Rick (00:00.802)
What's up this week, Tyler?

Tyler King (00:02.169)
Yo Rick! Not a whole lot going on. Yeah, pretty even keel. Lovin' spring. How about you?

Rick (00:10.126)
I woke up a little tickle in my throat trying not to be sad about it, but I'm afraid that I'm about to go down for the count. I am not going to though.

Tyler King (00:16.835)
Yeah.

I always have that optimism and I'm for a thousand. Every time you feel the tickle, it's always real. For me anyway, I don't know if you have that.

Rick (00:27.605)
It's a real tickle. Mine never matters. I'm just going to pretend that that works. Well, what are you working on?

Tyler King (00:35.172)
Yeah.

yeah, I've been doing a variety of things. one thing is, as is the case every six months, I'm preparing a kind of presentation for the company on various things. this is the first time I've used Claude quite a bit to help prepare the presentation. found it really, really useful. obviously not. I'm not like.

giving it a prompt, having it fill in all the blanks, and then I'm just gonna say, obviously it's a presentation from me, not a presentation from Claude, but I had all these thoughts that I, know, the presentation's largely gonna be about AI, but specifically economics of AI, how it might impact our business, how other SaaS companies are doing, what does this mean for the job of working here, for example, like, we're not.

the type of company that'll do layoffs, but like if AI replaces, for example, email support, maybe that means there's more phone support. If AI writes more code, maybe that means there's more code review. Like just kind of talking through lots of various things. And I was just having a really hard time connecting it all. So I spent like a full day talking with Claude, just like hear all the topics, ask me followups about every single topic. So it understood exactly how I feel about all these things. And I was like, can you just generate a PowerPoint for me?

It did it. have replaced every single slide. I'm not using a single thing it gave me, but that that unlocked me. was like, okay, that's the narrative. That's how all these ideas connect together.

Rick (02:06.743)
Yeah, that's a use case I find myself using Claude for a lot. It's just help me get to the story that makes sense and eliminate the blank page and then I can make it my own.

Tyler King (02:20.611)
Yeah, yeah.

I saw a piece of advice on Blue Sky that I thought was good, which is every AI use case is one of two things. Either AI does V1 and then you edit it from there, or you do V1 and then AI edits it. And like going into it, knowing which of those makes more sense. So for example, coding, AI writes the initial code pretty much every time. That's what makes sense. And then you go in and look at it and make sure it works.

Most writing, prefer to do, I'll do a draft. Maybe even spend a lot of time editing it and stuff, but then I'll give it to Claude and say, you know, what could be tightened up here? Is there anything that doesn't make sense? This is the rare case where it was more of a content creation thing, but I actually, well, yeah, guess, no, I guess it is the same thing. I started it and then Claude put it all together at the end, but one or the other though.

Rick (03:12.939)
Yeah. Yeah. But the prompt is different if you're, if you're doing one or the other, right? Like if you want, like what I found, if I, if I'm going in with the blank page, if I don't constrain or provide enough context, like it, it will give me, have, I don't get value. I have to like, I get too large of a document that I have to edit too much and I have go back to the drawing board. so I, so there is like a difference in approach where it's like, Hey, here's my first draft. I'd like to improve it.

Tyler King (03:36.174)
Yeah.

Rick (03:42.123)
Versus like, here's, I need a first draft. This is the gist of what I'm trying to accomplish. Like, if you don't get the gist right, like you'll get crap.

Tyler King (03:51.321)
Yeah. Yeah. Yup. I also had one yesterday. A customer wrote in like an angry email that was completely unreasonable. And I wrote a nasty response back and then gave it to Claude and was like, make this not mean.

Rick (04:04.033)
That I've, I do that all the time. love like, tone my tone me down, please. Yeah.

Tyler King (04:10.543)
Yeah, yep, did a great job of that. But yeah, so I'm preparing for the six month presentation. It's still a couple of weeks away, but that's been the main thing. I have a variety of other stuff I can talk about, in terms of my like number of hours spent, that's what I'm working on. How about you? I'm a serious... Yeah, I've said this before, but like...

Rick (04:27.309)
Wow, you are a serious CEO now. You spend all your time preparing for the one presentation that matters.

Tyler King (04:36.887)
A lot of these presentations often take one of two forms. One is most of the time it's like, already, we're already doing stuff. I already know what the plan is. I know what I want to say. It take, doesn't take that long to prepare it. And honestly, it's not that important, but every once in a while it's like, I haven't said this stuff to the company yet. Maybe I don't even know what I need to say. And so when I say I've been preparing the presentation, it's actually, I've been,

figuring out where I stand on AI. And the presentation is just the forcing function, but I needed to do all of this thinking about it anyway, I think.

Rick (05:16.557)
Yeah, of course, that's how it works. I, yeah.

Tyler King (05:19.491)
Yeah, I don't you're teasing I know, but I don't like the feeling of like, am I spending a full week of my my time on a presentation that does feel very

Rick (05:27.925)
No, you're doing business planning. what you're doing. You're doing serious strategic planning as a CEO.

Tyler King (05:34.597)
Even more than that, it is is like kind of management and employee, like how employees feel about it is such one of the biggest challenges with AI because it's like your job might change. It's scary. Other companies are doing layoffs. know, there's, um, there's a lot of expectation management.

Rick (05:52.462)
I think we might have talked about this in the last episode or maybe the episode before that, but I think that the interesting thing about AI is it's not going to just replace humans all of a sudden, but it creates new bottlenecks for humans and that changes the job. like code reviews was like the really big one that we talked about, think. And then I hadn't thought about it from a customer support perspective. You had said, you know, instead of emails, more phone calls. The people that have the current job

Tyler King (06:07.79)
Yeah.

Rick (06:22.637)
might not like the new job. And so like, I think that's something to like acknowledge. And I don't know if you're addressing that in your in your presentation or not. Yeah.

Tyler King (06:24.089)
Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Tyler King (06:28.355)
Well, I am, yes. And one of the things I'm saying is this is not specific to AI. I'm going back, I'm just doing a little case study. If you go back to like when we first started hiring people, call it 2014, the way we did email is we all had separate Gmail accounts. Every email you sent to a customer, you BCC'd the listserv to send it to everyone at the company. And everyone was responsible for managing their inbox to make sure like, this email has been replied to, this one hasn't.

It was really a terrible system, but like back then there weren't a lot of tools for this. then we set up front and email got way more efficient. The volume of emails did not increase. So that just means less of our time is spent on email. And that means more of our time is spent on other stuff. And then we built a much better help site with actually good search or, you know, search sucked originally and the customers were able to self-serve a lot more. And we got, I think our number of support tickets cut in half when we did that. So now there's a lot less email still.

And that means you're doing more stuff. So it's been a gradual transition of like, the thing that can be automated away goes away and then gets, you know, the vacuum gets filled with some other gas. This is just the next generation of that.

Rick (07:45.414)
We don't have to talk about this on the podcast if you don't want to, especially not before the presentation, but I'm curious, like, have you confronted as the like for some people and their skill sets and their desires, like their the your need for a role that have today is going to be cut in half. And yes, certainly you might not backfill it, like if they left. But what if they don't leave, you know, and they're not doing a good job?

Tyler King (08:10.969)
Right. Then we have to find something else for them. Well, sorry, if they're not doing a good job, that's different. So yeah, I'm happy to talk about this. I don't think that many employees listen to this podcast. Yeah, my.

Rick (08:16.843)
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. What if they like what if they have bad attitude? What they like? I guess like at some point there's conflict between like what you would do if you didn't like you wouldn't rehire that person. You don't need that job that you hired them for originally because of AI. How do you manage that situation? It like your plan is to

Tyler King (08:26.595)
Yeah.

Rick (08:42.593)
basically help them find a way to add value and keep them as long as they want to stay at less annoying CRM. But what if that doesn't work?

Tyler King (08:50.199)
Yeah. I mean that like the, so there's a question of how do I communicate this and the presentation and all that, but like the answer is then, then you leave the company, right? now the, the assurances I want to give is like, there will be time to adjust. It's not going to, like a lot of these companies are saying, okay, we have a bunch of people with skill a, we need a bunch of people with skill B let's fire all the skill a people and hire a bunch of skill B people. That's not what we would do. But if.

If the skill a person says, okay, I get it. This is the world we're in. I need to learn skill B and they give it a good shot. think we would have a very long leash. Like, but if they're just like, nah, fuck this. You hired me to do job. A it'd be like, well, job a doesn't exist. You know, you can decide, but I definitely, one of the things in this presentation is I'm looking at the economic, like I'm, I'm doing a whole section. I'm just like the economics of AI, also

the financials of less annoying CRM. and one of the things I'm saying is we've talked about this on the podcast. A lot of people, I just think have terrible takes about what AI is going to do to the economy. Cause they're like, we can lay off half our team. We can get the same amount of work done with half as many people, or the flip side of that is we can keep our team, but they all get three day work weeks. both of those are the same. It's we'll do the same amount of work, with less time.

That's not how capitalism works. It's a competition. your competitor is doing more work, you have to do more work. You never get to take your foot off the gas ever. Combine all the threats of AI, and I'm going to go into those like why could AI hurt the business? Look at how every SaaS company is down in the stock market in a huge way. Here's a list of all the problems that could happen. Look at this economic reality that

It's not, we have to do the same amount of work we were doing before. It's we have to do more work. And look at the fact that we've been plateaued for five years as is even without AI, we're not crushing it. And a lot of our policies as a company and like we pay more than market rate and we have sabbaticals. And I'm kind of saying all of that came during a time when we were, we had easy growth. there's no law of physics that says we have the money to afford that. like, we need to.

Tyler King (11:10.307)
If we like our quality of life right now, we have to adapt and make this work. can't just sit here. So I'm kind of trying to set that realistic expectation of like, y'all, we, if you want life to keep being good, you got to earn it. and, hopefully that helps get people on board with whatever changes need to be made.

Rick (11:22.38)
Yeah.

Rick (11:30.067)
just sneeze. That's bad. That is a bad sign. Well, good job. It sounds like you have a really strong presentation that you're going to be ready for and you're addressing a lot of really hard topics in one sitting.

Tyler King (11:33.573)
It's over, Rick.

Tyler King (11:43.159)
Yeah, it's a nerve wracking thing to, obviously I'm not like, the fact that I'm saying this publicly right now means it's not a secret. Like this is what has to be said. This is the obvious truth in my opinion, but different people receive that truth in different ways. And it's, I'm nervous if I'm being honest.

Rick (11:53.143)
Mm. Mm.

Rick (12:00.075)
Yeah, yeah, you have a to be.

Tyler King (12:03.077)
Yeah, what's going on with you?

Rick (12:05.197)
Well, I, had our partner meeting on Monday at leg up health and I really enjoyed our partner meeting this, this month. Um, feels like the two months. So, so for context, we took a different approach to planning this year. Usually what, what ends up happening is I want to have a plan like February 1st and like we're gone, gone, gone. Um, we took a slow approach, um, to agreeing on what we were going to do. We explored some avenues and I think we've landed on a really good approach took about 60 days.

to get from sort of more like almost 90 days to get from, know, hey, you know, what this is generally what I'm thinking to like, here's the point, let's go. But I but I think the result is, is a lot more conviction, a lot more focus and strangely a lot more calmness. Because of the time we took to get there. And so for for just to summarize, like high level, we're focused on

kind of three core outcomes. One is, you know, grow monthly recurring revenue to, you know, 50 % this year, 50 % on top of the base as a base plan. And the two sort of things that we want to focus on outside of the obvious, like keep all of our customers is, you know, improving what we're doing when we first interact with a customer and the value we can provide, like what's our offer to them. And the second is,

really ramping up our outbound leads, which we've, you I don't know if I've mentioned this in the podcast before, we did an assessment of our 50 or 60 customers and like 90 % or like 80 % of our revenue is from outbound prospecting. It's crazy.

Tyler King (13:49.615)
Yeah. Yeah. So over the last couple of years, there's been this marketing channel, this sales approach, you know, all these different things tried and overall it worked, but really one thing worked and everything else didn't.

Rick (14:03.405)
It's a let it's less dreary than that but like

Tyler King (14:07.142)
Not like everything else didn't, but like it's clear there's no confusion about where like we should be putting more wood behind fewer arrows.

Rick (14:14.445)
Exactly, not like, it not just it's not just like, the unique thing about it is it's not just the the number of accounts that we've received from outbound, it's all of our large accounts, like the accounts we want more of are all outbound. And so anyway, it's, it was so we're going budgets approved. We have a really strong like, allocation of resources.

And we're moving, I feel like there's pace and I'm excited to see what happens.

Tyler King (14:48.975)
Yeah. How, how quickly would you expect results from like, okay, it took a few months just to decide. Let me be a skeptic here. Imagine every time I listen to other people's podcasts, I'm like judging them. know, you can't help it. Someone's listening to this and judging and saying, it took you three months to decide to do sales. like how long before JD's fully up and running and, and the engine is going.

Rick (15:10.359)
Nah.

Rick (15:19.221)
another 90 days, realistically, I think we are transitioning from like, what do we want to work on? Okay, how do we want to do that to doing it? And I think doing it is what you're talking about. And that's going to take time. One challenge I think we all have coming out of the partner meeting you, me, JD and Tyler, Tyler's like, how do we make progress between now and the next partner meeting? I think that's the challenge we all like kind of leave with when I do when, you know, we're saying we want to do something. And so

I think we'll, have a milestone in 30 days. And I think those milestones are hopefully we, you know, that we're making progress on, on our value proposition. JD's doing that daily already in Claude, you know, in terms of the time to value that we're able to give new. Yeah.

Tyler King (16:03.529)
So let me just elaborate if a listener doesn't follow it. JD could just call someone up and make whatever generic pitch he's been making. He was sending a really long PowerPoint deck. He's getting it tighter. He's getting it instead of, we need three calls and I need an employee census from you to get you a quote. It's the first 20 minutes, we do a 20 minute call. I'm giving you a rough quote. You're understanding your options. You're getting value on that very first call.

Rick (16:30.901)
Yeah, exactly. So I'm calling this the TTV project time to value project. But basically the old way was if someone wanted to work with us, we basically would say, let's do a call and we would do an intake and then we say, OK, in order for us to tell you how much it costs, we need you to do some work for us. And then they, you know, then there would be this back and forth on like, that's not the right data format. Like and then a week's go by and it's like, OK, here are your quotes. And then JD would put together a really long list of

I mean, it's been a substantial amount of time building a package for them to help them make a decision. They're not customers yet. And so, so what we're what we've been working on, you know, when we say to what I say, TTV, what I'm saying is like, how on that first interaction, even before talking to them, if someone is interested in working with us, or we want to entice them to work with us, what do we give them that provides them immediate value?

And there's lots of ideas in this realm, but the one that we are focused on right now is, you know, let's tell them what all their options are and roughly how much they cost based on their situation.

Tyler King (17:36.163)
Yeah, because the reason it took so long for JD to get them a quote is because you have to go to the insurance carriers and put in all this employee information and all that. But what it looked like, I think, we've all been a part of a buying process where you can't get a price because the other side is being hostile towards you. They're like, the moment I say a number, I've given up my negotiating position. This is how enterprise sales works.

My guess, we have no validation that I'm correct about this, my guess is buying insurance seems like that, that the customer thinks, you're being coy because you want me to pay as much as possible. And it's like, we don't set the prices. There's no benefit to us of being slow to get you the price. It's just that we literally don't know what it's going to cost until we know all this information about your employees, but we can guess what it's going to cost.

Rick (18:27.775)
Exactly. So kind of back to the original topic here of like, how much progress are we making? Or should we make, you know, I'll get these goals that we have a plan. We already are making progress against all these goals. JD is making, you know, meaningful changes to his approach, primarily using Claude to improve his, his delivery mechanisms. And then, you know, on the outbound side, we've, we've signed a deal with Artisan as an AISDR.

that's ramping that will go live for 20 in two weeks. So it might not work, but like we're making meaningful progress towards these goals. But I would say like by the next partner meeting, I'd like to have like meaningful progress across all sort of the things that we have going on.

Tyler King (19:15.023)
Yeah. I'm excited about this. I like all this. The one like nudge I'm going to give you is JD could just keep doing what he was doing last year and the year before it worked. I I'm facing this exact same dilemma with AI on the dev team at less knowing serum, which is we already know how to code. We're already getting stuff done. We're moving really fast. should we stop working on the main thing?

and instead work on scaffolding around it, like building rails. Let's rework our code review system. Let's rework how, build more staging infrastructure so that we can do QA testing before things go live, roll things out gradually to customers. there's, we could spend a whole year just building tooling to allow us to use AI more effectively, or we could just say, you know what, we're good enough. Let's just keep coding over here. Like let's, let's use the tools we've got. I think leg up health.

faces that same dilemma of how much time do you spend improving the sales process versus just giving JD as much time as possible to go do the sales process that was already worked.

Rick (20:24.395)
That's a fair question. think we kind of I mean, if I think we did kind of talk about this indirectly, we didn't say this out loud as part of our 6090 day planning process. But I think it was there were there were a number of factors, probably not ones that I would mention on the podcast that that suggests that like, we're doing the same thing that we did last year. Is it what we want to do? Factors like JD's compensation factors like

you know, making this meaningful for you and me. And and and other factors like JD's psyche, you know, and his like his love of his job. And so and then, you know, there's the the factor that matters most to me, which is, I want to be a differentiated customer experience. And I want people to when they interact with our brand to go, man, that was a great experience.

And I think what JD is saying has told us and what you have observed from your own biases and I'm observing is that our initial brand experience with a ICP employer customer is not what we want it to be.

Tyler King (21:34.519)
Agreed, we could, what it looks like we're doing to me is rebuilding the whole thing from scratch at once as opposed to iterating on it. And that's fine. Like I think we're going to be done in two weeks or a month. So it doesn't matter. I'm more just saying this to have like, generalize it as a concept for like, we have listeners who maybe are thinking how to apply it to their business, but, we could say, okay, JD's doing these cold calls. He's sending out.

Rick (21:44.333)
Mm.

Tyler King (22:01.949)
emails, he's finding leads on LinkedIn, however he was doing things. And we could just say that first email should have a better pitch. I can build a little tool for him to send to the customer to get an immediate quote, but otherwise everything stays the same. And then, okay, what's the next step and what's the next step? I feel like we're doing, A, we're doing, it's more of a waterfall approach right now. It's like, let's get everything in place and then push the button to go, which feels a little unnatural to me, just generally that's not how I do things. But then B,

We're doing two totally separate projects. One is setting up the AI SDR, which again, as we talked about this last episode, like instead of JD doing the outbound and AI bot is doing the outbound and then hopefully setting up calls for JD is the idea, which is completely separate in my mind from getting JD's pitch and time to value really good. so anyway, I think we're in a good place. I'm really excited about it, but I'm also just like, I think it's always good to

I've made this mistake so many times at Less Annoying of you're doing a project and you think of the maximal version of the product project. And sometimes there's like 20 % of it you could just snap your fingers and have today and you don't have to wait for

Rick (23:11.841)
I agree. So I know I position these things as two different things, but they're really to me one thing, which is like, what is our differentiation that makes someone want to work with us when we meet them at a cocktail party? And how do we so quickly deliver on that differentiation with meaningful value? Like that is the thing that we're working on. Correct. You're absolutely right. And like, I think like,

Tyler King (23:32.847)
But absolutely. But the AISDR is unrelated. Like JD could have that without that.

Rick (23:41.814)
So I'm kind of let me me swing back to like, the larger point, which is, I don't this, this stuff's messy, man, like, you know, you try to create as much focus as possible. You people. It's I guess what I'm saying is like, execution is messy. And so we're gonna get there. And I think everything you're saying is right. And could we gotten there faster? Maybe but we didn't.

You know, but I agree with what you're saying. And I think we you're absolutely right. Like if you're listening and you you can create more focus and intentionality like you should. But it's also like there's also like things like there are related distractions that like are fun to work on and there's time considerations like there's all these like messiness that sometimes makes things not perfect in terms of sequential order. And it's OK.

Tyler King (24:36.771)
Yeah, it is okay. And my point is here is not to make anyone feel bad, but I do think it's, it's a missed opportunity not to anytime you do something that. Whether it worked or failed, I think it's worthwhile looking back and saying how, what would the perfect version of that have been? And that's how we, learn. And, to me, knowing what we know now, we had to go through this messy process. We wouldn't have gotten here otherwise, but knowing what we know now, what we should have done is said, JD, keep cold calling, keep emailing.

And what we're going to do is bit by bit improve the pitch. then whenever as a separate project, whenever there's time, we're also going to figure out a way to automate the outreach part, but we can perfect the pitch with or without.

Rick (25:20.225)
Yeah, the automated the the automation of the outreach is the second project that you're identifying that I don't think I had clearly like said, yeah, that's something different. So I think you're I don't have anything to say about that. I think you're right. Like, the only reason I think we moved fast on artisan is we got excited about it. And when you get engaged with a good sales team, they put time pressure on you for discounts, and they gave us a hell of a discount. So you end up with this like, you know, kind of that's the messiness that I was talking about.

Tyler King (25:46.853)
Yeah.

Rick (25:50.011)
But yeah, you're right. Like I have no nothing to say other than, yep, you're right.

Tyler King (25:57.487)
You

Rick (26:01.181)
Can I back up for a second? you know, if I'm you know, I've got a few hours I can spend on like up health every week. And like, I've done a good amount of stuff over the last couple months planning, getting our licensing in order, getting our, you know, our a budget in order. And now I'm starting to like, kind of provide like unnecessary probably but like,

My final input on like what, I think TTV could look like in terms of some of these things. I'm now going to be like, my, my focus is going to be on this, like outbound stuff. And I'm wondering, like you had mentioned, I think in the partner meeting that maybe the artists and projects should just be mine and we should get JD focused on what was, what he was doing before. And I come behind him and I'm wondering if you're, maybe that's how we create the focus that you're talking about iterate. Cause cause right now I think JD is driving the artists and thing.

And I think he's interested in it. like, how do you balance? I don't like talking about people when they're not here. But like, I think JD is okay with this. So let me just disclaim that. My question is, like, should, should we let JD work on this and be okay with the maybe the suboptimal focus? Or should we should this be like the thing that I go and grab from him and say, don't worry about this, go focus on your thing, it will come behind you.

Tyler King (27:23.317)
I don't know that I have an answer, but let me just think through this. So earlier you were giving reasons why things had to change, why we couldn't do things the way we have been. I'll be honest, only one of them sounded right to me. You said money for like making the money meaningful for you. I don't know. I think, I think we could grow 50%. I think we could hit the growth doing it the old way and the money, if anything, we'd save money because we wouldn't be spending money on artisan.

There's one other one I forget about, but the one that resonated for me is JD's morale, basically. Like it's not fun to be spamming people all day and cold calling and getting hung up on and all that. so I guess that's the only, that's to me, the main point is, is it, does JD really like working on the automating that again, like to use the language I'm using at less annoying on the dev site. It's like, should we be building, should we

executing the main strategy or should we be building rails so that we can execute faster in the future? One model is you're building the rails and JD's doing execution and that's it. To me, only real re there are two reasons why it might not make sense to have the, the, the specialization here. One is you don't have enough time to move fast enough and you'd be a bottleneck. The other one is this is just good for JD's morale.

Rick (28:45.581)
I think both of those things are true. and so, and I honestly, like, just want to give JD a shout out. I remember at the beginning of this year, when we first started this plan, it's like, it was like, guys, I feel so out of the loop with AI. And that dude has gone to like AI courses. He signed up for AI tools. Like he has totally like, he has a good model for your team members. If any of your team members are, are like laggards here, JD, like

is a model for how to get out of that. Like he is totally like he I wouldn't be surprised if by the end of this year, he is coding his own app through Claude like and like the acceleration of utility he's getting from AI and just like, like, in engagement, he's getting from it is super valuable. So like, that alone to me is worth it. What the distraction is, because one, it's making him better at the other things that he's doing meaningfully.

And two, I see a different level of engagement, like morale that is really positive because of the learning experience and you know, he's becoming a superhuman, which is what we want a leg up health team member to be. So I'm kind of leaning towards like, let this play is my takeaway, but I need to watch it.

Tyler King (30:01.775)
I think that's right. And I think it'll get done sooner with him doing it than with you. I think it's possible you've done this exact thing before. It's possible you would be able to avoid some mistakes that he might make. It's possible you would do a more sophisticated job. Not that he's not capable of it, just you have the experience that he doesn't have. to your point, yeah, I agree that A, I think it'll get done sooner. Whether it's better or not, I don't know, but sooner and B,

If you want him to be able to do it well in the future, he's got to get that experience at some point.

Rick (30:35.659)
Yeah. And I am helping him. I, I, I'm going to, I can that downside you talked about of like, have, know where the I've done this before. I've I know where what to avoid. Like I've, I'm, coaching him through the process and I could imagine that at some point, like he's gonna be like, can you just handle this?

Rick (30:53.089)
So yeah, I'll just let it play. What else are you working on?

Tyler King (30:55.013)
Okay. Sounds good.

we've got a new, homepage in the works. It's not live yet, so you can't go look at it, but, this is sorry. Everything's AI, for years. we're 16, 16 and a half years old. I've never been happy with our homepage ever. I like the positioning. Yeah.

Rick (31:16.233)
I know this, the number of home pages that we've gone through in this podcast alone is just like, why do you go, can I just stop you for a second? Why do you always say sorry, it's everything's AI.

Tyler King (31:20.687)
Yeah.

Tyler King (31:27.929)
Cause when I'm listening to podcasts, get bored as shit by everyone just talking about AI all the time. As a customer of a podcast, I'm like, I want to go back to 2015 when we all still don't really know how churn works. And we're like, let's talk about AB testing and churn and, you know, expansion revenue. That's, that was a lot more fun when we were talking about that instead of every single topic being AI, but

Rick (31:33.313)
You're okay.

Rick (31:46.509)
Rick (31:52.449)
You're not talking about AI right now. You're talking about branding and positioning and A B testing your homepage.

Tyler King (31:55.481)
Well, I'm about to talk about AI. I've, I think we've done a good job of like the idea behind the homepage. think our copy, we've had many different variations, but I think we've had good ones. When I say we haven't had a good homepage, that's not what I mean. What I mean is you look at it. It looks like.

A developer with a decent eye for design made it or a marketer with a decent eye for design make it. It doesn't look like what it should look like is nothing. You should open it and you should have no thoughts about the design. It should just feel like, yes, that's what a polished SaaS product looks like. But when I look at it, I'm like, the white space is wrong here. This typography is not good. I don't know how to make it good, but I can tell it's not good. That's what I think when I look at our homepage.

Rick (32:45.773)
Dude, like you've told me this so many different ways. It doesn't matter. You think it matters?

Tyler King (32:51.653)
I think that a business as mature as ours, the number of things you can do that matter shrink and you're starting to focus on 0.1 % improvements instead of 1 % improvements. I don't think leg up health should be worrying about this. Certainly.

Rick (33:05.932)
Okay.

Rick (33:11.159)
You've got a meaningful number of visitors to the website. some percentage, if some very small percentage of those are affected by the aesthetics of the site, then it matters to you.

Tyler King (33:22.969)
Yeah, I don't even really mean from like a pure conversion standpoint, although there's probably that, but the CRM space is competitive. One of our listeners was just DMing me on Blue Sky about she's buying a CRM right now and was just talking to me to make sure she's not making a huge mistake. And she was like, wow, there are a lot of options. You're really competing with a lot of products. If you're looking at 10 CRMs and one of them...

Rick (33:48.215)
Did you win the business?

Tyler King (33:50.117)
Well, most of the time we don't. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I even offered her a free count and didn't win it.

Rick (33:54.391)
Shoot. man.

Tyler King (33:56.133)
I didn't expect to not very few of our listeners should be using copper.

Rick (34:00.193)
What, who'd you lose to? Really? What was the reason? Yeah, I hated copper. I despise copper. No.

Tyler King (34:04.709)
You used to use copper, right? Where our product does... I thought you liked it. and then I lied because I said, I was like, yeah, I think Rick's liked it except it was missing some feature. I misremembered that then.

Rick (34:15.359)
No, they got bought or they got a new CEO came in and took them totally enterprise and I got so mad. Yeah.

Tyler King (34:22.143)
yikes. Okay. Well, maybe I'll follow up then. Okay. We just don't have any of the features. Like we don't send email. Almost everyone listening to this podcast, a big part of what a CRM does is send email and we don't do that whole cloth. It's not that we're bad at it. We don't do it at all. So that's why I wouldn't expect anyone that wants any form of email automation is not going to use us.

Rick (34:25.613)
Do you know what the differentiated factor was? that made her.

Rick (34:48.855)
Well, I'm looking at copper now. looks like they've reverted back to what originally attracted me to them. So maybe you gave good advice.

Tyler King (34:57.629)
accidentally. Anyway, I do think if you're, if you're looking at a bunch of different CRMs and I have this personally, when I'm, when I'm buying products, you can go somewhere and you're like, this doesn't look like they've updated it in a decade. Like I don't trust this company. I have that feeling when I buy software and is a new homepage going to completely revolute, like dramatically measurably increase our conversion rate? No. But I also just think there's a, it's pride thing. Like.

Rick (34:58.635)
Yeah.

Tyler King (35:26.831)
put out good shit and I don't need, I don't think you need to justify that exactly, but I've tried and tried and tried. We've expensive, well credentialed professionals to do this. I've never gotten a homepage that even looked just like a basic level, decent SaaS homepage. Claude just did it for us. It's going live soon.

It looks fucking great. It looks so much better than anything we've ever had and it was basically free.

Rick (35:58.476)
not to belabor the AI stuff, but like, okay, I want to switch this. So we just did AI with like branding and positioning. I want to talk about AI with Webflow. All right. So I know your site's hosted on Webflow. My question is, how easy is it to have Claude build a good Webflow template? And like, what's...

Tyler King (36:11.545)
Yes.

Tyler King (36:16.781)
Yeah. this has been a, would hate to be web flow right now. I would never two years ago, I would have said, if you need a marketing site, it should be on web flow. Period. now I would say I would never, I would never use web flow if I weren't already on it. I think I would just self-host. just have AI build like a, a react or whatever marketing site. And, that'd be that.

Rick (36:20.63)
Okay.

Rick (36:31.981)
What would you do?

Rick (36:42.625)
And it's good at like embedding forms. would just like, you'd evolve like a custom app to manage your website basically.

Tyler King (36:48.845)
Yeah, well, let me go through the history of how we evolved as a company. In the early days, I just built, like there was www.lessononcserum.com. That was our site. That's where our app was hosted. That's where our marketing site was hosted. One code base, all PHP. I coded the whole thing up myself. There were things that were great about that. If I wanted to, like for example, if someone clicked on a referral or an affiliate link and we knew that that affiliate or refer was based in the UK, we'd automatically...

convert all the pricing to be in British pounds instead of US dollars. I could just do whatever I wanted. I could make my own CMS. It could behave however I wanted. I could do forms. The forms could have any kind of automation I want. It was great. The problem with that is then as soon as you hire someone to do marketing, A, they almost certainly cannot do that. Like a founder, a technical founder can do that. Almost no one else can. And even if they can, then it's like, okay, does the dev team want this marketer to be able to push code?

like in the same code base. So that's when you switch to Webflow or should have started in Webflow if not that it existed back then, but the whole reason you use a tool like Webflow or any kind of website builder like that is so that non-technical people can do whatever they can. we want to switch from Google Analytics to Fathom. They can just go do that. Yeah.

Rick (38:05.421)
Yes, it's embed forums, spin up a landing page, set up an automation.

Tyler King (38:09.838)
Yes.

Tyler King (38:13.263)
But with cloud code, so I think that was the right answer in the past. Now you don't need like a technical founder level person. You just, you need a marketer kind of like you were saying JD, Eunice, our marketer is very similar. mean, she was even further ahead. She's been doing AI for a long time now, but she's just using cloud code and building the website. And if we needed a form, she just figured out, that wasn't an option two years ago, but it is an option now. And so I would probably just self host, but

So the question of we are using Webflow, is it worth migrating off of Webflow? It should be just a massive project. No, I'm not. the options, well, A, migrate off, that would be one option. B, design it with AI and then manually recreate it in Webflow. I think that's probably what we're gonna end up doing. Kind of clunky, but the designs themselves are what we care about. It's not like it would be hard to do it in Webflow. We just needed.

We don't have good enough of an eye for design. Option three, which we were exploring, and I think we ruled out, you can upload static HTML to Webflow and it hosts it for you, but Webflow clearly doesn't want to be in that business. And so they have all these limitations like the size of the file can't be more than a certain number of characters and all this stuff. So we could do that, but it would be, I think, more of a workaround than we want.

Rick (39:37.39)
Interesting. Gosh, have no one of my personal sort of projects this year is is migrating was rebuilding ricklinquist.com. Right now, like I'm my my search traffic is going down. I also just it's my it's my little fiddle. You know, it's like my dad always worked on cars growing up like that's my little like playground. And I was I just thought it would be migrating to Webflow. And I'm just wondering if maybe I should just cloud code a new ricklinquist.com and

That could be my experience with Cloud Code.

Tyler King (40:11.087)
That's my instinct. I mean, it's harder in some ways and easier in others, but it'd be a good experience, I think.

Rick (40:17.217)
What about connectivity? Like one thing that I find useful about Webflow is they are building the MCP connections so that like Claude can publish stuff to the site. Like does Claude code work the same way where once you have it connected?

Tyler King (40:28.869)
Well, if Claude wrote the site, you don't need an MCP server. It's just, yeah.

Rick (40:31.691)
That's what I thought. You just say like, put it, put this blog post up.

Tyler King (40:35.237)
Well, yeah, if you were going to do this, there's a question of how to implement it. And of course, could open up a Cloud Code session and be like, talk me through the options. But the most basic version is every blog post is just a new webpage. You open up a Cloud Code session, you say, here's this Notion doc, I wrote the post, can you just make a new webpage for it? There is no CMS, right? It's just, if you have 500 posts, there's 500 HTML pages.

That's not how you design like a real professional site, of course, because then if you want to, you want to change what the header looks like, you have to go edit it in 500 places. Um, there's various ways to make that more robust. Like, okay, I'm doing that, but I have backend code that like I'm including the header and I'm including the footer and all that. There's a thing called a static site generator where basically you write all the blog posts and markdown files, you push a button and it goes through and generates all the HTML for you.

And then anytime you want to make a change to the wrapper of the site, you just push the button again and it regenerates everything. Or there's build a real CMS, like build your own version of WordPress from scratch with Cloud Code. It has a database, it has an editor, you log in, you write a new post, exactly what you're doing in Squarespace right now, but it's like fully homemade code. Those are all options for you.

Rick (42:02.093)
I mean, I kind of I think like long term the I'm very interested in the last option. I'm just thinking about this for like what I was doing with programmatic SEO, Webflow broke on programmatic SBO. Like it was not it was too complicated for it to handle and too much work to maintain. But like if I could upload a file of all this data and have Claude just spin up state specific zip code specific, all kinds of like specific you very valuable pages.

to capture both like AI type searches and Google related searches. That would be pretty cool.

Tyler King (42:41.113)
And I think a static site generator would also be able to do that pretty well. I've never used one before, but, yes. Yeah. That'd be, this is why I sometimes lament switching to web flow in the first place, because back in the day, yes, I had to do everything. And it's like, it's great that Eunice can do stuff on her own now, but there's a certain power that comes from the founder. And again, now with AI, doesn't have to be a technical founder. It could be anyone. The founder could just has an idea sitting on their couch on a Friday night.

It becomes a reality versus about Webflow can't do that. I guess my idea can't happen. Okay.

Rick (43:16.685)
Hmm.

Wow, okay, I have a lot to think about. This is really, like, you kind of, well, only just to learn, like, I mean, it's my sandbox, right? And so like, if it worked for RickLinquis.com, I would quickly fast follow to Legapelth, like, because of the unlock.

Tyler King (43:22.063)
But you were talking about ricklinquist.com though, not leguphealth.com. Yeah.

Tyler King (43:36.601)
Yeah.

Rick (43:38.901)
Why wouldn't you do this for less annoying CRM? Why wouldn't you just migrate the whole site off of Webflow? Too many connected pieces?

Tyler King (43:45.559)
It's a big project with little unclear upside. leg up health has lots of downside. Well, and every, every time you migrate your site from one stack to another, you run the risk that your SEO just tanks. Even if the new site has good SEO. like when we moved to web flow, our web traffic dropped quite a bit for a while, and then it worked its way back up. But like leg up health has tons of programmatic SEO opportunities that I've, we have.

Rick (43:50.273)
Yeah, and lots of downside because it's working. Yeah, I don't have the downside.

Rick (44:07.399)
Mm. Came back.

Tyler King (44:15.595)
spent so much time brainstorming less knowing serum, we've never come up with a good programmatic SEO idea.

Rick (44:20.673)
Yeah, like if I just focused on Utah and Texas and I just said, let's build like awesome fricking programmatic SEO for every long tail keyword search related that a small business or ICP could search like that would be worth the experiment alone.

Tyler King (44:35.587)
Yeah, you're confident Webflow couldn't handle that.

Rick (44:39.117)
Not without a lot of like brainpower and effort because you've got to structure the collections. You've got to design each collection page like it's actually quite

Tyler King (44:47.525)
I mean, it'll take a lot of brain power to do it from scratch too, but maybe it's you're building more of a valuable asset that way. Yeah.

Rick (44:50.753)
Of course, but like, like, yeah, exactly. the, the it, what flow gets harder to maintain, not easier to maintain the more you add, because you've got to, it's, there's an, there's sort of like an annual update process where the data changes. Like it's, and then you're going into each collection page and editing the collection page. It's like super annoying. but, maybe I, maybe I should probably, I should probably, I'm gonna relist this episode and go through your three buckets. I can't remember what exactly what they are. It's like the web flow, the static site generator, and then the

Custom site, is that the general?

Tyler King (45:21.455)
I would just consider static site generator or just vibe code your own CMS. One of those two, I think is probably the right answer for you. Yeah, do it with the RicklinQuiz.com. It would be a fun project you'd learn. I also, what I like about this, when you talk about AI and when JD does, I think there's two things you're talking about, but a big third one is missing. One is using Claude, the web version of Claude or chat GPT or whatever.

Rick (45:29.153)
Okay, very cool.

Tyler King (45:51.237)
Everyone knows that. That's very useful. still use it. Yeah. And then the second one is using off the shelf products like Artisan or Notion or whatever. Like they built AI features and you're using them. The thing that I don't think you've experienced and that I think both you and JD, like this was the big unlock everyone had around like the holidays last year was realizing that stuff is prehistoric. That's not where the power is. The power is in local.

Rick (45:52.84)
That is what I use.

Rick (46:11.553)
The Clock God.

Tyler King (46:18.851)
like running either Claude Cowork or Claude Code on your computer and editing files on your computer. Maybe six months from now it'll be a totally different thing, but that is just when you do it and you see the magic, you're gonna be like, my God, I didn't get it. This is a whole different thing.

Rick (46:32.781)
I don't do anything on my computer though. Like what do you, that's exactly, so like that's the, like I do everything, everything is web based for me. Like all my files are on Google Drive.

Tyler King (46:34.755)
Well, writing code would be it.

Tyler King (46:41.367)
Right. But I think that, well, my speculation is that where we are right now is a temporary, very rudimentary version. Like I think all this will become web-based at some point, but like right this second, if you want to be most effective with AI, I think you might be better off changing that rather than saying, how do I get AI into my web-based tools? You'd be saying how to, like, for example, I said, it helped with this presentation. I don't use PowerPoint. I haven't used PowerPoint really ever.

But I had it make me a PowerPoint file because it was way better. I tried using Google Docs. It didn't work very well. I made the PowerPoint file and then I put it up in Google Docs.

Rick (47:19.735)
Yeah, interesting. Yeah, I do. That's what I've been doing too is we're word and going from word and then converting to Google Drive because of, but I can do that on the web. I don't need to have the desktop app for that.

Tyler King (47:29.955)
Yeah, but if you have like a bunch of like you could say here's an Excel file. I want you to look at it I want you to break it into. I want you to turn it into 200 different web pages for me and it would just do it.

Rick (47:42.005)
I can do that for it with a Google Sheet.

Tyler King (47:45.753)
How does it make the web pages?

Rick (47:48.334)
I don't know, that's the part. I haven't experienced the coding side of this. I think that's where the unlock is. Yeah, so I need to... Please challenge me on this.

Tyler King (47:55.171)
Yeah, that's definitely the best use case right now. But let me, let me re yeah. Let me give one other example though. Like I, I kind of said this to JD in Slack. He's he's saying he's giving Claude a PowerPoint presentation, a slide deck and saying, here's the generic one. Here's some information about a specific lead. Can you give me back a version that's customized, like customize all the stuff in the slide deck to this lead?

You know what I'm talking about? it can do that and it's okay. But JD was saying, well, the problem is like, it's always different in random, unpredictable ways. like it's kind of vibing a PowerPoint presentation and it's good. It's fast, but it's not perfect. The actual, the way to get it perfect is you say, Hey, Claude or Claude code rather write me code that will like pull it. Yeah.

Rick (48:25.837)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (48:51.895)
produce.

Tyler King (48:53.273)
The code will produce it because the AI is non-deterministic. It's different every time. It can't be trusted, but the code that it writes can be tested. And you can say the code works. I can run it over and over and over and it works 100 % of the time. And then that generates the PowerPoint presentation and it will be perfect. Like that's, that's the type of thing I'm talking

Rick (49:11.38)
I see what you're saying. Like, uh, okay. I would like to be, I I might ask from my friend asked to you is, can you please like every couple of weeks, ask me if I've done this? Like, I think I know we, this goes counter to what we talked about earlier, which is don't worry about like upskilling right now. Just do the thing that matters. But like, I think that this is worth investing in and it's something that I think will unlock some stuff for us. So, um,

Tyler King (49:23.256)
You

Rick (49:38.827)
And it's on my list of goals this year. It's like so aligned to like my personal goals. So if you could just like challenge me, I'd like to make some meaningful progress here before the end of May. And

Tyler King (49:40.741)
Yeah, yeah.

Tyler King (49:47.449)
Yeah. Why don't you just put something in the Notion board for, we'll talk about this and it'll just stay there. Yeah.

Rick (49:50.55)
Yeah, every week Rick's vibe coding journey. Update. Is that what we should call this?

Tyler King (49:57.157)
Great. All right. I think the term vibe coding is probably going to get antiquated pretty quick, but yeah, that works for me. I don't know what the new I mean, I think it's just going to coding eventually, but no, I think that works.

Rick (50:06.709)
What would you call this? Give me the right words.

Rick's coding journey update. All right, man. Thanks for this. This is a good episode. I appreciate it. See you later.

Tyler King (50:15.493)
All right.

Yeah, have fun. Talk to you later.