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

Tyler (00:01)
What's going on, Rick? We're actually doing an every other week cadence. Two in a row. yeah, what's going on with you?

Rick (00:07)
⁓ Don't get used to it, Tyler.

I just got back from a cool trip to see my ⁓ dad and brother in Philadelphia. I had no idea how many cool schools there were in that area. ⁓ my brother is a freshman at Haverford College. ⁓ and there are like it's in the there's a town of Ardmore there, which is super cool town. And then there's just ⁓ Swarthmore and ⁓ Brynmore and Villanova.

Tyler (00:33)
These are like small towns like not in Philly or or like parts of the actual city.

Rick (00:39)
Like suburbs, like twenty twenty minutes, thirty minutes from the airport, twenty-five, thirty minutes outside the city, easy train ride everywhere. Yes. Yes. No, no, no, no. and that Villanova felt bigger as I was driving through that. But like there's so many schools within five to ten minutes of each other, around college towns that are fifteen minutes from each other, but like super old history and just felt really cool to be around that vibe.

Tyler (00:46)
But it feels like a small college town, not like a okay. This isn't like Temple or UPen or something like

Yeah. Huh.

Yeah, I've never been to Philadelphia, but if it is one of the cities that in my head I think I would love ⁓ I've just never really found an excuse to go there. I I mean they thro they throw batteries at their athletes. I think that's fantastic. The the f I mean, Philly sports fans are not not a school, but I love how how rowdy they are.

Rick (01:17)
Yeah. So and then I

What what school is this?

⁓ yeah.

yeah, that's they're very obnoxious. ⁓ fly birds fly. ⁓ so stupid. ⁓ I'm a huge Philly hater. I I hate Philly fans. I hate Yeah.

Tyler (01:36)
Yeah. really? I see I also like the Oakland Raiders. I I don't know if I like the Las Vegas Raiders, but when they were in Oakland and they were just like the most violent, like ruthless fan base, I I for some reason think that's very endearing.

Rick (01:50)
Yeah, I t I ⁓ I went ⁓ to school with a bunch of people from Philadelphia at Duke. And when we went to ⁓ we went to a Monday night football game in Charlotte for the Carolina Panthers versus the Philadelphia Eagles, I was the only Panthers fan with like f three or four Philadelphia Eagles fans. I would never go do that again. I thought we were gonna get killed. They were so obnoxious. ⁓ gosh.

Tyler (02:01)
Mm-hmm.

I love that. I l I I went to a Rams game in Oakland wearing a Rams jersey and I mean I never actually felt threatened, but they were just heckling us three straight hours of people just yelling at us. It was so much fun.

Rick (02:25)
my gosh. So, ⁓ what's up with you?

Tyler (02:29)
⁓ yeah, not not much going on on the personal front. I have I had a little ⁓ like jump scare ⁓ listening to a different podcast. Do you know mostly technical?

Rick (02:40)
What's j what's a jump scare first?

Tyler (02:43)
Just like it's like in a horror movie when something startling happens and you're like, ugh. Like it just kind of catches you off guard. But yeah, well, okay, mostly technical is like the biggest, I think. I don't I don't know the numbers of podcasts, but it seems to be the biggest this type of podcast. Like two founders talking to each other. It's not like Joe Rogan big, obviously, but it's like much, much bigger than this podcast. One of my favorites, and Aaron Francis on there, they're like in the middle of the episode.

Rick (02:49)
That happened on a technical podcast?

Tyler (03:12)
And they're like, what should we talk about next? We got, you know, topic one, topic two, or or we could talk about less annoying CRM. boy, or something along those lines. And I'm like, what? no, what happened? What are we out of business? Does he know something? I don't know. And anyway, he was apparently Aaron listens. Apparently, Aaron listens this, which A, huge fangirl moment for me. ⁓ Aaron, this this ruins your credibility though. Don't say that out loud. B, ⁓ but but ⁓ he was talking about how

Rick (03:23)
Ha.

What was he talking about?

Yeah.

Tyler (03:42)
They've been having an ongoing debate about whether is anyone ever gonna vibe code their own SAS apps. Like should SaaS companies worry about that? And then he used what I said in the last episode as a anecdote that we are experiencing our customers vibe coding it and it, you know, kind of had the the debate about whether that's a real threat to SAS or not.

Which yeah, interesting discussion. Well

Rick (04:06)
What was that what was that thought? What was like the was there was there convergence on a a viewpoint or?

Tyler (04:11)
Not real. I think the big difference is like, so it's Aaron and Ian. Ian runs a very old school SaaS company, like Basecamp Aero SaaS, that sells to like hospitals and universities and very like the heart, like the most enterprisy enterprises. And he's like, no one's gonna vibe code anything because like there's all this compliance bullshit, and there's like this procurement process. And I I think I mostly agree with.

him that hospitals and universities won't vibe code this. But I think Aaron's point is most businesses are not hospitals and universities. And ⁓ there's probably some that are more likely to vibe code vibe codes the wrong word, to build their own internal SaaS tools and there there's some that are less likely. But if the whole market, if if only 10% of companies do this, the market's 10% smaller, that's like devastating to SaaS companies. That's not like

Rick (05:03)
Yeah.

Tyler (05:04)
Yeah, I I feel like a lot of these discussions about AR are like everyone's not gonna do that. And it's like it doesn't take everyone to do it to create because then the remaining customers, you've got more price competition, worse margins for businesses, just everything gets worse if if even a small percentage are dropping off.

Rick (05:20)
It sounds like the you know, the the compliance like regulatory thing is a is a theme still. Like hosp why won't hospitals and universities? Well, they're heavily regulated. ⁓ which lead

Tyler (05:31)
Yeah. I don't sell to any hospitals, but we s we do have a lot of universities as clients, but it's like a five-person career center team. It's not like university-wide procurement, but it still goes through that process. I do think universities are uniquely terrible at buying software. Like our I don't want to say worst customers. The people are nice, but the worst selling the worst people to sell to of our 10,000 plus customers are these little like

two and three and five person university teams where they're like, you have to fill out this huge questionnaire, you have to go through months of negotiations and we don't even negotiate on price. So it's like, why are you making us talk to the your procure procurement person? No, I I

Rick (06:09)
It's do you know you know why, right? It's government funding. Like there's so much like CYA to make sure that they're using their their money the right way. Like it's it's crazy.

Tyler (06:20)
But the cr I get that for a public university and I get that if grant money's being spent, but we're talking like private universities just they're spending a hundred bucks a a month on this. Like it's crazy. And they are often six months late in paying us. Like we have to invoice yeah. I I hate selling to fucking universities. Anyway, so and I don't know I guess what I'm saying is is it that they have to be all like enterprise like this, or is it just like cultural rot within these institutions? I'm not sure.

Rick (06:25)
Yeah, that's fair.

Yeah.

Yep. They do whatever they want. Yeah, no.

It's probably a combination of both, but like the the point I I think like it's a bureaucracy, right? No one wants to rock the boat and ⁓ p you know, committees and approvals run the day.

Tyler (06:53)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, absolutely. So anyway, I I have ⁓ a part of me wants to like join in on their debate, because ⁓ I have a lot to say, but ⁓ I they did not reach an agreement to answer your question. Aaron's like, people are gonna do this. The the other big point of dip disagreement is that Ian believes businesses will generally act rationally, with my with few exceptions. And Aaron is like, people often act emotionally and not the even if it doesn't make financial sense to spend all the time and

Rick (07:10)
Okay.

Tyler (07:27)
host your own infrastructure and own the security like

Rick (07:29)
There's it's a lot of fear based ⁓ behavior that's gonna go into this, yeah. What

Tyler (07:32)
Yeah, absolutely. And then my final thing I want to say, this is me making a statement to Aaron in case ⁓ as ammunition. The point of people doing this is not to save money. No one who's leaving our product is doing it to save money. Our our product is effectively free to begin with. They do it purely for customization. Like every cancellation notice is saying, I wanted it to work exactly this way. Yours was previously the closest I could get to that, but with AI I can make it work exactly the way I want it to, and that's worth

Rick (08:01)
But this is but this is where I go. Like, can't you make less annoying CRM do that? Like with with a more flexible ⁓ object architect architect you don't you have custom objects?

Tyler (08:12)
⁓ not the way Salesforce does, but this is a perfect teaser for what I'm gonna talk about later. But yes and no though, but the problem is the reason Salesforce sucks is because it's so flexible that nothing is specialized, you know?

Rick (08:14)
But you could

Alright, cool. So we get

Well, I would argue that Salesforce is starting to suck less because they're so flexible and an MCP with Claude makes that super simple. It becomes just a database.

Tyler (08:36)
Yeah, so so what you're saying is it's j yeah, if and their Salesforce is using the term that it's a headless CRM now, meaning you don't even need to use their interface. It's a database. Now, are they going to be able to charge three hundred dollars per user per month plus huge implementation fees with annual contracts to be a a database long term for some temp temporarily, yeah, but that's bad that's a bad business to be in, I think.

Rick (08:42)
Yep. It's a database. Yeah, yeah.

For some period of time. For some period of time, yes. Yes.

Tyler (09:01)
So that's the

Rick (09:02)
I'm not I'm not I I I think if you were to be a headless CRM for ten dollars per month or per user or fifteen dollars per month per user, like that is a reasonable price to pay.

Tyler (09:14)
Yeah, sure. I still think that's a bad business, though. It's gonna be pure commodity. Like especially for us. Like Salesforce, what is their strength? They're good at doing sales and all that enterprise bullshit I just said. I don't doing Salesforce is good at it. That's their whole skill set. What's less annoying serum skill set? Making the user interface simple. ⁓ it does not align with our DNA. You don't?

Rick (09:35)
I don't agree with that. ⁓ yeah, I think your skill set is ⁓ customer service ⁓ around around an SMB ⁓ focused, less technical foc user base. Like and and and and UI is a piece of that, but it's becoming less important with the infrastructure around ⁓ these tools.

Tyler (09:42)
sorry, that too.

It's absolutely becoming less important, which is why I'm concerned. But I I don't think our DNA makes us the best like we're talking about Airtable, basically, right? Like we are not in a better position to be air table than a thousand other SASP companies are.

Rick (10:11)
Airtable. What what if you are though? Like what if you are because you already have small businesses who know you and use you and like air small your customer base is not using air table.

Tyler (10:21)
Yeah, I I think that's our

Agreed, absolutely. I I think that's our I don't want to be overly dr I was gonna say that's our only hope. I don't wanna be overly dramatic. Maybe things rever we we actually did have one customer come back last week that said, I left for Claude like a year ago and realized my data is a mess. Like it works day to day. I can say give me five leads or whatever, but I realized like this data's getting saved in a million different places. Every thread I start has totally different context and it started becoming a problem. So

It's possible Sass makes a comeback or or that I'm that I'm overblowing it. That's possible.

Rick (10:56)
Well well, the headless the headless C Rm concept with the like the the harness database, like maybe that's a better way of saying it. Like if if less knowing CRM is providing the harness for someone to be dangerous and clawed or Gemini or Chat GPT managing a C Rm, then that's I think that's pretty powerful stuff.

Tyler (11:15)
Yeah, I think it's gonna but I think it's gonna be a commodity. I think there's gonna be it's more like AWS than it is like Salesforce.

Rick (11:21)
But isn't a CRM a commodity? I I'm just sorry, like how is that different than what what it is today?

Tyler (11:26)
I think people buy CRM. So what I mean by commodity is if I want to buy steel or I want to buy lumber, I don't go to Home Depot and like choose which brand of lumber to buy. ⁓ people pick CRMs based on which one they like the best. But if it's just like these are this is just a back end database, they all work, they all, you know, have backups and, you know, redundancies and this and that, people are just like like the way you can switch from ChatGPT to Claude, that's a commodity. I can give the same

Rick (11:53)
Customer service?

For your d for your user base?

Tyler (11:57)
I th I think the type of user who is using a headless CRM and letting AI drive everything does not need customer service because the AI is the customer service. ⁓ I have ideas on this, which I'll talk about later, but ⁓ yeah, I I don't know. Mm move on, I guess.

Rick (12:04)
Yeah, yeah, I have a good point. Yeah. Okay. All right. All right.

Man. Yeah, man, it's just like I want there to be like a an answer and I guess we the the the the truth is we don't really know and it's all hypothetical.

Tyler (12:23)
Yeah. I'm holding out hope. ⁓ before I get to that though, ⁓ yeah, what w what's going on in your work life?

Rick (12:33)
⁓ I have ⁓ let's see. ⁓ we started open enrollment at Leg Up Health, which is great. ⁓ so busy time. JD is very busy, which is good. but also like I f I wish I could help him more. You know, it's like this this kind of feel guilty feeling that I have. So I'm trying to be helpful in terms of when he needs something like contracting, like taking care of that. ⁓ or if ⁓ he if I see an opportunity to give him ⁓ leverage through a skill or

idea with AI, like I do that. But he's he's in the thick of it right now. And forecast is looking good. It's looking like we're building pipeline every day and ⁓ we are going to grow the business over open enrollment, which is what we want. Like if it's a good a good year, if we can grow throughout the year or at least like like kind of trend up a little bit. ⁓ but then like leap forward 50% in open enrollment, that's a huge year for us.

Tyler (13:16)
Okay, great.

Ups and downs but trend up a little bit.

Yeah, I mean fift fifty percent would be a huge year for anyone. Is that so last year, my memory of last year is so A, a bunch of like the A is it the ACA subsidies got so something changed about healthcare regulations, which made it a lot fewer people wanted were gonna buy h individual insurance, which hurt windfall. Plus there wasn't huge pipeline going into it. So it's like open enrollment last year was all about renewing current clients, very little like growth going on. Is is that fair to say?

Rick (13:35)
No.

Yeah. ⁓ last year ⁓ the subsidies expired ⁓ above four hundred percent of the FPL. So basically if you let's just call you were middle class to a upper middle class, you lost your subsidies. ⁓ and buying individual health insurance likely became unaffordable for you. ⁓ it and it also changed the economics of a business choosing to go the individual health insurance route for their employees. So it just lot of like indis like a lot of a lot of

non-consumption of health insurance as a result. So some percentage of the time people are just saying, I'm just gonna go without health insurance or I'm go buy something that isn't real health insurance, which we we we historically have not brokered. ⁓ so ⁓ that led to a lot of like long conversations, not growing the business. This year it's much more streamlined, like there's no surprises, that kind of thing. There's lots of rate increases though.

Tyler (14:51)
I do want to give credit though to what happened this year as a fly on the wall that observes what you and JD are doing. I think a lot more work was put in this year towards doing various forms of marketing outreach sales stuffs like earlier in the year, so that he has both a list of people to contact to sell to as well as like an engine for getting new people during open enrollment. It's I I get that there were headwinds that you could do nothing about, but I also think like

Leg up health has executed better on growing this year than last year.

Rick (15:22)
I think that's accurate. Yeah. ⁓ and and and I think as a result of that, it's not unreasonable to think we can't be at thirty to thirty five K in MRR to start the new fiscal year in February. So that would be a huge yep. Yeah, no, no, no. That's so like last year in Oct let's just come looking at the n the waterfall right now. ⁓ we average about you know, we somewhere between twenty five and fifty percent year over year growth each month, compared with the previous month. It's I need to figure out how to do this better, but

Tyler (15:33)
Great. Would that be a fifty fifty percent? Is was that a made up number or you're actually expecting that?

Rick (15:52)
⁓ like for example, in September and August, we were up fift forty seven percent and sixty one percent respectively, ⁓ year over year. So yeah, so like we need a big jump ⁓ from ⁓ in in in January and February to to to be able to stay to to maintain that, but thirty five like thirty five K would be a hundred percent growth. Yeah.

Tyler (15:59)
Year over year, okay.

Holy shit. Every once in a while we're in a meeting and i you know, it's like, Man, why isn't this working? And and then like you say something like that, I'm like, Wow, well it sounds like it's working. Yeah.

Rick (16:23)
Yeah, it's just not easy, right? Like I think that's the it's working, but like I think ⁓ until recently the it's felt like a slog to get net new business into like get get leads. And I think ⁓ everything gets easier in that department during open enrollment because people want to talk to us. and what I what I like as we go into next year, I think the really thick big thing we need to think about is like

Is our health benefits business just a seasonal business and we need to take the pressure off outside of open enrollment? Yeah, we need to build relationships, but like clot like the idea of like growing revenue from that source is probably unrealistic unless like we get lucky. It's like that not controllable.

Tyler (17:02)
Yeah. The question is is all of that work the reason that you're growing in open enrollment? Or is it just like, no, if you turned on the engine in October, you'd get roughly the same amount of growth?

Rick (17:15)
Yeah, and and maybe it's just like a drip nurture type thing. Like it's very like passive marketing and top of mind marketing, but not like, let's have a meeting. I want to sell you something. You know, it's like a different tactic than what we've done in pa in the past. ⁓ but then it it opens the question of like what else could we could we be brokering? Like I'm I'm looking at Leg Up Health less as a health benefits tech company and more as like a we're a broker of things for HR and business owners, you know, and like and finance people. And there's a lot of insurance people need.

Tyler (17:25)
Yeah.

Rick (17:45)
And it and that they need year round, right? That and and then there's, you know, other events that happen throughout the year that could trigger things. And we get more focused on like the event and servicing people through the event when they have an event ⁓ as an entry point. So that's the kind of stuff I'm thinking about for next year.

Tyler (18:03)
Yeah, interesting. ⁓ yeah, in the past we've talked about you you need the right number of staff at Leg Up Health to cover the whole year and then you need to staff up in open enrollment. This is like flipping that on its head and saying you need the right number of staff for open enrollment and then you have to figure out how to keep busy the rest of the year. Yeah.

Rick (18:24)
Exactly. Yeah. And ⁓ I I think that there's a there's a a a potential win-win where we can widen our scope of services, ⁓ which will increase like our ability to cross sell, upsell. but it should make ⁓ net new lead leads easier to generate and convert because there isn't this like health benefits is a hard thing to like dislodge except like at very specific points in the year and it's very relationship driven.

but other types of insurance are less relationship driven. It's more transactional and they happen less seasonally. And so there's potential that we could ⁓ use that as a as an entry point and then we build a relationship and it gets us more likely to build the the the the health benefits business business.

Tyler (19:08)
Yeah. Interesting. Cool. So that ⁓ that segues nicely into my current health benefits experience, which is that we've been we ⁓ I think we first added health benefits like I don't know, five, four years ago. Maybe six man, what is time anymore? I don't know. Like not we haven't had it the whole time is my point. when we added it, we did it through Gusto. ⁓ at the time they were good, like they'd get get on the phone with us, walk us through our options. ⁓

This year, Robert is on sabbatical. He's the one who normally handles renewal. So it's on me. I'm getting these emails from Gusto. And the email I get at least one a day being like, you must renew. Like you have to click the button. If you don't click the button, you will not have health benefits next year. But but then I've been getting up for like three weeks, and it's like reply to this email if you need anything. Here's a link to schedule a call with one of our with your benefits specialist. There's a survey. If you log into Gusto, there's a survey that's like, do you want to request other options? Tell us what you're interested in.

And we'll give you those other options. I did I also I did all three of those, plus I just contacted support the normal way. Just being like, I reply to me. Reply. Like, I want to talk. How do I talk to you? I tried scheduling a call using their link, no available times. They keep sending me this link to schedule a call, no available times. I technically today is the last day. You've told me not to worry about that. You've told me that's a fake, but like from their customer communication, I have to choose today.

But the only option they give is because I can't talk to anyone and I it's not self-serve in the app. In the app, you can't go in and be like, let me browse other options. They're just like, here are the exact like one-to-one mappings of your plans from last year to the plans next year, and there's a button to accept it. That's the only option I have. I am so frustrated with Gusto right now.

Rick (20:58)
That's the experience though. Like and ⁓ man, it's good for us because and I think I think Gusto is is perfectly happy with losing you as a customer from a brokerage standpoint and then gaining a couple more dollars per month than software fees to unlock like what we would need to serve serve you in this case. Yeah.

Tyler (21:16)
It is a net loss for the so for for the listener, you can use Gusto as your broker, in which case they get the commission, which you've told me is like forty bucks per household or something like user per month ish, just on average, depending on what the insurance is. or you can use a separate broker through Gusto, and Gusto charges an extra six dollars or some six per employee. So they're going from forty ish per employee to six ish per employee, but

Rick (21:25)
User

Six. Yep.

Tyler (21:44)
they're not doing the work of yeah. ⁓ and th which brings us to how are you gonna fix this for me, Rick?

Rick (21:45)
Higher margin. Yeah.

Yeah, so ⁓ as soon as the the Missouri State Department of Insurance ⁓ gets gets busy approving the licenses that I've submitted for approval for leg up health, myself and JD, we will we will become your broker and help you solve this problem ⁓ by ⁓ giving you someone first to talk to and two ⁓ translating like all your options into a simple way for you to pick. ⁓ and then ⁓

you know, business as usual from a gusto experience for you. So like a lot a lot of people like when we when I talked to them on there on Gusto, I was like, I I hate working with gusto. They never I can't talk to anyone when I need something. Like no knowing ⁓ what my options are sucks. But once it's set up, man, it's nice. I don't have to think about it. Payroll deductions work. I can add people to gusto and add them to health insurance. Like I love the HR H R I S system, the benefits management system. And and so what what what what what's nice about what we can do is we can say we're gonna leave all that in place.

Tyler (22:37)
Yeah.

Rick (22:45)
But you're gonna get the benefit of a a broker who actually is working for you across all the options, even the ones that Gusto doesn't ⁓ broker.

Tyler (22:53)
Okay, that's let me just confirm this because Robert was asking me this, even though he's on sabbatical, he's also kind of following. He was like, Is this going to complicate payroll? Because like Gusto, when we buy through Gusto, you know, they know exactly how much to deduct from everybody and all that. Is it still gonna be that same process or are we gonna have to like export a spreadsheet from here and upload it here or anything like that?

Rick (23:14)
The short answer is ⁓ it should be the same process. ⁓ the the dip the the gusto does have limitations on what they have out of the box. so they don't have every plan available in every state ⁓ through their system, which is you wouldn't know that unless you went to another broker who said, no, here these five other options that Gusto is showing you. ⁓ but we can't I I believe I need to check on this. ⁓ I believe that we can import the plans. They have like a basically a plan management structure like the one we built for Leg Up Health.

So we can import a third party plan into the system and manage that plan through their interface and then the payroll deductions happen from that. But you do have to import it the plan initially, but that's something that we would handle for you through Gusto. Yeah. Correct.

Tyler (23:55)
Yeah, and that's once per year, not every month, not every payroll. Okay. Cool. Well, ⁓ how no, fifty. Fifty percent of the quote unquote base plan, which is like the we call it the silver plan, the base plan.

Rick (24:00)
Do do you pay a hundred percent or do you pay fifty percent? Like how do you

Yep. Yep. So that could pretty typical.

Tyler (24:13)
Okay. ⁓ how late at what date should I start to panic that this isn't ⁓ handled? Cause and we have a February first effective date.

Rick (24:22)
Which ⁓ not until fourteen days before the f the effective date.

Tyler (24:28)
Okay. Great. Well, I ⁓ I'm I I'm happy to have someone who knows what's going on here ⁓ in my this is such I know I'm not I'm talking my own book here because I do have like a financial stake in leg up health, obviously, but what what a relief it is to have someone you can talk to. Like it's even just this, even just like I'm panicking because Gusto's telling me today's my last day, and you're telling me don't worry about it. Like that that right there is is what a broker's for.

Rick (24:40)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah. That that's and that's what I I I we haven't figured out how to message that. So like if we were gonna like think about messaging for next year and how to position leg up health like for the next phase of growth, like I don't know how to tell that story. I have not figured it out. Like it's it I've we've talked about peace of mind, like but like it is like a loadoff to say, like, we got it. Don't worry about it anymore. If you're worried, call us and we'll make you unworried. And if you're ever not satisfied, like

unworried, like find a different broker who who's better than us because we're not doing our job. You know, that I I can't, I don't know how to express that in a way that like actually resonates with people until they feel what you but like what what you're saying right now is what we hear from our customers. Like that is the number one thing that they get once they experience it. They're like, ⁓ and it's like the the monthly update just getting the monthly update saying that their your insurance is good. Like if you're a c a consumer, just saying like I don't my pi my my premium's paid like I know that it's or I'm good. Like I don't have to worry about this.

Tyler (25:34)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (25:50)
It's it's just like a okay, they're they they're they're what they're monitoring this for me. I don't need to worry about this.

Tyler (25:54)
Yeah. Cool. Well, anyone listening out there that needs health benefits, apparently you can just message Rick and say, I'm having a problem with gusto and he will get licensed in your state. That's what I've done.

Rick (26:04)
⁓ Yep. ⁓ no seriously, like if you it it we would we would love the opportunity to get more at bats with gusto customers. So if you're listening and you have a and you're on gusto in any US state and want help with your health insurance, we'd love we we will figure out how to help you even ⁓ even if it requires us to get licensed.

Tyler (26:23)
Nice.

Rick (26:24)
Thanks for the ⁓ p PSA.

Tyler (26:26)
Yeah. all right, anything else on your mind or should I be talking about the the thing I've been teasing?

Rick (26:32)
Before you go to this thing, I just want to talk about one thing with you. It's been on the list of things I wanted to talk to with you about for a while, and it's pertinent for me if something I'm working on right now. So, ⁓ through the age of AI, there's been this phase of what I would call like, and I know if you had this at Less Knowing CRM, but it's happened at at Windfall and I think a lot of other SaaS companies or growth companies. I'm calling it tool proliferation. Like there's Gemini, there's ChatGPT, there's Claw, there's Perplexity, and everyone has their like ⁓ their their

Tyler (26:59)
Yeah.

Rick (27:01)
you know, sort of favorite thing. And then there's Whisperflow, there's Granola. ⁓ and people are like, I have granola and Whisperflow. I'm like, why? They do the same thing. ⁓ and then there's Notion who has, you know, features that that overlap with those. And then there's Asana and there's Confluence and now Hubspot and Salesforce. And I could go on and on and on through like 30 other tools. And then they're I'm getting emails from like with with with the proliferation of spam through AISDR, like literally everyone, every user in our company is getting pitched a tool that solves their

Tyler (27:09)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (27:31)
Their biggest problem. And they're forwarding those tools to me saying, we got to check this tool out, Rick. And I'm going, my God, you're not even using the tools that we have the right way. And you want a new tool? So anyway, I'm just like, we're we're kind of reaching like, I think the like the max of this tool proliferation phase. And I think we're about to enter an era of like tool consolidation. And I think there's some companies that are really well positioned for this ⁓ across the stack. It could be like, like, take for example, there are there are tools like outreach or ⁓

Groove ⁓ or ⁓ Sales Loft. There are these like very specific cadencing tools. There are ⁓ call recording tools like Gong is probably the most popular one, Demo Desk. But they've they've started to like expand across the full stack where they do the outreach and the call recording. Well, why does that matter? Well, if you record the calls and you finish a meeting, you're you're much more likely to be able to draft the email right.

And make it easy to update the CRM based on the call, right? And so anyway, I we have all these duplicative tools that are starting to overlap with each other. And it's becoming a mess. And then on top of that, like it was already a mess. They're changing their pricing every month. ⁓ AI credits for this. Yeah. And AI credits this. ⁓ new package this. ⁓ and it's just like it it's it's very difficult for the like centralized owner of these tools to manage this.

Tyler (28:44)
Yeah. They're trying to figure out how to make it work in AI, yeah.

Rick (28:58)
So I think there are two options. If you keep a centralized manager option where like it's a RevOps team or like ops team that's managing all these tools, you're probably going to start consolidating. You're just gonna say, like, this is too much for my brain. People aren't using these tools. Yeah.

Tyler (29:09)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, is it a price thing or or a complexity thing? Yeah.

Rick (29:16)
both. It's it's a complexity thing and a price thing. because what ends up happening is you you you're trying if you're essentially managed, you you don't how what users how many users do you buy? It's all subscription based. Do you buy thirty? Do you buy ten? If you're managing it across the org, you don't know. You have to go talk to every single dip you know, depart stakeholder. Yeah.

Tyler (29:35)
is what I hate about that type of buying process. Like like the way less annoying serum works is add add a user, remove the user, we're gonna charge you the number of users times fifteen dollars. But yeah, that's not how enterprise buying works.

Rick (29:47)
If that if that's how it worked, this would be a less of a problem, but it still would be complex from a from a from a systems management perspective because they all got be connected now. So ⁓ the alternative path. So if if you go down that path, you know, where where I think you end up as a RevOps person is you're like, okay, we have tool proliferation, we can save money and increase the depth of usage and leverage if we consolidate these tools and start canceling stuff and expand our contracts with a HubSpot.

Tyler (29:50)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (30:16)
And like the ones that are like the bit behemoths that have all the functionality. Like Notion becomes a big player from a context layer because it can take away granola and whisper flow. ⁓ and also Asana. You you then get confluent get di ⁓ gong and you're like, okay, I'm gonna get rid of outreach and ⁓ all these other tools that are email tools. ⁓ and then you go, you know, to HubSpot and you get rid of all the you know chat tools and lead routing tools. And it's like, okay, now you're like condensing down to some court, but you but you get this concentration risk, which is kind of scary.

Tyler (30:45)
Yeah. Well, especially 'cause you can't trust these companies pricing. It's like it's not just do they go out of business or something, it's are they gonna tenx their prices once they finally capture the market.

Rick (30:46)
So that's one path.

Exactly. And so that's one path. And I think that's the path that in in the centralized model, there is no other way to do it because it's just like impossible to manage. ⁓ the the all the alternative path is to decentralize. And that is you basically allocate budget to the teams, ⁓ but you let the teams kind of make their own decisions on what tools to use and ⁓ kind of let it kind of work itself out ⁓ with within a governing

AI policy and IT policy. ⁓ the the the the the problem with that though it requires more technical people in each team than probably have been staffed. So you need like that's like if if RevOps is the centralization of marketing ops, sales ops, CSOps, etc., you need these like people embedded in the teams.

Tyler (31:41)
Yeah. I mean, this this is the classic, like, how do you structure an organization? Do you say, okay, there's five different departments, each department has their own marketing, their own sales, their own customer service, or do you say there's one marketing that serves the five departments? And my impression of how a lot of companies, if they live long enough to do this, is every time you bring in a new CEO, they just flip from one to the other. ⁓ Is flipping between these two options, basically. And the same thing applies to buying soft.

Rick (32:10)
Well, it affects how you buy software. It affects how you operate, right? Like, ⁓ so the org chart kind of dictates how you think about solving the problem of complexity in the AI world. And a centralized structure kind of leads to a ⁓ consolidation of tools, whereas a decentralized structure I think leads to a proliferation of s of tools. ⁓ and I don't know what the right answer is. So I wanted to get your thoughts. if you had a quick one.

Tyler (32:31)
Yeah. I mean, I have no idea. I I want to have a thought. The reality is I've never been involved in a company large enough where this would like a we have sixteen people at Less Annoying. Like it's naturally it it is centralized because that's the size of one team, more or less. ⁓ so I don't have personal experience with it. We don't sell to anyone that really deals with well, any big customers we sell to are doing the decentralized thing by definition, because if they're doing the centralized thing, they're not gonna pick us.

⁓ so my ⁓ my first answer is just like ignore whatever I say because I don't know. But my instinct is

Well, this isn't quite an answer. I you said right now there are these tools that are kind of turning into a like a what I'll call a business in a box. Like we're doing as much of the of everything as we can, so you need fewer tools. That is sort of the opposite of what we said earlier in this episode of like being a headless blank, which I th I think there's a world where in the future you have one kind of AI app that orchestrates everything.

And then every other service you buy is like very surgical. It's like this is my like what Mailgun is, what Twilio is. It's like if I need to send a text, I use this service. If I need to save a piece of data to a database, here's my database service. And the idea that there's this like broad we do lots of things at once product, I I don't that it's a different question from what you're asking, but that's what I'm trying to answer. Is the future a bunch of headless

infrastructure tools that you call via an AI tool, or is the future a single piece of software that does everything for you? What what do you think about that?

Rick (34:13)
Yeah. I don't know. I'm d I like and I I think that's a like probably a longer time horizon than I'm probably thinking on. I'm thinking on like eighteen month time horizon right now. Like how do you how do you make the decision on the Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I th I think

Tyler (34:22)
Absolutely. But you could work backwards from that, right? And then say, Well, what should we do now?

Right now we're moving more towards the business in a box thing, I think.

Rick (34:31)
Yeah, I think like I I think I agree with like there's probably a core tool that is orchestrating everything and then there are add ons that are splyly specialized. I think I generally agree that's the direction. ⁓

Tyler (34:46)
I don't even mean add ons exactly, I mean l well, yeah, I don't know.

Rick (34:49)
Well, it I I'm saying add-ons not as like they are providing the add on, but like a connector. ⁓ I'm I'm thinking of it like like it's like a ⁓ a third party tool. Like there's a core tool that's the the the orchestration, and then you know, there's obviously a database. Like that's like and I'm talking about GTM for most part right now, like ⁓ workflows. But but it still goes back to like there's a user training issue, right? Like if and then there's a collaboration issue. So like if I'm

Tyler (34:53)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Rick (35:16)
If I'm if I've got a team over here working on one stack and a team over here Yeah. Yeah.

Tyler (35:18)
I think you've got to centralize. Yeah. Sorry to interrupt you, but of course, yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to, right? At least with CRM with with some with some of the core things. Actually, let me reference ⁓ Aaron Francis for Mostly Technical again. Since you don't listen to that, let me give you a quick summary of him. He was like kind of an indie solo founder type person. ⁓ very involved in the Laravel ecosystem, gets hired by Laravel to be their VP of marketing.

Rick (35:26)
I think but then

Tyler (35:48)
Laravel is primarily a developer organization, like very engineering culture. I'm I'm just saying what I think is true. I don't have any real knowledge here. Aaron's running marketing. So like his his part of the organization is not the ⁓ center of gravity culturally, I think. ⁓ and something he has said on his podcast, he hates Notion. I've actually only ever talked to Aaron once in my life, and it was to show him how I use Notion. And at the end of the call, he was like, nah.

That sucks. ⁓ I love Notion though. ⁓ but like the rest of the org uses Notion, and Aaron comes in and is like, I hate Notion. I wish we didn't have to use it. But it would be crazy for the marketer to come in and be like, I'm going like there's two options. One is no one else gets I'm gonna advocate for no one to use Notion. That's crazy because he's not the center of gravity there. And or option two, we're not gonna be on the same system as everyone else. And now

Rick (36:17)
Ha ⁓

Tyler (36:43)
Like a lot of marketing projects are informed by, well, what releases are happening, what you know, what are in linear, they to use linear too. Like it'd be crazy for marketing not to use the systems that everyone else is using. So yeah, I am again, I have no experience. I'm just like hypothesizing, but it feels like for the core stuff, you've gotta have everyone on the same system.

Rick (37:02)
Yeah, at least in the short term, right? Until the until people get much more technical and more like like sort of like able to navigate the complexities of multiple systems themselves ⁓ and be smart about it. All right. Thank you for going down that rabbit hole with me. tell me about your your last topic here.

Tyler (37:17)
Yeah, so I actually I cheated a bit and started talking about it at in that last topic, which is so last episode I said, you know, we we had this whole like come to Jesus moment as a company where we you know, I'm not positive AI is going to meaningfully hurt the business of less annoying serum, but I'm seeing increasingly seeing signs of it, and I think it would be irresponsible not to prepare for it. Last episode I said one of the things we're doing is ⁓

Offering this paid service to our customers to do additional like IT services for them. Still figuring that out. Actually move moving fast. We we have our first like lead that is they have not given us money yet, but they're close, I think. ⁓ so moving on that. But that's less that's not really a hedge. That's saying like, how do we get more revenue per customer from less wing serum? If less and wing serum dies, so too does that other stream of revenue. And then I hinted there's another thing we're talking about. So that's what I want to talk about today. ⁓

This is yeah. ⁓

Rick (38:14)
I have question before you go for this. Can I gift my dad a year of less knowing CRM plus that service as like a Father's Day gift or something or a Christmas gift?

Tyler (38:24)
⁓ yes. My I would prefer to do that. So that's not good validation for us that someone will pay for it. ⁓ so I'd prefer to wait to make sure we're actually gonna do this, but then absolutely, yes. I accept. and so far the feedback is I I I talked last week about email, setting up their branded email. It sounds like website is actually gonna be the bigger opportunity. ⁓ and in the age of AI, it used to be like.

Rick (38:35)
Okay. Okay.

I agree. That's

Tyler (38:53)
Well, building a website for someone would take a huge amount of work. I just don't think that's true anymore.

Rick (38:56)
Build a build a like a a way to manage through AI everyone's website on any site and like you've got a great service business.

Tyler (39:01)
Yeah. Yeah, and and w anytime they want to update us, they don't have to log into Squarespace and figure out what they just email us and say, Hey, can you embed I've got a new map. Can you embed the map on my footer? It's like, Yep.

Rick (39:13)
And you're like, copy, paste into Claude, you know.

Tyler (39:16)
Yeah, exactly. ⁓ and I think we could charge like very competitive rates. So anyway, okay. but

Rick (39:22)
validation, validation. Like I would pay for that for me to manage my dad's site. And I'm sure my wife would pay money for that to manage. I'm just realizing I should just do this with Claude. my God. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Makes sense.

Tyler (39:27)
Yeah.

You should just do this yourself. Yeah. It has to be people who don't know how to do that. ⁓ okay. So that's preparing for a world like if less but if less if if CRM still exists in its current form 10 years from now, less knowing CRM's been plateaued for five years. So the question there's like, how do we succeed as a business in a world where CRM is not majorly disrupted? On the other end of the spectrum, is there are no more CRMs. Like you're just talking to ChatGPT.

It's you don't even need that back-end service or anything. It's just like ChatGPT or Cloud is your interface. There's nothing for us to do for that. Like what we should do is shut down the business. And any kind of pivot we would do would be such a pivot that it wouldn't make sense. We're not the team to do it. But there's a middle scenario, which is something replaces CRM that doesn't look like today's CRM, but it is still like a product that people are buying.

Separate from ChatGPT and Claude. ⁓ so we want to have one effort that we're doing is how do we make it work in a world where less knowing CRM is our future? And another one, which is well, how do we in a world where something replaces CRM and it's not just a frontier AI like thing? What is that thing? We want to figure out what it is and we want to build it. And basically the analogy being the net Netflix launching streaming, we want to.

Rick (40:32)
Hm.

Tyler (40:57)
kill our current business with this new line of business. We hope it fails because that means our current business continues to thrive. But if our current business is going to decline, we want to be the ones to eat all of that to cause all that disruption.

Rick (41:11)
I love the I idea. ⁓ I think if you're listening and you're trying to start a business, if you want to l pick any industry right now and do what Tyler's talking about, which is be the thing that replaces the thing, I think that's a great business idea generation plan. ⁓ I'm curious, like, how are you going about identifying that thing? Have you like broken CRM down to first principles? Like what like what what's your methodology here?

Tyler (41:32)
Yeah, I'm gonna share that, but first let me just say how unconfident I am in this cause because because like everything everything we've been saying on this podcast since, you know, the last six, twelve months is like, is there even gonna be SAS? Is there gonna be software? Are like the question of is there gonna be one horizontal SAS that does everything, or is are you just gonna talk to an AI agent and then that text all these API backends, like I I have no idea what the future holds. I I have a theory which I will share, but like

Rick (41:38)
Okay.

Tyler (42:03)
The real point right now is not to perfectly predict the future and build it because I'm confident that I'll be wrong. But what I do want to do is build. So one of the things we're doing, we're pulling three people, myself, Bracken, my co-founder, and Robert, our lead dev. We're pulling the three of us off of Lesson Wing CRM and basically starting a new product. Totally new tech stack, different hosting, like everything will be 100% different. I'm even taking the approach of like, there's a world where whatever the new thing is.

It gets acquired without less annoying CRM getting acquired. So we're gonna build it in a way where it's like separate enough that that could happen. and a big part of this is like our less annoying CRM is slow, legacy, but not just the software, but the team, but in a good way. Why do our customers trust us? We have so many I I sent that survey out to people asking them how they are using AI right now. 500 responses. Maybe a hundred of them said, I'm using you because.

You don't have AI. Like people trust us, people like us. I don't want to disrupt that. But to compete in this new world, we need to be able to move, like, you know, not review every line of code. Like we need to be able to move way faster. So one of the big goals here is just like whatever it is we build, even if it's the wrong thing, be a platform where now we can move at the speed of companies like AMP, these companies that are moving really fucking fast. I want to be I want to have a product that can move that fast. So when the new opportunity pr pr like emerges.

We can pounce on.

Rick (43:32)
Yeah, you're you're ⁓ you're not at a at a disadvantage due to your systematic limitations of of the legacy less as less annoying CRM approach.

Tyler (43:39)
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. There's a downside to the like the way I'm pitching it is like it's all upside. We get all the good of the old and all the good of the new. This of course is gonna distract from less annoying. Like we're not gonna move that product forward as fast. I think if you ask our customers, a lot of them would actually be relieved to hear that. They'd be like, I'd rather know you're not gonna like fuck up what you've got in a pursuit of AI, but it there that's the downside I see. ⁓ it's actually bit side note, been really, really fun so far because this

I'm a very like, I'm a very cowardly leader. Like, I want to protect everybody and I worry about how people's feelings and stuff like that. ⁓ everyone at the company sees the threat here. Everyone is behind the fact that we need to do something, and it has kind of given me permission to do to make changes that probably should have happened anyway, but like it it hurt too much to do it. And now it doesn't hurt at all because it's like w we're already in this change mode. Like,

I'm ch changing people's responsibilities around. Like a lot of these like decade-old policies we've had. I'm like, nope, I'm killing that. Bunch of recurring meetings off the calendar. Like tons of change happening in in a way that I I'm pretty excited about.

Rick (44:51)
That's awesome, man. Congrats. ⁓ you've done this before, ⁓ w I believe in the you know, almost a decade ago, maybe not quite a decade ago, but I'm curious, like how what if what what how are you gonna change your approach this time based on what you've done in the past to make sure that this doesn't that has like the highest probability of success?

Tyler (44:53)
Thank you. Yeah.

Yeah. ⁓ first of all, so the the thing in the past I've referenced on the podcast before was called sparse. It was Bracken and I had a vision for a product we really wanted. We just said, fuck it, we're successful enough, we're gonna go build it. ⁓ I still think it would have been a good product. I think the number one mistake there is it was a product that w did not appeal to our current customers. ⁓ I think it would have failed for other reasons, probably, but like the biggest pro like so th the main difference between this and that is we're saying

Phase one of this product is not, it's not gonna be pitched to anybody as here's this new AI forward product. It's gonna be pitched as here's a companion product to less knowing CRM built specifically for less knowing CRM customers. If you want the legacy tool, use the legacy tool. If you want the modern AI way of using a CRM, buy this other tool as a companion to it. ⁓ and you'll get both. So I think that's number one is like we are like we're gonna get users, just guaranteed.

We could build a piece of shit and we'd get users.

Rick (46:08)
Yeah. ⁓ the the other thing that is different is you're building based on the market need versus what you all want to build. So there's like a kind of a reverse on who's driving ⁓ the the idea. ⁓ the market's driving the idea here versus versus I know that that wasn't necessarily the case in the past. Yeah.

Tyler (46:22)
Mm-hmm.

Well no though, that's exact no, it is bec we thought we we wanted to do it the way you're saying, but we went out and tried to get customers and n no one people were like whatever and said was like, That actually sounds interesting. Build it and I'll buy it. And and I did the thing that all these bootstrapper thought leaders Well, will you put some money down to buy it? And everyone's like, No. And it maybe they said no because no one actually wanted it. But also they were like

Rick (46:48)
Yeah.

Tyler (46:50)
No, I will buy it, but like, why would I give you money now? Like, am I not gonna be able to buy it later? And I'm like, I mean, no, you'll it'll be for sale. And they're like, why would I buy it now? What what the fuck are you talking about? So maybe that's just sign that it it was a bad idea, but this time we will have customers, they will give us feedback. It could still go horribly wrong, right? They could give us bad feed big our customers could be such a small part of the market, whatever. But the point is if we have a product where we can move real fast on it, we've got some customers.

And again, I don't think the true opportunity has emerged yet. So I don't think anyone's building it. But my hope is that we have a launch pad that once let's say that my my dream is that the AI bubble pops, everyone uninvests, not fully, but it goes like the way the dot com bubble did, where it's like there's kind of a few years lull, that would be incredible for us. Cause then we could keep invest AI's not going anywhere long term. We could keep investing, get out ahead of it, and anyway.

Rick (47:49)
Yeah, you're you're starting Yeah, say it, say it.

Tyler (47:50)
I haven't said what the idea is yet, though. Yeah. It's basically what I teased earlier, which is so v V1 is going to be do you want to use AI with less knowing CRM? Here's this tool that like lets you do that. Basically, an agent. Yeah, AI add-on. But I think the long term goal is okay, what if you okay? Well, we you can use AI with less knowing CRM. What other tools do you use? QuickBooks. Never log into QuickBooks again. Log into this tool. You never log into less knowing CRM, never log into QuickBooks.

Rick (48:02)
Smart. AI add on. Yeah. Agent add on.

Tyler (48:19)
Step two, never log into Mailchimp again, right? And just kind of start picking off these user experiences. And then you can start doing multiple rounds of the same product. You don't even need to use less knowing serum. Use pipe drive. If they have functionality you want, better back end, whatever, but control it all with our UI. The reason you love us is the customer service in the UI. You get that. Use whatever back-end tools you want.

Rick (48:41)
I'm telling you, that does not exist in the market today. There is no heart harness like that that has service behind it for a non-technical person. ⁓ Claude is probably the best, but it's more enterprisey. perplexity is non existent. I haven't I a chat GP T chat GPT, no. ⁓ what's another one? Jim and I? No. Like I I ⁓ man, I think it's a really good idea.

Tyler (49:04)
Cool. ⁓ of course the fact that it doesn't exist yet could be a sign that no one wants it, right? But ⁓ I've started doing customer interviews, I've started talking to people, ⁓

Rick (49:15)
There is a chance though that you cheat you train them on your system, they reach the limitations of it and they graduate to a claude, which is maybe a not a bad thing, but like how do you prevent that?

Tyler (49:23)
I don't think Claude is ever gonna do what we're doing here. Claude will always be a better general purpose AI assistant, but so one of the big bets here, and I feel like I've said this on the podcast before, one of my big bets here is I don't think that natural language interface is correct. Like I'm giving you paragraphs of text, you're giving me paragraphs of text back, and that will solve all my business problems. I think people want a GUI. ⁓ they want

buttons they can press, they want to see the reports in the thing. They don't want to like generate an ad hoc report on the fly every single time. ⁓ so you may be right, but I I kind of feel like most people should have Claude and this other tool at the same time is my hope.

Rick (50:10)
Yeah, you're saying that a s a more specialized version of Claude i i is worth paying some amount of money for if it does the job better, whatever that job is.

Tyler (50:20)
Yeah, and I realize I'm I'm not explaining this well because we're still figuring out what it is and I don't have my pitch honed at all. But like one of the things Bracken so I'm off doing customer interviews and working on design, Bracken's off like literally building it. We assume he'll throw away everything he's building and start over. But Bracken one of the things we're realizing is a big opportunity, I think, is like rather all these AI agents, they burn tokens at

every single step of the process, right? Every time you give them a prompt, even if it's like a saved, like one of those automation, what what do they call it in Claude? like a saved thing where you can say, I want to be able a skill or whatever you want to call it.

Rick (50:58)
an arti there's artifacts, like that like that's probably something that's saved. skill can be saved. ⁓ there's plug there's plugins which are packages. And then there's rout there's yeah, routines and scheduled tasks. Yeah.

Tyler (51:03)
No, I'm talking about scheduled is what I'm talking about. Scheduled tasks, yeah. So like even if you schedule a task, i my impression of what's happening is it is taking the text prompt that whatever you give and giving it to the LLM fresh every single time. And you might get a different result every single time.

Rick (51:19)
That's one ⁓ that's one aspect, but generally like that's like the basic. What ⁓ what you can't what they also have is the concept of artifacts, which are ⁓ kind of coded like but bodies of work that are ⁓ stat like static from a ⁓ container perspective, but but dynamic within that container. And then you can have the scheduled task do stuff within that container. Yeah.

Tyler (51:30)
Yeah, sure.

Mm-hmm.

Do stuff with an artifact. Yeah, I've done a bit of that. My again, I'm being vague because like this is still blurry and we're still making giving it shape. I think there's a lot more to do there where instead of 10% of stuff is predefined in an artifact and 90% is LLM's burning tokens on the fly. I think it like most SAS, this isn't true for all LLM use, but for like SaaS use cases, I think it should be like 90% of this is like we wrote deterministic old school code.

Rick (51:51)
No, yeah.

yeah.

Tyler (52:15)
And we only call the LLM for very specific parts of this where we have to interpret language and make decisions. That's the only thing the LLM is doing. ⁓ I think there's an opportunity there.

Rick (52:21)
Yep. Yep. I agree. I a hundred percent agree. It's a challenge every day for me is g is getting ⁓ getting to that.

Tyler (52:29)
Yeah, great. I'm glad to hear that. ⁓ it sounds really hard to solve, which is another good thing here. Like it would be hard to copy. This is all back end, this is all like the sauce. Just you know when you use ChatGPT versus Claude and you're like, I don't know, I like Opus five point five better, but I liked like it just feels a certain way. I think it's hard to copy that feel. Anyway, I'll talk more about this, but that's what I'm pursuing right now. It's probab eighty percent chance this thing fails.

Only I think a one percent chance that it's a big success, but we're going for it.

Rick (53:03)
What's not gonna fail though is you're gonna have a launch pad for other ideas, ⁓ and you're gonna have the stack to ⁓ seize an opportunity that presents itself in the future. That is like guaranteed. So that's awesome.

Tyler (53:06)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ so we'll yeah, we'll talk more. I'm I'm win or lose, I'm having a great time. This is this is a lot of fun. So yeah. All right, we're see ya.

Rick (53:20)
Good. This is fun. Good. All right, ma'am. I'll see you later.

Tyler (53:27)
In this episode, we talk about how in the age of AI, businesses find themselves buying more and more tools, which creates major challenges with coordinating team members and tracking spending. Let's go.