Rick (00:00.58)
What's up, Tyler?

Tyler King (00:02.252)
I'm tired.

Rick (00:03.366)
me too. We're both dads now.

Tyler King (00:07.226)
Yeah, yeah, the waking up in the middle of the night thing is getting to me. No, it's not too bad. It's just a question of can I fall back asleep? And, because I only have to wake up once in the middle of the night. If I wake up, do my thing, go right back to sleep, it's all good. Last night I just laid in bed for a while, now I'm tired. Boo hoo.

Rick (00:27.494)
what do you do when you are laying in bed and you can't fall asleep? Do you get up? Do you just lay there? Do you try to read a book, watch a show?

Tyler King (00:36.782)
We, Shelly and I, since like right when we moved in together, so over a decade now, we watch Futurama when we go to bed. So I've seen the entire series Futurama through like hundreds of times I think. So I put that on. I'm not sure if it works anymore. Like I know it so well that I don't think it even really distracts me, but that's what I do. What about you?

Rick (01:01.702)
I have a Kindle and I just read my books.

Tyler King (01:06.562)
Yeah, I'm doing a lot more reading as a parent. like have I hadn't read a book for fun. Like I read occasionally I would read business books. I hadn't read a book for fun in basically my entire adult life. I think now I've read two books. Some fantasy nonsense. I don't even remember what they're called.

Rick (01:21.956)
What books did you read?

Rick (01:27.276)
shut up, tell me I love fantasy.

Tyler King (01:28.92)
There's a, it's not like one of the, what's it called? The Blade itself, I think it's called. I just went on some Reddit thread and was like, here's what I used to read when I was a kid. I read a bunch of like, probably not bad fantasy, but I don't know. I feel like there's this attitude that sci-fi is good and fantasy is kind of like, like, dragons and magic, but you don't have to think as hard. I liked that type of stuff as a kid. And I was like, what would an adult read if that's what they liked as a kid? And this was recommended.

Rick (01:57.53)
I love it. Logan nine fingers. Does that sound familiar?

Tyler King (02:02.069)
Yeah, yeah, it's a bunch of like, you know, the type of stuff a middle school boy would think is really badass, but I still enjoy it. It's just the next one in that series. Yeah, what about you? What are you reading?

Rick (02:08.102)
What was the other one, do remember? Book two, cool. I'm reading Mistborn right now, which is a Brandon Sanderson book. You would love it.

Tyler King (02:19.787)
Yeah. Do you like, Brandon Sanderson is one of these like really prolific like authors that just writes and writes and writes, right?

Rick (02:23.738)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. he's, think, I think Mistborn was like kind of his coming out party, like his first trilogy. And, but I'm not positive, but he, I he's, it's really good. I highly recommend it. you're totally deading out.

Tyler King (02:36.363)
Yeah, okay, I might do that. I think I've got like, yeah, I've got, wait, what? Just reading? yeah, it's weird. Well, at her current age it doesn't matter, but I'm anticipating like, you don't want your kid to be around screens all the time, which means I guess she can't see me. I can't let her know that I'm horribly addicted to screens, so. Kindles aren't screens, I know it's a screen, but that doesn't count, right?

Rick (02:43.364)
Like you're reading.

Rick (03:05.286)
I'm just imagining you holding a book upside down pretending to read in front of your kid.

Tyler King (03:11.597)
That's a very funny image, yes. No, I do know how to read, believe it or not. I'm incredibly slow at it. It takes me, I bet it takes me twice as long to read a book as like the average intelligent adult. Yeah, I've always been a really slow reader.

Rick (03:24.728)
really?

Tyler King (03:29.333)
Fascinating stuff, okay, what's going on with you?

Rick (03:32.102)
Well, I have a big I have a big update you know this but I'll say it for the podcast We had another record month at leg of health, which is pretty cool. So we're almost at 19 K Just on like 18.9 K if you're counting decimals of monthly work of my I wouldn't call it MRR but monthly revenue that's reoccurring in nature and

Tyler King (03:41.325)
Woo!

Tyler King (03:50.708)
MRR.

Tyler King (03:56.684)
Some of it is recurring and some of it's like bonuses for hitting whatever, yeah.

Rick (04:00.074)
Yeah. Yeah. But like, think the more exciting piece of this is like, not only are we growing every month, but we have better and larger pipeline of deals that will come in the next month. And it just seems like this is going to be a really good year.

Tyler King (04:18.187)
Yeah, that's certainly the impression I get, you know, observing, you know, what JD and you are saying from afar. There's a very, there's a big difference. Like in the past, I feel like when good things happened, it was, this is all coming from JD. Like I've been grinding and you know, I called a thousand people and it mostly didn't, but Hey, we got lucky and we got this, this one person and it's a big deal and we're going to get a lot of revenue from it. And it's good, but like, wow, what a grind versus now it feels like, even if you're still only getting that one customer, it's like,

yeah, like we have this system for getting leads and this month we got these four leads and one of them closed. It just feels, yeah, way more routine.

Rick (04:53.958)
Exactly right. Yes, routine. It's routine. I like that word. Yeah, anyway, I don't have any updates on that other than like it was cool. But, but, you know, I think that the thing that I think what I need to watch and what I think JD needs to watch is, okay, we're going to sign up for a lot of work when we close some of these larger deals, which will bring revenue and put JD in a great spot and put the business in a great spot. But it also comes with

It's not like it's selling software, right? Like we've got to actually fulfill. And so there's this like, we sell these deals and then there's going to be a blip in work and that'll probably impact sales in next 90 days. And then we'll just have to watch it.

Tyler King (05:38.54)
And presumably renewals every year. I assume the renewal isn't as hard as the initial setup, but like, I feel like with a normal SaaS company, you kind of think of growth and current customer base is like two unrelated things. But here JD is the whole thing. He's, he's growth, he's customer service, he's, you know, customer success. So every customer you add permanently removes a little bit of capacity to go get new customers, which probably

All recurring revenue businesses have this eventual plateau where churn catches up to growth, but there's this extra factor where growth actually drops, or at least the amount of time JD can put into growth drops the more customers we have.

Rick (06:12.998)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (06:19.398)
Correct. And so I have a lot of like, I think the short term split, I have a lot of ideas on this and I want to talk about it maybe towards the end of the episode, but like, think there's like AI has the potential to extend. we should hypothetically, if we take advantage of AI, we could displace, like we could like reproduce the capacity that JD's losing if we thoughtfully apply AI in the right places. And so I want to talk about that today at some point.

But not necessarily right this second. What's up with you?

Tyler King (06:49.335)
Okay.

Um, yeah, I, I, I'll give some updates, but I don't think I have a ton of groundbreaking stuff going on. Um, you know, one of the themes for this year has been, I've been giving form metrics updates. I'll give one more, but I think like we're at a point where they're slowing down. Um, so as a reminder, our goal was we're measuring form success by how many submissions we're getting per month, uh, from random strangers, the hope of creating a viral loop. The goal was by the end of the first quarter. So April 1st hit, uh,

1500, I think it was, submissions per month, 5,000 by July 1st, and then 25,000 by the end of the year. These goals are totally made up. Were they the right numbers to pick, who knows? We hit the first goal pretty easily. We're not at July 1st yet, but we're like roughly gonna hit 5,000. So we're either gonna hit that or come close enough that it's the same thing. But growth is slowing down quite a bit on the form submissions. Basically, I think, you we have our base of existing customers.

We got them, the ones who are interested in using forms are using it. I'm sure there'll be a slow trickle, but pretty much we picked all the low hanging fruit. I don't see a path to five X between now and the end of the year. So we're kind of pause. I don't want to say positive. Like I think there's like a long-term thing here where five years from now, I might look at it and the numbers might be really high. know, things compound and if you're patient, all that, but like in terms of this.

Rick (08:11.685)
Hmm.

Tyler King (08:14.273)
We just launched forms and we're making a push to get as many people using it as possible. I feel like we're kind of hitting the end of that journey right now.

Rick (08:20.72)
So is this a set it and forget it type thing or do you anticipate continued marketing efforts here?

Tyler King (08:27.437)
We have a couple more marketing projects going on. there will be some more, but we're kind of shifting from like, let's, so the, when you have an established business, as I do, the obvious way to get usage for new features to get it amongst your current users, right? I think we're kind of moving on from that and saying the remaining projects are like, when we sign up a new customer, let's make it more like, you know, basic stuff, like let's have a video in our kind of,

beginner's guide series talking about this. we're making onboarding basically a little bit easier. Eunice, our marketer is doing some, landing pages for forms, doing forms comparison pages, just all the standard SaaS marketing playbook stuff that you'd be silly not to do. But yeah, at that point, I think we're basically gonna say it, I'll share some more specific numbers in a second, but I think like the overall takeaway is like, if we wait long enough,

this might turn into something, but this is not going to be like, the viral loop is taking off in the short term and we need to like, it's worth it to continue pushing really hard on this.

Rick (09:36.304)
Makes sense, makes sense. What's next then?

Tyler King (09:40.866)
Let me come to that in just a second, since this is probably the last time I'm talking about forms metrics for a little bit. Let me share a couple things on that. One, we talked before about how like not every form submission is valuable from a viral loop standpoint. For example, a common use case is internal data entry. So we did add some logging to kind of figure that out. like if someone's logged in, we're not going to count that as a submission. you get a bunch of submissions from the same IP address, it probably means.

It could mean a number of things, but it's not a good viral opportunity, probably. About 60 % of submissions, it looks like, are from random strangers on the internet. So you can adjust all the numbers. I said, if we're at about 5,000 submissions a month right now, 60 % of that or something is the number of viral impressions we're getting. Yeah, I don't know if there's anything. I don't know if that's useful for anyone, but.

Rick (10:35.846)
Well, it's interesting that like 40 % of you I don't think you anticipated when you built the form feature that 40 % of use like the submissions would be internal users Streamlining their data entry into your CRM

Tyler King (10:49.613)
It actually does not surprise me. sorry, it's probably more like a 65 % of it anyway. Yeah. It doesn't surprise me partially because we've been pushing that a lot of these, think what's happening. A lot of our customers go to conferences and use this for lead. Like, uh, like they have an iPad set up at their booth at a conference. Those all come from the same IP address. Those are like not nearly as valuable. Like the odds of someone going up and, um, filling out a form on that iPad and seeing powered by less knowing serum.

much less valuable than if they're on their computer at home filling out a web form. So that's why we're not counting it. But of the 35 % that we're ignoring now, it's not entirely internal data entry. It's just these other use cases like a conference as well.

Rick (11:32.422)
That makes sense. makes sense. But it's internal workflow streamlining versus website conversion, which is like, I think that's pretty cool. That's actually what a CRM should do. So the fact that you built this thing and you had extra benefits for your customers that you didn't anticipate makes it even more worthwhile that you built it.

Tyler King (11:40.907)
Yeah.

Tyler King (11:46.477)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (11:53.422)
That's one of my big takeaways from this is this is probably the coolest feature we've built in a long time. Just forget the viral loop and all that. Everything we've been working on for so long has been just nibbles around the edges. Like we've already got this product and like, hey, did you know that now when you had a calendar, but now you can make sub calendars or whatever like that. And that felt like a really big feature at the time. But it's like, that's not really opening up new workflows.

This is the first thing in a very long time where it's like, can solve new business problems that you could not solve before, even with the internal data entry thing, right? Even if you're the one filling it out, this is basically our for dipping our toe in the water to automation. The reason you use it for internal data entry is you're like, I'm to fill out one form. And when I hit submit, it's going to assign it to the right person. It's going to add a lead. It's going to set seven follow-up tasks, you know, whatever. So yeah, I'm really happy we built it.

Rick (12:31.654)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (12:38.01)
Yes.

Tyler King (12:52.353)
we were wrong or our hypothesis for why we wanted to build it at least has not proven out yet, but there is a different accidental thing, which it turns out this was actually just a really good thing to build. And that's definitely influencing me now of like, should we be doing, I already thought we had said we're going to do less nibbling around the edges, but like maybe take it even a step further and say like what specifically, how do we open up new use cases? You know?

Rick (13:14.33)
Yes, internal and it like it doesn't have to be it doesn't have to be purely viral growth oriented. It could be just like like I like that new use cases. That's a very broad thing.

Tyler King (13:25.441)
Yeah, because like, right, so like to think about, if you were just looking at viral growth, and let's say we call this a success and we wanna do more viral growth, what would you do with that? You'd say probably appointment scheduling, invoicing, document signing. There are no internal use cases for those, right? Forms is kind of unique for that. They would not have the benefit that we got out of it. You don't make an event scheduling like a calendly link and then use it yourself to book things on your own calendar, you know? I don't think, do you?

Rick (13:40.88)
Mm-mm.

Rick (13:54.736)
So I mean, could see that use case. I would not do that. But I could see someone else doing that. I could see someone's internal scheduling could use that. Like, yeah. Yes, yes.

Tyler King (14:02.189)
Okay, but you get what I'm saying though, yeah.

you could send it to someone else within your company, Anyway, so yeah, that's basically all I've got to say about forms, but yeah, that does lead to the next question you said is like, what are we working on next? And then also like, how do we open up these new use cases?

Rick (14:20.9)
Yeah, and I think like the difference is like the way you're thinking about it now is not, you know, improving the existing software versus like new features for viral growth. You're more thinking about it in terms of improving existing use cases and adding new use cases.

Tyler King (14:37.205)
Yeah, and I'm not, to be clear, I'm not like committing, we're making a strategic shift and we're definitely doing this, but I am like saying, I'm not sure we've thought about it through this lens enough. And so I want to explore what, if we did look at it that way, what would the conclusion be? What should we build? Yeah, that's correct.

Rick (14:55.814)
I'm looking at your forms landing page on your website. It looks good. Like you've got the marketing piece here. Have you run any like AdWords or Legion from your forms? Like have you tried that?

Tyler King (14:59.169)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (15:09.319)
I know we have, it's so funny, like being, I'm a little disconnected from this, to be honest. I know we have put it, there's all these like directories like G2 and Captera where you can like list yourself. know we're, we've always been as a CRM listed there. Now we are like, if you go to the form builder section of those, we're listed on those. And those are like you, like with Captera, the way it works is they list all of the form builders. The one at the top is the one that's paying them the most. It's just straight pay to play.

Rick (15:27.846)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (15:38.798)
Form builder is a much cheaper category to get to the top of than CRM, as you'd probably imagine. So we've dabbled with that. Now, as you'd expect, most people who are like, I need a form builder are not saying, I want a CRM, but it's so much cheaper than CRM. We don't have enough data yet to say, but like we, it's not impossible that this is actually like to make the generic version of this.

Rick (15:54.438)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (16:06.689)
Go on Captera and find the cheapest category and lie and say that you make that, but you're actually selling in a different category and hope that 5 % of the people are actually in the market for that other category as well. It's possible the economics of that actually work. I don't think it will, but we're exploring that.

Rick (16:21.03)
I thought you're gonna go a different direction. I thought you were gonna say like, like our CRM is cheaper than most form builders. if they just, yeah, yeah, they like if they, if they buy our form builders, like our whole package for the form builder, like they're still winning.

Tyler King (16:29.151)
Or that. Yeah, that's fair.

Tyler King (16:37.101)
Yeah, it's sort of a tough sell because like setting up a whole CRM just to use a form builder is more complicated. Now, sorry, I've got a million thoughts. Let me pitch you on something. We've been talking, we're probably not gonna like invest a lot more in the form builder right now, because I wanna kind of wait and see what happens with it. But in brainstorming what we're gonna do with it, one thought is like pitching it as why would you want a form builder where like the forms get submitted and then nothing happens? Like a form builder that like...

Rick (16:48.357)
Okay.

Tyler King (17:05.535)
Everyone who fills out a form is a person. You need a contact record in the place that the form gets submitted. So even if you're not thinking, I need a CRM, you want more than just Google forms or whatever. That's a thing we've been exploring of like, how could we position ourselves against other form builders? What are your thoughts on that?

Rick (17:22.98)
I agree completely, 100%. Every good form builder that I've used that is not core, for example, I've used JotForm for edge cases. They have the concept of contacts and where do you wanna send them? Yeah, yeah. And you can push them to a spreadsheet, can push them like Google Forms, or you could push them to a CRM. They have lots of integrations, but they do have the idea of a submitter.

Tyler King (17:35.874)
they do. Okay.

Tyler King (17:47.501)
Because Google Forms doesn't have that, right?

Rick (17:50.17)
Well, they do in the sense that if you require a Google user to authenticate, they do require an email address. so you could unique identify it your way there. But if you don't require Google authentication and it's more of open form, like a normal form that's more competitive with you, there's no really unique identifier of the submitter.

Tyler King (18:01.152)
Sure.

Tyler King (18:14.699)
That's not quite what I mean. Like, yeah, every form tool is gonna, you can collect an email address and make it required. Like that's gonna be basic with everyone, but like then what? You have to send it to another system or whatever. You can imagine just a spreadsheet, yeah. But like, and then what? Like what are you doing with this?

Rick (18:25.68)
Well, Google's default is a spreadsheet.

Well, mean, you can spread. mean, I don't know how much you played with Google Spreadsheets lately, but you can do a lot with Google Spreadsheets sending data elsewhere. Yeah.

Tyler King (18:39.989)
Right, that's kind of my point is it's always your, like the form tool is always subordinate to some other tool that you're like syncing data to or whatever. I haven't fully fleshed out the thoughts in my head, but like, what if the form tool was the tool? Like what if that's where the data actually lives long-term for you?

Rick (18:46.598)
Correct.

Rick (18:57.86)
And I would argue that for most form tools, that's where it does live. I get what you're saying. The data as in the submitter and the data of the responses, does live in Google still? Their interface is spreadsheets. Whereas a JotForm has its own, they don't have the concept of a spreadsheet, they have their own table. Yeah.

Tyler King (19:18.635)
Yeah, even a spreadsheet though, and I acknowledge this is probably not a real use case. I'm trying to make up a reason why we're better than them and it's probably not real, a person fills out two forms. That is not reflected in a spreadsheet anywhere, right? There's no contact record in Google. Like you have Google Contacts, it doesn't sync to Google Contacts at all. It puts it in a spreadsheet and then it's your job.

Rick (19:39.494)
I think that's where a lot of form builders would fall down is deduplication, collection of multiple submissions by the same person or what you believe to be a single contact. HubSpot does a good job of this dedupe being on email, but there are CRM. That would be my comparison.

Tyler King (20:01.003)
Right, Anyway, that's just a random, we've been trying to think like if we were to market this more, like if this is on captera and let's say we can buy a click for a lot cheaper than CRM, we need some pitch that's like, you weren't looking for a CRM, but here's why you actually want this instead of JotForm. Anyway, I forget what question you asked that led me down that rabbit hole.

Rick (20:28.954)
Well, I had one more comment, which is like the way I would position this for some reason, I minimized this thing and then the picture and picture mode closed to maintain recording quality. Interesting. I usually have like the pip up at the top so I can look at the notes and it just disappeared on me because of quality, I guess. And it totally psyched me out. But what I was gonna tell you is that I really enjoyed, I really think that like when you

Tyler King (20:30.945)
Yeah.

Rick (20:58.362)
position the idea of tracking at the form submission level versus the person who's submitting the form level. Like that's probably the differentiator. And so I think you should pull that thread a little bit more. That started to speak to me.

Tyler King (21:08.493)
Yeah. and you were saying like, we're already cheaper than what most paid form tools are. So I think that the question, it's easy to say, or I shouldn't say it's easy. The question is we need to be better than Google forms, which is free. And we have a couple of things that are better. We take signatures, like kind of an e-sign type of thing and handful of other things. But then like, why pay $15 for this instead of paying $15 or whatever it costs for JotForm? And yeah, maybe that's the answer.

Rick (21:37.872)
Well, I think you should stick to your core positioning, is you have feature parity with Google, right? Like that's all you need. Second, you have awesome customer service. Third, you're cheaper. And then the differentiator on top of that is this like, know, sync to contacts. To me, that's like why you should choose you over Google.

Tyler King (21:42.7)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (21:55.223)
Yeah.

Tyler King (21:59.436)
Yeah, and I think it needs to have that last emphasis because even if those other ones are true, it's like, yeah, but I want a form tool. I don't want to CRM. We need to kind of talk them into like, yes, you do want to CRM or a contact tool anyway.

Rick (22:12.718)
A good form tool has a CRM built on top of it because that lets you send the data more more usefully to other places.

Tyler King (22:15.234)
Yeah.

Tyler King (22:19.755)
Yeah, exactly. So yeah, we'll probably keep like on the marketing side, we'll keep playing with it. On the technical side, we have a couple more features to wrap up, nothing major, and then we're moving on. So Kanban and Mobile have started in earnest, feeling pretty confident those are both gonna ship before the end of the year, hopefully well before the end of the year.

Rick (22:41.222)
That'd be great.

Tyler King (22:42.657)
Yeah, if that happens, that would mean we're shipping the email syncing feature, forms, Kanban and mobile all this year. And I think we actually have a good chance of shipping automations as well. Now the first two of those we built last year, but they kind of shipped at the beginning of this year, but it's very possible 2025 sees five features, all of which are bigger than anything we've launched in the last decade. Should be dope.

Rick (23:10.736)
Keep doing it.

Tyler King (23:13.109)
Yeah, and when I say not necessarily bigger in terms of technical challenge, like finding that what's actually gonna impact customers, know? I've been talking for a while. That leads to what are some of these other things we're exploring after that, but maybe send it back to you and we can see if there's time for me later.

Rick (23:19.568)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (23:31.59)
Yeah, I have like a just a random thought I had a random reconnection with a buddy. I lived in a small town before like my parents divorced when I was young. They lived across the state from each other in North Carolina, moved to the small town at five years old with my mom and like played on this traveling soccer team. There was this kid that I played with named Reed, who was just like this like he was always like the hardest worker. But I didn't know him very well. We reconnected like 15 years like 20 years later.

when he was in San Francisco at a startup and he's done really well. He's done some really cool things, but anyway, he was in Salt Lake City last two weeks ago at a travel agent conference and he's got a new travel agent app. And I was just curious, like, have you thought about, you know, in terms of a growth strategy, like vertical integration, like if you know you're really good at like travel agents, like go try to integrate into like the vertical technology stack.

for travel agents. Like there's a lot of booking tools out there that you could send data to and from. you explored that?

Tyler King (24:34.477)
Yes, it's actually funny you give that example because that's the exact industry we not just explored, we picked it and we started going after it. I think maybe when this happened, like this was during our little podcast hiatus. So maybe I never told you slash the audiences right before the pandemic, we were like, okay, as a growth strategy, we're just going to pick an industry and really go after it. I mean, a certain amount of integrating with their

specific things. That's a slightly harder thing, but like more like building generic tools that they were like every travel agent wants a kind of proposal tool that could also be used by other industries, but like travel agents really want it. So we interviewed a bunch of travel agents, figured out what they want, put together a whole plan and the pandemic hits and travel disappears. So that I don't have a good reason. I mean, I kind of do, we had actually decided and had started working on it and then abandoned it because of the pandemic.

Rick (25:34.234)
Hmm. Okay. Well, interesting. He has a cool app. It's early, but like, it just made me think that there's probably a way for you to plug into somebody's booking tools. I don't know. There's probably a travel CRM that's like, like if someone's using a booking tool, they're probably connecting to that. But anyway, I thought about it and it could be interesting collaboration opportunity for growth.

Tyler King (25:46.497)
Yeah.

Tyler King (25:49.879)
There's a bunch here.

Tyler King (25:56.182)
Yeah, so here's, I realize you're talking specifically about your friend and maybe we can come back to that, like, let me give like a high level thought I've had about this. There's kind of, when we see people leave less annoying CRM, I mean, first of all, there's kind of like voluntary and involuntary churn, like involuntary, or maybe I'm using these terms wrong, but like a lot of people are like, I'm retiring. It's like, okay, we're not going to keep their business, right? And then they'll be like, I love less annoying CRM. You guys did everything perfect, but I'm retiring. Okay, nothing to do there. The people who are leaving where it kind of,

feels like we did something wrong or what, like they're going to something else. There's basically, I'm gonna call it three types of things, although they maybe overlap with each other a little bit. One is like, I'm going to Pipe Drive or Insightly or Salesforce. like we're a general purpose CRM, maybe a little more niche down than those other ones, these tools tend to be, have a lot of different features, a lot of customization, work for different industries and be really polished good software, including us, I'd like to think.

there's another type, which is I'm, I use some other tool that added CRM for free. So this is the equivalent of like, if you're using front fronts, like we have a Calendly alternative, cancel your Calendly account and use us. And it's not as good as Calendly, but it's good enough. I don't want to pay for Calendly. So I'll use front scheduling tool instead. You know what I mean? It's that, but for CRM it's like they're using some agency management tool or what, like CRM was never their primary tool.

Rick (27:18.427)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (27:25.047)
They're using some other primary tool that they'll use that as their serum now. And then the third one is an industry specific one. The industry specific ones pretty much all suck. They're not very customizable. They're extremely expensive. They look like they were designed 20 years ago, but they just have like, like for the travel agent example, I've found this out working with lot of travel agents. Yeah. And like a lot of travel agents only work with Disney. The only trips they plan are at Disney resorts and cruises and stuff. And it's like, I'm only going to use a CRM if it integrates with Disney's backend, you know?

Rick (27:42.032)
deep features.

Tyler King (27:55.334)
those are the three things we see. And so I've been like, just thinking about the future of CRMs and stuff. Like, where do we fit? Like, are we going to compete with Salesforce on features? Probably not. Is there a world, this is kind of what you're saying. Is there a world, I don't want to go all in on travel agents or all in on insurance agents or whatever, but is there world where we're kind of in this weird hybrid of we have the

the software quality of one of these general purpose ones, but one by one we pick off industries and make these industry specific ones obsolete.

Tyler King (28:32.065)
That's just a thought I've had.

Rick (28:33.254)
Yeah, yeah. And I don't know what's involved to do that. I don't know what the, it's probably varies by industry, what the gap is, but to the extent that like they're on a really crappy piece of software, you know, in those industries and you could pull them out, that'd be awesome. If it's like a lot of work, yeah. So maybe a general purpose is the way to go. And then you lose them to those eventually. That's just what you live with.

Tyler King (28:39.234)
Yeah.

Tyler King (28:48.599)
Yeah, I think it's a lot of work though. Yeah.

Tyler King (28:56.331)
Yeah. But yeah, if, I don't know. Let me know if I should be integrating with your friends tool or vice versa.

Rick (29:01.19)
Hmm.

It was more like I just was like talking to him like I know someone who that you know who knows a lot of travel agents and he was he was joking he was like I'm at this conference and I keep everyone thinks I'm a CRM I'm like I'm not a CRM you have a CRM I'm a booking tool and

Tyler King (29:10.146)
Yeah.

Tyler King (29:16.847)
haha

Well, this goes to that second kind though, is like increasingly software is, it's consolidating. Like having a specialized, I'm not a CRM, I'm this. I bet he either needs to become a CRM or get bought by one eventually.

Rick (29:31.526)
Well, that's another thing for you, right? Like, should you be buying these vertical, like should you consider like buying the technology adjacent?

Tyler King (29:39.33)
Yeah. Every time I think about that, I'm just like the work of integrating this piece of shit other, not that your friend's is bad, but when you said that, like where my head went is there's some travel agent specific CRM that's probably much smaller than us. We could buy them and get whatever the functionality is that travel agent's like, but the work of integrating all that into our product would be greater than the work of building it probably.

Rick (30:04.527)
I would keep them separate.

Tyler King (30:06.807)
then what's the point of owning them?

Rick (30:08.55)
cashflow and Legion.

Tyler King (30:11.775)
Okay, but there's no synergy then, right? Like you might as well buy them if it's just for cash flow.

Rick (30:16.1)
No, I think you serve travel agents and some percentage of the app, the adjacent app will become less known CRM users, especially as you further integrate the tools, but you still keep them separate.

Tyler King (30:30.157)
Hmm, that sounds like a distraction to me. Like your friend's tool sounds more, again, not that he's for sale or anything, just like, imagine there's a shitty version of that out there that is for sale. That seems more appealing where it's like, you're serving this niche need of travel agents. buy it and we keep that separate, but it integrates with less annoying CRM, that makes sense. But having a complete CRM. I was asking a question about a travel agent CRM.

Rick (30:32.614)
too much work. Too much work.

Rick (30:53.754)
That's what I'm saying.

No, no, no, I'm not saying by another CRM. I'm saying by an adjacent tool, like a booking tool to a CRM, and then just make it easier to integrate less knowing CRM than any other tool.

Tyler King (31:03.554)
Yeah.

Tyler King (31:08.587)
Yeah, the problem is, and maybe your friend has found something different. There's so many details I don't know here. The tools like your friends, they're in the CRMs. That's the ecosystem of business software these days, I think. I could be wrong and maybe there's stuff I don't know about, it's like, want a CRM, if I'm a travel agent, I want a CRM that does the proposals, does the booking.

Rick (31:20.067)
Hmm.

Tyler King (31:33.663)
automatically updates if a flight gets rescheduled. That's all in the CRM. It's not like a bunch of standalone tools that they're a zappier pasting together.

Rick (31:41.698)
Interesting. Yeah, maybe that's what he's running into is like, yeah, they see this like really cool functionality is like an extension of their existing series. you have a do CRM. Cool. Would you want to shift to AI? So like the thing I've been I feel like the pace of. Like AI use cases is is accelerating beyond the chat bot, you know, and I'm I feel like we're behind the ball at like that health for some reason.

Tyler King (31:49.217)
Yeah, basically. That's my guess. Yeah, yeah, let's do it.

Tyler King (32:10.103)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (32:10.343)
or every day we don't do something about it, we're behind. So I just wanted to like get your take on that. Do you agree with that?

Tyler King (32:19.063)
I'm so torn here. it seems if the question is 10 years from now, will leg up health be doing more with AI than it is today? Yes, is the obvious answer. And so like the tempting thing to say to that is, well, so obviously we should be doing something now to prepare for that feature that, and I buy that, but I equally buy a different argument, which is things are changing so fast. 90 % of the things people are doing with AI right now will end up being

either bad ideas that don't work out or made irrelevant by advances and like just let the dust settle a little bit and adopt it later in a much more efficient way. I'm torn between those two thoughts.

Rick (33:00.388)
I have the same feelings as you, but then I go, I don't know if you've seen some of the literature around like building an AI first company. I know it's a buzzword, but like there is something to be said for a company built to take advantage of AI from the foundation is different in many ways probably than a legacy company or like today's average company.

And so I guess I worry, is there something we should be doing, even if it's like, what are the don't do's, I guess? What do you wanna avoid doing that might prevent your ability from taking advantage of the AI stuff once it becomes less early adopter, more mainstream?

Tyler King (33:50.882)
Yeah. I'm not sure I have a response to that exactly, but if I can riff off it, when you say we're so far, this conversation has been very high level and vague. does it mean for Leg Up Health to be an AI first company or whatever? I don't think there's a huge opportunity to offer a better product to customers with AI. It's a time-saving mechanism. It's not a quality improvement mechanism. Do you agree with that or do you think I'm missing something?

Rick (34:17.872)
think compared to JD, yes. I compared to the average agent that we're competing against, I think there is an opportunity to improve upon that. And so when I think about the next hire, is our next hire gonna be as good as JD when we hire them? No.

Tyler King (34:28.309)
Yeah, yeah, but...

Tyler King (34:34.955)
Right, okay, so that's exactly where my mind goes with this. Let me move to less annoying serum real quick just as a little analogy and then we can move back. We've been talking about how we might use AI. I've shared in the past on the podcast, like very, very minor ways we might incorporate into the product, but for the most part, I don't think the product needs it right now or whatever. If it does that separate, we've also been talking about like the customer service side is a really obvious place to use AI. And we've invested a little bit in it.

I mentioned we use resolve to 24 seven to draft emails for us in front and stuff like that. But we could be doing a lot more to save time with AI. We could make it so when you search our help docs, instead of just a traditional search, it's not necessarily chat bot, something like that, know, getting a much better answer with search. We could do even more to get our emails streamlined with AI. We could be using AI to, we could record every phone call and have it automatically summarize stuff. So our serum coaches don't have to leave notes anymore. There's lots of stuff we could do.

Every time we talk about doing this, it takes probably some of our developers time and certainly money to do it. And we always decide, well, the thing is we are, it wouldn't make things better. It would just make things more efficient. We're not going to lay off CRM coaches. That's just like against my values to do that. And we don't have good ideas on how to spend that extra CRM coaching time more effectively. like,

It's not a priority for me to make CRM coaches more efficient right now, because we already have more than we need. And I don't think that the replace that whatever we time we saved would not be better spent elsewhere. Now that's not the exact situation of like of health, but does that make sense? Like how I thought about this at less annoying.

Rick (36:13.19)
I've totally like you don't have a problem to solve with AI right now.

Tyler King (36:16.225)
Yeah, until JD's or maybe JD is at capacity right now. But anyway, like when it's like time to scale the team, no question, you could think about it. This is better than a different health insurance agent, or you could just think about it. Like there, some of the stuff JD does is really valuable and he's the best at it. Some of the stuff he does is mindless, menial labor that anyone could do or that AI could do.

You want to take away all the mindless stuff so that he can spend 100 % of his time on the differentiated stuff. That's how I would think about it.

Rick (36:49.094)
That's one way. I was thinking like there's a short, so I think there's kind of two lenses I think we should take this. So one is how do we prevent, how do we stave off hiring anyone for as long as possible? Can AI help us do that? And then the second is are there ways to, are there things we need to avoid doing or do now to enable us to

Tyler King (36:59.617)
Yeah, love that.

Rick (37:18.488)
easily adopt AI in the future, meaning like reduce like, like we're AI ready, but we're not necessarily like employing AI. Does that make sense?

Tyler King (37:29.685)
Yeah, so if this were a Ted talk and you said that, like, you know, a 10 minute talk and you're like, AI is important. You need to be AI ready. End of talk. Round of applause, standing ovation. But then when you have the next 30 minutes of conversation about it, well, what the fuck does that mean? That's what I'm not sure.

Rick (37:45.542)
Well, that's what I'm asking. Yeah. And that's, and that's actually what I'm trying to define is like, what is like, if I, if I, I might feel better about like waiting on AI, if I knew I was AI ready, I don't know what AI ready means, but I just know that like, for example, when, when a company gets super large, I'm in rev ops, it gets harder and harder when systems have different sets of data and there's multiplicity in terms of sources of truth of information. And

it gets harder and harder to train. And so that's what I'm more talking about. I think AI ready probably means really solid documentation. Are you saying don't worry about this until you actually need to employ?

Tyler King (38:26.155)
Well,

sure I'm very open to ideas but let me react to that one point which is this is a classic trade-off of startups that are transitioning to bigger companies in general is like yeah you get bigger and you're like oh man we cut so many corners and we were small we should have done it the right way back then and most of time that's not true most of the time it's like you wouldn't have gotten where you are if you'd said oh yeah exactly so I'm not saying you're wrong but I am saying like I'd take it with a grain of salt sometimes it's just that's part of doing business is things are slower when you get big

Rick (38:48.934)
feed it in focus.

Rick (38:57.946)
Yeah, it's just another form of technical debt. In other words, like it's operational debt. This that's more significant, you know, now that you AIs around. So I get that. get that. I don't think there's much more fruit in like talking about that right now. So I think it's more useful to figure out how to employ AI and that will lead. So OK, so yeah, so let's say let's say like we wanted to grow to let's say we wanted our I think a good metric for AI efficiency.

Tyler King (39:00.011)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Tyler King (39:14.379)
Yeah. So what could be done with AI?

Rick (39:26.32)
could for any company could be revenue per headcount, right? Annual revenue per headcount. So let's say we wanted...

Tyler King (39:30.338)
Yes.

Which is, this is a metric I've been talking about like internally a lot for a year. Like even pre-AI, this is just a great, most companies, their main expenses is payroll. Revenue per employee is a great metric, AI or not, yes.

Rick (39:48.454)
Yep. And so let's say that there's JD who's full time. I don't know what we count you at like right now, you know, some decimal of a person. Yeah. And then, you know, I'm something similar. And so then you add those up and like, what's our revenue per, you know, we're about what 360 ish, right? 300 right now. Is that right? that right? 200 times 12, 20 times 12 is 240, 250 something.

Tyler King (39:58.093)
point zero five or something.

Rick (40:18.246)
So we're heading that way. What is our target? Let's say it's 500. I don't know, what's yours?

Tyler King (40:23.489)
Yeah. I think we're at two, we're to something. Hang on. Let me look it up.

This is one of the main, like I have this one spreadsheet that I look at. wow, we went up since that price increase. We're 270, which is like pretty, 270 per employee can be very good or very bad depending on other qualities of the business, right? I know big tech companies tend to be a million, but they also have ridiculous margins.

Rick (40:50.383)
Expenses, yeah.

So let's just say that the target for leg up is 500k, which means we shouldn't have to hire another individual until we are at what's 500 divided by 12 roughly like 640 something 40k in ARR in monthly recurring revenue.

Tyler King (41:11.021)
Yeah, 500 is high.

Rick (41:15.064)
I'm just, it's a intentionally high number to force the conversation around AI that we're about to have. So, yeah.

Tyler King (41:19.136)
Okay.

And I may take, can I take that one step further though? Hopefully if it's, if the number is 500, the next employee is you, not a stranger. So it's really a million is the target, right? Like how, how to get a million in revenue without hiring anyone.

Rick (41:34.566)
Yeah, well.

Tyler King (41:41.931)
except hiring you.

Rick (41:42.342)
That'd great. That'd be great. Yeah. Like, it doesn't, think it like 501 million. I think it's both really hard, but like it forces us to say, let's say a million, a million per team member at leg up health. what would, like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So 500, yeah. Million in revenue with two people or 500K from one person. How do, like, okay. How can AI help us do that?

Tyler King (41:47.477)
Yeah, okay. Okay.

Tyler King (41:52.927)
No, no, I mean a million total. Sorry, okay, I get this is beside the point. I'm saying two people, a million total, okay.

Tyler King (42:06.945)
Yeah. I don't think, or I hope I'm wrong about this. I don't see a ton of opportunity for AI to get the customers. Again, it can streamline the process. I don't see a ton of opportunity for AI to make the product better in a way where it's like, wow, we went viral because people loved our AI chat bot in the app or whatever. That's my guess is that that's not the opportunity. Put another way.

I don't think the lever to pull is we're gonna get there faster because of AI. The lever to pull is we're gonna get there at the same speed without having to hire someone.

until we hit that number. That's how I'm thinking about it. What do you think about that?

Rick (42:49.232)
I think it's fine. It's just like, it's less about going faster and more about like, not like basically replacing whatever capacity we're taking from JD with new customers, we're replacing it with efficiencies.

Tyler King (43:02.707)
Yeah, and I guess target against myself. The way that results in going faster is if JD could in theory, let's say we could automate away 100 % of his service, he could spend all his time on growth. Even there, I don't think it would like speed it up a lot because we're buying all the leads we have, like we're buying every lead we're capable of buying right now is my understanding. But him having more time for growth would help presumably.

Rick (43:27.07)
Well, is like, think there is like probably if you didn't have time, I think it's easier potentially to automate the Legion than it is to automate the sales process, like what JD is actually doing talking to customers. So we could, yeah, so we could.

Tyler King (43:41.421)
Yeah, okay. I consider that all growth, I guess. What I mean is like when renewals happen with existing customers, that's if you could automate that away and he could spend all his time on the other stuff.

Rick (43:51.814)
Yeah, it seems like an agent should be able to explain. Here's what, I'm saying an AI agent here should be able to explain, hey, this is your plan. Here's the changes for renewal. Here are some options for you. Like that seems like an agent should be able to do that. And then like, like try to service that. And then when the person wants to jump on a call, it gets escalated.

Tyler King (44:00.621)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (44:19.959)
So here's what makes me nervous. it may sound like I'm against this idea. I'm going to end up being for it, but with a caveat. What makes me nervous is we have no advantage in that. The people who like, up health like it because of JD. You don't want to, you don't want to take away the thing that they like about it. I had this at less than a week serum for so long where we didn't invest heavily in a help site because we're like, people love our customer service. We don't want to, we don't want to like not have them contact us because that's the whole reason they buy from us in the first place.

But where we landed, which is obvious in retrospect is like, there are a lot of people who hit a problem and they just want the answer right now. And like, they want to know they can talk to our customer service, but that doesn't mean they want to talk to us for every single thing. So I think we'd want to thread that needle with this, which is let customers say, don't like still JD's still the default, but be like, do you want your answer like immediately? And you don't think you need to talk to JD? Here's the person to talk to. Do you just...

You already have health insurance you're happy with. You just want to press a button and it renews, press this button. But it's not, hey, you have to talk to the AI. That's the default path. And then JD is like an escalation.

Rick (45:28.71)
Yeah, you're just saying like, like bake this so it's like more of a consumer choice on how they prefer to interact with like appellate versus like, this is the way like, how about this business.

Tyler King (45:36.065)
Yeah, and a lot of people will choose the streamlined path, is to use the AI probably. But can it give that advice well?

Rick (45:40.528)
Yep, yeah.

I don't think it's giving advice, right? Like I think that's the key. I think it's outlining options. that's like, part of what I think our differentiator, I think so. Because I'm thinking for consumers, yes, because fundamentally all marketplace decision is it's a limited number of options based on a limited number of inputs that have a limited number of changes every year. And it's all like summarized in a spreadsheet.

Tyler King (45:52.439)
Can it do that well?

Tyler King (46:14.421)
Yeah, so this is a pet peeve of mine with the whole AI discussion in general is like, have you seen everyone's dunking on Apple right now because they're advertising or maybe it's just a rumor that their next big iOS release is going to use AI to predict how long it will take to charge your phone? It's like we've had that technology. I mean, you don't need AI for that. If what you're saying is, well, picking a health insurance policy is looking at five different options and picking one, what does AI have to do with that?

Rick (46:43.238)
That's not, yeah, so that is, we have software to support that today. What I'm talking about is contextualizing those five options based on the individual's situation and educating them on how to pick the best option for them. Not necessarily telling them what the best option is, but educating them on how to make the decision. That's what JD does. It's not like, hey, I recommend this one. It's.

hey, let me help you understand the differences like why you are having these five options, how your inputs affected these five options, what changed this year, you know, based on the data. And then, you know, here's some considerations, which one do you think is best for you based on all that? And then boom, they pick one because they've now got a confident decision because of JD's consultation. So I think that's potentially an AI opportunity.

Tyler King (47:37.901)
Sounds hard to me. Like either, I think it's easy to do poorly and it's hard to do well and I don't think we want to do it poorly.

Rick (47:39.13)
Hard, yeah.

Rick (47:46.522)
Nope. And this is the kind of thing where it's like, feel like I just don't know enough about the technical requirements to make something like that come to fruition. And so I feel like this is a sandbox opportunity to just play around with maybe.

Tyler King (48:03.297)
I think so. played around with something maybe. Let me share what I am not an expert on AI by any means, but I did a little deep dive on some things for lessening serum recently. Here's like an example of when I say it would be easy to do it poorly. Here's what you could do. Chat GPT has a thing called assistance. Are you familiar with this?

Rick (48:22.534)
Assistance?

Tyler King (48:23.513)
It's like when you're using their developer tools, it's not like a consumer facing thing. So when you're using their developer tools, you can make an assistant and assistant basically has like the same instructions every time. So the less annoying serum use case for this, we're using this to let customers create their own forms or get form template ideas with AI. And so we made a set of instructions that are always the same, which is like telling chat GPT all the context they need. we're like,

Hey, we make a CRM product, it has this built-in form tool, there's contacts, companies and pipelines, here are the different field types we have, here's the format I'm gonna pass you the data in, here's what I want you to do with it. And then there's the actual, so that's the same for everyone. And then there's the actual prompt, which will be like, might say something like, okay, but the following is what the customer, how the customer describes their business. The customer types in here, you I'm an insurance agent and I'm interested in going to conferences, whatever. That prompt combined with the instructions get combined together.

and then returns data in the format we want it, which is JSON so that we can put it in our database or whatever. You could imagine making an AI assistant where we type up this, hey, here's the deal. We're gonna give you three insurance policies in this format. JD gives advice like this. Maybe we just give them like five examples of JD's advice and then say, take these insurance policies, take this information we're gonna give you about the customer and try to mimic JD's type of.

I know you don't want to call it advice, it's advice. It's not saying what to buy, but it's saying, okay, coaching. Here's the coaching. Yeah, you could do that. I don't think it would be good. It'd be a lot better than what we could do five years ago.

Rick (49:51.302)
Coaching, we call it coaching. Our term is coaching, yeah.

Rick (50:03.75)
Okay, here's my takeaway from this conversation. think there's a medium term opportunity to think about how we can improve the renewal experience for consumers and make it more efficient for us using AI. I think that is an interesting idea. The second is I think there's a top of funnel opportunity here where there's stuff that JD was doing to build lists, enrich them, kick off outreach that could potentially be an employee and agent, a supervised agent.

I think those are the two areas that I would focus on for now. I don't think they're like, those are probably the lowest hanging fruits.

Tyler King (50:38.637)
Do you remember a while back we talked about the term human in the loop where there was this security company that it's like a ring doorbell, but it has an actual person looking at it. Do you remember that?

Rick (50:49.403)
Yes.

Tyler King (50:50.379)
Yeah. And we had a whole conversation at the time of like, we weren't talking about AI, but we were talking about like a business model. Yeah. Yeah. Mechanical or actually, no, I think it's the opposite of a mechanical Turk. Mechanical Turk is you're interacting with the machine and there's a human behind the machine. Maybe that is what the security company is doing. What I think I would advocate for like up health is the opposite of that. You're interacting with a human and there's a machine behind the human. If our customer is interacting with AI,

Rick (50:56.782)
Mechanical Turk.

Rick (51:15.014)
Mmm.

Tyler King (51:18.333)
A, I think it's going to be very hard to give them a good experience and B, we have no advantage there. That's going to get commodified very quickly. I think our advantage is you are talking to JD, but JD's like all of his tools behind the scene. Like let's say he's writing up a proposal and sending someone can AI write up that proposal, but JD's the one sending it or what tools for, every month he has to do these things, push a button. It preloads everything. And then he goes and reviews it. I don't know specifically, but I don't like the idea of the customer interacting with the AI.

Rick (51:46.822)
So I'm gonna put a third bucket here, which is more like, so there's prospecting, there's renewal experience, and then there's like what I would call like internal support of the full customer journey. And that could be proposal generation, like document generation, script generation, any like email, you know, that kind of stuff.

Tyler King (52:14.689)
Yeah, I wonder if there's, think every month JD has to download information and check like, have any of the customers not made their insurance payment and are in danger of, like, can AI review that for him so he doesn't have to, that type of thing.

Rick (52:24.762)
Yes, yep, yep, that makes a lot of sense. Cool, that was helpful, thank you.

Tyler King (52:32.395)
Yeah, I think we should go deeper. mean, we don't have time right now, but like, what are these? The best thing to do is just pick something and try it, right? Maybe you'll do that outside of this podcast, but if you want to make that a topic for next time, we can.

Rick (52:42.153)
Mm-hmm.

Rick (52:46.704)
I'm gonna put an AI update on the topic for next time. Just so I'll share with you if any progress has been made, there's likely gonna be none, but at least I've got some things to sort, like focusing my, I've been worrying about this more than like being proactive about it because I just didn't have enough substance.

Tyler King (53:00.748)
Yeah.

Let me also though share, I know we need to call it in a second. We are taking advantage of AI. said in the, in our last episode, I'm using AI quite a bit for coding. We're going to like, we just had our partner meeting, up health partner meeting. the audience doesn't know the specifics of this, but like we planned the next round of product stuff without AI. There's no way I'd be building that right now. Like it's too ambitious. we are like up health is really leveraging this like.

Rick (53:24.794)
Mm-hmm.

Tyler King (53:30.699)
not a tech company, but with just enough tech to have this kind of proprietary experience that no one else is offering in a way that would not have been possible without AI. So I wouldn't beat yourself up and feel guilty about like leg up health, not using AI.

Rick (53:43.024)
That's a good point. I just added a fourth bucket, which is coding slash product development.

which is what we're employing it for right now. And then writing, like content production. I'm using it for that too. So anyway, I just want to be intentional about this and make sure that if we hire someone, like we hire someone who's able to grok this, versus like, what's happening around me? I don't understand. It's going to affect how we think about growing the business. Anything else you want to chat about? All right. Well, if you'd like to review past topics and show notes, visit startuptolast.com.

Tyler King (54:13.836)
No, I think I'm good.

Rick (54:18.694)
See you next week.

Tyler King (54:20.408)
See ya.