Pricing Experiments
Hey, Bootstrapped Web. We are both back from vacation and we've got so much going on on both of our ends. It's gonna be probably a jam packed episode. So, yeah. Jordan, when when did you get back?
Jordan Gal:I got back on Saturday last week. So we've been home all week.
Brian Casel:Okay.
Jordan Gal:Feels great. Outer Banks, NorthCon, pretty cool. Never been there before.
Brian Casel:That sounds like a cool spot. I I haven't been there either. Yeah. I got back middle of this so like Tuesday night, I got back. So this is like one of those like weird like half weeks for me.
Brian Casel:Getting back into the swing of things here. Went to Chicago and drove all the way up to the Upper Peninsula Of Michigan. Absolutely loved it. We and my One of the best Airbnb's I've ever stayed
Jordan Gal:in.
Brian Casel:Two Actually, two of the best. Like, one in Chicago and one up in the Upper Peninsula. Both were incredible. Makes a big difference. Like, right there in in like you know, great part of Chicago near the near the lake and everything.
Brian Casel:And then, on the beach, like we had a private beach on Lake Michigan in Upper Peninsula. Was just in
Jordan Gal:the UP? Oh, that's right. UP. All the way
Brian Casel:up.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Yeah. Yeah. That place
Brian Casel:Across the bridge.
Jordan Gal:Wild. Literally wild. It's just a forest and a lake.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And then, we drove up it to Lake Superior to the Pictured Rocks.
Jordan Gal:Oh, you
Brian Casel:went far. And just really yeah. There's nothing up there. It's just wooded, you know.
Jordan Gal:You're kind of like you're almost it feels like you're deep in the South. Like you're deep in the it. Yeah. But you're
Brian Casel:super north.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. Everyone's got a gun. There's a, you know, a lot of pickup like they they live close to the the ground. Like they
Brian Casel:Oh, yeah. Just to
Jordan Gal:get through a winter there is no
Brian Casel:It was it was definitely Trump country up there. You could you could see that.
Jordan Gal:Did did you swing by Traverse City by chance?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. We had there. Yeah. Cool.
Brian Casel:Beautiful.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Nice man. Well, yeah. North Carolina was cool but look it's a little boring. It's just a beautiful kind of beach area
Brian Casel:boring but for us it was like the Airbnb was the thing. We chilled, it was super comfortable. We are literally our own private beach. The girls loved it. So cool.
Brian Casel:It was just incredible. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Nice. Our our thing was like a house with a pool on the beach. Like that's the advantage of there. Mhmm. So sitting on the beach and your kids can just like walk up by themselves to go to the bathroom, come back down.
Jordan Gal:It was it was like an actual relaxing version. Yep. Yes. And and they had waves. I haven't surfed in years.
Brian Casel:Oh,
Jordan Gal:cool. And I rented one for the week and my shoulders are jacked and I'm tan and I got salt water. The the whole thing
Brian Casel:Look at this guy. Yep.
Jordan Gal:I love it. It was fun. But now we're back. It's Friday. I went to the bakery.
Jordan Gal:I got my challah called my mom like a good Jewish boy and we're ready to roll. Let's do it.
Brian Casel:Alright, dude. Yeah. I mean, I I think we both have a lot to to cover. I'll just get like the quick rundown for me. Cool.
Brian Casel:This week, I tweeted one month dot app. It's like a new packaging of my consulting service seem to make the rounds on Twitter that that's Mhmm. I can talk about that. Basically, MVP in a month with with a price and that's Bro. That's what it is.
Jordan Gal:You piqued my interest. Even just as a software person, I was like, that that's a good bet. That's that's a good bet.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. If you want, we could talk about like the pricing and the strategy around that. Also today, actually yesterday, we launched all new pricing for Clarity Flow. Actually, same pricing but different trial.
Brian Casel:And that we don't have one anymore.
Jordan Gal:Okay. We talked about this because my big topic for today is we're going live with self serve and there's a bunch of stuff around pricing and a board meeting. And and you're switching pricing. Yep. And we know going into this initial launch that we're going to experiment.
Jordan Gal:So we kinda have a few experiments in mind. It sounds to me like what you're doing is it's a tweak to Yeah. Not just pricing but the onboarding and the mentality that goes into using the product and and all that.
Brian Casel:Yes. I can get into the thinking behind the bet there. Last thing is ripple.fm. It is done. I'm sending the very first invites today.
Brian Casel:I have a private podcast on it but it is a networking community platform for podcasts. It's not just for private, it's for connecting with popular podcasts and your fellow listeners there. I I just finished a whole video on it. I'm gonna release that after this episode. So that's the other thing.
Brian Casel:So it's like too many things but it's all kinda crashing into this week. So there we go.
Jordan Gal:We need to take a step back because two weeks ago we spoke and you had this idea and you said, I'm not actually sure I'm going to build it. This is part of me launching ideas and kinda thinking through it. It's two weeks, Brian. Did you build a a podcast networking app in two weeks?
Brian Casel:Yes. Pretty much.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Okay. Well, I do I'm not technical, but I would I am interested in what has what's happening, what is the state of technology and frameworks that allows you to do that. That's, you know
Brian Casel:Yeah. We can maybe also talk about like what's the state of my mental craziness that gets me Sure. That makes me like hack on that for for two weeks straight. Mhmm. But yeah.
Brian Casel:There's that.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I did talk to you one night at like 11PM my time and you were like, I'm finishing this thing up. So you you you've been working on. It's not like it just magically came Yeah.
Brian Casel:This was I I I did a lot of it before the vacation. I hacked on it during the vacation on the plane in the hotels on the free time and finished it up this week. That was my goal. It was to get it to a quote unquote like finished state so that I can I I definitely wanna invite people to start joining it and listening to mine and and forming their own communities? But like this is one of those ideas that I just really wanted to exist and build it and get it out there, but not spend months on it.
Brian Casel:Like I'm ready to move on. But I do wanna see it into the wild and see where it goes, you know. It's like
Jordan Gal:an in between. It's like idea is one thing, building an app is another thing, and then spending six months on marketing it is a different thing. It sounds like you're in this in between phase.
Brian Casel:Is this Okay. So like I mentioned all the all the different things between Clarity Flow Yep. And OneMonth app and I talked about Sunrise Dashboard still on my Yep. Radar as something I wanna get to. Ripple.fm is something I'm super psyched about.
Brian Casel:I I love the concept. I love how it came together but I treat that more as like a passion project or like a little seed of something that like I wanna see in the world. Let's see if it grows into something. Mhmm. I also see it as a benefit for it's a way to grow your network.
Brian Casel:That's the headline. And I wanna grow my network through this podcasting medium and yeah.
Jordan Gal:Very interesting. And I I Anyway. I either pinged you on DM or tweeted publicly that I felt I felt the the need for it. I wanted to do a lightweight podcast and send it out to people who would be interested in something lightweight because I was I was arguing with Ian Landsman. Hey, Ian.
Jordan Gal:About friend.com and about the founder who you know, the headline is spent one raised $2,500,000, spent 1.8 of it on a domain.
Brian Casel:That Yeah. And so that's exactly what it's for. It's that kind of thing. Two sides of it. There's private podcast and there's public podcast.
Brian Casel:Meaning you can connect with, like we should have the listeners of Bootstrap Web connect with us and connect with each other through ripple.fm. Like you literally go in there and you'd put in, these are my favorite podcasts. It connects to the directory and then you can see who else is fans of your favorite podcast. That's like one side of it. The other side is private podcast where, you know, like I have a private podcast and anyone can start one.
Brian Casel:What what it's all totally free.
Jordan Gal:Like The it's yeah. The the need that I felt was not just the ability to to create, like produce an audio podcast or video. What the need that I really felt was to be able to send it out to people. So I wanted to jump on with Ian and basically say, hey, let's have a fun conversation for twenty minutes about this. And then after that, able for me to be able to send it out or notify people that follow Bootstrap Web, and at the same time for Ian to be able to notify and send an email or whatever form of communication to let people know for his podcast.
Jordan Gal:And it's like this this blending of those audiences and communities.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It literally does those things.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Okay. Fun.
Brian Casel:Subscribe to it. You get notified when there's a new episode. Also, there's discussions happening around the episodes that you listen to. Like there's all that is is there. Cool.
Jordan Gal:Cool. Yeah. That's exciting.
Brian Casel:Alright. Let's talk let's talk pricing. Okay. So so you're you're thinking pricing. I'm doing some pricing experiments.
Brian Casel:We're Yeah. Over to you.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Cool. Let let's talk about this week. The last few weeks I have focused a lot on pricing. It is a huge lever.
Jordan Gal:It matters. It incorporates our approach to the market, what we think is gonna happen, what competitors are doing. This soup, all of us know pricing is this weird science that none of us actually have an answer to. It's this it's this thing, but it really matters. So what happened was very fortuitous timing.
Jordan Gal:Our plan has always been to launch self serve and for that you need pricing published either this week, I think it will actually happen today or Monday. So the last few weeks, it's almost like I I I, like, apologized to my team almost. I didn't apologize. I just said, you're gonna see me be a little schizophrenic about pricing, and I'm gonna change my mind five times. But this is the nature of pricing.
Jordan Gal:I can either make it private and you can't be involved in it, or I'll make it public and you have to almost forgive my schizophrenia because it's
Brian Casel:Especially this this early. Of course, it's it's all over the place. So Right. Can you remind me where where was your thinking on the pricing for Rosie like two weeks ago? Like where where what was your assumption back then?
Brian Casel:And then we'll get to what it is. Cool. Okay.
Jordan Gal:So we you know, my tendency in general, I think this comes from the bootstrap mentality, comes from my experience at Cardhook and so on, is to charge more.
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:My mentality is make something valuable and charge appropriately, and it is much easier to build a good business with $300 a month as the average revenue per user than it is at $50 a month. It's just you know, it's easier. Fewer people, higher quality businesses, all the stuff that goes with the lower churn, everything else. So my thinking in general was let's go a little higher. One of our competitors is I'm ignoring enterprise stuff.
Jordan Gal:One of our competitors is at like $350 a month and $550 a month. Okay? That's a premium product for businesses that needed $6,000 a year. Yep. It's it's a decent amount of money.
Jordan Gal:And I like that. It's attractive. Hell yeah. Mhmm. Our other competitor on the other end of things is at $59 a month unlimited everything.
Jordan Gal:Not as good of a product. They're going for scale. It got spun out of Google like, you know, a a different type of mentality.
Brian Casel:Are those competitors more or less targeting the same customers or market as each other and as you?
Jordan Gal:Nope. Nope. So the the lower price one is targeting SMB self serve mass quantity more generic approach. And the $3.55 50 competitor is home services specifically like the founder ran his own like painting or pest company and like very specific niche.
Brian Casel:So they're they're both small businesses but that one is the the higher priced one is niched down vertical.
Jordan Gal:And the and the sales process to go with it. So sign up for a demo not self serve compared to $59 a month self serve. Okay.
Brian Casel:Got it.
Jordan Gal:Well, I saw that and not just because of where the competitors are, but also in my analysis. I ended up in between those two. And I keep telling myself, this is gonna change. This isn't final. We can change it.
Jordan Gal:So this is an initial stab at pricing. I was at about a $199 a month. And then a second tier we're not gonna open up a second tier because we don't have those features built. So one of the challenges in our pricing is that we don't want it to be just based on minutes used. We also want it to be based on value and how that connects with the type of business that needs more sophisticated features like CRM integration and API access and more more things.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:So this first launch is basically just of the lower tier, and then we're gonna open up the middle tier. We actually designed it in the pricing page and then just hit it. Mhmm. So then we had all these conversations and where we ended up over the last two weeks was at $99 a month. And I said, wanna bring it down.
Jordan Gal:I wanna open up the bottom of the you know, I wanna open up the funnel. I want more and so on. So we were at $99.02 49 and then custom. That was my plan going into this week before we had the board meeting.
Brian Casel:K.
Jordan Gal:Okay. So now the board meeting and like you said it feels like this just happened. It's because three months just flies by very fast these days. So the board meeting was good. You know, I am I feel I feel some pressure to do a good job as CEO because I just pivoted.
Jordan Gal:And And I it's not like I asked a lot of permission from the investors.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:I just kinda did it. I made sure that, you know, the investors on board. But it's a bit of a bold move, you know, to go from a ecommerce checkout, raise money for it, and then be like, you know what? Actually, how about an AI voice voice product? Yep.
Jordan Gal:So I it's not that I'm on thin ice, but I gotta mind my p's and q's. I I think that's appropriate.
Brian Casel:Sure.
Jordan Gal:No one's putting any pressure. I'm putting pressure on myself because I'm assuming if I'm an investor on the other end of any of emails, I I wanna see the CEO, you know, play things straight. Do do all the right stuff.
Brian Casel:I think it's good to hear you say that. I think there's so so much I I definitely relate where it's like, you know, we we just assume that that there is this perception. But it's really just putting the pressure on ourselves. But I think to a certain extent that's that could be healthy.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We're we're adults here. We're responsible. We wanna behave a certain way. We wanna keep a certain reputation.
Jordan Gal:So Okay. So going into this board meeting, I was like, how do I make this a good board meeting? So I I do my research, you know, how to run board meetings. You know, a lot of VC blogs have this blog post, and a lot of them are really good because it's something that's genuinely helpful to founders that have raised money. So I go into this board meeting focused on like, how how are we gonna make this a good meeting?
Jordan Gal:It turned out to be just so helpful. And the way it's helpful, it's related to the conversation about the domain name that we'll have later for for forfriend.com. What the board meeting helped us with is that Rock and I two things. One, we're very close to the problem. We're staring at it every day.
Jordan Gal:We're literally close to it. Right? An investor who's on a few boards and focuses on investments and that sort of thing is not as close to it. So it's always good to have a little perspective when your face has been stuck up against it for months. Okay.
Jordan Gal:Secondly, Rock and I come from the bootstrap background. We wanna build a healthy business and that's our focus and we we do a lot of our calculations in that way and that is not always compatible with building a venture scale business. And going into this this conversation, we we wanted to get into the pricing conversation. It was the largest part of the board meeting. And what it helped us understand was we we have multiple audiences.
Jordan Gal:Right? We have ourselves. We have our customers. We have our, like, business financials and and health, and we have the capital markets. We have we have investors.
Jordan Gal:And right now, I think we were weighing things too much toward building a healthy profitable business. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it was skewed too far in that direction.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And what it what it it really meant is that we were seeding a large part of the market to the lower end by saying, no no no. Well, we have higher quality and we're gonna charge more and we're gonna make a bunch of money that way.
Brian Casel:It's like less about revenue. It's more about like land grab right then right now.
Jordan Gal:Okay. That's exactly the way to put it. It is a land grab and the the reason some of these markets in AI are so interesting is because there are large parts of the economy that have widespread problems. Normally, when that situation exists, there are a ton of solutions aimed at those problems. That's how capitalism works.
Jordan Gal:Right? It fills in those gaps. This is a very strange scenario right now that very, very widespread problems don't have this type of solution because the solution was not possible. Mhmm. That creates a new space in the vacuum to be filled.
Jordan Gal:Yep. That's literally the the land grab. New space on the map Yep. That did not exist. Also, new territory opened up on on the board, and and now there's a rush.
Jordan Gal:Yep. And so that is what makes our product and business interesting at venture scale. It's if that spot is gonna get filled in three or four years from today, there are a million, if not several million small businesses in The US that use an AI voice solution. If that's the case, the number one or number two in the market are gonna have tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of customers. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And if
Jordan Gal:you want to attract capital, you need to make the argument that you are likely to be that number one or number two in the market. And the way to do that is not to grow on efficient revenue growth and margin. It is to grab land.
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:And that's why today when we flip our pricing page, we will be at $49 a month.
Brian Casel:It's a really good way to put it. And and it's it's really like the traditional VC mindset and a whole strategy. The whole point of It's about the land grab. It's it's not about Like, I'll I'll talk about my Clarity Flow Yes. Pricing.
Brian Casel:It's it's like literally the opposite spectrum and strategy. Right. Not wrong way. But I I wanna hear more about this. So $49.49 dollars.
Brian Casel:So is there a trial? Is there is it How does that work?
Jordan Gal:There is a seven day free trial. Okay. Pretty aggressive. That's like try the thing and then you know buy it or don't buy it.
Brian Casel:And credit card upfront or or when they're ready to go?
Jordan Gal:Credit card at the critical moment in the onboarding is how I would put it. So you go to the pricing page, you click on get started, you put in your login, and then you put in your business URL, business name and URL. After that, you see a little spinny thing, your agent, your Rozy agent is being built. We just scrape your URL and then you get dropped into the admin with your Rozy account. You have not put in your credit card yet.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. You set up, you add training PDFs, you add FAQs, you choose tone, you do you can do all the things. And then when you are ready to test it, when you want to hear the voice, you wanna call it and interact with it, you click on I'm ready for my Rosie number, credit card mobile comes up, seven day free trial, go. And then one very critical piece of it, your account gets locked after seven days. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:There's no like, oh, I haven't used my fifty minutes. Like, no, you have seven days to decide and that's it.
Brian Casel:Yep. So that's
Jordan Gal:our that's our starting point. I what I would love to do is put account creation, literally the username and password on the other side of the agent creation.
Brian Casel:That's what I would like to do. Let them like use that like really as like a late lead gen on the homepage of this. Yes. Super interesting, man. Where are you at on it?
Brian Casel:Like is it live?
Jordan Gal:It will be live by the end of today. So we did the pricing page, all that and you know, I'm trying to contain myself. I wanna make the site awesome, but I want it live. So we're going live first and then improving it later. Sure.
Jordan Gal:So we have you know, right now if you go to landing page, you don't even see the product. You you don't see the admin. So we have a bunch of screenshots to add. We'll just start doing that all next week. But today, the only thing that changes is it goes from a landing page to a landing page with a pricing page where you can sign up.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I know that you're not targeting SaaS with this, but I I told you like I I really am interested in like trying it and seeing if there's some way I could maybe use it to to throw a phone number on the Clarity Flow website. And and I think that's actually like critical to the strategy that I'm taking now with Interesting. Like charging upfront because people need their questions answered before they pay money, you know.
Jordan Gal:So just to address that before we throw it back to you. The thing we do, we have a we have a public ROSI number that we're working on. Mhmm. So that you can just call us and interact with it and it is trained on our software product.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. I I wanna call that later. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yes. So so we have like, you know, I I did it with an investor yesterday on the phone. We called it and I said, do you have a free trial? What happens when the free trial ends? And while listening to that on speakerphone, I was showing the investor on screen the FAQ.
Jordan Gal:I asked it not the exact question that I put into the training, but similar and it understood that it was a similar enough question. And then it read verbatim what I wanted it to read. And it really is this thing that takes text. It takes like this is how I would want to answer someone who asked that question and it turns it into this conversational speech.
Brian Casel:I love it.
Jordan Gal:So interesting and I I don't want to niche yet. Maybe I'll regret that, but who cares about regretting something that you can easily change later. I don't want to niche yet. I think this thing might just be super wide and
Brian Casel:super interesting dude. I love it.
Jordan Gal:Okay. So walk us through pricing Alright.
Brian Casel:From a
Jordan Gal:very different point of view.
Brian Casel:This is it's it's funny. It's like So we we also start at $49 but it's like the opposite strategy. This is the bootstrap strategy. Right? The headline is like as of yesterday, we have killed our free trial.
Brian Casel:We There is no more free trial whatsoever. If you wanna And this is an experiment. I'm literally on day two of this experiment. I I I'm gonna give it at least Probably at least two months to to see where we're at. And then and then go from there.
Brian Casel:Maybe we'll keep it and or maybe we'll tweak it. Alright. I wanna unpack this. So so it's no free trial. You pay upfront and we're offering a sixty day money back guarantee.
Jordan Gal:As Okay. So you just You flipped it. Right? Instead of free trial, it's no pay and be invested. Yes.
Jordan Gal:But you could But there's no risk. You can still get
Brian Casel:your money. It's interesting the progression that we went through like starting Going back Zip Message, it was low priced and then pretty early on I went to freemium with totally free plan forever with low prices. And then fast forward to switching to Clarity Flow, that was when we killed the freemium play but we went to a more traditional like fourteen day free trial with no credit card up front. That's been the status quo up until yesterday. Similar to you like where where we had like no credit card up front but you you put in your credit card when you wanna activate like the the good features.
Brian Casel:But it does cut off at fourteen days. So that that's been the situation and when we would get our org our number of trials every month and a handful of them convert and and some of them are just tire kickers. Some of them are really good. Some of them need a lot of support. Some of them should get more support but instead they drift away.
Brian Casel:Yep. And so we And and Kat on the team is is customer success and she's incredible. And customers love her and she's really helpful and she's helped to to convert a lot of these trials. But you know, the And she sends async messages and does live calls with customers. But a lot of them like, they're trialing without a credit card.
Jordan Gal:Right. Of them a lot
Brian Casel:of them like literally don't respond. Or they might respond like three months later or something like that. Mhmm. So this bet to to remove the free trial, obviously we're gonna drastically cut down the number of people who enter our funnel. But the thinking here is they're They they've just paid to come in.
Brian Casel:They're gonna be more engaged and more serious. So they're more likely to actually respond to cat's messages when when they're you know It's not a requirement. Like we don't have a required setup fee or setup service or talk to Like you don't have to talk to someone. You can self you can self purchase and self onboard. We have videos and stuff.
Brian Casel:But the thinking is is that people who buy are going to be more engaged and more committed to the process of getting set up.
Jordan Gal:Right. My committed.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And my thought a few months ago was maybe we'll introduce a setup fee. Like a paid setup service. That's worked in the past for stuff that I've done and I've seen other SaaS do this where you pay, I don't know, like a thousand bucks to like get a concierge setup service and that that would create more engagement and more commitment from the customer. This is a different take on that.
Brian Casel:We're not doing a setup fee but but you do need to pay upfront. And yeah, like Clarity Flow needs something. We need to juice growth and this is a new experiment. We do have like another big feature coming. We're doing appointments like a Calendly alternative built into Clarity Flow.
Brian Casel:A lot of customers have been asking for that. So that's coming and that that should help as well. But really we needed to kinda change the game. At least try a different model. And you know, I I went into this like basically with the assumption that like, alright, once we kill the trial like nobody's gonna buy.
Brian Casel:We're we're going to kill the business overnight
Jordan Gal:and see. Scary part. That's the scary part. You you choke off that that flow of trials.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So so it launched yesterday morning and it went all of yesterday with no purchases. So I'm like, oh shit. Yeah. Alright.
Brian Casel:Here we go.
Jordan Gal:Were you getting a trial like trials every day before that?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. We we
Jordan Gal:So you used to a flow of
Brian Casel:activity used to multiple trials a day. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Okay.
Brian Casel:And and usually a a a conversion a day, usually. Okay. And so I woke up this morning to a a purchase. Someone paid. I was like, okay.
Jordan Gal:It still
Brian Casel:works. It's it's been it like roughly twenty four hours in, we we got the first purchase. Okay. We got one. And I don't know if that person's gonna ask for a refund yet, but we'll see, and we'll see where we're at about two months from now.
Brian Casel:This was also a good opportunity to actually optimize our checkout flow. Like our in app pricing Like we have the public pricing page but then in the app, there's the page where you see the plans and you can purchase and go Literally, we haven't touched that since like day one of Zip Message. It's been the same old confusing too much information checkout flow for the last three years and we just never touched it. Never got around to it. Okay.
Brian Casel:This was an opportunity that Like I designed it but my team implemented it. And much cleaner, simpler in app pricing and purchase flow and Yeah. So that that should help regardless of whether we keep the no trial or or not like now we have a a much cleaner optimized checkout flow. So that that's good too.
Jordan Gal:Okay. So different approaches. Not right Yeah. Not wrong. Not good, not bad.
Jordan Gal:Speaking of ways to spend money. This was one of the more fun stories this week. Come on.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It was like young kid. Friend.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. This young kid, Avi Feldman, I think or or Schiffman. Avi Schiffman.
Brian Casel:All I know about this thing is the video that that made the rounds on Twitter. And like like everyone else, I'm I'm looking at this. I'm like, is this? What the hell is this?
Jordan Gal:I I mean, I I don't know if it was part of the strategy, but it was insane, which was I guess part of the whole thing. Anyway, this kid Avi, I think one of these like Harvard Wonder kid type right when he was 18, he built like an Airbnb clone for Ukrainian refugees and people in Europe who wanna house them and it went viral. He's like, you know, one of these like Mhmm. You touch it turns to gold type of thing. Okay.
Jordan Gal:Cool. Mhmm. So, goes off and raises $2,500,000 for an AI wearable. And anything that I get wrong in this story, I don't care. It's just fun.
Jordan Gal:Yep. So, goes off races 2,500,000.0, takes an open source library called friend. Okay? Buys friend.com as a domain, takes the open source library, jams it into hardware
Brian Casel:so you know much more about this than I do. Yes. How did this kid raise?
Jordan Gal:2,500,000.0.
Brian Casel:And he spent 1.8 of that on the domain?
Jordan Gal:Yes. Okay. And that video from Sandwich was probably $200,000 also.
Brian Casel:Okay.
Jordan Gal:I love it. I love it. Okay. Now here's the thing. I I don't even think he made like a big stick of it.
Jordan Gal:People were just like, are you insane? How much did that domain cost? And he was like, 1,800,000.0. And people were like, what's wrong with you? And he explained, we're we're leasing it.
Jordan Gal:We didn't pay $1,800,000. It's like a three year lease with an option to buy at the end. Right? So what happened afterward is a lot of people came out with here's my domain story. Right?
Jordan Gal:A lot of like big time founders explain it. One of them, I forget the domain, but it was like a three year lease with an option to buy. If you miss one payment, it goes back to the owner, and he explained this logic. The logic that I think applies to Avi and friend.com was it's just a bet with unlimited upside. Right?
Jordan Gal:The upside is friend.com is an amazing domain. You get a bunch of attention. You get a I think I think the video got 16,000,000 views in twenty four hours. Like, it worked. But he probably spent what?
Jordan Gal:$30,000 for the first month? I don't know. 25? $50,000? Whatever.
Jordan Gal:And the upside is, if it works, who cares? You're just gonna raise a $40,000,000 round and buy the domain for the 1,800,000.0. It it doesn't even bother you.
Brian Casel:I didn't even I didn't know about this like lease to buy thing with domains. Yes. Like, didn't know if that's a thing.
Jordan Gal:Bro, we in America, Jack. Everything's financed. Yeah. So, the downside is limited. What's the downside?
Jordan Gal:It flops and then you don't buy the domain and then you just give it back to them. Yeah. Cares? Yeah. I love Three
Brian Casel:years, you'll you'll know what's what by then. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Right. And a lot of people were like, you know, talking bad about it and I was like, no. I think if you look at it and this is a a bit related to a pricing conversation. If you look at it with a normal business mindset like revenue more than expenses, it makes absolutely no sense. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:If you look at it from, hey, I'm in the capital markets. I need to attract attention and capital and I get 16,000,000 views for a $50,000 investment plus my video. I gotta my company's off the ground like your company has never been off the ground. And I don't think that's I don't think that's my for
Brian Casel:for friend.com is he'll he'll keep the domain and it will evolve into something that is not what they showed on that video. Because the the the hardware AI thing is ridiculous. That's not gonna work.
Jordan Gal:I am not sure about that.
Brian Casel:When I You know, when I saw it before I like pressed play on the video. I was like, oh, this is gonna be the VC backed version of you know, those Is it like therapy.ai? Or like the friend? What's the one where where it's like an AI friend? AI
Jordan Gal:Oh, like like therapy or something like that.
Brian Casel:There's one I forgot the name of it. There's some site where you could just talk to an AI chatbot and it's like your, you know It's your friend. I thought this, and and there's like some some like bootstrapper stuff. I think I think Levels might be doing one of those. Sure.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And so like when I saw the the thing, was like, this is gonna be the VC version of that. And I I think that's where it'll probably end up going. That that would be my my guess.
Jordan Gal:So the thing is in reality that's everyone's guess. Everyone's guess is very unlikely to work. So what this kid did I think is he sprinkled a little bit of leverage into that risk with the domain name and now it's got little bit better chance to make it. If it doesn't make it, who cares? The whole point was to put in, you know, a few $100,000 each and if it works, we're geniuses and if it doesn't work, it doesn't bother anyone because it's money that's supposed to be put into bets.
Brian Casel:Love it.
Jordan Gal:I love it. And that is why I'm gonna debate Ian about it or maybe the next story on Ripple FM. Hell yeah.
Brian Casel:There you go. Love it. Yeah. I guess, let me talk for a minute about one month dot app. Yes.
Brian Casel:So unlike Ripple, which I was like hacking on for you know, everyday straight for the last like three weeks. This was something that I put together in like two hours. I should say like I've been actually doing this service for a few months and thinking about this offer for for several months. But this is what I've always loved about productized services or productized consulting is unlike software, unlike anything else, you don't have to spend months or weeks or even days building it in order to launch it and get customers. It's You just need like a landing page, if even that.
Brian Casel:So I This was like a dialing So 1month.app is is my productized consulting offer. This is like a dialing in of what I've been doing as a consultant working with SaaS. I talked about taylormadeui.com. So now I have like two sides of what I do as a consultant. Right?
Brian Casel:Like taylormadeui.com is UI UX for established SaaS products that that need improvement upgrade on their UI and UX. Right? Mhmm. That's aimed at like established SaaS and you know, that that's a great option for for me and for them, think. It's been working out great.
Brian Casel:This is an option for startups. For founders who have an idea. They want a quality MVP built. They don't wanna do the stupid no code thing. But they also don't wanna spend multiple months and hundreds of thousands of dollars on an agency or hiring a development team.
Brian Casel:They don't wanna deal with all that. They just like I firmly believe as a full stack Rails app developer, I think that you can get a super simple tight scope MVP fully ready to use app in a month. That's aggressive. And people seeing that are gonna misread it and say like, oh, you can't build a whole SaaS app in a month. I say, yes you can if as long as the scope is super tight, number one.
Brian Casel:And I mean like tight. Like not everything you want to be in the product is gonna be in the MVP. But the most important thing or two things is gonna be in there. And if you have the right stack, and by by stack, I mean like a a stack that works really well for the developer. For me, that's Rails and Tailwind and Stimulus and Turbo and all that.
Brian Casel:But I also have my own app template that I've been using on my own stuff and honing it and crafting it. So all of my UI components and everything are built into that. It's got authentication. It's got accounts and teams and and all the boilerplate stuff and custom mobile and dark mode. All that is like in there.
Brian Casel:So when I get started on a new app, I'm going. I'm I'm working on the business logic on the features. Right.
Jordan Gal:You don't have to do anything that has already been done multiple times.
Brian Casel:So so the thinking with one month dot app is it's an offer and I I put the price on it. This is the starting price. It's it's gonna be higher later. It's $10,000 for a a one month scope. And my thinking on that is, first and foremost, I really do wanna deliver for you like an actual MVP that you could actually give to customers, put in their hands, and have them sign up and use and get the core value.
Brian Casel:Like, it's not gonna be half an app. Like, it's not gonna be like unfinished in terms of like, you can't even get any value from this. Like, you you should have some value in a month. But, the thinking is that like, there Of course, there's gonna be more work to do after the month. Right?
Jordan Gal:Right. Some people will take it off on their own.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So then I then I have a couple of retainer options as like optional add ons. Like one is One option is like, okay. One month. Great.
Brian Casel:We're done. Let's It's yours. It's yours. Either I can hand it off to your team or we pause and you do some customer development and you come back in six months and we'll continue. That's fine.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. Or I've got two retainers. One is called just keep the lights on retainer and that is like low cost. We're not really actively building anything but me and and my team like we're around to keep the lights on. Right.
Brian Casel:Monitoring Something is wrong. Quick quick bug fixes, know. You get a hand a small handful of hours a month. That's we're around you you know. So so you can you can start to onboard users and if things go wrong, we're here.
Brian Casel:Right? That's that's what that retainer is for. Then the other one is act more active development. That's our my standard weekly retainer. Okay.
Brian Casel:We've got additional features that we wanna build. Me and my team will will continue to hack on that. And since you're a past client, you get priority access to that retainer. And that is That's that's the structure of it. Know?
Brian Casel:Like I I've always loved to do this is like productize consulting. And I And it's been an evolution. I've I've been off I I I've done a couple of these MVP apps for clients and and for myself already this year. But that was more like general consulting and now it's now it's learning from all that. Honing in on my app template and everything and packaging it up.
Brian Casel:And I think this I think this works. So I so I put that out on Twitter. I've I had two three call Two calls this week. One is booked for next week. A third is booked for next week.
Brian Casel:And looks like I have at least one project probably coming through but as of today, it's still open for for August and September. And I'm looking to actually book more projects at this point, to be honest.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Like I have the team ready to go. It's still me doing all the design and development and direction. But if and when we book more projects, like I I would like to see this grow into a small productized agency that I can oversee and run. I've got Like the team is ready to scale and the systems are there. So that's something that I'm looking at doing.
Brian Casel:We'll we'll see You where it have the
Jordan Gal:capacity. I I find it so attractive it makes me wanna start a side project. When I think about the last so it was we we counted it. It was ninety one days from the time of making the decision to build Rosie to the first user account created and and like, you know, a real stranger in the app. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:The work that goes into the business logic and everything else is one thing. To actually have it all come together and come together means like, well, now on the Internet and you can click on it and register and it creates an account for you. You can invite the teammate and all the stuff that actually makes it into a commercialized product.
Brian Casel:Yeah. There's to be like some form of onboarding. Like, it doesn't have to be a crazy wizard or anything but like when a customer signs up, they need to be oriented and know where to go and navigate and use it,
Jordan Gal:you know. Yes. And there's a lot of things people expect out of a software product now that you actually can ignore. Yeah. Weird And things like authorization, password reset, all it just takes a lot
Brian Casel:And of and there's so much time that goes, honestly, into the UI and the UX and the design and the cleanness of it. And that's what's all built in out of the box for me. I've I've done all that work already. Like, you see it on ripple.fm. Like, I I used my template on that.
Brian Casel:Like, the the structure and navigation, and how it's all mobile and dark, and all that is in there. And the menus and the drop downs and the modals, like, I don't have to design and implement and wire these up again on every project, you know. That's that's stuff like the business logic takes time, but the UI and and the and the tightening up also takes time. You know?
Jordan Gal:That's that's what, like, makes things stretch out into weeks and all these decisions and how you wanna handle this thing. Yeah. I I think it's I think it's very attractive. I I like seeing, you know, the posts on Twitter from from people running very, very focused solutions. Like, turning this type of file into that type of file can actually make you $30,000 a month.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And here's how I did it. Like I I love those. Those are beautiful. People you know, it's it's easy to get lost in the shuffle of of big numbers But that's real life changing money.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:$30 a month will change your life in a in a hurry.
Brian Casel:For sure, man. For sure. I mean, you know, and that's This consulting stuff for me, it's for me, it's it's my sustainability to be honest, you know. I'm I'm back to fully you know, bootstrapping and working on my products. But but this is like the Like, I could do like the one off consulting gigs like just myself directly.
Brian Casel:There's a lot of kind of feast and famine with that. Between Taylor Made UI and one month app and like the package of those two together, I see that as like the basis for like I I could form like an ongoing agency with this and I have the team and operations like ready to go. It's it's sort of just like firing up the the lead flow. And like, know, so far I'm just putting it out there on this podcast and on Twitter. I could do more to like, know, do like the outreach stuff and the marketing stuff but
Jordan Gal:Yeah. The word-of-mouth.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Short.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. The short term cash flow while while you invest in other things. Yep. Alright. Well, let's let's do it.
Jordan Gal:We're back. It's August.
Brian Casel:Yes, sir.
Jordan Gal:We're not going anywhere for a few weeks.
Brian Casel:No. Yeah. Neither am I. Back at it. It is super hot here.
Brian Casel:But, yeah, we're gonna we're gonna keep at it.
Jordan Gal:Cool. Enjoy the weekend. Thanks for listening, everybody. Brooks.
