Tyler King (00:01.058)
What's going on, Rick?

Rick (00:02.128)
Not much. What's up, Tyler?

Tyler King (00:04.908)
Yeah, it's been, we skipped last time, so it's been a month, so hopefully we've got a lot of updates to give, although before we started talking, we both said we don't really. No, we've got stuff to talk about here. Yeah, what was going on? You were busy a couple weeks ago?

Rick (00:13.518)
Yeah, I know. It's been a month.

Yes, and I've also, I incentivize myself to lose a bunch of weight and if I bought, if I a bunch of weight I let myself buy a cheap car. And so I bought a Miata, like a new one, and every, yes, yes. And everyone's making fun of me for it. Like I don't think anyone understands like the beauty of a Miata.

Tyler King (00:35.224)
you bought it since Monday? Because last time we talked you were about to buy it. Okay. Well congrats.

Tyler King (00:47.662)
So you're much, I'm not a car person at all and I drive a Mazda, so I'm certainly not opposed to the Mazda brand. What does a Miata hold? Like what is the reputation or brand of a Miata in your mind?

Rick (01:01.85)
I mean, pure driving like experience like a go kart, basically. The closest thing to like the simplest roadster. Like the type of car is a roadster, but it's a two seater. And it's just like, you know, being able to just go drive a car. There's no functionality other than the driving experience and the reviews for the new ones are awesome. So.

I don't know, you probably don't buy a bunch of cars or look at cars, but it's very difficult to find a new car with the features of 2024, 2025 that also has a stick shift or manual transmission. And so this is one of those. Yeah, so it'll just be fun to drive. Like I've got a pretty long commute to work. You know, it'll just be like something fun. And maybe I'll be like, why did I do this?

Tyler King (01:46.574)
Nice. All right.

Tyler King (01:53.593)
You see this being your main, cause you still have like a normal sedan. You see this being your main car, but like if you're going out with the family or something, you drive the other one. Yeah.

Rick (02:02.738)
Correct, yeah, this is just like, I'm gonna go make my chores and commute a little more fun, a little more exciting.

Tyler King (02:10.284)
Nice. Cool. I bought a guitar amp for myself recently, so I guess we're both doing kind of midlife crisis purchases right now.

Rick (02:18.482)
Hey, I earned mine man. I lost 15 pounds

Tyler King (02:23.544)
Well, if I lost 15 pounds, would wither to dust. I'm a little guy, Rick, I can't lose 15 pounds. No, I basically stopped rucking when Sydney was born. I'm getting back into pull-ups. I stopped exercising entirely when she was born, and I have now more or less gotten back into my pull-up routine, I don't know, maybe rucking's next.

Rick (02:27.954)
Hey, it's a percentage equivalent. Are you still wrecking?

Rick (02:50.844)
Now that you have the basement all built out, you should look into a tonal.

Tyler King (02:55.566)
Is that that mirror thing you were talking about? Yeah.

Rick (02:57.168)
Yes, it's so cool. It's basically every day it comes up with an AI based workout and based on what it knows about your workouts for the last bit so it knows what areas are weak because it does a full assessment on your strength when you start and it just like tells you exactly what to do and it hits every part of your body. It's awesome. I think you'd really like it.

Tyler King (03:25.986)
I don't think I would, I think Shelly might. She does actual work. What I've learned about myself is my workouts just have to be built in. Like I'm at my desk typing and then I go do 10 pull-ups. I, if it's like, I need to go set aside 30 minutes or 60 minutes to do a real workout. It's just never going to happen.

Rick (03:28.422)
Mmm.

Rick (03:44.306)
Yeah, and also when you have a baby, is, I mean, this is the last thing that gets added back is time dedicated to workout. So, I mean, it's taken me four years to figure out with kids how to work out regularly.

Tyler King (04:00.172)
Yeah, Okay, cool. So you bought a car, I bought an amp. What else is going on?

Rick (04:07.906)
Well, we had our partner meeting at LegUp Health. You were there on Monday. One of the things that we talked about, just wanted to, maybe if you were willing to just take a step further, because I thought, first of all, I just want to comment, every time we do a partner meeting and we have less to talk about, but we go deep on one topic, the value of the partner meeting explodes into much more value versus having a packed agenda.

Tyler King (04:34.222)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (04:34.77)
and trying to cover a bunch of stuff, which is the tendency, I think, that I have.

Tyler King (04:40.866)
I think it's the tendency like, I think it is what corporate America trains people to do. And it's why people hate meetings so much as you go. Like, sorry, I'm interrupting you here, but like, I talked to so many like friends and people like that who work in corporate America who sit in meetings that they don't need to be in, which is crazy to me. Cause I've just never had this in my life. Like a meeting where you don't talk the entire time. I don't think I've ever had that in my entire life. There are people going to 20 person meetings where they just sit there and listen like,

The amount of time wasted in meetings is very normalized at a lot of environments, I think. Do you agree with that?

Rick (05:16.818)
Yeah, and I think you bring a different perspective to these partner meetings and I still haven't figured out how to be intentional about what you think is the right way. But it happened on Monday. Yeah. Yeah, but my tendency is just to fill up the list. Like, oh, we have an hour, that means we need to cover this, an hour worth of stuff. But this week's partner meeting was...

Tyler King (05:30.99)
I'm not saying I have all the answers, I'm just complaining about a problem, but yeah.

Rick (05:45.574)
You know, we, things are going as expected. and JD had a couple of things you want to talk about. And then we were like, we have an hour left. What should we talk about? and so it just, it, it, it, I brought something up related to positioning and content and we, we, we literally noodled on it together for an hour. And the action items that came out of it were pretty cool. So the topic that I brought up and I just, I want to, I want to build out,

I want to basically give myself some action items out of this conversation. So like, why do I bring this to the podcast? Well, I don't feel like I know exactly what to focus on next. So, leg up has three offerings. We have a consumer offering. We have a group offering for employers, which like traditional health insurance offerings. And then what Tyler's built and we've really started to get more and more momentum on is this middle layer, middle option, which is

use leg up benefits to offer health insurance to your employees and also give them money in a structured way that they like. That's the gist. And we basically, if you go to our website, it was originally a website built for consumers because that's all we did. Then we sort of we hired a marketing consultant and they helped us position for employers. And so we updated like for employers, but it's very generic. Like we help you with your benefits.

There's nothing racy. There's nothing that goes, what makes leg up health different? And so just, I don't wanna spend time recapping the partner meeting I wanna get into the juice, but I think the context of the partner meeting that is necessary to just catch up to this conversation is we basically said, oh no, no, we need to decide what we wanna be that's different. And it might not appeal to everyone we can help, but.

Tyler King (07:17.358)
You

Rick (07:44.05)
it will appeal to the people that we can most help and that will be more likely to help us generate opportunities and buzz through marketing than our current approach.

Tyler King (07:58.893)
Yeah. And I think specifically how we got there was JD is emailing people. Some of them are cold emails. Some of them are like someone we talked to three years ago, like so coldish, but they know who we are. and we looked at the email template, like what is the actual email being sent? And the problem is it's like, well, if, it could be for people who want a totally free option, or it could be for people who want a group plan, or it could be for people who want to drop their group and go to this kind of paying an allowance, but there's not a group plan.

The email ended up speaking to nobody, think. I don't know if you ended up agreeing with that by the end, but that was kind of my take. And so it was, how can we send an email that speaks to somebody?

Rick (08:38.726)
Yeah, by trying to speak to everyone, we're speaking to no one. Who do we want to speak to specifically and what does that change about the messaging? so there's this, and then if you go to the website, it's the same problem. Like if someone comes to the website, it's like our positioning is around how we can basically make you feel confident about your health insurance decision. And it's got a lot of good stuff in it, don't get me wrong. think it's got good proof points and reviews and that sort of thing, but like what do we actually do that's differentiated is very unclear.

Anyway, so I would love to just, so what we decided on, and I just wanna figure out, I wanna workshop how to take this to a new website. So JD has, I think, action items with outbound. And I would like to know what I should be doing to build the marketing piece of this so that we can generate leads for him, basically.

And so the gist of the positioning that we got to that we very high level was there are people every year, every month out there that are business owners or leaders at companies that have group health insurance and are considering canceling it. And if we find that company, we went through all of our customers and we realized if we find that person at that company at the right time, we are

Like the best thing since sliced bread we validated this already from monday with by go That's where our customers come from and they may not cancel the group plan They may not cancel the group plan, right? They might stick with group and we've become the agent but they now trust that will help them Re-evaluate every year and be confident. They had made the right decision Or they go. Hey, like you just gave me a new solution with like a benefits where I drop the group plan Give money to employees and i'm saving Ten thousand dollars a year, you know

Tyler King (10:13.057)
Yeah, that's where our customers come from is it's people with group plans. Yeah.

Rick (10:38.13)
per employee. It's significant savings, real business impact.

Tyler King (10:43.991)
Yeah, and if I can just pause here, this is something that took me so long to learn at Less Annoying. I feel like most of the marketing we all as humans are exposed to is consumer marketing, like marketing towards B2C products. And a lot of that stuff is impulse driven. A lot of it's like, hey, you want a Coca-Cola? Go get a Coca-Cola. And there's no like thought put into it or, you're on, I don't actually use Instagram, but when I talk to people who use Instagram, the algorithm figures out you want a thing and you might,

push a button and buy it right there. And so I think we all want our marketing to be very like persuasive and impulse driven based on that. Like if this product is a fit for this person, all we have to do is give them the right message and they'll buy it. That is not how most B2B works. There's this other component, which is it has to be the right time. So there might be a whole universe of people who would be great, very happy with like a benefits. And there's a whole universe of people would be really happy with less annoying CRM. But if they're not looking to buy right this second,

they're not worth wasting any time on. And so what I think really what you just said and what really came out of that meeting for me is we need to not focus on all the potentially good customers. We need to focus on the customers who are actually ready to buy. And that's people with group plans that are gonna cancel or thinking about it.

Rick (11:59.154)
Yep, exactly. and what I also like about that positioning is it doesn't necessarily exclude other people because they might not be thinking about canceling your plan right now. They, uh, they might be, you know, saying, Hey, I've thought about that in the past, or I might think about that in the future. This might be worth like flagging and noting. Um, also. Yeah.

Tyler King (12:08.631)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (12:17.523)
Or I don't have a group plan, but I was thinking about adding one, but now maybe I'm second guessing that, this makes me think that if all these people are canceling group plans, what am I getting wrong here?

Rick (12:27.866)
Exactly, exactly. when I think about the website update and how to like build all the pieces of the, let's just say we wanted to kick off a campaign October 1st. Let's just use that as the critical event to work back from. We want to do email marketing with some offers. We want to do a webinar that reinforces its positioning. We want to have a social media campaign that kicks off and runs through the counter year. We might even have some ads running on social media related to this.

what are the P like, if you look at our website right now, it basically has a homepage. has a section for consumers, a concession for businesses, a section, like a section for proof. And then it's called action from there. My, guess my question is like, where do I start here? What is the, what is like the 20 % of effort here that gets me the 80 % of punch to actually get this thing ready to go actually do.

I think the homepage is an obvious one where it's just like we rethink the positioning more around cancel cancellation. But then I always get into this cycle where I'm like, well, we do have people who are customers who are going to come to our site. They're consumer customers. I want them to have a place to go. I think I don't know.

Tyler King (13:45.688)
Do you? I mean, does it matter? Like the LessonWingSerum marketing site, www.lessonwingserum.com is just not for our customers. It's for new leads. Our customers go there and then they hit the login button. I don't care what they think of our H1 when they see it.

Rick (14:04.242)
Do you feel like it's important? you think logins are not for existing customers?

Tyler King (14:09.495)
I think so, and with LegUp Health, mean, I'm running the server, no one's even logging in. I don't think anyone's seeing this website, so I wouldn't worry too much about it.

Rick (14:14.288)
Yeah, yeah.

so you don't think we need a section for consumers.

Tyler King (14:21.879)
I don't think, I think we've decided, this is shifted. If someone goes back a few years and listens to you on the podcast, I think you had a very like values driven, like we need to serve consumers. And I think it is still the case that if a consumer comes to us or if we have a consumer, we want to serve them. But I think that we've got a lot more clarity than we used to that we're not pursuing consumers. We're not trying to market to them or do, you know, outbound to them or anything like that.

Rick (14:37.254)
We will not say no.

Rick (14:50.66)
Only they're business owners. And just to be very clear in case a customer listens to this, what we're not saying is serving consumers is gone. No, that is a core part of our product offering, is taking care of employees and what particularly their health insurance needs. It's just not the lead that we generate for sales from a go-to-market motion.

Tyler King (14:52.406)
Yeah.

Tyler King (15:13.485)
Well, because the customer acquisition costs are too high. That's the same way, like, when less annoying CRM buys leads, we don't buy one user, even though 70 % of our customers are single users, it's not profitable to buy leads for one user, chase them down and sell them. So like, if they come to us, great, but we're not going and chasing.

Rick (15:29.586)
Let me just flap a second. This is my larger concern. I just want to make sure we talk about it. Right now we have something on the website for all the people we serve. If we take one like something away for consumers, am I doing something wrong? Like is that bad? And you're saying no. Like don't worry about it.

Tyler King (15:47.406)
I'm saying leave, I think the navigation's good. says individuals, businesses, clients, which until I clicked on it, I didn't know what that was gonna do. then about, yeah. I think that's fine. Like leaving individuals there and just don't touch that page at all seems fine to me. But I don't think the homepage needs to be positioned to be like, hey, you know, we're actually for a bunch of different people. That's my take. But.

Rick (15:54.477)
its reviews.

Rick (16:13.778)
So basically you'd focus on the homepage, the about page, make the client's page more obviously testimonials and reviews, and then work up the funnel from there.

Tyler King (16:24.299)
Yes, but my big question with this, which every time a marketing idea comes up that involves like making content or redesigning a page is like, who's seeing it? Like right now, no one's seeing this. So I get that you're saying maybe reworking the website is the first step and then you can go do the other steps of getting people to see it. But like those other steps are very important. Like in terms of who is gonna see this, how are they gonna see it, et cetera. I would think what I would do is

update the homepage and nothing else and maybe change the word clients to testimonials and reviews and don't touch any other page until like my approach is normally let's get traffic to a page and then we can worry about optimizing it. Cause if no one ever goes there, you wasted your time spending a bunch of time.

Rick (17:13.66)
Yeah, I think I generally agree with what I would call iterative improvements. In this case, this is a wholesale. I would feel very irresponsible spending money to drive people to the site around the new messaging without having it be reinforced.

Tyler King (17:30.753)
Yeah, well most ad campaigns don't go to the homepage of a website though. Like would it be better to

Rick (17:35.494)
So what you're saying is you could even build a landing page that's custom, yeah.

Tyler King (17:38.466)
Yeah, much simpler potentially. But again, that's, that is if you're doing a bunch of paid, well, I wouldn't say it's the same amount of work necessary. It could be landing pages can be a lot simpler, but like, if the thing you're doing is driving traffic with PPC campaigns, then yes. If you're trying to do an SEO play, one of these little very, very simple, sparse landing pages is not going to get any SEO juice for you. So in that world.

Rick (17:43.922)
Same amount of work.

Tyler King (18:06.879)
It's a different set of things you want to change.

Rick (18:08.982)
The high level is I think I need people who go to legapelt.com to see what we want, what we are, like what we want them to see, the best message possible. So I think I need to solve that. So that's one action item. The client's in reviews thing is a no brainer, I just need to fix that. Then it's, you I think, okay, well, what are the, like from there, what are the magnets that are going to attract people to the site?

It's ad copy. If we're going to spend ads, it's, it's email template, marketing email templates and offers, that are organic. and then it's SEO content. I do think it's, I did some research on. If there's a lot of the space that we play in, it's dominated by what's called a ICRA, ICHRA, which is a health reimbursement arrangement. That's like been, been like, like totally ruined. but, but, it's.

that and then like stipend is the language and no one is going after that stipend language. Like it is very reasonable that we could move to the first page very, very quickly for that, like for those keywords, particularly for Utah specific long tails. And so I think that's where we, what I'm thinking is homepage.

some offer, it doesn't even have to be a bill. It just needs to be the landing page for the offer. And then when someone requests that we could build the like we could go, oh, you requested it here. Here you go. Like give me 24 hours. I will write the e-book or whatever you asked for. And then, you know, it's the sort of content that is more educational, that's SEO driven. And then it's the ad copy. And then from there, it's just OK, let's go.

Tyler King (19:58.723)
Yeah, that sounds reasonable to me. one thing I'll like, there's already this other thing going on, which is JD reaching out to people. I would probably put at the very top of the list of priorities here is when someone gets an email from JD and then goes to the website, like I would treat that person as the primary audience of the homepage.

Rick (20:18.268)
That's a great point. So when someone goes to leguphelp.com because they heard about LegUp Health, that's the audience, right? When a...

Tyler King (20:26.156)
Yes, it's not necessarily driving organic traffic yet.

Rick (20:29.636)
No, this is good. That's so. number one is home page. I'm getting very actual here. And the audience is an ICP persona. So it's Utah. Basically. I don't think we need to say Utah, but it's do you think like saying Utah is important? I guess that's a sidetrack.

Tyler King (20:51.394)
I don't have good instinct here. My concern is like, LegUp Health also serves Texas and I'm not sure it's worth it. Whatever benefit there is, I'm not sure the, yeah. Yeah.

Rick (20:58.832)
Yeah, it's not worth it.

It's not worth the squeeze. The juice is not worth the squeeze, Tyler. Audiences, so it's someone that heard about Legap Health. And I actually think that is 100 % of our traffic right now. It's someone who's like, should check out Legap Health and they go to the website or we're reaching out to them from our network or our database and saying, hey, we have updates or here's what we do now. And they're coming to Legap Health to learn more without talking to us.

Tyler King (21:13.88)
Yeah.

Rick (21:30.971)
I love that.

Tyler King (21:32.13)
Yeah, and I think this is true for a ton of small business. I was just talking to a friend of mine the same way. He's got like a small SaaS business. It's been in business for like 30 years or something. He gets very little website traffic, but his homepage looks like it's meant for some kind of generic mass audience. And it's like, no, you serve a very small niche. Yeah, Yeah.

Rick (21:54.418)
speak to them. Okay. I think that's all that matters is the first step then is getting that addressed.

Tyler King (21:59.021)
Yeah, I think so. And then my final thing is I like above the fold is 90 % of this. And if you scroll, if you go to the homepage, like uphealth.com and you scroll down, the page is like, I think it's good, but it's, like you said, the problem you're trying to solve here is it's too generic kind of the generic could work for you in terms of being able to work on this incrementally. You could put anything you want above the fold and it's not going to clash with what's below the fold right now. So I might even cut it.

Rick (22:18.129)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (22:27.004)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (22:28.576)
slice it down smaller and say, what is a really compelling H1 and like, you know, that sentence or two after the H1 and call to action. You could just ship that and leave everything else as it is as a step one here.

Rick (22:44.198)
Good call, Yeah, I wonder if that's what... Yes, yes, I think this is potentially very impactful. One other area that I just spit on my mind is when I go to someone's homepage, the first, what I'm trying to figure out is what does this company do? I don't think we make that very easy. Would you say that we should maybe focus the scroll down on what we actually do or would you say...

Tyler King (22:46.574)
I'm excited to see what you come up with here.

Tyler King (23:02.798)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (23:12.548)
we should maybe get rid of individual and businesses out at the top and put that maybe in the footer so we don't lose those pages. And then just say what we do, reviews and testimonials. And then like, honestly, like maybe it's we merge the about page and the what we do page. And it's like basically homepage, what we do, testimonials and reviews, sign up.

Tyler King (23:38.649)
Yeah, I'm torn here. Let me share what I know from less annoying CRM's website, understanding their different products and different markets. But like we used to have a what is a CRM item in our nav. No one clicked on it. And like, why not? And I think it's partially because everyone already knows what a CRM is. But it's partially because I don't think that's how people buy. Again, like a lot of people who hit the site have already been warmed up in one way or another.

Far, far and away, the first thing people click on for us is pricing. And that's true for any SaaS. Should you have a pricing page? Even though the pricing is zero, well, it's not zero for LEGO benefits, I guess.

Rick (24:09.914)
Rick (24:18.362)
Yeah, mean, but we could use a pricing page to like, instead of saying what we do, we could say pricing and then say like, hey, there are three approaches. Yeah, yeah.

Tyler King (24:25.144)
Yeah, that communicates what, I like that a lot. This is very similar to like when you're writing an email, know, write whatever you want and then put a PS line that has the thing you actually want them to find out. Like you can write the information they're looking for, but if it's in the wrong place, they're not gonna read it.

Rick (24:39.772)
I like that. So basically that's how I look at websites too. The first thing I do is home page and I scroll and see if I'm getting anything. Usually it's not useful, but I understand enough to read more. And then it's like, where's the pricing page? And I get super annoyed if I can't find the pricing page. Then it's about page. Like who are these people? Do I trust them? And then if there's reviews, like case studies, I click on that too, but most people don't make that easy to find either.

Tyler King (25:04.13)
Yeah, so the navigation could be what we do pricing reviews about or just price it. I think pricing reviews and about you want there. And then I think option, I don't think it hurts to have something for individuals and businesses. I don't think it hurts to have, I wouldn't do all three of these, but either individuals and businesses or what we do, but hopefully what we do is answered by the homepage.

Rick (25:29.714)
Yeah, I'm thinking that we just get rid of individual and businesses and move it to the footer. So we keep the, you know, sort of sub pages that people are going there. Um, and

Tyler King (25:36.236)
Yeah, I think that's fine. Very few individuals come to the website and sign up, right? That just doesn't happen. So I, yeah, I think that's fine.

Rick (25:47.004)
Do we want to keep signup free at the top?

So the call to actions right now at the top are book a call, which I think is probably the right call to action. Yeah. And then sign up free.

Tyler King (25:57.123)
That's the main call to action, yeah.

Tyler King (26:01.688)
So if you had a lot more traffic than you do, I'd be like, A-B test is for sure. This is a great type of, like call to actions are great to A-B test, but there's not enough traffic to do that. My instinct is either get rid of it or I think signup free is like giving the wrong impression. It makes it sound like this is some kind of like self-service SaaS thing when in fact the personal touch that JD offers is the product. So I would either.

Rick (26:05.49)
Yeah, we're...

Rick (26:28.146)
So maybe we change signup free to something else.

Tyler King (26:30.094)
It could be get started or something like that.

Tyler King (26:36.118)
even sign up, yeah, it's just not, it's not a pure tech play.

Rick (26:40.978)
This was built when, sign up free is when we were focused on consumers and all the messaging was like, we are free, a free basically add-on to your health insurance plan, get started. So that's an easy one. Do you like book a call? What's your gut there? Yeah, okay.

Tyler King (26:58.19)
Yeah, I like it. My guts, yeah. I think probably a lot of people are going to be intrigued. I'll put it this way. I hate it on a SaaS website. What that tells me is this is not for me. This is for a big enterprise client. I think anyone looking at health insurance or a health benefits product is gonna understand I am gonna have to talk to somebody at some point in this process. So I think it fits here.

Rick (27:23.826)
Do you think, sorry I'm asking so many questions here. For get started, do you think it would be worthwhile to test instead of going straight, like right now it goes straight into the app sign up registration. Do you think it would be worth putting a more dynamic survey form in front of that that is like, are you a consumer? Not built into the product but like maybe a middleware. Are you a consumer? Do you have group health insurance?

And we basically guide them through a wizard to get them routed to either the signup free or, cause we have a business, have three, we have two signups, right? There are kind of three paths that we might take based on someone's answers to those questions. One might be create your consumer account. One might be create your consumer account with business, like, you know, limitations. And then the third might be request a call to discuss your group health insurance. Submit your.

you know, your current group health insurance information for review.

Tyler King (28:25.848)
My instinct is that overcomplicates it. There's two reasons to do that. One is we are so overwhelmed with like low quality booked calls. Like this is a consumer who should have signed up. We just wasted some time talking to them. That's not happening. So like if JD's ever like trying to save time, then maybe that makes sense. The other option is people, we are scaring off people who don't want to book a call as their next step, but you.

Rick (28:36.114)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (28:52.788)
If there's a get started, which is a signup form and a book of call, lets the customer decide which one, which path they want to take. They both lead to the same place, but

Rick (29:01.956)
At the end of the day, Jay's gonna call him. That's a good point. I guess what I'm saying is like right now that gets started is first name, last name, email, password, and what state do you live in? And there isn't any like, why would you fill this out?

Tyler King (29:03.66)
Yeah.

Tyler King (29:15.758)
Yeah. Oh, sorry. Should there be a different form instead of that? Yeah. Okay. Sorry. I was coming from the approach of instead of book a call, do that. If Get Started takes you to a form and the form is like, which of these three types are you? And if they're like, I'm an employer, the next step is, okay, we're gonna give you a call. And if they're a consumer, the next step is go sign up. Yeah, yeah, sorry. I was misunderstanding that. That sounds fine.

Rick (29:37.68)
we send them to this page.

Rick (29:42.224)
Yeah, do you think that's something that, yeah, that there's tools for that. Like there's dynamic form tools that we could use for that that are pretty good.

Tyler King (29:51.225)
Yeah, for sure. reform definitely does that. You have to pay for it. I assume HubSpot has something like this. Don't we have a HubSpot account?

Rick (30:01.5)
We do have a HubSpot account. We have the bare bones. We do not have a whole lot of capabilities. Yeah. The $20 per month account is what we have.

Tyler King (30:10.582)
hate that bare bones account that's how they steal all our customers

Tyler King (30:18.508)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that makes sense. I definitely agree. Get Started probably should not take them to the Laravel app sign up page that I made. I agree with that, yeah.

Rick (30:30.32)
Yes. Cool. Cool. Okay. So, but even something like very simple, one question, like one landing page.

Tyler King (30:38.354)
or a simpler, if you don't wanna like figure out a form tool, what you could do is take them to a webpage. It's not a form, it's just some button. It's like, if you're an individual person who wants us as your health insurance agent, click here and sign up and that takes them to my signup page. If you're a business that's looking for options, click here and book a call.

Rick (30:59.728)
Yeah, it's basically landing page with choose from these options to get started. That's a simple version. Yeah, okay.

Tyler King (31:11.318)
And you could position that well, think being like, if you're an employer that doesn't currently have an offer, anything click here. If you're one who does click here again, at the end of the day, they're talking to JD, but that speaks to them saying, Hey, this is actually for you. We have the thing you're looking.

Rick (31:27.184)
Yep, consumer, group, no group. Or no benefits, I should say. It's like no group, no benefits, gives money, giving money to employees.

Rick (31:46.278)
No benefits.

Tyler King (31:47.938)
Yep, sounds good.

Rick (31:49.254)
Cool, thank you. That was really helpful. I feel like I've got a very clear website. And then once I get the website done, I think I don't worry about anything else except getting the website done for now. And then from there we can decide, okay, how do we get people to the website?

Tyler King (32:01.548)
Yeah, and again, I would just encourage you ship in tiny little pieces. This feels like the type of thing that could be like in December, you say, all right, I just pressed deploy. That would be a shame.

Rick (32:14.77)
That would be a hold me accountable here. guess, you know, definitely call me out next podcast episode if I haven't done this. Cool. What's thank you for letting me go through that with you. I was struggling to action our partner meeting. I now have a very clear path. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Tyler King (32:20.942)
Alright. Sounds good.

Tyler King (32:31.182)
Great, great. For me, I've got a handful of just little updates here. One, I'm on my new schedule that I have talked about multiple times before, but where now Mondays I'm fully off and Wednesday mornings I'm off for parental leave. So I'm working three and a half days per week. I don't really, I've already kind of gone through the, it's hard to get work done when you're not working five days a week thing. I won't rehash that, but I'm living it now through mid December.

Rick (33:00.018)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (33:01.218)
we had a, a developer on our team, say she's leaving, which is a shame. The good news is because we haven't talked in a month, a lot's happened in the last month.

Rick (33:12.498)
Okay, it's weird. I feel like when we were talking weekly, we didn't have updates, so we would go deep on topics. And then like, this is too long, in my opinion, because I'm like, okay, I should have listened to last episode of it, because I don't even remember what we talked about. But like, yeah, so what has happened in general in the last month?

Tyler King (33:14.67)
You

Tyler King (33:22.541)
Yeah.

Tyler King (33:29.954)
Right, yeah.

Tyler King (33:34.339)
So, I mean, the big thing is this person's leaving. I think it's possible she told me she was leaving more than a month ago, but like right around, like, you you don't wanna make it public until, like, I don't even know if it was public to the team yet. Anyway, it is now. She's staying through the end of December, so we've got her for a while. So it's okay. Every time someone leaves, there's a question of should we replace them? And with where Less than Knowing Serum is right now,

Rick (33:47.952)
It is now.

Tyler King (34:00.748)
It's not like in the past, it was always an easy yes. Like when you're growing, it's like we're hiring people anyway, certainly we're gonna replace anyone who leaves. Where we're kind of plateaued right now, growth wise, we're profitable, but our profit margins are getting smaller and smaller each year. When someone leaves, you kind of have to ask that question of should we replace them? The last developer we didn't replace when they left. So our thought is this time we will. But I think like,

If our company is, I wanna say 18 people right now, it might settle in at 17 or 16, but we're not like trying to get, we're not trying to like cut to the bone, get as lean as we possibly can. Anyway, hiring sucks. Or I don't know, I actually like hiring, but it's a huge, huge time suck. And it's just hard, it's stressful. I love hiring interns because if it doesn't work out, whatever, no big, it's all upside. Hiring full-timers is really stressful because

Rick (34:57.51)
Yeah, and then you got commitment to, you know, to manage. It's never, it's rarely what you get is what you thought you were getting. There's always like, or it's like, wow, you're gonna get bored in this job. You're better, like this is, it's never perfect, you know? Just so you know, I took over an org at Windfall and there, it needs to be, there needs hiring, hiring has evolved.

Tyler King (35:09.239)
Yeah.

Tyler King (35:13.932)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Rick (35:27.002)
And so I've probably done 30 interviews in the last, I'm exaggerating, but like there are 30 candidates in the pipeline right now. And so I've done so many interviews over the last three or four weeks.

Tyler King (35:37.164)
Where are you, like, I'd love to hear as much as you're able to share, like, how many interview steps are there? Where do you talk to them in those steps?

Rick (35:45.36)
Yeah. So, when you get a little bigger, you, you end up having dedicated talent acquisition team members, who are focused on the early stages of the funnel. So there's two main functions that they, there's three main functions that talent acquisition plays. One is sourcing candidates. generating applicants or a cold response, you cold interest. yeah. Yep. Exactly. The second is a complete, they completed an initial screen intake, which is like, in addition to the application.

Tyler King (36:04.43)
Yeah, messaging people on LinkedIn, going to career fairs, whatever.

Rick (36:14.31)
questions that we ask, just validating like, is this person worth investing in a interview with the hiring manager? From there, we go into a stage called internal hiring manager review where it's basically, okay, TA thinks you should interview this person, should you? And that's where calibration can happen on profiles and that sort of thing. Very high percentage of those are yeses, because usually TA is empowered to say, I don't think you should interview this person.

But they're also some device that make hire. So it's like it's a healthy tension. And so then, you know, I am the next interview from there. That's called the hiring manager interview. From from there, we have a step where it's a more in a hiring manager interview. It's more of like an assessment of. Is this a company fit and do they have like the broad swaths of skills to do the job?

Tyler King (37:04.418)
Yeah. So it's something like, it's close to a behavioral interview, I assume.

Rick (37:08.35)
It's part behavioral and then it's part skill. So it's basically check the box on behavior, check the box, try to like find some red flags with skills and if you can find enough, it's not a fit. Basically it's uncover red flags that would make them unhireable for windfall or low probability of success in the role. The next one is a deep dive skill set. we call it technical screen and that's a different person.

From there, we have a project that we have the candidate do.

Tyler King (37:41.326)
And sorry, each of these are different like calls or so they're like talking to you four plus times throughout this process, five times and doing a take home assignment. sounds like damn.

Rick (37:44.348)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (37:48.038)
Five, probably four or five, yeah. Yeah, the Annotate Come assignment, they present to a panel. Usually when they present to a panel, depending on, we only hire in office now, so that changes things. So we typically build a super day of interviews around the panel presentation, because usually if someone's gotten there and done a good project, which has been validated,

It's like, okay, we need to get everyone let's maximize them being onsite and interviewing as much as possible. And then from there, it's final interviews. It's usually, Hey, you know, some, some form of like, they coachable? and then, know, kind of, executive, like founder, founder sign off.

Tyler King (38:28.526)
I need you to share this with my team because everyone who's worked here, they've never worked at any other tech company before. And every time we put together an interview process, people are like, are you sure it's okay for us to ask for two phone calls? And I'm like, I promise you that's not, well, everyone has like previously worked at like a restaurant or something where they think, you go in, you fill out a form, you talk to someone for 10 minutes and you get the job. What we do is so much less than that normally, but I...

Rick (38:55.218)
I have an unpublished guide. So I built Artanak position function at WinFall when I first joined. Hired the team and built the playbooks. The original interview process is still very much like the founders vision, but I learned a lot from it. I have an unpublished guide to hiring on my website that I'll just publish and send to you. Like it has all this in it. Not the WinFall stuff, but like just general, like how to think about hiring. I think the hardest thing that people

Tyler King (38:59.416)
Yeah.

Rick (39:25.136)
get wrong about hiring is like, you wouldn't just like go on a couple of dates and get married, would you?

Tyler King (39:30.648)
Well, that's the thing is you would with an intern, but yes, you wouldn't. Yeah.

Rick (39:33.732)
Yes, so you've confused them. You've confused them with the approach to internships and probably even the, what do call it? The not the sabbatical, but the fellowship. Yeah. So that's a lower stakes. Those are two lower stakes.

Tyler King (39:43.816)
fellowship. Yeah.

Now, I'm gonna tease the ending here. We've already hired somebody. But so, well, so here's how we got there. So we were deciding like, do we wanna do this whole interviewing thing? We've only ever hired one developer that wasn't like entry level before. And even the entry level ones, pretty much all of them interned with us or something. So almost all of our dev hiring has been fellowship or internship and then, or an internal hire from the customer service team that we trained up.

Rick (39:52.942)
well good for you.

Tyler King (40:17.702)
We've only really hired one, like this person has had a job as a developer before. And in retrospect, looking back, we got an amazing person in that round, but there were like two or three other people. If that person had rejected us, there were other people we would have given the offer to. And in retrospect, I look back and I'm like, they would not have been good enough. Our standards were too low. And I'm nervous about, you know, yeah, I hate firing people. It sucks. So I really wanted to avoid that. Anyway, we have, we do this fellowship every year. And

most of the people go on and do their own thing and either we wouldn't, you they don't quite hit our bar for ability or they don't want to live in St. Louis. Like very few of them are actually long-term fits, but we had someone from a few years ago that did the fellowship that we wanted to give her an offer at the time, but just didn't have a position. So anyway, we had this whole internal discussion of like, should we actually go do a full recruiting round or should we just recruit this one specific person? We decided let's just recruit this one specific person. We still want to interview her cause

She was a college student who didn't like the point of the fellowship is they don't know anything yet. so we basically, we just brought her in for one pretty in-depth technical interview. was like four hours of pair programming with her basically. plus some other stuff. anyway, what went well, we gave her the offer. She accepted. She starts at the end of the month.

Rick (41:35.44)
What was she doing since since you last saw her?

Tyler King (41:38.745)
She was working at just a different, I don't want to dox her too much here, but like working at a big company in the, it's not like a tech company, but like in the technical, yes, she was programming, yeah. So yeah, and so part of what we wanted to do is like this other company, it's like this giant corporation. So like how much of what they do, like, is she actually learned any useful skills that will apply here? And so that was a big part of the interview. And yeah, I mean, she's still,

Rick (41:48.338)
Was she programming? that's perfect, man.

Tyler King (42:07.224)
closer to entry level than it's not like a, you she's only been out of college for a year or two. but definitely ahead of the typical person we've hired. So yeah, nailed, nailed the one and done.

Rick (42:16.818)
It's terrific.

Yeah, I mean that's, yeah, when you do the sabbatical, I think, not sabbatical, fellowship and internships, always, the immediate thing is like, well, maybe I'll hire this person after the internship, but there's this long tail that, you're building this kind of bench of people who have affinity that you could hire at any time. And that's pretty cool.

Tyler King (42:36.738)
Mm-hmm.

And it's actually great because we don't have any real internal knowledge of how things are done. That one other person we hired, talked about, he formerly worked at Google. He brought in so much knowledge. Now, Google's a much more sophisticated organization than this other company, but like, yeah, it'd be great to, like in a perfect world, it's like they do the fellowship, then they go to Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, and then we bring them back. Of course, that's unrealistic because those other companies pay way more than us and the people have...

Rick (42:46.45)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (43:07.862)
outside of St. Louis, but that's the dream really.

Rick (43:10.246)
Yeah. And yeah, it's totally, that's awesome. this happens all the time in other ways too. Like I, the way I got my job at windfall was I consulted, for a four month project. I wasn't ready to like, to, come on full time after that. So I said, thanks. and a year later I got a call and I was right. It was the right time.

Tyler King (43:27.662)
Yeah.

Yeah. You're about to cancel group and JD called you and said, Hey, use leg up benefits. yeah, cool. So, since we last talked, someone quit and we've replaced them. yeah, I've got, I'm not sure if this will turn into something to talk about or not, but so I think I mentioned, yeah, we've been talking about VoIP for awhile. What started the VoIP conversation was actually that.

Rick (43:34.438)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Tyler King (43:57.971)
I was going to rebuild the, the soft phone, like the, the VoIP phone that our CRM coaches use. Cause I built that originally in Twilio. and so I, I'd spent like a couple months working on that. What that really means is probably like three or four days total. Cause I don't have a lot of time for deep work right now, but I had been trying to rebuild this phone system. turns out in, at the same time Twilio was deprecating our old system and

They just turned it off. Our phone system just stopped working. They did email us, but they emailed us and said September 10th was the deadline. And then they just turned it off in July. Then they turn it back on. They were like, that was just a warning. And it's like, don't tell us September 10th if that's not the date. Anyway, sorry, I'm mad at Twilio. Because it was kind of urgent all of a sudden, one of our other developer, like I was in meetings all day and stuff. So I was just like, hey,

gave it to one of our other developers and he got it working like immediately. Pretty embarrassing for me. I'd been working. Now, I admittedly, I wasn't trying to just update the current one to use the new JavaScript library, but like, it was pretty apparent from this experience to me at least. Probably no one else in the company cares. I don't think anyone thinks of me as like a developer anymore, but I still think of myself as a developer. And I was just like, I am a lot worse at this than...

Rick (45:01.627)
Yeah.

Tyler King (45:23.02)
this other person that works for me, this person who in theory, like I used to be able to do that and I can't anymore. So that was pretty humbling.

Rick (45:31.346)
Yeah, I think I'm starting to have these experiences at Windfall as we hire really good specialized executives where it's like, oh my God, you're so much better at this than me. And I think it's the cost of, I think founding companies, early stage startups require more of a jack of all trades approach than a master of one. And I think this is the cost of the path that we're on.

Tyler King (45:43.512)
Yeah.

Tyler King (46:00.258)
Yes, so yes, I think the difference between what you're saying you're going through is you were never a specialist at those things. I was like a full-time software engineer. So yeah, but you're right, of course, like there's no reason. It's crazy to think that the CEO or like an executive would be better at any individual thing than the specialist you hired to do those things. Of course, it's not so much that this developer is better than me. It's that I'm worse than I used to be.

Rick (46:07.314)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (46:27.844)
Yeah, software development is accelerating at a rapid pace. Like technology is getting crazier and crazier and then, I mean, it just changes. And so I think it's, yeah.

Tyler King (46:38.402)
Yeah, well, you know what's funny in this case is actually that's exactly the opposite of what bit me. I tried to use AI to do this and it just completely shat the bed over and I tried a bunch of different approaches. And the thing is Twilly's documentation is terrible. It used to be good. but so the, yeah.

Rick (46:46.462)
Rick (46:53.068)
I think when they bought Syngrid, Syngrid infected them. They became a bet.

Tyler King (46:57.262)
man, Twilio has gotten so much worse. it the, yeah. SendGrid. can't even, you go to log in now and it's like, do you want to log into Twilio? Do you want to log into SendGrid? Do you want to log into whatever their metrics tool is? So yeah. And then our developer just went in and was like, oh, I just, I did not fuck around with AI with this. I just got it working. So anyway, I think you're right. A big part of it's the tooling. Like I see the devs on the team and they're like, code editors have changed a lot since, since I was doing it all the time. And they're.

doing stuff in the terminal and I'm kind of like, whoa, what was that? Or how did you do that without a mouse, you know?

Rick (47:30.834)
Tyler, you need to dedicate some time to practice. And if you want to use leg up health as your practice ground, you are welcome to.

Tyler King (47:36.431)
Yeah. Well, that has been on my mind too, right? Is like at the same time, I'm not good enough to code for less annoying CRM, but I'm like the only developer for like up health, which is funny. Yeah. I'm still, I'm still very useful in like in less annoying CRM meetings. I'm still really use like, we need to figure out how we're going to build this feature. Let's break it into pieces. What's the database schema going to look like, how we're going to architect the backend. I'm still good at that stuff. But then when you sit down and actually write code.

Rick (47:45.618)
It's a different product.

Tyler King (48:07.052)
I'm just so slow. anyway, this kind of has me like, so A, maybe my developer skills have atrophied. That's understandable. But I'm also like, am I capable of doing hard things anymore? Like, am I capable of, I never spend a week on something, ever. Can I do that?

Rick (48:16.53)
Mm.

Rick (48:23.25)
Capable yes, I've actually gone through a similar question. Yes is the answer. Willing is a whole nother thing. think we're at a, think there is a, I don't know, I see, this is a sidetrack, but one thing that I notice is that I'm very impressed by older entrepreneurs who are grinding like I was when I was in my 20s and 30s. But I can tell you right now with a,

Tyler King (48:45.56)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (48:53.074)
four year old and a two year old and all I got going on with family and the fact that I'm not that worried about things like I used to be. I don't have the willingness to grind right now. Now will that come back? Is the question I think. It's not, am I capable? Do you think the willingness to do this and put it like is gonna come back? And I actually think it will at the right time. It's just not the time right now. You got a freaking four month old.

Tyler King (48:59.736)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (49:17.026)
I don't think I was doing this before my kid was born.

Like you've had kids for several years now. I am very, I can very directly compare like when I was 39 years old, childless, affluent, I had all the time in the world if I wanted to grind on work. I did, like sometimes I would work late, but that was like, I've got this little Figma thing I'm working on and it'll be fun. wasn't, I'm gonna spend the next month building some really hard thing.

Rick (49:48.274)
My opinion to this is at some point there will be a refound willingness to do hard things when the right hard thing presents itself and the right circumstances come about and it's not a capability issue.

Tyler King (50:06.786)
I hope you're right. think like we, research has been done on this. All of our brains have been rewired by social media to like, we have less attention span than we used to. I mean, there may be exceptions to this. You're one, you're more offline than almost anyone I know, but like it changes how your brain works. If you're swiping between 15 second videos over and over for hours a day, it can also, I would imagine change how your brain works.

if you're just not doing deep work ever. And then when you go back to it, probably you can retrain it, but it's possible to lose it. And if you go back when you're 50, a 50 year old's brain is not the same as a 30 year old's brain.

Rick (50:43.73)
Yeah

Rick (50:53.468)
Well, hopefully transhumanism has caught up to us by then. We're gonna live forever, Tyler.

Tyler King (50:55.374)
Yeah, okay, so anyway, no, please no. Okay, yeah, that's all I am just feeling very inadequate.

Rick (51:07.57)
One thing you said that is interesting that I like someone there's a really nasty thing that happened in Utah last night and I didn't know about it until family members told me about it because yeah and so like I just I don't know if it's right for me but like I don't know if it's like the way but I don't read news. The way I receive news is I actually intentionally go get it. So after someone told me about this I went and got it.

Tyler King (51:13.709)
Yes.

Tyler King (51:19.042)
You're very lucky.

Rick (51:36.858)
I seek out sport news, but like I'm not in this habit of consuming news daily. And so.

Tyler King (51:41.592)
So what do you do if you're, I don't get the impression you read a ton of books. I mean, you read books, like as a hobby, like it's 9 p.m. you're sitting on your couch. What are you doing?

Rick (51:54.482)
I'm usually in at that point. So I'm reading a novel at 9 p.m. in bed.

Tyler King (51:56.673)
Okay. You just work and sleep and...

Okay, you don't watch much TV? Sports?

Rick (52:07.634)
Yeah, but I do watch shows, but so like sometimes instead of reading a novel I'll watch a movie or show with my wife on the couch. it's it's yeah.

Tyler King (52:20.174)
Or like, here's an example, like I'm taking care of Sydney, you know, some days per week. Mostly I'm trying to be present and, and, know, interact with her, but sometimes like literally what, like she's supposed to get a certain amount of time on her back staring in a mirror, right? Like I'm not involved and so I'm sitting right next to her, but like, I pull out my phone and start scrolling on Reddit. Like, what do you do in that moment?

Rick (52:46.48)
I don't scroll any social media.

I'm usually reading art. I do intentionally have non-fiction material that I either subscribe to. For example, I'm very interested in AI right now, so I have AI news, I wouldn't call it news, but AI information, newsletters and stuff coming in, and so I clear those. If I know that a sports event is coming up, I'll read about that.

Tyler King (53:08.812)
Yeah, like newsletters and stuff like that.

Rick (53:21.116)
For example, I know that Duke's playing this weekend. I'll check out whether or not, you know, they're favored in the game, but like, it's very like, I'm going to get specific information versus going to a place that just like overwhelms me with information.

Tyler King (53:32.024)
Alright, so the reason you have confidence that your brain isn't rotted is because your brain isn't rotted. But Rick, the rest of us, our brains are rotted.

Rick (53:37.196)
Okay. You could you could could unrot your brain.

Tyler King (53:43.5)
Yeah, you say that, I've tried. And I think I'm way less rotted than most people. I don't use Facebook, I don't use Instagram, I don't use TikTok aside from with my wife at pre-scheduled time. I basically don't use TikTok. I don't use any actual social media. I don't watch YouTube.

Rick (53:59.386)
YouTube is something I do do in bed sometimes. Like if I'm like, I will sometimes go to YouTube and start with like a sports recap, but then it like, it does that like, let me show you the next thing. It's like the, I would love to watch that video. Thank you. And then it's the next one. It's the next one. Yeah.

Tyler King (54:06.766)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (54:12.994)
Yeah, YouTube's terrible for your brain. I said I don't use social media. I use Blue Sky, but it's so quiet on Blue Sky. There's not really a lot going. I read every single thing in my feed in 15 minutes a day. It doesn't take much. It's really just Reddit. But the thing is I through a period where I uninstalled Reddit and then I just find something.

I'm like, I'm not gonna sit here staring at the wall, like, I'm gonna do something and my brain's not going to read long-form articles. It's done with that.

Rick (54:45.522)
Reddit is such an interesting one to me. I've never gone to Reddit to discover something. I've always gone to Reddit because it was a result in Google for a very specific question I was trying to answer. The only exception I can remember is when I was in gaming, I did find value in going to the subreddit for Modern Warfare and seeing all these cool trick shots people were doing. But that was it.

Tyler King (54:54.254)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (55:09.026)
Yeah, there's a lot of really good stuff on Reddit. I don't think my brain's rotting because the content's even low quality. It's just because I'm scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and like, that's neat, that's neat, that's neat. I'm not focusing on anything.

Rick (55:19.622)
Yeah, you're not managing your attention.

Tyler King (55:24.77)
Yeah. Anyway, I've tried. still think I'm better than the average American, but we all aspire to be you, Rick.

Rick (55:33.522)
well it's lonely. tell you that much. Everyone else is doing what you're talking about and like usually at the same room as me and I'm like, what is happening?

Tyler King (55:35.246)
Ha!

Tyler King (55:40.46)
You

Tyler King (55:44.952)
I will say that, I am not doing this around other people, aside from like me and Shelly might like when we're relaxing after putting Sydney down. But yeah, I'm not addicted to my phone when I'm with other humans, but okay.

Rick (55:55.302)
Yeah. Well, if you'd like to review past topics and show notes, visit StartupToLast.com. See you next time.

Tyler King (56:03.257)
See ya.