meeting for Leg Up Health this week of what you were a part of. The thing that I keep thinking about from that meeting is something that actually came out of

the conference we went to, Health of Palooza. but like I keep thinking about, and that is most of the insurance agents I talked to about like how do you get your like one of the questions I asked everyone I talked to is like, what's your strategy for growing your client base? All of them said my number one channel is client referrals. Like so and and so I've been thinking a lot about that. And we get client referrals at at Leg Up, but not not as many as I would say that like we would say it's our number one channel.

You know, most like our number one channel is Cold Call. Like it's outbound basically networking. And I think most of the people at Health of Balooza would validate that, but I I get the impression that if we get one referral per 20 customers per year, they're getting like our our the average agent is getting some multiple of that per customer per year, right? Yeah. Exactly.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (14:42)
Yeah, one out of ten or one out of five, yeah.

Rick (14:45)
Exactly. And so I

I've just been thinking a lot about what what like what is that telling us about how we're spending our time? Like are we spending too much time trying to get new customers by talking to new customers? Or are we spending n and and not enough time on like what I would call like account management or, you know, serv

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (15:05)
Yeah.

Rick (15:06)
spending time with our customers?

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (15:09)
I think this is a good line of thought. And what I'm about to say is sort of gonna like dampen it a little. Like, one big difference is everyone at Health of Palooza, or almost everyone, is selling to consumers and you're selling to businesses. And probably it makes sense that I just turned 65, I need Medicare, someone helped me get it. My sister is about to turn 65 in a year, I'm gonna refer her to the same person. That feels like a much juicier referral opportunity than like.

We've got this really good small business that's growing steadily, using us for their group insurance. Maybe they know other business owners or something, but I don't know. It's not as easy of a referral opportunity.

Rick (15:48)
I agree. we we I think you're right. The other the the the on the reason that I'm kind of staying on this is there are other sort of symptoms of what I would call not enough account management. like there's there's controllable churn where people are leaving us because they didn't know we could do what they leave us for. Like and they love us. Like so when we tell them, no, you could do that with us, they're like, I'm coming back right now. Like, do that for me.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (16:16)
Yeah. They just didn't

know.

Rick (16:18)
They just didn't know. And so I don't know. I'm I'm I'm playing with you know the this idea that we should have some sort of North Star measurement that that tells us whether or not we're doing enough account management. And I thought customer referrals would be that leaving the partner meeting, but I'm not sure it's right based on what what you just said. But like what is it? you know, and and

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (16:42)
Yeah.

Rick (16:43)
And I don't want it to be like we're calling our customers to check a box. Like that's not the point. but it does seem like there's something we could be doing more regularly with our customers that provides them value and also opens up a growth channel for us that is potentially like under leveraged.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (17:01)
The thing I was really surprised to hear in that meeting, in a good way, good surprise. So the obvious thing, if if you're talking about whether it's referrals or just generally account management, the obvious thing you want to do is get on the phone with the customer. And we've tried this a million times at Less Wing CRM. Like our backstory here is we have eight CRM coaches, and during busy times,

If it's really busy and one person's on vacation, another person's sick, we have six people and it's busy, we can barely keep our head above water. So that's why we have eight people. But then imagine a different time of year where the volume's pretty low, all eight people are around. Now we have like three people doing nothing. So we've always been trying to say like, how can we absorb that surplus time? How can we spend that effectively? And a thing we keep trying over and over is like account management. At a f for a $15 a month product, we can't.

constantly be reaching out and having just check-in conversations with every customer. But when we have extra time, sure we can. And we try to reach out, we've we've tried all kinds of things. We we ha wrote a script that scans everyone's like anonymously scans all the database, all the CRM data, and is like, we can tell that you've got a few red flags. Like your pipelines are not set up correctly. You're creating a new pipeline every month. That cannot possibly be the right way to do this. Or things like that. And we email them and we're like, we've identified problems with your account.

Can

we just get on the phone and help you with it? Even then, people are like, no, fuck off. They love us. They give us a five star review. They're Less annoying serum is the best company I work with out of any software company ever. No, I will not talk to you. I've got other things to do. I was very surprised to hear JD say, no, any any leg up health customer will get on the phone with me. No problem.

Rick (18:41)
Yeah, I believe that. That's my experience too. And it's probably the nature of what we do, like health insurance being just traditionally a human to human sort of exchange, but like

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (18:52)
But I bet if it's

individual, I it wouldn't be true. It if imagine you're just a random

Rick (18:54)
Yes, that's true. Yes.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (18:56)
person, your health insurance agent calls you in April and is like, Do you want to talk about health insurance? And you'd be like, What? No, of course not.

Rick (19:02)
Yeah, I know. No, that's that's

true. yeah, I I I interesting. Yeah, that's a positive. So like there is an opportunity for us to have a better pulse on our customers and share more information with them. the question is like what should we do and like how do we do it?

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (19:18)
Yeah.

Rick (19:18)
Right. And I don't know, like I and and is it working? Like that's kind of where I'm focused on right now is like how do we know before we start go doing stuff, like how do we actually what's our hypothesis here? And how do we know

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (19:28)
Yeah.

Rick (19:29)
if it if it's true?

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (19:30)
Well, what's the what's the health benefits version of what I just said? Again, it didn't work for us because no one would get on the phone with us, but a different version of what I was just saying at less annoying that happens all the time is a customer calls in with a simple question. How do I do XYZ? And in in answering it, we log in as their account with their permission and we look at it. And then we're just like, While I'm here, I do notice this you you have a thousand incomplete tasks. You want some help dealing with that?

And then they're like, yes. And at the end of the call, they love us. They're they're praising us so much. So I have good validation that this type of help is helpful. People love it. It creates tremendous goodwill. I just can't get on the phone with people in the first place. What's the health benefits equivalent of that type of help, do you think?

Rick (20:14)
Well, the difference between our the businesses is seasonality. So like there are events that sort of lead to value creation opportunities. One is the renewal, right? Open enrollment, like the

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (20:26)
Yeah.

Rick (20:26)
the 90 to 120 days prior to the end of the current benefit year. The other events are employee sort of ads and deletes. I've decided I want to hire someone. I've posted a job posting.

I have lost someone due to benefits. Like these events that are related like to the like why do you offer benefits in the first place? Well, it's to be able to hire and keep people. Like that's it's something related to the to that sort of thing. other events that that create opportunity is like change in business plan. So like these are typically triggered by macro environmental shift where that's imp impacting the business, like could be positive or negative, or like another

seismic s shift is like they've raised funding of some kind. Like someone who r like raises a series B most likely made made commitments to the investor that they're going to hire a bunch of people to do a bunch of stuff. that requires a benefits assessment. So there's all these like events and most likely like one reason to call is like making sure we have a pulse on the events so that we can support them and making sure that gets updated regularly so we can forecast those events

the second is like helping with those events when we know about them. so like I would kind

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (21:44)
Okay.

Rick (21:44)
of like put them in those two buckets.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (21:47)
So right off the bat, the I think the obvious idea that comes out of what you just said is J D should have a Google alert or more than one Google alert set up for any customer above a certain size.

Rick (21:59)
Yeah, what you're go where you're going is this is about signal. Like what signals can we can we act on like what signals can we alert on and then what is the action we take based on each alert? Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (22:13)
And I think this does two things. One, of course, like the the ultimate goal is provide value. Like, you raised a new round of funding. Let's talk about your benefits. But two, even if you can't provide value, I mean, what what is that other person thinking? Like, wow, you read a you are monitoring my business to see if news happens about it? Like that that's a really, really good signal that you're a human being that cares about them.

Rick (22:36)
I agree. Yeah, that was really helpful actually. Now, like

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (22:39)
that's just one small tactic, I think.

Rick (22:41)
I think it's the one to try though. Like but how and then how do you know it's working? Well, there's probably three sort of indicators. One is like just people wanting and you know, verbal feedback of like some kind, like more data that we have about the cost customer and then retention, reduce like we don't

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (22:57)
Yeah.

Rick (22:57)
have a lot enough numbers here, but like more referrals, less like more what do you what would you look at?

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (23:03)
Well, the reason I say it's a small

the reason I say it's a small tactic is if you set up a like let's take take the top twenty clients of Leg Up Health and you set a Google Alert, you're not gonna get a hit for every one of them every year. so like that this needs to be like JD needs to talk to everyone right now because to to elaborate on what you said earlier, a customer is switching from one benefits thing to another, from group to no group or from no group to group.

And they don't know we do the other one, and so they cancel. JD needs to talk to every single one of them soon to be like, we do it all. that's that's kind of the the main takeaway, I think, from the call. The Google Alerts thing is more of just a background, very, very long term thing. What's the actual impetus for getting on the phone with everyone right now? And sorry, he said they'll get on the phone. He can get on the phone. So forget the impetus part. What does he do on that call to make them walk away from it? Like, wow, next time he wants to call, I'm taking it.

Rick (24:02)
Yeah, that's the action, right? Yeah. I don't know.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (24:03)
Yeah. W with

Google with Google Alerts, it's obvious. It's like, well the alert said they raised around, so do something about that. Or the alert said whatever. What's the generic one if you don't have any inside information? Just

Rick (24:19)
I g I

just call and say I want to do a check in to see if there's any like I the action

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (24:23)
Yeah.

Rick (24:24)
is like I need to know what your plan is so we can support it. and

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (24:28)
Yeah, yeah.

Rick (24:28)
I don't know what your plan is. and there's probably some regular check in of some kind of like, Hey, this is the plan that I have currently, has it changed? Wanna make sure we're supporting you? So it's it's

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (24:38)
I feel like news

would be a good one. Like, so I agree with what you just said. All that's good, but you want there to be a moment on the call where the person on the other end is thinking, like, this is why I have a broker. Wow. Like I would not have that would not have happened otherwise.

Rick (24:54)
Employee

benefit we've decided employee benefits advisor. This is why I have an advisor, not a broker. Yeah.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (24:57)
Yeah, yeah. An advisor. Okay.

This is why I have an advisor. But what I mean is like I could go buy insurance online. This is why I have a human. and I think

Rick (25:07)
Yeah, this is why I have a human. I like that. Yep.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (25:09)
a nice one one way to do that is are there any like news stories you can share with them? For example, a regulation is changing. It will affect small businesses in the following ways. I don't think it'll affect you, but I just want to get on the phone and make sure you're aware of it.

Like if you were thinking about hiring ten people next year it would affect you, just be aware of that. You know, that type of thing.

Rick (25:30)
We we're every time we start talking about this type of thing and I and I go to where we are today, we're kind of like using pipe drive, trying to make it work with HubSpot. We've got a webflow website. And I'm going, man, we should just like take like build this as a custom app. And it's like everything is built on top of Leg Up Health and all j all JD does is like work within the app and when the app doesn't do it, we build it into the app. anyway, I've just that's where I go in my head of like this is what we should build.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (26:00)
I've pitched that to you before, right? That

Rick (26:00)
And it's I know

and I just now getting there is crazy. Like you've been here though

I think you've been here for years.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (26:08)
Well, yeah, I mean, I don't know that I could have connected it to the actual like referral growth strategy the way you are, but here's what we know. Nobody wants to log in to a SaaS tool related to health insurance. Less annoying CRM is a tool that a happy customer uses every single day for hours a day. Leg up health will never be that. It doesn't matter how good or useful th no one needs anything from the tool, but JD needs so much for the back office stuff.

Rick (26:34)
So much. Yeah.

And what what like what people do get value of that our tool is connected to is the coding process, right? That is a consumer tool. The employer,

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (26:46)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (26:46)
like our our like if if we' what we're talking about right now from an account management perspective is actually the CEO, the founder, the COO, the CFO, the HR leader, right? And or and or like maybe like chief of staff office manager persona. And

That

pr we don't have anything that is like not human for

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (27:09)
Well,

Rick (27:09)
those people.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (27:10)
agreed, but I I will say I think you work at a high growth tech startup as your day job, and the word scale I imagine gets spoken over and over and over again. The custom building of this only matters at scale. It's not gonna make

Rick (27:25)
Agreed.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (27:26)
JD better at it. So like I I think in the past you you have expressed some confusion about why less annoying CRM exists. You're like, why would anyone use this given that you don't have any of the features that you, Rick, want in a CRM?

And like this is it is these health insurance agents that you met at Health of Palooza that get all their business from referrals, they don't have any tools. They have a Rolodeck. They don't even have CRM half the time. They have a phone. And that's all JD needs right now, I think. Yeah. so like I think we should explore the yeah.

Rick (27:48)
They have phone. And a car. No, I yeah, totally total totally

agree. It's just like the direction when when we when we talk about the job, I think the observation I'm having, and I just want to say it out loud, 'cause is like when you think about this in terms of the job we're actually doing versus the function of service that we're doing, brokering.

The the the the tooling and the way that we deliver like the data that the the the things that we need to support J D doing the job to be done is totally different than what we have today.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (28:27)
Yeah, yeah. Right. But that the he only needs tooling to scale. He doesn't need tooling to

Rick (28:32)
Correct.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (28:32)
prove what to experiment and figure out what works.

Rick (28:36)
Correct. Correct.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (28:36)
Yeah. Cool. all right, let's keep talking about that. I wanted to give an update from from the last episode. I was talking about this idea. We used the word wake. This idea that when you do one form of marketing

You

also tend to see an uptick in your unattributed or organic, whatever you want to call it, leads coming in. And I we kind of called that the wake. I was talking unrelated to that, I was talking about some marketing stuff with Claude since then, and it used the word echo. and again, I I didn't prime it. I didn't say, hey, what would you call this? I was just like, I asked it to analyze a bunch of data, and it was like, you can see when you had the Chrome Web Store channel working well.

It echoed a lot in organic and then it dropped and organic dropped. And then you can see when your affiliate program was really going well, the echo in organic really showed up here and here. So anyway, echo is the word that Claude thinks is correct, and that feels like a good one to me.

Rick (29:37)
I like that. Yeah. I actually like it a lot.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (29:41)
I don't know is this like an industry wide term that neither of us knew, or is Claude just doing its normal like making up aph not aphorisms, but making up sayings that aren't real, you know?

Rick (29:52)
Well, I I like it better than wake because wake is so obvious. Like when you're riding riding a boat, like it's like you you can see the wake and you can watch it and

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (30:01)
Yeah, yeah.

Rick (30:02)
like it it's like no, like echoes are a little less predictable. Like you you know that that you can ex you can kind of trace them a little bit, but like sometimes the it kind of escape it's it's not intuitive to like how the echo is happening. You have to look for it. that to me is a better metaphor.

for what we're trying what we're talking about here, which is like why? Why is it echoing? I don't know. I need to go figure that out. Yeah.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (30:25)
Yeah, what surface is it bouncing off of? And

then is it coming back a second later or ten seconds later?

Rick (30:29)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (30:30)
Yeah. so yeah. Like that a lot. I'll I've already started incorporating that into I'm kind of writing a little memo of sorts to give to the handful of people that are working on marketing and sales stuff for us. to kind of say, like we've been we've been doing this health insurance push, and then a separate person has been doing affiliate stuff. That's those are our two big pushes, but like I'm trying to get

All of this under one umbrella. And then more important to that is to say, well, what's all the other stuff that we shouldn't be doing? For example, I think we're probably

Rick (31:04)
Mm.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (31:05)
spending too much money on advertising right now. historically that's w it's you and I talked just last episode about you never want to stop doing anything because you don't know if it's if if there's echo or not, basically.

But

if you know something else is working even better, then then you can shift your money over there. So one of the big goals is like, let's not just stop advertising because, but let's figure out better ways to spend the money because we're spending $800 to acquire a paying user, a user paying us $15 a month. Like, I don't care how much echo there is. That's it's hard to make that math work. so any then, with that, we are

We're kind of getting back into this affiliate game. So so I've we I've talked ad nauseum about the health insurance side. The other big push right now is the the affiliate side. So I thought maybe I'd give an update on that.

Rick (31:55)
That'd be great.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (31:58)
so the the way okay. Emma on our team is the one she is a CRM coach that spends one day a week. Everyone gets 20% time, and then she gets an extra day a week of marketing. So kind of two two days of marketing per week. and it's largely

Like Eunice is kind of the marketing manager, the main marketing person. She's overseeing Emma doing this affiliate push. Before I get into what Emma's doing, I asked Claude to like build I'm I'm the process of building like a marketing dashboard that's only going to give us the stats relevant to health insurance, affiliates, and then our organic channel so we can see the echoes, hopefully. so I'm like right now I have like a million reports that show high level stuff. I'm trying to get way more narrow on are these specific things working?

In doing that, it was Claude was looking through all this historic data before I even had decided affiliates would be the the the main thing to focus on. It was looking through all these old channels that we had. And if you look at our numbers over the years, it's like something works for a while and then it dies, and then something else picks up and then it dies, and then something else picks up and it dies. You could explain the story of our current plateau as we just don't have one of those other things working right now. So we're relying entirely on that base organic traffic. And anyway.

It asked me a bunch of questions about tell me about the Chrome web store, why did that work? Tell me about affiliates. How did that work? Why did it die? And I'm telling it, like, well, we really only ever had two successful affiliates. One of them was this, one of them was that. I told about various ad campaigns, various sites we advertise on, all that. And it pulled out of that. Health insurance, I mean, I maybe I subtly biased it and I was trying really hard not to, but it was like, yeah, of all your old channels, like PPC ads, that's what got you started.

They're dead. Like way too competitive. There's you're you're not gonna be able to afford it at your price. Chrome Web Store, dead. I mean, it doesn't even exist anymore in the way that we used it before. you know, SEO, not dead, but like highly yeah, highly competitive and AI is i is hurting it quite a bit. a type of affiliate that's dead, one of our b two best affiliates ever was someone wrote a top 10 CRM's blog post.

And we were one of the top 10, we were like number seven. And then that linked to our site with an affiliate link. AI's basically killed that type of content marketing. If if someone wants a top 10 list of CRMs, they're going to ChatGPT and asking. The PC Mag, like review site style publishers. Yeah, that well, that's how the AI gets the information, but

Rick (34:28)
That's valid that's like like still there. Yep. Yep.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (34:32)
like random bloggers just spamming this stuff are not gonna get the traffic directly. So what it pulled out though is the the things that

have worked that are that have a good chance of still working are use the word advisors. You just used that earlier. So haha, coincidence. people who are advisors to small businesses. Not just people who are like, I have a website with a lot of traffic or I'm a social media influencer, but people who are like, I have a course on how to start a wholesale, wholesale real estate business. Chapter seven is

You need a CRM and I recommend less and wing CRM. Like that, that that's the second good affiliate we've ever had, like really, really good affiliate we've ever had. But and then beyond that, it's like utility warehouse, a multi-level marketing company that years ago we kind of partnered with and we got 600 of their users, of their independent people. It's like there's a centralized authority that people look to for advice. FMOs for health insurance agents, health insurance being another example, what we haven't had made that work yet, but it could. It's just like that's the only model.

That has worked in the past and that has any hope of still working, go all in on that. And that means affiliates, but like a specific slice of the affiliate game.

Rick (35:45)
And

and what what it what is a specific slice? How would you categorize it?

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (35:49)
Yeah, I don't know that I have the the right language for this, but like again, it used the word advisor. There I I would break all of our affiliates historically into two types. One is publisher and one is advisor.

Rick (35:59)
Like advisor of what? Like advisor of growth? Any advice. Like it could be a CPA. Okay, got it. So generic advisor.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (36:01)
Small someone who's giving advice to small businesses. Any advice? Yes. we we've never had success with a CPA, but yeah.

Rick (36:11)
I think well, I I believe this to be true for like up too. Like our our best referrals come from advisors who are trying to help a small business in some sort of consulting capacity. it could be in the on the financial side, it could be on the growth side, but they're like generally when you're helping a small business owner, you're like,

genera general adv advisory services. You're not like a specialist. and I think that's what you're saying is like you yeah there might be a specialty. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. But but

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (36:35)
Yeah. It's not a CRM advisor, yeah.

Rick (36:40)
but they might but but because they serve small businesses, they field a lot of broad questions about how to help the the the the small business owner grow their business.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (36:51)
Yeah, and again, the the best version of this we've ever had is not broad. It's like, here is a course, chapter seven is use less annoying CRM. And and I my understanding of how it worked is he was it wasn't just like a do-it-yourself course, it was like an actually guided, like high cost course. He's like, you do not move on to chapter eight until you send me your like less annoying CRM API keys so I can hook up my integration to it. Like it was really it's like you can't do this program if you don't use less annoying CRM.

That's that's a perfect example that you know, I don't wanna like get my hopes up that we're gonna find another one of those, but yeah, that type of thing, it's kind of AI proof. I think it works r really well to our strengths and that

Back when I was in the dating world, I'm bad at the first part of dating where you're supposed to look attractive at a bar, but I'm pretty good at the second part of dating where you're supposed to not seem like a predatory asshole. I wanna skip to

Rick (37:49)
Hmm.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (37:50)
the second part of dating our customers, you know?

Rick (37:52)
Yeah.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (37:54)
I think an advisor helps with that. so anyway.

Rick (37:58)
You gotta still get the advisor

to like you first.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (38:01)
Absolutely. There's still some work to do, but it's kind

Rick (38:03)
Yeah.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (38:04)
of like getting introduced via a friend versus being

Rick (38:06)
Yeah.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (38:06)
like, I'm just gonna walk up to you at a bar, you know?

Rick (38:09)
Yeah, but you gotta make a friend first.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (38:10)
Gotta make the friend. Absolutely. But so Emma has started doing this. She's reaching out. it's a low, a low volume relative to someone who's like a full-time salesperson, but 10 cold outreaches per month. LinkedIn and email hybrid, three, three touch, three outreaches per person. she's using Claude to help her get.

Who to reach out to. And we're still exploring like different industries. Like, yeah, should it be a CPA? Should it be a business coach? Should it be MLM, a franchise business, like associations? but starting to get like it went from nobody replied to the messages at all to I think there are three affiliates that have signed up and two in the pipeline, like two that have responded positively, out of, I don't know, thirty, forty or something.

These are probably all really small ones that are not gonna like meaning drive meaningful growth by themselves, but you're starting to see the beginning of a snowball potentially here.

Rick (39:09)
No, that's great. I would love to hear more about this. It's very relevant to leg up. like, man. This is it's it's like it like knowing all the advisors is the best way to get to

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (39:24)
Yeah.

Rick (39:24)
a small business. The best. You want to be an arrow in their quiver. If you're an arrow in their quiver and they trust you, you're gonna get business. Period, the end. Like that's that's

the

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (39:34)
Yep.

Rick (39:35)
way it works.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (39:36)
And interestingly, it's gonna look there's gonna be so much echo to that. Like there's gonna

Rick (39:40)
Yes.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (39:40)
be there's gonna be a handful of like someone calls up and says, such and such advisor told me to talk to you. But for every one of those, there's gonna be 10 people that years ago heard your name from the advisor, doesn't even remember that that's where they heard it from. But now it's time to go sign up for something and they're like, leg up health is does health benefits, lessening CRM does CRM. Got

Rick (40:03)
Yes. And when we did this in the past at Leg Up, one of our challenges was we got pigeonholed into individual health insurance. So just like a lot of our customers who are early customers don't know that we do group now and leave because they

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (40:20)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (40:20)
they don't know that. advisors don't know that we do it all. And they actually would love to have a do it all shop. Like that is actually most of the time they're having to go like I here's a guy for group, here's a guy for Medicare. Yeah.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (40:30)
Yeah, they have to do the con yeah.

So so that actually brings up an interesting little tangent here from something else going on at less annoying. So when I was doing this deep dive with Claude on the data, one of the things I'm trying to figure out is like how how long does it take to know if something's working or not working? And for example, when you build a new feature, you'd expect it to show up in free trial conversions immediately. Like a new person who signs up doesn't know we didn't have a mobile app last year. They don't know that we didn't have Kanban boards last year. To them, we just have it.

And

there should be no real delay of that affecting that.

Claude is of the opinion that that that is true, but that's only half the story. There's a very, very significant delay on the other part, which is do all of our current customers know we have a mobile app? So that's our whole word of mouth engine. Are they telling people? Now, maybe that wouldn't come up in a conversation, but ChatGPT, especially the free version, which is what most people use, which uses older models, which presumably were trained longer ago, it probably doesn't know we have a mobile app. It probably doesn't know we have a Kanban board.

Rick (41:35)
How do you get to know?

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (41:35)
And like,

yeah, how do you get it to know? And but and and so part of that is like that's a good reason to do marketing. I said SEO might not be a good p channel for us in terms of driving traffic, but we still need to be like putting out content. We need to be correcting, you know, if if there's a website out there that says we don't have a mobile app, we need to reach out to them and get them to update it so that then all the AI systems can learn that. But that has like a probably multi-year timeline before it really kicks in. And if we're saying

Our trial paid conversion is pretty good. It could be better, but it's very, it's like top tier by self-serve SaaS company standards. what's not great is people coming to us. And those people are finding out about us from word of mouth, from brand reputation, all that. That's where that lag happens. so anyway, I I'm I'm saying this because of what you were just saying that like you've got to start doing it now to get.

three years from now for people to know that you're the solution.

Rick (42:35)
What what I love about what you're saying right now, and I appreciate this is one of the benefits of having sort of like different stages of companies right now. Like I'm focused on, I would say still very early, and you're like more like, okay, how do I got here, now how do I get there? The one thing that's true, I think, for both of us is like have like when you have conviction about marketing channels, like being so disciplined about what those channels are. And I have never felt

any sort of conviction around our channels at Leg Up Health.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (43:08)
Same.

Rick (43:09)
I and I I I I want I I wonder if you did at some point though. Like I wonder like if maybe you did. Yeah. Yeah.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (43:15)
Well, we abandoned them all though.

Rick (43:17)
So but just but like in both of our businesses, I think, like to know whether because we're targeting a similar customer, right? Small businesses, in order to know if it's working, like it's not a like it you gotta do it for a long time.

And you gotta be and and so it and when you have to when you wanna do something for a long time and you have to do something for a long time in order to know if it was working, the you

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (43:41)
Yeah.

Rick (43:42)
have to have conviction around what

you're betting

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (43:44)
Well,

Rick (43:44)
on.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (43:45)
absolutely. And you asked the question earlier, like a a couple topics ago, how would we judge if JD doing account management is working? And the answer is you might not ever. And the thing that I wish I listened to my intuition on more in the past with lesson wings serum is just does it feel good? Like if you have a conversation with a person and they walk away from it saying like, Wow, I'm impressed.

Even if you cannot track that to any revenue or anything like that, I mean, obviously you can lead yourself astray with this, but like if we go to health insurance conferences and people are excited to talk to us, that just has to be worth doing. I just have to believe that for the next decade and keep doing it.

Rick (44:25)
So so what I think this there are other areas of business where we where we do this and we don't ask questions. Like core values. Like we say we're going to set some core values here. Like we are going to make these decisions ahead of time on how we're going to operate. And we believe this will help us grow. Like the implicit like sort of statement is if we do these things, it it will lead to top it will lead to growth and value. Right. And I think what we're what what we're kind of coming to, and maybe you've been here

but maybe not felt like fully con full conviction around this is that apply there there are values as it relates to marketing too. And you have to be clear about what those are, even if you can't tie them to any sort of ROI. And they're the bets that you make that lead to like, I'm gonna do this until like it doesn't feel good anymore. And I I I don't have those for leg up health. Like, and I and as a result, I think we've been just like and it's like like this very circular cycle of like,

we're gonna go try this and then we come right back to

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (45:25)
Try something, move on. Yeah. And it's

Rick (45:27)
it.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (45:28)
it's easier. This is probably bad advice for someone starting a brand new business. Well, Leg Up Health is earlier than less annoying, but it's still like supporting a full-time employee. It's making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in revenue. So it's not like that early. The

Rick (45:40)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (45:40)
the later you get, A, the more you just know, the more you're like, no, I've talked to thousands of people. I know that this must be true. And B, the more you can afford to take that long time horizon. This is probably terrible advice if you're starting something from scratch. You can't be like,

don't worry about the fact that you're getting zero customers. Five years from now, you'll get your first customer. but like what that says is less annoying, should really be doing this, and Legapel should kind of be doing this.

Rick (46:04)
There was a great article by Nathan Barry, the I think CEO and founder of Convert Kit, which is now called Kit. he was talking about sources of leverage. and he was like, I always like try to look for the high leverage activity. But like what I'm realizing is there are kind of two sort of measurements of leverage that you need to be clear on that create a matrix. One is like potential leverage, and the other is actually realized leverage from the task. I wait, and and he admitted doing this too.

Is like when you're starting a business, you you want to build leverage for yourself. The point of building a business is freedom and leverage. And like you want to build scale, right? and most of the time when you're building for scale early on, the potential for leverage is like off the charts. But the realized leverage is zero. Right. And so early days, like the most important thing, and I would say leg up health is still here in the early days, is

The

highest leverage thing you can do, and this is what he was saying for growth, is talk to people. Like live.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (47:08)
Yeah. Yep. Can't go wrong with that.

Rick (47:12)
And it's like it's super high realized leverage. Now, it's also like the the the potential leverage is the realized leverage. Like you're getting it's kind of like,

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (47:21)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (47:21)
you know, if whatever the potential leverage is, you're realizing it. So there's not a lot of long-term upside, but there is nothing better to do.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (47:28)
I mean there I

think there's unrealized like y you never know. Like if if you have a large network of people it'll pay off in the future in some yeah.

Rick (47:35)
Oversimplification.

You're right. You're right. But like I I guess I don't I can't remember why I was gonna tie this to w with what we were talking about. Is like I think that's an interesting framework to think about what the bets are at any time around marketing. And it's like we're just gonna talk to people right now. That's like a core value. We're we're just gonna talk and that could change like as you get to a different scale. Like what you are at zero dollars versus two hundred thousand dollars versus three million in terms of like how you think about spending time from a marketing perspective is probably gonna change.

and but you have to be intentional about it no matter what.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (48:08)
Yeah, yeah. let me pull back up out of this rabbit hole and say one more thing about affiliates, which is in the past we you know, we we've done different things throughout the years to try and like optimize whatever that means, the affiliate channel. And I think one thing we did is we took like our DNA is self-serve. You know, our lesson CRM is

Come onto our website, sign up for a free trial. Like we have great customer service, but most people don't want, like, if you have to talk to somebody to use the product, that's not a good experience for our our main product. We kind of applied a lot of those same techniques to the affiliate program a few years ago where we were like, let's make a whole marketing site for it. Let's make content, try to drive people to it from the newsletter or whatever. And it's not it's not 100% self serve. Like you do need to submit an application so we can filter out scammers, but

We basically let anyone in and we were just like, fill out this form, we're gonna read your answers, and then we're gonna make an account and send you and give you your affiliate link and you're off to the races. A scammers still get through. We've got three what look like really successful affiliates that signed up in the last few months. not from these outbound efforts, just like inbound. All of them are, as far as I can tell, doing shady shit. Primarily what that means is they're advertising on our branded keywords. So we we've identified we we've dealt with this before. This is not new.

but now we have to cancel all their accounts and stop paying them. yeah.

Rick (49:35)
If if you w didn't want to spend any money on advertising, that would be just

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (49:39)
Just let them do it.

Rick (49:40)
let them do it. But like I guess like that's your the that's still creeping into your like word mouth. Yeah. Yeah, I see. Yeah. That should be a hard no. You cannot bid on our keywords as part of the agreement. Okay, okay. All right. You've already dealt with this.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (49:44)
Then we're spending we're giving them twenty five percent of and th advertising's very expensive. It says that in the affiliate agreement. It says you cannot bid on those so we we have there's no gray area here. Yeah.

because advertising's really expensive. Advertising on your own keywords is not. Like that that's very, very cheap.

So but w it was a very self-serve low like we were willing to talk to you, but like we were thinking it was a volume play. I'm listening to Jason Cohen's new book, Hidden Multipliers, I think it's called, that just came out. one of the things he says in it, I'm I'm probably gonna butcher the exact thing he said, but he's like, if you have a thousand customers I I said this in our our leg up health meeting, I'm I'm repeating this to you. But if you have a thousand customers and you make a million dollars in revenue, if you want to go to two million dollars in revenue, you think to yourself, I need to have two million

Or 2,000 customers. I need to double the number of customers. But if you break it down by revenue per customer for most B2B SaaS businesses, you really need like 50 of the best customers, not a thousand of your average customer. And so the the growth, the way you grow is you go for those 50 great customers. I don't actually think that applies to to our core business with customers because we serve such small business, everyone pays us the same amount. But with affiliates, I think this insight is absolutely right.

Is like if we look back, we have something like 800 affiliates that have ever signed up, most of whom never did anything, but some of whom did. If we look at this, like we need 800 more affiliates to get the type of affiliate conversion, like traffic that we were getting before, A, very, very difficult to do, and B, it probably won't even work. If instead we say, we have had one really good affiliate before, this wholesale real estate guy.

Let's go get one of those. Let's spend the next three years getting one of those. That would double our affiliate b channel. so as a result, A, good I think that's a useful insight anyway, but then B, what does that mean for us? We're shutting down the self-serve thing. We are not we're not pitching this as fill out this form and we'll give you an a an affiliate link. We're saying, do you want to partner with us? Email Emma. She handles partnerships. How can we grow together? How can we

Build less and serum into what you're doing as an advisor of small businesses. Let's talk. Let's partner. Yes, there will be a revenue exchange. Like we we'll share revenue with you, but that's only part of what this partnership involves. So we'll see

how that goes.

Rick (52:15)
I it.

Yep, I love it. I can't wait to hear what you learn from doing this. I think it's very relevant to Leg Up Health. I I well I I'm very curious to see what like makes this type of advisor go, I'm choosing less annoying CRM because they do this for me. Like like what is it for me as the advisor that less annoying CRM is gonna do that's gonna make me say their name?

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (52:40)
Yeah. It'll probably be a long time before I have a good answer to that, but yes, I I'll I'll keep you posted if we learn anything. So yeah. Affiliates, health insurance, and then hoping to see echoes in the unattributed bucket. That's our whole business right now.

Rick (52:55)
Perfect. Conviction.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (52:58)
Yeah. Hopefully not foolish conviction. We'll see. yeah, anything else for you before we close? Yeah.

Rick (53:03)
Where what one question for you on the

echo thing is like where does you've I think you've had moments of conviction around the the the car play sort of adding always just sort of releasing

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (53:15)
Yeah.

Rick (53:15)
new useful features. where does that sit in your sort of core value like core marketing

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (53:22)
Yeah.

Rick (53:23)
value suite?

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (53:24)
Good question. So I'm gonna answer that slightly different, which is I think I've maybe hinted I've said something similar to this before, but when when going into these numbers, what you see is the main thing that what like our growth was going well for a long time, and the price increase is the main thing that hurt it. In twenty twenty we raised prices from ten to fifteen dollars and just immediat well, I shouldn't say immediately, that's the key thing. It took about two years, but conversions went way down. Some of it hit happened immediately, some was gradually as our brand spread out throughout the

Internet that now we're 50% more expensive. Since then, our growth has been plateaued. We haven't grown at all. But if you break it down by channel or by source, whatever you want think about it, our unattributed went up and up and up. It went straight down when we raised prices, and it's been going up and up and up since then. All the other channels have been going down at almost the exact same rate that unattributed has been going up, which leads to a thing that looks like a plateau.

that I don't want to do nothing and just wait, but like it's possible that if we just keep doing what we're doing, eventually all those other channels go to zero. They can't go below zero. That unattributed channel goes keeps going up, and eventually we get our growth just from that. It could be five years. Anyway, you asked about CarPlay. I think of this as just like our conversion rate, our trial to paid conversion rate dropped by about five percentage points when we raised prices. We've recovered at about two.

The volume dropped. We've recovered it, not to the peak, but close to the peak. I think that everything we do to make our product better just greases that engine a little bit more, but I don't see any of it like doing what affiliates could do or doing what health insurance could do, where it's like, yeah, there's another 200 free trials coming in a month all of a sudden.

Rick (55:15)
But if you stop doing it, something bad might happen.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (55:18)
I mean certainly eventually, yeah. but we

Rick (55:20)
Yeah. So you're gonna keep doing it.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (55:22)
we've never seen a quick pop-up like, we launched this feature and trial to paid conversions changed because of that. We're gonna keep doing it. But

Rick (55:29)
So you're just gonna keep doing it. Yeah.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (55:31)
yeah, maybe this is kind of a non-answer for you though, but like price is I think that's more important than anything. Every year we don't raise price, we get closer to where we were inflation adjusted in twenty twenty. That's the main thing we gotta do is just keep our price the same.

price increase just fucking hammered us. It goes

Rick (55:49)
Yeah.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (55:50)
against every piece of SAS advice you hear out there says raise your prices. It I think it was good for us financially, but it was terrible for us from like a growth standpoint.

Rick (56:02)
in a year you're gonna be like, We gotta raise prices. Twenty bucks. Yeah.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (56:03)
So gotta raise prices again. Maybe not fifty percent this time though.

Anyway, all right. We're at time. Yeah,

Rick (56:11)
Have a good rest of your day.

Tyler (Less Annoying CRM) (56:12)
you too, see ya.