Rick (00:00.745)
What's up Tyler?

Tyler King (00:02.242)
Not much, I'm, yeah, very normal week for me. I feel like I'm kind of just in the flow of summer right now. How are you doing?

Rick (00:12.369)
I am in the hotness of summer. It's like 95 degrees here in Salt Lake City. So I keep wanting to go for walks, but then I'm like, I have to go lay down after I spend more than an hour outside.

Tyler King (00:23.374)
At least it's dry there, right?

Rick (00:25.063)
Yeah, it's super dry, but it's hot.

Tyler King (00:26.862)
We're getting 95 with, you know, as much humidity as the air can hold.

Rick (00:31.561)
no. But you know what I'm using this opportunity for is lots of smoking. Not what you're thinking, Tyler. I'm using my Yoder YS640 to smoke meat. And my latest concoction is brisket. I did brisket over the last three days and it turned out great.

Tyler King (00:37.966)
Yeah.

Tyler King (00:45.806)
That's the time to do it.

Tyler King (00:50.604)
Nice, how'd that go? You know, when you cut off on the podcast the other day, what I don't think you heard me say is pastrami is my favorite.

Rick (00:58.739)
really? Smoked pastrami.

Tyler King (01:00.012)
It's basically brisket, just, you know, whatever, brine, I don't know how you make pastrami, but that is like my favorite bite of barbecue I've ever had in my life was really well cooked pastrami.

Rick (01:10.919)
Well, my brisket turned out really well. Everyone said our niece is somewhat of a eater. What she'll eat, she'll eat a lot of, but her palate is narrow. Anyway, she took one bite, she's like, is the, it just like melts in your mouth. And she was like, that's the best bite of meat I've ever had in my entire life. So, success.

Tyler King (01:13.742)
Nice.

Tyler King (01:21.891)
Yeah.

Tyler King (01:27.682)
Yeah.

Tyler King (01:31.31)
That's awesome, very nice. Did you say at one point you were getting a hot tub? Did you get a hot tub? You are, but you don't have it.

Rick (01:36.903)
We are getting a hot tub, it's not one of those things that's important to me, so it's not in my court.

Tyler King (01:41.314)
Yeah. But during the summer, it might be a cool tub, potentially.

Rick (01:46.449)
I don't know how that works. Can you make a hot tub a cool tub?

Tyler King (01:50.232)
I know, I'm from an area where no one had a pool or a hot tub, that seems like absolute elite, that's out of reach for any normal person in my, like how I was raised. Shelly, my wife, grew up in an affluent LA suburb where everyone has either a pool or what they call a spa, which is just like a little tiny pool built into the ground. Is that a term you're familiar with?

Rick (02:14.793)
Yes, it's yes. I mean I would like to I would prefer to have yeah Yeah, I would rather have a tiny a tiny pool in the ground than a hot tub

Tyler King (02:17.048)
Okay. I think of a spa as like a place you go, you know?

Tyler King (02:25.857)
Yeah, I think a hot tub could turn into a spa though, right? Just don't heat the water.

Rick (02:30.501)
Maybe. I don't know. But I haven't thought about that. like it's one of those things where I gave it as a gift. The gift was being able to do it and like the budget and all that sort of stuff. It's not I but I exactly which maybe makes that a bad gift. I don't know.

Tyler King (02:32.205)
Okay.

Tyler King (02:43.723)
Right, but not like you're doing it. You're not executing the plan. Yeah.

Tyler King (02:51.221)
I mean, that's quite a concession, so I'll call it a good gift. Cool, how's work stuff going?

Rick (02:58.441)
Good, we had our partner meeting on Monday, so I was surprised when I saw the podcast jump up. like, I just talked to Tyler, this shouldn't be a podcast right now, because we only talk on the podcast, which we should change. the reason we have the podcast is it forces us to talk, and so it's doing its job. But the best thing that came out of that partner meeting was hearing JD's just excitement around the stuff that you've recently built. So Tyler recently built some new features in the leg of health. We released those.

Tyler King (03:03.329)
Yeah.

haha

Rick (03:27.877)
And it's, they are valuable enough to where I could tell like both JD and Tyler like, this is a real software product now. Versus like, I feel like we've had this ongoing sort of unspoken friction, but like kind of friction around like, is this even real value software? Is it vaporware? Maybe not vaporware, but yeah, you know what I'm saying.

Tyler King (03:48.15)
Yeah, it always felt like we were asking the customer, I never talked to the customer directly, but like what I hear through JD, like we're asking the customer, hey, like go to our website and create an account and log in. But like, why? You can't do anything when you're logged in. And yeah, it feels like it kind of crossed the tipping point to like, there's clearly functionality now. Like it makes sense why I need to use this software.

Rick (04:11.209)
And it's worth it. So anyway, that was it was I could tell I could tell like there's just this change in confidence on JD's part going out to customers that are existing customers and prospects and saying, hey, check this out and just getting the demoing what we have. I also go to your place. I'm going to go. can tell he's like adjusting his playbooks to drive people into the app now.

where he was probably skirting around that. Now he's like, let's put him in the app. Let's get him in the app. Let's get him in the app. And so that's a really, really good sign.

Tyler King (04:44.823)
I've heard other podcasters talk about this a little, that like conventional wisdom from 10 years ago or five years ago was basically like, you don't need the working product to sell it. Like make a PowerPoint presentation or just pitch a good vision or make like a prototype that doesn't really work or whatever. There really is something different about having an actual demo you can show someone in terms of the sales process. And I feel like more and more people are coming around to that reality, I think.

Rick (05:13.191)
Yeah, I mean, JD said it like almost exactly like used to said it, but he was like, I can't explain it, but this is so much easier to explain to, you know, to a prospect. And they go, yeah, this makes sense now. they're, they're having conversations around not like, what is this thing? But like, yeah, how can I configure this thing to work for me? Which is a next level conversation, which a demo unlocks, but more so than the concept. Although I think a lot of the people who

promote the, you don't need a product, are probably using Figma or some sort of design tool to fake a prototype more so than we were doing. So that there's probably a middle path, a middle ground too.

Tyler King (05:52.045)
That's probably true.

Tyler King (05:56.534)
Yeah. now, mean, now with, with AI maybe like, depending on the sophistication what you're building, it might be worth spending a week or two. If you're starting a new idea and trying to validate it, like vibe code, a prototype that yeah, it doesn't really work, but it's, it's not just figma designs. It's like, you can click on stuff. You can type stuff in. It's not saving anything to a database. The login isn't actually authenticating you, but like, just some HTML and JavaScript to show what your vision is.

Rick (06:23.465)
Yeah, it just changes the conversation with the prospect to like, I'm trying to explain them what this is versus like actually getting feedback on what you're showing them. It's just a different, a totally different conversation that leads to different places.

Tyler King (06:37.991)
and yes, yeah. So I mean, my, big topic is still VoIP. maybe I'll save that to the end. So we'll see how much time we have for that. a new idea that came up since we last spoke. So for a long, long time now, when you're in business for as long as less annoying serum has been, there are these like ideas that keep re-emerging and then you keep making up reasons not to do it.

Rick (06:38.195)
What's up with you?

Tyler King (07:03.891)
One of those is like the idea of trying to have something like a user community. And this has taken many different shapes throughout the years. We've never done it, but like when we discuss it, it's taken many different shapes in terms of like, should we have a Facebook group or, you know, like a message board or a Slack or a discord, you know, workspace, whatever. And we've always come up with reasons not to, but we're revisiting that. And I think I'm actually more interested in this idea than I have been in the past.

Rick (07:32.482)
Where does this idea come from? it internally surfaced? Are customers asking for it?

Tyler King (07:38.488)
Customers do ask for it. It kind of strikes me as a type of thing where they might be saying they want it, but they wouldn't actually use it. I'm not, like definitely one of my concerns is do we have large enough of a customer base for there to actually be a community slash are people really thinking about less knowing CRM all the time? So one of the companies that has one of these quasi communities that we're modeling ourselves potentially

looking to model ourselves after is Webflow. But Webflow, like there are professional like Webflow agencies and those people are in the community. We don't really have that equivalent for less annoying serum. So I definitely have some doubts, but people do, you know, they're like, Hey, how can I get in touch with other less annoying serum users? want to ask, like, I want to see how they're using it. Yeah, that type of thing. And there has been one little point of validation years ago, like pre pandemic.

Someone, one of our customers made a travel agents who use less annoying CRM Facebook group. And it actually, I don't even have a Facebook account. assume it's dead by now, but like for a while there, it got a few hundred users, I think, or a few hundred members of the Facebook group. And it was active and people were sharing like good content. There was, it wasn't just like, how do I add a contact? You know, like generic stuff. was like, Hey, I'm planning a trip for.

multiple families and I need to keep track of each family separately but they're all part of the same trick. Trip, how are you doing that unless you're CRM? Like that type of stuff. It was really good while it lasted.

Rick (09:15.305)
So it sounds like when you say community, you're talking about taking some subset of your users who want to interact more with other users and giving them a forum of some form to connect with each other and share best practices, answer each other's questions, basically get value out of each other.

Tyler King (09:34.466)
Yeah, that is the dream. think there's like a stripped down version of it, which is it's basically a help site mixed with email support. Like right now it's like you go on the help site and you have documents that we've written or you email us and have a private conversation with us. You could imagine it just being basically a public support channel. I think that's the version of it where we don't have the critical mass of people to actually answer each other's questions. It's us answering the questions, but

in a public way where other people can access those answers later.

Rick (10:07.209)
Do you have a public product like vote board where people can submit features and upvote them and that sort of thing?

Tyler King (10:14.901)
No, I've kind of, how do you feel about those?

Rick (10:18.417)
Well, I don't, I think by themselves, they're not useful, but within a community, could be a carrot, you know, to get people into the community and create an account and like, you know, here's why you should, know, if you participate in the community, you get more votes. it can be a tool. and I've seen it work well. I was just thinking, I was looking at web flows community and then I was like, what's my favorite community that I've been a part of as a tool that I didn't ask for, but I got a lot of value of and.

Tyler King (10:25.581)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (10:36.13)
Yeah.

Rick (10:46.121)
The company that came to mind is Memberstack, which is that login sort of no-code tool. And they have a Slack community, they have the product vote board, but they also did a good job curating content. They had someone who was very proactive in terms of creating conversation points around either new features or use cases or verticals. And so I do think there is some...

If you want this to work, like there is some sort of investment you need to make, not just in like the technology or whatever, like the lipstick, but also like the conversation starters, if you will.

Tyler King (11:26.989)
Yes, that's actually one of the reasons I'm a lot, there are a few reasons I think now is it's, there's still the same downsides there's always been. And actually that feature of voting one is one of them, which is there's value in customers being able to do that, but there's also a lot of potential for negativity of people going and be like, this was requested 10 years ago. Where is it? Like, you know, that type of thing. So there's a lot of downsides. One of the newer upsides that I've mentioned to you, but we haven't really sunken our teeth into on this podcast is,

I'm interested in using AI to make CRM coaches more efficient. But then the question is, what do do with that extra efficiency? we have the potential, even without any efficiency gains, we have eight CRM coaches. When they're all around, that's too many. The reason we have eight is because at any given time, someone might be on sabbatical, someone else might be sick. I think we need five or six to really, I think five is like,

unsustainable, but we can survive. think six is like, okay, when we have eight, we just have extra time as is. So I think we have that time to put towards that type of thing that you're talking about. And it would actually be really interesting. Like serum coaching, if we're being honest, can be a boring job. Like I think it's interesting in a lot of ways, but it's repetitive. You know, it's like, I've answered this exact question a hundred times. This is just a new thing.

Rick (12:49.213)
Have you thought about? Yeah, I love I think this is a great thing to do. I think it could be there's probably like a Goldilocks piece here where it's like there's there's the bowl that's too hot and like it's there's it's gonna be too big or it could be not enough. There's probably like a sweet spot where this is a good investment. Have you thought about how to measure success and like it to be like if I were going to approach this like I'll just say it is I would want a very clear like this is working. This is not.

system for measurement so that whoever is responsible for the success of this thing, whether it's a CRM coach with their 20 % time or someone else, it's very clear they're not doing enough or what they're doing is not working or they need to stop working on this because it's working and we're over-investing. I could see it bloating and taking more resources than is worth it as well. So I see upside and downside.

Tyler King (13:19.223)
Hmm.

Tyler King (13:46.412)
Yeah, for sure. I agree with that. Yeah, I have not thought about it, but just to like talk about it off the top of the dome here. Like it seems like it could serve a few purposes. One is,

just our users using it. And if I don't know, like we'd have to have some, we want X number of posts, not from our employees per month or, something along those lines. The other big one I could imagine is SEO, like are these pages getting traffic one way or another? A third one I could imagine is this is pie in the sky. I think this is unrealistic, but like the real dream that travel agent.

community I was talking about had a bunch of people who weren't less annoying CRM users in it, but they just wanted to learn about travel agent stuff. Could we get actual community engagement from non-users? Again, I think that's unlikely, but that would be the real dream. And then there's a final one that I haven't provided context yet, so I'll save it. What do you think about the three I just said?

Rick (14:48.595)
plenty, I think just the first one, customer value. In other words, like I kind of look at it as you've used the analogy about you're not trying to build a Ferrari, you're trying to build the perfect utility vehicle like a van. Yeah, and so like this is another cup holder feature to me where it's like the people want, your differentiator is service, right? And so this is another element of that, that if some meaningful subset of your customers,

Tyler King (15:00.749)
Minivan, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Rick (15:14.823)
are getting value out of it or even just getting value knowing it exists, even if they're not using it, then it's a good feature to build.

Tyler King (15:18.316)
Right.

Yeah, yeah. Yes, I agree. I guess what I meant was like any of these three could hit. So even if our customers aren't using it, if it's like, we're actually getting like, or let me rephrase. There's a version of our customers post a question, we post an answer. It could have been an email and the customer would have received the exact same amount of value. But if we're doing that and then that question is getting like, people are going on Google and searching for it and finding that answer.

I think that would be validation on the SEO front.

Rick (15:51.822)
The best flywheels, I think you're basically saying this could be flywheel. The best flywheel start with something you would do even if only the igniter of the flywheel. yeah, and that's the customer value, right? And then if you deliver on customer value, there's all these extra things that could happen that arm forward momentum. One is the SEO and bringing in traffic and leads, and then the other is potentially like,

Tyler King (16:02.347)
Even if it didn't have the feedback loop, yeah.

Rick (16:21.777)
I heard that there's this cool community where travel agents are sharing best practices around how to grow their businesses. I'd like to be a part of that. it's a whole nother thing.

Tyler King (16:31.019)
Yeah, yeah. So let me introduce the final thing that one of the big reasons why I think this is more appealing now than it ever has been for me is how it relates to AI. And that is to say, so right now we are using this tool called Resolve that drafts, it does like writes AI drafts in front for us. So when a customer emails us, it automatically writes a draft and then we review it and the reality is

significant majority of the time we completely rewrite it. But like, if it's actually a pretty standard question, we just tweak it slightly and send it. This is trained on our front email history, which is like the, if you think of all of the knowledge about customer service for Lesson 9 CRM, when you, a lot of these like customer service AI things are like, we'll look at your knowledge base. We'll look at your help documentation. That stuff has a fraction of the content that's in our email history, right?

You don't have like 10,000 articles in your help site. You don't even want that many because if you have that many, customers can't find what they're looking for.

Rick (17:37.278)
Yes, and there's, know, the stuff that makes it to the help article are the frequently asked questions. It's not the edge case questions that are actually the hardest to write and most valuable to solve via AI. It's really an interesting problem because the hardest thing for a new, like you hire a new customer support person at any company, the hardest thing to get them to is being able to answer the edge cases. So what ends up happening is an edge case question gets asked. I'm dealing with this right now, by the way. And like,

finding out who knows the answer because there's no documentation for it. There's no help article. They go through this goose chase and it impacts multiple people in the organization. They finally get the answer, they forget the answer, then they have to search for it. So if you can solve that through AI, that's huge.

Tyler King (18:21.313)
Yeah, well, and this is, so I've had this conversation with so many employees where they, a new person joins the company and they're like, hey, where's the documentation for this thing? And we're like, we don't have it, just add, like, here's the person to ask. And then they're like, we should write the documentation, which sounds smart on the surface, but then it's like, okay, A, you're not going to be able to find anything if there's 10,000 articles. Like search isn't good enough. If this keyword appears in 200 of the 10,000 articles, you're not going to find the one at the bottom of the list. That's what you're actually looking for. And B,

Who's maintaining all of these, right? The information's gonna be wrong by the time you actually look it up. employees often want more documentation and some of it, some documentation's good, but it's just not realistic. I do think this is one of the big things AI sort of addresses is if you just think of it as like it's search, but it lets me, instead of saying here are the 200 articles that match the keyword, it lets me get the actual answer from the article 190, which is the one I was looking for. It does help with that, right?

Rick (19:20.345)
smarter search like it's it's a where's the signal for what I'm actually trying to solve for here so yeah it makes sense

Tyler King (19:26.315)
Yeah. So here's the thing though. We are already using this resolve 24 seven tool, looking at all of our, or I mean, we're not doing it. They're doing it. They're looking at our email history. You know, I don't know if I'm using the right terminology, but building an AI model or whatever. And so these drafts are coming from that. I don't know.

Rick (19:49.066)
It's a black box. It's predictive and generative AI combined into a machine learning model that predicts the future. Something like that.

Tyler King (19:54.549)
Yeah!

Absolutely. Synergy. But here's the thing, like it's being trained on private data and there is a chance that it could leak that private data in one of its answers. Now that's fine right now because it's just drafting a response and a human reviews it and hits send. And I have never seen an example where it does leak the data. I'm just nervous that it could. Training on email history and then using that to build a chat bot feels extremely risky to me. Training on

Rick (20:25.993)
Risky, risky for what, like can we stop for a second?

Tyler King (20:29.259)
Yeah, like let's say a customer emails us and says, hey, here's my password. And then the AI is dumb. Like it's as smart as it is, it's also dumb. Someone else gives a question. might, I know this sounds preposterous. Our customers will go into this chat bot and say, what is my password? Right? And what if the chat bot is like, well, I have someone's password here. That's your password, right? I'm not saying that I don't know enough about AI to know if.

Rick (20:53.725)
You

Tyler King (20:57.709)
Could it avoid that? like, I'm nervous. That's the type of thing I'm nervous about. Does that make sense?

Rick (21:03.197)
Yep, thank you for sharing it.

Tyler King (21:04.877)
But if we have this community, all of that is public. It's got the depth of content that we have in our email history, but we can assume all of that is data that we can train on and we don't risk leaking any kind of sensitive information that a customer sent us with the intention of it being private. So that strikes me as an opportunity that didn't matter in the past, but it matters now.

Rick (21:29.135)
So let me just restate what you're saying to make sure I understand. You're saying that because the forum is by definition public, anything that someone shares there, you're not responsible for keeping private. Therefore, you feel safer letting AI train on it. All right, cool.

Tyler King (21:48.29)
Yes. Now I'm not saying that's not like the main reason I want to do this, but that is a thing that has changed in the past. That would have been, that just wasn't a thing on my radar. And now it's like, yeah, having our help site isn't enough to train on and our emails have too much private information. This strikes me as a nice middle ground.

Rick (22:06.921)
There are other ways to solve that problem. You could go through your emails and tag them safe, unsafe. So anyway, I don't know that that's compelling reason to do this, but it could be a side effect, like another side effect from doing it.

Tyler King (22:09.762)
Like what?

Tyler King (22:25.355)
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so anyway, we're investigating it. so normally you say do it and I'm always like, Rick, that's not constructive kind of is my reaction. Well, okay, but what I feel like often doesn't come up is the opportunity cost, right? When you say do this, you mean don't do that. This is different though.

Rick (22:31.795)
Do it.

Rick (22:38.377)
I feel like you need to run more experiments. So I'm all about like spin this thing up and like see if you get traction.

Rick (22:48.745)
I don't think so. This is a CRM coach, 20 % experiment that, if you have something better for them to do, pitch me on it.

Tyler King (22:52.377)
Exactly. That's.

Tyler King (22:58.509)
No, no, exactly. We're in agreement here. I'm just trying to provide context for why. Most of the time when this comes up, it's a feature that a developer has to build. And it's like, if we build that feature, then we're not building this other feature. This is the rare thing that can be executed 100 % without any developers at all, which is we do not have a lot of ideas like that. So I'm excited about it for that reason. Yes. I think we likely will.

Rick (23:01.167)
Okay. Okay.

Rick (23:08.169)
so you're trying to...

Rick (23:18.621)
Do it. Are there more that we should, should we spend time thinking about ideas like this? Are there other ideas?

Tyler King (23:23.765)
Yeah, mean, I'd love if anyone has any, I'd certainly love them.

Rick (23:27.497)
The constraint here is like we have resources that are non-technical resources that have, let's just say, 20 % time available to spend on growing the business. What are some things I could spend one day a week on that could help move the business forward? Everyone's gonna say content creation.

Tyler King (23:44.555)
Yeah. And right, which we've we do like that's certainly a thing we do. That is becoming less and less. It was never all that useful for us. It's becoming less and less useful as.

Rick (23:57.501)
Friday cold call blocks.

Tyler King (24:00.949)
Yep, mean, you're right and we would have a mutiny.

Rick (24:06.825)
That's incompatible with the less known CRM culture.

Tyler King (24:11.181)
Yes, yes. But yeah, A, we have this, again, when, a lot of the time we don't have surplus year on coach time, but sometimes we do. And we've talked before, if you want good customer service, you have to be this way. You have to have buffer. So I think a lot of companies that want good customer service should run into this of like, do I get, what do I do with that excess time? It's also though, like I've been having a harder and harder time even finding 20 % product, even like forget,

Rick (24:26.173)
Buffer.

Tyler King (24:40.031)
I want this to be useful for the company. Even if you just think of it as like, I want the employee to feel like they're learning, growing, doing. It is so hard to find these projects now. Because back in the day it was like, no one is doing office management. Nobody is doing HR. Like, yeah, take it, it's yours. And now we make a new hire and they come in and it's like, we've got everything under control. Like, I don't know what you should be doing with this time. So, I like this, okay.

Rick (25:04.497)
Yeah. I got nothing else. I can't think of anything else. But yes, do this one.

Tyler King (25:11.885)
Yes, I think we will. I still need to talk about it with Bracken, but otherwise I think we're a go.

Rick (25:15.721)
Have you thought about what tooling to use for community? That's kind of an interesting topic.

Tyler King (25:20.649)
Yeah. Webflow uses discourse, not discord discourse, which is basically a no discourse. Yeah. Jesse from Bento uses discord for his community. If you're familiar with Bento, like the email thing, even that, like I, it works for him.

Rick (25:27.657)
Discord is not compatible with the less noisy user base. This is for gamers.

Tyler King (25:47.726)
It's very nerdy. And if all your customers are nerds, maybe it's okay. Yeah, that would not fly for us. Discourse is basically just like message board software, but A, it's more modern. It's not like that really old shitty, you know, 1990s looking message board. And B, I get the impression it's meant for like businesses creating communities as opposed to like, you know, this is a St. Louis Cardinals message board, you know. That's what Webflow uses.

Rick (26:15.155)
I don't know if we had a, I feel like we might've had a past episode about this, like early days. There was a business that I started with a guy in Park City called Group Current. And we did a lot of thinking around community building for Pando Labs, which was an entrepreneurial community in Park City. And then also Park City Angels, which is an angel investment community. And

Tyler King (26:19.766)
Yeah.

Rick (26:38.109)
we did a lot of software research. So I don't know if we were talking about in the podcast, but there are lot of different tools out there. I think it's different when you have a group of people and you're trying to get a subgroup of people that already have like this interaction with your brand and you're trying to get a subset of them into this other system. I think that's a unique situation where discourse is like the one thing that I remember being for that. I don't know if there's other stuff out there now.

There's probably got to be something for this like this like I've always thought this was a huge business opportunity to help You know create communities, but also help businesses create sub communities It seems like someone should be trying to solve this problem

Tyler King (27:06.763)
Yeah.

Tyler King (27:20.619)
Yeah, there are definitely a lot of different things. again, a lot of people will use Slack or Discord. That's not appropriate for what we're doing here. Among other reasons, because I want public access. I don't want people to have to like, I don't want this all to be a walled garden. I want the SEO and stuff. Facebook groups probably, if all you want is engagement, a Facebook group is probably best because everyone's already on Facebook. But then you're competing with all this other stuff there and you don't have any control over it, et cetera. Circle.so is one. Are you familiar with them?

Rick (27:49.021)
Yes, I do remember them.

Tyler King (27:51.418)
I've used them as a end user, not like the person making the network. It feels a lot like Facebook, but you own it, kind of. But the beauty of Facebook isn't that the UI is so great or whatever. The beauty of Facebook is people are already there, they already have an account, they're checking it every day, so their notifications, they'll see them. I personally think making a Facebook clone that is a separate product defeats the whole point of why Facebook's good for this.

Rick (27:58.641)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (28:17.901)
So yeah, we definitely will look around for others. But what I like about discourse is it basically just makes a help site for you. It makes like a website. It's public. It's scrollable. It's searchable. One way or another, that's what we would want. So maybe there's a better version of this, but I don't, I'm not interested in a chat type thing. I'm not interested in a walled garden social network.

Rick (28:43.741)
Yeah, mean that, I mean, circle, I was just looking at the website is what I was thinking of. Like they have built a business around serving this use case. so yeah, I,

Tyler King (28:50.69)
Yeah.

Rick (28:54.409)
I think you'll find, the tooling probably isn't that important to get this off the ground. can always, if it gets a lot of traction and you hit the constraints with whatever tool you start with, you just switch tools.

Tyler King (29:07.531)
Yeah, yeah, I think you wanna try to get it right. But anyway, okay, we've probably talked about that enough. I'll, if.

Rick (29:17.095)
You could have you thought about this building something custom with Webflow. They have their new like login stuff and their collections. Like have you looked into that like just very basic.

Tyler King (29:22.945)
Hmm.

I have not looked into that. That's normally what you tell me not to do. No, actually that is interesting though, because one of the things on my mind here is like, does this just become our help site? Like right now we have a pretty custom made, we call it the help center and it has search. has our contact form built in, which we custom coded. We want to put AI like answers in there. I don't know exactly how that fits in. What I would like, my concern with any of this stuff is I don't want to like outsource the

Rick (29:28.997)
Yeah.

Tyler King (29:55.686)
UX of getting help from us. So the idea of using a custom Webflow thing, I like that it would give us that customization. I don't like that we'd have to build it.

Rick (30:07.113)
Yeah, so take that off the table. They are deprecating it starting January 31st, 2021, and it will no longer be available after January 2026.

Tyler King (30:12.874)
really? Yikes.

Tyler King (30:19.67)
Okay, we will not do that then. Let's go back to you. What else is on your mind?

Rick (30:21.768)
Yep.

Rick (30:26.493)
Well, the thing that, I, the other, so I've always felt like there's this like tension between the, the product side of like, what should we build? And is this actually providing value? we, are we, are we asking more of our customers that we're giving from a software perspective? I think we solved the, software thing. The second thing that I've had tension with internally is with you and JD is like, where should I spend my time? And I always get pulled toward where I get energy is like building the system that provides.

a long-term value, not necessarily it's it. I can do it. can go generate a blip and pipeline, but like it, it consumes a significant amount of energy. it doesn't make me feel, it feels good. Don't get me wrong, but like, it doesn't delight me. Like working on a system that produces by itself. Does that make sense?

Tyler King (31:15.757)
Yeah, your dream job, if you're like a successful bootstrapper working on whatever you want, your dream job is not to be doing sales calls all day.

Rick (31:24.167)
No, it's tinkering, right? It's like tinkering with the thing that produces the sales. And so, are you still there? Okay, cool. You froze for a second. So the idea is, that I came away with was really exciting to me, which is I feel 100 % supported. We identified, let me back up. At the partner meeting, we identified that the number one risk of the business right now, or...

short term, medium term, long term risk is predictable pipeline gen. We've proven that we can service customers and keep them. We've proven that we can convert customers when we have meetings with them. We've proven that when we have a lead source, we predictably close them. The biggest risk of the business now is like, do we have predictable meetings flowing to JD with prospects so that he can grow the business? And so I feel like I would just like,

looking at both of you on Monday and you both said, yeah, you could go work on predictable pipeline gen. Like that's more important than just getting a couple more leads this month. And I feel a little bit set free there versus, and so I don't, hasn't turned in anything for me, but that's going to be my focus moving forward is just how can I build predictable lead gen? going to be, I feel like I don't have to apologize for it or justify it. And so I'm, I don't know where that will go. I just wanted to call that out to you and just say, that's the thing that I'm probably second most excited about coming out of the partner meeting on Monday.

Tyler King (32:41.771)
Yeah.

Tyler King (32:46.541)
Great. Yeah. And can I provide a little context on kind of my perspective on like why I mean, you kind of touch on this, like we're at this weird place with like up health where everything is sustainable, right? Like JD is making enough money that the next best option for him is worse than this, right? So he would have no reason to leave. Things are, we're growing, et cetera. But like, I think every bootstrap company hits this question of like,

Should we be investing in growth? Like, should we be looking ahead and saying, in a year, here's where we'll be. So let's start spending money right now as if that's where we are. Yeah, exactly. Which less annoying serum did. I actually, in retrospect, I think it was a mistake. It worked out, but it only worked out because we got lucky. We never hit any bump in the road during this period. So like our version of this is the moment we could afford to hire someone, we hired them, but we hired them at an entry level salary. A few years later, they're making a lot more money.

Rick (33:25.107)
should we spend ahead of growth?

Tyler King (33:46.316)
we can only afford to keep them if our revenue goes up a lot. And so we always just hired them based on can we afford them right now rather than will we be able to afford them three years from now. That's just one specific example of spending ahead of growth. so at Leg Up Health, we're trying to figure out, do we trust our growth? And right now the growth looks good, but it's all coming from one source that could and actually sometimes does disappear. And then it's just like, okay, I guess we're not growing anymore.

Rick (34:15.721)
Yeah, exactly. So...

Tyler King (34:18.263)
So we want you to get another, a second and a third and a fourth of these so then we can say, well, okay, maybe one of these will go away, but they're not all gonna go.

Rick (34:25.537)
And what that allows us to do is, okay, well, yeah, let's hire another person and invest in growth before we have it. so right now the bottleneck is the number of prospect meetings JD is having in a week. Right. And so that's the bottleneck we're focused on. I'm excited about it. I don't have any major update yet. Well, I know that outreach, figuring out how to systematize outreach without JD.

Tyler King (34:45.997)
Do you know how are you gonna do it?

Rick (34:55.321)
is an important element here. And I don't know exactly what that will look like, but there's some level of like AI agent there that can help. But it could be just like partnering with an SDR, you know, a business development shop that's doing cold outreach on behalf of JD and setting appointments for him. That's like the most basic. have to figure, it's my belief, not successfully.

Tyler King (35:11.521)
Have you done that before?

Okay, you've, there are eight, like companies out there that are like, we have this call center of sales reps. They're not, SDR meaning like, okay, appointment setters. They just cold call a bunch of people, they have a script. If the person's interested, they set up a call with JD and then JD takes it from there. Okay, but you've tried it, it hasn't worked, but you're not like burnt out on the idea.

Rick (35:22.727)
I call them appointment setters.

Rick (35:35.929)
No, I just I think it has most of the time it hasn't worked because of the economics. The reason in order for it to work, you've got to be able to to pay for an appointment. The reason we haven't looked at at at leg up before is we were two years ago, we were focused exclusively on consumers. This does not work for consumers. So this has to be B2B for our business, at least. And then, you know, it doesn't work for small businesses. So there's a certain like

Tyler King (35:53.709)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (36:01.633)
Yeah.

Rick (36:03.215)
ICP for outreach that works, that's probably 25 to 100 employees. Anyway, we will set the parameters of the target list and the script, and then they just execute it and set appointments. And then they get paid if the appointments are held. And then you can work out revenue shares as well, just like a normal outbound setter.

Tyler King (36:25.505)
This is an impossible question because there are so many variables, but do you have like a ballpark of what we would have to pay for an appointment to get set? Like is it $100, is it 500?

Rick (36:35.529)
Yeah, so the way I would think about it is the business that would do this for us is in the game of making money. And so if they're employing someone for, let's just say, $20 an hour, if they're spending 40 hours a week on this, they're going to need to make $25 an hour on that person or $30 an hour. And so it depends on how productive they are. The reason I say that is like,

Tyler King (37:01.537)
Yeah, the close raid and stuff like that, yeah.

Rick (37:02.865)
Yes. Yeah. So if like, if they have to call a hundred people to get one meeting, like you're paying a lot more for that meeting. If you, if you have to call 10 people to get one meeting, you could pay a lot less. if it, so anyway, I didn't, that's a non answer to your question. but it depends on the final metrics and I, but the nice thing is I think what, like our willingness to pay, we're willing to pay not even for a meeting right now, but a buyer's, a purchase lead hundreds of dollars, just, just knowing that they are in the market, you know,

Tyler King (37:31.575)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (37:32.322)
much less like we're paying that whether they take the call or not.

Tyler King (37:35.137)
Yeah, that's like our current lead source is works like that. Like JD is not getting appointments from him. He's just getting their contact info.

Rick (37:41.587)
Correct, yeah, and the knowledge and confidence that they are actively searching and expecting a call from him. So, know, for an outbound appointment that is a larger entity that we know is 25 to 100 employees, I mean, I'd be willing to pay a couple thousand dollars for that.

Tyler King (38:00.013)
Yeah, it'd have to be given, this is a small business, we can't get 100 leads a month like that, but getting five leads a month and we're paying $10,000 total maybe, that could work.

Rick (38:14.937)
Yeah, JD closes one like that's that works and then it's like, okay. Well, how do you maybe that's a more expensive lead source to spin up but like that's a very investible coin operated lead source where it's very I would say it would be much easier to spend ahead of growth for than a Source that we don't necessarily control

Tyler King (38:36.621)
I've always been jealous of this type of thing. For the unit economic reasons you mentioned earlier, lessening CRM just, we can't afford this type of thing and never have been. like kind of a marketing, there's like marketing goes straight to self-serve purchase or there's marketing goes to sales. Like there's marketing either way, but is there a salesperson in the middle? Buying leads that go directly to sales is so much more repeatable than any marketing to self-serve thing.

Marketing and self-service is nice because once you get it, it could be basically free, like SEO or some kind of viral loop or whatever can be quote unquote free, but you don't control it. You can't be like, okay, well let's double our budget and get twice as many leads this month. So yeah, if you can get something like that working, that'd be awesome.

Rick (39:19.163)
Yep. then, I mean, we, we, the, the other area that I know, I mean, when we're buying a lead, we're basically buying someone else's marketing spend and we're probably paying more than what we would spend if we were actually doing the marketing. So I do think that there is, we do need to probably start experimenting with some form of Google, very targeted Google, Facebook, Instagram spend on, our ICP, particularly if they're

searching, they're displaying intent around health benefits or health insurance. And they're in Utah and they're, you know, a business owner. So there's something there. And then the third thing is, this is assuming we get the outreach thing figured out, we have, that will lead to a high quality growing number of, let's just call it contacts in our database that we can nurture and reengage. And so that's where remarketing.

following them around different sites and saying leg up, leg up, leg up, inviting them to webinars, providing them value on some least annoying cadence, just around content marketing and email marketing to our base.

Tyler King (40:38.893)
Do you have a sense of like, we're targeting Utah small businesses here. Like how many ICP customers do you think exist in total?

Rick (40:50.419)
I haven't thought about that actually, because what we're talking about here is like, I would have said, my circle answer to that is we don't care who our customer is, but that's not your question. Your question is how many 25 to 100 employee businesses are there in Utah that in that, that we could actually, we really, really, really, really, really, really want. I don't know the answer to that. That's a good question.

Tyler King (41:06.731)
Yeah. It's probably a number. It's certainly enough that like, like up health could be a very, very successful business just based on that. Like without going into any other States or anything like that. There's no question. Is it a number though, where like, if you have some kind of automated outreach type thing, realistically we could get in a couple of years where every single one of these people has been contacted by us. Like maybe. Yeah.

Rick (41:17.833)
Correct.

Rick (41:30.291)
absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. in that range, 25 to 100, think below 25, it's a long tail that like gets exponentially larger down to the solo founder. So to the extent that like our appointments are, our AI works, good enough. Like we could apply that to the sub 25 space and still have this work. but, it

Tyler King (41:47.693)
Yeah, you're not gonna have the SDRs reach out to sub 25, but this other thing could be much cheaper and more scalable. So that could work with smaller customers.

Rick (41:57.929)
Hypothetically, like I don't know where the 25 is arbitrary right now, but but there's some Place where it's like we can't spend enough money to make this work

Tyler King (42:00.758)
Yeah.

Tyler King (42:06.571)
Yeah. Okay. Cool. so you're just going to go, sorry. Good.

Rick (42:09.447)
The last thing, the last area is what I would call like SEO slash AI search optimization. I do think that leg up in because we're focused on Utah, the local aspects here, if we can figure out how to write good content that is being picked up by these engines, I do think that there is an inbound opportunity there, but it's the lowest on my list because it's the least predictable.

Tyler King (42:36.717)
Yeah, yeah, I, that's definitely the one I'm least excited about, including even if you got it working, I personally wouldn't feel like it de-risked the thing we're trying to de-risk here. It would be good in the short term, but I'd still be like, yeah, is that gonna last?

Rick (42:52.389)
I mean, so the only counter to that is my last business people keep, we literally built a $5 million business on SEO optimization, Legion. And so like, it can be done and it can, but there's always this like, what happens if? It's, you know, so it's...

Tyler King (43:08.939)
Yeah, well we talked last week, right, about how both of us believe tofu content doesn't, in an AI world, tofu content is going away. And so if they're looking for insurance, that SEO should continue working. Yeah. But, okay, cool.

Rick (43:20.979)
Pay dad.

Rick (43:25.629)
Yeah, and then we could also capture it with paid paid advertising because you know that the AI search engines are going to take, you know, ad spend at some point. It's inevitable.

Tyler King (43:34.881)
Yeah, 100%. I think Google already announced something, whatever they do, I'm sure it's gonna evolve a lot, but yeah, there's no way they're gonna just give out free links forever.

All right, what we got 10 minutes here.

Rick (43:52.487)
Okay, let's go into your, I would love a VoIP update,

Tyler King (43:56.258)
Well, let me, okay, again, this is such a big topic. We have to break it into tiny little pieces. I wanna address something you and I've heard from other people. Last time you kind of said, have I considered going out and acquiring a company? I've heard, have you considered hiring, like outsourcing the development and hiring someone else to do it? Stuff like that. And I'm always resistant, but I'm not sure I've, like, anyway, I spent some time over the last couple of weeks thinking about that. Like, what is my answer for why I don't like that? And.

I think my answer is basically like, so in thinking about this, I packed up and I was just like, why do I want to do any of this? I could sell this business and make enough money that I never have to work again right now. And I don't, right? So presumably, yes, there are realities. I have to think about growth. I have to think about money. I can't ignore that stuff if I continue running this business, but I'm not running it just to make more money. Like I listened to podcasts from other people who are like,

I'm only doing this until I can retire. Like I don't want to keep doing this. I do want to keep doing this. And so that caused me to kind of reflect on well, why, what is it that I want to do? And it's the building of the product that I want to do. Which sounds obvious. Anyone who listens to podcast would know that about me. But like, I hadn't had so much clarity about buying another product from somebody. That's like paying someone else to play a video game that I think looks fun. Like I want to play the game.

That's why I'm doing this. And I'm just not interested in paying someone else to play the game for me.

Rick (45:29.747)
In other words, the thing that you're most excited about VoIP isn't necessarily just the value and the money it can make you. It's the experience that you gain from building VoIP.

Tyler King (45:42.872)
Well, not even, even that makes it sound like it's the destination. It's the journey, right? It's the fun that I have. Yeah, yes, exactly. Yes, exactly. And again, I also have to acknowledge, yes, the money matters. I don't want to just go build something nobody uses. Like it's multiple things, but that's a big part of it. Bringing in an outsourced expert who could give us advice sounds great. Like I'm not obviously writing all the code myself, but like,

Rick (45:48.721)
It's the experience of, not the experience gained, but the experience of.

Tyler King (46:12.865)
When I say I want to play the game, mean, I want the team that I'm overseeing to be the ones building it. Like that's a big part of what appeals to me about this.

Rick (46:22.289)
No, it makes sense. And I'm not surprised for you to say this. I will just say, like, I don't think this is binary. I don't think like you're giving acquiring assets is you could apply the same thing as well. shouldn't hire engineers or CRM coaches or anyone. You shouldn't, you shouldn't have any, you should just go sit in your room by yourself. So I think there is like some version of this that could.

Tyler King (46:39.605)
Right, right, absolutely.

Rick (46:50.917)
even be more interesting for you from an experience standpoint than building it yourself. Although I doubt that because building it yourself is actually the ideal, but there's probably a way to have your cake and eat it too. guess what I'm trying to say.

Tyler King (47:02.093)
If I was really interested in learning, if that was my primary thing, think definitely like acquiring a company, even if it failed, acquiring a company, going through the whole thing, I would learn so much. And I think that that would be fulfilling in a different way. But it's the actual work to be done after that is the worst part, right? It's like now it's just porting code from one tech stack to another and it's migrating data and it's, but yeah, I agree with you. There's definitely an angle to acquiring a company that is pretty interesting.

Rick (47:32.871)
Yep. No, I appreciate you saying this. stop. I'll still push it every now and again, but I'll like caveat it with this probably isn't a good thing to acquire. I think this actually is a good thing to acquire because this could be fun for you.

Tyler King (47:42.882)
Yeah. Yeah. Or so absolutely please keep pushing. Maybe five years from now I'll be like, you know what? Like one of the things I love about being like a bootstrapped founder with no investors to respond to, I get so much variety in what I work on. And you've commented on this before that I kind of go through cycles where I get, I don't want say I get bored. I don't think I've ever been truly bored, but I get like, it's time to push myself into a new frontier.

And almost every time it fails, but like I really appreciate that I have the opportunity to do that. So it's possible five years from now, I'll be ready for a new challenge or maybe two years from now, I'll be ready for a new challenge. It'll be time to try this out. I'm not closed off to it forever, but that's where I am right now.

Rick (48:28.051)
Yeah, thank you for sharing that. That was helpful. I'm glad you caused a loop on that.

Tyler King (48:30.369)
Yeah. Yeah. And well, and thank you. And, also Dave do shock, the guy I mentioned last week that has been giving me advice on VoIP also suggested some of this and I, didn't have a good answer for him either. but again, I do want to reiterate, I am going to probably look for a outside and he might have a lead for me on that outside, expertise to like the part where you're trying to do a new thing and you're banging your head against a wall. Like how do I connect this open source library to that open source library? And someone could just tell you the answer.

Rick (48:59.913)
You wanna VoIP coach.

Tyler King (49:01.121)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm very open to coaching, but then I want my team to do the work. Yeah. All right, we probably don't have time for any other VoIP stuff. Do you have any like, very short?

Rick (49:11.219)
Can you move VoIP to, can we do VoIP like first next time? I'm actually very interested, I mean, I've got a small thing, but like what's this YouTube experiment thing?

Tyler King (49:14.432)
Okay, sure.

Tyler King (49:22.925)
Honestly, did I already talk about that and forget to close it off? I think I did. Did I say we're gonna try to make some, didn't, okay. This is another thing that I probably wouldn't, I think it's a long shot from working. I wouldn't put developer time towards it, but it's something a serum coach can do with 20 % time. You remember when I made less annoying business.com back in the day? And it was basically like me trying to make a content site, trying to build an audience, whatever.

Rick (49:31.443)
I don't remember.

Tyler King (49:53.812)
I, it didn't work obviously. In the process of trying it though, I made a handful of YouTube videos for the, I made a course on how to make a small business website. I thought my current customers, lot many of them don't have websites. I'd make this course, they'd make websites. I thought it would work. Nobody, nobody made a website. Bunch of people did the course, but nobody made a website out of it. Out of that whole thing, I made one video on YouTube that got almost 50,000 views. Which, you know, it's not like Mr. Beast numbers, but.

If I could put out YouTube videos that are getting 50,000 views, I'd be pretty happy with that. The topic was how to set up DNS records to set up Google Workspace email, like to get Gmail working with your domain. It's like a boring video. just, one take on Loom. It literally had to be one take because I was like buying the domain on live. I couldn't do it twice. So it wasn't well produced.

50,000 views and tons of comments like, my God, this is incredible. Thank you. I've been looking for hours trying to figure out how this works. Basically the thought experience and in it, I used CloudFlare as the DNS provider, but I was like, this isn't a CloudFlare video. Just like you bought your domain from someone. I bought it from CloudFlare. So I'm going to show you how to do it in CloudFlare, but like you might use GoDaddy. You might use Namecheap, whatever you use, it works the same. I bet a few people signed up for CloudFlare because of that video.

even though wasn't a video about Cloudflare, was a video about setting up Gmail. So the thought here is, does that type of video exist in the CRM space? It's not a video about less annoying CRM. It's not someone who's searching for less annoying CRM. It's just someone who has a question, and we can show the answer to it using less annoying CRM in the same way that other video showed the answer using Cloudflare.

Rick (51:40.905)
Yeah, I mean, there's a, feel like forums provides a lot of content opportunities. Like, for small, like that's like the most basic workflow automation, starter. so, yeah, I think this is a great idea to experiment on. So do it, do it.

Tyler King (51:44.973)
Mm-hmm, yeah.

Tyler King (51:52.619)
Yeah. How do I integrate forms with? I will. Yeah. One of our CRM coaches has already claimed this. It's going to be, it'll be a slow roll because you know, one day a week isn't a ton of time, but we're gonna, we're currently brainstorming topics. think we're going to come up with 10 or 20 kind of titles for videos. The CRM coach is going to make those videos. We're going to publish them and just see, any of these, I'm not expecting 50,000 views for any of them, but even one thought, cause if you look at the videos I made before, it's like 50,000.

and then like 5,000 and then like 200 or something. There's a really sharp drop off. So can we get into the thousands? And if we can, I think that would be validation that we should keep trying this.

Yeah, that's all I got on that one. You want to call it or you got any? Okay, sounds good.

Rick (52:37.353)
Let's call it. If you'd like to review past topics and show notes, visit StartupToLast.com. Do we still have that website by the way? Okay, good. Transistor, all right, see you next time.

Tyler King (52:44.844)
Yeah, Transistor, hosted by Transistor. See ya.