Networks & Audiences
Welcome back, everybody. Another episode of Bootstrap Web. It's Friday. It's August 9. My brother's family just left after being here for a few days.
Jordan Gal:I've had a weird work week, mostly not working. It's
Brian Casel:very nice. Yeah. We're we're back at it. Super hot over here. Super humid.
Brian Casel:But but yeah. We're gonna get through it. And so what they does your your brother have kids and it was like the whole family getting together?
Jordan Gal:It was the whole fam. So, brother and his wife and their three kids.
Brian Casel:Full house.
Jordan Gal:Full house and then we saw a great opportunity. So, my dad came up from Florida. So, we we had a whole thing. It was awesome. The city, pool, beach, restaurants, like fun stuff, color factory, whole deal.
Brian Casel:Oh, very cool. Actually, couple days ago, we we went wine tasting with some extended family who came into into town. So, yeah. Nothing like hanging out with the fam and getting drunk for doing some day drinking. Good time.
Brian Casel:Yes. Today? What do we got?
Jordan Gal:Well, we we gotta talk about Ripple because I've seen you active on that front and I wanna hear how things are going.
Brian Casel:Actually on that note, mean, why don't we just kick it off off the top. Hey, if you are a fan of Bootstrap Web, you can join the free community for Bootstrap Web listeners on ripple.fm. So the the link is in the show notes. Jordan's phone is blown up.
Jordan Gal:Just my daughter. My bad. No. No. Can't do it.
Brian Casel:Hanging up on your daughter. Love it.
Brennan Dunn:Damn it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So so I was actually I just went on to Ripple just now and I see so far we have 54 of our listeners on Ripple. And Yeah. Like just this morning I posted a message. I was like, hey, what should we talk about on Bootstrap web today?
Brian Casel:We've got a couple of responses. But it's it's really cool like I So I As of as of now, Ripple is totally live and open. It's all free. Actually yesterday I moved it to the root domain. So you can just go to ripple.fm.
Speaker 4:I set up like like a small marketing site for it. But the cool
Brian Casel:thing is that right on the homepage is like a podcast search box. So you just type in the name of any podcast that you're a fan of. Like like public podcast that you're a fan of. You could put in Bootstrap Web. You can put in whatever.
Brian Casel:Like the Acquired Podcast or Mixergy or anything. Right? And and then that leads to a sign up flow and then you can just connect with people who are fans of the same podcasts that you're a fan of. You can like follow people. People can follow you.
Brian Casel:Sort of like a social network in that way. And so then so that's like one half of it is public podcasts with, you know, organic communities of listeners. And then there's the private podcast. So I have a private podcast and and actually just in the last week, we have now like nine people have launched private podcasts on ripple.fm. And they've been posting episodes and I've I've been listening to them.
Brian Casel:It's it's been really cool. So I Mine has like 10 episodes but a couple episodes on the other ones too. It's just tuning into people like us talking about talking openly. I think even more openly than they would on a public podcast. Talking about their work.
Brian Casel:Talking about building products and stuff. And it's just been really It it's it's been a fun project to put out there and see it come to life. There you know, there's hosts and conversations happening on the platform. People are following each other. And we, you know, Bootstrap Web has a little community going here now.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So Yeah. There you go. I don't know. It's it's cool.
Brian Casel:And I think it's at a point now where I it's it's out there. I'm continuing to hack on it. But I'm ready to kinda cool things down on my on my working on this project. I'm starting to look ahead to to other projects to to shift my focus to. But Yeah.
Brian Casel:I I like that it now exists and that people can join it. I wanna see more activity happen on it. I wanna I wanna do some things to try to get some more users and and activity going on the platform. But yeah. I'm happy with with the progress that I made on it over and like it's been about a month of like pushing hard on this thing and I think it's at a good point now.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's pretty wild. When I when I'm searching public podcasts, where is that feed coming from?
Brian Casel:Yeah. So I Apple iTunes offers a free to use search API. So it hits the well, I I set it up so that, you know, so now we have about 300 public podcasts like cataloged just in our own database of of people favoriting podcasts. Right? So when you when you search it, we initially search our own database.
Brian Casel:Like if it's already on Ripple, we'll we'll show you And we'll even show you how many other fans are on Ripple.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:So you know, if you search for like, I don't know, like start ups for the rest of us, you'll see a bunch of people on the platform are fans of of that already. Right? Yeah. Give you a link and then you can join right from there. And then if it's not if if it's not yet cataloged on our site, then then we hit the search API, the iTunes search API and we pull in literally any public podcast.
Brian Casel:It's really cool. You could just pull in like the artwork from podcast and
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That's what I was I was just starting to search for. I don't know. Something like group chat. If you ever listen to group chat, I like it.
Jordan Gal:Right? These three guys that talk a little Mostly business. Mhmm. As I started searching, just saw, you know, effectively access to a feed of all podcasts. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yep. That's it. And then and then I did put like So there's like two tabs on the homepage. You've got the public search and then you can do the other tab which is discover private podcasts.
Brian Casel:So people who have private podcast, I give them the option to make it discoverable or not. Right?
Jordan Gal:Okay. I see that here.
Brian Casel:And so so these are like the the podcast on the platform that are that are sort of like featured because they have the most episodes so far. Or the most downloads actually, I should say. And so like if you're looking to if you're looking for new like private podcast content and small private communities to join and meet some new people, like that's a cool little tab to to get in on.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That's what I'm looking at now. This this is very cool. Congrats on the progress, getting it out there. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Very cool. It's what what Right? Let's say we're recording a podcast, what happens after this? Does something automatically is it like a notification sent or is it just part of the feed? So
Brian Casel:not for public podcast, at least not yet. So so the only integration with public podcast is that you can find them and then you can favorite them. Mhmm. And then what that does is it it adds it to your pro so like Jordan, like you just signed up, so so you have a public profile now on Ripple. Just like a Twitter profile and you and people can follow you.
Brian Casel:You could follow people. On your profile, it shows your list of favorite podcasts. And and so whatever you add to that will be on your list. The A new thing that I'm working on now is the ability for hosts of public podcasts to like officially claim their podcast. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Right? So you know, we've got a bunch of podcasts that you know, there's a lot of popular podcasts where like their fans are And so like the the hosts should be able to go on and fill out a form and claim themselves as like, hey, I'm the official host of this podcast. And I didn't really build this stuff yet but they're gonna be able to have like a badge on their on their name to say like, this is the host. But also like giving them more abilities to manage like maybe moderate the discussions around their podcast, maybe add more content to to their podcast listing. You know, more direct access to their audience and the people who like their podcast, you know.
Brian Casel:So that's an interesting angle. I thought about maybe we, Ripple, could subscribe to the RSS feeds of public podcasts, so that we could then like notify and and drive engagement around episodes as they drop. So that's something that I'm I'm thinking about doing. Yeah. So I'm sure.
Jordan Gal:Right. Endless feature ideas. But I Yeah. I think it's interesting that it is a I don't even know if I I was gonna call it like a contained bet. But there there isn't that much of a bet element in terms of like, you know, I hope this blows up and becomes some huge thing.
Brian Casel:As a business, you mean?
Jordan Gal:As a business. Yeah.
Brian Casel:I have a couple So I I really don't know where it could go as a business. I I have some potential ideas of where it could go. They they all depend on this thing becoming like They all depend on the on on the thing be like having a a large growing active user base. Right? So my first priority is really just to to get users and activity and and make it a quality plat like that's why I built it is I want it as a as a way to network.
Brian Casel:Right? There I have a couple thoughts around maybe monetizing with the hosts of public podcasts. Like everyone should be able to claim their podcast for free but maybe some additional abilities Mhmm. For for hosts. A few people have already asked for and one of the obvious things that I could do is make communities paid.
Brian Casel:Like the ability for podcasters whether private or public to charge for access to their private community and make it like a like a paid and VIP kind of experience and we can charge for that. That'll be one avenue to monetize. But I I'm a little bit more interested in just growing an active user base and then there's more business models once the thing has a has an active user base. Whether that's like sponsoring like offering sponsorship revenue or or like exposure like you wanna grow your podcast, you can expose your podcast to other listeners of similar adjacent podcast because we have data showing that like people who like the acquired podcast also tend to like these other podcasts. And we can it we're growing what I think is a pretty valuable database frankly of of people who like specific podcasts, you know.
Jordan Gal:I like it. Oh yeah. Cool. I mean, we're gonna see like where it organically Yeah. Grows and what comes out of it.
Brian Casel:I And at the end of the day, like, I I still sort of amazes me that something like this doesn't really exist or or at least hasn't become big because you you other than I literally don't know of another way other than Ripple to go find my people who are interested in the same exact things that I'm into. Like I don't really know a good way to just go do that. I mean, example, like Right.
Jordan Gal:Reddit communities, but that's its
Brian Casel:own Maybe Reddit but that's just so It's just so random and you know. Mhmm. Like Okay. Like if I wanna go chat with a bunch of people about the US presidential election right now. I'm not gonna go do that on Twitter, you know.
Jordan Gal:Why you you don't want like chaos goes with it? No. It is it is chaotic. I have blocking anytime I mention something on politics, something comes out of the woodwork. Like, I have no response other than to block you.
Jordan Gal:Because what what am supposed to do with that?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Exactly. I and a, I don't wanna annoy my followers on Twitter because they don't wanna hear me talk my opinions on
Speaker 4:Yes.
Brian Casel:On politics.
Jordan Gal:That's right.
Brian Casel:That's And also like I'm frankly, I'm not interested in getting back a bunch of random disagreements or whatever Mhmm. About whatever views I might have. Right? And I I sometimes I have chats with with friends in private, but like not everyone not all of my friends are into but if I can find the listeners of a few political podcasts and then just post my messages in those feeds.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Like if you're if you're a fan of, I don't know, like Hacks on Tap, which is about which is a couple like political
Jordan Gal:Okay.
Brian Casel:People talking. Like that's that's an area where you know, like any of these like political or like a popular political podcast. You know, I could do the same thing for like Mets Talk. I can I can go find podcasts about sports or about the sports teams that I'm into? And then I could have those chats in those specific communities because I know that only those people are actually interested in chatting about that stuff.
Brian Casel:They they added that podcast to their favorites, you know. They listen to it. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Very interesting. I just added a few political podcast in Ripple. Nice. Nice.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Nice. We'll see where that goes.
Brian Casel:I I wanna actually take that idea even to a next level where it's like, maybe leveraging like categories of podcast. So like, if if you like this podcast, then then you're probably a fan of this topic in general. So you know, or or even like like I could post a message to only fans of Bootstrap Web or only the fans of, I don't know, New York Times, The Daily something like that. Mhmm. But it would be cool if I could post a message and like check off a box of like five different podcasts.
Brian Casel:Like if if you're a fan of these five different podcasts, then you'll see this message that I'm about to post. Mhmm. If not, then you just won't see it.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. It does feel I am self conscious of what I post on Twitter when it comes to politics because I feel like it pollutes my what I normally wanna talk about or or listen to or or look and read
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:On the business side. And I'm like, it's not that I worry about offending, but you're almost you have to curtail your public, like, personality and be self conscious about it because everything is very public and it's one feed and it's amazing in some ways. I thought the move toward anonymizing likes, I thought that freed people up. I know there was some pushback initially, but I now like much more freely because I don't have a history of my likes that I need to think about in the future.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That was interesting how how you brought that up. I that that change didn't impact me at all. I I don't even think about that. But I do But the nature
Jordan Gal:of
Brian Casel:I shouldn't be. I just like whatever just just for to hopefully influence the algorithm in some But it I don't even look at the for you anyway.
Jordan Gal:It's like a soft follow. I I I use the for you almost exclusively now. So Yeah. Like is like a soft follow because I'm I'm signaling to the algorithm that I like it as much as I'm signaling to the
Brian Casel:I mostly use it just to tell friends like, hey, I I like what you just tweeted there.
Brennan Dunn:Right. Right.
Brian Casel:But the but the thing with Twitter is that it's This is the nature of any big public social network is that I I think over time just the way that it influences our behavior and our our culture is like, that's why we see so much garbage on Twitter. People optimizing for the Twitter algorithms or optimizing for likes and and all that stuff. And the I think maybe one of the things that that I've always wanted on Twitter for years. I I've been thinking about this as a potential feature for Twitter and I think it it this is probably an influencing factor that led me to wanna do Ripple is that I I always wanted a way to have like sub interests on Twitter. Like for me to say as a Twitter user like, hey, I'm I'm interested in sports.
Brian Casel:I'm interested in politics. I'm interested in tech. I'm interested in startups. I generally tweet about those four things. And you can tune in to my startups tweets and my tech tweets.
Brian Casel:And you can tune out of my political tweets.
Jordan Gal:Yes.
Brian Casel:And you know, but I but at least I can have the ability to like tweet about those things and or or when I post a tweet to say like, hey, this is a political opinion. Only show it to people who actually wanna hear about my political opinions. You know? And in a way, and that that's why I did ripple.fm because it's like, we can use the podcast ecosystem to do that. Like Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:If you
Brian Casel:are in these podcast, then you are interested in those topics.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That's like that.
Brian Casel:That's the whole concept Yeah. Behind
Jordan Gal:The course selection criteria is interests. Things that you're willing to spend a lot of time listening to.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:I I I have a mixed view on on on Twitter and people mixing their political beliefs with their economic beliefs with their business approach, all that stuff. Yeah. I I have I'm not good at remembering who I'm supposed to be mad at. I've never I've never been able to remember. I I like it's kind of a funny weird thing, but I can't stay mad at anyone.
Jordan Gal:Mostly because I don't even remember that I'm supposed to be mad at them. Yeah. But that has taken on a very strange tone because some some people I have admired on the business front before I knew anything about their politics, I now admire them a lot less. And I have to almost like keep it in mind.
Brian Casel:That's pretty interesting. Like
Jordan Gal:Paul Graham, love your writing. Not into you as a person at all. Was an odd thing.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That's that's very much how I think about Elon Elon Musk these days. Like I I kinda hate everything of what he talks about and stands for, but I I I still like his products generally, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm I'm still an Elon fan, but
Brian Casel:Yeah. Here we are. You know, it it is you know, it is funny about like a little bit of a political sidetrack here. Like, I I've gotten to know some of the I have like more private like political chats with friends and you and I have talked a little bit but like other people. And it's really interesting how people have pretty very very far different political views or voting patterns than I do.
Brian Casel:But I'm still a huge fan of them as people and and a lot of times their their business, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Well, the
Brian Casel:it's also kind of fun to like, after being a fan of a person and their business for years and then only then discovering like, oh, really? That those are your politics?
Jordan Gal:I Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Never knew that about you and it's interesting to see to to hear like how far from me you are, I'm still a fan of of you, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yes. You you Yes. You sometimes like will get disappointed in them almost. Oh, you're not on my team in that way. And then you have to it forces you to check yourself on, like, okay.
Jordan Gal:So I have to be more accepting. I that's why I think generally, the more the closer you are to someone, the more you know them, the easier it is to accept these differences, which is, like a very key element in general of being okay with people with different politics and views and arguments and all this other stuff. Online and the distance has made that very difficult.
Brian Casel:I mean, I've always thought that it's pretty awesome that we get to be in a in an industry and a community where we're connected to so many people from so many different locations. Right? Because if I'm hanging out with just people from here in the Northeast Of The United States, there's there's still some variety of political views here of what people I grew up with. But you know, most part, it's it's I'm in blue team country over here, you know? Yes.
Brian Casel:Yes. But like it's Yeah. It's it's kinda cool to mix it up. And I I mean, maybe just my personal positions on things, I'm very I'm like literally in the center. I'm I'm a I'm a centrist, whatever you wanna think of that.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yep. So the extremes of both sides really turn me off. And I and I think that that I think that just personally makes me more empathetic to people who I Probably you and me, we we probably have very different voting history. Sure.
Brian Casel:But like I totally relate to a lot of what the other side technically, you know, believes. Yeah. And I I find myself drawn more and more there. Not quite crossing the line but Mhmm. You know.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. That's that's where I am these days.
Jordan Gal:I I I hear you. Yeah. Everyone gets gets influenced in their voice. Anyway, I I I love it. Let's see what happens with Ripple.
Jordan Gal:Let's see what conversations happen over the next week in in our podcast, and I I will be very interested to see if things surprise you. Right? If like, you know, some sub genre just finds it and all of a sudden starts to use it as a place to communicate that's just distant from where we are.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like I haven't done really any active marketing of it yet other than just sharing it here and on my Twitter. So and partly that's because I wanna like smooth out the bugs and stuff first. Yeah. I think it'll be interesting.
Brian Casel:Like what I did ship this week is what I hope can become some sort of like growth flywheels. The fact that like so there's a few ideas there. One is we have this public podcast search. So every time somebody adds a podcast, it gets indexed on our site. Or it this is like a programmatic SEO play.
Brian Casel:So people theoretically, if you're searching for a popular podcast, maybe over time
Jordan Gal:Oh, like creates a page?
Brian Casel:Yeah. It it already has a like we already have like hundreds of pages of podcast on the site right now. Mhmm. So hopefully that like I don't wanna try to compete with the actual podcast themselves, but like if people are searching for communities, that could be an interesting thing. And then like one of the things I wanna ship soon is like a leader board to show like the top 10 most popular podcasts on the Ripple platform.
Brian Casel:And then promote that out on Twitter and and and social media. And that can attract other fans of those top 10 podcast but maybe even the hosts. Mhmm. And then this is something that I'm playing with. Like I talked about how how a a public podcast host can claim their show.
Brian Casel:I haven't fully tested this out. But like the idea would be like, in order to get verified as the host of your show, you have to promote Ripple to your audience on air. Like
Jordan Gal:I see. This sounds like a like a crypto thing. Like no, go out in public and post this secret key.
Brian Casel:Well like, if you First of all, for some people that I literally don't know who they are, like I have to authenticate that it's really them. Yeah. But also this is like a growth hack. Like if So if you're the host of a show, you tell me like, hey, I'm going to promote my Ripple community on the next episode. Then I listen to that episode and I verify that yeah, Like you you've promoted it.
Brian Casel:Then we give you like the host badge and make you the host on Ripple. But like that that's a way for you. And and it's like a win win because it's you're promoting your community and you're connecting with your fans for free. So that's another idea. It's like to get to try to incentivize hosts to promote their communities on air to their listeners to get them to just come into Ripple for free you know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That sounds like the ideal. The ideal is if a podcast host uses Ripple as the place to go have conversation instead of Twitter. Yeah. Like that that that feels like the ideal.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And it's like also It's it's like the I hopefully, by having the leader board, it it also gives them more of an incentive because it's like, hey, my people are actually already on Ripple. You know, if you're the host of a podcast and your and your podcast has 50 fans already on and already connected on on Ripple around your podcast.
Brian Casel:Like, it really does sort of make sense for you as a host to hop into those comments and and start to participate. Like that's that's the theory of this little social experiment. I don't know. And then there's like the public the public sorry. The private podcast side where like hopefully private podcasters will will invite their audiences.
Brian Casel:So for that side, I'm thinking maybe like creators who wanna have you know, or founders who just wanna have like a private like journal feed or a mastermind group or something like that. You can promote that to your people and have them subscribe, you
Jordan Gal:know. Cool.
Brian Casel:So we'll see.
Jordan Gal:I don't know. We'll get updates.
Brian Casel:What do you got going on on your end?
Jordan Gal:So this week, the biggest thing that I focused on was advertising. So I wanna talk about the experience I've had with this company that we hired, And I also wanna talk about outbound a a bit also.
Brian Casel:Yeah. We got some questions about that. One was in Ripple, one was on Twitter about outbound. So yeah. We could both
Jordan Gal:talk about that I think. Okay. Cool. Well, let's talk about ads first. And and then we'll get into that.
Jordan Gal:And I wanna shout out Brian Shachman who has been helping us Shankman, excuse me, helping us on the outbound at Supercella. I wanna talk about that service. So these are like two services that I recently hired. One on outbound, one on ads. So this week was was the the focus was ads.
Jordan Gal:So I I feel like I learned a lot in how this is done these days with short form video. So I just wanna share that because I was generally impressed by their process. So I hired a company called Newform, newform.ai, and they create and manage the ads. So manage meaning like on the platforms, bidding, you know, demographics, all the stuff that goes into the actual ad management. And they also create the ads themselves.
Brian Casel:They're creating videos?
Jordan Gal:They are. And so so these are short form videos that are intended to feel user generated and are run as ads. So this isn't working with influencers. One of the key differentiators of this company, what I liked about them is that their ad creators are employees. So in house, they have employees that create these videos themselves.
Brian Casel:So like what's a give us an example of what what's a video? What what does it look like?
Jordan Gal:Okay. So so this is probably the most interesting part of the process that that I came across. So we signed with them a few weeks ago, but we said, hey. We need some time to get this product out. We need to get into beta.
Jordan Gal:We need to make sure the thing works. The sign up flow works and only then are we okay with pushing a lot more traffic with ads. So this week was was the onboarding week. We agreed on it maybe four weeks ago, but this week it actually happened. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:So first, there's a little bit of technical stuff in pixels. Right? No no big deal. But then getting into the process, we had a call and the first thing is explaining the product, the value, the ICP, the the problems. So effectively giving them fodder on what to talk about in the ad.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. What's the hook? What should we talk about in the script? What do people care about? Who are we who is this intended to go out to?
Jordan Gal:So after all that, they basically said, okay. Thumbs up. Be right back. We'll send you scripts. Three hours later, I get back scripts.
Jordan Gal:So what happened was they gave me three scripts. I gave a little bit of feedback and ended up in four different scripts. So these are like ninety sixty and ninety second, and the script is talking about the problems. And right. So an example would be something like, don't you hate missing phone calls when you're out on the job, and every time it goes to voicemail, no one leaves a message, and you know you're losing money every time?
Jordan Gal:I found a solution for that. I've been using Rosie which is an a you know, so okay. So that would be like a normal script. And So but like do
Brian Casel:they position themselves as like, oh, I'm just like this normal person who hey, I just I just found this this cool tool called Rosie like
Jordan Gal:Yes. Exactly right. Yeah. And it's like, know, true and exaggerated. It's like an advertisement basically.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. You know? When you see an ad, it's not like the person's like It's
Brian Casel:sort of like
Jordan Gal:use x clad out of the goodness of my heart and I wanna I wanna make a video about it. No. You're getting paid. Like this this what it Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So it's like it's sort of like a like a testimonial video.
Jordan Gal:So there are different approaches. There are different types of scripts aimed at different customers. So we ended up with four different scripts and then they took four different like video styles. One would be like talking head, right like right into the camera. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:One is walk and talk. So literally on the sidewalk holding your phone and walking. Mhmm. Another one with a different thing. So then they took the four scripts and each style and made one of each.
Jordan Gal:So then you have 16 videos. And all of a sudden we have our first batch of videos and then it moves forward. So all this was like in the span of three days. It was like scripts approved, videos approved, and now the ad management and the pixel gets done today and by the end of today, it'll be pushed out.
Brian Casel:Where were you pushing this out to? Like Facebook or TikTok? Like where are these going out?
Jordan Gal:So their advice was to hold off on TikTok and focus on meta. Right? So Facebook and and their their point of view was that TikTok is very hit or miss. It'll either blow up immediately or won't work at all. And generally, that's not the first thing to do first week.
Jordan Gal:Right? It's meta is easier to kind of launch and optimize and figure out over time.
Brian Casel:Find like the winning ads there and then and then push those winners Right.
Jordan Gal:Further. So right now, we are experimenting with 16 variations and what we'll soon find out is which script works best, which style works best, do more of those and then come out with like another, you know, 16 or whatever varieties Mhmm. And keep pushing those out.
Brian Casel:Interesting. So then it's all about video. It's it it So in terms of like, okay. If if any of us are going to invest in pay per click advertising. Like I I did some experiments with Clarity Flow last year and it was just kinda straightforward like Google Ads.
Brian Casel:And they they're we we got some data, some some results, but we're just paying for search results in in the search engine. The the go to thing here is like, video is a more powerful play these days, you think?
Jordan Gal:I think the nature of it is different. So Google AdWords are phenomenal especially for SaaS when it comes to bottom of
Brian Casel:the search intent. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Very high intent keywords. Yeah. Like, you know, coach coach management software.
Brian Casel:Like Yeah. But if you're like going for branding and exposure.
Jordan Gal:That's right. There you're going out and generating demand as opposed to capturing it. Mhmm. So I think eventually we'll have Google Ad. We don't have it up yet, but we'll we'll have it up there and eventually we'll start to bid against competitors.
Jordan Gal:But the experiment here is can we go out and generate demand or, you know, generate interest. And I didn't think we would be jumping into this so quickly. One of the things that convinced me is I found a case study with one of our competitors put out by TikTok. And if if that case study is to be believed, which I don't have any reason that it would be falsified, there is more existing demand in the market than I expected. And so I said, you know what?
Jordan Gal:If they're getting that many signs up sign ups on TikTok alone through this type of a campaign, that means people are more open to this type of solution than I thought. Yeah. And so let's push it. Why I mean, yeah. Sure.
Jordan Gal:There are reasons to wait, but I don't like those reasons as much as I like the potential for
Brian Casel:I love the idea of like a a team, like an agency just recording these videos for you. You know? And make it like and not not super fancy, not like, it doesn't sound like they're like high production values, just like it's supposed to be just like a person walking down the street with a phone, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yes. They are They're a mixture. They're medium production value. Uh-huh. So they feel authentic but they still have little graphics that come up
Brian Casel:Uh-huh.
Jordan Gal:And you know, the the screen switches from the person talking to the website. Like, go to rosie, you know, hey rosie.com, and then you'll see, like, the site scroll by. So there's, like, this in between where it is produced, but it's not super super
Brian Casel:I mean, and I I'm just thinking about it like from a from a bootstrapper's perspective, know. I I feel like rougher the better with with video advertising. Right? Like, we, you know, we can spend all day and spend all the dollars and time we want on like these fancy explainer videos. And maybe you wanna put something like that on your on your site or like a demo video.
Brian Casel:But like when it comes to catching someone's attention in the feed on Facebook or something like that, like people just wanna connect with other people on a human like real level, you know.
Jordan Gal:Right. You kinda don't want it to feel too much like an ad.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. So yeah.
Jordan Gal:So this is one approach. What you just mentioned has been the other thing that I've been focused on this week. I found a product called Screen dot Studio.
Brian Casel:Oh, dude. I love it. I I use it all the time now.
Jordan Gal:I wanna talk about it. What a great product.
Brian Casel:It is such a great product. It's it's so well done. I I That all all my recent videos of showing my work have been Screen Studio.
Jordan Gal:You can go in deep as you if you wanna produce, you want if you can you can impact every single little variable. Mhmm. But I looked into it. It's an it's an
Brian Casel:indie also like not overly it's not like the script and it's not like Adobe Audition or anything. Like it's it's simple enough that you can just dive in and and get a high quality video done.
Jordan Gal:Yes. It's an indie dev and I hope he's making an a a bucket of money. Yeah. It's so cool. I I started following him on Twitter.
Jordan Gal:You know, you like fall in love with these types of things. This is clearly like I love software and I'm gonna make beautiful great software. And then I'm just
Brian Casel:gonna sell
Jordan Gal:it for a normal price. No subscription and and that's it. I I just hope you
Brian Casel:get rewarded. Forgot how much I pay. It's like some like annual fee
Jordan Gal:for $99 or something like that. Yeah. You know?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I think I paid for it twice that I have it on both my computers. The so you know, I earlier this year, I was talking about like doing YouTube and I went I went deep. I went on like production value and software and all this stuff. And now, I'm I'm recording more videos showing my work on software products because I'm using this is gonna be a total testimonial here but
Jordan Gal:like Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Because I'm using Screen Studio, like, it's it it it's like the way that they they can make the zooming like really really smooth and and the mouse pointing and it's just it's a really easy way. Like I'm I'm already thinking through ways to like share more video of my product work and yeah.
Jordan Gal:I I felt the same way. I was like, oh, I think I can get into this and I can just publish stuff all the time and then use it for document look, you know, we have users now
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And and we need documentation. We need help docs. Yep. So I look at that and I'm like, oh, I I think I'm gonna make more videos mostly because of the software. It gives you this element of confidence without knowing that you're gonna commit three hours to a short video.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yep. It's great. Love it.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So that that's it. Let's see what happens. I think we're we're gonna launch the ads today. The next phase and what I'm really excited about is, you know, the advertising company.
Jordan Gal:They they told us this can only work to the degree that your funnel is optimized. And right now, your funnel is not optimized. Mhmm. Your funnel is optimized for people who get to your site, click a button and wanna create an account. That's not the same people who saw an advertisement on reels and click with interest.
Brian Casel:What's the And Call to action for them.
Jordan Gal:So the philosophy is basically to get them as deep into the funnel as possible before you add friction. And so a page that says username password, basically register an account is the worst possible thing.
Brian Casel:Uh-huh. So Like like get them using the product before
Jordan Gal:Using yes. Whatever you can give to get them deeper in in closer to the value before you ask for any additional friction. Mhmm. So I think we're gonna do a lot of work over the next few weeks on what that looks like and it gives me some new appreciation for our competitor that I don't think their site is good at all. But then when you click to get started, at first I was like this feels you know kinda hokey.
Jordan Gal:It's weird. Like you come in then you choose a voice then you go this thing. So all this like stuff you do and it's like like step one of five. In my mind I'm like that is crazy. What do what do you mean step five before I can like create an account?
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. Then if you view it from that point of view like, oh, people are paying to get into this funnel. They don't even know who the company is. They haven't seen the website. Like totally different mindset.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And I have a new appreciation for you.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I like that. I It'll It will be interesting to me the the the response of the like, the types of users that come through those funnels, like the video ads versus the types of You If if you do the out outbound directly to businesses. Like, I feel like those are gonna be two completely different funnels.
Jordan Gal:Yes. But we we are gonna push on both. Yeah. Yes. You wanna talk about outbound?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Let's do it. I mean, I I know you've been working with an agency. I I've I've been setting it up myself for the past year with Clarity Flow and we could talk about how how it's all working, know. I I know we've had a few questions here and there on on that.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Anything specific in in Ripple that that we wanna answer?
Brian Casel:Where was that question? Let me find it. Favorites.
Jordan Gal:This is kind of awesome. I can just jump in there and look at the replies. That's awesome. Yeah. So it looks like looks like Adam was asking you about how you designed and implemented your cold outreach for clarity flow.
Brian Casel:Yes. Yep. Yeah. I mean, I I can't get into all the all the weeds on it. But at a high level And I I I learned some things the hard way.
Brian Casel:You're setting up So at first, I I set up like a bunch of different sending domains like the theory there is like you don't wanna send cold outreach from your actual domain. You wanna send it from like similar domain. So, you know Yes. If if your if your main domain is like example.com, you might be sending from like examples.com or or example.co or you know. Because you don't wanna ding the the reputation of your main domain.
Jordan Gal:It's it's almost like rule number one. Like you are We Like there will be fuckery involved here, you know, on on the number so
Brian Casel:nature of the beast is is people are there's gonna be some percentage that's gonna mark you as spam no matter what.
Jordan Gal:Yes. You
Brian Casel:know. And then the more like, it only takes a few people to mark your email at in as spam, and then like all of your emails will be going into the spam folder for like ninety days until it recovers, you know?
Jordan Gal:Yes. And like all of your most important emails
Brian Casel:just like personal emails from Yes. Domain. So you you wanna like Yeah. Avoid that. Yes.
Brian Casel:So that that involved At first for me, it was like setting up 20 different Google Workspace accounts and paying for 20 like and and having like all these different domains and and and because like you can't even That's the other thing is like you you sort of wanna like separate the sending accounts too. Mhmm. Mhmm. I've I've since Did
Jordan Gal:you do that yourself?
Brian Casel:I did. It was a complete pain in the ass. Okay. And I've since moved to a service called Maldozo, which basically replaces the the need for Google Workspace Yep. Which is great.
Brian Casel:I think they are startups. They they were knocking out some kinks when I was getting started. But And then I I use What's it called? Instantly..ai, I believe.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Brian Casel:It's not even really an AI tool. They just have AI in their domain.
Jordan Gal:Sure. Because why not?
Brian Casel:But that's You know, it's one of of the many cold email outreach tools that you could use. There's another whole side to like building lists and and all that. Don't get into all the details there but Right. There's plenty of tools to find your your ideal prospects, know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We use smart lead for a lot of things combined with Google sheets but just to talk about two two services. So Brian Shankman runs a service called super Seller. So superseller.co. And that's who we have been working with on the outbound side.
Jordan Gal:So he set up the system, including the domains and and the copywriting and then manages it also. So it was it was great because we'd have done that in the past ourselves. And even when we had on staff some salespeople who had done it before and and and were familiar with it, Brian just like elevated everything. Made everything so much easier and so much better at the same time. Yep.
Jordan Gal:And now we're working I have to give a shout out because Michael Mike is a a listener. But Mike Benson runs a a company called Male Reef. Male, r e e f. Mhmm. And that feels like we're going from like the civil war to World War one.
Jordan Gal:Like things are like getting mechanized. So right now, we did what what you did on the on the domain front with some tools that made it make it easier. You know, as opposed to doing it totally manually.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That's essentially what like Maldozo does. I don't know. May maybe Malreap is a similar idea.
Jordan Gal:It's similar but it's just like you can really scale.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:So you could do You know, you can get to a place where you're sending a 100,000 emails a month. Yeah.
Brian Casel:So we I are mean and that's the other thing about having multiple emails like, you know, because there's a limit to how many you can send like per day. Like it's you know, it it's a question of like how safe you wanna play it but it's like only like, I don't know, something like 50 or something like that. Like, it is recommended like per day per email. Otherwise Mhmm. You know, because these services will notice like you're sending the same email over and over again.
Brian Casel:And then there's you know, for for people who aren't familiar, there's also the warm up period where there's a lot of tools that handle that for you which is
Jordan Gal:like Yep.
Brian Casel:This gets again getting into the weeds but like before you can even really start sending from a cold email outreach program like you have to like show some what looks like organic activity in your email client to to show that you're sending and and receiving emails back. That takes Yeah. About like four weeks to quote unquote like warm up. Yeah. That's As sending day.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:I love that. I just love the the concept of that. Yeah. Just get getting ready to hammer the market. Right.
Jordan Gal:We are currently in the warm up period with Male Reef. So our outbound right now we send about 450 emails a day. So it will be interesting to see what happens when that is like tripled, quadrupled
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:And and so on in in about a month.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That's yeah. We're we're a little bit more than that per week across all the different email campaigns. And then, you know, and so like about twice a year now, I go through the process of what do you call it? Just like rebuilding our list.
Brian Casel:Right? Like we we have a we have a lit we have a couple different ways that we build lists of of prospects and and then we build it up to like something like 20 or 30,000 contacts and that'll last us for like the next six months of cold outreach, you know like. Yeah. So I and then that's like a that's like a probably like a month project. I have I have an assistant who works that little task for me and we just do that like twice a year to build up a list.
Jordan Gal:Alright. Well, we're we're gonna see where where that leads. It yeah. It does feel like the you know, there's a question in Ripple now from someone asking me like, how will I know if this is, like, working? If we should you know, what's the criteria?
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. I I have really stopped thinking about that. Originally going in, if you recall a few months ago, I was like, you know, basically, you know, one product every four months, get it up in two months, push it for two months, let's see if we should stick with their pivot again or launch a new product. I kinda stopped thinking that way
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And mentally all in Yep. On Rosie and just, you know, I think it's gonna take a while to make it work. Yeah. But we like it and we like the potential and the feedback so far is is good. And therefore, like, I've kinda shed the idea of another product and more around the well, we're just gonna persevere with this product and that might mean pivoting in direction and strategy and who we're focusing on, but not not a different product.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I I like that for you because you you have the firepower, you have the funding, you have the team, you have a great product already right out of the gate and and you're in a great space. And like Yeah. It Right. There there's so There many there are so many more moves for you to make.
Brian Casel:And so many more things to build and figure out on go to market, on all that stuff, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Right. We we are basically in search of a channel Mhmm. And a market to capture some element of product market fit and how to reach them and Yes. And then Yeah.
Jordan Gal:It feels like if we're careful enough on spend, then you can kinda make it work.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, you know, actually on that on that note, like what's what's next? Like that's where I find myself today is I I just spent the past month really hammering on this ripple idea. And now, I I tweeted about this yesterday like, I got it to like what I think of as like a checkpoint, like a finished state. Not finished forever, but finished for now.
Brian Casel:Right? There there are still more things that I'm deploying to it and and you know, I talked about the growth hack ideas. But like, I'm not I'm decidedly not all in on on this Sure. Product or any product.
Jordan Gal:Right. That's almost the strategy.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yep. My strategy that I'm embracing now is build a bunch of ideas. Just get a just just act. Get out of analysis paralysis.
Brian Casel:Get out of putting all my eggs in one basket. I don't have the kind of funding or runway of a of a funded startup. I'm a bootstrapper. I I have a consulting business that I'm running now. And and when I'm not working on client projects, I am hacking on product ideas.
Brian Casel:So I'm I'm starting to turn my focus again to to like the Sunrise dashboard idea. I'm playing around with some programmatic SEO stuff to to get that going, but maybe building that into sort of a system, maybe a product around programmatic SEO. I'm just starting to like hack on on stuff. And and I and I think like having spent the last month on Ripple and got and getting sort of like getting it to a finished product. That could be sort of like the pattern for me now.
Brian Casel:Is like spending about a month to to get the MVP of a product of mine into the world. Mhmm. And I've been, you know, I I talked about last time I I launched my service 1month.app that I'm I'm literally starting on on one of those for a client next week. Oh, cool. So and this gets back to like Screen Studio.
Brian Casel:I wanna be more public about the things that I'm building. I have ideas for content around like a series of videos on building an app in five five business days or something like that, know. Or building an app over the course of a month. And just really publicizing the work that I'm doing on on these products for the purpose of content, for the purpose of building, and just for putting stuff into my portfolio that could who knows where it could where it can go. Like like I need to be planting more seeds because my portfolio of assets is has been sort of stagnant for for longer than I would like.
Brian Casel:So I need to get new stuff going. That's that's my mindset. I must say like building new, the speed that I'm able to build at now is incredible. With with the use of AI, it is incredible. What you go to
Jordan Gal:in development.
Brian Casel:This is really interesting.
Jordan Gal:A lot of things about Claude, lot of things about Cursor.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Cursor I don't use Cursor. I tried it. I have not really used Claude. I I wanna check that out.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. I'm mostly just using chat GPT.
Jordan Gal:GPT?
Brian Casel:Frankly, it I do use so my coding text editor is RubyMine. It's Cursor is a is sort of a fork off of Versus Code, which is like one of the most popular ones. Now they all like Cursor, Versus Code has Copilot. I use RubyMine which has AI, which I think uses ChatGPT. So like, it's built into into all the text editors now.
Brian Casel:But I've I've and I that's what I've been using for the last like two, three years where where like it'll help you complete a sentence or complete a line of code. Right? And so that's good for like day to day small AI help in your coding workflows. But what I found in building new, building a new app from the ground up with with Ripple, and I have an app template and stuff that I use, I find myself going directly to ChatGPT, especially with four o, which is way faster Mhmm. To generate content, to generate stuff.
Brian Casel:So I just go to chat GPT and be like, alright, this is what I'm building. We need to we need to wire up the controller, the view, the model for this. Here's how it's gonna work. Here's the logic that I want. Fire it up.
Brian Casel:And then I copy and paste and put that into my app, and then I polish it up and get it working. And it's like so much faster than me writing all that stuff from scratch.
Jordan Gal:So like the structural foundation It's just like of the app?
Brian Casel:Like building a new app from the ground up is so is like, I mean, a 100 times faster than I was like two years ago. Like because it Two years ago, I was pretty good at building full stack, but I was writing every single part of it. Mhmm. If I'm if I'm creating a new model and a controller, I'm writing every line of that model and controller. Like, yeah, I might copy and paste some common patterns that I have, but but it's still me doing it.
Brian Casel:Now, for the most part, it's like, okay, I need to I need to do this this this logic for this background job, for this thing that I need to do. Here's what it needs to do. Boom boom boom. Here's the here's the programming logic. Pop that into ChatGPT.
Brian Casel:It gives me a it gives me like the the 100 lines of code that I need for that logic. I grab that. I pop it into my app. I test it. I tweak it.
Brian Casel:I polish it. And I ship it like the next day. Like, that's the workflow.
Jordan Gal:And pretty wild.
Brian Casel:I mean, that's literally how I'm I'm I'm sort of amazed at like the taking this idea of Ripple from idea to what it is today in the last four weeks. That would have not been possible a couple years ago. Would have been four or five months of work right there, you know. And and then even the other part is like getting into okay. So you're building new, so you're gonna hit a roadblock all the time.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. Alright. This this piece is really complex. Okay. So like this week, I I spent a lot of time doing like spam bot protection so so that our search box on the homepage of Ripple does not get abused.
Brian Casel:Right? Okay. There's some stuff happening like underneath the hood that that hopefully is is invisible to users, but I wanna make sure that we're not gonna get hammered with spam on that search box. And hitting the API and hitting our database and all this stuff. Right?
Brian Casel:Like that's a pretty complex problem to figure out and and implement in the right way without harming the user experience. And I just it's me in collaboration with ChatGPT to get through all the hairy problems with that. It took like twenty four hours to get it going, you know. Like it's it's incredible, the speed.
Jordan Gal:So you are you are accidentally a 12 startups in twelve months person?
Brian Casel:Maybe. I don't know. I'm not I'm not like doing that thing where like, oh I'm gonna proclaim that every calendar month this year, I'm gonna release a new app like none of that.
Jordan Gal:I'm But the pace, you you keeping up.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, and I'm not I'm not necessarily trying to start something and then stop working on it a month later. But I am I I I'm just following my gut on everything where it's like, okay. I I know where this current project needs to get to. Where it gets to a point where it's okay if I could turn my attention to something else and and it won't completely like kill all the momentum that I had over there.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So like like just just knowing like what is the next finished checkpoint that I need to get to. Like for for Ripple, that was basically where we're at today, which is like home page is live. People can sign up and search and use it for free and interact. I've got some some like notifications that go out to help engagement.
Brian Casel:Okay. So it's it's at a good point. Now I can start to think about something else that can be more of like a revenue generating type product. That's more what I'm focused on now. And and what and so like Okay.
Brian Casel:Like right now my thinking is with Sunrise dashboard, which is still just in an idea phase, my first task is to see if I could fire up a programmatic SEO system to generate pages that can start driving traffic to this thing. And I'll probably spend the next couple of weeks building that and deploying that. And then it's like, okay. Let's see if that works and get some traffic and I'll probably then turn my attention to something else for for
Jordan Gal:And then I can Right. As it starts to roll.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And then like here and there, day here, a day there, I can I can pop back into Ripple and improve some little feature or I can or I can go build Sunrise dashboard if I'm getting Mhmm? You know, enough early access sign ups and things like that. And it it just optionality, keeping it open, doing a bunch of things. I sort of like to jump around a little bit.
Brian Casel:I had a good conversation with Josh Pigford the other day on on my other podcast. We talked a little bit about doing multiple projects and products and going down the rabbit hole for three weeks and benefiting from that, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. Cool. I I like watching Josh do that.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. For sure.
Jordan Gal:I I like his he just doesn't feel very self conscious about Yeah. Switching attention. Hey, this is what I'm into. I'm just gonna share what I'm doing right now that is what it might be three d printing. It might be taking down, you a designer that screwed me.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. But I'm gonna focus
Brian Casel:on it. Yeah. Sure. But it's it's also cool because it's like, you just get exposure to so many different problems and so many different new skill sets and that you can take what you learned from one thing and bring it into another thing. And and like everything that I build goes into my app template.
Brian Casel:So like whenever it's something that I know I'm gonna reuse, it it goes right into my app templates. So I did like just in building Ripple, I 10 x'd my templates. So that like the next app that I fire up is gonna be that much faster to get going.
Jordan Gal:Interesting. Yeah. Cool. Well, we are we're gonna see what the next week hold for us.
Brian Casel:Yes, sir.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We're we're officially self serve. Anyone that wants to jump in and test things out can feel free at hey, Rosie.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I gotta I gotta try that out.
Jordan Gal:You should. I I'm gonna post a video of me inside of the basically the what we're calling public Rosie, which is the phone number you can just call to ask about our actual product.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And so it's an example of a SaaS company using the phone. For us, it's more important than maybe others because people wanna hear and experience the product and the end result of the product is actually a phone call.
Brian Casel:Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. But it's been
Jordan Gal:it's been fun thinking about it in that context because I've showed it to a few founders. I showed it a few investors also and it's a trip. It's it's a trip. So I would have on the screen, this is probably what I'll show also in in in the recording that I make. I will ask a question on the phone, on speaker phone.
Jordan Gal:And on the screen, I will highlight me asking something similar, maybe not verbatim. And then the response, will highlight in the app. And then all of a sudden, you'll hear the exact words that I want Rosie to say when asked a question like it. And then maybe I'll ask it slightly differently and she'll give an answer that's slightly different. So it's it feels like a person like adjusting and saying the same thing but with different words.
Brian Casel:Where do okay. So how do you feel about the product today as it stands? Like like in in your phone number for Rosie, what do you feel confident in it answering? And like have you found any spots where it's like, yeah, it's not quite there yet for the for this or that type of conversation or or
Jordan Gal:at we we we find some things that are silly, some things that are serious, and are already you know, right now we're we're listening to user recordings.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:We're reading transcripts, and we are identifying things that should be improved. So the way I look at it, the way I just explained to my team at All Hands a few days ago, that we have a good product that is 80% of the way there. It works. You can ask you questions. It talks back to you.
Jordan Gal:It does things like set appointments. It sends you text message confirmation. You can go into the app and add a new FAQ, and the answer will be better for it because you just trained it by adding an FAQ. We're 80% of the way there. The next 10% is from feedback and learning.
Jordan Gal:So a piece of feedback was Rosie was saying, is there anything else I can assist you with today? Right. Totally reasonable thing to say. But if you say the those exact words three times in a two minute conversation, it's weird. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Is there anything else I can assist you with today? You know, and then thirty seconds later, is there anything else I can Yeah. So we so a lot of it is is solvable with code. You just say Yeah. Here's this phrase, say it differently if you've already said it before.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. And and you know that as a developer, you you just code that in. You say, if this comes up more than once, so now she'll say, is there anything else I can assist you with today? And then if it makes sense to ask something similar, she'll say, anything else I can help you with?
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:So these little tiny tweaks that just improve things over time, I think that's the next 10%. The last 10% is going to be a challenge. Yeah. A combination of breakthrough innovation, model improvement, time, user feedback, and that I basically have set the expectations to our team. That's gonna be really hard and churn is not gonna be really good until we get to that last 10%.
Jordan Gal:So we're in for a lot of work.
Brian Casel:I'm guessing the is more complex like working with customers to help them or like almost like consulting customers, like the AI being able to consult customers on stuff.
Jordan Gal:There's some of that and there's also human conversation. Edge cases are not that edgy. Mhmm. You know, something that comes up that isn't just what when are you open? What services do you offer?
Jordan Gal:Can I set an appointment? Like, it's actually a lot. A large percentage of conversations have at least one element that is slightly different. It's just a matter of style, how people speak to each other, the way I call a business, and the way my wife calls a a business are completely different.
Brian Casel:Very different.
Jordan Gal:My wife likes to pick up the phone and explain and then ask the question. I like to ask the question because I mean whatever it is. So matching that
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Is difficult and there's also a ton of work on the UI and the UX itself where we are getting good as a team improving an agent and making it better. But that does not equal a total stranger being able to come in and within thirty minutes have it be working really well.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I know you're really going for like the self serve strategy on this. But I I just can't help but think that like what you're building really There there's still an opportunity for for your team or someone to to be the consultant for your customers to help them set up and optimize their agent, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We're we're starting to see like maybe two tiers and they literally might match with pricing tiers. Yeah. Where someone that values speed and being able to do it on their own without talking to anyone and just getting their agent their own 80% of the way there and that's just a huge help and that's $50 a month and and they're happy with that. And then other businesses that are more sensitive to what it says and how it responds and getting closer to the 95 percent and that is where it may might make sense for our team to jump in and offer a service or to have the tools that if you are willing to spend hours in the tool making it awesome that you do have those tools.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And of course, we can help with that if it's a $250 or $500 a month tier as opposed to 50 or or a 100. Different versions almost.
Brian Casel:Like I wanna try to find a way to offer a phone number for Clarity Flow customers. And that's that's why I'm really interested in Rosie because I can't really I can't really afford to have somebody on available on the like I would like to use it for presales. I feel like I could potentially use it for presales questions. Right? If we give it the the our own FAQ like these are the features that you could educate customers about.
Brian Casel:And then my fear is that like existing customers will call it and and their conversations with Cat or customer success like those are much deeper and way more complex because they're actually setting up their whole coaching practice on on Clarity Flow and like it's really comp that's why Kat does what she does, know.
Jordan Gal:Right. Right. That might not be good or it might need to be effectively pushed toward leaving a detailed message
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:More so than getting help right there. But yeah, I think the presales mean, you you wanna try it? I'll just call right Yeah.
Brian Casel:Oh, hell yeah. Let's do it. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Hello. Thank you for calling Rosie. Our call may be recorded today for quality control purposes. My name is Rosie. How can I help you?
Jordan Gal:Oh, hi. I'm on your website and I'm just curious if you have a free trial.
Speaker 4:Hey there. Yep. We do offer a free trial. You can try Rosie for seven days, and it includes fifty minutes of free usage. If you go over those minutes, you'll switch to our forty nine dollars month plan.
Speaker 4:How's your business handling calls after hours right now?
Jordan Gal:Right now, just goes to voice mail, which we're not that happy about. Alright. So let's say I go through the free trial, and then what did you say is $49 a month? What's my what's my minute limit for that plan?
Speaker 4:For the $49 a month plan, you get up to two hundred fifty minutes.
Brian Casel:Hey. I gotta
Speaker 4:help over those two hundred fifty minutes, it's 20¢ per minute after that. How's your business handling those missed calls right now?
Jordan Gal:One sec. Hold on. One sec.
Brian Casel:Hey hey, Rosie. Can can I hear Sure.
Speaker 4:Take your
Brian Casel:Is it don't know if my speaker can hear you.
Speaker 4:Nice to meet you.
Brian Casel:Hey, Rosie. I got a quick question for you. Rosie, how how does the setup process work with me and my team for my business?
Jordan Gal:I I hung up because I don't think she was able to hear through
Brian Casel:the speaker. Yeah. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. But that's that's it. I'll give you that phone number and you can ask that. And you know, think what you should do is just create an account and put in your your URL and it should be trained on on that. That's the easiest thing is website scraping, then it's trained on the information on the URL.
Jordan Gal:And then I think the best feature we have right now is this f the thing that we're calling FAQ. Yeah. But what it is, it is like it is your when you're in the admin and it's your Rosie account, it's like having the ability to train an employee with your knowledge.
Brian Casel:I love it.
Jordan Gal:And when someone asks you this question, like, want you to be able to say this. This is the right this is the correct answer, and then I can add 30 of those FAQs, and you don't have to remember them. Rosie just knows them from then on, and she does a really good job of adjusting the answers based on how the question was asked and very and you you saw there, like, we started we started doing this thing where instead of just asking answering the question, she goes, how are you how are you doing that now?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Very like sales sales led Yeah. Tactic there. Like it. Yes.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I I I do wanna try it out later. Because I wanted to ask it like just like explain to me what what the setup process is like. Like trying to get away from like a yes or no answer like a
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. Super cool. And so what what we should do is we should be listening to those. Right?
Jordan Gal:As a business
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:We should be listening to those and that is such a great question from someone who's interested in the service that I would then say, how would I want my employee to answer that question? Mhmm. And I would open up a new FAQ and I'd say, what's the setup process like question mark and then I would write exactly what I want Rosie to say in that context. Because sometimes on your website, it the answer might actually be too long where in the phone context, you may wanna say this is what happens and then this and then this and if you need if you need any help, we're always for
Brian Casel:you. And also I could see you using AI to analyze the recordings. Right? Like because that's the other thing that that you know, because over time if a business is generating a lot of phone calls, they're not gonna take the time to actually listen back to them and and optimize them. But but you can use AI to add like, hey, these are like the top five questions that keep coming up again and again.
Brian Casel:Focus on these and put you know Right. You don't have
Jordan Gal:an FAQ for for these two. Do you wanna create them now? A great idea.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like like, oh, these these are some questions that we don't have that These are some questions that came up that we don't have an FAQ for yet, know. Awesome.
Jordan Gal:Cool. That's fun.
Brian Casel:That was cool. It's We we gotta do that again. The the live AI call on air.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Oh, yes. I I wanna get to a point where it's really easy to Like that's my goal with with the recording that I make either today or next week to be able to just go and show how easy it is. You put the URL in, it goes into your account.
Brian Casel:I mean, that could already be have this but like, you can even have a couple of quick videos maybe using the the Screen Studio thing. But like on the website like, yeah, you could just call it and test it out. But really demonstrate like, hey, these are like five or 10 different recordings of real people calling Rosie, calling our Rosie number. Mhmm. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Cool. Good stuff, man.
Jordan Gal:Good to see you. Thanks everyone for listening. Have a great weekend. Later, folks.
