Rick (00:01.198)
What's up Tyler?

Tyler King (00:02.41)
Hey man, it's been a while. I've got a lot of little updates, yeah, like personally not a whole lot, except if you recall a few weeks ago, or a few episodes ago rather, we talked about how I was too addicted to scrolling on Reddit or wherever. And I have made progress on that. I deleted Reddit from my phone and I am slightly less addicted to bullshit now.

Rick (00:04.022)
I know. What's new with you?

Tyler King (00:30.06)
That's great.

Rick (00:30.904)
Good for you, dude. Well, does that mean that you were not getting value out of Reddit or was it more that you were doing it at the wrong times?

Tyler King (00:42.128)
so I think that there's at least two sides to this. One is I was constantly looking for distraction, which I don't necessarily view as a bad thing. Like when you view pictures of like people commuting from New Jersey to New York city in 1960, they're all reading newspapers. Like I think it's fine to be like, I don't want to just be sitting here staring at the person in front of me.

I wasn't necessarily trying to get away from that part of it, then the other part, sorry, I'll say three parts. Then there's the part of like the distraction is in such small pieces that you completely lose your attention span. And then the third part is that the distraction makes you feel bad because it's all these engagement algorithms are just like doom and gloom all the time. So I was trying to get rid of those last two. I feel like Reddit used to be a place you could go and just see like stupid jokes and stuff. And now it's all politics, but it's also wrong.

Regardless of what side you agree with like increasingly the people I agree with were being idiots on there, too So I was just like I was getting mad even at people who agree with me, and I'm just like this is not healthy at all

Rick (01:51.854)
Well good for you, I'm proud of you. Are you still? Yeah, well.

Tyler King (01:53.601)
Thank you. It's boring now. I'm playing New York Times games all the time, but I suck at crossword puzzles. I started reading more when Sydney was born and I have been probably one night a week, Shelly and I are reading rather than watching TV. Plus I read anytime I nap with Sydney. So I'm reading some. Six months, almost seven.

Rick (02:00.654)
You gotta read some books.

Rick (02:16.558)
How old is Sidney now?

six months. That's a big milestone. I feel like that's when they start doing stuff. Yeah.

Tyler King (02:23.54)
great age. I was okay with having a baby at three, four months old, but at six months I'm like, yeah, this is pretty cool. Anyway, what's new with you?

Rick (02:34.554)
Not much. It's been a while since we recorded the podcast, primarily because of my schedule. I've been traveling like crazy, mostly for personal reasons. I did a windfall trip, did a San Francisco trip. I've been all over the country. It's been, but probably means that Thanksgiving and Christmas will be tame for me. So I'll just probably be a homebody for the next, for the rest of the year, which is, I'm perfectly fine with. have you ever been to Zions National Park?

Tyler King (03:03.692)
Yeah, I did the narrows there. I haven't done the whatever the angel. Yeah, I haven't done that one.

Rick (03:03.726)
Did you ever go down there?

Rick (03:08.854)
Angels Landing. Cool, yeah, I didn't do it either, but I was there. my wife and niece did do Angels Landing, beautiful landscapes. I'd never been there, so that was my first time after many, years in Utah.

Tyler King (03:27.936)
I am not by any means a national park connoisseur, yeah, Zion is really nice.

Rick (03:32.844)
What do you have to cover today? I've mostly wanted to give a leg up health update and talk a little bit about the shutdown. And then I've got, I'm always down to talk about AI use cases. Do you have anything you wanted to spend some extra time on today?

Tyler King (03:47.051)
I think I probably am leaning, for my topics leaning towards more just a bunch of updates. I feel like over the last several months I've been dominating with like, let's brainstorm this big thing and any number of what I'm hoping to give updates on today could be big brainstorms, but like, let's not, you know, let's just give some updates. So yeah, you want to start?

Rick (04:04.236)
Yeah,

Yeah, I can give I can give an update on like upheld. So we're squarely in open enrollment. This is a really challenging open enrollment, though, because the government shutdown has created some uncertainty. And I don't necessarily want to like be the person that has a strong opinion about what the what the outcome should be of the government shutdown. But for people who don't know the primary negotiating leverage point that the Democrats are making by by by not extending the the the budget.

is they want to address these expanded premium tax credit health insurance subsidies from Obamacare that have expired or will expire at end of this year. because this is ongoing and we've started up enrollment, it means that people can't make sound health insurance decisions based on certainty. So what's ultimately going to happen here, I believe what's going to happen is the Democrats are going to win.

this shut win the stalemate and the Republicans are ultimately going to do something to address the subsidies as part of the refund like reopening of the government and then any work that people have done in open enrollment from from November 1st to that point, they'll have to revisit it. Yeah. yeah, you have to you have to because like the mean the economics change we're talking I mean

Tyler King (05:26.528)
have to redo it? Yeah. Are you going to be allowed to? Like, I mean, I guess who knows, but

Rick (05:35.695)
The primary issue, are two issues, the primary issue is something called the subsidy cliff. So once you make a, it's called 400 % of the FPL, but basically once you make a dollar more than you should to qualify for these things, you go to zero. So you could be, you could have a $20,000 insurance policy that you're paying $5,000 for, but then you make a dollar more.

and you lose the $15,000. Yeah, and so what the fix did two years ago for two years was it eliminated the cliff.

Tyler King (06:08.46)
That's so stupid.

Tyler King (06:17.004)
It just gradually steps down.

Rick (06:18.634)
It's what they said it they made it so that it is globally a percentage of income cap. So no matter what your income is, you can qualify if health insurance is greater than some percentage of your income. I think it's like nine percent, which which has the effect of as you increase your your your income, you eventually get over where health insurance can be that much of your income. So it has the same effect. But anyway, that expires.

Tyler King (06:40.908)
Yeah. Yeah.

Tyler King (06:46.06)
So JD's doing all this work to renew people and then something likely will happen and he's just gonna have to go back and loop back with everybody and say, does the thing we decided on still make sense now?

Rick (06:56.206)
Yeah, and there's probably like, I'm thinking about it out loud right now, there's probably people who are less impacted by this. So if you're not on that, I mean, the people who are most impacted by this are the people who are right at that cliff, you know, or above. The other, the second part of what is expiring is expanded subsidies. So there was like,

think of it as like the same rules, like more subsidy, that's going away. And so that impacts everyone, I don't see that coming back. I feel like that was probably not something that's gonna be agreed to.

Tyler King (07:22.412)
more money. Yeah.

Rick (07:35.342)
But anyway, yeah.

Tyler King (07:35.552)
So, but you guys are just, you know, acting like nothing's going, like you're just treating it like normal open enrollment, just understanding that you might have to go back and redo.

Rick (07:45.027)
Yeah, and we're trying to be, I mean, part of what we try to do in our approach is be educational. And so we want people to be aware of what's going on, that this the actual, like, this is the issue with the shutdown. Like, this is the thing that the Democrats have said they're willing to die over. And, you know, I'm curious your thoughts on the shutdown. Like, it's the longest in US history at this point. It's clearly like damaging the Republicans.

press, in the press, I believe, like I think they're losing.

Tyler King (08:17.12)
Yeah, well, I mean, they certainly didn't do well in the elections last week.

Rick (08:20.502)
Yeah, that's true. I don't know if that had anything to do with the shutdown necessarily, but.

Tyler King (08:23.454)
Well, but if the shutdown was damaging Democrats in a major way, it would have looked different.

Rick (08:27.756)
Yeah, you think so?

Tyler King (08:29.9)
I I kind of think all politics are national now. Like if you like the president, you're gonna vote for a Republican. And if you don't like the president, you're gonna vote for a Democrat. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. A, I'm totally uninformed because I've mostly detoxed from, yeah, not that Reddit was ever a good source of information for that. I have subscribed to some like newsletters, but anyway, I think most Americans probably are like me where it's like I knew that healthcare was,

Rick (08:45.989)
I took away, you took away your Reddit.

Tyler King (08:59.776)
the sticking point and I didn't, I couldn't have told you what about it. It's just like Democrats are pro something and Republicans are against something and I couldn't have described it more than that.

Rick (09:04.269)
Yeah.

Rick (09:09.71)
Well, what I've what I watched happen was I think the Republicans were like, we are going to stand on principle. We will not negotiate under these circumstances. And it's like, well, when the issue is as absurd as the one that we're talking about, which is a like cliff that affects like probably a lot of, you know, a lot of Republican voters like we're not talking about. It's like this is not the Hill to die on, guys.

Tyler King (09:38.337)
This is the, so just a meta commentary about all political stuff in the last year is like a lot of it I find very concerning and like I'm not thrilled with the country right now. And yet absolutely nothing in any single way has affected me. Which partially just cause I'm so privileged and all that. But it is kind of like at some point the stuff needs to have consequences for like.

You do read headline after headline after headline. And I know it has consequences for many Americans. I'm not trying to diminish that, like the nihilist in me is like, yeah, let it fucking happen then. Like if these are their policies, let people experience what those policies are and then let people vote based on that rather than like the tariffs are about to get overturned by the Supreme Court, it seems like. And then Donald Trump's never going to be held accountable for how terrible of an idea those things were.

Rick (10:31.31)
Oh man, yeah, so, I am, it's interesting to say that it hasn't impacted, I don't think it's, it's impacted me through my business leg of health. It has not impacted me as an individual until actually I was traveling with my son this weekend, or this week, and when I started seeing the news about the air traffic and.

Tyler King (10:31.35)
Anyway.

Tyler King (10:55.852)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (10:56.51)
the impact on flight, I got a little nervous because being in an airport with a four-year-old, it's not running on time, it's not what you want to be.

Tyler King (11:02.656)
with a kiss.

Tyler King (11:07.008)
Yeah, yeah, I'm flying this weekend, not with my daughter, but I'm flying this weekend and definitely keeping an eye. That could be the first time I am impacted by any of this potential.

Rick (11:15.768)
That's awesome. that's so, so anyway, like I've held this doing fine. We've got our open enrollment plan. We, I guess another update is we did get notice from one of our cornerstone original business clients that they are moving to a different more sort of scale, scale oriented broker services. And that was hard, a hard loss, but expected. I need to write them a note and just say, thank you. It's one of those things where

this customer was foundational to get us to where we are now. And while they're leaving and we never got them to where we wanted them to go in terms of the customer we thought they could be, they were so critical in giving us the confidence and the revenue and the social proof that what we were doing was legit that led to so many other customers. So it's like, I'm so grateful for them.

Tyler King (12:10.599)
Yeah, yeah. And it's great that losing them is not a huge hit. is, mean, it hurts, I know, but this is true with less annoying too. Our biggest customer has told us they're leaving. I mentioned this already on the podcast. It'll be, I forget exactly, like 1 % of our revenue or something. Whereas I remember like when Twilio went public, I forget who it was, maybe WhatsApp. Some big company used them and they were like, that's 60 % of our revenue.

If we lose that customer, we lose 60 % of our revenue and it's good to be able to lose a big client and not really sweat too much about it.

Rick (12:47.694)
That's true, that's true. Well, what's up with you?

Tyler King (12:52.592)
lots of just stuff going on at work. just had the, you know, every six months we give a presentation, to the company. then now instead of every six months, once a year, I meet with everyone at the company afterwards to get feedback and stuff. So just wrapped up all of those one-on-ones and stuff. I'll, I'll dive into that a little more later. I guess for my first update, I'll say, I mentioned that we're exploring a community forum.

type thing earlier on the podcast, believe. don't know if you recall that. Just like a place for our users to go, like a message board basically. So we were gonna like roll it out probably around the end of the year. And then we kind of realized, cause so we're using discourse, which just has a million settings and all this customization stuff. So we thought it would take a while to get set up. And then we just decided, you know what? We can post some stuff here. It won't be like set up the way we want it.

Rick (13:30.51)
That's very cool.

Tyler King (13:50.689)
Like an example of this is they have to sign up for a totally separate account and different email and password, which is annoying. But we were like, whatever, let's just start posting stuff on here and start linking to it from the newsletter. Cause why not? And so we did that. so kind of like soft launched this user form and actually had some pretty good results from it. So let me start with the stats and then.

Rick (14:15.82)
What's goal? We're getting with the community forum.

Tyler King (14:19.22)
Yeah, so I will acknowledge, I can't directly connect how any of this would like cause the business to grow aside from just a general like connecting with customers and having a genuine relationship with people has this kind of hand wavy, I don't know, good thing about it, but that's as close as I can get. But I think worst case scenario, it's like a blog.

but where our users like comment on our posts and we can get a little more engagement. think medium case scenario is it's like a support channel for our customers, but where they're posting publicly instead of emailing us privately. And that way other people can search the questions and answers. And we've even already had some customers come in and answer other customers' questions. Very, very low volume right now, but like that would be the medium case.

and then the best case would be that people actually come here to talk about more than just support questions. You know, you could imagine industry specific sections of it or whatever. where, like, it's actually providing value to customers that they were not previously getting. think those are like, obviously there's like a zero level, which is like, it totally flops and doesn't work at all. but that's kind of how I'm thinking.

Rick (15:43.466)
I you know, sounds like if people are already, you mentioned like there's people using it already.

Tyler King (15:49.993)
Yeah, so the only lever we've pulled so far is we send a bi-weekly newsletter out to anyone who opts into the newsletter, which is about 55 % of all of our users opt into it. So about 55 % of our users get this bi-weekly newsletter. Normally it's like blog posts on our blog and the newsletter's like, here are a few blog posts with links to those posts. You know, new feature, whatever. Now, instead of posting that on our blog, we're posting it in the forum and we're linking to it.

from the newsletter. we did get good engagement from that, but it's like, okay, every other week we can send people there. We definitely have not hit the point where it's like, people are just coming and checking this on their own. And there's other things we could build in, like when people go to the help center to get, to ask us a question, direct them there in addition to directing them to our normal support channels, right? There's stuff we can do to get more people coming into it. But right now it's just kind of this every other week we can get this push of people to it.

Rick (16:47.406)
That's great. Is there any level of engagement that you need to see in order for this to work? is it like, do you have like a success criteria?

Tyler King (16:48.748)
Tyler King (16:56.918)
I wouldn't say like specific numbers or anything. Definitely, if we start getting any meaningful amount of support questions there, I'll consider that a win. Because again, I just think it's better to have that stuff be public than private. Better for us anyway.

Rick (17:15.33)
And you can view that stuff without a login, but you have to log in to interact. Is there any way to single sign on that?

Tyler King (17:18.827)
Yes.

Yeah, correct. I, that is on my list to look into. The answer is yes, but is it worth the effort of building it? I don't know. Cause we don't have single sign on in other capacities yet. the other like side of this that we could have just as easily done on the blog without this, except people being able to comment makes it a little more compelling. I'm trying to make our brand a little more like personal.

our customers really love us, don't like they want not all of them, obviously, but like 1 % of our customers want to be interacting with us and know they want like a behind the scenes look at this or that. So as a little experiment, the first thing we like launched, we announced via the newsletter was I recorded a loom video that was just like, I pulled up our notion board with our project management system in it. And I was just like, I'm going to run through all the projects we're working on right now, just so you all can see what we're working on. And I did a few little tangents of like.

This feature might seem simple, but like here's why it's more complex than you might think. Just to kind of like, you know, give a little behind the scenes look. That one did quite well. 2000 people saw the page. Sorry, I'm reading my stats right now from two weeks ago. 2000 people went to the forum in some capacity. 200 like watched at least the majority of the video. I got nine comments.

from different people about that video, all very positive. So yeah, better than I was expecting. Again, how do I connect this to like business value? I don't know, but it feels like worth doing to me.

Rick (18:53.742)
That's incredible.

Tyler King (19:05.548)
Do you have any reactions? Like, is there any way this is actually valuable?

Rick (19:09.9)
I mean, the way I was thinking about it is one, it's community, which people value in addition to a support function. like it's a, I think it's an appropriate level of weight for building a community at $10 or $15 a month CRM. You're not going to have like the less annoying Palooza, you know, every year that people fly out to. So this seems like the right, like lift.

for people and to engage with each other and people like that. And especially when they're trying to grow together and they want to meet other people like them using the tool. I also think that if people can get value out of it from sharing ideas, like there's all these edge case questions, right? Like if this happens, then this happens. I do this all the time on Salesforce where I'm, okay, I've run into an issue. There's no way I'm the only person who has ever had this issue, but

You know, you have support, so probably I've, you know, enough people call support. The person knows the issue, but there's some cases probably where people just like have tried to don't want to call support, right? They don't want to call and talk to a human. Um, I love being able to find a message board where, where people have replied and offered workarounds for certain things. And so I, I'm not like going to like go be a part of the community to be like, yeah, I'm in this community, but I will, I would love to have.

work around, you know, sort of edge case value discussions that I know I could go find. And I guess the third thing is, I mean, this should give you more support capacity if people use it, which means, you know, you should be able to do more proactive things with that time.

Tyler King (20:48.864)
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's, that's all more or less how we're thinking about it. And, and that you said you're not going to like be a part of the community. I think like Wikipedia, Wikipedia is often given as an example of like how the internet works, where it's like for a hundred percent of like, for a hundred people that, read it, like 10 people maybe have once ever like left an edit and one person is like a hardcore editor or whatever for that 1 % that are the ones actually answering the questions and stuff like that.

I do think that it builds a lot of like brand affinity or whatever you want to call it. Even though they're doing work, like I have no idea what motivates people like that to do it, but I do think it will make them like us more and refer more people and stuff like

Rick (21:31.468)
yeah, it's great. It lets them promote themselves and whatever service or brand that they have. And that's why people answer those questions or they just like it. They get personal. Yeah. And I don't understand that.

Tyler King (21:39.51)
Yeah. Yeah, they just like it. Yeah. Same, but I, I don't know. I kind of do. And I kind of don't last point.

Rick (21:48.537)
I mean, the best person, the best example of this is Jason Lumpkin on Quora. Like that guy dominated anything related to it, like remotely related to a startup or venture funding in Quora and still does to this day.

Tyler King (21:53.652)
Yeah.

Tyler King (22:02.442)
Yeah. final comment on this. You've commented before that we've been doing this podcast for long enough that I kind of go in and out of like phases of what I want to work on. And I, I bounced around between wanting to create content and not, if you recall, like when I made less annoying business.com was one of those like phases where I wanted to make more content and then I just completely stopped. I do think I'm entering a phase. Like I've enjoyed, I enjoyed making that one loom video. I kind of have plans for.

a lot more like deep dives into like, I'm thinking I'm going to pick up a feature we're building and say, I'm going to make one video on here, the designs, like you only see the final designs, but look at all these other variations we came up with. And then like another video about, okay, we took those designs and turned it into these cards and notion. And then another video that's like, here's the final product and just kind of walk through that.

Rick (22:50.21)
What do you think that's about? why do you, is what's drawing you back because you think you can, you see an opportunity to provide value in a different way that you couldn't before or is it that you're just like getting the itch to be creative? Do you have any?

Tyler King (23:04.972)
Yeah, I don't know. I think at least part of it is as the product gets bigger and as the company gets more mature, it's hard to do individual contributor work in little bite-sized pieces as the CEO. if anything, it's easier to make content, which is a form of individual contribution. So I think that's part of it is sometimes I just want to make something, but I don't know the code well enough to make code for that business right now.

Rick (23:32.376)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (23:34.059)
I'll admit there's probably a certain amount of vanity here where part of what, like our customers love us, but I don't think they appreciate it. Like we get emails all the time, even from good meaning people that are like, why don't you add this feature? would take like two, like I used to program, it would take two hours to build this. I kind of liked the idea of showing off the level of thought and detail and complexity behind everything. Just to show off because in that one video I did already, the customer was like, whoa, like crazy. So.

I don't know, I think it'll be fun to have people appreciate all the work that's going into this.

Rick (24:08.504)
Yeah, you're basically using, it's kind of like the why Let's Knowing does the things the way it does and why you should value the way we do it type content. I like that.

Tyler King (24:18.324)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I've been trying to come up with a tight like a catchy way of saying basically that Simple is actually really hard, you know

so anyway, we don't need to continue talking about that, but that's ongoing. I would call it a successful launch. And so it may die out eventually, but as of right now, I'm thinking this is like a new ongoing part of the company.

Rick (24:43.064)
Cool. Good job. mean, I just want to call out that it's really cool to see you move quickly on something like this and get it to a good job getting it out.

Tyler King (24:51.99)
Thank you, thank you. And I didn't do most of the work, team members who I won't name, because I don't know if they want me to, but thank you. Back to you, what's up?

Rick (24:58.317)
Yes, yep.

Um, well, I finished one of the big projects. I think it was a month and a half ago. I asked you to, or maybe it was too much ago where I was like, I need to update the website ahead of open enrollment. Do not let me not do this. Um, and I did it. I redesigned or remessage the entire website, repositioned it, did the navigation. Um, and it's all around our new positioning of, Hey, we can help a business offer whatever is best for them, um, without limitation. And that is actually very unique. Uh,

So there are not many small business benefits consultants out there who are going to sit down with you and go, you want a PEO? No, you want to do nothing? We can help you with that. And we can help you with everything in between. And so I feel really, really good about the progress. I also rolled out a couple of offers, an ebook, a request, and set up like the landing page system so we can do that anytime we want to. I just, you know,

To get it out, I said, I'm not gonna write this until someone downloads it. It's been a month and no one's downloaded it.

Tyler King (26:05.548)
I would love to talk about this. So you're not saying like it's a bad ebook. You haven't even written the ebook. Have people hit the page? Have people hit the page where they would download it?

Rick (26:11.138)
I haven't even written the ebook. No one's actually requested it.

That's a question. I haven't really dug into this, but that's the next question, right? So I guess like I've made to this, to share this as like, I feel good about the work I did, but also like, I don't feel good about the impact of the work I did. We did a press release about the new website and the new positioning. People have hit the website. JD, I don't think has attributed anything to what we've done. The other thing that we did was we built out the CRM so that I can actually like do marketing and help JD manage the

Tyler King (26:35.436)
Yeah.

Rick (26:45.27)
like really scale the business from here. And so I feel good about all that work, but like, it's like, but so what, you know, anyway, yeah. Yeah.

Tyler King (26:53.024)
A lot of stuff doesn't work. Yeah. That's been a common theme on this podcast. Right. Okay. I want, I want to dive into a few of these things though. Okay. One is I, you taught me years ago. I don't, do you remember when you flew out to San Francisco and gave me like a marketing inbound marketing, like crash course, basically. and you know, the classic, like you write top of funnel content, you have an ebook or some kind of like.

Rick (27:10.797)
Yep. Yep.

Tyler King (27:17.802)
downloadable thing, but they have to give you your email that puts them on this campaign and the campaign moves into middle of funnel, moves into bottom funnel and you sell them. I tried that. It never worked for me. I probably wasn't executing it well, but a part of me has always thought that only works for real enterprise stuff. Now you did it for PeopleKeep though, which was not real enterprise. But anyway, part of my, I have more to say than this, but like, is it possible this just isn't how you sell to the type of customer that

Leg Up Health is selling too.

Rick (27:49.369)
It's the same customer we sold at PeopleKeep. So I'm like, I'm a little stunned. think, I'm trying to get to this content to see if there's anyone who actually, is this a landing page conversion issue or is it a landing page visit issue? I suspect it is a landing page traffic issue, which we have a site, yeah, no one sees the page, exactly. But I don't know how to navigate, yeah, performance, here we go. How many people do you think have viewed this?

Tyler King (27:51.626)
Okay.

Tyler King (28:06.442)
Yeah, if no one sees the page, how's anyone gonna, yeah.

Tyler King (28:18.358)
So what page is this? Is this just some random page on the website?

Rick (28:22.338)
This is a landing page that says request an ebook.

Tyler King (28:25.206)
But like what, it's not the homepage. How did you get people to this page?

Rick (28:29.902)
I sent an email out. The only way I've driven people to it is so two things. One, there's an email that has gone out and two, there is a pop-up on the bottom left of the website that says new ebook. And so guess how many people have seen the page?

Tyler King (28:46.25)
I'm ten.

Rick (28:48.586)
19 people, no 19 page views. And I'm pretty sure that many of these are me. And JD. Yeah, looks like a couple of people, three people came from the email. But I only sent the email to 300 people, because I just don't want to be like, super annoying.

Tyler King (28:49.068)
19.

Tyler King (28:55.276)
Yeah

So, okay, I buy that that's part of it.

Tyler King (29:09.056)
Yeah, but yeah, 1 % click through, although I was gonna say that's not great. You were having deliverability problems, so maybe of those 300 emails, a lot of them might not have actually landed in the inboxes.

Rick (29:22.062)
Correct, yeah, we're having major email deliverability issues. I'm scared about it.

Tyler King (29:27.16)
yeah, maybe that's another thing to, topic to talk about. Okay. The other part of this though is, so when you said you made a press release, I'll be honest. My reaction was like, who the fuck reads a press release?

Rick (29:40.066)
Yeah, wasn't for like, it wasn't, go ahead. Sorry, I'm interrupting you.

Tyler King (29:43.021)
Sorry, the actual answer is press releases are for press, right? Like that's the origin of it is it's like, if you're a tech crunch writer, we send you a press release so that you can read it and then decide is this worth writing a story about. But you've had success sending press releases to customers before?

Rick (29:59.799)
Yeah, so like my strategy is a press release is a short form company update for the public. That's what I think a press release is first and foremost, like company release. Let's call it a company release. That's what a better term is. And I think that that is a very useful thing to do to force yourself to say, what am I like and what do want people to know about this business that is worthy of them, of distracting them?

And so that's why we wrote the company release. Originally I was just gonna post it on the company blog and that's what we did. But then I was like, wait a second, I know that there is utility in formalizing this a little bit more. And so I did formalize a little bit more. I want the inbound links, want, maybe there's some pickup locally given the timing, who knows. But there's always upside, right? And so I did publish it on PRWeb for 100 bucks. That wasn't the point of it.

But then the main goal here was for the company blog post when we sent the email out, we wanted to let some of the people we've engaged with most deeply over the last couple of years, we wanted them to know what we are because when they first talked to us, we were consumer only and these are business owners. And so we went out to all of our business owners and said, hey, this is what we're about. We've published a press release. You can read it on our website.

And then at the very bottom of the email, there was a, are you interested? We also have this ebook. Does that make sense? That's what went out, yeah.

Tyler King (31:30.86)
It does. Okay, so A, the alternative was to do nothing and this is better than the alternative. So I'm not saying this shouldn't have been done. And I get what you're saying that writing it, putting it as a blog post makes sense. No pushback on any of that.

Rick (31:44.69)
And also I wanted to get the, I wanted something simple and not super annoying to get the email systems and CRM systems built out so that we could do this for different types of offers in the move forward. Yeah.

Tyler King (31:55.649)
like a test email to send out. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that'll make sense to me. I don't have evidence of this yet because again, no one clicked on the link in the email to get to the ebook offers. I can't say it or sorry, very few people did. My point is I think I have no data to back this up. I think ebooks and press releases and other forms of like B2B enterprise, like marketing collateral from 15 years ago. I just don't think anyone has the attention span.

Rick (32:05.706)
We did, they did, they did, three did. Yeah.

Tyler King (32:25.798)
read anything like that now. I'm not sure what the answer is, but I think those aren't it.

Rick (32:29.57)
That sucks. Yeah, I don't, I mean, the data doesn't disagree with you. there's probably not enough data to know whether that's true or not for this business. but yeah, like I, I generally agree with you based on my observations at other businesses. Like webinars are much more people are like, I, I, if I register this webinar, maybe I'll show up and I'll pay attention. and most people don't show up.

most people don't pay attention when they show up for the webinar, but you get the form completion.

Tyler King (33:00.332)
Yeah. And even that though, I mean, you're saying at WinFall that's happening, like I assume is what you're saying. You're selling to engaged enterprise buyers there. Like less annoying CRM. There aren't people who it's like, my job is procurement and I need to buy a CRM. Those people exist, but they're not buying less annoying CRM. Even a webinar, we can't get someone to join a webinar unless they're like, I am already on a free trial and like engaged in this.

Rick (33:28.686)
I think you're probably right. I'm thinking that this we're talking about this, we're probably just, I believe in content long-term. So regardless of whether it's this ebook or some 30 second, I know we don't have attention anymore. Here's your 30 second offer. I know that we need to invest in content and we need to have really good content. And I want to do that because it's fun for me. And it also provides the baseline for what we wanna educate people on.

foundational AI stuff. There's so many reasons that we should invest in our own content that we know is good and reliable. But yeah, in terms of lead gen in the short term, it's like, okay, maybe that's not the right place to put our efforts into. It's like, yeah, we want to invest in content long term, but what's the short term lead gen effort? We know that lead purchasing works and we've maximized that. And JD and I, when we were in our offsite, we literally called, we went through and

we made a list of, we went through Google and all sorts of searches for health insurance lead purchasing. And we found like 30 firms. We went through 30 firms websites and requested callbacks from 10. Not a single one could do what the one vendor is doing for us. And so it's probably, but we probably need to invest in more like bottom of funnel, like, okay, you're searching for health insurance, you're in Utah. How do we get in front of you? That's probably where we need to be spending our time.

Tyler King (34:53.836)
That's definitely the same journey Less Noing Serum went through of like trying this top of funnel thing and just, it is so, you need a million people to read this blog post to get that one customer at the.

Rick (35:03.854)
It's a long term. Yeah. Yeah. It's a long term play and we need to bake. We need to make the investment. I want to make the investment. I just don't want to have I need to stop having short term expectations as I assigned to those long. Correct. Correct. I do think email marketing is an open enrollment tactic. Now that now we're getting into OK what's the what's the what's the content right.

Tyler King (35:14.998)
Yeah, that's not how you push for open enrollment. It's not a top of funnel.

Rick (35:26.606)
And what this wasn't right, although maybe it was maybe we just haven't gotten the inbounds yet, you know, and and maybe it was too late

Tyler King (35:33.674)
Yeah. And I want to reiterate, my point here isn't like, you shouldn't have done that. This is like, you got to do stuff. You got to try stuff out. It's more just like, okay, lessons learned. What's the iteration for the next version of this?

Rick (35:46.083)
And I don't know yet. You asked the right question, which is like, go look at the pages. I think like I would, the other page that I have is a request to quit page. What I really want to do, and I just don't have the skillset or the time, is I want to get highly targeted Bofu ads out there. And it's just like not my skillset. And it's probably something we need to talk about in February, is just like, okay, we talked, remember when we have extra cash flowing out, log up.

It's like, where do we spend that? Do we save it? Do we pay JD? Do we pay me? Do we pay you? Or do we invest in third party, like, you know, labor, you know, and whether that's hourly or part time or full time or, you know, a full time hire, whatever, it doesn't matter. It's like that, that bucket feels like potentially the right bucket to explore for performance marketing because an agency or a highly skilled individual that has like with like

our knowledge of who our customer is and what their journey is, should probably be able to shortcut getting set up. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Tyler King (36:54.54)
Uh, no, I, it sounds really expensive, not the person, the labor sounds affordable, but I would imagine like health insurance in Utah is a 20 to $50 click on Google probably. Um, so, you know, it's gotta be B2B. You're definitely not making this work with like individual buyers, but even then it probably needs to be a 20 person company plus, um,

Rick (37:07.627)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (37:21.45)
Yeah, I don't know. It needs some research. That's my main concern is just how expensive the clicks are gonna be.

Rick (37:26.862)
How would you think about the funnel? I haven't spent enough time on pay. My expertise is organic. If I start getting into paid, I want to be more knowledgeable here. How would you think about... If I gave JD, let's just say, five leads, he's going to close one of them for sure. I have no doubt. If there five people that are...

Tyler King (37:35.596)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (37:55.919)
business owners in Utah or HR people in Utah that are in the market for health insurance. We're gonna get one of those and probably get another one within the next year. So let's call it two. That's a $10,000 annuity per customer that we convert. It's like, so does that mean we could spend 10 to $20,000 to get five leads?

Tyler King (38:12.736)
Yeah.

Tyler King (38:21.43)
So, okay, it's been a long time since we've talked about this. Different people, like people talk about this in terms of payback period, right? Like you spend money, how long does it take you to get it paid back? And a lot of people say, I've heard two to six months is the payback period you want. I have found with less knowing CRM, like that is laughably unrealistic. Like 18 months would be good for us. And then a lot of, absolutely.

Rick (38:44.782)
Yeah, but your $15 CRM, yeah, going after $45 per month customers.

Tyler King (38:51.616)
Yes. mean, you're not, Leg Up Health is in the same ballpark. It's probably 5X or something. Anyway.

Rick (39:01.762)
or $40 PPM.

Tyler King (39:05.324)
Yeah, if you AOR them, yeah, okay. If you AOR them, you are, and you AOR about 20 to 5 % of a company. So you're getting $40 per employee per month for, oh, okay.

Rick (39:05.634)
on average.

Rick (39:10.392)
So yeah, so if we go after 25 person.

Rick (39:16.75)
I'm talking about group. Yes. So let's like, let's go through like what we're what we're what I'm talking about. So let's say we're targeting a 25 % company on average. Our average there is 40 bucks per person. So 25 times 40, 1000 bucks. Let's multiply that times 10 just to get to $10,000 a year. That's a $10,000 annuity. Okay. If we get five of those, we close one guaranteed. No doubts. We're the best service for

Tyler King (39:43.052)
Yeah. So you can spend, right. So you can spend $2,000 per lead. If you want a 12 month, yeah, if you want a 12 month payback.

Rick (39:51.343)
If we wanted a one year payback, but you're saying like target, let's just say three months. Like I think that's right. So we've cut that in a third and say that we have $3,000. Okay. So we have $3,000. Yeah. $3,000 total to get a three month payback for five leads. So that's five. That's, mean, it's interesting how it always seems to be $500 a lead. So that's $600 a lead.

Tyler King (40:02.218)
$3,000 total okay okay

Tyler King (40:15.179)
Yes, but and then the math here that we're skipping is that's per click, right? That's saying, okay, so if you're paying, sorry, you said $600? Yeah, so if you're paying $30 a click and you can pay $600 per lead, then that means you need to convert one out of 20 clicks into a lead. Like we're talking qualified lead.

Rick (40:22.99)
That's per conversion.

Rick (40:35.874)
Is that... yeah, so that to me that justifies a $20 click.

Tyler King (40:42.572)
Yeah, I think that's borderline. There have been periods in less knowing serums history where we've converted 5 % of clicks to free trials. We definitely don't now, it's more like 1 % right now. Obviously, LegUp Health is a totally different business. So what are these numbers is the big question. I think you just have to go do it and figure out what these numbers are.

Rick (41:06.082)
Yeah, and what you're saying, I think what you're saying, not what you're also factoring is, is there's an experimentation phase. Why you get the, you know, you get the keywords, right? The messaging, right? On the ad, the offer, right? On the landing page. And then, then you're like, okay, this barely works. After all that, after you've wasted, you know, you've been unprofitable for some six month period.

Tyler King (41:20.438)
Yeah.

Tyler King (41:24.746)
Yeah, I will say this is one of the only parts of less knowing CRM throughout our history where, there's this attitude that most entrepreneurs have, which is like, it's not working now, but I'll keep working and it will work later. And that's almost always not true. Things always get harder the more you do them because you've like picked the low hanging fruit. This is the one area where I personally have experienced it is true that like, if you're like, okay, I'm paying $800.

Rick (41:36.898)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (41:51.767)
to acquire or whatever, I'm paying some number to acquire one paying customer, but I haven't like the benefit of optimizing the landing page, optimizing the ad copy, figuring out the funnel better, you can significantly improve the conversion rate at each step of the funnel.

So yeah, try it, I guess. I still think that like what JD is doing is probably gonna end up being, I bet 10 years from now, the LegUp Health model is substantially similar to what it is today.

Rick (42:26.254)
hire a sales rep, have them knock doors, support them with good content and branding. Yeah. And then so it's basically brand marketing. What you're talking about was radio ads, it's billboard marketing, it's direct mail. Like, I'm not, I'm not saying that's the kind of the tactics versus like, you know, trying to find someone randomly searching on Google.

Tyler King (42:33.452)
and get word of mouth.

Tyler King (42:47.062)
That's a total guess. just, my attitude is all of, so a combination of these tech companies have starched all of the margin out of it. There's no way, I shouldn't say no way, but they've made it harder and harder to capture value through their marketing channels combined with other people in the world who are way more sophisticated than you or me at this are gonna, I mean, you're kind of selling a commodity here in some ways. They're just gonna be better at this. So I'm very nihilistic about

Rick (43:11.618)
Mm-mm, not for sure.

Tyler King (43:16.908)
playing in those waters, whereas I think like actually talking to another human, less annoying serum and leg up health are still better at that than all of these like weird affiliate marketers that are great at running Google ads.

Rick (43:30.732)
Helpful conversation. Man. Thank you. That was helpful.

Tyler King (43:37.034)
Yeah, sorry to be a wet blanket though.

Rick (43:39.201)
Yeah, well, I mean, it's I don't think I don't know that you were a web link. I feel like it's like I did good work. We made it. We tried something. We have a we're we're in a much better place from a systems perspective and a reporting perspective. And so we actually can like there was no way we could run an experiment and actually know if it was successful prior to this. Like like even even getting the like an ad campaign running, getting a landing page set up, we didn't have the infrastructure to do the do a landing page. Right. Like we didn't.

We didn't have the ability to send emails to people. I'm still questioning whether we do because of the deliverability issues

Tyler King (44:11.37)
Yeah, I would say throw all this stuff out the window. Email deliverability is the only thing I'd be thinking about right now.

Rick (44:15.67)
Yeah, yeah, I got it. got it. We got to solve that. Thank you for reminding me about that. I keep I've snoozed that for like a year. I knew it was an issue and I was like, long time like before I can remember it started happening. It's like that's why I was bringing up the cloud for thing. I was like this has been happening since for a long time and I kept like snoozing it because it wasn't high impact. And now that I thought I thought it was just front. I thought it was just impacting front and

Tyler King (44:24.216)
it's been happening that long?

okay, I didn't really set.

Tyler King (44:38.122)
because you weren't sending emails.

Rick (44:44.234)
It's clear that it's not just impacting front, it's impacting other things.

Tyler King (44:48.01)
I was talking with JD and I think the emails, so sorry for the listener, bunch of two big-ish new employer clients signed up and an email goes out to each one of their employees and a bunch of those emails didn't get delivered. Combined with some of these marketing emails seem to have bad email deliverability. JD went into it. Most of the emails that didn't get delivered, they just entered the wrong email address for the person. I don't know the specifics. You might want to talk to him, but I think the...

Rick (45:12.977)
really? That's good.

Tyler King (45:17.324)
those emails weren't as concerning as they first appeared.

Rick (45:20.7)
that's good. I feel like the commonality here seems to be SendGrid. I think we use SendGrid and perhaps they're not as reliable as we think they are. think Front's issue is with SendGrid on their backend.

Tyler King (45:35.276)
That front sends it all through Gmail.

Rick (45:37.622)
No, we use their, we use, have a SendGrid thing and you can either do through Google group or SendGrid. What I might do is switch to Google group to solve this, it costs, I have to create a seat for all of our Google groups. And so it's like, it's adding a hundred dollars per year to our, yeah, okay.

Tyler King (45:41.11)
They have like an email marketing thing.

Tyler King (45:56.394)
Let's talk about this some more. Probably this is getting two in the weeds for a good podcast topic, but let's talk about, I have some thoughts on email deliverability that we should discuss. Cool. Only got a few more minutes here. I think I've got an update that can fit nicely into that. Yeah, so I mentioned before we were switching our signup process. It used to just be one page with like,

Rick (46:02.199)
Yes.

Rick (46:09.442)
Cool, sounds good.

Tyler King (46:26.1)
Name, email, password, what industry are you in, which we used to like customize their default settings. How many users do you expect to have? Which to be honest, we didn't use it all. We just liked to know it so we could reach out to the bigger accounts. And then you sign up. We switched it to, or we're A-B testing, switching it to a multi-step signup where the first page is just name, email, password, like the very basic signup stuff. And then there's an, and then it like...

slides that one out and slides in another screen that's like what industry you and then slides that one out. And it asks if they want to be on the newsletter. We previously asked the newsletter question as a pop-up when they first signed in. Anyway, just kind of like having this framework for like, let's get all the info we need from you before we even let you into your account.