Tyler King (00:03.47)
What's going on, Rick?

Rick (00:04.47)
What's up this week, Tyler?

Tyler King (00:06.659)
I actually have stuff to talk about this week. What's going on with you though, first?

Rick (00:10.538)
I am, let's see, I'm back from vacation. I went to just outside of Charleston. Have you ever been there?

Tyler King (00:18.54)
No, I haven't. This has been on Shelly's list of places she really wants to go, so I hope to, but I haven't.

Rick (00:22.744)
All right. Do you like beaches? Okay, well, the nice thing about Charleston is you can go like you can go visit it. There are many beaches within 20 to 45 minutes of the the downtown area, which has wonderful restaurants, a lot of history, lot of fun things to do. We stayed. We started at Folly Beach, which is kind of southwest, southeast of Charleston.

Tyler King (00:26.08)
No!

Rick (00:51.538)
and we got catfished on an Airbnb, which, have you ever had that happen? man, it was not as advertised.

Tyler King (00:54.188)
Oof. No, I haven't, thankfully. Like you just showed up and it was, okay, so you got the house, but it wasn't nice.

Rick (01:03.256)
It was not what we thought it was. I'll put it that way. Some people might think it was nice. But it was more geared towards a bachelor party type thing, more of a frat house than a family vacation house. And we had our family and it was pretty embarrassing. The first night, yeah, exactly. And so the first night, one of our...

Tyler King (01:05.816)
Okay.

Tyler King (01:20.398)
The kegerator is in the kitchen.

Rick (01:30.68)
I think it's our nephew was taking a shower and all, I get a call from my sister who's in the room below that shower and she's like, what's going, Rick, can you come look at this? The pipes were I guess leaking and all the water was coming through the ceiling.

Tyler King (01:44.974)
Okay, did you have Airbnb switch you out or something?

Rick (01:51.286)
We got a full refund, moved the next day to a different island called Isle of Palms, which was fantastic. And so we ended up working out great. you hear about the Airbnb horror stories, the hosts in this case both handled it great. We got some sympathy from the new host. And it was...

Tyler King (02:14.04)
So how big of a group was this? You say your family, but like, it sounds like extended family too?

Rick (02:18.015)
Yeah, so had my, it was, it was the six of us. and then my, my, my parents, and my siblings, which is another six, were going to join me, but they came in waves, instead of coming, they didn't all come at the same time. I can't, had two here, two there, that kind of thing. Yeah. It was really, really fun. It was really relaxing. I totally checked out. I don't usually do that. and so I'm, highly refreshed.

Tyler King (02:34.158)
Gotcha. Cool. Sounds like lot of fun.

Tyler King (02:45.174)
Yeah, that's great. You're back at work now, you're feeling like you've got the productivity, not that you had lost it necessarily, but you can sustain it. Okay.

Rick (02:53.481)
Still in catch up mode, still in catch up mode. So I don't know yet. I don't know about you, but maybe it didn't happen for you the way you have things set up, like I come back from, if I take a week off, the cues I have are, I mean, it takes a week to get caught up.

Tyler King (03:07.17)
Yeah.

Tyler King (03:10.786)
Yeah, mean, your options are don't fully unplug when you're on vacation so that you can come back and hit the ground running, but then your vacation's not as restorative. if, yeah, if I fully unplug, I'm definitely like a week to maybe even three weeks of a catch up kind of, yeah.

Rick (03:25.564)
Mm-hmm. That's yeah, so I've got a good it's either three weeks or a couple of like long days of extra work catching up. So

Tyler King (03:33.43)
Yeah, this is the thing I was kind of complaining about with my four day schedule right now is missing that one day, even just a normal week I'm catching up all week when I'm behind when I come in and I've got a bunch of stuff piled up. I might not even be able to get, yeah, that one day a week really makes a difference for that.

Rick (03:50.524)
Yeah, did write an article right before I left on a concept that I was reminded of and I just wanted to share it and I'd love to hear I think you have a pretty large topic today that we should we should jump into soon But I have some quick hitters if you'd like to go through those real quick First is like this the article is right around first team principles. Are you familiar with this concept? Okay, so a guy named I never know how to say this guy's name. It's Patrick Lincone or pack

Tyler King (04:07.758)
Yes sir.

Tyler King (04:14.061)
No, I'm not.

Rick (04:19.979)
Patrick Lincione, but he wrote a, Lichione, that's probably, Linchone, yeah, it's probably Linchone. But he's written a bunch of books, but one of his most popular books is The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. And in that concept, he talks about the pyramid of how you build a team. Yeah. it's useful framework for thinking about teams and how to get them functioning.

Tyler King (04:23.092)
Lincioni! You gotta do the gesture with your hands, I think.

Tyler King (04:39.904)
I did read that, sorry. Yeah, you suggested that a few years ago. did read that, yeah.

Rick (04:48.167)
And not, know, the foundation of all teams, his point is you have to have trust. And I think you're really good at that, by the way. That's something that I struggled with. It's like, no, let's go straight to results, which is the top of the pyramid. But anyway, there's a concept he shares in that book about first team. Or sorry, not in that book, but like there's a general concept of first teams that he shares in other books that like when people apply that five dysfunctions, what they often get wrong is they apply it to the people who report to them.

Tyler King (04:55.806)
You

Rick (05:15.807)
without thinking about who their first team is. And if you think about an organization, it's made up of smaller teams and being super clear as an individual who your first team is can be really, really helpful to real, to help you understand who's important for you to be in sync with in order for you to succeed. and so I just took over this new team at, at windfall. And one thing that the first thing that, that I've noticed is that a lot of the managers involved aren't necessarily like clear on

who the first team was. And so I wrote this, yeah.

Tyler King (05:47.277)
So let me put it, when you say first team, mean like, let's use me as an example. I shouldn't go to the CRM coaches first or the devs first. I should do like me, Michael, Robert, Bracken, like the kind of management or like first team is, is that what that means?

Rick (06:01.897)
Yes, and I would even argue that your first team is probably your partners or even your co-founder Bracken. And then it's their partners. And then it's the full management team. And then, you know, whatever other teams you work on.

Tyler King (06:13.422)
So it's kind of like concentric circles is maybe the way to think about this. Okay.

Rick (06:15.483)
Mm Yes, yes. And it's more of a prioritization thing where, like, if you want to do something that is going to, you know, maybe benefit a second team over the first team, you want to make sure you understand the consequences of that because you might build trust with one team at the expense of another. And if you do that too often at the wrong team's expense, it will backfire on you.

Same thing like just like team building and so anyway, I've heard an article about it. It was just it was good to remind myself of like the importance of Sometimes it's easier to go fast with your direct reports Who like, know, it's easier to build trust with because you have authority over them and like you can like you can basically just you know Create the atmosphere that you want but if you do that without thinking about okay Who actually is my first team that I like that I need to be worried about be be on the same page with?

Tyler King (07:11.203)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (07:11.395)
You can, you can run into a lot of friction unnecessarily. It's actually a slower process to get where you want to, where you want to be. That's all I got. I haven't sent a newsletter in a long time. So I just posted, I silently posted it on my, on my website. Yes. But.

Tyler King (07:19.224)
Gotcha. Did you send that out in your newsletter? I didn't see anything.

Tyler King (07:28.088)
Alright, well, I'd love to say we'll link to it the show notes, but I don't have time for that. Go find it, reader.

Rick (07:33.4)
Um, yeah, go find it. Um, well, if I, if I can get an album leak out of this, hold on here, let me, uh, let me slack it to you right now. Um, anyway, uh, the other thing that I had here, and this is, then I'll pass it over to you for, for the larger topic today, um, is vibe coding. I am feeling a lot of, uh, what do you, what's it called when you feel like you're missing out on something? I'm feeling FOMO. Yeah, I'm feeling that, uh, about.

Tyler King (07:39.918)
All right, okay, I'll post it.

Tyler King (07:57.08)
FOMO.

Rick (08:01.673)
AI in general and like just tinkering, but particularly with vibe coding and I'm watching Jason Lemkin basically geek out over this. I think he's like built the perfect like job for himself. He can just experiment with technology, make money and invest. It's like this.

Tyler King (08:14.424)
He's the guy who AI wiped his whole production database, right? And it went viral. I think that's...

Rick (08:21.307)
Is that the guy I don't know Well, anyway, he posted an article or I should say a Twitter thread Or an X thread or whatever is called now You don't watch that stuff anymore and can't read it So I sent it to you to Tyler and he could not you know, look at this So I posted a little picture for you to look at but basically he's gone. He's basically said I've done a lot of different out a vibe coding Here's sort of like my learnings and he basically category

categorizes by green, yellow, orange, red, the different types of apps vibe coding is suitable for. And he basically is saying like green light is like if you have an internal app, the idea that you can lock, but you can make sure that whatever you're building is on a platform that is secure. It's like a no brainer to just like start using AI internally to supercharge, build internal tooling that makes your life easier. Do you agree with that?

Tyler King (09:19.138)
Yeah, I agree that he makes the point. The thing you have to be careful about is make sure that it's locked down properly. That's the big risk is you make an Ajax endpoint, that endpoint isn't authenticated and then anyone can hit that like major security implications. if you, I don't know how a non-coder would feel confident in that, but if you are confident that you've got the security down, I agree that Vibe coding is great for internal apps. Yeah.

Rick (09:44.994)
Cool. The second thing was landing pages. and, and I was actually surprised this wasn't higher than the internal apps because generally landing pages are like, no one cares. It's, it's, there's no security issue. Correct.

Tyler King (09:59.107)
Well, yeah, so I'm reading what he says. says, the reason it's yellow instead of green is landing pages often collect personal data and vibe coded apps may store PII behind the scenes. I don't know what he's talking about. Like it is true they store data, but it's almost always through a third party. Like you put your Google analytics script on there or something. I've never, I guess I hard coded this myself like a decade ago for lessening serum, but I don't think landing pages are really ever like,

manually collecting PII in a way that would be a problem that I can think of.

Rick (10:33.719)
Yeah, me neither. don't like, wouldn't it be just to solve just to say, like, I agree to our terms and the terms, you know,

Tyler King (10:42.136)
I mean, maybe he's talking about like, if you're doing, you you have a piece of content and then you want to drive someone to the newsletter. Like if you're, if you're coding all that yourself, instead of using HubSpot or something for the forms, I guess the, like the way you store that form data, if you're, you know, in a HIPAA situation, but you're not like, even if you're in the healthcare space, you're not getting someone's medical history through a, like a landing page form.

Rick (11:03.585)
Yeah.

Rick (11:08.949)
And if they do, is that your problem? If someone's sharing their medical history online? if you're, okay, yeah, there you go, okay. yeah. The orange ones are complex apps and what I would call prototypes. And he basically says, is,

Tyler King (11:14.294)
Well, if you're asking for it, I think it's your problem. But yeah, anyway, I agree with you. That seems like a weird concern to have.

Rick (11:36.694)
You can only go so far like for prototypes, it's fine. But like if you're going past like prototype and actually selling the complex app to someone is probably it's not there yet. And then he talks about apps handling confidential data into PII. That's Orange Light. I was surprised that was a red light to me. Like that's the security stuff here is like the number one concern. And then. And then red light, this wasn't necessarily like vibe cuttings, not a good use. It was more like it's a dumb use case. It was like building your own CRM, which I thought was funny.

Tyler King (11:54.252)
Yeah, for all of them basically.

Tyler King (12:05.592)
Well, specifically, said Salesforce.

Rick (12:08.033)
Sure, but what he's saying in this is when you can buy a versus build it, buy the tool. Don't try to rebuild it. It's not worth the energy.

Tyler King (12:19.564)
That's not how I interpreted this. I interpreted this to mean don't think you can build and sell to someone else a CRM. Yeah, that's how I interpreted it.

Rick (12:27.046)
Enterprise, software. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I agree with that. There's another piece in this, towards right around this one where it was like, oh, and like it's dumb. You should just buy this stuff versus build it for yourself.

Tyler King (12:37.517)
Yeah.

Tyler King (12:41.122)
Yeah, actually, I'm sorry, I'm rereading it. Your interpretation there is correct. So number five was complex apps. That's saying don't build Salesforce and sell it to someone else. Number seven is saying don't build Salesforce for internal use because Salesforce already exists. Okay, yeah.

Rick (12:49.686)
Yes.

Rick (12:54.583)
Exactly, exactly. Um, so anyway, do you have any like other green light vibe? Like I know vibe coding, probably doesn't apply to you because you're not necessarily a non-technical person, but like, you have any, any at, at, and, know, ands to this?

Tyler King (13:10.124)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, not quite what you're asking, but like when I was reading this, I use the term vibe coding. think a lot of people like me is the term vibe coding. Jason Lemkin is not a coder at all. My impression is he has no coding experience and he's really just letting the AI lead him. And that is the true definition of vibe coding. And it's different from what I mean. Like when I'm talking about it, I'm like, I know how to code, but I'm going to like...

I'm gonna try to code through prompt rather than code by myself writing the actual code, but I still am reviewing it and stuff like that. He's saying like, I can't even review it. I can't even look at the security implications, things like that. So I just thought that was an interesting distinction that I probably didn't have clear enough in my head. So for example, like leg up health, I would argue I'm kind of like quasi vibe coding some of the features that we add, but he couldn't do it, right? That's the comp. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rick (13:53.14)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (14:02.699)
You're supervising. You're playing the role of a supervisor that you would say the reason it works on leg of health is because you're supervising it as a technical person.

Tyler King (14:11.904)
Right. So yes, I think this is an interesting list. It would be a different list if the question is you have some coding background, not even necessarily as much as I do, but like some coding background, and you're using AI to kind of supercharge what you're doing. I think the list would look different, but I agree with what he said aside from the landing page one. I think you and I are both on the same page about that. I think he's absolutely right. That's what you can do if you have no coding skill at all.

Rick (14:36.171)
Yeah, do you think that there is an opportunity like anywhere else, Greenlight, that you would say for me to, where would you tell someone that's non-technical to safely sandbox with AI coding?

Tyler King (14:49.506)
Yeah.

I mean, I would just like emphasize his one green light was internal apps. and, but specifically, I feel like a lot of internal apps you kind of think of as, kind of what we're doing with like up health using Laravel Nova, which for the listener, this is like JD goes in and manages all the policies we have in our database and that type of thing. It's like a part of our app. It's just a part of our app that we only use internally. I would say not that there's a different type of internal app, which is like.

You know, once a year we have to get all the data from whatever source you get the data from on what all the new insurance plans are in the country. And then we have to like get that into our database, build a standalone app that's just like, I'm getting the data, I'm cleaning it and I'm pushing it into the database. That's how, like, I think that's the best opportunity here where it's not even like a long-term internal app. It's just like a single purpose, totally separate code base to do this little standalone thing.

That's where I would really focus.

Rick (15:52.886)
Yeah, he actually, I'm looking at this image I shared with you and it's missing two of them. His first one is basic info web apps, no customer data. And what you're saying is the same thing, which is like, if there's a third party data source that's publicly available and you're, and you're basically, you're, building a website that is providing that information in a, in a different structure, in a different structure, without any receiving any third party data outside of that publicly available data.

Tyler King (16:10.413)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (16:18.657)
that it's like, it's, low risk. Like, cause you're not collecting anything. There's no security issue. That's smart.

Tyler King (16:23.298)
Yeah. And it could be that it could be, I was listening to the mostly technical podcasts and Aaron Francis said, I didn't, I didn't even exactly follow what he was doing, but like he does, he's basically like a YouTube personality, more or less. I'm kind of oversimplifying, but he built something that like downloads YouTube videos automatically and then does like trans codes and something or other, and then puts it. I don't even fully get what he's doing, but it's like, it's just a little tool to make his video editing process slightly quicker. Right. So it's like,

Rick (16:49.601)
Mm.

Tyler King (16:50.658)
Yeah, there's no data concerns. This is all public information. There's no maintenance. One of the worst parts of vibe coding is the maintenance is a nightmare. Like AI is just writing this absolute garbage code. Not that it can't write good code, but if you don't direct it correctly, it's gonna write really hard to maintain code. So something where you're like, don't care if five years from now, I can't maintain this. Like I can just type a prompt and it'll regenerate it for me again. You know, that type of thing.

Rick (17:17.975)
pretty cool. basically, yeah, I'm thinking about that. There's a lot of really interesting data in the form of 5500. I think we've talked about this before for leg of health. It sounds like some tool to expose the form of 5500, even if just like an internal tool for leg of health to begin with, is a pretty low risk endeavor. then that's a potential thing that could be exposed to external users with low risk as well, because we're not necessarily.

asking anyone for their information, or they could just like peruse it.

Tyler King (17:51.245)
Yeah, and I would even say if you're doing that, like you could put that in our real production database, whatever data you're manipulating, don't do that. cause then, you know, well, what if one of your queries is pulling from the wrong, like the fact that you're even connecting to the production database makes me nervous. Just throw it in a CSV or yeah, whatever. Now, having said all that, like my final thought here is like, I don't think you should be feeling as much FOMO as you are feeling. I think this vibe coding thing, like,

Rick (17:57.866)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Rick (18:06.433)
Put it in own space. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Cool.

Rick (18:15.606)
Okay.

Tyler King (18:20.468)
It is evolving so quickly. think it's very possible a couple of years from now. You just type in what you want and it gives it to you. like learning all these skills might be, these might be very transient skills that aren't really useful a couple of years from now. And I don't think this is like what windfall needs from you. If you're just personally curious and want to play around for fun, cool, but yeah.

Rick (18:38.231)
No, this is personal curiosity. It's one of those things where it's like, just, this is the type of tinkering I like to do. And I feel like I'm missing out on this moment of tinkering. Yeah.

Tyler King (18:51.096)
Well, so let me propose something different to you then. Rebuild your, rebuild ricklinquist.com. Cause that's pretty low stakes. You've got a little functionality there where like you'll have, where do your blog posts go and like the newsletter signup and stuff like that. So it's kind of a real project, but with low stakes.

Rick (19:10.539)
Yeah, interesting, you know, and I'd probably need my own content management system, that would be interesting. Cool, that's a good idea actually, thank you. All right, over to you.

Tyler King (19:18.446)
Okay, so my big topic that we have always saved to the last 10 minutes that we haven't really sunken our teeth into, I've been describing it as VoIP, but I wanna reframe it a little bit. Okay, sorry, I'm probably repeating things I've said in previous episodes, but lessening CRM has always only ever had one price. It was originally $10 per month, now it's 15. So we've had a price increase, but we've always at any given time had one price.

And that means growth, there's only one way to grow and that is to increase the number of users. And for, you know, a long time, that's, we grew that way. We added more and more users. We have about 25,000 users now. We've been plateaued on users for a while. There's a different type of growth, which is increasing ARPU, average revenue per user. We already did that once when we did the price increase, right? Going from 10 to $15, our revenue went up a lot.

I can't just keep doing that. I can't just be like every year we're raising prices endlessly. So the discussion really is how to increase ARPU, I think, by selling something else to our customers. That's like the high level topic, right? Yeah.

Rick (20:33.227)
Yep. Is it also not convert more of your traffic?

Tyler King (20:40.416)
Yeah, it could be both. I'm kind of, that's kind of where one of the evolutions has happened since we last spoke is realizing that there's a, so at the end of the day, what this looks like is building another product or a feature on our existing product and charging for it. And there's kind of this like sliding scale of A, how much do we think, how many people do we think will pay for it such that it will increase our poo and the other sliding scales, how much does this just make our product better? Now let's put some language to that. I've described that before as

Rick (20:41.462)
Yeah.

Tyler King (21:09.774)
CarPlay. As a reminder, cup holders are features that, like if you think of what we're building as a minivan, a cup holder's nice to have, but no one's buying it because of that. If you've already got a customer, adding more cup holders makes them happier, but it doesn't really help convert new customers. CarPlay is a type of feature where like, I'm not buying a car that doesn't have CarPlay. People come evaluate our CRM and say, I like what you've got, but you're missing things A, B, C. I'm not gonna use you because you're missing those.

So a carplay feature is basically saying like, is obviously it's not a requirement for everyone. We have 25,000 people. So like we already have enough for a lot of people, but each additional carplay feature we add expands the size of the market that we can sell to. Okay, cool. So that's the language here. like when we talk about adding another product and by product, again, it could be a feature, it could be a product, but when we talk about adding another product, increasing ARPU or

Rick (21:54.315)
Yep, like I get it, yep.

Tyler King (22:08.034)
getting this carplay benefit are kind of the two main axes I'm thinking about it

Rick (22:10.667)
Got it. All right, cool.

Tyler King (22:15.366)
So last time we talked, as well as the few episodes before that, VoIP was, we had not decided to build VoIP, but it was the front runner. I hadn't really talked with the rest of the team a lot about it. Anyway, we've gotten a lot more into it. And I didn't want to have tunnel vision and be like, I've already decided it's VoIP. So I kind of went to the team and said, if we want to build another product, what should it be? How should we charge for it, et cetera. And so we got more ideas than just VoIP. Feel free to interrupt all the time, by the way.

Rick (22:42.003)
No, I'm interested in what the ideas were.

Tyler King (22:44.622)
Yeah, so we listed out a bunch of ideas. Yeah.

Rick (22:47.671)
Well, can you back up for a second? Sorry. Can you explain how you position this to the team? And then maybe you could talk a little bit about like how they reacted and this evolved from there. Cause I think that's important context.

Tyler King (22:56.682)
Yeah, good point. I positioned it pretty similarly to how I started this conversation, which is like, we all know our user growth is plateaued. We are good for a while. I actually sent my newsletter to the company this week was like, basically if nothing changes, we don't add any more users, our only increases in expense are kind of expected, giving people raises and inflation. I think we got seven years before we run out of money, which in a way sounds scary. The fact that we ever run out of money is scary, but like,

There are a lot of knobs we could turn, know, we could, someone leaves the company and we don't replace them and that type of thing. So we need, but we need to increase revenue to get to, if there's no runway, it's like it's unlimited runway. One way to do that is to add, basically the question is, is it easier to add 50 users a month or is it easier to upsell our current users an extra $15 a month to 50 people? It doesn't have to be $15 a month, but you know, that type of thing. And basically everyone's like,

Rick (23:52.107)
Yep, yep, yep, yep.

Tyler King (23:56.303)
I've not heard a single dissenting voice on like, yes, we should add the ability to sell something else to our customers. So that was kind of the starting point of it. But then the question is, well, what should we sell? And I've heard a lot of different opinions on that.

Rick (24:11.839)
And is it outside the void? Okay. Okay.

Tyler King (24:14.092)
Yes, right, VoIP is one of the options. The main answer that I hear from the team is email marketing, which does not surprise me at all. I probably should have gotten ahead of this a little bit. There's no question, email marketing is what everyone's asking for. It's what most CRMs offer. I just really, really, really don't wanna build it. But whatever, it's on the table. So that's kind of the main thing.

I don't think anyone else was necessarily pushing for VoIP. That's not a thing that intuitively came naturally to the team. The other set of things are, there's a bunch of different ones, but things like appointment scheduling, project management, invoicing, document signing. Basically, if you just think about the whole ecosystem of SaaS products that tends to integrate with the CRM, just like start with one of those, but the idea would build a whole ecosystem of these kind of surrounding tools. Yeah.

Rick (25:09.323)
as add-ons basically.

Tyler King (25:11.022)
Yes, that's, let's just acknowledge we've got another 25 minutes here. This conversation is gonna go all over the place and probably be unstructured. One of the topics is what should we build? Another topic is how should we price it? Is it a separate standalone product? Is it an add-on? Meaning I think of an add-on is like you can buy it a la carte. Like if we have three products, you can say, well, I wanna buy that one for $2 per account per month. I wanna buy that one for $3 per user per month, whatever.

Rick (25:18.198)
Yeah, yeah.

Rick (25:36.855)
Yeah, then you might have seats that you assign to different users. Like there's a whole thing there.

Tyler King (25:38.669)
Right.

Or there's a tiering system, which we're all familiar with, although normally tiers are like for this price, for a low price, you get a bad CRM, for a middle price, you get a medium CRM, for a high price, you get a good CRM. We're not really talking about tiers in that sense, but more like for $15 a month, you get a CRM. And for let's call it $30, whatever the price is for $30 a month, you get a CRM plus other stuff, but it's like a bundle in the same way that our core product is already a bundle, right? People don't get to be like,

Rick (26:03.607)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (26:07.882)
I want your CRM, but I'm not paying for pipelines. So can you reduce the price for me? Like it's all bundled together, right?

Rick (26:13.013)
Yep. The thing I don't love about, mean, let's just acknowledge that the downside of that type of packaging requires the purchase of a CRM in order to use some of these other features. And so it does limit your breadth in terms of new users. so I, I generally like the, the, but the trade-off benefit is simplicity for the buyer.

Tyler King (26:24.482)
Yes.

Rick (26:39.767)
and the seller in this case. So you're much more likely to be able to do a, uh, your current motion with, with, with, with three tiers than you are with, uh, with, uh, you know, lots of complicated add-ons. Um, but at the same time, yeah, keep going. Sorry. Yeah.

Tyler King (26:39.779)
Yeah.

Tyler King (26:55.406)
So yeah, I, well, let me dive into that a little bit. like, let's just talk about some of the complications. Someone calls our support line. You can't just pick up the phone and say Less Annoying CRM. If it's like there's Less Annoying CRM and let's call it Less Annoying Voice or whatever. Now we have two brands and then like, is the app at lessannoying.com or is it at lessannoyingcrm.com? if you want to sell to standalone things, there's that complexity. There's the pricing complexity. There's the technical complexity of like, okay, now

Like you have to be able to use this and have the whole CRM feature set turned off potentially. But the upside you're talking about is it creates an entirely new channel for people to come in and become customers. Yeah. So yes.

Rick (27:36.311)
Which is the core root problem here. Like the existential problem.

Tyler King (27:42.157)
Yeah, well, yes and no, no. So there's how do we get more users and there's how do we sell a higher price to existing users? I do think upselling currency RM users is gonna be a hell of a lot easier than creating a whole new SaaS business with a new channel. Those are two different ways to increase revenue. We don't necessarily have to do both of

Rick (28:06.387)
Agreed. All I'm pointing out is that, if you didn't have a user growth problem, we wouldn't be having this conversation. So like there there's a potential that like, that is the bigger, if you could solve that, if you had confidence, you could solve that it comes, it comes first.

Tyler King (28:13.422)
Absolutely.

Tyler King (28:23.554)
Yes, so that goes back, okay, so that goes back to how could we solve that? mean, option A is what is the best CarPlay feature? Forget charging more. And actually it's working against us if we charge extra for this from that standpoint. It's like, how do we convert more people through our current channels? That is find the best CarPlay feature and build it. Who knows if that works or not? We're doing that right now. We're building mobile and Kanban and automations. We'll see if that has an effect. Then there's like starting a whole new

business almost, right? And trying to get customers directly. Those are two different things, right?

Rick (28:57.739)
Yep, yep, and then there's also, I'm going back to, yeah, this is very unstructured, sorry. I'm going back to another benefit potentially of the packaging approach is once you figure out who that ICP is for the middle package and the highest package, your ability to spin on marketing is gonna go up dramatically because your ACVs are gonna go up. So that gets me interested, I'm just, I'm ultimately like,

Tyler King (29:19.244)
Mmm, I hadn't thought of that

Rick (29:26.921)
most worried about the user growth issue and solving that. Like that's my bias in this conversation. And so I'm thinking about like, okay, how is this helping us solve the root problem? And it seems to me like this actually helps you, if you get the right packages with the right features, you're gonna be able to market to a different group proactively in a way that you haven't been able to do before at the low $15 per month, you know, user level. That is interesting. That is exciting.

Tyler King (29:31.79)
Okay.

Tyler King (29:56.824)
Yeah, okay.

Rick (29:58.038)
You're gonna need...

Tyler King (30:00.014)
will say though, like I'm more interested in ARPU growth than user growth personally, just cause I think that's a really, like we've, we have tried a lot, a lot, a lot of things to get user growth and we're not giving up on that by any means, but we've done nothing to increase ARPU. That's where the low hanging fruit is.

Rick (30:14.859)
Yeah, and I would argue that the reason you're hamstrung on growing users is your $15 per month price point. And so to the extent that you can eliminate that constraint on marketing spend, that gets really exciting from a user. Anyway, I know it's not important to you, but it solved my problem that was keeping me from diving into the ARPU conversation.

Tyler King (30:23.437)
Yeah.

Tyler King (30:31.223)
Nah, at the-

Yeah.

At the same time, I do want remind you, when you hear discussions about SaaS pricing, often hear product-focused founders like me always under charge and the customer doesn't care about price. When we went from $10 to $15, it tanked our free trial flow. It dropped by basically proportional to the price increase. So I think there's more money to be made here, but I also don't want anyone listening to think of this like,

Like I don't know anything about windfall really, but I bet your customers are like throwing around like going from 15 to $30 a month probably doesn't matter to them. It does matter to our customers.

Rick (31:15.607)
Yep. No, you got it. Yeah. And you're in the nice thing here is like with the packaging, you're on asking them to do that. They still have the $15 option. But, what you're, think what you do need to acknowledge is like, it's, it's likely that if you're going to have a $15 package, a $30 package, and maybe a $50 package or 49 99 package, you're going to probably need some sort of, I don't know if it's the role your coach plays, but you're going to need some sort of sales assist motion to help them evaluate. Um,

Tyler King (31:23.062)
Exactly.

Rick (31:44.075)
that you probably haven't had to do before because it was, it wasn't this, was, it was a buy, no buy decision, not which one.

Tyler King (31:49.973)
Yeah, I would be curious about, there are a lot of SaaS companies that don't have that, that have tiers, like all of them. We're one of the very, very few SaaS companies with no tiers and there are a lot of these that don't have sales assist.

Rick (32:02.081)
That's true, like, pipe drive, I've never talked to anyone there. That's a point. That's good point.

Tyler King (32:05.782)
It probably limits the upside. okay, maybe this is a nice time to go into like some stats on pricing. First of all, I have not done a lot of research on this, but like I asked ChatGBT, there's all these SaaS companies that have multiple tiers. I don't know if ChatGBT is telling me the truth or not, but I asked like, what percentage of customers are on not to the cheapest tier? What would you guess the answer to that is?

So like X percent are on the cheapest tier, Y percent are on something above the cheapest tier.

Rick (32:35.517)
I would assume that the majority are on the, not on the cheapest tier.

Tyler King (32:42.25)
Okay, so more than 50 % are upsold. ChessGPD said 20 % upsold is 20 to 30 % is pretty common. Now that's not necessarily by revenue, that's by like number of customers. So like potentially a lot more than 20 % of the revenue is coming from those higher ones. Another stat I have, this is, yeah, I don't know. don't know. it did list specific companies. It was like PipeDrive has this.

Rick (32:43.991)
Yeah.

Rick (32:48.247)
Mmm.

Rick (32:58.199)
Oh yeah yeah.

Rick (33:03.891)
Where's the source on that? Surveys? Yeah. Chat.

Tyler King (33:12.145)
Dropbox has that. I didn't check to verify any of that, but it hallucinated convincingly anyway. Let me give a few more stats here. This was very sobering for me. So the last big feature we launched was this email integration where we automatically log emails. This is highly requested by lots of our customers. When we sent the email out to announce it, only 55 % of people even opened the email. And that's probably too high because a lot of

people register as opening but didn't. Only 7.7 % of our current customers are using that feature. So we built one of the most, not one of, the most demanded feature and it's free and we could only get 8 % of people using it. One of the things that I want to be realistic about here is like, we can't just build something, like we built that forms product as well sort of recently that you could,

That's the only thing we have right now that you could think of as a separate product instead of just a feature of lessening serum. 1 % of our customers are using it again for free. So if we were like, well, let's sell forms to people, the amount of money that would generate would be pretty like, what would 1 % go down to if we actually charged for it? Like 0.1 % maybe. It'd be a pretty small ARPU increase impact. So that's a little sobering. However, to counter that, again, maybe ChachiPD is hallucinating.

Rick (34:29.163)
Yep.

Tyler King (34:41.134)
You guessed even higher than they said. I don't think 20 % is unrealistic to think. When SaaS companies have tiers, something like 20 % or more often pay for the higher tier. And the other thing is while I said this email integration thing, only 8 % are using it, if you do cohort breakdown on that, 18 % of customers that signed up this year are using it. And more like 4 to 5 % of customers that signed up prior to, basically before it launched.

So one of my takeaways here is it's really hard to get current customers to adopt a new thing. It's not nearly as hard to get someone when they sign up and they're already going through this change process to get them to adopt the new thing. part of how I'm thinking about the numbers is like, it's more about every month we add about 400 users and we lose about 400 users. So yes, we're plateaued, but there's actually quite a bit of new customers coming in. Probably the big opportunity is selling to those people more so than selling to the people we've got.

Rick (35:35.8)
Yep, I totally agree. 100 % people when they're buying something are in change mode, implementation mode. If you're not in a buying cycle, most likely you are focused on something else other than CRM optimization. the only exception would be if there's a dedicated person. I don't know if you know this, but if you can find out who is like the system admin.

of your customer, like that person potentially, if they're a dedicated resource, could be always in the market for new features and that would be someone you want to have a list for. Okay.

Tyler King (36:02.242)
Yeah.

Tyler King (36:10.638)
Okay, so here's some more stat. I think that's a good point. About 65 % of our customers are single user accounts. So obviously there is no system admin, or they are the system admin accounts. And then there's a very long tail, like going up to, think our largest account right now is 350 users or something like that. it's like, if you just think of one and two user accounts, it goes up to like,

Rick (36:23.511)
65 % of users are accounts. Okay.

Tyler King (36:40.014)
75%, one, two, and three user. So like, we're basically talking about almost entirely one to five user accounts here in terms of upsell opportunities. And, but with the multi-user accounts, it is very easy to tell who the person is. Cause basically whoever adds the other users, it's them. So we do know who they are.

Rick (36:58.583)
You got it. Yep.

Tyler King (37:00.942)
Uhhh... Okay.

Because there are so many different variables here and like it's hard to stay focused. Maybe I'll jump to the set of options we're currently considering and what I think that each option means. And I'd love your thoughts on this. Okay, so there's VoIP. Well, actually let me start with email marketing. Again, I don't wanna build email marketing and I might refuse to do it just cause I don't want to. To be clear why I don't want to, I think you're basically just spending all your time combating spam. It's not really about the email marketing product itself.

That doesn't sound fun to me, but email marketing to me is probably the best CarPlay slash upsell feature. It's a feature when people come in and they're evaluating a CRM, a lot of people expect it. We don't have it right now. So even if we made no money off of it, like we'd obviously have to charge for the email sending itself, but let's say we had no profit off of it. It's still probably helps expand the total market we can sell to more than any of the other features we're considering.

I think it has decent upsell opportunity, but not great because you basically can't do email marketing without changing DNS records on your domain name. And 25 % of our customers don't even have custom domain names. They're on Gmail or whatever. Of the remaining ones, a bunch are like one individual person who's part of an insurance agency or a larger, they don't have control over their domain. And of the remaining ones, a bunch of them aren't technical enough to go in and change their domain. So I think like,

A pretty small percentage of our customers could even turn on this feature even if it was free. So I don't think it's a huge upsell opportunity, but it's a good carplay opportunity. Any pushback or questions about that?

Rick (38:44.631)
I think what you're saying, was that all email marketing related to, are you saying that you see that as an add-on more so than a package piece? Or am I, okay.

Tyler King (38:54.574)
I definitely don't see it as a standalone product because I don't think we could, that is such a competitive space. There's no way, yeah, yeah, we're just not gonna be competitive there. I think it would be, yes, an add-on or a second tier, however you think of it, yeah.

Rick (39:02.347)
That's MailChimp.

Okay.

Rick (39:10.049)
But I do see it as a carplay. I think it is something you could charge by, it stands alone as something as an add-on you could charge for, or you could include it in a premium package, or both.

Tyler King (39:18.242)
Yeah, yep, okay. Let's talk about VoIP next. Now I do think of all of the ideas, VoIP is the one that could be a standalone product. And what I mean by that is when you look at the competition, it's competitive of course, but less competitive than CRM or email marketing. And I think like we had that whole conversation about SIP trunking and stuff like that, that I think we could make not like the best VoIP product in the world, but something competitive that maybe could be sold on its own. But that's the more I've talked about it with Bracken.

What I really think the VoIP product is, is it's niching down. And that is to say, email marketing is saying, we need to be a CRM that can be used by marketers and we're not right now. VoIP is saying, we don't need to be a CRM that can be used by marketing. We're selling mostly to individual people. There are still a lot of businesses out there. It's a minority, but still a large group of businesses out there that don't do a lot of email marketing or other automation type stuff. They're like old school salespeople.

They place calls, they schedule one-on-one meetings. There's one CRM out there that really, I think has this focus, which is close.com. Where they're just like, we're a sales CRM, we're not for that other stuff. It's a smaller market, but we could be a much bigger fish in that market. To me, that's what VoIP would indicate is we're saying we're deliberately stepping away from trying to compete with the hub spots of the world.

I don't think it has great ARPU increase, especially of our current customers because we surveyed them just like, it's, some people really want it, but you know, not a lot do. Way more people want email marketing than VoIP. Yeah, thoughts.

Rick (40:58.383)
So let me just kind of repeat back what you're saying. Make sure I follow. You're saying that your ideal, you're hypothesizing that your ideal customer profile is not a generic rev ops person who's covering marketing sales, customer success, the full good of market stack. You're saying your ideal customer is a sales ops or really a sales person who is has, doesn't have dedicated operations support and they're focused on managing a sales, a traditional sales pipeline and

and you need to focus on building features to support them at the, and potentially at the expense of marketing, marketing users. And that's how you'll win.

Tyler King (41:37.824)
Exactly. And like JD is actually a good example of who, this type of person would be. He's probably more sophisticated than our typical customer, but like until you get like more involved with like the marketing side of like up health JD doesn't really use marketing automation features.

yeah, thoughts on that.

Rick (41:57.752)
So, me, well the only, like where I'm going is, don't just, well let me, my brain's going a lot of different places, sorry. I don't know enough to agree or disagree with you because I don't know your customer like you do.

Tyler King (42:03.981)
Yeah.

Rick (42:13.993)
I don't see any downside to like, you always have the option of going being everything, right? Like that's always on the table. You can always decide to be the all-in-one. It's very difficult, I think, to not be the all-in-ones once you go that because you've got so many users who are expecting that. So to the extent that you actually believe this, it makes sense to try that path first to me because like you can always,

Tyler King (42:24.782)
Yeah.

Tyler King (42:40.622)
Mmm.

Rick (42:43.403)
go oops I was wrong and you're not gonna alienate anyone you know by making a switch you can always add marketing features I think it's very difficult to add marketing features and go we're not gonna support marketing anymore

Tyler King (42:48.397)
Yeah.

Tyler King (42:56.834)
Yeah, that's a good point. It's similar. I've complained before. Like if you start your business with freemium, I think it's a good model. Adding freemium later, you've just like cannibalized your own customers in a weird way. Yeah. Okay.

Rick (43:06.679)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

I don't have any strong opinion there. I like the idea of focus. know that. Like, Up Health is Utah and Texas only. We'd be Utah only if JD didn't live in Texas. And we are, like, we don't, we focus on small businesses and consumers. Like, we are very focused and constrained. And it does provide benefits.

Tyler King (43:17.24)
Yeah.

Tyler King (43:23.107)
Right.

Tyler King (43:34.339)
And this is the classic bootstrapper playbook, right? The thing is in 2009, when we started, the CRM market was so much smaller, being focused on really simple small businesses was a niche. And now that market's like 50 times bigger, it's not like, it's not, it feels like we're a general purpose CRM now because the market around us grew so big. But so this is kind of saying like, let's niche down again because we are a small bootstrapped company.

Being an all-in-one is just very hard to execute with a team of 20 people.

Rick (44:04.939)
Yep. mean, the only place that I'm going is that the way that a lot of CRMs out there solve the VoIP problem, and I'm kind of coming back to the topic, which is like, they don't build this. They integrate with VoIP providers. Yes. Yeah. so I just, I'm going, so really like what you're like to forget where you decide to position the brand, this feature you're competing against.

Tyler King (44:16.726)
No, even Salesforce doesn't have it, yeah.

Rick (44:33.751)
a dedicated VoIP product that is integrated with another CRM.

Tyler King (44:39.074)
Well, I am for windfall. Windfall would have someone set up Salesforce and set up some complicated VoIP product and integrate them together. It's saying, I mean, what our pitch has always been for the really simple small business. And this is what close.com is already doing and they're 10 times our size. So, you know, there's at least that market out there saying, what is the CRM without VoIP? Like if you can't make calls from it, just sign up and it's all there for you.

I agree with you that if you have a rev ops team that's putting this all together, they're gonna want the more specialized VoIP thing.

Rick (45:13.611)
So, okay, so let's walk through an example customer here. They have less knowing CRM. Who is their current VoIP product? Are these at their cell phone?

Tyler King (45:23.896)
So of our current customers, yes. Most of the people who filled out the survey said they have their cell phone, but a lot of them are using Grasshopper, they're using RingCentral, you know, that type of thing.

Rick (45:35.009)
So just just bear with me. Like why not just integrate with Grasshopper and RingCentral and charge for that integration.

Tyler King (45:40.899)
We do, yeah, we have a bunch of integrations for VoIP. Well, we can't charge, no one would pay for it if it's someone else's. They already are paying 30 bucks a month for that other product. It's gonna be very hard to then say you have to pay us. We have not built these integrations to be clear. Third parties like Crispcall is probably our best VoIP integration right now. A lot of our customers sign up for Lesson 9 CRM, they say, I want VoIP, do you sell it? We say no, but you can use one of these three companies that integrates with us and then they go over and buy them.

Rick (45:45.354)
Okay.

Rick (46:10.027)
Got it, okay. So, and you've got, wow, you've got a lot of them. Okay, I'm looking at your integrations. So you've got just call, you've got, and these are the, since you, I forgot we did this years ago. You opened up your API and said, come build apps and it's people have done it.

Tyler King (46:20.576)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yes. Now, most of those integrations are, I would say, pretty low quality in the sense like, we could build something. It's not that our VoIP tool would be way better. It's the integration would be way better. You'd be in your CRM, the phone rings. It would just take you to the contact that's calling you and like let you enter a note and it would log voicemails. And whereas right now it's like, you have this totally separate system and anytime a voicemail gets left, they leave a note and that note has a URL linking to the voicemail. Like it's just a

not as good of an integration.

Rick (46:52.287)
Yep, got it. Okay. And so what problem are you solving by not by building a native VoIP? Can you just walk me through that real quick? I'm still not seeing it Versus pointing them to like why why is you building a VoIP product better than what you're doing now pointing people to these integrations or just in

Tyler King (46:59.714)
Versus what?

Tyler King (47:07.628)
because our integration would be way better and because we could make money off the top from it.

Rick (47:12.371)
Okay, so you think that a native, the hypothesis is a native VoIP solution will be a better solution for the customer, therefore you can charge more money for it than an integration, an integrated version of anything.

Tyler King (47:27.382)
Well, or charge the same money they're charging, but instead of them getting the profit, we do. Now, yeah, if they're charging 30 bucks a month, we could charge 30 bucks a month and take the profit for ourselves. Yeah, yeah, that too. Let me move on though. Honestly, I'm not interested in VoIP that much anymore. Sorry, I'm leading to the one that I'm most interested in right now, which is.

Rick (47:31.509)
Yep. Charge more than charge more for yeah, same percent. Same thing.

You could tell you or you could charge 25 bucks a month because you don't have a customer acquisition costs. Okay.

What?

Tyler King (47:54.735)
This is gonna sound probably not nearly as exciting, but that is, we were talking about a second tier. There are all these other things that people, so there was email marketing, was VoIP, and then there was other. And the other, again, was scheduling, docuSign, project management, whatever. A lot of people ask for this stuff when they sign up right now. And I am interested in bundling the,

Basically building a handful of these. We already built forms. We could potentially pull forms out of, obviously we'd give legacy to all our current customers, but pull it out, put this in a second tier and bundle it with other ones. Scheduling, one that people ask for a lot that would be really easy to build is like a document library basically. Like, can I just upload files that aren't attached to context so that I can get my sales templates really easily, know, that type of thing. That would take like...

Rick (48:49.143)
Yeah, it's like, it's basically a tip of the attachments or links.

Tyler King (48:52.396)
Yeah, and we already have a bunch of file functionality. It would be so easy to build that. Yes, potentially. Potentially, yeah.

Rick (48:55.511)
Could you build public links? Like DocSend? man. Okay, this is getting more sales forward. I like it.

Tyler King (49:03.63)
Yeah, so here's the thing about this one. None of these would work as standalone products, right? Because just like our form tool, it's not better than JotForm. It's pretty good, but it's not better than JotForm. I don't, the thing that I get nervous about in terms of increasing our poo with all of these ideas is that back to that stat of just, it's really hard to get a meaningful number of people to convert to a single thing. But I think there's like an all you can eat buffet type

buying psychology here, where if someone's signing up and we say, you want VoIP? I think they're gonna be like, well, I've got a cell phone, I don't need it. But if someone's signing up and we say, we've got this bundle of other things, your budget was already 30 bucks a month, our base price is 15, but for 30 you get everything. I don't think they're, my hypothesis is, they're just gonna be like, yeah, that's still pretty cheap and all that stuff looks great, I want access to that.

Rick (49:58.2)
Okay, I don't disagree with that. Backing up, I think I'm getting where you're going with the sales forward thing. like that's where I'm having the aha moment. You're basically saying once you realize and you buy into the fact that you're a sales CRM for less tech forward sales organizations, which is a much different market than what you're currently positioned for.

Tyler King (49:58.435)
That's my hypothesis.

Tyler King (50:09.313)
Okay.

Tyler King (50:22.147)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (50:27.552)
It's not different from who we're selling to, but it is different from how we're positioned, yes.

Rick (50:30.081)
positioned. Yeah. Then you go, okay, what are the features for that? And it's all the things you've talked about, but you get higher conviction about certain features over others when you're selling to that group. And so, and then you add in more that you wouldn't build probably otherwise. That's really interesting. I have a lot of thoughts on the sales CRM and I, we don't have time to talk about it, but like, I totally agree with like, I think, I think

I'll to noodle on a little bit more, but I think I totally agree with going after the sales persona. And I think there's a lot you could do that would be really valuable. If you're a salesperson and like, what do you care about? It's like, how do I share stuff with customers and how do I track how they're interacting with that? And then how do I make it easier for me to track all the things I'm doing? And then it's like, then you layer in like automation on top of that. So it's like, how do I go faster? I think it's really interesting, Tyler.

Tyler King (50:58.892)
Okay.

Tyler King (51:24.256)
Okay, cool. I'm a little surprised to hear that, but nice. I can go another five minutes by the way, if you can. Okay. So like, okay, again, there's a bunch of things to talk about here. One thing I'm interested in is this, the idea of bundling a bunch of features that couldn't stand on their own because they're good, but not great, but like the integration's tight and the psychology of like, I'll buy the bundle versus one like higher quality, like to me, VoIP is a much,

Rick (51:27.915)
Yeah. Yeah. Again, again.

Tyler King (51:54.251)
more standalone high quality product, but they're thinking I'm buying VoIP rather than, I'll just get the second tier and get my grab bag of things. What do you think about that?

Rick (52:04.311)
I don't think it's an either or. I think there's a middle path where you can say, in order to have VoIP, you've got to buy the second tier and it's an add-on.

Tyler King (52:13.624)
Sure, but is VoIP

Rick (52:16.799)
I don't think so. I don't think VoIP should be bundled. I think it's too usage-based and too high-risk for you to sell as part of a bundle.

Tyler King (52:20.492)
Yeah. Okay, but so it is either or the, guess what I'm talking about is the psychology of like, let's say we have four products. Do you sell them as a bundle or do you sell them as standalone ones? Okay, say more about that.

Rick (52:31.361)
I think you do both.

I think like the way I would see this as you basically have two tiers. You have your base tier right now, plus you have your $30 tier. And then you have certain items that aren't included in the premium tier, but require the premium tier in order to add on. And so like the VoIP would be one of those obvious ones for me because like don't think, just, any usage based, anything where you have a very high variable cost,

based on usage, think should be an add-on, not as part of a larger package. That would be my sort of rubric for this. Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (53:09.208)
Yeah, certainly usage, there has to be like overage pricing and stuff like that at the very same with file storage. Like you can have some bundled in, but you can't have unlimited. Okay, but the way you said that makes me, it makes it sound like you start with the bundle and then you add VoIP second. Is that correct?

Rick (53:17.055)
Yep, exactly.

Rick (53:25.269)
Yeah, I would just say like, hey, you in order, want VoIP? Well, it requires you to buy this package in order to add it on.

Tyler King (53:31.852)
So, sorry, I get that, like we are a very small team. We have to build one thing at a time. What do we do next is kind of the question.

Rick (53:39.039)
I would not build VoIP. I would build the $30 package and I would not include VoIP in it.

Tyler King (53:43.343)
Okay. That's certainly where I'm leaning, I should say. Yeah, I've been saying 15. On my list is like that price is, I'm just making up a price because it's double what we've got. I'm open to that. course, like it takes, another question, we don't have time to get into this, but just to tease like a future topic, it will take a while.

Rick (53:47.127)
Yeah. And can we get to a $40, $9 package instead of a $15 package?

Rick (53:56.736)
Okay. Yeah.

Tyler King (54:07.404)
Like we could pull forms off right now and be like, okay, there's two tiers. There's the CRM for 15 and there's CRM plus forms for 30. Like five people would pay for that, you know? Obviously having another thing in there would make it more compelling and more, and on and on.

Rick (54:16.823)
it

And forums in this case isn't marketing forums, it's sales forums. It's intake. It's automated intake. When you're at a conference, bring your own scanner, basically.

Tyler King (54:25.346)
Yeah.

Tyler King (54:31.17)
Yeah, mean, certainly people are using it for marketing as well, but yeah, from a positioning. But my point is like, then if it's like, okay, well you can get forms plus scheduling, now it's not five people, it's 100 people. And then if we say, well, it's forms plus scheduling plus this document library, my hope is that it kind of like one plus one equals three, where the more things you add, the less it's like, I am paying $15 for forms and the more it's like, yeah, I just like, I'm not.

Rick (54:34.113)
Yeah, of course. Yeah, but yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tyler King (54:57.634)
I'm not assigning a specific value to a specific product. I'm just thinking I want to get the bundle, you know?

Rick (55:02.209)
So I mean, to me, like I would go ahead and build the bundle with what you have now and start getting feedback on the bundle on conversions. Cause people might buy what you have now just because it's slightly better, right? And so I don't know. I, to me, like I would probably move quicker towards marketing the bundle with what you have. and then add stuff like systematically.

Tyler King (55:12.781)
Yeah.

Tyler King (55:19.97)
But what we-

So, okay, then another big thing I've been struggling with is like, I like the idea of we've got like the CRM, you get the whole CRM for $15. If we add a CRM feature like automations, that's included. This other tier is other products. That's not how anyone else does it. And I'm wondering if I'm wasting an innovation token here and I should just do what everyone else does and be like, no, it's not, this other bundle isn't just for other products. It's like, oh yeah, you want this integration, you want...

automation, you want whatever, that's on the higher tier and just treat tiers the way everyone else does. I've been struggling with that.

Rick (55:58.647)
That's a whole nother topic. I think we should talk about that, I think we need to spend more time on what does it mean to position for sales and how does that change your entire philosophy about how you run the business? Because ultimately, think a lot of what you've built at Less Learning CRM is around serving a very, very small business, generic user, and potentially a lot of your decision frameworks change when you reposition for sales. Outside of what your morality.

Tyler King (55:59.852)
Yeah, yeah, obviously we don't have time for that. I'm just teasing.

Tyler King (56:26.126)
I don't think this bundle is as much of a pivot as doing VoIP would be, we should probably call it here. I'll add some more topics for next time. All right, thank you. Thanks.

Rick (56:28.171)
concerns.

Rick (56:34.263)
Mm-hmm.

This is fun. Good job, dude. If you'd to review past topics and show notes, visit StartupToLast.com if you made it this far. See ya.

Tyler King (56:44.588)
See ya!