Episode Transcript
[00:00:16] Speaker A: Hello. It is bootstrapped web. It's Friday, June 14. Here we are. So Rosie Jordan. That's right. Rosie. Hey, right now I'm getting it wrong. It's. It's hello, Rosie. Right. Hey, Rosie. Sorry.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:00:31] Speaker A: But you have hello, Rosie.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: I did get hello, Rosie and hi, Rosie and some other stuff.
[00:00:36] Speaker A: Okay, so the. So the name is Rosie. The domain is, hey, Rosie.com.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Yes.
Didn't want to stick AI in there. Maybe. I don't know if regret is the right word, but I kind of want the AI in there also. We'll see how things go on the domain.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: No, I like this, that. I think your current form is my favorite form. Of all the options with heyrosi.com dot, you don't need, like, the dot AI or any of that.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: Well, if we were selling to tech companies, I feel like the AI would make sense, but we are not. We're selling to the end consumer. It's b two b. But it's still the end consumer. They don't care about the tech. So we're going.com.
[00:01:13] Speaker A: Yep. Yep.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: It's been a long. This week has felt like three weeks. It was so long.
But, man, it felt great to hit publish. Hallelujah.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: Yeah. So I saw your, you know, we all saw your tweet. That was really well written. I thought it was, like, positioned really well.
[00:01:32] Speaker B: You want to talk about the problem? You know, what are we solving? And not linger on the tech too much other than basically say we want new tech and we want to keep it dead simple, right? Yep. That's the goal. The goal is don't care about the tech. And I would say so far, that response has worked when it comes to people interested in the product.
The tweet got more love than I expected, which is awesome.
Got a bunch of likes and a bunch of responses and, you know, some fun stuff. People listen to the pod friends, that sort of thing, and then submit really interesting DM's.
I think, you know, you gotta love the DM's. I like what Elon's doing. I like the, like, button. I like this, like, feeling of freedom on Twitter.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't really understand that one, actually. We could talk about that, too.
[00:02:25] Speaker B: I am a huge fan. It's probably.
[00:02:28] Speaker A: I just don't understand what the difference is. It's not. It doesn't seem like as big a deal to me as most people think it is. Okay, maybe I'm missing something.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: My assumption is you're not quite as deep in war Twitter as I am, because my country is at war.
[00:02:40] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: So what happens is, when you want to show support, sometimes you are emotional in that support, and you like things that maybe a year from today, you would prefer people not see that you liked.
[00:02:52] Speaker A: Yeah, but how would they see that you liked it?
[00:02:54] Speaker B: Oh, you just go to the profile and hit the likes tab, and you see everything the person likes.
[00:02:58] Speaker A: But, like, do people do that? Who does that?
[00:03:01] Speaker B: People who want to cancel. Other people do that?
[00:03:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: Yep, yep. On both sides.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: I mean, I could totally see if I were. If we were, like, celebrities that, you know, and that maybe. Maybe that's why, like, Elon cares so much about it. But, like, something I never think about, I don't think about who's checking.
[00:03:18] Speaker B: You're a normal person.
Most people don't, but activists and people who want to police what people are saying, and they try to use it against them based on where they work. So they're among people who are involved in more controversial topics. On Twitter, there is an element of self censorship. Even if you want to support something, you know, that hitting, like, effectively puts it on your Twitter record.
And maybe right now, in the moment, you're okay with that, but maybe six months from today or two years from today or five years from today, you're less okay with it. And so there's just a little removal of this. Of this little bit of internal mental friction.
[00:04:02] Speaker A: Yeah. And, I mean, I like that. You know, and I think I've. I've tried to make an effort to like more things that I actually personally like across all different topics.
It's just. It's become a habit for me, and I don't even think about who's seeing my likes. Yeah, but it's also like, it doesn't even matter because I never look at the for you tab. I'm all about the following tab. I want no algorithm. I just want the out the chronological.
[00:04:29] Speaker B: My guess is that you are. My guess would be that you're in the minority, and if you're in the minority, you will be very soon.
[00:04:37] Speaker A: Well, I think that a lot of. I think a lot of us tech folks tend to, I'm guessing, tend to prefer the following tab and not the for you.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: I. The for you tab. Immediately, as soon as they came out, I was like, let me see how this thing is. And it's. It's. It's good. And then, obviously, the more you like things, the better it gets.
[00:04:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:59] Speaker B: You'll be there very soon. It's too good.
[00:05:01] Speaker A: I feel. No, I mean, I think I used to be on the four you have for a long time. And then I sort of got annoyed with it because it's like, you know, it plays into all your. All your worst addictions when it comes to, you know, social media. And I didn't really like that. And I. I do like the. How the following tab is sort of, like, boring in a way.
[00:05:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:23] Speaker A: You know, like, it's have a limiting factor on, like, all right, I've seen enough for now. I'll check it again later on, you know.
[00:05:31] Speaker B: Yes, yes. It turns out the temperature a little bit.
[00:05:33] Speaker A: I also found that, like, by sticking to the following tab, I am more intentional about, literally the people who I'm actually following and a few people who I mute, like, because if you're watching the for you tab, I notice I used to be on the for you, maybe this was like a year or two ago.
And I noticed that, like, I keep seeing the same small handful of people in my speed just mute.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: I mute and block relentlessly.
[00:06:02] Speaker A: But, like, by staying in the following tab, I see everyone's tweets, but if I don't like it, then I'll just unfollow. And it's like a reminder, like, you don't belong in my feed.
[00:06:12] Speaker B: Yes, I control that. I hear you in that. I think that's what the following tab is for. The issue around that is that you are very limited in your discoverability of new people.
[00:06:23] Speaker A: Sure, that's probably true.
[00:06:24] Speaker B: It's just trade off.
[00:06:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:26] Speaker B: Anyway, where were we? The tweet. It's exactly as you would expect. Friends reach out, say, awesome. Congrats. Go for it. People reach out about, hey, I was thinking about building a competitor. Maybe I could white label.
[00:06:45] Speaker A: That's the one that you always see.
[00:06:49] Speaker B: And I respect that. Absolutely. You know, solo founder, bootstrapper, like, yo, how do I shortcut? Hell, yeah. Some people digging around for what tech we're using, of course. And then, of course, you know, a couple of big name VC's.
And when I said that to a few people on the team, they were like, oh, that's awesome. We're getting interest already. And I was like, no, no, no.
That's not it. It's that AI is so competitive that the only reasonable thing to do if you're a hard working VC is reach out and make sure everyone knows you as soon as they launch so you can build up a relationship. Because if you happen to be one of those companies that takes off, like some companies are taking off, you need to be involved in that. That's literally your job as a VC. So I said, that is more of a reflection of how competitive VC AI is right now than us. Give us some time, we'll get some traction. Then we'll say, oh, it's us. That's why they're reaching out right now. It's more of a market dynamic.
Okay.
[00:07:51] Speaker A: So, like, I have so many questions to unpack with the revealing of, hey, Rosie. So what went into the actual launch? We saw the tweet. Was it basically just the tweet or was it like other activity to get the name out there, the website out there?
[00:08:09] Speaker B: So what we did was we put together a 30 day plan. 1st 30 days from the time the website launches. What are we doing in the first 30 days? The launch of the website really kind of kicks off a lot of those plans. A lot of those plans are dependent on a website. Even like, the SEO agency that I hired is like, cool story, you know, something on.
[00:08:30] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:08:31] Speaker B: So we didn't put a. It's not the type of launch that we're like, if you're launching a consumer credit card product and you want 10,000 people on your waiting list, that's a different form of launch with pr, with ads, with building up all this energy around it.
[00:08:49] Speaker A: It's not that I feel like there's two launches in terms of how we tend to work. There's one launch, which is this one, just announcing to our peers, this is what we're working on now. Then there's the actual launch to customers.
[00:09:03] Speaker B: That's right. And this was a little bit of both. But if you're going on Twitter and saying it, you're not. At least my assumption was that we're not going for our ideal customers. They're not really following me on Twitter. Yeah, our peers are partners, are some service providers. One dude in my DM's right now is like, hey, who are you using for, you know, this part of the stack? I go look at his service and I was like, holy shit. That's really impressive.
So there's some partner stuff.
A few agencies that have the same end customer. Right. Like, that's kind of an ideal. Hey, we do marketing for home service companies. Let's introduce this to our 50 clients kind of thing. Like that type of thing. It's perfect for a tweet. Like as an end result of a tweet. That's ideal.
[00:09:50] Speaker A: Yeah, sure.
[00:09:51] Speaker B: A little bit of investor stuff. Just because I've raised money before and there are investors in the orbit and so just kind of letting them know. I got a few calls next week with some really good investors that I've spoken to, and why not build the relationships? I think that makes sense.
And then we have some people on the newsletter, and that was, like, a last minute thing. Like, should we just add a newsletter thing to the footer? Sure. Very happy. We did that.
And we've got demos. I did three demos yesterday, and that's.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: The most interesting thing to me. So who is booking the demos? Who are these people?
[00:10:28] Speaker B: Okay, so that's actually a very interesting experience.
[00:10:33] Speaker A: So currently, your button get started points to calendar booking.
[00:10:39] Speaker B: Yes. And I'm happy to share a lot of this stuff because I'm thinking a lot about the funnel and how to do it and what to do and why. So launching the website right now is before the product is ready. So we're doing demos because we want to learn. We don't have the ability to take on accounts just yet. It's actually pretty close. Things have gone very fast. If, you know, if I'm being honest, I'm really happy with the team and our progress overall.
We'll be ready in a few weeks to take on accounts, so it makes sense. Let's start talking to people now, getting feedback, and it was really interesting to hear and feel people's reaction on a demo.
So we had two demo is with you, demos with me, and I got nothing, bro. I got a call. I can call Rosie on the phone. And that's the demo. Demo. That's like, hey, this is how it actually works. But I'm not showing. I have some screenshots, but I'm not showing an admin. I'm just having a conversation.
[00:11:36] Speaker A: Sure. Yeah.
[00:11:37] Speaker B: So two of the people were not ideal customer, but the way they were leaning in was like, not that I don't care that this isn't built for me, but I want this value. How do I get it?
[00:11:53] Speaker A: So, like, can you share, like, who. What kind of businesses they are? Like, who are they?
[00:11:57] Speaker B: Sure. One's a listener to the podcast. What up? Thank you for reaching out.
So, one, for example, was like a moving company.
So they move furniture, and they get a lot of phone calls because not all of their customers have their system set up in such a way that it's automated.
[00:12:14] Speaker A: Right.
[00:12:14] Speaker B: These are like, b two, b moving. Like, okay, I ordered something on this store, and then this company takes the piece of furniture from our warehouse and delivers it to the end customer. Okay. Like, b two, b moving. Let's call it.
So they're missing calls. And the.
[00:12:31] Speaker A: I mean, why aren't they?
That seems like a good fit for this sort of thing. No.
[00:12:36] Speaker B: So here's the thing.
It's very interesting use case, actually, because what they want out of it, this is interesting on the tech front, they just want information pulled from a database.
Okay, let's say someone calls you and is like, has my shipment gone out?
That information, it's just sitting in a database.
So a person can look at an app while on the phone and say, yes, it shipped and will arrive tomorrow, but a phone call can't do that. But then when you mix in an API with a voice, it can.
[00:13:15] Speaker A: Right. So that is, that seems like something that you could do in the future where it's like you start with the calendar appointments, and then you move into more complex, configurable actions.
[00:13:28] Speaker B: Yes. Different use case. That's right. So, like an API connect your database. And so that's like, literally the first call is try. It tries to pull you away from your focus. Literally, the first call, and you're like, it makes sense, but we have to stay strict and we have to kind of keep focused. So the use case that we want to go after right now is information escalation to a human. When necessary, schedule appointments. Like those three things. Like, have the right info. Easier said than done. Don't give wrong info.
Second, escalate to a human if and when necessary. And for that, we have all types of things. Like the person can just say, you know, I don't want to talk to you anymore. Can I talk to a person? If they say that, we will understand it.
[00:14:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:10] Speaker B: We also have, like, emotion detection. So, like, if we hear frustration in the voice, we will, we will recommend. We'll say, it sounds like you're getting frustrated. Do you want to talk to a human?
[00:14:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: You know, and also, like, let's say it's a plumber. And the calls at 11:00 p.m. we have to understand that context and say, this is 11:00 at night, they're calling a plumber. This might be an emergency. And if it is emergency, let's offer. Do you want us to forward this to the person on call right now and then do that? So that's, that's a, that's wide enough of a set of use cases for home services? Yes.
[00:14:43] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. It's like, it's like it can basically do what, what their current phone number answering solution can, can do. Plus a few nice things like remove the human from, from needing to actually book the appointment, you know?
[00:14:58] Speaker B: Yes. That is a good way to put it. It is. It sits above voicemail, right? Voicemail is dumb. And one way it can take a message, then a human needs to take that information and process it. So it is a step above voicemail in that it gets people to actually talk instead of just hang up because no one wants to leave a voicemail.
And it can take in the information and set appointments. But really what it can do is it can convince the person to provide the information where voicemail fails at that.
And that's kind of where it needs to live for the time being. It doesn't need to be as good as a human.
The good as a human is, like, that's where if and when it gets there, that's when it tips over and people are like, well, why am I wasting my employees time picking up the phone?
[00:15:44] Speaker A: Just as a consumer, I think there's even me who I, and I use AI. I'm a tech person, and I use it in my day to day. I'm still very skeptical of me talking to a robot on the telephone, like, any, any company or thing that I need to call. Like, I try to skip to a human as quickly as possible, even though, like, the AI stuff out there, you know, is much better now. It's like, I feel like there's still gonna be, like, a level of, like, tri, like, skepticism or just like, you know. Cause if, again, like, if you are offering the option to skip to a human, which I think you should.
[00:16:25] Speaker B: Mm hmm.
[00:16:26] Speaker A: Like, you know, like, I think there's. There's going to be, like, some convincing of customers to actually accept the fact that, like, like, because even if you're telling me that I could book an appointment and I can say to it, and it can confirm to me, like, yeah, your appointment is booked. And I'm still thinking, like, is it really booked?
[00:16:43] Speaker B: Like, what if it sends you a text message?
[00:16:45] Speaker A: Is this person really going to show up at my house? Like, I don't even fully trust that the, that. That the home service guy is even checking his messages from Rosie and he's gonna actually show up. Cause that has definitely happened to me in the past. Like, I thought I booked online and they didn't even know about it.
[00:17:02] Speaker B: Yeah, it said it was booked. Yeah. There's a whole set of issues around skepticism and trust. And I hear you. All of us have experiences with phone trees.
So if I call American Express, I had to call them last week for a chargeback thing.
In total, it was under two minutes that I had to deal with the phone tree. Before I get to someone, those two minutes seem like a hellscape of eternity. You cannot believe the frustration that they put you through. And that's two minutes.
[00:17:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:35] Speaker B: So it's like, can you beat that? Can you improve on. Right. All this stuff is like incremental and there's a ton of skepticism. It's gonna take time to get all the way to where some people think it should be now. It's not there now.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: It does make me think of like, because I think that you, again, I'm just totally speculating on, I don't know your market at all, but it does make me think of a parallel that happened in the transition from zip message to clarity flow.
Because one thing that I learned was like, the thing that I'm talking about is like, your direct customers, the small business owner will probably get very excited about the value proposition that you're offering. Like, you know, you won't miss appointments, you can automate your phone calls and it's fantastic in theory, but then there's like a second level of sales which is like their end customer. So if their end customer isn't receptive to it or it backfires in some way, then they will cancel. Right. So I mean, I definitely found that with like, there were a lot early on with zip message. It was not focused on coaches.
The actual very, very earliest version of it was a customer support use case. I thought I was going to have people send their zip message, link to their SaaS customer support or whatever and have them record their videos and send them in and 95% of their customers just did not do that. That was a high cancellation reason.
And then there were all these other use cases that I was looking at and a lot of people started using it for sales. Right. Like, oh, I can use this as a way to send videos and receive videos from sales prospects.
And the reality is, like, when you don't have the relationship there, they're, they're much less willing to record themselves on video to send you a message. Right.
[00:19:25] Speaker B: Yeah, you can get the b two b, right. But then the b two c, the.
[00:19:29] Speaker A: Second part, the b two b to c is hard. And then the pivot to coaches was like, oh, they have a relationship with their clients so their client is fully bought in different ways to the fact that like, hey, I'm paying to communicate with my coach, I'll communicate however.
[00:19:45] Speaker B: Tell me how you want to communicate.
[00:19:46] Speaker A: Yeah. And then they start to see the value of it that way. Like, I'm wondering in your case if there's any like even that moving company you were talking about, like their customers are already paying customers of their moving company.
[00:19:59] Speaker B: True.
[00:19:59] Speaker A: So, you know, in order to get the information they need, like, sure, if you're telling me I have to get it from a robot, why not, you know, yeah, that's just like one, like, who knows? Like, that's just my, the first parallel.
[00:20:12] Speaker B: That the reason, the reason that right now, the CTA on the site opens up a calendar immediately.
[00:20:21] Speaker A: Right.
[00:20:21] Speaker B: Like there is. Right. If we just want to talk. Today we had a demo, and they have their own reasons for looking for value from this product that we just would not know. So this company this morning in particular, the guy we talked to, owns multiple home service companies, insulation company, roofing company, construction company, you know a bunch of things.
One of his companies is super seasonal, and having a receptionist full time is a waste of money, and he doesn't know what to do with it. So that one business goes to voicemail, the other ones have receptionists. He's spending money all over the place, and he knows he's losing money on the leads that are hanging up on the voicemail.
So for him, he's like, hey, if you can help me solve this, that's the first place I want to try it. And if it works, then I'll spread across. So he's thinking in this very skeptical, realistic way also.
But on that business, if you beat voicemail, I will find value. So that's like the beginning of it.
[00:21:27] Speaker A: Yeah. Can you speak to at all like the pricing, or at least like the pricing model? How are you thinking about that?
[00:21:33] Speaker B: So the pricing model is pretty interesting for people in software, what we are used to is variable expenses being negligible.
Meaning if I'm going to spend $1,000 on AWS, I can make $10,000 a month or I can make $100,000 a month. That variable expense is going to go up a little bit. Maybe it'll go from a thousand to $2,000 a month for AWS, but your revenue will go from ten k a month to month.
[00:22:00] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:22:01] Speaker B: So they're not that directly connected in this case, at this time, they're connected, yeah.
[00:22:07] Speaker A: You mean like, like the cost of AI?
[00:22:08] Speaker B: That's right. So the, our cost is per minute. And so doing anything other than charging per minute gets pretty weird. Now, I don't like that. I don't like usage. I don't want to charge per minute. I think better off to do buckets. So that's my current thinking.
[00:22:26] Speaker A: We have that kind of thing. We have sort of the same thing with video costs and everything.
And we do have a very high upper limit, at which point we'll start to charge overages, but almost nobody hits that. And currently the costs, in your case, the cost of AI is probably a lot higher than my cost for processing and storing video, you know.
[00:22:50] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: The interesting thing, it is a significant factor that I run so many different calculations on, like on what are really costs and based on average account usage and all that. Yeah. It's something I keep an eye on for sure.
[00:23:03] Speaker B: Yeah. So it's something to keep an eye on. The, what I think is the most likely thing to happen is that, is that those costs are going to go down faster than traditional, like AWS, for example.
So that at least that's good. So our margins can expand over time. So, look, this thing is a self serve product, is where it's going to be when it launches. And so the price, I don't want it to be too low, but it can't be too high. So, you know, $100 a month, $200 a month, $300 a month, something in that range is where we'll likely come out. You know, $50 a month starts to make it difficult to. Makes sense. $500 feels like I don't know if people are going to sign up self serve for that.
So, you know, seven day trial, the credit card requirement will be there. But where it lives in the funnel, I think, is the interesting question. When it comes to credit card, do you put it up front? You can't see the app. Do you put it in the onboarding process? Do you allow someone to create the account fully, but then not launch? Launching in this case is us generating a phone number for you, and then you forward to that phone number. So that might be a natural point to put the credit card to be able to come in, address your skepticism, impress you with the product, and then right before you get the phone number to actually go out and use it, maybe that's where we put. Put the credit card.
[00:24:33] Speaker A: The other question that just occurred to me is like, can you, can you process, concur, like, simultaneous calls on a single number?
[00:24:43] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:24:44] Speaker A: So that could be another terrible factor. Right? Like you can, like, the low plan is like you can process one caller at a time, the higher plan, ten callers at a time, you know?
[00:24:57] Speaker B: Yeah. What I've seen in competitors is that that's kind of table sticks. Like your human number can handle one call at a time, and then it goes to voicemail. This can handle 100 calls. It doesn't really matter because it's Twilio and it's telephony tech, and it's interesting, not hard.
Yeah. So we got the website up. I have a list of things that need to be improved on the website. I think the website looks great. It was really important to me because our competitors are relatively immature overall. It's not these big, gnarly companies with big, beautiful websites. And I thought it was a real opportunity to kind of leapfrog the competitors in terms of design.
And much more important than design is the positioning, because most in the space are super horizontal. We can do everything. We can replace every phone call you've ever received. We can do sales, we can do customer support. And I didn't want to do that. I wanted to say, here's this problem for this set of customers. Yeah, that's where we wanna be.
[00:26:00] Speaker A: I like it. So, like, in terms of, like, next steps, are you gonna do any sort of, like, direct outreach to businesses or anything like that?
[00:26:08] Speaker B: So one of the surprising things from the tweet is how many people responded and said, oh, this would kill it. Using cold outbound, cold email.
[00:26:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:18] Speaker B: And I.
In that 30 day plan, I have a bunch of things on that list. SEO ads, partners, notify the investors to ask them to amplify stuff. LinkedIn. Look, this whole list of things that seem obvious that I can do over the span of a few weeks, cold outbound was at the bottom of the list. And I pointed it out to the team. This thing is at the bottom of the list. One, because it should be on the list. Two, because these other things are more important. And I don't want us to rely on outbound and sales.
And then as soon as I put the tweet out, I get a bunch of responses and DM's like, yo, yeah, I feel like this is what you need to do. And it definitely made me rethink I.
[00:27:06] Speaker A: Would also, I don't know what else is really filling up that list, but I feel like I would want to bump that up in priority. Not just the tactic of cold outreach specifically, but the idea of getting some signal directly from a small business owner who is definitely not looking at Twitter.
Because I feel like whoever's filling up the demo calendar now as a result of the tweet or even LinkedIn posts or whatever, is the most tech savvy, even if they are a target customer, it's the most early adopting, tech savvy version of your target customer. Like, to start to get to some feedback of, like, what is the local business even like.
Like getting the question of, like, what is AI? You know, like, seeing how that conversation goes a little bit, you know?
[00:27:58] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:27:59] Speaker A: I feel like you're gonna learn a lot.
[00:28:00] Speaker B: So if anything, over the last few days, what it's made me do is rethink how valuable that signal that you're describing can be. And maybe we should push off the advertising in exchange for getting more signal first.
[00:28:19] Speaker A: Yeah, I guess ads would be like another way to do that. But even ads sort of just sort of pre assumes that the person is actually on the Internet and clicking on ads.
A cold email is going to someone who. It's interruptive or it's coming to their inbox. And then of course there's like, actual cold calls. You know, there's that too. But like, yeah, there's, yeah, getting out.
[00:28:44] Speaker B: Of the building people helped me come up with some, some pretty clever stuff, so. So the interesting thing is that these types of businesses have their information online on purpose. They want to be contacted.
[00:28:55] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:28:56] Speaker B: So all their information is there. They're all on Google Maps. Google Maps is scrapeable. Angie's list is scrapable. So you do all of a sudden get into this situation where if you are a self respecting entrepreneur, there is a way to reach out to a lot of people very efficiently. So it does make sense. That's worth the effort. That's worth the try.
[00:29:20] Speaker A: I feel like the other thing that I would be thinking about this year is conferences for these, you know, the, I don't know, insurance agency conference. There's like a lot of that kind of stuff. The trade show.
[00:29:34] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely.
[00:29:37] Speaker A: Those industries like, eat that stuff up, and there's so many of them.
I think in our industry, every conference has one national thing that happens every year. But a lot of these industries have statewide conferences. So you can literally have people go to 40 of these conferences a year for one industry.
[00:29:55] Speaker B: Yeah, there's an endless number once you start looking at home services.
I mean, what we did, we literally just went to chat. GPT. We're like, here are, you know, five or six industries. Give us more like it. Around home services, it's, it's 50 categories. Lawn care, pool care, pest control, roofing restoration. It's, it's a bit endless.
[00:30:19] Speaker A: We just hired gutter cleaning and power washing for our house the other day. They've been, you know, cold emailing us all year long, and it's like springtime. We finally need it. Let's do it.
[00:30:30] Speaker B: Yep. Yeah, makes sense. And my guess is a lot of people in your area are doing the same thing.
[00:30:35] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:30:36] Speaker B: Yeah. So I feel like eventually we'll shoot for having one channel and really focusing a lot of our efforts there. But what are you supposed to do when there are ten potential channels? You don't know which one, right. How else do you do it other than spray and pray a little bit? I know we don't want to set ourselves up. We got to try a bunch of different stuff.
[00:31:02] Speaker A: I think that's just like any really. I think any niche down. See, I feel like there are two pathways that many of us sass people get take to reach the totally niched down vertical. Sass. One is you're already in the vertical. Either you personally have experience in it or your brother in law is a carpenter and you make a thing for carpenters, or it's like you or like me and just finding lists of random industries to try to target.
And then that's more of like, it starts like a spray and pray and then you start to dial down, dial down, dial down. Until you realize, like, these respond in a way that's different from all the rest.
And that could be like, maybe they all respond, but then these are the ones who don't cancel because it just works because the use case is perfect for them.
That's exactly what happened with me with zipmessage into clarity flow. And I actually remember back when I was doing restaurant engine years ago, this is over ten years ago now. I did the same thing. There wasn't chat GPT then, but I remember writing in my notebook just a list of 20 random industries that could possibly need better website design. Restaurants was one of them. So I was like, I'll just go with them.
[00:32:21] Speaker B: Yeah, right. There's a difference, though, between industries to go after and channels to use. And I think my concern is around channels. I like the philosophy of make one channel work before moving on to the next. I like that. But how are you supposed to start, other than take a guess at three or four channels that you think are likely to work and then whichever one works, that's when you focus on it. But it does make sense to do SEO feels. It feels passive, honestly. SEO? Yeah, right. So that's like, okay, just get that train rolling. It's not going to pick up speed or momentum for a while, so just get it started on day one. Which is what I did, literally. I published the site and went and found the link that the SEO provider gave me to sign up and signed up. I was like, all right, you know, why not check that off then then there are certain things that feel like they just take a little bit of effort from the founder or a few people internally. So me sending email, like making a list of potential partners and then trying to network into them over the next few weeks feels like that just feels like my job. That's why I get paid Monday to Friday. So may as well do that.
Ads feel more intense and more focus required.
And I do. I feel good about the decision to just push those back a little bit. I really want to see.
[00:33:48] Speaker A: I would push those back.
[00:33:49] Speaker B: Yeah. I was going to start this week and then launch. Launch them, like, realistically, in about three weeks, but it feels a little premature.
[00:33:56] Speaker A: I mean, as like an early test just to see what's what. I think it's fine to do that in there, but I think of ads as, like, you start dumping money into ads once you know you have a market that somewhat works. Let's start to scale it, right?
[00:34:09] Speaker B: Yes. The guy at the ads company, a really, really impressive young dude, he was like, look, I think you should look at this as going from one to ten, not zero to one.
[00:34:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:21] Speaker B: Go figure out the pricing, the onboarding, the pitch, just all that stuff. And then we are the fuel on the fire. And I kind of blocked that out. Last time I talked to him a few weeks ago, I was like, cool story, but I want to get. I want to be really aggressive. And I think he's right.
[00:34:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:37] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:34:37] Speaker A: Good stuff, man.
[00:34:38] Speaker B: So we're underway, bro. That's it.
[00:34:39] Speaker A: Pretty exciting, dude. I like it.
Yeah. Congrats on the whole pivot. I mean, it's quite a pivotal. It's not just like a rename. It's like a completely new company. It's like the same company, but, like, totally new product, you know?
[00:34:54] Speaker B: Yes, I heard that. That's exactly like, one of the investor replies was like, now that's a pivot.
[00:35:00] Speaker A: It's, like, way more than just a pivot. That's like a. It's just totally, like, restarting of things.
[00:35:07] Speaker B: And it's, you know, there's some confusion.
[00:35:11] Speaker A: It's great. Yeah, yeah.
[00:35:13] Speaker B: There's a little. There's like, some, like, internal chaos that just needs to be dealt with that we ignored because you're not gonna not do it just because of that. So, like, my calendar right now, I don't even know what to do with myself. I got two calendars. My calendly is linked to rally. I need to update that. Like, my email's all over the place, so I got to sort that stuff out.
We did a DBA. So it's like rally Commerce Inc. Doing business as Rosie.
[00:35:44] Speaker A: My company for clarity flow is still zip Message, Inc. Yeah, that's like, there you go.
[00:35:49] Speaker B: Yeah, whatever.
But it feels good. It feels great to just be underway and out there and I can talk about it and get to work.
[00:35:59] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:35:59] Speaker B: That's the truth. This is the starting point.
[00:36:02] Speaker A: Yep. Yep.
[00:36:04] Speaker B: What's up with you?
[00:36:04] Speaker A: How's the week? Yeah, pretty good, I guess. The only two. So I've got like two halves of what I do. One is clarity flow land, and there've been a bunch of developments there. Nothing huge, but, like, I'm hacking on some projects there for once. And then the other half is it's my other corp, it's my consulting business. And I'll probably talk more about that next week because I'm starting to really dial into a way to position and not niche down, but productize in a way.
And even that's probably the wrong word for this, but taking what I've been doing, which is like UI design and development for SaaS companies, essentially, and really packaging in like, what is the value prop exactly, of what I'm delivering.
And I'm actually working with a new domain name, I'll reveal that next week, but that's what I was writing copy for last night at 03:00 a.m. okay.
[00:37:09] Speaker B: I'm pretty curious about that. I've been watching your tweets.
[00:37:12] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's the thing that I'm starting to make an active effort because now that I've worked with a handful of good clients and I have bunch of projects that are visually done and able to launch, I'm actually making an effort to build in public more and actually share my work that I've been doing. So I've been recording these 62nd quick walkthroughs of the interfaces that I've designed and built and just showing them off. So I did a couple of those tweets. I'm going to do a few more in the coming weeks. There's a couple more projects that I've been working on that I haven't shared publicly yet.
The tricky thing about that and what I'm writing copy, what I'm working out, like the sales copy for right now, is trying to convey the value proposition because I know what the value is for the clients who have hired me.
And I'm trying to word it in a way that's easy. Universalize, make it kind of sticky and crunchy that works in a headline and speak to the benefits and also something that people in our circles can latch onto and talk about and recommend me to other clients. That's how the first handful of clients have come. Okay, so what I'm talking about here is like, okay, I'm a UI designer, essentially, okay, but most companies think about when you hire, if you're going to hire a designer, you're thinking about hiring someone who might design an interface in Figma or design a mockup in Figma and then hand you that Figma file, and then you have to hand that Figma file off to your developers.
What I do is sometimes I wireframe things in Figma, but I'm taking it a bigger step further, which is I deliver my designs encoded HTML and tailwind CSS.
And so I'm completely the goal here. The main value is I'm trying to remove the whole front end coding piece of your stack. Because the people who have found the most value in my work are the smallish SaaS companies who already have their back end developers dialed in. They're awesome.
Maybe they're the founder is a developer, or they have like a CTO, or they have a small team of backend developers and they are technically labeled full stack developers. And because they are full stack, they never actually hire someone who's really specialized on the front end. It really wouldn't make sense for most small SaaS companies to hire a full time salaried person to be yourself, pixel perfect front end UI designer. And instead they task their full stack developers with the task of you not only have to architect the thing and design the database and do the business logic, you also have to.
To them, it's a slog of taking the admin. Yeah, the admin. The end customer's experience, making it Pixel perfect, making sure it's mobile optimized, implementing dark mode, making sure the pop out menus all work the way they should, all the little nitty gritty details that are really pretty annoying for most back end developers to have to do, and they're really slow at it.
This service I'm finding is really, really valuable to the actual developer, to the backend developer to remove that whole piece of the puzzle and then also selling it to the founder, the CEO of why it makes sense to separate the front end from the backend in terms of who you're investing those dollars with.
Those are some of the things that I'm thinking through. And then the other piece is, yes, there are lots of component libraries out there, like Tailwind UI is a great one. And there's also these starter templates, you know, bullet train and jumpstart and things like that.
But even those, and I've used those, lots of teams have used them.
Even those don't completely eliminate the workload, the burden, and even like the level of quality that you get to take those component libraries and then adapt them and actually implement them into your app.
What, what I'm like, the value that I'm bringing to these companies is like, I'm helping you design. I'm designing for you your own personal, private UI component library tailor made to your SaaS.
[00:42:07] Speaker B: One of the reasons we like Framer so much is because you design in framer and you don't have the Figma to reality gap. Yeah, yeah, that gap sucks. And a front end. I want to push back on your description as a UI designer for just a sec because when a designer hands over a figma, it always looks amazing.
[00:42:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:32] Speaker B: And then between that and being implemented in the app with all these issues around. Yeah, it just doesn't quite live up to the Figma.
[00:42:40] Speaker A: And then that should, that's a result of like, okay, like kind of doing it quickly, maybe like front end people, it's not their specialty. It ends up being a little bit slapped together. And the other thing that happens over time is like even the app that you ship might look and feel great on day one, the version one, but then a year later, after you've added 20 features, the features start to feel disjointed. Things are sort of like bolted on and they're not quite consistent with the original UI.
[00:43:09] Speaker B: We see it all the time.
[00:43:10] Speaker A: That's where having your own component library, like every time you're doing a menu, it should use this coded component that was tailor made for your SaaS. Or like I've been working with these SaaS companies who eventually you're going to have specialized UI needs like one was doing.
They need like a bulk product importer system. And these products are very complex with many options. So you can't just pull any UI components library off the shelf and expect that to fit a need like that. It really needs to be worked into the actual interface that their customers need. So that's where someone like me can come in and say, yeah, I have my go to patterns, my go to components that I can use as my starting point, but I'm going to tailor them and give you. In some of these cases, I'll actually spin up a fresh rails app just for their team to be able to pull these components out of when they implement them in the final production app so that they're configurable. Anyway.
All of those words that I'm describing here, I'm trying to consolidate into a sales page that sells the value to the backend developer, but also sells the value to the CEO on why it makes sense to work with me for, like, some period of time to set up your. Your company's UI, you know, components library. Right.
[00:44:38] Speaker B: Like, fix it, you know, for the future, not just this one project and this one screen.
[00:44:44] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:44:46] Speaker B: When I see your tweets, the UI looks good. What I. What I end up being most impressed by is the decision process on why things are where they are and where the consistency is. That sounds like more ux, right? This combination?
[00:45:03] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's actually a big part of what I do when I'm working with clients, although that part is a little bit more difficult to show in a tweet. But, like, what I'm showing in the tweet is, like, the end result, but a lot of the time it's like, I'm taking.
Maybe either they just describe to me their end goal for this new feature that they're building, or they're showing to me their current admin interface or whatever it is that was pretty much slapped together by maybe it was like a backend developer, or maybe they were just adding features after feature for years, and things became a little bit disjointed. I'm going in there and I'm saying, all right, well, if I were to think about this fresh, as if it were one of my own products, here's how I would think about it logically from a UX point of view, and maybe, you know, try to improve things, you know, fundamentally. Yeah.
[00:45:53] Speaker B: We were looking at a competitor's integration page yesterday, and you can understand how things go wrong, right? One integration, you click on it, and there's a modal one integration, you click on it. This is a new page. One integration, there's, like, a mobile that looks like a new page, and you're like, this just happens over time. It requires, like, this. This UI vigilance. That can be exhausting. And you cut corners sometimes you need to.
[00:46:20] Speaker A: I'm also trying to tie, and, like, I'm describing all this copy that is not live yet. I'm gonna hopefully push it live next week, but I'm also trying to tie it back to, like, what is the actual value? Like, investing in front end UI, ux experience. Like, I'm playing around with headlines like, go from good enough to growth lever like turn your UI into an actual growth lever because your customers, it's so easy to use that they, that they can't help but rave about it to other customers. Right.
[00:46:51] Speaker B: More likely to convert, more likely to refer.
[00:46:53] Speaker A: Yeah. Or like make your competitors jealous is another headline that I'm playing with.
[00:46:59] Speaker B: That's a powerful one for founders.
[00:47:00] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because it is super competitive. Like everything is competitive. So for your customers, it's a lot.
We all love to assume that when our customers run into trouble or run into friction or get confused, they're going to reach out to customer support. More likely they're going to go find the other ten competitors and see who's easier to use. Yep.
[00:47:27] Speaker B: Sadly.
[00:47:30] Speaker A: Actually, speaking of websites though, on clarity flow, I did launch a new version of our homepage this week. That was the other thing that I worked on the past week.
I got some really good advice and really not repositioned, but really dialed in. It's actually funny because I realized I hadn't actually changed the homepage at all, really any of the copies since we launched clarity flow over a year ago.
I should have been updating and optimizing pieces of copy as we learned, but I've been so busy with everything, so now it's like an all new h one.
Most of the copy on the page is all new.
I also killed a bunch of pages and redirected them. So specifically what happened there was, it used to be.
So this is no longer live, but the previous version was at the top. Navigation there was like a thing that said product, you open that and under that there was like five links that go to five sub pages which are essentially five different versions of the homepage. Each of those pages was optimized for a different part of the product. Like we had one talking about our courses feature, another talking about our payments feature, another page talking about our communities feature, our async communication feature.
Some people navigate to those and they might click around, but it's not like those are driving search traffic, frankly, they're just confusing. So it's all on the homepage now. Like now the homepage is like our one and only sales page.
We have a demo video as well.
[00:49:12] Speaker B: Yeah, pricing page, but everything you need.
[00:49:15] Speaker A: Homepage, demo page, pricing page are essentially the three parts of the funnel now. And we've got the other stuff, we've got the integrations, we've got the comparison pages and stuff like that. But that was like one big step. I've got a bunch of other projects that are in progress right now.
It's all really in an effort to simplify and just better optimize the website and the buying funnel.
So this was like the tippy top of the, which is the homepage, like what they see first.
Another thing that I did was I removed the email opt in from the demo. So now you click demo, you are going straight to the video to just watch it. We're not even asking for your email address anymore.
[00:50:01] Speaker B: Okay, interesting. Can we talk about that for a sec?
[00:50:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:05] Speaker B: Okay.
In the past, that was behind an email.
Okay. And what that allowed you to do, obviously, is collect contact information.
[00:50:16] Speaker A: Yep. And we had an email sequence that would like, remind them to sign up for a trial if they didn't do that.
[00:50:22] Speaker B: Was that not working or not working well enough or you want more people to be able to see it?
[00:50:28] Speaker A: I think that was working fine.
But I think two things. It probably prevented a lot of people from even looking at our demo in the first place because they just don't want to enter their email address.
And frankly, the main goal is to simplify and streamline the way that people come in and buy the product. So there's more changes coming in the next couple of months on this front, but the goal right now is to sell you on the value proposition on the homepage. And I want you to dig in. I want you to spend time on the website, like looking in and consuming as much information as you possibly can. So making our demo readily, readily available to you, that's like a 20 minutes video. The other thing that we're in the process of doing right now is we're moving our help docs off of help scout onto the main domain, onto the main marketing site. And it's going to become like a main part of the whole website is like our help docs, which have a lot of videos in them, are serving two purposes. One is to support our existing customers. The other is to educate new customers because they want to find out and dig into every nitty gritty detail.
And I want you to come to our website and spend 30 minutes, spend an hour digging into our stuff. And then it gets to a point where it's just like, all right, I have to sign up for this thing now. Let's go.
[00:51:58] Speaker B: Okay. So if that's the type of person on the site, then just give them everything they want.
[00:52:04] Speaker A: And from an SEO like time on site, I'm learning is more important than.
[00:52:08] Speaker B: We might think on the SEO front.
[00:52:10] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:52:11] Speaker B: So go stick around and watch a two, three minute demo. Not a bad thing for SEO either.
[00:52:16] Speaker A: Yeah. And also not a bad thing for that to happen on your main domain and not a KB, your domain.
[00:52:23] Speaker B: True, true.
Yeah.
One of the next steps that we are going to take right now, we have just you click the CTA, you go to a calendly link.
Next up, I think we'll do a Typeform survey on the way to a calendar link. Shout out to Ruben for helping me think through that process.
[00:52:44] Speaker A: We've had that forever. And same thing, we've had a form, a survey form.
Even on the demo. We had email opt in into a survey form into the demo, and then we also still have it in our app onboarding. So you sign up for the app and then you answer a quick survey question and then you're into the app. And so I've removed it from the demo. And now, and next I'm actually going to be removing it from the app because it's been in place for well over, it's three years, really, but for the past year and now it's like, okay, I've learned a ton.
Now it's about streamlining and getting them into value as quickly as possible.
I think it's definitely the right move to have it for a long period of time and collect the survey.
[00:53:28] Speaker B: Just more info.
[00:53:29] Speaker A: More info. And we did have it forever. It's all in a spreadsheet. It's coming in.
[00:53:36] Speaker B: Yeah. I think it'll be temporary because we want people to sign up self serve, so we don't want to put too much in the way. So right now maybe it goes to calendar, then it'll go Typeform to calendar, and then it'll go type form to self serve. And then it'll just go straight to self serve. One of the things I'm wondering about is email collection. And we want people to be able to use to test the product.
So we can just put a phone number.
Right. That's the most straightforward thing you want to try. Give a call right now that, that makes us pretty susceptible to bad actors.
[00:54:12] Speaker A: Yeah. And you made a phone number to call your AI.
[00:54:15] Speaker B: Yes. Yes. And we're going to pay for that. And I've spoken to some other people in the space that were like, that's dangerous. You know, it's a normal thing to kind of wake up and say, someone just hammered us for a $1,000.
[00:54:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:54:29] Speaker B: So that's a little tricky. But we do want people to try it. But I wonder if, I wonder if putting that experience behind an email field.
[00:54:38] Speaker A: I was just going to say, would make sense. Like register to get a demo to try, or to try.
[00:54:43] Speaker B: That way we can have demos. Like, what's on there now is basically the first demo.
[00:54:47] Speaker A: Right.
[00:54:48] Speaker B: That's basically the worst demo we'll ever publish, and it's not bad. So we'll end up having a bunch of those. And as soon as we have customers using it, the best thing, best marketing we could possibly do are successful, real recorded phone calls. Yeah, don't tell my lawyer about that. But that's the best thing for the marketing. So maybe if we have enough of those available, then we can put the. Try it for yourself behind an email. Yeah, yeah, that could work.
[00:55:14] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, your demo video looks great right now. Yeah. Even.
I feel like you could even just create some. Like, you did do it with your current demo video, but, like, maybe create more that are. Maybe they're not actual real customers out in the wild, but, like. Right, but that's not actors, like, rep, you know, replaying a support interaction that could. That could very well be real, you.
[00:55:38] Speaker B: Know, that's my lawyer. Thanks you. But I feel like we could take a transcript and basically just have a real human talk to the AI, because what's on the site now is not fake. That's someone on our team talking to the Rosie service.
[00:55:54] Speaker A: Right.
[00:55:55] Speaker B: And the text message came through. It's all, you know, it's actually an interesting conversation internally. Right. Because it's like, okay, how do we put our best foot forward?
The unethical thing would be to have two people recorded. Right. That's not. Okay. That's easy to point at and say, oh, that's too far. Then you get into a situation where you're like, okay, well, do we want to talk about things that aren't available now but will be available? Do we want to show exactly what's available? Do we want to not mess with the recording in any way? So we ended up going as safe as possible with it, because my worry, if we messed with anything, we'd get called out immediately. And that's a lot of stuff.
[00:56:36] Speaker A: One thing I noticed, correct me if I'm wrong, but one thing I noticed when watching the video, there did seem to be, like, a delay.
[00:56:45] Speaker B: Latency, baby.
[00:56:46] Speaker A: It's latency.
[00:56:47] Speaker B: Yeah, that's the thing.
[00:56:48] Speaker A: So just a couple seconds. It was totally tolerable. But I. But I was thinking, like, man, since they made this a video, they could have easily just cut out those extra seconds and made it faster.
[00:56:58] Speaker B: That was, I think, an acceptable conversation to have, and I think we ended up in the right place. Where we did not want to cut because it would have given. It would have given a false impression. The latency is still an issue. It's getting better with every model, with every service, with every optimization.
But what's really happening under the hood is speech to text. Text submitted into an LLM. LLM responds with text, text turns back out into speech. Like, that is what's happening. It's amazing that there's only 2 seconds of latency, but the more we can shrink that, the better and more natural.
It's always one of these situations that all of us deal with. What's in development right now is so much better than what's in production.
[00:57:47] Speaker A: I know. It makes me not even want to promote the current thing.
[00:57:49] Speaker B: Right, right. But we are forcing ourselves to basically say, no blockers. Like what? The app isn't ready. Doesn't matter. Launch the website. It's better in development. Doesn't matter. Launch what we have now.
[00:58:01] Speaker A: I'm such a fan of tech news and following, especially lately with AI and everything. And obviously this week, Apple launched Apple Intelligence. But what we're talking about here kind of reminds me of Google from a few months ago. I think one of their earliest rollouts of Google Gemini, they did these recordings which were clearly doctored.
They got a lot of flack for, like, you guys are like, it's obviously fake. Whatever their demo was. You saw, like, camera cuts. You saw, like, you saw all this different stuff. And then, like, somebody would watch the video and then, like, you know, and we're talking about Google, so obviously there's all these, like, tech reviewers who are like, well, let me try it. Yeah, it's nothing like the video, you know?
[00:58:47] Speaker B: Yes. But, you know, Google's still going to make $5 billion next week.
[00:58:50] Speaker A: I mean, like that. Yeah. Like, that being said, like, I feel like we should be a little bit more. We have more leeway when it comes to, you know, rounding the corners a little bit, but, yeah, that's right.
[00:59:04] Speaker B: Yep. Yeah. It's all tempting and all. Bad news. Bad news.
[00:59:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:59:11] Speaker B: What else? We did get some questions on Twitter. I think I answered most of them. Ian asked about demos. Yep. So far, so good on that.
Cesar wants me to call Rosie. Maybe on the next pod, I'll just call, put on speakerphone.
[00:59:25] Speaker A: Maybe it'll just be me and Rosie and we'll leave you out of it.
[00:59:29] Speaker B: There is an element to dog fooding, like in marketing and sales.
So a lot of my ideas are like, how do we use the product to do the sales, to confront the skepticism. That is the thing. It's skepticism.
[00:59:50] Speaker A: Yeah. That is something we, you know, now that Kat is doing customer success for clarity flow, a big part of what she does is she. Every day she does what I used to do, which was I send clarity flow messages to all the trial and customers. You know, so she's doing it, and it does help. It's a different scenario than yours, but in many cases, like, she's, like, the first actual clarity flow conversation that somebody is going to have that's with a real person.
[01:00:17] Speaker B: That's great.
Yeah.
We have features for outbound in development.
Think about.
We talked to a salon, and they were like, phone calls to, you know, taken when. When the two of us aren't available. That sounds good and valuable.
Can you call the day before or the day of an appointment to reduce the no shows? Because right now, either we're doing it or we forget to do it. Maybe we send a text, but we would love another touch point. And that's something that's, you know, it's. It's just programming. It's just like, x amount of time before this thing is on the counter, then send this message.
[01:00:59] Speaker A: I mean, I look at Rosie and I definitely think, like, man, I want to use this for SaaS and, you know, like, I want to put a phone number on Claritypo's website, like, a support number. But I. But I'm very hesitant to.
I don't have the funds to, like, hire somebody to man that. That phone number.
[01:01:21] Speaker B: Yeah, it's pretty interesting to.
The training is wild. The training is wild. And the prompt engineering that we talked about last week is super, super interesting.
And I feel like I need to be, I don't even know, selectively flexible on these other potential categories.
[01:01:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I don't think one.
[01:01:43] Speaker B: Person with a shopify store reached out and was like, this is awesome. Can I cook this up with my direct to consumer company and. And answer questions on whether my shipment has gone out and can I get a re. What's your refund policy and just whatever else.
But I'm scared to open up too broad.
[01:02:02] Speaker A: I definitely like the focus early on, especially on, like, a use case of, like, if you take phone calls to book appointments, this does that period, like, yep, that's great as a starting point, but I can definitely see a world where you expand into. Okay, you could feed rosie your set of documents or instructions.
[01:02:23] Speaker B: Yeah. Our onboarding was, like, create a name and an account and then put. Give us a URL and we ingest the URL.
[01:02:30] Speaker A: But even like, feed it, like, your 50 most frequently asked questions and the answers that it should know about, and it doesn't even have to. And since it is AI, it's not, like, programmatic, where it's like it's going to just recite those word for word. It's just like, that's the training data that it has. So that when a customer asks one of those questions in whatever wording they choose to use for that, it's going to know how to answer it. Right.
[01:02:58] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. I think what's. You know, what's scary is that all of these little areas will get crowded, I think. Apple intelligence.
[01:03:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:03:10] Speaker B: Horror show of a name. But we're gonna like it.
[01:03:14] Speaker A: I mean, it's so Apple. Like, it's.
[01:03:17] Speaker B: I know. I think it's easy to hate Apple, at least for me. But I think we're all gonna have, you know, consumer AI in. In our phone.
[01:03:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:03:26] Speaker B: Like, soon. I think they just did. The partnership with, with OpenAI, it's all. It will be incorporated.
And what scares me the most about that type of a use case, even though it sounds interesting, it's that the behavior isn't currently established.
[01:03:43] Speaker A: So that's the biggest thing I feel like that's gonna be the biggest blocker, really, is consumers just getting comfortable with talking to AI and trusting that it can. That it. That it has the same capabilities as a human does.
[01:03:57] Speaker B: Yeah. I'm less worried about that than I am about the behavior of the business. My software company. Your software company, we don't have phone numbers right now for customer service, and people don't call. They don't expect it. So that's a new behavior. And I would be very worried about betting my business on creating a new behavior, like replacing your checkout when you're not on Shopify. Really, really hard getting in the way of an existing behavior. An established pattern of. I look around for plumbing companies and then I pick up the phone and I call. That feels. It feels easier.
[01:04:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:04:34] Speaker B: I jump into that existing behavior.
[01:04:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's. I think that's key. Yeah.
[01:04:40] Speaker B: What do you got going on? What's. What's this weekend like? I'm going to see a band first.
[01:04:45] Speaker A: Have you heard.
[01:04:45] Speaker B: You heard a band of horses? Great band.
[01:04:47] Speaker A: I've heard of them. Yeah. I don't know, but I listened. Maybe I heard some of their songs, but, yeah.
[01:04:52] Speaker B: The lead singer has the voice of an angel. I don't even know how else to.
[01:04:55] Speaker A: Describe where you saw him. You're going to Chicago. Like, where you seeing them, bro, it's.
[01:04:59] Speaker B: It's in the burbs. It's in the next one over in Winnetka. So when I saw it, I was like, band of horses in Winnetka. Clearly that's a different band of horses, because why would those rock stars come to the burbs up here?
[01:05:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:05:13] Speaker B: But it turns out, I guess it's, like a big thing. So it's really them. So I'm going tonight with all the other nerds in the suburbs, and no one's gonna know this band except me. I'm gonna be singing along to every song.
[01:05:23] Speaker A: There you go. We got tickets for next month. We're going to see iron and wine. Oh, yeah, that's good. He's playing in New Haven, which is, like, ten minutes away from me, so it'd be like, us and a bunch of college students in there.
[01:05:35] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:05:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:05:36] Speaker B: Get a good crying with iron one.
[01:05:38] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. I only know some of his music, but good songwriting. Good thing for me and Amy to go to.
And then pearl jam tickets I've been eyeing forever. They're playing at Madison Square garden later in the year. Got my eye on those.
[01:05:52] Speaker B: Whoa.
[01:05:52] Speaker A: I've never seen them live. I've been a fan for years.
[01:05:55] Speaker B: Yeah, I haven't either. The one concert I considered, I guess it might be past tense. I don't think I'm actually gonna do it, but. But dead and company at the sphere.
[01:06:03] Speaker A: Oh, at the spear. I have a friend who went to that, and he showed me some videos where they were. Unreal.
[01:06:08] Speaker B: Look. It looks unreal. Yeah.
[01:06:09] Speaker A: I mean, I'm a huge fish fan.
Long time fish nerd. And. And they did the sphere, like, two months ago, and I've just been consuming those YouTube videos like crazy.
[01:06:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:06:19] Speaker A: I was thinking about getting tickets and going out there.
[01:06:21] Speaker B: I like this. I feel the same way. Like I'm an adult.
[01:06:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:06:24] Speaker B: I have credit cards. No one can tell me what to do.
[01:06:26] Speaker A: I would go see fish again. If they do it again next year, I'll do it. Yeah.
[01:06:30] Speaker B: I like fish, but I've always liked the dead a bit more, so that. That sounds fun.
Besides that, man, I don't know what's going on, but I feel not old.
My youngest daughter. Excuse me. My oldest daughter is going to camp on Tuesday for a month.
[01:06:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:06:49] Speaker B: And I feel like a sad dad. I'm like, I barely see this kid. She's twelve. She's got her own life.
[01:06:55] Speaker A: That's a big step to sleep awake.
[01:06:57] Speaker B: Oh, my God. Yeah, we did it last year for two weeks. Feels very short. A month.
[01:07:01] Speaker A: Did you go when you were a kid, like camp?
[01:07:04] Speaker B: Oh, man, I got a story there. I don't think we want to touch it. Okay. I went one year for a month, and I cannot tell you when it was because I blocked it out because it was such a traumatic experience.
[01:07:16] Speaker A: Oh, wow. Okay.
[01:07:17] Speaker B: Oh, my God. My poor parents had no idea.
It was like, right after we got to the, you know, to the US, parents didn't have money, and this religious jewish camp, the guy was like, yo, you guys are from Israel. Let's do a mitzvah. Let's get your kids there for free. My parents are like, that's amazing. Thank you. You know, let's do it.
We're not a religious household, bro. I didn't go to temple growing up. I didn't know what I was doing. I got to this camp, everyone was so religious.
[01:07:46] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[01:07:46] Speaker B: It was like three prayers a day, davening. I was like, I don't know where I am. I don't know what's happening, what I'm doing. I was an alien. I did not know what in the world was happening around me.
[01:08:00] Speaker A: I actually, I did go to summer camp, and it was a jewish camp for, I went for like, ten years, 1011 years summers in a row.
[01:08:08] Speaker B: Which one did you go to?
[01:08:09] Speaker A: Went to Campbeco in Adirondacks in New York.
So that's the boys camp, and then their sister camp is Camp Shinawa. So I would go for two months every summer for, like, most of my childhood, me and my brother.
And, you know, we're, you know, we grew up jewish, but, like, very unrelated, we never went to temple. Temple. And I'm not religious today at all. And.
But, yeah, it was mostly sports camp and, like, a very light service every Saturday. That was it, you know?
[01:08:41] Speaker B: Yeah, it was not. Not the case for me, but, no, my kids are going, and then wifey and I are going to Mexico City for hell, yes. Oh, my God. So excited.
[01:08:51] Speaker A: Nice.
[01:08:52] Speaker B: Anyone has good restaurant recommendations, let me know. All I know is supposedly you need reservations for, like, dinners everywhere.
[01:08:59] Speaker A: Hmm. So I hear so many good things about Mexico City. That should be awesome.
[01:09:03] Speaker B: Yeah, same. So a few weeks from now, no pod, I'll be in Mexico.
[01:09:07] Speaker A: That might be around the same weeks that I'm heading to your neck of the woods. We're flying out to Chicago and then. And then doing a trip around the lake. So that'll be fun. Northern Michigan.
[01:09:17] Speaker B: Good stuff. All right, everyone, thanks for listening. Later.
