Launching mobile apps, sales cadence, and summer work-life.
Bootstrapped Web. We're back after a break. I'm back in The States, and, yeah, just trying to get back to normal here. Here. Jordan, how's it going, buddy?
Jordan Gal:Good. Good. You went very far away. It's good to have you back.
Brian Casel:Yes. Yeah. We my family and I, we were, really, away for two full weeks. We spent a week in The Philippines in Cebu, hung out with my wife's side of the family over there for a week. And then then we jumped over to another island in The Philippines called Barakay, which was a really incredible beach destination in The Philippines.
Brian Casel:Really one of the best beaches I've I've ever hung out on.
Jordan Gal:Saw some pics of that on Twitter. Right?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. I shared more on Facebook.
Jordan Gal:At least one.
Brian Casel:With the family and stuff. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Not you're not exclusively on threads yet?
Brian Casel:I am on threads, but but yeah. Same. That's that's a whole interesting thing. Yeah. But then and then after that, we jumped over to Cambodia.
Brian Casel:We saw Angkor Wat, which was a pretty incredible sight and, like, ancient ruins, ancient temples, and things like that. We got we got stuck in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam for unexpected one nighter there, so that was an adventure. And, yeah, dragged the kids the whole way. But, really, overall, it was it was a fantastic trip, really one of the best vacations that that we've done. And it was, like, multiple segments.
Brian Casel:Right? It was, like, family in Cebu, then, like, a beach thing, then then sightseeing, a ton of flights. But, I mean, the kids were were troopers, and and it it would you know, I know we're gonna talk about this, but, like, I I did work actually quite a bit throughout the whole trip. But we still had a great vacation too. I still had a lot of relaxation, a lot of adventure, a lot of lot of family time.
Brian Casel:But it was I won't say it was, like, norm like, certainly not the the same number of hours that I would normally work here at home, but definitely every day. Like, I got some work in every day that I was away. Like, at least one or two hours. You just saw that stuff. Different different hours of the day, different locations.
Brian Casel:And and, you know, it was a massive time difference with with a lot of jet lag, that that also made for a lot of sleepless nights, which which meant like, oh, three in the morning, can't sleep. What else am I gonna do? I might as well open the laptop. So there's a lot of that too.
Jordan Gal:Interesting. We are, we're about to start our travel. We we go we go to the Eastern Long Island tomorrow
Brian Casel:for a week,
Jordan Gal:and we come home for a week, and then we go to Michigan for two weeks. So similar kind of, like, food segments.
Brian Casel:I miss Eastern Long Island. You know, growing up in Long Island, I I used to go out there, you know, with friends and stuff when I was younger. And and now it's just like I don't know how you guys booked it, but it's, like, impossible to book anything out there now that unless you do it, like, way in advance.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. My my younger brother and his wife get a house out there every summer.
Brian Casel:Oh, nice.
Jordan Gal:So so we just kinda hop into their life for a week. Yeah. Right? So the whole family gets together, my parents, the whole deal. So it's like a it's like an annual family get together.
Brian Casel:That's great.
Jordan Gal:The house is big enough for everyone to just, like, jump into the house and and stay there for a week. So all the cousins get together.
Brian Casel:Beautiful.
Jordan Gal:And then Michigan is a bit more of, like, tourism, hangout, you know, less family. So I have been wrestling this week with, like, these swings of motivation. I don't know how anyone else, like, listening. It's July. It's right in the middle.
Jordan Gal:And I go back and forth between, I don't wanna do anything. It's summertime. I wanna go take a walk all the way to, you know, full days, super exciting, big sales call pressure, and and then back into the other swing. So I'm like a little I feel a little yo yoed out.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. Do you do you feel like the motivation on the business still, or is it like, yeah. Does some does summertime do you do you find that, like, summertime like this, like, actually because I know that you and I are both super motivated about our businesses always. Right?
Brian Casel:And I I know that historically, I and this was true even during the trip just now. Like, I'm just constantly motivated to keep pushing things forward in the business, and it I feel uncomfortable when I have a full day go by that I didn't do anything on the business. Mhmm. But does the summer, like, ease that up for you at all? Like, do you feel more comfortable not working?
Jordan Gal:I I want to feel like that. But when I think about the context of where the company is, the summer is actually incredibly important. Because when we get toward q four, our our customers are gonna check out. Right. Right.
Jordan Gal:They they basically like, they'll have come yeah. They'll have conversations. But especially now with the focus on much larger merchants, they're just gonna be much more risk averse in q four. So it's really like we gotta get deals done between now and, like, September, October at the latest. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And then it and then it turns into just conversations and then making sure that we get into the budgeting conversations that happened in February.
Brian Casel:Right. Right.
Jordan Gal:So as much as I wanna check out a little bit and ease up, it doesn't make sense to.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:So maybe that's part of the yo yo of my natural tendency. You know, the kids are home. They're not at school every day, so the schedules are different. I I I'm pulled toward hangout time, family, less intense on work. But mentally, I'm the analysis is, oh, no.
Jordan Gal:That that that's not the case at all. Now is the actual time to get things done, get people on the calendar. Our sales cycle is starting to look like it's sixty ish days. Mhmm. And so I just work backwards.
Jordan Gal:And if it's July right now, we we're starting to get pretty close to when customers are gonna say, alright. This is cool, but we'll we'll have this conversation in q one.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And and especially now that I'm home, and I'm and I'm gonna be home for a while. Like, I have no other major trips planned until until the fall.
Brian Casel:And and so, like, now is the time to push. And and July, especially July into August, I really I keep saying this, but I see this as a turning point because we're gonna really, like, finish shipping the the roadmap for Clarity Flow. And we're always gonna have more things to build after. But the list of key big tent pole features are they've already started to drop. I mean, the first one or or not the first one, but one of them, a big one, mobile apps for for iPhone and and Android are out now.
Brian Casel:They they just launched this week. Custom domains had launched actually while I was away. We're also about to launch community spaces. We've got programs, and then following on to that, we've got payments coming. So like big whole string of shipping features.
Brian Casel:I wanted to before we get into all that stuff, I
Jordan Gal:wanna ask about the mobile apps.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. One, I don't know, I guess sort of like realization, like deep thought sort of idea while I was away about the nature of our work. You know, this is like an ongoing conversation that we have, and I know that our industry has about like calm, work work lifestyle businesses, work life balance. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And, you know, I think that there is I'm mostly just speaking for myself here, obviously. But, like Okay. There's this tendency to to feel, like, guilty about going on vacation and still breaking open the the laptop and getting those hours in and doing the time shifting between hanging out with my kids and then opening the laptop and doing some work. But you know and I and I do go through periods where I really do actually, one of my goals is to fully disconnect. But in this case, it was like I I again, I still had a lot of time, like, downtime, can't sleep in the middle of the nighttime, I'm on a flight time, or like, these are windows where I could do some work.
Brian Casel:But also, like, just the nature of work itself is it's not like like, it's hard mentally, of course, and it takes a lot of creative energy, but it's not physically demanding work. It's still pretty relaxed.
Jordan Gal:And you're sitting in a nice, safe environment on the internet. Yes. Relatively speaking.
Brian Casel:And I guess in my case, right now it's not very phone call driven. That's going to change now that I'm home doing a lot more demo calls and things like But for the most part, my work is working on the product, which means I'm in deep work state, in code, in design. I'm just on the laptop working quietly with my headphones on. And if I'm communicating with my team, it's mostly texting or async messaging using Clarity Flow. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:But, like, there were there were times during this trip where I was literally on a recliner chair on in in, like, a resort area near near this beautiful beach with my laptop Yeah. Like, getting getting work done. And it was, like
Jordan Gal:the best person at work.
Brian Casel:It was it was fucking awesome. Like, you know, like, it it felt
Jordan Gal:It's lucky
Brian Casel:lucky thing. Literally felt like I was relaxing, and I was being productive at the same time. I know that probably sounds ridiculous to to a lot of people listening, but, like, but to me, was like, man, I feel pretty lucky right now because I love what I'm working on right now. I love the the craft of making software.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:I'm sitting on a beautiful beach. The rest of the day, I'm hanging out with my kids. Like, it doesn't it doesn't really get better than this. And it's like and it's like, man, we are lucky to have this type of work. You know?
Brian Casel:Because, like, even you know, because there are just so many people who the nature of their professional career is physically demanding. Like, you're going into an office, you're commuting, or you're on sales calls nonstop Yeah. Or your your team or team calls nonstop,
Jordan Gal:and and it's like Or carrying things or Yeah.
Brian Casel:Or or physically, like, the whole way.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I it was just sort of a
Jordan Gal:It's it's
Brian Casel:good to have You know?
Jordan Gal:The the the perspective shift of going away and and exploring these thoughts that you don't normally go into when you're in your regular routine. Now I I will say, I I as you started talking, way you described the guilt. Right? You you said there's something in our community, and it makes me feel guilty for working while I'm on
Brian Casel:vacation. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:So you know it is a a product of your environment, your peer group, your people the people and things you compare yourself to because in my world, it is the exact opposite. So in well, the things around me tells me that I should feel guilty if I'm not working while I'm away. And, you know, I I saw someone that I respect and is very experienced and smart in the venture world say there's unfortunately, there's a direct correlation between the number of days your CEO takes off per year and the success of right? And so, like, that is that that's the narrative out there. And so I I always feel guilty for not working enough, and I have a relatively healthy balance on like, I I take time off.
Jordan Gal:I I ran an errand this morning at 09:30. I'm not feeling guilty about that. I am feeling lucky that I get to make my own schedule.
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:But but there's a lot of pressure. So you're feeling it in one direction. I'm feeling another. It it is it is an external stimulus that makes you feel a certain way, and it is really challenging to figure out your own path and what it means for you.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. And and I I mean, there's also a side of my my business and work life right now that is frankly not ideal. And I hope it it improves over the next year or or so. And that, like, I am still very much the bottleneck in my biz and I have a small team, and and they do amazing work, especially while I was traveling.
Brian Casel:We we still managed to ship, like, two major features. But this is not like it was with audience ops for me right now. Like, if I take a day off or a week off, like, a lot of stuff just stalls. Mhmm. And, like, literally, like, progress on my the features that we're building.
Brian Casel:Like, the my inbox is crazy every single morning with questions from my team, So so that's actually the a good time. The pressure that I feel literally on a every morning basis is, like, I have a full inbox of four four or five different team members each have questions for me. I need to unblock them. And and if I don't, they're either gonna slow down or they can't complete their task. Right.
Brian Casel:And and that's it's just on me to to keep the keep keep the the pipes flowing, you know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. It feels like you are
Brian Casel:It's it's weird. Like, I I feel like that was a strength of mine in my previous businesses in audience ops. I literally touched to that business, like, two hours a month, and it ran without Right.
Jordan Gal:Different different thing entirely.
Brian Casel:This is like, I'm way in it, and it's and I don't see a way out anytime soon. I mean, I love working in on this business, so I but, like, I I I do hope that, like
Jordan Gal:Right. It's not forever. Like, that can't
Brian Casel:Yeah. The the push on this current road map, I I feel like six to twelve months from now should look very, very different Mhmm. With things calmer, probably different team structure, and I am a little bit more, relaxed. But right now, it's like Yeah. Because it's it's also like a financial thing.
Brian Casel:It's like I'm paying my team to to be productive. And and and I and and, like, that expense depends on me working with them to keep the the productivity going.
Jordan Gal:You know? It's it's very interesting, the the difference is, because my pressure feels like it's maybe like a almost like a heavier weight that goes slower. It's a more slow drive down type of a pressure because it's like, okay. You have two to three years of runway. I don't do anything on the product and engineering side.
Jordan Gal:And relatively speaking, in all the work that gets done in the company, I'm a fraction or small fraction of the work that gets done, But the financial pressure to make sure things maintain a certain way, we, you know, don't need to do layoffs or just all that pressure. It's like a longer time frame. So it's not like, hey, this morning, you gotta you gotta sprint right now. But it's like this grinding thing that's like you have to be patient, but it takes a long time and there's pressure. So that's I have tried over the last six months or so to get into a healthy place where I'm making my own analysis of what we need to do and not letting the external pressure because there's there's no right way to do this.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So some people are going toward how do we just go all out and just get the growth we need so we can raise more money. Other people going to a profitability. It's like impossible. You can't just follow someone else's lead on this.
Jordan Gal:We we have to make it do it in a way that works for us. And so figuring that out has been a big challenge. The the patience required is feels a bit excruciating.
Brian Casel:The patience is unbelievable.
Jordan Gal:Mean, it's like It's it's mhmm. It's like the hard the hardest part to just maintain you you're gonna go up and down. You're gonna have the pessimistic, optimistic roller coaster, but you gotta get back up to the optimism and have that be the default and have that be be the 80 and and the pessimism be the 20, not the other way around.
Brian Casel:Man, it is I mean, you you know just as well as I. That is so hard. It it doesn't get easier. We we've done this a while. It that doesn't get it probably gets harder.
Jordan Gal:No. It it like nuggets.
Brian Casel:Keeping a level head head, like Yeah. Through the the daily the daily gut punches that you get when when a churn comes comes in or when Yes. Like, when, you know, when the when you get one comment from a customer, but then you get a a win. You know? And it's just, like, it's sort of insane to deal with.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And it and, you know, it's also and because I know that you've been going through this shift in strategy to to the sales driven, you know, mid market approach. I've had this long road map, the the shift to clarity flow coaches. Like, that's not something that you can just sort of experiment with one in in one month and then call that experiment over within four weeks. Like, this has been a year in the making, and and I'm deep into it.
Brian Casel:I I can't just shift strategies on a dime here. So Mhmm. It's like, it's still a rocky road while while this process is going on. The signs still point to, like, I'm making the right strategic decisions here, but, like, strategic decisions are one thing. It still takes a year to execute this stuff.
Brian Casel:You know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And you need feedback. You need you need these little nuggets that feed the optimism along the way. Like, the the the stuff on the pessimistic side just happens all the time. Someone leaves to go get a different job.
Jordan Gal:A customer churns. Right this morning, I did that stupid thing where I woke up and grabbed my phone first thing instead of my Kindle. And first email I read is, you know, we're trying to, like, get into this organization that, like, would help us go to market. And we got the client. It's like, no.
Jordan Gal:You know, maybe in six months from now. Those things are just everywhere. So the positive nuggets is I felt just as much relief from the self imposed pressure when we closed like the last big deal. We we closed another big one. Awesome.
Jordan Gal:I felt just as good about the fact that the team got motivated by it and saw it as I as I did or the revenue or anything else. Yeah. Because they needed the nugget of optimism too. They needed like, oh, we are on the right track. This shift actually does make sense.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's hard to even think about what everyone else's concerns. That's like that's like too much. Just trying to maintain my own.
Jordan Gal:So let's let's go back around. You are in a different game all of a sudden with with a have you ever done a native app before?
Brian Casel:No. Never. This was the first time. Total learning experience. Yeah.
Brian Casel:So, like, as of now, Clarity Flow like, you could search Clarity Flow on the Apple and Google Play app stores. Our app is there. Overall,
Jordan Gal:was it easier or harder than you expected?
Brian Casel:Before I even pulled the trigger on, yes, we're going to do a mobile app, I definitely built it up in my mind like, oh, that's a huge investment, time, money, complexity. That's why I kept pushing it off for over two years. Yeah, there you go.
Jordan Gal:I'm hold hold on my phone in the app. Sorry. Yeah. You found it.
Brian Casel:There you go. And and so I pushed it off for a long time because I built it up to be as big of a project. And then once I pulled the trigger and I scoped it out with my development team and and I hired a a mobile developer to work full time on this, it ended up being like start to finish from the time I pulled the trigger to today. And like, they entered the app stores yesterday. So I think it's about ten weeks, maybe nine or ten weeks total.
Brian Casel:So that was one new full time mobile developer on that for about ten weeks, and now he's gonna ramp down to just sort of a maintenance level hours. Plus one of my Rails devs worked on the APIs for mobile. So there's like basically like two of them, plus myself working on the design and and working with them on on on the whole thing. And it was a basically two and a half month project. I can get into some of the weeds on how I scoped it out to make sure that we didn't go overboard on the scope because it's easy to do that.
Brian Casel:But I focused on basically the two key because the thing is, Clarity Flow worked basically fine in the mobile web browser before this. It still does. It's been mobile responsive since day one. Okay. So so, you know, it took me a while because we constantly got requests for a native mobile app, and those requests started to amplify even more now that we're focused on coaches and clients.
Brian Casel:So that's why I did pull the trigger. And I and I really wanted to understand, like, do customers truly want what's the underlying need for a native mobile app? Like, when they could just use use it on mobile anyway on the web browser. The key things are number one, the recorder, obviously, like, recording a message on the mobile web browser definitely was slower, like, slower to finish and upload. You can run into issues.
Brian Casel:And and also, like, we're browser based, so we couldn't use all the same browser tech that we're able to do on desktop on mobile. So, like,
Jordan Gal:just Yep.
Brian Casel:Like, the clunkiness and the slowness of recording on mobile kinda sucked on the browser. Number two, related to recording is is audio only, like, microphone only recordings was even harder to do in the mobile browser. Like, you had to record a voice memo and then upload it. It was sort of a mess.
Jordan Gal:Okay. So and that's because you just don't have access to the device in in the same way?
Brian Casel:It's a little bit weird, but, like, when you're on a mobile device, it it's sort of easy to record a camera message, but it's not super easy to just record a microphone only message when you're in a when you're in a browser environment.
Jordan Gal:Okay.
Brian Casel:By going to the so that was, like, goal or objective number one was, like, if if we're gonna build a mobile app, we have to build a custom amazing, like, way improved recording experience. And that that was what we did. So, like so now, like, you can record and we upload in the background while you're recording. So it's much faster to and we're leveraging your your on device camera and recording capabilities. And we give you a a voice recorder too.
Brian Casel:So you can do voice only messages all built into the mobile app. It really works amazingly well. You could edit your recordings all there in the app, text as well. So that was piece number one was much like, has to be a way better recording experience. Like and and we did that.
Brian Casel:And the other thing was mobile push notifications. That's that's the other thing that our new app delivers. Before this, the only notifications that we were sending were were email notifications. And and in our app, we give you, like, you know, a little pull down men menu of of events. But now with the app, you can get SMS or no.
Brian Casel:You can get push notifications to to your mobile device. Like, when someone has sent a reply, when someone has watched your your message, like, that goes to mobile push, you can control those settings. So those are like the two areas. Like, those are the only two things we want to build. It's like focus a lot on the recorder, add in push notifications.
Brian Casel:Everything else in the app when you're in it, it looks and feels like like our web app because we are serving our web app in in web views. So, like Okay. And we have a lot of other features, like, in in our app. We've got your your message templates library. We've got automation workflows, onboarding clients.
Brian Casel:Like, all that stuff is functionality in our app that is fully available and usable on mobile just as it it has always been. But we didn't have to build anything special for the mobile app in order for those features to to work in you have access to all of our features in the mobile app, except most of them, you're just using our our web app inside our mobile app. When you click but when you click the button to start a new message, that's when the new mobile experience takes over, and now you're seeing, like, our our better recording.
Jordan Gal:And when one of your customers signs up, they're also asking their coaching clients to download the app? Yes. That that's
Brian Casel:what will be the Two
Jordan Gal:points if you wanted.
Brian Casel:So our customers and their clients can both use the the same app and it gets them in. One interesting
Jordan Gal:What do you call those? What's your nomenclature? Is it like user customer? Like, we have merchant shopper.
Brian Casel:Technically, we call them respondent users, but more and more I just call them clients or guests.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Yeah.
Brian Casel:And and that and the the diff the other type of user would be team members. Right? So if you're if you're a company or if you have multiple coaches on your team, you invite them as team members, and you actually pay for them in in our plans. But the clients and the guests, which are the same thing, those are free unlimited, like yeah. That's been a really difficult part of of this business for sure.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. The language.
Brian Casel:The an interesting thing about the mobile apps okay. So we our apps are free in both app stores. They're they're gonna be free forever. Like, free like, we're not making money in the app store. Yep.
Brian Casel:This is just about checking a big feature box for us. We are not sharing any revenue with Apple or Google.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And the way that we do that is we disable and hide all references to signing up, to paying, to upgrading, to managing your billing. All that stuff, we had to hide or or just say, like, this view is not available in the mobile app.
Jordan Gal:Go go to
Brian Casel:desktop if if you want.
Jordan Gal:You don't like the idea of sharing 30% of your revenue?
Brian Casel:Not into it. You know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. The fact that it's actually 30% is so wild. It's ridiculous. Yeah. It's so wild.
Jordan Gal:I I don't see I don't know how they've kept up with that.
Brian Casel:And I and so and, like, I'm again, like, I'm new to this whole routine, so I I wanted to look at other apps to see how they handle it. Like, the one that I kept looking at is HelpScout, you know, because, like, we're basically just a SaaS app, and we wanna offer a mobile app client to our SaaS app users. Right? So, like, HelpScout, I pay for HelpScout through their SaaS, and then I also have the Help Scout mobile app. I, you know, I pay for Notion, and I have the Notion mobile app.
Brian Casel:I don't pay for those through Apple's App Store. So, you know, we we did a lot of, like, observing of what these other companies do, and and we can see, like, okay. They're just not showing me anything about signing up or upgrading when I'm in the mobile app. It's just a client. You know?
Brian Casel:That was that was interesting. It took a little bit of work to to work that out. On the approval process, so this happened over the past week. We submitted it to Apple and Google. We submitted on Monday of this week, so like five days ago, and we got approved yesterday.
Jordan Gal:Okay. So no major bottleneck there.
Brian Casel:Apple was the one Google approved us on the first try. It it just took, like, four or five days to get it approved. Apple did reject us the first time, and the rejection was because we are a messaging or communications app. They look at us almost like a social networking app, and we have user generated content. And that brings a bunch of extra precautions that Apple wants us to go through.
Brian Casel:And so we actually had to build some so this was again one of those cases where like, okay, they give us the rejection and I get super nervous because sort of the way that they worded the rejection seemed like they wanted us to build a whole lot of new systems in our app. So they they you know, user generated content. So they're worried about objectionable content.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Spam. And so
Brian Casel:Spam, but also the the ability for users to block other users, the ability for users to hide or report inappropriate content. Like, they didn't see any of those features in our app because, frankly, we didn't have them. Because we didn't we've never we've never had that problem. We've never had users like, we don't we don't do any, like, moderation of stuff. Because, frankly, the way that our users use our app is, like, private messaging between Among those clients and stuff.
Brian Casel:That got me nervous at first when when it came in. I was like, oh, shit. They they want us to build a whole moderation system and reporting system.
Jordan Gal:Prepared for, like, a public version of of an app.
Brian Casel:Yeah. We managed to resolve that within about two business days of of work. And the way that we got around it was so they they wanted us to make sure that every user is agreeing to our privacy privacy terms and the fact that we will remove, you know, objectionable content within twenty four So we do have users go through a checkbox, agree to our terms on their way into the mobile app for the first time. Like, we had to we had to, like, tweak the the flow that a user sees. So so you gotta check this box.
Brian Casel:Okay. We that's that was fine. And then the other thing was I added a link on every message to to report this content. Okay. And all that does is it launches our HelpScout contact form.
Jordan Gal:Right. But at least there's an avenue for it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. There's an avenue, and we and we have to show the user, like, we will take action on this within twenty four hours. And that that was the way around, and that that was accepted. Like, they they saw those updates, and they were like, that's good enough. And I I was sort of prepared for, like, okay, this might not be good enough for them, but let's just see if if we can, like, MVP this thing.
Brian Casel:Just link to our contact form, report bad content, and maybe that'll be enough. And and sure it was. It it it was. You know? So
Jordan Gal:there you So far so good. But your your relationship with Apple and Android has officially begun.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Okay.
Brian Casel:Yep. Cool. And, I mean, as I record this, they're they're in the App Store, but we haven't announced it publicly. We will on Monday. It'll be out by the time this comes out.
Brian Casel:So it'll be really interesting to obviously, everything is like we we've done a ton of testing on this stuff, but nothing's really tested until you put it the hands of of customers. That'll be really interesting next week.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Cool. Alright. Well, you gotta report back on adoption if that is what you expected and then market marketing worthiness. Right?
Jordan Gal:Is it is it moving the needle when you email people back and say, hey. We have it now.
Brian Casel:And so Yeah. So I I worked on yesterday and today, I worked on a whole, like, promo video. I recorded, like, a one minute video of the thing, and and I put some extra work into that. I I think it came out pretty good. And next week, I'll be blasting out the emails, social posts.
Brian Casel:We're gonna put it into our, like, new account onboarding flows. Like, really make it a centerpiece of, like, this is a because it we get the question all the time, like, oh, you guys don't have a mobile app? Like, it's Mhmm. In in in our space, in our competitors, like, it's a it's table stakes, and we're one of the only ones that doesn't have a mobile app. So now it's and we've got it linked on our footer on the site now.
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:Now you need to make sure everyone else that's right. Yep. Okay. Cool. Life at Rally is dominated by this shift in ideal customer profile and sales process.
Jordan Gal:So up and down the whole team from SDR reaching out to people all the way to engineering and QA, it is dominated by this shift. So it means something a little bit different for everyone. Right now, the engineering and the product teams are doing a lot of work to unblock newly signed customers and get them launched. So we recently launched that big contract that I talked about. So we went through the sales process, signed the contract, and then worked to get them live.
Jordan Gal:And that was obviously very kind of high stakes and high stress because we wanna impress. We want things to go well. So that was a lot of pressure and felt great to launch. Well, I think it was earlier this week. And it was about a week ago because now this is what I mean by the feedback.
Jordan Gal:Everyone in the company now sees the daily GMV number. Like, it basically doubled overnight from one big merchant.
Brian Casel:Nice. What's the feedback on the product? Are you getting, like it's it's working pretty smooth for them?
Jordan Gal:The product is working smoothly, and what I'm paying a lot of attention to is a lot of the feedback on how it is to work with the team because that feels like it's going to be an important element of our success overall. Your your
Brian Casel:team working with their team?
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. And how that's going. And we're we're being really attentive right now, myself and Rock and Jess, at just watching and trying to learn. Because right now we're in the midst of onboarding.
Jordan Gal:But if you took the number of merchants that were onboarding and you increased it, let's just say you doubled it. It would feel out of control. And that's because we don't have all the systems in place to handle this level of service when we onboard. Right, the whole shift impacts everyone. We're trying to figure out where everyone should live.
Jordan Gal:Now it's becoming obvious that the next gap, the next piece of the puzzle is an enterprise account executive, basically a professional salesperson. I have started to do the first call on sales. I'm playing that role right now. I'm really enjoying it. It's a lot of fun and I've gotten better at the first call.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. So the initial call with the discovery and showing the product and initial, like, conversation.
Brian Casel:Can you can can you recap? Like, how how are those leads, like, getting teed up for you? Where where does the lead come from? Like, they they were, like, prospected, and they've already responded, and now they're ready for a call. Right?
Brian Casel:Like and then they come to you?
Jordan Gal:Yes. So typical would be our SDR sends an email and a LinkedIn message to a merchant, and they respond with some interest. And he shows them a little bit more, like, basically, here's your existing checkout. Here's what your checkout would look like using Rally, and here are some key features. Maybe they come back
Brian Casel:And that SDR is doing it all over email right now?
Jordan Gal:It's email, it's phone, and it's LinkedIn. It is multi touch, multi Okay.
Brian Casel:So the SDR is doing a a bit of a first call before they get to you?
Jordan Gal:It it can be a bit of it can be a call. It can be text messages. It's it's like what however this person likes to communicate, you you move around to get to that right spot. So you might email someone and then connect with them on LinkedIn. And turns out they don't reply to email, but they will reply to your LinkedIn message, and that's the right channel.
Jordan Gal:And so we
Brian Casel:understand those people, but I know that they exist.
Jordan Gal:You know, I saw a I saw a tweet today basically hating on this process. Yeah. Like, hey. I wanted to use your software. Cool.
Jordan Gal:Let's get on a call. I just wanna know how much it is. Okay. Let's do a call at the end of the first call is okay. Now can
Brian Casel:You can hate on it all you want, but this is how it's going.
Jordan Gal:Hate on it all you want. Right. Now the right. The reason it exists is not just because the software company wants to charge more money. It's also it's probably more than anything, That's just the way people buy.
Jordan Gal:Yep. This is how people buy. It is multistep. It is not their money. Their job and reputation is at stake.
Jordan Gal:They might have made a recommendation last quarter that didn't work out. Like, they are careful with this. This is their livelihood. It's not their business. It's their livelihood.
Brian Casel:Right. So that process It's real it's really been interesting to see the shift in Clarity Flow because I'm seeing a lot of that too where it's like definitely, I wouldn't say every customer, but, like, there's a definitely a significant segment of our users who who hit our marketing side who just wanna call or they wanna send multiple long emails. Like and they're serious. Like like, they're they're sussing out, like Mhmm. All the features and exactly how they're gonna implement it.
Brian Casel:And, I get this this wording a lot where they'll be like, I have a bunch of questions before I dive deeper into this. Yes. Because I could see Qualification. From the outset, like, this is gonna be a big investment for me, in terms of, like, time and taking over running my a key part of my business. Like, and that was by design for me, like, to move to Clarity Flow.
Brian Casel:Like, that's a big difference from from what it was with Zip Message. It was like, people just wanted, like, try this messaging app and then try it or love it or leave it. And Clarity Flow, like, there, it's a much slower thing. And I'm Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Bigger decision. Yeah. Yeah. And it's more critical to the business, the the whole deal. So we we are experiencing the same thing.
Jordan Gal:So that work that, yes, I am actually interested in a better checkout experience, but can you work with this and can I process with Adyen and will you integrate with this? And maybe I've had a bad experience with your competitor. Can you avoid x, y, and z? Can you work with gift cards? Can you do buy online, pick up in store?
Jordan Gal:Right? So they're like, that first level of qualification happens at the SDR level. Mhmm. And then it gets scheduled because things are looking good and they wanna know more. And then there's, like, the big first call on, alright.
Jordan Gal:Let's introduce our side of the team. It's usually myself and two other people. So it's three people from our side and one or two people from the merchant side.
Brian Casel:Where when does price pricing come into play? Like, is the SDR doing any qualification on, like, okay. If if you're gonna get into this, we it's gonna start at x thousand.
Jordan Gal:Nope. No. Nope. Nope. So there's They
Brian Casel:they just get a feel like, they they just have a feel like, alright. They're they're big enough. They're serious enough that, like, it's they're not gonna run away once they hear a dollar sign.
Jordan Gal:Yes. That's right. So so we have information on who we're reaching out to. Right? There are, like, public estimates.
Jordan Gal:And let's I mean, they're rarely accurate, but they're gen like, directionally accurate. So if if if we have info from our databases that the merchant makes $40,000,000 a year, it might be 20, it might be 60. It's not 300, and it's not 0. So it's like, okay, it's in the right ballpark. So price doesn't come up until usually like the third conversation.
Jordan Gal:So it's the first conversation is, does this make any sense? We're gonna talk for thirty minutes, and then I'm gonna understand whether or not I should bring this up to the stakeholders and the people involved.
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:Then the second call is, this sounds great, but is this technically feasible with how we do things? And that's when Rock jumps on the call and their technical people jump on the call, and then it is a technical sales discovery call. And then after that, you get the business track going. Like, the ideal path is actually for both tracks to happen at the same time so that on the technical call, if everything sounds good, we try to move forward on the technical front. We say, let's set up a Slack channel.
Jordan Gal:Let's get you the Magento extension so you can install it on your testing environment store and start answering these questions for real instead of just over over a call. And the deeper that can go, the better, more confident we are in the business front. Yeah. Sometimes
Brian Casel:It's almost like you you're you're you're working in their test store and everything even during the sales process. It's like you're you're even starting the onboarding process.
Jordan Gal:Yes. You're you're moving forward. That's right. You're moving forward, and you're you're gaining confidence, and you're exposing them to how our company works, and we have an advantage in that. We are we're good at that.
Jordan Gal:So that's one of our strengths. We want we wanna expose that as much as possible because people are generally used to working with vendors that they don't like and they find annoying and maybe they're out for themselves. It's just you know? That just happened.
Brian Casel:Dude, I'm getting, like, I'm getting, like, pumped just, like, hearing you talk about this because, like, this is right around the corner. Diff totally different types of sales and and industry, but, like, I'm getting into sales demos now, and I have them inbound coming, but I but I have not figured out the the sequence and the optimal way to, you know, sell and onboard yet. It's it's still been, like, winging it. And and, like, it it's just exciting to hear you dial it in because I could I could see ways where I could, like I know that our listeners probably feel the same way. Like, there are nuggets in everything that you're that you're talking about here that I know I'm gonna be applying in my sales process.
Jordan Gal:And and we did
Brian Casel:coming up here.
Jordan Gal:I I looked back. We went through the sales process and lost the deal on an amazing merchant, which we would have killed for. And looking back, I am so mad that we didn't know then what we know now because it's so much better now and it's not surprising at all that we lost the deal because we didn't do we didn't do the stuff the right way. So we we've hired a a go to market, like, consultant, and she has she has been the x factor in all of this so that we're not learning all of it by a million mistakes cause we don't have the time for that. We're learning it because of her experience.
Jordan Gal:That that is the truth. So all of these individual steps, all these different individual pieces on what to expect and what happens when, and then the dynamic nature of the process. So this week we had an amazing call, phenomenal prospects, can be an even bigger deal than our biggest so far. But when we got to that technical discovery call, they put a halt on the technical track and said, No, no, no, no, no. No Slack channel, no install, no beta.
Jordan Gal:We talk business first. Right? So it's it's a slightly less ideal version of the process, but completely understandable. Right? I basically don't want my team to go spend time on this and get excited about this if you're gonna come at me with a price that we don't wanna deal with.
Jordan Gal:So I need a ballpark from you. I understand you can't give me a perfect proposal because you don't yet know all of the work that you need to do to accommodate our situation technically and the other additional stuff that we will ask you to do that will will make sense for us to pay above and beyond because we need a specific integration. Like, you you literally cannot give me the right price, but I need a ballpark before we go any further on that track. Yep. Right?
Jordan Gal:And that's almost like an experienced buyer maybe with some scar tissue on on previous, experiences.
Brian Casel:Interesting.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yep. And and then it's proposal and order form.
Brian Casel:And then it's like you you've got like playbooks for for each. Right? Like, it's it's how, you know Yes.
Jordan Gal:Like, this is
Brian Casel:I I remember we had we had similar things in in audience ops, like, some like, just handling different we had a very standard process overall, but, like, there were probably two or three different, like, avatars of, like, types of clients and the way that they buy, and we handled them a little bit differently each time. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So now what we're doing is we are shifting all the way to the ground level. Right? So, like, today before this podcast, I did a call on on HubSpot, on the way our pipeline is set up because our HubSpot pipeline is set up for what made sense two months ago, which was we have these 30 to 40 opportunities. How do we make sure we know where each one stands?
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And now it's a fraction of that, but they're much bigger and go through a different process. So we have to change that and the data that goes along with each one. And and now it feels like we're ready to hire a professional seller to come in to the to the process.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yep.
Jordan Gal:So it's like these like you said on your strategy shift, it is not a few weeks. It is months and months and months, but it it's gotta be done.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah, man. I mean, it's it's a long game. You know? It really is exciting to hear hear these pieces come come together, though.
Brian Casel:I thought I'd give an update on something I talked about probably a month or two ago. We on the marketing side, we've started to overhaul how we do content, content marketing, SEO driven and s there's a much bigger open question about what is SEO in in the AI world. Is it you know, is is Google search even going to be a factor in the future? That that's a legitimate question. But I still think that, like, we we still Google search is still our top channel for us, and we Okay.
Brian Casel:Are gonna continue pushing on that. We still get leads clearly searching for Google and finding us. So we're gonna keep doing that. And but I I talked about a few weeks ago, I feel like it's a little ridiculous to just use the old way of doing things, which is, like, hire writers, 100% human writers to write articles of several thousand words each. Yep.
Brian Casel:We're still producing the same output, but we we're now over a month into this, and we're we're on the ChatGPT train on this.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Okay. Are you actually using ChatGPT for the writing itself?
Brian Casel:A lot of it. Yeah. We we have published as of today, I think we published seven new articles just in the month of June, which is way more than what we we were only publishing maybe three before that per per month if if we're hiring a writer, plus it's costing us several thousand dollars to do three. Now we have my one marketing assistant. She is driving, like, I did some upfront keyword research in Ahrefs.
Brian Casel:We have a long list of of keywords in a queue. She then has a whole process that is that just creates the the brief, which, you know, that's not necessarily new. Like, typically, you would create a brief that you would hand to a writer. So the creation of that brief uses a lot of AI. There's a lot of steps in that.
Brian Casel:And then we continue the the process from there, still using AI to take the brief and develop out an article. And it's not I wanna keep repeating this because it's not just like press a button, have the AI write us a whole article. Right. Each article is still taking her it's still several hours of work for her to to drive the AI, to to drive, you know, taking this topic, this outline, these references, going piece by piece. Alright.
Brian Casel:Write us the headline. Now write us an intro. Now write us the next section. Now let's edit that. Now let's put a human touch.
Brian Casel:Let's let's make sure that we're connecting this back to a key feature in Clarity Flow. Let's interlink these articles. Like, that's still the human element, but the the legwork of churning out two, three thousand word articles is ChatGPT. And we ran the experiment where we hired a writer to write the same article that we also had the AI do and Oh, brutal. I mean, but, like, it it was, like, abundantly clear that the AI one was actually better, like, in terms of quality.
Brian Casel:Like, the final result after after a few hours of working with the AI to get it to where we want it to, it was just better. It there was more useful information put together better, better references because we have our our in house marketing person connecting the dots with our product and the use case and the and the problems. Whereas you hire, like, an external writer, you know, like, they might have the gist of what Clarity Flow does, but, like, they're not in here every day. They don't know exactly who who we are serving and why. You know?
Brian Casel:So Yeah. And so with her spending she's dialed it in now. So she's done seven or eight of these articles, gets a little bit more efficient each time. We've got a really dialed in process for it. From a cost perspective and an efficiency perspective, we're able to publish at least twice as much from what we were able to do before at a fraction of the cost.
Brian Casel:And it's just an internal engine that we have up and running now. You And if you look at our you can look at our blog. It's at clarityflow.com/articles. I mean, it's I'll put this challenge out there. Roughly half the articles that you see on the homepage of that page are from before written by professional high end writers, and roughly half of them are AI.
Brian Casel:And I challenge you. I don't think you'll you'll be able to notice which ones are AI, which ones are human. I guess they're all pretty good, you know Yeah. In in my opinion. So there so that's that's like piece like, in in terms of our marketing stack, I feel like that's been, like, the baseline.
Brian Casel:Like, we should just have SEO driven content going at all times. That's our process for it now. It's all documented. We can even hire more VAs to help with this, but, like, it's it's going. And and, like, now now it's, like, now I turn to, alright.
Brian Casel:What what's next in the stack in in marketing? Like, we're, you know, we're doing stuff with, like, influencers and webinars and affiliates. Mhmm. But one of the that whole thing is still just, like, cover keywords we know their search volume for that is good for us. We should have pages for those.
Brian Casel:Let's keep turning those pages out. That that's taken care of. But I I think that this is more important, and that's brand content and audience. And I think that's becoming way more important now going forward in this AI world. Because like, frankly, I think even the SEO stuff is becoming a little bit more of a short term play.
Brian Casel:Because I don't know that that this type of traffic is still gonna work the way it does now a year from now or two years from now. So I I feel like us and most other SaaS companies should be investing more heavily now in brand content. So what I wanna get into, I I haven't had the bandwidth to do it, but I but I need to to slot it in soon. We're gonna start a new podcast where I am interviewing coaches, getting these conversations going. I'm I'm in conversation with coaches anyway, just in customer research and stuff, but now we need to start to record high quality interviews with coaches, case studies with coaches, stories from how coaches run run and grow their businesses, get those published as podcasts, as YouTube content, social media content, you know, cross link, cross reference, cross quote these things, mix it in with our SEO content.
Brian Casel:Like, that has to be a whole layer of high quality, like, just story driven brand content. Mhmm. And and that's
Jordan Gal:what you mean by brand as as compared to, like, SEO keyword search driven content.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. Like, the the SEO articles is like, I don't I don't even care, like, when they what hour or what day they come out. Like, just get them up on the site. We just need to have them
Jordan Gal:For the YouTube page. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:This is more like we just need to have interest coaches. And I think that this goes for most SaaS businesses. Your customers are interested in hearing stories from other customers who are just like them. I mean, just think about us. Like, we listen to podcasts of other entrepreneurs to hear their entrepreneurial story because that's interested interesting to us.
Brian Casel:We identify with them. They're like us. We wanna hear
Jordan Gal:That's relevant.
Brian Casel:Exactly the same thing with with our customers. Like, coaches wanna hear about other coaches, you know. Probably ecommerce owners wanna hear about ecommerce, like, stories. Right? Like
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So it never made sense to me to talk too much about ourselves. The only thing we talk about yourself is, okay. Here's a feature, and here's what it can do for you. Right.
Jordan Gal:And, yeah, maybe now that we feel much more comfortable on the niche that we're targeting, we can then identify the content that that niche in particular wants to hear about. And that's just very, very different from general content on, like, ecommerce, how best practices. It's just Yep. There's too much of that out there.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Because I I do think that, like like, yeah, like, we're we're growing our traffic. And and and, by the way, we're also literally seeing an increase in Google search traffic since we've been publishing this higher volume of articles. So, like, that's a good it's still early, but it but I am starting to see that uptick in Google. Like, that people have questions about, like, whether you can publish SEO articles using AI, and is it gonna impact in our case, in our niche, we are seeing it.
Brian Casel:It's it's starting to work. It's early, though. But I think long term, like, to really grow the top of funnel and the and generally, just the whole reach of of the brand, like, you gotta have I think YouTube is gonna play a huge part in that too. Like, you can take, you know, like, hour long interview with a coach, release it as a podcast, and then release it as, like, four different ten minute YouTube segments. You look at, like, any popular podcast.
Brian Casel:Right? Like, Conan or, like, Joe Rogan or any of these
Jordan Gal:Broken up into dozens pieces of content.
Brian Casel:Like, that's how I consume those guys. Like, I actually don't even subscribe to their podcast, but I I catch and and if you look at the YouTube content, like, you know, it'll be like Conan talking to Paul McCartney about this one interesting topic that gets me to click, and I'm gonna watch that for twelve minutes on YouTube. Right? Right. That was
Jordan Gal:the story he told about John Lennon's glasses. Like, that's how
Brian Casel:I can Yeah. Oh, that's so that's so interesting. I gotta hear what he has to say about his glasses. Right?
Jordan Gal:Yep. Yep.
Pippin Williamson:And that's like one one
Brian Casel:fourth of the hour long conversation that they had. Right? Like and so that's sort of the model that I'm thinking about going forward. Yeah. Cool.
Jordan Gal:Well, you know what time it is for me? It's time to go do a sales call.
Brian Casel:There you go, buddy. Get it. That's the right
Jordan Gal:way to finish up Friday. Next week, I'm out. I'll be at the beach.
Brian Casel:Hell, yeah.
Jordan Gal:No podcast for me. Nice. Alright. Good stuff, man.
Brian Casel:Well, let's let's
Jordan Gal:call it a day. Thanks everyone for listening.
Brian Casel:Talk to
Jordan Gal:you soon.
Brian Casel:Later, folks.
