Tyler King (00:01.091)
Hey, what up Rick?

Rick (00:02.658)
What's up this week, Tyler?

Tyler King (00:04.547)
Yeah, not a lot. hear you've got some stuff going on.

Rick (00:07.99)
Yeah, I have JD in town for the next week and we are working on like up health stuff. So, it's basically. A intentional forcing function for a planning session so that we can get ahead of all the things we need to do for open enrollment, which starts on November 1st.

Tyler King (00:28.357)
Are you gonna be ready? Is he gonna be ready more importantly?

Rick (00:31.052)
We haven't talked about the business much. We've just hung out. Yeah. So we, I mean, last night we basically, last night we had dinner and we threw down all the things we wanted to talk about. and we'll prioritize them today, but, the main thing that I, I was surprised by is he has some pretty aggressive growth goals that he wants to hit for open enrollment. so I don't want to, I kind of don't want to share them. I'm scared to share them because I don't think there's any way we hit them, but.

Tyler King (00:33.637)
You just hung out. That's cool.

Tyler King (00:54.863)
Nice.

Rick (01:00.148)
He wants to basically hit 40k MRR by March. 23.

Tyler King (01:03.919)
What are, what's like up at now? 23 doubling by March. I mean, that's what has happened previous years, right? More or less. What would that mean? Like how, what is 40K MRR? Is that like, wow, we're just overflowing with money and have to figure out how to spend it or distribute it? is is it just like, you know, business as usual, just a little better than it is now.

Rick (01:12.354)
Yep. Yep. So I don't know.

Rick (01:30.99)
We would have a lot of excess cashflow and we'd have to I think the question that we will face at multiple junctures on the way to seven figures or a million in ARR is should we hire people? Or should we outsource work or should we automate it or should we do AI stuff? Topic for another day, but but anyway like the We're basically gonna work backwards from that 40k milestone and You know, there's we got to cover

our renewal plan to make sure we protect the base, but also think through the most efficient path to 40K NMR. And it's interesting, like if we focus on like 40 to 60 person companies that have group health insurance, like it takes 10 of those.

Tyler King (02:23.599)
Yeah. Probably easier said than done, but yeah, that doesn't sound crazy.

Rick (02:24.544)
So it's not, yeah. Yes, so it definitely is making, I think us think about differently about what our target account is for now, but I don't know. It'll be interesting to see what happens over the next few days as we dig in. I'll provide an update on the next podcast.

Tyler King (02:44.015)
Great, so yeah, I asked before we started recording here if I can just dominate the entire episode. So I feel like we're gonna, I've been talking about little bits and pieces of stuff in each of our last maybe three months or five months worth of episodes, but we haven't really sunk our teeth in and I feel like I've hit a new level of clarity that, so I just kinda wanted to go through all of that with you, if that's okay.

Rick (03:12.917)
Absolutely.

Tyler King (03:13.977)
Yeah. Before I get into it, I do want to just acknowledge like one of the downsides to a podcast that's every other week is enough changes over two weeks that it probably sounds like I'm just wildly flailing and bouncing from thing to thing with no like connection to them at all. There is a natural progression. And if you go back and listen to previous episodes after listening to this one,

You might think I was just all over the place, but actually all those previous discussions led to where I am right now. I don't want to the impression like all the decisions are made, I feel like you have to give yourself space to have what end up in retrospect looking like bad ideas before you get to the good one. So I just want to acknowledge that. Or maybe this is a bad idea, I don't know.

Rick (03:59.02)
So wait, are you saying that you, like, this is the way now, you feel like you have high conviction? Okay.

Tyler King (04:05.251)
Not necessarily, it's very different, or I shouldn't say very, yeah, it is very different from what, like if you think it went from VoIP to let's do a product bundle to like last episode it was, I didn't even know what to do but I listed out a few possible options and now I'm on something else. It's possible next episode I'm gonna be on something else. This feels more likely to be the path, but we'll see.

Rick (04:27.33)
Well, I'm just, reading ahead on the agenda and I feel like there's a lot more structure to you. you're using some terms in here that are like, like I, yeah, like you're talking to like a, like a business person right now. So I feel like this might be real.

Tyler King (04:35.299)
Yeah, ICP comes up a lot.

Yeah, thought you were, I did adjust the order of these topics because I know you're just not gonna let me talk about product until I talk about some business stuff, so I ordered it that way.

Rick (04:51.278)
my influence is I'm glad my influence is positive on you because I think that's the right decision.

Tyler King (04:57.577)
yeah, so I don't think it's worth me getting into the whole progression of like how, how I got here, but, yeah, I'll just start talking. This is going to be unorganized. One of the big themes right now in my conversations with Bracken, my co-founder and other people at the company is trying to narrow down who our ICP, our ideal customer profile is.

We've talked about this a lot for your business, like up health on this podcast. We haven't talked about it a lot for less knowing cause it's like we've been in business 16 years. We definitely have product market fit. You know, we know who we serve or so we thought, but I think the CRM market has changed a lot since we started. And it used to be the case that like when most people thought of CRM, they thought of Salesforce and we just had to position ourselves against Salesforce as the CRM for kind of simple, small businesses that worked in 2010.

The market is way bigger and there's way more competition now. And so I think we need a better idea of who we're serving. And it's hard to think, well, what should we build as our product improvements and how should we market and what should our growth plan be if we don't have a really concrete idea of who it's actually for.

so I'm, we're still trying to figure this out, although I definitely am leaning in certain directions. if you open up this notion document, I wish we had like a video. I've never bothered to figure out how to like get this on YouTube or whatever. This would definitely be better if the listener could see the thing, but

Rick (06:27.246)
Would you be, could we actually do podcasts where we record the screen that we're looking at?

Tyler King (06:32.185)
Yeah, mean, we're using Riverside. It actually does record the, well, it's recording our, yeah, I think there's a way to record the screen, but I don't wanna like take the time to make a YouTube channel and all that stuff.

Rick (06:41.452)
You know what I Yeah, that would be cool.

Tyler King (06:44.837)
but for the listener, I've got, Rick and I use notion to kind of share the agenda for these podcasts. And in one of the topics, I left a little, table where basically when someone signs up for less knowing CRM, we asked them what industry they're in. It's not a required field. So, the most common thing is no answer at all, especially cause we haven't always asked it. So anyone who signed up outside of when we asked it has no answer. but I basically listed what.

industries people say they're in in descending order. And then if you exclude all of the people who haven't answered, like what percentage of the total responses is each industry? So just, not going to read every single one of them, but other is at the top of the list, but that's not a single industry, right? That means something else. And they do, if they choose other, we ask them what they, to describe it. And we have all that data, but those are just a million different things.

That's 21, I'll do number of accounts. That's about 20 % of accounts chose other, about 18 % chose sales. That's not an industry, obviously. Like sales is a job, yes. Why?

Rick (07:56.14)
Is this a drop down?

Rick (08:01.332)
Why are you asking that they are the industry of sales?

Tyler King (08:05.113)
Well, what this, what this determines, this isn't like market research. This is like, what template do you want? And we have a sales template. it's just like generic lead pipeline, basically. the first real industry is insurance agent with 17 or 18%. Then consulting with 8 % and real estate with 7%. and you know, it goes down from there.

Rick (08:10.126)
Rick (08:16.322)
Got it, got it, got

Tyler King (08:31.651)
So I'll just say like as one of the inputs to who is our ICP, we can say who are the people currently using our product. obviously one of the questions anytime you're figuring out who to target is like, do we double down on what's already working or do we try to go out and find someone new? But any reactions to seeing this list here?

Rick (08:48.962)
Just kills me that you haven't forced people to answer this question in a more structured way for your own marketing.

Tyler King (08:54.819)
What would more structured mean? mean, know requiring it is one thing, but what would more structured mean?

Rick (09:00.142)
Knowing more about your customers because you're asking questions about them and validating them so that you have like, I'm surprised that the fill rate is...

Tyler King (09:09.413)
But what? Sorry, the reason there's so many people who haven't filled it out is because we didn't ask it until a few years ago. It's not, the majority of people do answer.

Rick (09:16.968)
Okay, got it. But what I guess I'm saying is the reason that you have this data isn't because you wanted this data for this purpose, it's because you wanted to give them value with a template. And so just, it's interesting. So what I'm saying is like, you actually haven't done a survey of your customers about who they are and what they are. And so you're trying to make this work.

Tyler King (09:35.139)
Yeah. Well, this, this is that, this is that sir. mean, you're right. The, the motivation behind it was different from what you're saying, but I mean, this is valid data, right? Like what's the difference.

Rick (09:46.198)
mean, sales is not an industry and that is the largest bucket other than other and other is not useful. if you look at like the percentage that

Tyler King (09:53.873)
Okay, but there's 20 options on here. I'm not, like, other has to be an option.

Rick (09:59.519)
But like what it's what it's telling me when other is the highest field is that it's not broken down enough So like probably career services Well, I don't know what is other what are the others we have to go find out what the others are actually

Tyler King (10:05.702)
But what do want me to do, put 100 options on here?

it's like, I run a bowling alley. I mean, it's just all kinds of shit. Like, there's no way to get structured data for all these customers.

Rick (10:14.656)
Okay.

There's people that run bowling alleys? Okay.

Tyler King (10:19.898)
I mean, I'm just picking, like my favorite example of a really weird, partially cause it's a weird industry, but it led to some very funny customizations is someone that's a horse broker. They just buy and sell horses. We serve a really broad group of people right now. And it, there's not like a 20 option dropdown list that will capture that.

Rick (10:40.75)
Here's a couple of things that stand out to me on the data that I just want to call out. It looks like your average users per account in the sales and other buckets are higher than your other buckets in general. Consulting maybe is an outlier. But like to me, like I see a lot of financial services in here. Insurance agents, real estate agents, financial planners. Maybe recruiting isn't an agent, but like I kind of look at it as like consumer.

Tyler King (10:51.75)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Rick (11:09.634)
almost consumer services. But anyway, that's the one thing that stood out to me is that something about the people who are not telling you what their industry is is making them larger in terms of revenue than the other ones.

Tyler King (11:23.642)
Yeah. So let's talk about that. There's, well, one of the big questions is, so in the past, I've always said, like, obviously the unit economics are better for bigger accounts. A 10 user account does not take 10 times the customer service of a one user account, but they pay 10 times the revenue. They don't use 10 times the technical resources, 10 times the bandwidth and so on. So like the unit economics are better.

One of the big things that I think I'm shifting on here, but I'm open to pushback is I think trying to increase the average account size has been a mistake. And like, we're going to lose to HubSpot and PipeDrive with a 15 user account. I've always said that for a hundred user. I've been like, yeah, we're not going to win the hundred user accounts, but I have said like 10 to 15 could be our sweet spot.

The more I look at this data as well as talking to customers, talking to employees, I really think the one to five, the really small accounts are the ones where we're killing it. So I agree with you. Yeah. I was looking, I realize you haven't had time to like digest all of this. I was looking at it. I think of the industries that are high-ish on the list. Again, other in sales are at the top and I don't know what to do with either of those. I think you can break them into two categories. Insurance agent, real estate agent,

Rick (12:26.926)
The data supports this, yeah.

Tyler King (12:47.215)
Probably financial planner, travel agent. Those are all like independent reps selling someone else's product or brokering a transaction between two counterparties. And then there's consult, basically the other category is consulting. One is it literally called consulting, the other is called coaching, which I think is very similar. Yeah. Yeah.

Rick (13:09.186)
marketing agency, it could be in there, so could recruiting and career services.

Tyler King (13:13.701)
Now, Career Services are almost entirely universities using us for a... But yes, I mean, that's 1.2 % of all of our people. So there's like, there's other, which I agree is worth diving into, by the way. I didn't mean to sound too defensive there. There's other in their sales. I don't know what to do with... I don't know enough about those yet. But aside from that, it's these two buckets. It's the independent rep and the consultant, basically, make up the bulk of who we've currently got. But there's still just a lot of other shit in

Rick (13:16.835)
Okay.

Rick (13:29.26)
Yeah

Rick (13:45.036)
You know each of your account companies websites, right?

Tyler King (13:48.927)
Mmm, many of them. A lot of them use some Gmail account or something, so no. And a lot of them have... No, we don't click.

Rick (13:52.93)
You know their business name?

Tyler King (13:59.839)
I mean our general less annoying thing has been we don't ask you for information unless we can provide value to you with

Rick (14:04.91)
The reason I was asking is usually you could, if you have a website, most likely we could enrich the industry to a lot, at a higher, do you know what saying? And you probably could do another slice of this with a third party tool.

Tyler King (14:15.13)
I yeah, a ton of them do fill it out. let me just, this is funny. I'm just looking at a list of recent signups. The most recent account that picked other, the other description is financial services, which we have that as one of our categories.

Rick (14:31.403)
Okay, so.

So I think what you're saying is like, it's pretty obvious that financial services is a big category and it's pretty obvious that there are related sort of services, you can call it consulting, you can call it travel, brokering, that is tangential and similar like sort of business models to financial planning that you would say is like, okay, there's a consistent thing here.

Tyler King (15:00.986)
Yeah, yeah, and I'm scrolling through the list of others and it's just, it's just a bunch of different stuff.

Yes. okay. I think that it's, I have fairly high confidence that the right move for us is to figure out what has always worked and what is working now. And not to exclude the others. unfortunately there's so much revenue coming in. There's like 20 % of our revenue is coming from big accounts. And you know, something like 20 % of our revenue or whatever is coming from other industries that don't fit in this bucket.

So I'm not saying we can completely throw them out. I'm not saying like, I want to niche down so hard that we exclude that 20%. But I do think we can focus a lot more on what's been working. And I think that's one to five user accounts that are either in this independent rep or consulting type space.

Rick (15:54.668)
And the reason that focusing matters is today you are a for small business, you are a less annoying CRM. If you are for a financial planner, what does that change? I guess it changes your ability to focus on them with any marketing or advertising or lead generation efforts that you have. It allows you to tailor messaging. It allows you to, I guess, build new features.

that they might want that other people might not want.

Tyler King (16:25.914)
Yes, so like an example of a mistake we've made in the past is anytime we've prioritized something that's related to collaboration, well, 70 % or 65 % of our users or of our accounts are single users. They can't collaborate. I'm not saying we shouldn't have any collaborative features, but if you say, okay, we're targeting one to five user accounts, building a chat room feature probably just isn't important for that size company.

Rick (16:44.803)
Hmm.

Rick (16:52.854)
No, it's very interesting. The job to be done gets more clear when you focus on a financial planner. Okay, that's very powerful.

Tyler King (16:58.756)
Yeah. And, and let me share one other thing about this. Like one of the big challenges with this business, even though we're making money, we have a lot of customers relatively, there's the hub spots of the world. And it really hurts when someone's like, I, the worst one is I run a small sales team, but the marketing person at my company needs our data integrated and we're both battling it out with the CEO and they won.

I'm sorry, I hate this, I don't want to switch to HubSpot, but I'm forced to because of the marketing person at my company. One of the big decisions to make is basically, we going to try to win that customer or not? And when you look at these, types, I don't know if industry fully tells the story, but like if you actually are on the phone talking to these customers, one of the things all of these companies all that have in common is there, I don't know how to say this without it sounding insulting, but they're not complete businesses.

And what I mean by that is like, if you think of an insurance agent or real estate agent, the real estate agent didn't build the house that they're selling. The insurance agent isn't United healthcare. They're an independent rep that's really just doing this sliver of the bigger business. And less annoying serum is perfect for that type of person. And it's deeply imperfect for even a business like Leg Up Health. That's only three people.

It still has all the different functions. There's marketing, which is separate from SDR, which is separate from sales, which is separate from customer service, and we're not the right fit for leg up health.

Rick (18:32.576)
It's interesting, I totally, first of all, just want to say I totally agree with your observations. And I also want to say that this feels like you're going back in time to the Zane Benefits days where this actually idea originated in the first place. And the reason that it originated was we were working with insurance agents.

Tyler King (18:51.524)
Yep. Yeah. So for people who don't know, like Rick and I worked together at Zane Benefits. We were launching a, basically we wanted to sell this health benefits product through insurance agents. So we wanted to say, we're not selling directly to the employer. We're partnering with insurance agents. So they're already going in and selling insurance. They'll just tack on our software. And in order to help them, I built a basically CRM. We didn't call it that, but it was a s-

You put your leads in, track their contact info, and then when they're ready to buy our product, you push a button and we called them up basically. Is that your memory of it? Yeah. And then people liked it. And I was like, this seems like an opportunity to start a company around it. And so I left and started Less Knowing Serum. Yeah. I never meant for Less Knowing Serum to be an insurance agent serum. I never, the homepage never said anything about it. I didn't do specific ads aside from later on when we started targeting lots of industries.

Rick (19:27.532)
yeah, exactly.

Rick (19:36.334)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (19:49.434)
The fact that Insurance Agent is the number one industry without me ever trying to do that definitely feels like something.

Rick (19:56.46)
Yes, I agree. Do you, have you, I mean, I feel pretty clear about where you're focusing your ICP criteria on. It's sub, you know, it's called sub 10 employee, really sub five team member firms that want to use a CRM. When you focus in on like a financial services, there, how does this impact how you...

When you look at through this lens, how does it impact your current product roadmap? Like, is there anything you should stop doing, start doing that become really obvious or is it, you just kind of have to think a little bit more.

Tyler King (20:35.318)
so our current set of priorities as a reminder is what we call car play, which is just like checking the basic boxes of in the last 10 years, the CRM industry has leapfrogged us. used to have enough features and now we don't in particular, the ability to send emails, Kanban, mobile and basic automations. I think all of that, that is true regardless of who the customer is. Maybe you could argue, argue automations doesn't belong there. We're already almost done with it. So kind of a moot point.

I don't think it changes anything about what we're currently working on. I definitely think it changes what's about to come. And so I can dive into this is actually the topic I'm more interested in, but I figured we'd want to lay some groundwork. Do want me to go into what I think this means for product?

Rick (21:21.068)
I do. Just before you do though, are we gonna talk about marketing at some point or is that? Okay. Okay. So yeah, I think product would be interesting to talk about and then let's go to marketing after that because I just did a quick search on insurance agency RM and I am pleasantly surprised by the lack of like compelling results. it's, yeah.

Tyler King (21:27.15)
Yes, I've that's the thing I've thought the least about. Let me make. OK.

Tyler King (21:46.895)
It's interesting, other industries have much more competitive niche CRM markets than insurance and I don't know why that is. Like real, if you do real estate or travel agent, there are tons of CRMs that are pretty, I don't wanna say they're good, they all are bad CRMs but they're good for the industry if that makes sense. Before moving off the like defining the ICP thing, your feedback is noted that we have kind of neglected this.

Rick (22:06.158)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (22:16.446)
Eunice, our marketer who's actually like, you marketing's broad, different marketers have different skillsets. think she's like, especially good at kind of like, she was an anthropology major. likes understanding like the idea of finding it, figuring out who our ICP is really. She lit up when I was like, can we go into this? She's going to start doing as many customer interviews as we can. we're going to, this is a thing we can talk about later, but, specifically trying to focus on.

people right after the free trial ends, who either paid us or didn't to try and understand why, what were they looking for, who are they, et cetera. So more to come there, but I acknowledge that we should know more about this than we do.

Okay, product. So last episode, I basically kind of laid the groundwork that eventually we might have to add another pricing tier or product or something to increase our poo, but I don't want to. And so what I want to do is like, try everything I can to make our current model work. And if nothing works, then we will say, okay, we need to add another pricing tier or whatever.

So the question is, are the things we should try to get working? One of them is CarPlay, which we're already doing. Is there anything after CarPlay, but before pivoting or whatever you want to call it that we should try? And I kind of said in the last episode, I listed out, I think it was four ideas. It was like, do more CarPlay stuff, build features our current customers are asking for, work on onboarding stuff, or start building features that we think we can charge for later just so we're ready for it. And I believe of those four, you...

thought the last two were the more promising ones, onboarding and building features we can charge for one day. I could be remembering wrong, but do you want to disagree with anything I just said?

Rick (24:05.218)
What was it? Remind me what onboarding was? Okay.

Tyler King (24:07.172)
Well, we didn't say, we didn't talk about that. And that's actually my, that's the thing I wanna dive into right now. But I've been talking a lot. Let me stop, anything to say?

Rick (24:12.161)
Okay, all right.

Rick (24:15.914)
Well, yeah, I guess.

Rick (24:21.762)
in the world in which you don't, the idea of increasing average revenue per user is attractive to me from a marketing perspective. So like the ability to spend more money to acquire a customer is interesting. This ICP narrowing has the opposite impact of that, right? Like you have to spend less money and so per customer acquired, because it's average revenue per, or average users per account.

Tyler King (24:33.786)
Yes.

Rick (24:51.574)
And so I still think that's something to consider is like your ability to reach who you're for is limited by the amount of money you make for that from them. Just as a general statement. so I, yeah.

Tyler King (25:04.454)
Yes. So let me, I agree that that is a thing to consider. I think there's a jujitsu move here to actually make that an advantage that what's so funny about all this, this brainstorming I'm doing right now is I'm realizing things that I knew 12 years ago and that I, it's not that I forgot it. I just forgot it was important. And one of the, if, in 2013 you asked me, why is less knowing serum doing so well, one of my answers, and I said this out loud many, many times is

Most other CRM companies can't make it work with low priced customers and so they don't even try because they raised a bunch of venture capital, they have to do paid acquisition because that's how you grow quickly. we can, you can't do paid acquisition with our customers because it's not profitable. You have to do word of mouth, just be really less annoying, treat people really well and just be patient. That's like.

I'm not making up revisionist history here. I said that a million times in the past. So yes, I agree with you that if you want paid acquisition to be the growth channel, the change we're talking about is bad for that. But if you wanna say, how do we do a thing none of our competitors can or will do, I don't know, is that compelling at all?

Rick (26:25.134)
Still gotta be able to spend money. Yeah, yeah. okay, so like, what happens, okay, let's say you do the finish the carplay stuff, and you're like, okay, here are the three big product bets around this new ICP, like, what do you think about?

Tyler King (26:25.145)
Of course it relies on us being able to execute on it.

Tyler King (26:41.243)
Yeah. Okay. So I think it falls under the onboarding umbrella, but I've been thinking about onboarding very differently for the last week or two. I always thought onboarding improvements meant changing the signup form to be more appealing. When they sign up, do you just see a blank screen or do we pre-fill data? Is there a video tutorial? What's the drip campaign that they get? I always thought of that as onboarding and it is.

If our ICP truly doesn't need a bunch more features and they truly just want the simplest thing because their business is really, simple. the thing I'm really interested in right now is the idea of making our product simpler. It's not new features. It's not even like, it's not really improving anything you can do with it. It's making it so like slap you in the face easy that

the free trial users can tell how different we are. I know that's vague and I have specific ideas on that, but that's the general category.

I've basically never heard, like I listened to a lot of podcasts from SaaS founders, followed a lot of people on Twitter, read a lot of blog posts on Hacker News. Refactoring the product to be a lot simpler is not a thing I hear people talk about a lot. Maybe that's cause it's a bad idea or maybe it's because they're not targeting our customer TBD. Okay. So I want to explain specifically what I mean, cause I was very vague, but pause any, anything to say.

Rick (28:10.402)
Yep. Yeah, keep going deeper. like pick pick.

Tyler King (28:15.109)
Yeah. Okay, so every SAS product, not every, almost every SAS product is a CRUD app. It's basically a database structure with the UI on top. And when we think about product simplicity, we almost always talk about the UI. The way the database is structured is a huge part of what makes a product simple or not simple. For example, you make a project management app. You could have a project and then tasks, and then the tasks have dates, and then you infer the project dates based on the task dates. Or you could give the project dates and the tasks don't have dates. Or you could have subtasks.

Like the way the database is structured is the product in a lot of ways. 15 years ago, we separated ourselves from Salesforce by making a lot of simplifying decisions about how the data model would work that made us simpler than Salesforce. It was the best or at least much, much better than Salesforce at the time. But now that we have 15 years of experience talking to customers, we know there are still a handful of major points of friction when someone signs up that

We have to explain to them, they find it confusing, it makes data importing hard. Once they get onboarded, it's fine, which is why we have so many happy customers, but there's just friction related to how these data models relate to each other. I'm gonna very quickly summarize it. I can dive into more detail, but you and, yes.

Rick (29:33.198)
Do you have an example of like a type of data point that they have trouble pulling in?

Tyler King (29:38.524)
Yes, so we have contacts and companies as our two primary records. This is one of the things that makes us simpler than a Salesforce. Salesforce, every record is its own thing and then you can like connect them together however you want. We say, contacts and companies are the primary records, everything else gets attached to those. If you enter a contact and you type in a company name, we create both records for you. There's a contact and there's a company. And then you can go fill out the company details and then you can add more contacts at the company and so on.

If you're right, exactly. You mean B2C customers? Yeah. So if you're B2B enterprise sales, multiple stakeholders per deal, our model right now is great. If you are a B2C insurance agent and you literally, you might care what company a person works at, but you don't care about the company itself. Having this extra company record is bad. I could go a lot.

Rick (30:08.302)
What about consumers?

Rick (30:32.152)
noise.

Tyler King (30:36.027)
deeper into that, there's a lot of complexity there, but like this idea that what we have now works for B2C and it works for B2B, but it's not ideal for 95 % of our customers, we could fix that. And just importing data would be way easier, getting your pipeline set up would be way easier and just.

Rick (30:54.136)
I mean, a financial planner who's focused on consumers would really appreciate the ability to better track consumers independently of companies if they're not interested in the company.

Tyler King (31:02.117)
Yeah, and you can already do that to be clear. Like you don't have to make a company, but the fact that the company exists and it's you go to your list, your address book, and instead of you imported a hundred rows and now there's 200 rows because there's one for each company.

Rick (31:14.414)
Do you have, oftentimes financial planners want to track a household. So for example, like the Lindquist household would be Rick and Sable, and then maybe even, they'd have places to track our children if that's relevant for the product that they're selling. How do you handle that currently, or is it, yeah.

Tyler King (31:24.187)
Yes.

Tyler King (31:38.396)
What a lot of people do is they make the, the way our company record works actually works very well for that. So they just say, I'm going to make a separate company field if I care about the company name at all. And then I'm going to enter a contact for each family member. And then I'm going to, as the company name, I'm going to put the Smith household and then it links them all together. But yes, that's another example of how this like underlying data model could, there could be a concept of a family record that isn't on for everybody, but you know, we turn it on for the right accounts.

That would simplify things for people.

the other, so one, that's one big category of improvement we could make. And the other big category is, we have pipelines. That's where statuses are. So if you think like a Kanban view with statuses, you have to like make the contact or company and then attach a lead pipeline to it. And the lead is what has the status, not the contact or company. Again, if you're tracking multiple processes and like complex stuff, our current model works quite well.

But if you're just an insurance agent that's like, I just have leads, everyone in my CRM is a lead and they all have a status and that's all there is I'm doing. Our current model is overly complex and we could fix that by just putting a status field on the contact. They can add a pick list, there's not like the reporting and stuff isn't really strict. It works. You can do everything you're imagining with that pick list, but the UI is not like, like what I want is when you log in, I just want you to see a Kanban view.

Rick (32:53.006)
Can they not add a pick list field to the?

Tyler King (33:09.455)
of your leads. And now right now you see a address, you see a list of your contacts and then you have to go to the lead report to see it's minor in a way, but it also like importing is way more complicated because it's like, well, you're importing the contacts, but then you have to attach leads to them later. Just making it so by default contacts have statuses and you don't even have to know what a pipeline is. You could still make them if you have the more complex workflow, but most people don't.

Rick (33:38.296)
and the statuses would be customizable? Got it, so they could be customer or prospect or unqualified or that kind of thing.

Tyler King (33:40.699)
Yes.

Tyler King (33:46.054)
And I think another type of thing, like right now to customize it, have to go into custom fields and find the field and change the dropdown values. Of course we could do it the way Trello or Notion does it, where you're just on the Kanban board and you're just like, I want a new column. Like that's another area here where don't make the customer think I'm changing the fields in the database. Make them think I want a column here, make the column. And then that just updates the field. Everything I'm saying is pretty, it probably doesn't sound all that novel, but like,

I think you add it all together and it would make the product a lot simpler for the typical user.

Rick (34:20.898)
Makes sense.

Tyler King (34:22.695)
The question is would it matter? And I don't know a good way to figure that out. growth, like we're already the simplest CRM. We could be a lot simpler. Would that help the business is the question here.

Rick (34:27.084)
Matter in what way? growth.

Rick (34:40.247)
I would say that if you can't build conviction around that answer to that, assume no.

Tyler King (34:46.791)
Well, I mean, my answer is yes. But I can't prove it. Like it's a hunch.

Rick (34:49.773)
Okay.

Yeah, I mean, I would say that I don't have the data or the feelings that make me feel strongly. So I would say no, just because of the lack of that. But if you had it, I would trust your judgment given you've spent your career here.

Tyler King (34:59.345)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (35:05.521)
Well, you say you don't have the data, like what would the data look like to you?

Rick (35:11.466)
People saying they're not signing up because this stuff is missing. Knowing that there is a competitor that other people are going to instead of you. And that they're never seeing you because you're lacking features or you're not where they are, that kind of stuff.

Tyler King (35:29.125)
Okay, so we have a little bit of that. The reality is that the type of person this targets is mostly the non-consumer. We actually, just coincidentally, yesterday we got the perfect cancellation message. They were like, I signed up. I love everything about Lesson Knowing CRM. I'm super impressed by what you're doing, but the way your records work and the import because of that was complex and confused me, so I went with Pipe Drive. Bye. So I have a call with that guy next week to learn more, but.

Rick (35:35.406)
Mm.

Tyler King (35:58.352)
We don't get that super often. It's not like an everyday thing, but like that was exactly what I'm talking about.

Rick (36:03.724)
Yes, yeah, as a financial planner.

Tyler King (36:06.279)
consultant. You have said a lot of you've said financial planner a lot. I think that is a part of our customer base, but a pretty small part. Well, if you consider insurance to be financial services, but

Rick (36:07.98)
Yes, yeah.

Rick (36:19.116)
I Yeah, I do. consider insurance and I would consider career coaching, financial services. I know that the coaches would not see it that way, but why do you have a job? You want to make money? It's financial services.

Tyler King (36:32.645)
Well, by that logic, every business is like every business is about money one way or another.

Rick (36:37.046)
No, I mean like when you're advising someone on how to advance their career, it's a financial, usually it's financially motivated. I'm not saying it's always financially motivated, but why are you paying a coach to coach you? I wanna make more money, you're gonna make more money, right?

Tyler King (36:52.261)
Yeah, I think that's to me the difference between a financial planner and insurance agent is one is selling another company's products and the other is providing advice. Like I think of the financial planner more like a consultant and less like a broker.

Rick (37:03.17)
That's fine, yeah, I think you're getting into like, is this a service business or are they a broker? And those are two different things, I agree with that.

Tyler King (37:08.572)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (37:13.681)
So anyway, can't prove it. One thing I like about this idea is it goes back to the like, is the thing that worked for us still a valid business model is a big question here. And if it is, this is the move. Like this is going back to our roots, playing to our strengths. And I think it cooperates nicely with the low price.

can't do a lot of paid acquisition. It's just about having a less knowing product. And then I think there's like a totally different direction, which is try to increase ARPU, try to increase account sizes, play the same paid acquisition game that every other CRM is playing. I think those are basically the two paths we could take. And that one is about adding features, like from a product standpoint.

Rick (38:01.974)
I agree. You don't, I agree. You don't want to compete with the pipe drives and the hub spots and the sales sources. Like I don't, I think you want to, you want to figure out where they're losing or where you're winning against them and, and triple down. So I like to the extent that you feel that you found it, like I'm all on board. I, all I'm saying is I don't know that the, pro like if, don't know if this is more, how much, how much of this is product, you know, sort of

improvements versus making it more clear that you are for them and how, and then also being more of a known quantity in those areas. so I don't know what your market, like the questions that it brings to mind are like, what's the market penetration in the, if you were to say US financial planners or coaches or consultants, like what's your percentage of those?

Is it 1 % of the market that you have? Great. Okay, well, what percentage of the market know the less knowing CRM brand? Is it 2 %? Great. Well, there's a lot of opportunity there and I would go, man, like that seems really exciting.

Tyler King (39:13.127)
Okay, so let's talk about that. And to your question of like, so you're saying if our market penetration was 50%, that's less exciting because there's fewer people to sell to. I have not looked it up for every single industry, but of the industries we've got, think career services, again, by which I mean career centers at universities. That's what that means for us. We have pretty high penetration. Travel agents, I think.

just because there aren't a lot of travel agents, we're still probably 1%, but that's more than most of these other industries were like 0.001%.

Rick (39:54.574)
mean, there's a lot of consolidation happening in the travel agent space, right? Like the independent travel agent is going away, right?

Tyler King (40:00.229)
I don't have like hard data on this, but from talking to a lot of travel agents and stuff, my impression is the commodity travel agent is already dead. They died 10 years ago. The ones that continue to exist are more like a concierge kind of service provider and less like a, like most travel agents do not buy your plane tickets anymore. That used to be the main thing they offered. And now they're like, just go on Expedia or whatever. They're like,

planning experiences and arranging private drivers. But I don't get the impression that that industry is being shaken up at this point. It seems pretty stable to me. But it's small. It's a small industry, no question. Insurance is huge. Real estate is huge. Financial planning.

Rick (40:38.382)
Okay. Yeah, small industry, yeah, look up.

Rick (40:45.282)
Real estate, think it's hard. think real estate, I would be scared to triple down in real estate because I think there's a lot of MLS related, Zillow related type features that are very niche and it kind of scares me to try to compete with.

Tyler King (41:01.061)
Yeah, I agree, but let me, so a listener of the podcast actually, who's a customer I was talking with over email last weekend, and he said something interesting, which was, he was basically like, I might be, I hope I'm not mischaracterizing what he said, but basically he said, why do you on your podcast talk about insurance and travel agents and not real estate agents? Like you've got a lot of us, we're a good fit. And I was like, well, it's because I feel a little, like we don't model the,

like the property relationship in the way that like a real estate specific CRM would. And he was like, listen, the thing I wanna do is get leads. Like I'm doing the exact same lead process any other business would. I can figure out that like, I'm not selling that many houses at any given time. That's not what the CRM is for. I don't know if that's representative of all real estate agents, but I did find that pretty insightful.

Rick (41:54.85)
man, I just assumed that the leads came from people looking at houses. And yeah, like I just, guess I didn't think about like there being leads, a lot of work being done outside of a specific like inquiry, know? So I have a lot more questions on that. Yeah. Yeah.

Tyler King (41:59.985)
Yeah.

Tyler King (42:15.739)
Yeah, me too. We do have a lot of real estate agents. just like, there's no question we're at least a fit for some real estate agents.

Rick (42:23.854)
Well, the thing that I think so to kind of kind of where I think I'm ending up on the product conversation is I have, I think this makes a lot of sense to me from an ICP perspective, but I don't have the data to say like, yeah, yeah, this is what this is the sub sub vertical you should focus on. And here's the product improvements that you made. I have a lot of questions on how they're actually using, using this and what, what it's doing for them and what, it's falling short and also where

Tyler King (42:46.725)
Yeah.

Rick (42:52.598)
Like they don't see what it could do for them and we could maybe like, you know, build the, build the car for them instead of the horse. so I have, I have a lot of like customer interviews are the way to go by the way. Good job. Yeah. Good job on that.

Tyler King (43:03.323)
Yeah, I'm all of the things you just said are on the list of questions we're going to be asking.

Tyler King (43:11.153)
Yeah, one of the things I like about this simplicity thing, by the way, though, is I like a bold strategy that has a failure mode that's still pretty good. I have like 100, 1000 % conviction that our product gets a lot better. Does it result in a higher conversion rate or this or that? I don't know. But like when I've mentioned this to CRM coaches, they're like, my God, we won't even have to do support anymore with half these people.

The main thing we're doing is helping them deal with this stuff. If this stuff just works, amazing.

Rick (43:45.678)
That's a really good sign. That's a data point that's a really good sign, I would say. Like service requests related to this. That's a very strong signal that this would have a massive improvement on experience and thus word of mouth and conversions.

Tyler King (43:49.477)
Yeah. Yeah.

Tyler King (44:01.147)
Yeah, now, but to your point, is true. This is not exactly what people are asking for. Like the person who submitted this cancellation message, I said, he's obviously more sophisticated than our typical customer to even be thinking like, I think your data model is wrong. Most customers do not provide this feedback directly, but the CRM coaches were excited.

Rick (44:19.502)
Well that means there's a lot more people that are not choosing you because of it then. Yeah, yeah, I agree. So I'm getting, that service request thing was a big unlock for me on a data point.

Tyler King (44:22.821)
Yeah, I think so.

Rick (44:34.7)
Okay, so I'm totally on board with this. So how do you move faster?

Tyler King (44:43.621)
Yeah.

Do you have idea? mean, I could ramble, but do you have, is that a leading question?

Rick (44:49.678)
I guess you're, yeah, was kind of like, guess it's more for me to ask myself too. like, it feels like, okay, this is a, in order to know whether this is another big bet, like it takes a lot of time and also a lot of like movement to know whether you're seeing results. And so I think customer interviews are a great next step. Are there other things you could do like between now and like, you the end of the year? Yeah.

Tyler King (45:01.808)
Right, right.

Tyler King (45:12.326)
Yeah.

Tyler King (45:15.739)
Right, good question. So two ways to answer this. I agree with you. We haven't really gotten into the marketing side of things. And this is, I feel like a lot of times I ask you for advice on the thing that's on my mind is product and you just don't know our product that well. so like, but what I really need your advice on that we don't have time to get into today, but maybe this can be a big topic in a future episode is that that marketing angle, like again, I don't want to pivot to we are an insurance or a financial services CRM. I don't want to do that.

but how do we keep our broad base of customers, but go deep on the industries that we fit best? I'd love to talk more about that. Yeah. And then on the product side, I do think we have to finish these CarPlay things first, because I still believe if we don't have the basic requirements, it doesn't matter what else we do. So it's not gonna happen by the end of the year, but I do think they're, Bragg and I were talking about this. Almost all of the complexity, like,

Rick (45:54.786)
Me too, that's fun. That's a really fun problem.

Tyler King (46:13.915)
The product improvements I'm talking about are about simplifying things. The reason things are complex in the first place are because some people need the flexibility to track relationships in a different way. 100 % of those are B2B. And Michael, our head of customer service, estimated to me that 70 % of our customers are B2C. We don't collect that data right now. We're going to start. So the move fast version of this is just get it working really well for B2C.

B2B will still get the exact same experience they do now. It's not like it'll get worse. There's some much, it makes it much easier and like the effort to impact ratio is pretty high to say we're just not going to worry about B2B for now.

Rick (46:54.094)
I mean, positioning yourself as a B2C CRM is not a bad idea. I would say like that probably, I mean, I just typed in B2C CRM. Clavio is one that comes up and I don't know much about them, but I think they mostly play in the, I wanna say the retail space. yep. And then there's really nothing else.

Tyler King (46:58.534)
Yeah.

Tyler King (47:15.761)
Yeah, they're not even a real CRM there. They're like email marketing.

Rick (47:24.086)
So that is interesting. Yeah.

Tyler King (47:24.167)
That's really interesting. It's also, so sit, one of the things that people hate about Salesforce is you sign up and it's like accounts and account is your main record. Even pipe drive, very B2B focused. I haven't used HubSpot, I think HubSpot is.

Rick (47:38.126)
I suppose 100 % B2B focused. People use it for a consumer and they do the same thing that they're doing with yours, but it's not built that way. Salesforce has person accounts and the concept, people hack it all the time, they have retail. But what Salesforce has done to go after these verticals is they've built subversions of Salesforce and packaged it as the nonprofit package or the financial services package or the retail package or the hospitality package.

Tyler King (47:40.305)
Yeah.

Tyler King (47:47.473)
So is it.

Tyler King (47:57.19)
Yeah.

Rick (48:06.872)
kind of comes with these templates that you're talking about. But it's very complex. mean, these are not for two person companies. These are for, you know, multimillion dollar organizations.

Tyler King (48:15.867)
Yeah, that's real. The hard thing is we do have a lot of B2B customers, like a lot. but yeah, I've been trying to find the word of like, well, some of them are brokers and some of them are consultants and this and that. No consultants are B2B, guess, mostly.

Rick (48:32.332)
You could be like a people first CRM. I think you could probably thread the needle where it's like you're able to speak the B2C piece, but you're not pigeonholing yourself. It's more about the contact than the company kind of thing. I don't know.

Tyler King (48:36.806)
Yeah.

Tyler King (48:49.095)
This actually touches nicely on the 30 % of B2B. if these numbers are even right, almost all of them, this is another way we can simplify. Almost all of them are like, I have one person at this company I'm talking to. This is not a multi-stakeholder enterprise sale. It's like, it's still more transactional than what a typical enterprise sale would be. And that's another opportunity to simplify is like, basically merge the company and contact record together.

which would still fit with, I don't know how to like condense that into a marketing message, but yes, I agree with you.

Rick (49:24.334)
And this is all like I would say these like I'm seeing an opening in the market for B2C CRM I'm not what I'm not saying is that that's the right solution here. I think customer interviews will tell you where to go Or at least like open up the next like level of conviction So so I think that's the right next step so I guess like that's where like if you make meaningful progress on customer interviews and you you develop more conviction around the specific things you need to do to be

to position for this ICP that you're not doing already, that is a really, really good progress.

Tyler King (49:59.122)
Yeah. Okay, great. So I will have had this conversation with one person before the next time we talk. I bet Eunice will have by then. certainly at some point, and maybe as soon as next episode, I'll have some more info. I feel like we've still just grazed the surface of the marketing potential here. But what I'm hearing from you is you don't even want to talk about the marketing stuff until you learn more from these customer interviews.

Rick (50:21.102)
Correct, yeah, I, because at the end of the day, I think, well, here's what I'll leave you with on the marketing side. The more conviction and data you have around who your ICPs are in terms of verticals and industries, who the people are that you wanna target at those industries, what the kind of specific criteria and problem sets that they have, how many there are, once you have that, it's like, okay, how do we go get them?

Like that's a very interesting conversation and you can be very specific and you can do a lot of like what I would call organic, low cost, tactical, not annoying marketing, specific, especially with AI these days, like some of the AI tools that are coming out to get in front of them where they are. And you can be a lot more specific when you're talking about a health insurance agent about like, there are so many ways to get in front of a health insurance agent that you haven't thought of.

if we're going after insurance agents.

Tyler King (51:20.411)
So, okay, I agree with all that. We're gonna do the customer interviews. I'm not gonna let that stop me, because even if we make no product changes, we already know we're a good fit for insurance agents, like one to five persons. So, I think we can start thinking about that stuff and get even more specific as we learn more, but it's gonna take months to finish these customer interviews.

Rick (51:39.758)
Okay, well then I would pick one that you have high conviction on. If your real estate conversation goes well, let's do real estate. If you feel good about insurance agents, let's be clear about are they business to business insurance agents? Are they B2C insurance agents? Are they health? Are they property and casualty? There's a lot of different flavors there. And I think if you pick one, we could go through the full how would I think about marketing for that specific subvertical. And I think that would probably unlock something.

Tyler King (52:07.661)
I'll, I'll add that, to the list as a topic. thank you for letting me completely dominate this episode, but I feel, I feel like the past ones I was just wandering around and I, I feel like I'm getting focused here.

Rick (52:16.887)
I loved it.

Rick (52:24.332)
I love it. mean, just to give you an idea on like a taste of the insurance agent stuff, do you know how like GAs work? General agents? Okay. Yeah. So like, I mean, if you become the vendor of choice for a GA, they're independent insurance agents. The GA is not like employing these people, but like you're getting the same value of a big customer with your ICP and there are lots of GAs.

Tyler King (52:30.533)
bit only because of you, yeah.

Tyler King (52:48.785)
Yeah. Man, I hate to hear that. Like, because we've gone after franchises. We've gone after that exact model, but not with our ICP before.

Rick (53:01.518)
I think that's, yeah. So I think there's a, I think these independent people, they're brokering other people's products or services. They hang out together. They report up to the same sort of pyramids. And in some cases it's tooling. Like if you're a marketing agency, maybe you're a HubSpot affiliate. So maybe that's not a great one. like, if you're a, maybe you're, I don't know. I'm not thinking of a good one right now, but like.

Tyler King (53:13.479)
Yeah.

Rick (53:29.574)
There are usually when you are independent two to four person company, you are you are a sub of something else, which is how it works because you don't have the infrastructure to build your own thing.

Tyler King (53:37.819)
Yeah, that's exactly the, I didn't have the language for it I still don't think it's perfect, but like the, it's not a complete business. It's because you're under an umbrella and someone else is running the corporate level and you're just running, okay, I want to, I want to think more about that. That that's the key thing that makes all our customers similar, I think.

Rick (53:45.741)
Yes.

Rick (53:57.23)
Correct, correct. what's beautiful about that from a marketing perspective is there's a one to many, you get that leverage in terms of the, you could spend more money to get a lot of them and the unit economics work.

Tyler King (54:11.761)
Yeah. Okay, great. Thank you. This was really helpful.

Rick (54:14.722)
Well, if you'd to review past topics or show notes, visit startuptolast.com. We'll see you next two weeks from now.

Tyler King (54:20.818)
See you.