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Welcome back, everybody. Another episode of Bootstrap Web. Brian, it's Friday. It's July 12.
Brian Casel:I'm back Sir. Back from You're vacation. Back in The States. You took a week off, and, yeah, back at it. When when did you actually get back from the trip?
Jordan Gal:We got back Sunday night. So we were gone for, like, five days.
Brian Casel:Oh, so you were around this whole week?
Jordan Gal:This week, I was around.
Brian Casel:Oh, okay. Yep. Got it.
Jordan Gal:Yep. We went away. You know, our kids are at camp. They come back tomorrow. So, you know, we went away.
Jordan Gal:We had a great time. Mexico City is cool. Happy to talk about that. That place is is is a fun fun break to take.
Brian Casel:Looks awesome. I always hear great things about it. That's that's a spot I wanna check out for sure.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That was cool and that's good to be home and you know we took advantage of the kids being away. We like went out to dinners and hung out. It was it was great. Of course, what that means for my wife is basically like all the house projects possible.
Jordan Gal:Just
Brian Casel:all of it.
Jordan Gal:But the house looks like they're now finally.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yep. Yep. Very cool. My kids are yeah.
Brian Casel:They're they're still going to day camp. They've got one more week of of day camp and then so I'll be around next week. I I could record next Friday but then the week after I'm on vacation. So we're we're heading out to Chicago and then driving around Lake Michigan up to the Upper Peninsula.
Jordan Gal:Very cool. Yeah. So you're gonna be here when I'm actually in North Carolina. So next Friday, I'm not around so maybe we'll do a podcast on Thursday or something like that.
Brian Casel:Alright. Yeah. Very cool. Yep. Well
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's summer but we we are no Europeans here. We're keeping busy. Yep. You you announced something on Twitter.
Brian Casel:I did. Yeah. Let's see.
Jordan Gal:On the bush. We wanna talk about that.
Brian Casel:Okay. I'll I'll talk about that. I I just to set it up a little bit, I've I feel like this past week, especially the week and a half, I've been I feel like I finally broken out of a, like, a funk that I've been in where where I I I sort of had, like, analysis paralysis throughout this the year. You you might have heard it on the podcast where I'm talking about ideas that I'm getting excited about, and then I and then I put them down. Like, nope.
Brian Casel:Not doing that. And then I get really excited about another idea, like, Nope. I'm not gonna do that. But then, you know, so I've had like four or five of these ideas for potential next products and I Mhmm. And I keep making the mistake of of like building them up and building them up and feeling like they have to be the perfect right idea.
Brian Casel:And I send them to friends like you and others like, hey, what do you think of this? And then they poke holes in the logic and like reasons why it won't work and and like, you know, being helpful in in that way. And and then, yeah. And and and so I've been a little bit like hesitant to pull the trigger on to actually move forward. So I did break out of that.
Brian Casel:I settled on one idea that that I really like a lot. It's called sunrisedashboard.com. Today, I put up that that page, put put out a tweet and yeah, that's out there. So sunrisedashboard.com. It is one dashboard to gather up all of your metrics and report them in one place.
Brian Casel:You can get automated reports. Send like, so all the different tools and services, all the different apps. So think like your traffic analytics, your Stripe, your your payments, your your marketing tools, maybe your help desk, maybe maybe stuff coming out of your database. Things that you need to keep a pulse on, you can pipe into this dashboard and have it send you automated reports on a daily basis, a weekly basis, monthly, whatever it is.
Jordan Gal:Okay. So it's not just numbers, it's it's other data also?
Brian Casel:Yeah. So it could The way that I like to think about it in terms of these metrics is like, it's not a replacement for like your Google Analytics or whatever you you like whatever pixel you put on your website for for your traffic and and whatnot. It's more like it takes snapshots of your key metrics from your traffic tool, from your marketing tool, from your email tool, from your social media profiles, from your payments tool. Like like whatever. So like every day or or every hour of every day, you need to like take a snapshot of what the number was and then that's gonna pipe into this dashboard, graph it over time.
Brian Casel:So it's so essentially it's like Cool. All the key numbers that you really care about from like 10 plus different tools and services all gathered together in a single dashboard. Right?
Jordan Gal:Okay. Alright. Well, I got a lot of questions. This is very interesting.
Brian Casel:And there there's there's more to it but that's Sure. That's where it starts, You know?
Jordan Gal:Okay. Like that's the that's the core promise is this will give you a pulse check based on the tools that you want to be in your field of view On
Brian Casel:a regular basis. Interval.
Jordan Gal:Yes. So now you said for you And
Brian Casel:like there's also the question of like, okay. Well, why is that important? Right? Number one, like, we we all wanna like check our numbers like today. Like, what what what's the current state of things?
Brian Casel:Number two, what's what's our history? What what were the trends in in the past that led us to today? And that's not just like a single graph. You need to look at the relationships between, okay, there was the traffic trended this way and then trials trended that way. And then activations trended this way and then what was like a leading indicator from from this to that.
Brian Casel:Like you need this like historic context and to to connect the dots. So that's like the history. And then and then the third piece is looking into the future. Forecasting. Right?
Brian Casel:So we could all do the the little dotted line thing where we project our current graph and just keep it going into the future. Like if nothing changes, here's where our our graphs will will head into the future. Okay. Sure. That's that's if nothing changes.
Brian Casel:But we want to game out different scenarios. Like what if we cut churn? How is that gonna impact our future? Or what if we double our traffic? How's that going to impact our future?
Brian Casel:You know, what if we focus on activations? Then how how can that you know, so we wanna play with the numbers. Play you know, we've talked about like spreadsheets where we kind of plug in different scenarios. We wanna compare and sort of compete these these scenarios and game out the what ifs. So that that's the other like, when you have all of your metrics history in the app and when you have all of today's numbers in the app, it opens up possibility on on like how can that become really useful to you.
Brian Casel:Not not just in the reporting and the alerting piece and stuff, but it's also like helping you make better decisions about what to prioritize to to focus on going forward. The the last piece and this is this is sort of interesting to me is is is like an AI element. Right? So like, well, okay. Two two more pieces I wanted to talk about.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Is that about forecasting?
Brian Casel:It it'll be related. So, okay. Before I even get to the AI, there's there's one more new element to this and that is journaling. Right? So something that that I've done for a long time is I have like a not just my my regular journal, but like a a log, like a change log of like what happened in my business.
Brian Casel:Like the the key events. Right?
Jordan Gal:Okay. Like launch this campaign, change We changed prices.
Brian Casel:We launched a new feature. We we launched a marketing campaign or some market event happened that impacts us. Okay. Anything that I I try to log them in in Notion. I I've been good and bad about it.
Brian Casel:But like Mhmm. But I like to do it because I wanna know like, alright, what date did that happen? And then what were the numbers at the time? And what was the aftermath of of the impact of that? So there's gonna be this journaling piece built into Sunrise dashboard where you can jot down key events of what happened.
Brian Casel:And those entries, those journal entries will be linked to your metric snapshots at the time. Mhmm. And and then you can see the relationships between those. Okay. So that that's also something that that's a little bit of a twist on this type of product.
Brian Casel:Now let's take it the final step of infusing AI. Okay. Right? So you have your all of your different metrics from all your different tools piped into this one dashboard. It's been taking snapshots of of the metrics in the history going going back as far as you want.
Brian Casel:So you have all that history. You have all these relationships. You have your journal entries of what happened in your business. All of that is information that can that can train the built in AI assistant so that the AI has the complete history and context of your business. Okay.
Brian Casel:So that the AI can help you spot trends, help you spot patterns in the data in leading indicators and whatnot that maybe you're are not completely obvious to you. It could help you suggest ideas for Right. Recommendations. What to focus on next. It can suggest ideas for forecasting.
Brian Casel:Like you you can like ChatGPT alone can't just do that because it doesn't have all of your business history fed into it as as context. Know? Yeah. So that's that's the other kind of twist that I think is interesting.
Jordan Gal:Okay. So what what like the the picture that formed in my mind as as you're speaking is it's it's an existing pattern. This is you're describing what business owners do. Yeah. But it's not an existing behavior because there isn't a way to do it.
Jordan Gal:But but everyone kind of get I mean, I go to loops and I hit refresh, and I see how many email subscribers we have. And then I go to Google Analytics, I hit refresh, and I see how many visitors we got. And then I go to this other thing, and I how many sales. So I'm doing it. I'm I'm I'm following that same pattern, and then it's up to me to synthesize that.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. But but I have no memory. I don't know how that looked a week ago. Yep. Let alone two months ago.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And even just like working with existing patterns but you are looking to create a new behavior, basically putting it all in one place.
Brian Casel:I think I think that could be true. That that could be fair that it's like sort of a little bit of behavior change and maybe which is generally not ideal for for a new product in my opinion. Right. Right. Are
Jordan Gal:10 competitors that do the same.
Brian Casel:There there are competitors in this. It it is it it definitely is a category. That that's so another reason why I'm interested in this is I I've done actually the first project that I'm doing on this whole thing, I haven't started building anything on this product The first project has been SEO. I I've been I've been really spending several days in Ahrefs you know, coming up with a list of SEO key terms and and what has been really interesting about this particular idea is that it is an established category with search volume and it is not competitive from an SEO standpoint. Somewhat competitive but it's not it it's it's not insanely difficult in in the competitiveness.
Brian Casel:Okay. So that's that's the channel that I am focused I'm I'm actually working on that before I'm even working on any any sort of coding. And you know, through through that research, I started to look at the competitors. There's a few that like are are probably pretty well known like Gecko Board is a is a is a pretty well known one that's been around for a while. I think like Data Box is is one.
Brian Casel:Okay. And there's a you know, there's a long list of other ones but then a lot of them are really enterprise focused. Know, because like large companies do that. They have entire departments that do like you know analysts who who just look at metrics all day and and just create reports. Like that's what they do.
Brian Casel:Business intelligence is is is the is the term that these big companies use. But us, the the small guys, we don't really have something like this. So when you when you talk about behavior change, think you're right that the small smaller companies don't do a good job because they Of this because they don't have a Mhmm. Dedicated team or function or department or tooling to make it easy. Like what you were just describing is what all of us do.
Brian Casel:We we open up 10 browser tabs with Google Analytics and Stripe and ChartMogul and Mixpanel and whatever else you're using and it's it's all spread across all these different tools. Yeah. And you open them all up and now you gotta like sift through each one and like pluck out the one or two numbers from each one that that you actually care about. And then maybe if you wanna if you wanna actually analyze the data and make some decisions, maybe you gotta like put them into some sort of page or report to synthesize it all in one in one place. Like, that is hours and days of work just to get one report.
Brian Casel:Just to get like today's report. Then what about next week's, you know? Mhmm. This just eliminates that. The the idea is like just put them all in like pipe them all into this, and then this is gonna collect them, snapshot them all the time, keep your history, and then you can and then deliver it to you via email.
Brian Casel:Get your numbers sent to you every morning.
Jordan Gal:You know? Right.
Brian Casel:Right. You don't
Jordan Gal:you don't necessarily have to lock in and create that behavior once
Brian Casel:so you you
Jordan Gal:got a few of these elements that you've talked about. You've got a set and forget it element to it. Yes. You've got an existing traffic and existing demand element to it. Right?
Jordan Gal:So a lot of stuff you talked about
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, that that piece remains to be seen. But but compared to other ideas, this one has pretty interesting, I think, traffic opportunity. So that's what I'm working on first. Like I'm I'm not even working on the product yet.
Brian Casel:I'm just working on the I I end like on that front, we can get into it maybe another day is like figuring out. So like I have a good list of keywords like commercial and some informational and stuff and I'm thinking about like programmatic SEO around like a content site structure and that's kind of my first project on
Jordan Gal:this idea. Interesting. So pretty strategic on the SEO side as a key element to even getting into this. And I see the the site looks nice and at the very top, it's email address early access.
Brian Casel:Yes. Yeah. So what you see there is what I worked on yesterday. That's the site. I I did a a rough concept in Figma.
Brian Casel:It doesn't look great. I spent like an hour like making that little graphic for for what this thing could look like. Right. Right. And then I wrote the page.
Brian Casel:I spent a lot of time writing the the copy. It has an email capture and then on the back of the email capture, it goes to a survey to get some more information. And then and that I mean, that's what this is. This is just the the very very first steps of an idea. I don't know where this idea is gonna go.
Brian Casel:I I I have a pretty clear vision on what I want this product to be. And you know, it definitely It's it's definitely also a scratch my own itch. Yeah. That's right. Where I feel more comfortable doing a product that is a scratch my own itch because I have a more opinionated clear view of what this product should be.
Brian Casel:And But I I mean, I don't know. I have the same feeling that I have going into every new product. I I operate from the assumption that like nobody is gonna want this. Nobody's gonna wanna buy this.
Jordan Gal:Not like unbridled optimism and then disappointment but more like, hey, probably I'm just gonna scratch my own itch.
Brian Casel:I don't know if it's like age or or wisdom or grumpiness or what but like the more the more years of doing the the product entrepreneurship thing, the more the more I just assume that like nothing's gonna work. Just it's it's not gonna work. I I I'm gonna try to make it work, but like prove me wrong world. Yeah. Please.
Brian Casel:It is it
Jordan Gal:is like a a you know, it's a different side of the same cube as I only have so much to do with whether or not this works. And luck and timing and all these other factors have a bigger say. So I'm gonna do it. Doesn't mean it's gonna work. Hopefully, all these things come together.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Alright. Here's a question. I don't know if you have a good idea of this, but who's it for?
Brian Casel:That's a that is a good question. I I don't have a clear enough answer for that yet. I wanna get clearer on that as we go forward. So yeah. Like right now, I I think it could be useful for folks like us, like SaaS product owners.
Brian Casel:It could be. I I think there's a an interesting play for agencies who generate reports for clients. Mhmm. Marketing agencies specifically do do like performance reports of their campaigns. They deliver those to clients.
Brian Casel:That that's an interesting angle maybe. E commerce services consultants. I think also I do think that there's a play for creators who they they track sales but they're also tracking growth of their YouTube channels and their and their followers and their email lists and things like that. So the early but but like it original idea which by the way happened like six years ago when I when I did Sunrise KPI. I mean, if you want we could talk about that.
Brian Casel:I know people ask about it but Yeah. All of that, the the initial idea back then and again now I think, again it's a scratch my own itch. So I think it fits pretty well for SaaS companies because they have so many different metrics and KPIs to track. You know, there's all the SaaS metrics of like the stuff that you might use something like Chartmogul to to or ProfitWell to to track. So you can pull out the two or three like your MRR, your churn rate, your you know, whatever whatever is important there.
Brian Casel:And then there's traffic. There is maybe metrics coming out of your own database like user activations or user doing users doing whatever. Maybe your help desk ticket metrics. Mhmm. You know, and then marketing stuff.
Brian Casel:Email list, leads, CRM, social channels. Like, there's a lot of different numbers that that kinda matter, you know?
Jordan Gal:So you're agnostic on the data source.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, that's
Jordan Gal:You get to put it together yourself.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Alright. So so another another interesting thing about this What I Another thing I like about this is that there's a potential for other revenue besides just the SaaS. I think there there could be services revenue here as well. Okay.
Brian Casel:Integrations are definitely gonna be the at the core of like, we're gonna just gonna have a growing list of integrations. Right? Starting with, the most popular ones. Like, probably Stripe, probably analytics, probably you know, some of the popular email tools and stuff like But And I remember this from the last time I did Sunrise KPI. I I regularly got requests from like, oh, does it does it do Does it integrate with Shopify?
Brian Casel:Does it integrate with Mailchimp? Mhmm. Hey, I I use Convertkit. Does it integrate with that? And then there would be requests for things that are like, I really use this tool but it's not super popular.
Brian Casel:Only I like So I think one level of revenue could be, hey, request your desired integration and we and we can make it a priority in the next thirty days for a fee. If if it's not already in our roadmap. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Right. People who find value in the tool itself, it becomes more valuable the more you
Brian Casel:get. It's great that it has these four integrations, but I really need this one or two other one. Like, when are you gonna get to that? Well, we probably won't get to it because you're the only one asking for it.
Jordan Gal:But if
Brian Casel:you wanna pay, then yeah, we'll get to it.
Jordan Gal:Yep.
Brian Casel:So there's there's that option. And then the other thing could be services around like me and my team will design and implement a custom dashboard for your Right. Data sources integrated into your systems, you know, customize the reports that you and your stakeholders, your your team get.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:That's It's great. Could be like a consulting thing as well.
Jordan Gal:Makes me think a lot about multi location type businesses. I think about my brother and his seven crunch gyms. My my brother my brother has seven crunch gyms. Right? 200 or so employees.
Jordan Gal:Doesn't go to the gyms. Right? That's not his business. Yeah. His business is managing.
Jordan Gal:So he meets with his management team. Every once in while, goes to visit, of course. Go hang out, see how things are going, but that's not his daily activity. His daily activity, sitting in his apartment looking at spreadsheets.
Brian Casel:Checking the numbers. Yep.
Jordan Gal:But when you have seven locations, the it gets clouded. You're not looking at one set of spreadsheets. You have to synthesize a lot to get an, you know, a good feel of what's going on and what's going wrong and seeing how things change over time, not just on one location, but also as a as a whole, but also individually. So it's it's any type of a complex analysis synthesis problem from different data sources. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Pretty interesting.
Brian Casel:That's exactly it. Yeah. Like last time around, I did not I didn't even think about offering like revenue like a consulting services with this type of product? I I didn't even treat it like a real product back then. I I could talk about that because I get asked about it a lot.
Jordan Gal:Well, I I think that's worth going into. This is, you know, a little bit how I had Cardhook checkout and then Rally checkout, and I did some things right, did some things wrong, learned, whatever else. So why don't you talk about that? You you had a very similar product. And what happened?
Brian Casel:A bunch of people listening to this probably remember, but if you if you're newer to the show, you you don't know about this. This was back in 2018. I had a I had a thing called Sunrise KPI. So this new one is sunrisedashboard.com. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:That was sunrisekpi.com. I ended up selling that business on on micro acquire which is called acquire now. The guy who bought it didn't do anything with it. Didn't you know, didn't even build that thing. I don't know.
Brian Casel:It's redirecting to some weird domain out of my control. Didn't do So I sold it on on MicroEquire for like $10,000. Right? It it was just a project that didn't really end up going anywhere because I didn't really push it anywhere. At the time, in 2018, I spent that year learning to build apps in Ruby on Rails.
Brian Casel:That was the year that I transitioned to to Okay. That's right. To go from just being a designer into being a full stack developer. Sunrise KPI was the very first It started as like a practice project. I was like, be cool to kinda pull some metrics in and this could be a good learning project.
Brian Casel:That's right. I was like, but as as my first stab at a let me see if I could actually build a product that I could actually take to market and sell as with customers. Again, I still treated it as a practice run of that. Because at the time I was running audience ops. I was already planning on on working on what what would later become process kit, my next SaaS.
Brian Casel:Like, I was planning on getting to that. Sunrise was still just like a a pregame, a learning thing. I put it out there and it actually got I think looking back on it, like, it it had some traction like on on social media, people passing it around. I think somebody submitted it to Product Hunt, like, without me even realizing it. And then it actually did pretty well over there.
Brian Casel:And then I had a handful of, like, paying customers on it for a while. I got all these requests for other integrations on it. I I added something like 10 different integrations. I hacked on it for like a year or two. I used it myself to to report my business.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:But it was just a little thing in my portfolio over there while I work on my main business at the time, which was Audience Ops. But fast forward to 2021, I believe. That was when I was going all in on Zip Message and decided to sell off all of my businesses and that was one of them. And so so yeah. That was just a little project in my portfolio that didn't have many customers and I sold it for 10 k.
Brian Casel:Still thought about the the idea for since then, but I but I went on to work on several other ideas and now it's like six years later and I still think there's something to it. So I start I start with the same concept that I had back then.
Jordan Gal:What what
Brian Casel:a blessing. And now and now I have some new ideas like I talked about like the journaling, the AI, the forecasting.
Jordan Gal:Okay.
Brian Casel:But the the core where where it begins, the core is the same. It's a it's a single dashboard for all your different apps to report into.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So so conceptually very similar, maybe some feature differences. But how about approach? I mean, the first thing we heard you say was pretty deep on the SEO analysis.
Brian Casel:Yeah. The approach this time, I I'm definitely more seasoned now as a as a SaaS product founder than I was six years ago. Yeah. The the approach Yeah. Like I said, I'm I'm basically just starting with SEO and traffic and and putting the pitch out there which is this, like putting out the landing page.
Brian Casel:I'm not building anything just yet. And and I'm thinking through business models like pricing Mhmm. And revenue and and like consulting revenue like I was talking about. Like, these are new new things that I wasn't thinking about last time. I'm fully boot bootstrapped on this.
Brian Casel:I intend to be fully self funded and bootstrapped going forward in in everything that I do. The and and look, this Sunrise dashboard is not my new full time job. Just to be Mhmm. Totally clear. And and that this is this is where having a podcast gets kinda difficult.
Brian Casel:Okay. Because it's true. I think it's true that people who like, just the act of talking about businesses on a podcast makes makes them sound a lot bigger than they actually are. This is one thing that I have that I work on. I also run Clarity Flow.
Brian Casel:I've got a team working on that. I have I actually have other new new ideas that I'm that I'm hacking on and like incubating right now and I don't know where those are gonna go or when they're gonna happen but I'm playing with other ideas. This is one idea that has it it has moved a a few steps ahead along in the in the pipeline of an idea. Right? It's gone from early concept and just a notion page to to an actual landing page with a domain and an early access list.
Brian Casel:And and now I'm really learning and and we'll see where where it goes from here. I think I'm gonna build it, but I'm I'm I'm working on some traffic stuff first. And but you know, I I'm spent like, I work on different things throughout the week. I do consulting. I do tailor made UI which is like my UI service for SaaS.
Brian Casel:Sometimes I build entire MVPs for for SaaS founders. I We have projects going on in Clarity Flow that I'm overseeing. You know, like I I split my week. So so one or two days a week, I hack on this. I other other days I'm hacking on other side, you know.
Jordan Gal:I'm I'm curious. I I feel you on the podcasting. It does have an impact on how you talk about things, when you wanna talk about things, same with me.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:There it does seem to have more weight or friction or whatever the hell you wanna call it when it's audio and it's a podcast. Because if if you went on to Twitter and were like, I'm gonna do an experiment and do 12 startups in twelve months. Right? Like, we've seen people do that. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:It doesn't feel very heavy. You're like, oh, okay. Cool. Experimentation. And I often read I you know, Peter Levels, the best example of all this stuff.
Jordan Gal:Every once in while, he'll just post here are all my projects that I've ever done and how much money they made. And it's that know, that list
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Is very long and if you look at that over a five or whatever year span, you're like, oh, homie homie was busy. He was launching something every month or two and it's he's not the only person that that's done it. I like that guy Mark who sells ship fast. Oh, And he's like very clear. He's like, I did so many things that didn't work and now this one worked.
Jordan Gal:But it's Yep. You know, I'm the same person. It's like I became a genius. I just think that you should try more stuff and that's like a philosophy.
Brian Casel:You bring up in a alright. You you brought it up so I'll I'll I'll talk a little bit about something else that I'm playing with right now.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Okay.
Brian Casel:The idea of building in public and sharing the work is something that I'm I I just I've I've always felt is really important to me. Mhmm. I I put out on Twitter the other day that I'm that I'm starting a private podcast. It I haven't actually launched it yet but I have recorded five episodes on this private podcast over the past like seven or eight days. Five episodes.
Brian Casel:So so this is like a almost daily like ten minute update on on what I worked on yesterday. But more focused on like, here's the project, here's why I worked on it, here's what went into it, here's what I'm thinking about on on what I'm working on next like tomorrow.
Jordan Gal:It's solo. Just you. No
Brian Casel:no yeah. A solo private podcast. I'll talk more about this in the future. I think this could turn into something like a private podcasting community Mhmm. Network platform.
Brian Casel:I I I actually have a domain for it and everything and I'm Mhmm. I'm kicking it around. I but you know, for so many reasons that doesn't seem like a good business idea for me to work on next. And that's essentially why I'm putting Sunrise Dashboard out there first.
Jordan Gal:Uh-huh.
Brian Casel:But this is more of a something that I'm hacking on. What what I wanna say here for now is that like, the idea of of working on multiple things, I think there's a lot of people who don't understand that. And rightfully so. Like I understand why this is like different or foreign to most people in our circles and why most people are like turned off by the idea of of people who who do the small bets thing and work on multiple ideas. Right?
Jordan Gal:Okay. I think in the wider world, people think that's absolutely insane. But in our universe, at least people are aware that there are people that do it. So I think they There are
Brian Casel:people that do it and there's a lot of people who focus on one great business and and power to them. That's fantastic.
Jordan Gal:Right. Most people focus on one job.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I and also like the fact that we only record this podcast like once a week and it's both of us and sometimes we skip weeks and stuff like, it's it's it's hard to paint the full picture on what this actually looks like.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's like a check-in. It's it's a
Brian Casel:check-in and it's it's it's even less than a highlight reel. It's like, it you're seeing just such a small sliver of what actually goes into doing what what people like us do. So this private podcast is like if I can record this on a daily ish basis, it gives you a real actual slice of like a day in the life of of working on these different projects. There's much more detail but I'm working on keeping it short. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:I just think that there's something interesting there. And the other thing that I'm very interested in there as well is the connections between people, the the network effects of Like people who listen to this show, something that has driven me kind of crazy is that I know that we have a few thousand people listening to this podcast. Yeah. But we Very hard
Jordan Gal:to communicate with them.
Brian Casel:Very hard to reach them. Like I'm talking to these people right now, but I don't have them on a list anywhere. They're not in a community with us anywhere. Actually, very few of them probably even follow us on Twitter. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And Twitter is a different thing right now.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Many of them probably don't even use Twitter, you know. It it just seems kinda crazy to me that that it it podcasting is such a one directional medium. And then you think about all the adjacent podcasts like people who listen to us probably listen to like the other five or six podcasts that I listen to every day.
Jordan Gal:Yeah.
Brian Casel:This We're very we we vibe with the same kind of personalities and and topics and interests. We we should be in a group together. It should be easy to go find the other listeners and connect. And so that's something that is interesting to me that I'm also starting to hack on but more as like a something that I just want to have exist and be a part of. I don't know where that's gonna go if if anywhere but
Jordan Gal:Brian's gonna scratch all of his itches.
Brian Casel:All the itches.
Jordan Gal:One after another. Hell yeah.
Brian Casel:Look that I just and then just to be clear because there's gonna be people on Twitter like, oh, why are doing multiple things blah blah blah. Like that's something that I'm motivated to to work on. I'm motivated to work on Sunrise dashboard. I'm motivated to do the consulting stuff that I that I do with clients. That to me that's the the best way to bootstrap and self fund is.
Brian Casel:And and there's there's a bunch of other ideas on the list that I'm not doing. But Yeah. This is what I'm working on next. I don't know how long each one is gonna last. I don't know how many days per week I'm gonna give each thing.
Brian Casel:But I'm just kinda taking it more short short term focus. Like this is something that I'm interested in in hacking on right now. I'm gonna see where it goes and I'm not all in on anything anymore. Know? It's not like it has to work by a certain date.
Brian Casel:Like I'm I'm good. So let's just let's just build stuff. I I gotta stop analyzing and just build some shit. Mhmm. That's where I'm at.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It does what I not what I'm worried about but what I I guess is important to address is the ability to just shed some of the self consciousness around both starting and stopping. Yeah. Right? So it should be not very expensive emotionally to say I'm starting another thing.
Jordan Gal:And just as importantly, if not more importantly, it should also not be very emotionally and like reputationally expensive to say, I did that for six weeks. I don't like it anymore. I'm not gonna do it anymore. Right? You can't cut it really well.
Jordan Gal:I don't care about the expect I learned. I moved forward. I'm a little better for it for all the good and the bad that came out of it forward. Yeah. And and I think a lot of us, we come up with the criticism of an imaginary person, but most people either don't care or are not critical at all.
Jordan Gal:They're just they're just appreciative and admiring of someone who just did something new and tried it and and moved on.
Brian Casel:That really resonates, man. I that that's that's really good. Because I I do spend a lot of time thinking about like, you know, like putting putting new ideas out there to the world knowing that we have people listening to this podcast and following the story and and people on Twitter. But at the same time like I I hate working on stuff in a silo. And especially being a solo, like I don't have a team.
Brian Casel:I I have some I have a developer and a support person and stuff but like I don't have partners. You know, I'm not in an office. So I'm sold. Yeah. And that's that's why I like to
Jordan Gal:build Yeah.
Brian Casel:That's why I like to put stuff out there in the world and show people what I'm working on so that I can get feedback and and I wanna see what other people are working on. Like that's interesting and helpful to me. So you know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. The other people are are a crutch. You know, my ability to go to rock and have these ideas that I would normally be much more self conscious about in public, rock is my crutch and it builds up my confidence before I go public with something.
Brian Casel:You call it a crutch. I I mean, I see that as like an advantage.
Jordan Gal:Like, it's It's both. Because what we're both talking about is ego. Because we have them and they don't allow us to operate freely. I know for sure my ego does not allow me to operate freely. I admire so much people who shit post.
Jordan Gal:People who shit post on Twitter with absurd things next to their real name. I admire them so much because they have shed the ego and just say whatever the hell they want. Yeah. And I I'm not I have not evolved to that point yet. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:So in the business context, shitposting is basically like not worrying about what other people think of you when you say something or bring up an idea or launch something new or say, that didn't work at all. Aren't I stupid? Move on.
Brian Casel:I yeah. I I you know, I I think that the people that I'm like envious of on on Twitter and and whatnot are the people who just who do share multiple products and ideas that they just put out there to the world with without any care. Because what really bothers me is when people make judgments, especially publicly on on Twitter and whatnot, about like, why are you deciding strategically to do this with your time? Like, what do you know about my time and my and my priorities and and how I define success? You know?
Brian Casel:Like I can help it. Yeah. You know, like that kind of sentiment really really bothers me. Know? I it's like why do I even think about that?
Brian Casel:Like I I shouldn't care about that. I think it's And the people who who have the ability to to block that out or or have it not affect them I I think is
Jordan Gal:I think I think the money is a big element of that. What are you gonna tell Peter Levels? Not not what are you gonna tell him. What are you gonna tell him that he's gonna care about? He's gonna make his $300,000 this month.
Jordan Gal:You can have whatever opinion you want. Yep. And I that that does play a role in it. Yep. It it does.
Jordan Gal:You know, we've talked about this before where I, you know, I I basically stopped listening to podcasts because I found myself too envious of other success. And then magically, when Cart Hook took off and he was doing millions in ARR, my I I had an easier time dealing with all of that stuff.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I've done the same with with several podcasts that I actually enjoy. I like the people, but I had to just tune it out because it's like this is too much in my head right now.
Jordan Gal:Right. It's like unhealthy in some way. So I it really is in the interim. When once you get to the other side and you've gone through four, five, six, seven, eight ideas and felt stupid, one of them all sudden starts making 50 k a month, I I hope what I would love to see for both of us, for everybody, is to just loosen up a little bit around that ego and then be able to share more vulnerably, which becomes more helpful, which attracts more people
Brian Casel:Yeah. Which makes it
Jordan Gal:more likely to succeed. It's like this very strange virtual cycle.
Brian Casel:Because the part of the sharing that I really love is the creative work of building things. And and and that's not just like design, that that's also marketing, that's also positioning, that's also we're building startups. We're building businesses. There's a lot of creative and thoughtful and inspiring work that goes into that. We should be openly sharing and learning from each other like the craft of building businesses without judging like why are you doing this or that or why are you not doing this or that like Yes.
Jordan Gal:It should not
Brian Casel:be I'm doing this. So so let's talk about the work and not talk about different people's motivations because it's different for everyone.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I I also think you're you're talking about that the work can stand on its own independent of the result. Just because the result wasn't amazing does not mean that the work wasn't worth doing and sharing. Yep.
Brian Casel:Anyway, that was a was a long time on me. What what's up over there in Rosie land?
Jordan Gal:Okay. So so we are ready to to launch our our early access accounts next week.
Brian Casel:And was telling you offline, I'm really impressed with the speed on this one for you.
Jordan Gal:I'm really impressed too and I can say that because I didn't do it. You know, the engineering team, it I just looked at the calendar. It has been eighty one days since we made the decision to go forward with this product. I can see that because in April, I had about 25 or so conversations in one week about a different idea. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And by the end of that week, was like, that was a bad idea. I don't wanna pursue that anymore. Yep. And then, you know, I had this other thing rosy on the back burner and then the following week, was like, okay. We're we're doing this idea.
Jordan Gal:So it's been eighty one days.
Brian Casel:Eighty one days. So where where are you actually at on the product? Like, what what's been built? What
Jordan Gal:So okay. So now I'm gonna like boast and brag on behalf of my engineering team. Yep. It's been a very interesting experience because we we trimmed down the team so it was a thinner team. Right?
Jordan Gal:Like, one back end plus Rock. So two back end. One front end, one DevOps, one QA, and then we also went from two product people to one because our chief product officer is our VP of product, excuse me, Jessica's on maternity leave. So so it there's been a whole bunch of things that have been awesome. One of those is Jordan, our product manager, just stepped all the
Brian Casel:way up.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. So she basically ran the entire thing. And then Rock and the team there, what they've told me is that the experience of building this product has been dramatically different from the checkout product. And the difference you know, think about running on a treadmill at, you know, at a normal pace, 10 pace, you know, and you're on incline of three. Really hard.
Jordan Gal:And then take the incline to zero. You're doing the same running. You're coming to work. You're working the same number of hours, but everything's easier because you don't have an incline. For us, that incline was the complexity of the checkout product.
Jordan Gal:Payments, vaults, integrations, refunds, like platforms. So all this complexity that made everything slower and also a bigger team, which makes things more complicated and slower. So we made the team smaller, made the product easier, less reliance on integrations. All of sudden, the team's like, oh my god. We can run because this is this is us being freed into building just a relatively normal software product.
Brian Casel:You know, I have not really built anything with AI APIs at all yet. I'm I'm curious and and I think having not touched it myself, I in my mind, I'm like AI complicates things. Like it's I I wanna build stuff with AI someday soon. Mhmm. But to me it's like the the unknown makes it seem like it's going to be more time consuming to build an AI product.
Brian Casel:It sounds like it's it's easier than expected or or faster to build stuff than than expected.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. What you're saying is true if you go about building the product, building more yourselves.
Brian Casel:Right. But if you leverage APIs.
Jordan Gal:Leverage a lot of yes. A lot of existing things that we that have made our cost basis higher than we want it to be, but we can address that later. The most important thing is how do we get product market fit and therefore our strategy was let's pay more but build less. Mhmm. Because what that ends up creating is you're really building.
Jordan Gal:You're building an admin. And experienced software people with all the tooling these days, it's not that complex to build an app with login, with accounts, with an admin. You know, it's it's not not that crazy complicated. So you can do it. And underneath it, this is where it gets interesting.
Jordan Gal:It's easier to build an admin, but the capability that you're offering your users is sci fi. So when I look at our app as a nontechnical person, I have regularly over the last few weeks said, is that real, that feature? Like, is that actually possible? Or are we doing that right now?
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And the answer is like, yes. Because because it's actually not that complicated to bring that functionality up to the user. Here's an example. Right? What we're launching this week is is MVP.
Jordan Gal:It's v one. Mhmm. So it's not the full scope and all the full features and the full everything, but we wanted to decide what's in scope and what's not for MVP. And I am very surprised at what's in scope. One of those things is you come in as a small business and you set up your Rosie account and then we just have a page where you can train it.
Jordan Gal:I think the other day I I tweeted something like, hey, it looks like what we're really doing is making our users no code prompt engineers. This this is what I mean. So we have a training page in the admin and you can just upload PDFs. And, you know, not for MVP, but eventually you just you just upload YouTube URL So you can take if you wanted to as a business, let's say you ran an HVAC company. You could go to your favorite, I don't know, training PDF from a conference that you went to and just upload it to your Rozy account and then all of sudden that gets attached to your model and your account and it makes your voice agent much more proficient on your business.
Jordan Gal:You could do it for FAQs. You can do it for your policies. You can do whatever you want. So it's things like this that that sounds complicated to do with an AI model, but we're actually doing very little. We're providing an admin in a way to upload, none none of which is complicated.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. And then underneath, you know, about an experienced back end engineers is is not gonna have that hard of a time understanding, hey. This is what the OpenAI model wants in order to attach it to this thing, and then it's get linked to this row, which is this account. And it's like it's just building a normal software product. You know, it is it is AI powered, but because you're not building the AI yourselves Yeah.
Jordan Gal:You can build pretty amazing functionality all the way up to the user without diving that deep into the
Brian Casel:I love it. Guts of AI. I I would also imagine that like the all the new tooling and APIs and services out there that that we're able to leverage, they're all so new. So so so by by their newness makes them easy to work with because you know, there's all sorts of like Yeah. Old APIs out there that are just a pain to work with because they were made decades ago and
Jordan Gal:Right. There's no legacy anything.
Brian Casel:Yeah. There's nothing's legacy. This is all Yeah. All fresh, you know.
Jordan Gal:Newness, oddly, is an advantage when it comes to quality of the product because our competitors who launched a year ago built their infrastructure on older stuff, and our products quality is actually higher because we built more recently.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And our our approach to this has been let's not save money, let's focus on quality because we think that is what matters more in the market right now, not cost. If you try a $59 a month voice AI product for your business and it hallucinates and it makes you sound like an idiot for your business, and then you go and you work with whatever we end up with in the beginning, $99.02 49, something like that. But the quality is much much better. You're much more likely to stay. You're much more likely to talk about it with with your peers.
Brian Casel:Right. 81 days going from idea to product ready to put into into the hands of customers. Like a v one, but it sounds like it's pretty far along already. Yeah. It is.
Brian Casel:Do you think that there's any I I think just for my observations, it it I you and Rock and the team there, you've this is not you've you've been working together for multiple businesses and companies. So there's that that that plays to your advantage in terms of like just getting better and better at the muscle of building and shipping. Do you think that there's something else to you you talked about how it's a it's a much more trimmed down team. Like Mhmm. Fewer cooks in the kitchen.
Brian Casel:Do you think that actually sped things up?
Jordan Gal:Yes. The way it sped things up for us is Jessica, our VP of product, what she was really good at, what what she did amazingly well at Cart Hook, and the reason we've been working together ever since. Poor Jess, when when she came into Cart Hook, I put her through an unpleasant experience. She we had we had a VP of product. She was hired to work underneath him.
Jordan Gal:We interviewed. We made her an offer, and then she had a vacation planned. So she went to Japan on vacation that she had planned for like a year right after getting the offer. In between the basically, while she was in Japan in those two weeks, I fired the VP of product. So she came back with no boss and no mentor and that was at the time we were probably somewhere around a 100 k MRR Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And growing, you know, 2030% a month and churn completely out of control and chaos and frustration. I mean, the reason we let go of the VP of product that we needed to is because the team wasn't getting along and it was it was not not a happy situation even though we were growing.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:She just wrestled all of that and put it into a place where things worked much better and that's part of why everything took off because the churn went from 15% a month to 3% a month and everything got fixed.
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:So she played a really really big role in the success there and she came over to Rally with us and now, you know, it's me and Brock and Jess as I talk about regularly. In in the checkout product, reliability trumps everything. Yeah. You can't screw up. You can't have a down you can't have a down fifteen minutes.
Jordan Gal:So she put together a rigid process that made sense for that context, And that slows people down because you're making you're making a trade off. We need reliability more than we need speed, and that's why it takes time and everything gets built with concrete. As we moved over to this, the the very explicit agreement between Rock and Jess and I was we're gonna make it a little messy, but we're gonna go towards speed, and we're kinda not really gonna have any process. We're not we're we had no no no Kanban, no confluence, no tickets, no road map. We were like, yolo, do what Rock says that week.
Jordan Gal:Let's bang it out together and and just keep in tight communication. And that you can do with a handful of engineers.
Brian Casel:I yeah. I'm I just strongly believe that like fewer people working on the product just go faster. And and fewer processes. I I definitely have processes like with my team on Clarity Flow like I have one developer right now. I'm I'm down to one full time.
Brian Casel:She she's everyday. And I just give her a long queue of things that that I I designed and I spec them out and kinda queue them up for her to go execute. And we're insanely efficient that way.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. The efficiency is there.
Brian Casel:I could literally like literally this week, I did a few things on on Clarity Flow but like just stuff is like getting done and then I'll check it later and then we get back to it and then it's like
Jordan Gal:I I I think it's great. I'm And
Brian Casel:it's also great that Rock is like just call like, alright. Boom. Boom. Boom. Like, call shots like
Jordan Gal:Rock has been the biggest driver of that speed. Rock is like you you know push push push and he's been he has been more forceful with the team than they're used to.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And so he and I need to kinda keep checking up on that. I don't wanna say good cop bad cop thing, but it feels like that a little bit. But he's very very motivated and you don't wanna stand in the way of that, you know. I've seen this I've let him go, but I'm not surprised that about two weeks ago, as things went from build, build, build to we need to get this into the hands of users, right around that time is when Rock and I and Jordan, the the other product manager who's running things now in Jessica's absence, we got together and said, we need a little process now. Let's get a Kanban.
Jordan Gal:Let's keep it simple, but we need we need to start to get more things more into a process and start to trade off. You know, it was the the seesaw was 100% towards speed
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And now it's coming back a little bit because we got users, we got QA, we we need accounts, we need billing, all these things that are like, oh, okay. Now now we feel like we need to get a little a little more rigid.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That totally makes sense. So where what where are you at on, like, the lead flow and the first customers go getting on board? Like, do you
Jordan Gal:know who the first customers are? Yes. So what we've done over the last few weeks is get people into our CRM.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:From them signing up on the site for early access and newsletter to partners reaching out to myself reaching out to investors and then getting intro introduced to vertical SaaS has been a very interesting thing. Like like a a tiny seed company that I'm looking to work with is like GymDesk. Mhmm. So it's it's management software for independent gyms and a lot of them get phone calls that they don't wanna deal with. So looking at that and trying to figure out how do we integrate, how do we partner, how do we incentivize.
Jordan Gal:So that's been one area. Outbound starts either today or Monday. So we've worked with consultant that helped us do all the modern things around outbound which is like, 12 email addresses. Warm it up, all that stuff.
Brian Casel:Rosy dot co. Hey. Get get Rosie.
Jordan Gal:Hello, Rosie. Hi, Rosie. Yeah. So the Microsoft accounts, Gmail accounts, all the stuff that you're supposed to do. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And what else is there? And then advertising starts the second week in August.
Brian Casel:I'll give you a funny thing about the the cold I I've been doing cold outreach for Okay. You know, going on like almost a year now with with Clarity Flow. And I do the same thing. I have like multiple accounts. But I I created like an AI avatar person as the person sending the the emails.
Brian Casel:Okay. It's like a random name. Like I don't know like Michael. Michael. Because I don't wanna put like my personal name on a lot of these cold emails that are gonna be marked as like Sure.
Brian Casel:Spam or or whatever. Yeah. And then I use like an AI like it like avatar image on it to put on the email. So it's always weird when people because we we get a bunch of replies every week. It's like, oh hey Michael.
Brian Casel:Thanks for thanks for replying. Alright. Well, yeah. Brian here. I'm just hopping in and like you know.
Brian Casel:Like, love the reply, you know, or or Kat, the the customer success person like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mike Michael's working on something else right now, but
Jordan Gal:I mean
Brian Casel:It's always kinda weird.
Jordan Gal:That is just part of the new reality. I mean, you start to see it on the timeline a lot these days around like, you know, agents, assistants, employee AI employees. I think Lattice came out with like onboarding for AI employees or something. Right.
Brian Casel:Okay.
Jordan Gal:Okay. I don't know what that means.
Brian Casel:Cultural fit for AI employees.
Jordan Gal:And and, you know, what what I'm hoping next week is that we get a combination of partners that we set up with accounts.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Actual, you know, early customers and and some friends to kinda bang on it from a software peer point of view and say this is weird. This onboarding thing was was good. This was not good. And then we have
Brian Casel:I'm thinking two years ago. Wanna use Rosie someday on my products and put a phone number on my marketing site and have it go to Rosie. Like that's my goal for your
Jordan Gal:for your product. We have seen we have seen more of that than expected where it's like I'm an insurance agent. I just want I just want some something to pick up the phone for me.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:So a a lot a lot of funny use cases.
Brian Casel:Like I actually see it as like the ability to unlock that. I'm doing a bunch of changes on on how we sell Clarity Flow in the next couple of weeks.
Jordan Gal:Like the phone channel?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like I I At my current bootstrap budget, I feel unable to offer a live person to man the phone lines. Mhmm. And also like sales, like it would have to be me which I I could I could do but but I'm I'm very distracted. So Sure.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like the the ability to even have a phone number is like that's a that's an unlock. That's like valuable to me.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We we've heard we've heard some funny feature requests like we wanna have a phone number. We need to have a phone number out there. It improves our conversion and everything. But then when they call, can you flip it to text message?
Jordan Gal:Because that's what they how they actually wanna talk. So they want Mhmm. Rosie to be like, do you wanna turn this conversation to a text message? If yes, I'll text you right now at the phone number that you called from.
Brian Casel:Oh, interesting.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. They want their they want it's a younger demographic customer base. And so they just want to actually talk on text, but they feel like they have to make this phone call because that's what they're supposed
Brian Casel:to do.
Jordan Gal:Oh, wow. And they would just prefer okay. Just go go right to text.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Oh,
Jordan Gal:nice. Then if you think about it, it's the same model. It's the same everything. It's just instead of being turned into voice, it gets turned into SMS. So I think we talked about this as, like, a voice API or, like, a commute you know, communication API.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:So I think we'll have about two weeks of early access without being able to sign up on the site. Right? We'll talk to outbound. We'll do demos. We'll show the product.
Jordan Gal:We'll create accounts, but you won't be able to do it on your own. And then in like two weeks, we'll flip open the self serve part of it with, you know, credit card required and ability to sign up on your own.
Brian Casel:Got it. Yeah. Saw your tweet about that too. So you so you are even right at this early stage, you you are going full speed ahead on like the self serve checkout or sign up flow or whatever that
Pippin Williamson:is. Yes.
Jordan Gal:Yes. I think it's gonna be the absolute mess. I I we had all hands this week and my my most important message to the team was do not be disappointed by what's about to happen. We are not going to have a problem on acquisition. We are going to have a problem on retention.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:So don't get discouraged that when we get a 100 sign ups in the first month, 80 of them immediately churn and tell us that we're awful. Like, this is now the journey that we're on. We're gonna be told that we're awful for a few months and the only thing to do is just improve it, improve it, improve it. Keep the acquisition going, and then watch retention change, and that will be the actual inflection point. Not the, oh, now we figured out how to acquire customers.
Jordan Gal:That is not going to be the hardest part. The hardest part is is gonna be keeping them.
Brian Casel:Interesting. Yeah. That that is super interesting. It's there there's stuff in that in that vein that I'm flipping the script on on Clarity Flow in in the next couple of weeks and and I'm trying to figure out like how to how to deal with the blowback of like changing the way that people buy and the way that people onboard and and the impact on our customer success person and on me and what that's gonna look like. Yeah.
Brian Casel:We are we
Jordan Gal:are unprepared for it. And I I would rather have the mess and fix So as opposed to prepare prepare prepare and then and then turn it on. Wait. So We're we're we're gonna spend, you know, call it $10.20 k a month on like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Reels, short form video, and it's going to drive a lot more traffic than we are used to on anything and it will definitely be a mess. It's definitely gonna be
Brian Casel:a Interesting. That'll be exciting to hear about. The Hell yeah. The sign up flow. So so what what is the what what are you working toward having?
Brian Casel:Like, person signs up and you're saying credit card upfront and do they buy upfront or is there a trial or
Jordan Gal:No. Our first guess at it or basically our first experiment is you can come in and create an account. We we do need an account authentication. So you gotta go to your email and authenticate because for a variety of reasons
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Mostly related to cost. So if you come in and start using as soon as you use the product, you're costing us
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like real money It's AI credits. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yes. That's right. So we want people to be able to go into an account creation and then configure. So we want you to get the experience of the app and the admin and the power of it and what you can do to impact it and your different options and and how well it works by ingesting your website and taking into your account your hours of operate. We just wanna impress people.
Brian Casel:All before the credit card.
Jordan Gal:Yes. That's right. Mhmm. And then when it's like, are you ready to test Rosie? Like, you need a phone number to test it.
Jordan Gal:So that's actually our power is providing or not providing the phone number for your agent.
Brian Casel:Interesting. So so you can so you can't even like hear it as like a test run until you put in a credit card.
Jordan Gal:That's right. We we want we want to do two things at the same time. Impress the person by set by configuring your agent and also increasing the demand for actually experiencing it.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And when you want to experience it, if we have impressed you enough and you have now enough desire to hear it and test it for yourself, that's when you need to put in a credit card. You don't need to pay anything, but that's when you need crossover into credit card land. Once you do that, then you have x number of minutes to experiment with. We're willing to eat that cost. If you a lot of stuff like that.
Brian Casel:Currently in the trial for Clarity Flow, there's a lot of features that like you can't you can't unlock these features until you put in your credit card but you won't be charged until the end of your trial. But yeah, we have a lot of those.
Jordan Gal:Yes. We you know, when we analyze the onboarding experience, we have one dead obvious like point where, oh, that's where it crosses over into the majority of the value which is let me let me hear how this thing sounds.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Yep. So we'll need to we have done much more instrumentation on this than we ever did with the checkout because we didn't really care about onboarding in the checkout because we had pre sold them before they even got into the account and then we just help them get onboarded.
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:Now there's a lot more instrumentation around where people are dropping off Versnot because there's no way it's very unlikely that our first experiment, our first guess is perfect.
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:We should definitely move the credit card. What happens if it's all the way at the front? What if it happens if it's a seven day? What if it's you prepay? What if it's on the other side of your first ten minutes with your agent?
Jordan Gal:So I told Rock to build everything in a flexible way because we will definitely be experimenting. Don't be surprised by me saying, I would like the credit card to move on the other side of ten minutes.
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:And then we need to want we're just gonna measure. And this is funny, you know, on Sunrise side. It's like, we're gonna have to journal. We're gonna have to gonna say, like Yes.
Brian Casel:We're gonna a dashboard where you can track where these activations are happening.
Jordan Gal:Yes. But I don't wanna have to remember it, and I wanna look at over look at the results over time.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Somebody should build that.
Jordan Gal:Cool.
Brian Casel:So, yeah. Good stuff. Good good good week. We'll we'll get back at it.
Jordan Gal:Great week. I hope it's nice out for everybody to get out. It's Friday. My kids are coming home tomorrow, so wifey and I are heading out to the beach this afternoon.
Brian Casel:Bunch of rain around here this week, which means I'll probably just coat on stuff.
Jordan Gal:Coat on whatever you want. That's what I think.
Brian Casel:There you go.
Jordan Gal:Hell, yeah.
Brian Casel:Alright. Later, folks.
Jordan Gal:See you.
