What Customers Want
Hey. It is Bootstrap Web. We're we're back after a slight break. And, yeah, feeling that that crisp early fall air come through the window here.
Jordan Gal:If if 80 degrees and sunny for like ten days straight is crisp fall air, then yes. That's what we're experiencing here in Chicago.
Brian Casel:It's summer
Jordan Gal:all over again.
Brian Casel:Man, this is like this is the the peak. This is the the the perfect month in the Northeast Of The US. The the it's like seventies and then it it dips down into like upper sixties, like pretty sunny most days. Just absolutely perfect. I like the other day, like, I worked outside the entire day just on the deck.
Jordan Gal:No worries. Just outdoor office. Yeah. I remember living in Manhattan and you know, glorious September
Brian Casel:Yeah, man.
Jordan Gal:Everyone back from the summer.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I was at the US Open last week for the tennis which was unbelievable weather for that. Yeah. Awesome.
Jordan Gal:Nice. Well, yeah, I'm pumped for the weekend. We got some fun. It's feels really good to the for the kids to be back at school. Feels like work is back to normal.
Jordan Gal:No vacations on the horizon. Everyone's focused.
Brian Casel:Hell, yeah. Yeah. A just just hooked me up with a ticket to I'm going up to Boston next week to see Pearl Jam at Fenway Park. It should be pretty cool.
Jordan Gal:That is fun.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Can't wait. Alright. Yeah. Other than that other than like being busy with like life and family and fun stuff, we we we got jam packed days of of business.
Brian Casel:Let's talk about it.
Jordan Gal:It's it's work time. Yep. It feels like work season like between here and the holidays and I'm psyched that this is my first q four not being in ecommerce in a long time.
Brian Casel:Oh, yeah. That's a that's a different dynamic.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Black Friday Cyber Monday, just all that stress is out. Our checkout product will be totally, shut down by then. So no customers to to work through on Black Friday. So fully focused.
Jordan Gal:Yes. And rosy everywhere, all day, all
Brian Casel:I love it. Love it. Yeah. Like high level my list today Yeah. I got some I'll I'll do a quick update on on Clarity Flow.
Brian Casel:Things are rolling along nicely there right now. We've got a big new feature that we that's basically live but feature flagged for now. And then what else? I I'm I'm studying business model. There's there's I know what I wanna build in terms of like the next long term commitment focus for building a new asset.
Brian Casel:So now right now, I'm like talking to a lot of people who run this type of business and I'm trying to learn as much as I can and and kinda study this business model. I can get into that.
Jordan Gal:It's interesting you're looking at it from business model first.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Because I was talking about last time how I'm a little burned out on trying to make a SaaS business work. Mhmm. I still build SaaS products as like what I do but I Yep. I'm not In terms of building the next asset and investing a lot of time and commitment to it, I see other opportunities that are more attractive than than starting a than trying to be all in on a SaaS product.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Very interesting.
Brian Casel:Like like basically the the SaaS asset that I have is Clarity Flow and that's gonna continue to do its thing. Yeah. But I'm I'm looking ahead to what's next. And and I mean the other thing on my mind that that I can get into is the frustration or the pain of balancing my time between some frankly really good consulting projects. I've been building MVP SaaS apps for clients and and that's been awesome.
Brian Casel:But but I don't like spending all these days like not building a new asset. That's just selling my time. And Mhmm. It it happens to be a really good form of selling my time but it's ultimately I'm I'm here to build assets and Mhmm. I'm I'm spending too many days not doing that.
Brian Casel:So that's that's the current problem I wanna fix.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Alright. Those those are good topics. I want I wanna ask about the business model side. The way it's translated or maybe relatedly for me is I have like this vision of how I want Rosie as a sass to look and feel and behave.
Jordan Gal:Maybe maybe imposing what I want it to be is a little bit dangerous in terms of like not letting it become what it wants to. But I I I Interesting. Feel okay kinda forcing it.
Brian Casel:You know? I I I yeah. Let's I wanna talk about that. I have
Jordan Gal:some questions. The the crux there is is self serve versus any I thought
Brian Casel:you were talking about that, and I have some questions about that.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Cool. We can get into that when we talk about business model. For us, the big theme is, I guess, how would I describe it, we we have a higher degree of confidence around demand being there, and now we're starting to understand the problem on our hands around activation. Like, we're, coming to terms with, okay.
Jordan Gal:What do we need to do? You know, we got an MVP out. We released this big feature a few days ago for messages, and next week will be appointments. And those are the two features that we feel like make it MVP complete, like version one. This is something that people had told us that they want and they're willing to pay for.
Brian Casel:Messages is like they can like leave a message basically.
Jordan Gal:They can leave a message. They talk
Brian Casel:to the AI but like the AI like gets the good information and stores the message.
Jordan Gal:Yes. You can you can dictate to the AI. You can say when you take a message, I want account number, address, and phone. Those are the three required
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Pieces of information. That's what I'm gonna consider a successful message. So when someone's leaving a message with you for the team or, you know, whatever that transition from conversation to, I wanna leave a message. This is what I need. So you can you can those are custom questions effectively that get wrapped up into what we call a message.
Brian Casel:I know I keep saying this, man, and I'm I'm not like bullshitting here, but I I really do wanna try Rosie. It's just like I have such a long to do list. But every time I hear you talk about it and what it can do, I'm like, I see use cases in Clarity Flow that I I want to have it like like schedule calls with with Kat, our customer success. Mhmm. You know?
Jordan Gal:Cool. Yeah. It it's it's not very far from from you being able to do that. It's it's actually quite close. Would say
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:I would say realistically, you know, two weeks or so. Cool. And then appointments is an interesting thing to talk about because it's it's a feature that we we shrunk before we tackled it. We thought it was gonna be one thing and then we challenged ourselves and we actually came out with a much smaller version of the feature. So we can talk about that.
Jordan Gal:Nice. And you know, we are we are starting to get our marketing engine rolling. We linked up with a new designer, Francois. Fantastic designer and a great like working relationship.
Brian Casel:I think I know him. What what's his last name?
Jordan Gal:You you may have recommended what when I went to Twitter and said, hey, I need, you know, a designer. A few people recommended him. I think I think the name of his company is clearly design. And he does one of these services where it's like a flat rate, you know, based on like tracks. And it's just been such a great experience and it's such a huge addition to the marketing team.
Brian Casel:Nice. So what we
Jordan Gal:did is we actually ended up purchasing two tracks with him. One for the product team, one for the marketing team. So they don't like, I don't wanna take capacity away from product and I don't want product to take away capacity for marketing.
Brian Casel:Does he do he does like design UI UX Yeah. On it?
Jordan Gal:He kinda just does all of it.
Brian Casel:Love it.
Jordan Gal:And so we're launching landing pages. So now all of our ad traffic is going there. So we're kinda like building out the marketing side and starting to understand the challenge that we have around the product and activation. But yesterday was our biggest day of sign ups by like, you know, maybe triple our our previous biggest day. So it feels like it's starting to work and there's still just an enormous amount of work to do.
Brian Casel:Yeah. What do you know about the activation funnel there? Like, how do you so what what does it look like when customers sign up and then what what can you see? What kind of insights can you get from there? So Are they talking to your team?
Brian Casel:Like is there customer support stuff that that you can learn from?
Jordan Gal:There's there's a lot of customer support and you know, there's there's calls happening every day with with individual customers. So there's a lot of learning. It's kinda you know, some things are surprising. The the the Wait.
Brian Casel:But it it is self serve. Right? But
Jordan Gal:some It is self serve. We encourage conversation. So when you get into our product for the first time, we use Intercom and we put a little banner that basically says, want help training your rosy agent. Click for a fifteen minute, you know, conversation. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:So we are encouraging as much of that as possible. Intercom for support and chat has been great. Just just really reliable and really good. And we we, you know, we can tweak just enough where we can do things like, you know, once you're in the admin for more than ten minutes, make this pop up. Like, once you've hit this marker, have this thing pop up.
Jordan Gal:So we're encouraging as much conversation as possible because we we clearly I mean, we do not have everything we need. We've had a a funny experience where, you know, our VP of product, Jess, has been on maturity leave. She gets back two weeks ago. She walks into the product with a clear set of eyes. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And of course, it's immediately like, oh, why would we do x y and z now that we know who this customer is? So that has helped understand the challenge that we have around activation because we have someone with totally fresh eyes coming in and saying, I'm hearing from the team what you want people to do and be able to accomplish. I'm hearing from customers what they're trying to accomplish and we got work to do on our admin to make it doable, easy, understandable
Brian Casel:things like use cases that they're trying that the customers are trying to do that are different from what you're offering? Or or they're just like they're it's like navigating around the admin interface? Like what are they trying to do?
Jordan Gal:I so they are trying very specifically to accomplish a few things. Right? They wanna get it trained. They wanna test it out. They wanna understand how to go live with it.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:But I think we made very understandable mistakes around the UI when you just put an MVP together and you get it launched and then you get feedback. So now that we have feedback, we realized all the things we got wrong. Mhmm. Right? And you know you're not gonna get it quite right.
Jordan Gal:The challenge I think a lot all of us face when we do this, at least I know for I can speak for myself. Once you get something launched, it's actually not that easy to say, now that we've learned, let's make all these adjustments because you have so many other things going on.
Brian Casel:Refactoring is always, like, harder than building it. You know?
Jordan Gal:So we feel like we have one really good opportunity. We got Jessica back. We've got this new designer. We have a bunch more information. So now we're gonna relook at our existing admin very unsentimentally.
Jordan Gal:We're gonna tear this thing up and and get it to the right place.
Brian Casel:I like it. I've done so many it's it's kinda crazy at this point how many different iterations I've done in in the Clarity flow, onboarding flow, the the whole user experience, the whole user interface, the navigations, like all of it has gone through like like lots and lots of hours of building stuff and then hours of just tearing it all out and and building it again.
Jordan Gal:Like Really hard. Yeah. Yeah. Because you're always making a trade off and then later on, you look at that trade off that you made in a different light based on new information and then you feel silly. Oh, okay.
Jordan Gal:Well, I I I knew I knew I was complicating this thing, but people told me those are really important to them. So it's okay to complicate it. Then you come back and say, okay. I was wrong about that. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:It hurt too much.
Brian Casel:On the onboarding UI UX stuff, a change like our our most recent iteration. So two iterations ago, I spent a lot of time building a big onboarding video experience. Right? You come in and and you're presented with this like kinda big pop up that gives you like like a like a like tabbed interface with videos and like, alright, let me introduce you to conversations in Clarity Flow. Now, here's courses in Clarity Flow.
Brian Casel:Now, here's Clarity Flow Commerce. And each of those had like a five minute video that you could watch. Okay. I also like, you know, wired it up throughout the app so that they can like like pull pull back up the the, you know, the like the in app education experience. And and I did get a lot of churns and and I it took me a while to to connect the dots on this but like a lot of people part so of the cancellation reasons it was like, it's just too complicated.
Brian Casel:It's it's like too much work to set up. It's just like super overwhelming. Right? And so the the more recent iteration was I ripped all that out. Like all that design work is out.
Brian Casel:And now, it's it's more about like like, just let let you explore. You're gonna come in and and we've got a main navigation on the left side. You just click, alright, conversations. When the conversation page is empty, we give you an empty state that gives you a few tips on like, alright, what are conversations? What do you what would you use them for?
Brian Casel:Here's a quick video if you wanna see it. If if not, just go ahead and create your first conversation. If you navigate over to the library, you know, it's empty. We'll just give you a couple like on the empty state, just a couple tips. But you can just like whatever is wherever you want to navigate to, go ahead and do that and we give you a little little help, you know.
Brian Casel:I I have noticed I think an increase in or a decrease in churn, increasing conversions and definitely less of the of the comment like, it's too complicated, you know. But that combined with like Kat being there to help people but Right.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. But it didn't work the way you wanted to the the very guided experience.
Brian Casel:Because we always think like, let's guide our users down a specific tiny tunnel because we want them to do exactly this and then this and But then people are just not that way. And I think that's another thing with SaaS. Like, there are some SaaS where that really works where you just wanna funnel them down a down a track and they cannot leave that track. But I think more times than not, at at least from what I'm seeing and like customer behavior in general. People are more savvy with SaaS tools.
Brian Casel:They want to try them out and click around and figure it out themselves. Just make it easy and handle all the little all the little like, what if you what if you fall over to here? Then then what's then how do we handle you? You know?
Jordan Gal:That is a challenge, man. Because, you know, some enterprise software gets bought by someone who doesn't use the product on a day to day basis. So you then have no choice. You just go up to the learning curve. You have no choice.
Jordan Gal:We paid for it. This is what you're using for customer support. Therefore, learn it.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Self serve and, you know, SMB, like, it's you have a lot of choice. If you don't like it within the first sixty seconds, ninety seconds, you're out. And I know what experienced product people say is that you should not need a tour. You shouldn't need a wizard. You shouldn't need a tool tip.
Jordan Gal:The app should do it for you. And that just feels like a really high bar in in today's world. And I think We're gonna talk more about this as we're doing onboarding and admin work over the next few weeks.
Brian Casel:I think that's one of those things that seems to be it's like a pendulum that goes back and forth. I think for a bunch of years there that that did make a lot of sense. Like, the the notion of like, do wanna point them down the the the path that we want them to go. But I I also think that like that adds friction. Like Mhmm.
Brian Casel:People different people have different styles of becoming oriented in software. And I think that the more that we can we can lean on like really well known conventions like this is a this is a chat interface. It should look like a chat interface.
Jordan Gal:Right. This is an inbox. It should feel like an
Brian Casel:It should feel like an Just you just use existing patterns that people know. You know? Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's it's so when I think about that, I I have two competing issues. On one hand, I'm a believer in the Nikita Beer School of get them to the moment within seconds. And on the other hand, we talked about, like, my vision for the company, how I want the company to look and feel, and how that is self serve, frictionless. Right?
Jordan Gal:My mantra to the team is we're gonna get this thing to a point where it can take on it can onboard a 100 people a day. And because of that, you we cannot require a demo. We can't use a crutch of convert. We can't we don't have any options. We have to make this work by someone walking in not knowing what it is and coming out the other end activated and successful with it.
Jordan Gal:So
Brian Casel:between I push back on you on that. Oh, okay.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Give me a second. Give sec. So between those two, I am willing to sacrifice some of the experience to get them to the sooner because I think that buys us a little more time with them and attention to be able to get them onboarded and successful beyond that initial moment. It it's almost like that moment might need to be out in the marketing experience
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:Before they get into the account.
Brian Casel:What what agree with that. Okay. So I I agree with you that like, show them and make them feel an moment as soon as possible. And yeah. Maybe part of like the marketing funnel.
Jordan Gal:Yep.
Brian Casel:Or like the onboarding, you know, thing. But the I think that the point of the of the that moment is to like you said, like to have them buy in to like, okay. I'm not gonna go elsewhere yet. I think this has what I want. So now I'm going to give it the time.
Jordan Gal:Right. You've convinced me
Brian Casel:You've convinced me to like spend more time. And more time might be weeks, you know, to fully adopt a tool
Jordan Gal:Days, in their weeks. What what's your push back on the the 100 a day?
Brian Casel:I mean, nothing against the volume but I I think that I think that this this type of product with the type of customers that you're going after, they do need hand holding. And I think that's peep Just put a person on it. Service. Like, I know it's it's not self serve and maybe you can still have a self serve option. I just think that you're gonna convert so many more of them when you have an official rally, not Rally, Rosie Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Expert on the team ready to help you design your AI prompts and get you all set up. I am know?
Jordan Gal:That's that's a different company. That's a different product. That is $500 a month and
Brian Casel:I I think it's more of a setup fee. I I I picture that more as like a paid first month is like a thousand bucks and then I and then and then charge whatever you want for the next set them up.
Jordan Gal:The you know, Sam who has been talking to the most people in terms of support success, onboarding, so on. He said the same thing.
Brian Casel:Because it's like, I agree with you, like it's the dream to have a self serve thing but I just think that this product in this market at the which is cutting edge, this is it's we're in cutting cutting edge territory here and we're and we're selling to small business. There's a lot of hurdle for them to get over. And that's because it's like Mhmm. They it does require like, it's it's not just an interface problem. It's like a business consultation problem.
Brian Casel:Like, they need to be consulted on like, well, how because like, it's it's probably not even just about taking whatever they currently do on the phone with customers and copying that over to Rosie. I I would bet that a lot of these small businesses have really crappy current phone phone thing. Like Yes. They haven't even figured the old way out.
Jordan Gal:Yes.
Brian Casel:It's not not really as optional.
Jordan Gal:In and whatever else.
Brian Casel:So like if you just picture it like a business consultant working with a small business on how can we optimize our customer service over the phone game, it's like like Rosie should offer that and while you're at it, you're you're consulting but you're setting you're automating it with AI.
Jordan Gal:You know?
Brian Casel:And and that's a that's a one month thing and you have the software to do it. You have the processes to do it. You can have a team get on it. And then month two and onward, you're they're they're charging whatever you're currently charging.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Oh, man. I think it's gonna be a challenge.
Brian Casel:I know. It's like
Jordan Gal:it's It's gonna be a challenge because I don't I I two things. One, I don't want that. Yeah. I I actually don't want it. You know what I mean?
Jordan Gal:It doesn't that doesn't sound good. And and we can definitely get to a place where we are outsourcing that to to, like, a, you know, a service outside of the company. There are a lot of agencies these days, one and two person agencies that are getting p getting business SMBs set up with AI products. It's like a new category. So we could definitely outsource it.
Jordan Gal:We could definitely push people in that direction, but I don't want it. I think the biggest opportunity in what we have is to create the the product with the least friction in the market and sacrifice some of the complexity and power and Yeah. Figure out a way to make it self serve. That and and what we've
Brian Casel:started to do The go ahead. Sorry. You you go. Finish.
Jordan Gal:I was gonna say what we started to do is we've started to look so appointments is this very important feature. What we started to realize is there are two forms of the appointments feature. One form is dead simple and works with self serve. The other one is not gonna work with self serve. It is a conversation.
Jordan Gal:It turns out everyone does appointments differently. For example, plumbing, thirty minute consultation appointment. No problem. But seventy five percent of those turn into just getting the work done right there. Obviously, if you have a problem, you're like, I don't care how much it cost.
Jordan Gal:You have to fix it or you can't go on. So then that thirty minute turns into sixty minutes, and then that screws up your calendar. So you can't have Rosie booking thirty minute appointments when a lot of them turn into sixty. So as soon as you dip into the nuance of an industry, you realize, oh, this feature is not gonna work self serve. So what we're doing is we've shrunk it down and we're launching this feature with just a counter link.
Jordan Gal:You want appointment? Cool. Enter your Calendly, your SavvyCal, your HubSpot, and then we will text it to the caller and that's it. So that's a conscious decision that if we launch the full feature, it moves us away from self serve. If we launch the small feature, it keeps us in the self serve bucket.
Jordan Gal:And then we can reserve the full complex feature Mhmm. For when we're ready to open up a 250, $500 a month tier and Yeah. Then we're we're game. We'll do the customer success.
Brian Casel:That that definitely is that's literally what we just built in Clarity Flow. The whole appointment booking with with the buffer time and all all that. Yeah. That's It's it's super complicated to build. That's right.
Brian Casel:Took it took us several months to to get it out.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And then imagine an external service tapping into your API and trying to get it right. Yeah. By just by just throwing appointments on. It's kind of easy to throw an appointment onto an API.
Jordan Gal:It's not easy to start looking at the rules and what about this buffer thing and
Brian Casel:For sure.
Jordan Gal:So that's later.
Brian Casel:Alright. Like one one last quick point to to push back because this is not even on you. It's it's on because I hear this from so many people, know, I don't want to do services in in my staff. Yeah. I Look, I totally get it.
Brian Casel:Right? But I think that people wrongly and you know, this goes back to like my productized services days, like talking about that. I just think that people wrongly conflate done for you, done with you SaaS onboarding services with like what we all know is like consulting serve. Like what I do with clients right now building MVPs on rails, that is pure consulting. Every single Yeah.
Brian Casel:Reuse some components here and there. But every project is different. I'm spending weeks just completely custom from one project to the next. That is pure services consulting. Right?
Brian Casel:Mhmm. The thing, to me it's not like I'm not a I would love to have a SaaS where we can personally onboard customers because it's so predictable. Like every single one follows the same exact process. And and we have our own tech to supercharge that. Yeah.
Brian Casel:You know?
Jordan Gal:You can handle the nuances as you go as opposed to trying to build
Brian Casel:the nuances. That's the thing. Like you can you can boil it down to like there basically are no nuances. You know? Like in terms of what we care about, there are no nuances.
Brian Casel:The customer, it's like hard. So they need help. But to us, like we can make it super predictable and put a person on it and give them a process and give them our tech. Like the like, I had it working really well with Restaurant Engine back in this was over ten years ago where we were setting we were designing entire websites for restaurants. But my team would do it in three hours each, you know.
Brian Casel:Because we have our own tech to to make it easy. Right.
Jordan Gal:And then you get a a high LTV Yeah. Because they don't churn out.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Because they they pay for it upfront, So you that that's the I just think that there's a very different thing between done for you SaaS onboarding and like what we all know is like services. Yeah. What's the
Jordan Gal:know. Look, it's not you know, I've done it. Right? Yeah. Hardhook at the end was a forced demo, $500 a month and help them get onboarded.
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:And that that worked. But I want a 100,000 customers. And the only way to get a 100,000 customers is none
Brian Casel:of
Jordan Gal:that at all. Almost none of that. Maybe there's an element of that in the higher tiers, in annual contracts, in larger companies. Maybe there's an ecosystem of companies that we can point to to say you you have oh, you're in the health care field? Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:This company specializes in getting people onboarded to Rosie in the health care field.
Brennan Dunn:Right.
Jordan Gal:And and I think we can get there, but I I at least for now, I'm gonna shoot for the actual goal. Maybe we won't be able to reach that ideal, but if we if we design the product to onboard a 100 people a day and keep the North Star as like, what would we do if we wanted a 100,000 customers? I think that will drive us toward decisions that are very different on the product itself.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So we'll we'll see over the next few months.
Brian Casel:Yeah. You have the resources and the time to to execute on that. So yeah. Go for it.
Jordan Gal:We'll we'll we'll see. If it's if it's right, then great. It it can be a breakthrough because this is a very big problem, but it doesn't have many solutions because right now the only solutions are voice mail and a third party answering service.
Brian Casel:Right. Right.
Jordan Gal:So it it be, like, blitzed in that way to growth even though, right, there's effectively there's effectively no there's no incumbent.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I do like the message aspect of it. That that seems like a really powerful, like, fallback option. Like, you don't have to build a lot of complicated logic, but still get a lot of value out of the like the AI talking getting getting what you need out of the customer and then recording it. Like, that seems like a really powerful win without needing without needing to build a lot.
Brian Casel:You know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's so complicated, and we don't know how to present it yet to the caller. Right? When the caller calls, should the Rosie agent say, I'm the AI assistant for North Shore painting.
Jordan Gal:I can answer your questions, set an appointment, or leave a message for the team. Which one would you like to do? Like, should it say that or should it have a natural conversation and let it go where it wants to go? Like, I don't know. Yeah.
Brian Casel:It's tough. I mean, yeah. You could sort of maybe like like the anyway, we're we're gonna get product design here. Like, I can go all day with this stuff. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:What else you focusing on?
Brian Casel:Yeah. So I mean, Clarity Flow is in its second month of its experiment where we don't have any trials. They just sign up and pay upfront for whatever plan they want.
Jordan Gal:Respect for sticking with it.
Brian Casel:You know, I again, I I talked about it last time. I thought I would it would be a one month and done and the numbers show like this is worth giving it a second month. And so, here we are in the second month. We're about a little more than a week in, and it's going pretty well. So, you know, it it if if it continues, then September is gonna be the second pretty good up month in a row.
Brian Casel:And then maybe it becomes a third. We'll see, you know.
Jordan Gal:Can you trace It's like, what's working? What's doing this? Is it is it the traffic going up? Is it the conversion? Is
Brian Casel:it stuff now finally working. I think the product is in a good place. It's not perfect yet. It sort of never is, but Kat on customer success has been awesome. We have I mean, still have churn, you know.
Brian Casel:And I and and it's like the really difficult churn to It's not like, oh, everyone's churning because we're missing this feature. Let's just build that feature. It's it's it's not that. It's Was it all over? It's it's just like you know, some percentage of coaches are they don't have serious coaching businesses and and others do.
Brian Casel:Or you know, some of them are like, oh, love the product but my coaching is on hold until until next spring. Like okay, well, I don't know what to do with that. You know, so so it's like a combination of like getting the you know, the the the coaches with the really good businesses in and that's Those are all the customers who do really well and and stick with us. And so that's you know. I don't know.
Brian Casel:So so then what else? We we did finish and ship our, we call it appointments feature. It's it's essentially the the calendar booking feature. You can, you know, it's a it's a it's like essentially a Calendly built in to Clarity Flow. So like fully seamlessly integrated.
Brian Casel:So like it can do some pretty it does all the things that you would expect. You can connect to your Google Calendar. You can you can set your availability windows. Lots of rules around that. You can set buffer time like don't don't book me back to back, you know, minimum notice like only book this far out.
Brian Casel:It has actually team appointments too. Some round robin logic kind of stuff if you have a coaching company.
Jordan Gal:How did you do? Because my initial instinct is, did did you overbuild it, my friend? That's a lot of features.
Brian Casel:I mean, it's it that that remains to be seen because it's not actually It's live, but it's behind a feature flag. Okay. The only thing we're waiting on is Google verification. I mean, did we overbuild it? I I don't again, it remains to be seen but I I I think that that we put in what I what I think to be our like essentials.
Brian Casel:Like if because the goal with this feature is to say like you can cancel your Calendly account. Or or like a lot of coaches are coming in and they don't use a Calendly. You know? Or a SavvyCal or whatever. Like they don't they don't use those.
Brian Casel:Replacement. They are comparing us to competitors and they're and and we constantly got the question for years. Like, can I can I book my my coaching sessions through this? And then we say like, no. Just use Calendly or SavvyKey.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. Sure. And and they don't like that. They they don't wanna connect and duct tape multiple tools. When they're when they're searching for coaching software, they expect to do all the coaching things in this platform.
Jordan Gal:And And and that was an expectation.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And and I I refused to build it for for two or three years. I was like, this is this is not worth building. And and just the the requests got louder and louder. And and then it got to a point where it's like, alright, we've we've built everything else and I'm and I'm seeing churn and I'm seeing non conversions due to this feature.
Brian Casel:So so we pulled the trigger with it. We, you know, we didn't build every it's only Google Calendar. It's not Microsoft. It's not Apple. I don't know if or when we'll do those.
Brian Casel:But it does the things, you know. It it does the essentials. The the other cool thing about it is that it is integrated into Clarity Flow. So like when you book an appointment, it also sets up an async conversation for you so that you can message before the appointment and after the appointment. And you know, if you cancel or update the appointment, it it all posts into this async flow.
Brian Casel:So it it seamlessly integrates there and and it integrates with our Clarity Flow Commerce. So what coaches really wanna do is they wanna sell
Jordan Gal:Oh, interesting. A point
Brian Casel:of That's the That's why that it's part Okay. That's why it's an essential for them. It's like they're selling If their
Jordan Gal:need a one hour session to focus on this $100
Brian Casel:buy it here and then that gives you access to my calendar. Awesome. So all that is there. And so it's live. It's gone through a ton of testing and it's But we have disabled it until we get this Google verification and that's a fun little dance where we have to like basically revise our language and our privacy policy to suit Google's needs and Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Get the right scopes approved and and all that. But I I think we've you know, I'm I'm still waiting but but I I think we've responded to their feedback and it should hopefully be live by next week.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Okay. It's a big deal. Yeah. Do you have anything else on the horizon on a feature that you feel like is needed or you you get to chill
Brian Casel:There definitely are
Jordan Gal:to pull back on features. That's my hope.
Brian Casel:For
Jordan Gal:me? No. For me.
Brian Casel:Oh, okay.
Jordan Gal:I I wanna take a step back and and not just rush into building more features, but just give it a minute, listen everyone.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I do yeah. I I think that now that we've shipped that, there definitely are like two or three other big features that I've heard requests for for for over a year or two. And and I'm not yet convinced on whether or not we're gonna build them. My developer does not yet have her next big feature to start working on.
Jordan Gal:Okay.
Brian Casel:But she'll she'll always have bugs to She'll always have a queue of of bugs to work through so that's that's not a problem. But yeah, like like people ask about having forms like like like custom questionnaire form intakes. That's a popular thing with coaches. And then the other thing that that people ask about all the time, this might actually be super easy for us to build is It doesn't sound easy but they they wanna do live calls. And we certainly would not build a live calling tech.
Brian Casel:But we could maybe do like a Zoom integration or a or a Google Meet integration where you're just embedding a Zoom inside Clarity Flow. Which again to me like because we get that request all the time and I'm like, look coaches just use Zoom and then and then for for your non Zoom calls, you just use Clarity Flow. Like, it's not that hard to to have two different tools for that. Yeah. But again, like coaches constantly ask like, it's a coaching platform.
Brian Casel:Can I do my calls right in? Like So we might do some little tricky like integration like like embedded Zoom call kinda kinda deal. But Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Maybe there's Yeah. There's a whole universe of white label stuff out
Brian Casel:there. Yep.
Jordan Gal:We we we have found a lot of white labeling in our competitive arena just because people want to resell as their own. And as of right now, we just again, same mantra. How do you get a 100,000 customers? Word-of-mouth. How do you get word-of-mouth?
Jordan Gal:Brand. So everyone we talked to were like, we will do whatever in terms of reselling affiliates, but you you cannot take our brand off it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But even those those features that I talked about like I Those all seem like nice to haves at this point. I I really think that like, especially now that we've shipped appointments. Appointments seems like the final big pillar feature. Like the final thing that goes in our main navigation.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. Everything else like, I feel like the product is pretty close to complete. There's always gonna be UX like all the features that we have, we're always circling back to make them easier to use. Mhmm. But yeah, I I don't It wasn't like last year where we just had a long list of things to get us
Jordan Gal:into Yeah. Payments.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But like now, And and I And we have a far less amount of feedback on like, oh, it's missing this, it's missing that. Like it's it's got everything you need. It's just a question of whether you activate and use it, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And then some people always wanna use features in a slightly different way and that is feature work but it's not a new feature. I yeah. When when you know, I at Rally, there was an endless, absolutely endless number of features. Payments and checkout and then you look at Shopify's checkout, you're like, I mean, there's like hundreds of people working on this thing.
Jordan Gal:There's literally endless features Yep. And endless integrations. What I have told the team is my hope is that that is not the case with Rosie. That we do not just build features forever. That we really get to a point where I mean, how would you describe it?
Jordan Gal:Like, main feature set pillars? Yeah. Is what you call?
Brian Casel:Yeah. If it's like so simple that it does one or a couple things like really well and it's like just known for that. Like that That's been part of the challenge with with Clarity Flow is like it it it has turned into this like kind of a beast of a software. It's not I I wouldn't say it's like the, you know, the software tool that tries to be everything for everyone. I think Zip Message probably was going down that road.
Brian Casel:But then I then I when I changed to Clarity Flow and and niched into Coaches, this market and this type of tool category, like people want the quote unquote all in one, you know. And for coaches, that's like multiple components combined under one platform which makes it a hard product to to build and maintain, you know. Mhmm. But and and like, again, like that it's like it like this is why SaaS is working hard.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yes. On my side, I mean, I I that's pretty much it for me for the the week. We moved everything over into Asana. We were kinda just, you know
Brian Casel:I never clicked with Asana.
Jordan Gal:You know? You you haven't liked it?
Brian Casel:I've I've tried it. I I just never clicked with it.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Or I I'm liking it. Yeah. You know, the last few months has been like, I'm just gonna make a list. I'm gonna knock it down and maybe this little list is like for next week.
Jordan Gal:You know, I'm just trying to keep it real simple. And then we just started to realize, okay. Now we have too many ideas and too many things to do that are not this week or next week, but we do wanna get to them. So we just started putting things into Asana, tier one, tier two, tier three. Tier one, we focus on.
Jordan Gal:Tier two is after we get to tier one, and tier three is, you know, we just want it written down, but we're not pursuing it now.
Brian Casel:I I don't I don't love Notion but I haven't been able to leave Notion. That's that's just been my go to project management for for years now. You know? I I like
Jordan Gal:Notion because it's flexible.
Brian Casel:You can set up however you want.
Jordan Gal:Little lists if you want. If you like, you know, lists with sub lists. You can do that or whatever else. Yep. And that's it.
Jordan Gal:We are we're out there.
Brian Casel:We're in
Jordan Gal:the market. We're trying
Brian Casel:Yeah. There you go, dude. I mean, the other thing that I sort of wanna talk about is like the I I've been actually asked about this a couple times from people in my On my newsletter and and stuff asking about like how do you manage like work life balance? And for me, it's actually not a challenge to manage work and life. Like the family stuff and work stuff.
Brian Casel:That's always been in pretty good balance I think. Especially being able to work at home, being so close to the kids all the time and like I I got a great home life. I don't feel like I'm over I don't feel like my work is like cutting into that side. Right. It's pretty balanced.
Brian Casel:But for me, this year and especially now, the it's it's the hard balance is between client work and my business assets work. And in years past, I was 100% always building my own business assets.
Jordan Gal:Focused on the future.
Brian Casel:Like literally every day of the week, I'm building value. Like you could literally Like the way that I think about it, I think that most business owners probably think about it sorta like this is every single day, I'm trying to increase the number of dollars that I can sell this business for in
Jordan Gal:the future. Mhmm. Mhmm. Like, you know Yeah. Like, cash flow, increase
Brian Casel:Just like
Jordan Gal:you know, overall enterprise
Brian Casel:value. Enterprise value. You know, like, I'm I'm I'm so less concerned about like, what am what am I getting paid for this current hour, like, of work. Like, I don't care. Yeah.
Brian Casel:As long as I'm building an asset.
Jordan Gal:You know? And that's the right thing to focus on especially because prices in the mid market are awesome. They're awesome. You could sell your company for 10 x ARR. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:You gotta get you gotta break a million.
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:So that's like the goal. Just focus on getting to a million ARR, a stable good business, and you could sell for, you know, potentially 10 x depending on Yeah. A bunch a bunch of factors. But that that's the right thing to focus
Brian Casel:So so this year, I I opened the doors again to my consulting work and and now, like, I I I'm pretty regularly booked with one or two simultaneous consulting projects. Like, now, have two. And I've got another new one starting in October. So it's like and these are just like MVP app bills. And and I gotta say, like, for consult I've done all sorts of consulting over the years.
Brian Casel:I've worked at agencies over the years. I used to be a freelance web designer and then I'd had a lot of clients through audience ops and a lot of those were great, but some of them were headaches. A lot of web design clients in the past and agency clients can be headaches to deal with. I gotta say, the clients that I've been working with consulting on like MVPs, my my one month MVP service, it's been sort of a dream in terms of consulting. Like, I I can't really ask for a better situation to just really really cool people to work with.
Brian Casel:That's been awesome. And the projects themselves are are great. And and I'm actually pulling a lot of byproducts out of these prod out of the out of these projects. Like, literally just building up my internal components, my app template with Like I'm building two apps right now that use AI. So now I have like a whole AI system component that I can build AI apps with.
Brian Casel:I built a nice like Stripe payment flow yesterday for for another client like now now that's part of my template library. But at the same time, this is two to three to four days a week where I cannot even touch my own project, my my own businesses. Right? I I can maintain Clarity Flow and direct the team there but I I know what I wanna be building in terms of like my next real big business asset. I I have a clear vision and I'm and I'm talking to a lot of people, learning a lot about that.
Brian Casel:But it requires like full time focus. And it's it's just hard to to balance that. So so that's the next like problem I'm trying to solve. I think what it looks like because I I've been thinking about like really just putting a pause on consulting and just saying like, I can go x number of months without consulting in momentum now though.
Jordan Gal:It's
Brian Casel:tough. Yeah. It is tough. Because like now I'm starting to get clients without any effort. It's just word-of-mouth or or clients coming back for more, you know.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:That takes
Brian Casel:time to build up. It does take time. And and if you pause it, like, it it's really hard to start it back up again. Mhmm. I learned that the hard way.
Brian Casel:So I think that the answer is just be more willing to to bring on my developer and and task that person with, you know, because if I, like, these projects are still gonna require a lot of me especially especially because like I handle all the UI, the UX, like, I think, you know, my client yesterday was was telling me like the big value for them because they are developers that like But they they liked hiring me because like I just had an eye for product. Like they I just make these product decisions just like it's my own product, you know? And they can really outsource that and and work on their other business while while I hack away on their next idea, you know. So I What I could do instead of spending three or four days in a week on a client project, I could spend one or two doing the UI UX and directing my developer on like, okay, now you gotta wire up this stuff and then sort of start to take back some of my time. Know?
Jordan Gal:Think that's think of margin but but gain back some of the time. Give up
Brian Casel:a little margin but I I could afford that and I've got a really efficient team at my disposal here. So Yeah. Like, because like literally like every week that goes by and I'm like, man, I I like I hate that feeling of like Friday is here and I I have not shipped anything new to move the ball forward in this business that I wanna Like I need to be building that next asset and and I'm just letting time go by without doing
Pippin Williamson:Yes. Doesn't feel great.
Jordan Gal:That's the that's the fire. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Not not I'm getting really I'm getting really fascinated with membership models, training, like training and content content and training businesses.
Jordan Gal:It's the business model you're talking about.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:It's not software, but it is valuable on an ongoing basis.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I I think for me, probably the next thing that I will build as a product will be software templates. Like taking like I I have a very valuable components and app template library now. I just need to make it into a product. That could be part of it.
Brian Casel:Like the the thing that I'm thinking through is like, probably under under my instrumental product brand, it's gonna be like some combination of access to my templates or a commute like a growing library of templates. Not all from me, but from community contributors. There would be a community. There would be a growing library of courses and training, especially project based stuff. A a lot of it, if not all of it, is gonna be very AI focused.
Brian Casel:How to build with AI, how to how to leverage AI. And you know, community. And maybe even getting into events like in person events. Like all of that combined into some sort of like annual membership. That's what I wanna start to really commit to and and at the top of that funnel is is YouTube content and and growing an email list.
Brian Casel:Like that stuff takes a lot of daily work to to execute on. But I think that that's the business model that I think if if I were to If I could give it a sustained amount of time and focus, I think it fits my strengths the best. I think it has the best prospects for growing into a really solid business asset. And it's it seems like more attainable than going all in on a SaaS product. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:To try to
Jordan Gal:do the same. It sounds like you like it.
Brian Casel:I Yeah. I do. But I I think that the the key Like, it'll require a lot of work for me upfront and probably me creating the first batch of courses and the templates But and what I wanna do, and I'm talking to a lot of people and trying to learn from people who have built these businesses with a large group of outside contributors.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Not everyone wants to deal with the admin of running that business, but they want if they can contribute, it helps them grow their audience, they can make money from it, they
Brian Casel:can Yeah. I mean, it's it's really interesting because like different businesses do have different models for this. Right? Like sometimes it's like just guest contributors. Sometimes it's like they grow a team of of teachers.
Brian Casel:Sometimes it's And then it's like how do you price it? Is it is it like one membership price or pay or you're selling individual courses? I tend to like one membership price, but then how do you pay out your contributors? Is there like a royalty model? Is there this or that?
Brian Casel:Like So I've been I've been talking to a lot of people and learning. But yeah. I I I I like the idea of building for builders. I I also think that it's the the one of the thing that attracts me to that type of business model is an unlike SaaS, people buy access to this kind of stuff sort of all the time. There's always gonna be demand for more training.
Brian Casel:I I happen to think that there's a ton of demand for AI based training. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:I I love what the funnel looks like for that. It's just a big wide open content funnel at the top in all these different platforms. I see I mean, everyone falls for it. I fall for it because it you want value. Yep.
Jordan Gal:Yesterday, you know, I I I commented on a Twitter thread. Someone was like, comment this and I'll DM you. And I'm like, I think more of myself in this, but I'm gonna comment because I want these Figma files. Mhmm. There's just an endless amount of top of the funnel content to create that that's helpful to people.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's interesting and like, thinking about training a lot, it's like, especially in tech and like like learning to code stuff, like, you can you can find everything on YouTube. Like, it's not like like it's it's kinda rare that that you're gonna come up with a paid course that somebody cannot find the same content for free elsewhere or cheap on like Udemy or whatever. Yeah. So I think that I I do think that there's still a space for for offering training but it's more about like connecting to the instructor and also the community support.
Brian Casel:And I I just think that there's a like if if if I can grow a community and there are a lot of different things that you can different directions you can go with that. You can go into like small mastermind groups. You can go into like support networks. You can go into like events, either big conferences or just what I prefer is like small retreat type meet ups. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Like just benefits of being a member of this and paying an annual fee, you know. And so I'm also trying to think through like what are like literally the very first steps. What are the bite sized things that I can step into this business with besides starting to get that content engine going in the top of funnel? Maybe a couple like very small like light like live workshops on the topic of building with AI and start starting to learn and understand what the top questions are to turn into courses. Definitely selling my templates library.
Brian Casel:That's you know, part of it.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. You you do have the beginnings of it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's just It's like a lot of stuff to think through and and figure out like how to What's the because it's Like I feel like a SaaS has the benefit of like you can clearly make a road map. Alright. This is what the MVP is, then we're gonna build this, then we're gonna do that. Yep.
Brian Casel:This is more about like just grow the audience and learn from them and then see what direction you wanna go, you know. Cool. So I love it. We'll see. If I could find the time.
Jordan Gal:You you are building it as you go. At least to some extent, it's it's all part of
Brian Casel:it. Yep.
Jordan Gal:Yep. I gotta I gotta run to a call.
Brian Casel:Alright, dude.
Jordan Gal:Hope everyone has a great weekend.
Brian Casel:Later, folks.
Jordan Gal:Thanks for listening.
