What Customers Want

[00:00:17] Speaker A: Hey, it is bootstrapped web. We're back after a slight break, and, yeah, feeling that. That crisp early fall air come through the window here. [00:00:26] Speaker B: 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. Summer all over again. [00:00:35] Speaker A: Man, this is, like. This is the peak. This is the perfect month in the northeast of the US. It's, like, seventies, and then it dips down into upper sixties. Like, pretty sunny most days, just out of. Absolutely perfect. Like, the other day. Like, I worked outside the entire day. [00:00:56] Speaker B: Just on the deck, just outdoor office. Yeah, I remember living in Manhattan and, you know, glorious September. Everyone back from the summer. [00:01:06] Speaker A: Yeah, I was at the US Open last week for the tennis, which was unbelievable weather for that. And. Yeah, awesome. [00:01:13] Speaker B: Nice. Well, yeah, I'm pumped for the weekend. We got some fun. It feels really good for the kids to be back at school. Feels like work is back to normal. No vacation's on the horizon. Everyone's focused. [00:01:26] Speaker A: Hell, yeah. Yeah. A friend just hooked me up with a ticket to. I'm going up to Boston next week to see Pearl Jam at Fenway park. This would be pretty cool. [00:01:36] Speaker B: That is fun. [00:01:37] Speaker A: Yeah. Can't wait. All right. Yeah. Other than being busy with, like, life and family and fun stuff, we got jam packed days of business. Let's talk about it. [00:01:50] Speaker B: 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 e commerce in a long time. [00:02:04] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. That's a different dynamic. [00:02:06] Speaker B: 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 work through on Black Friday. So fully focused. [00:02:20] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:02:21] Speaker B: Rosy everywhere, all day, all. [00:02:24] Speaker A: I love it. Love it. Yeah. Like, high level. My list today. I've got some. I'll do a quick update on clarity flow. Things are rolling along nicely there right now. Got a big new feature that we. That's basically live but feature flagged for now and then. What else? I'm studying business model. I know what I want to build in terms of the next long term commitment, focus for building a new asset. Right now, I'm talking to a lot of people who run this type of business, and I'm trying to learn as much as I can and study this business model. I can get into that. [00:03:08] Speaker B: It's interesting you're looking at it from business model first. [00:03:12] Speaker A: Yeah. Because I was talking about last time how I'm a little burned out on trying to make a SaaS business work. I still build SaaS products as like what I do, but 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 starting a, than trying to be all in on a SaaS product. [00:03:36] Speaker B: Okay, very interesting. [00:03:37] Speaker A: Basically, the SaaS asset that I have is clarity, flow, and that's going to continue to do its thing. But I'm looking ahead to what's next. The other thing on my mind 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 that's been awesome. But I dont like spending all these days not building a new asset. Thats just selling my time. It happens to be a really good form of selling my time, but ultimately Im here to build assets and Im spending too many days not doing that. So thats the current problem I want to fix. [00:04:22] Speaker B: Okay. All right. Those are good topics. I want to ask about the business model side. The way its 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. Maybe imposing what I want it to be is a little bit dangerous in terms of not letting it become what it wants to, but I feel okay kind of forcing it, you know? [00:05:01] Speaker A: Yeah, I want to talk about that. I have some questions. [00:05:04] Speaker B: The crux there is self serve versus any. [00:05:07] Speaker A: I thought you were talking about that. And I have some questions about that. [00:05:10] Speaker B: 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 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 like coming to terms with, okay, 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 have told us that they want and they're willing to pay for. [00:05:50] Speaker A: Messages is like they can like leave a message, basically, they can leave a message. They talk to the AI, but like the AI like gets the good information and stores the message. [00:05:58] Speaker B: Yes, 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 pieces of information. That's what I'm going to 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. [00:06:27] Speaker A: I know I keep saying this, man, and I'm not like, bullshitting here, but 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 want to have it like, like schedule calls with cat, our customer success. [00:06:49] Speaker B: Cool. Yeah. It's not very far from you being able to do that. It's actually quite close. I would say, realistically, two weeks or so and then appointments is an interesting thing to talk about because it's a feature that we shrunk before we tackled it. We thought it was going to 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. Nice. And we are starting to get our marketing engine rolling. We linked up with a new designer, Francois. Fantastic designer and a great working relationship. [00:07:27] Speaker A: I think I know him. What's his last name? [00:07:29] Speaker B: You may have recommended. When I went to Twitter and said, hey, I need a designer, a few people recommended him. I think the name of his company is clearly designed and he does one of these services where it's like a flat rate based on how he tracks. And it's just been such a great experience and it's such a huge addition to the marketing team. [00:07:49] Speaker A: Nice. [00:07:50] Speaker B: So what we 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 want to take capacity away from product and I don't want product to take away capacity from marketing. [00:08:01] Speaker A: Does he do. He does, like, design, ui, ux? [00:08:05] Speaker B: Yeah, kind of just does all of it. [00:08:07] Speaker A: Love it. [00:08:08] Speaker B: And so we're launching landing pages, so now all of our ad traffic is going there. So we're kind of 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 signups by, like, you know, maybe triple 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. [00:08:31] Speaker A: Yeah. What do you know about the activation funnel there. So what does it look like when customers sign up? And then what can you see? What kind of insights can you get from there? Are they talking to your team? Is there customer support stuff that you can learn from? [00:08:50] Speaker B: There's a lot of customer support and there's calls happening every day with individual customers. So there's a lot of learning. It's kind of, you know, some things are surprising the, but it is self serve, right? But it is self serve where 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 Rosie agent, click for a 15 minutes conversation. So we are encouraging as much of that as possible. Intercom for support and chat has been great, just really reliable and really good. And we can tweak just enough where we can do things. Like once you're in the admin for more than ten minutes, make this pop up. Once you've hit this marker, have this thing pop up. So we're encouraging as much conversation as possible because we clearly we do not have everything we need. We've had a funny experience where our vp of product, Jesse, has been on maternity leave. She gets back two weeks ago. She walks into the product with a clear set of eyes, 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. Cause 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. [00:10:26] Speaker A: Are those things like use cases that the customers are trying to do that are different from what you're offering or they're just navigating around the admin interface. What are they trying to do? [00:10:39] Speaker B: So they are trying very specifically to accomplish a few things. They want to get it trained, they want to test it out. They want to understand how to go live with it. 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, right. And you know you're not going to get it quite right. 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. [00:11:18] Speaker A: Refactoring is always, like, harder than building it. [00:11:21] Speaker B: 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 going to relook at our existing admin. Very unsentimentally. We're going to tear this thing up and get it to the right place. [00:11:40] Speaker A: I like it. I've done so many. It's kind of crazy at this point. How many different iterations I've done in the clarity flow, onboarding flow, the whole user experience, the whole user interface, the navigations, all of it has gone through lots and lots of hours of building stuff and then hours of just tearing it all out and building it again really hard. Yeah. Yeah. [00:12:06] Speaker B: 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. Well, I knew I was complicating this thing, but people told me it was really important to them, so it's okay to complicate it. And then you come back and say, okay, I was wrong about that. [00:12:24] Speaker A: It hurt too much on the onboarding UI Ux stuff, a change, like 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 you're presented with this kind of big pop up that gives you a tabbed interface with videos. And, like, all right, let me introduce you to conversations in clarity flow. Now, here's courses in clarity flow. Now, here's clarity flow commerce. And each of those had, like, a five minute video that you could watch. 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, like, the in app education experience. And. And I did get a lot of churns, and I. It took me a while to connect the dots on this, but, like, a lot of people, part of the cancellation reasons, it was, like, it's just too complicated. It's, like, too much work to set up, and 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. Um, and now it's. It's more about, like. Like, just let. Let you explore. You're going to come in and we've got a main navigation. On the left side, you just click, all right, conversations. When the conversation page is empty, we give you an empty state. That gives you a few tips on like, all right, what are conversations? What do you, what would you use them for? Here's a quick video if you want to see it. If not, just go ahead and create your first conversation. If you navigate over to the library, you know it's empty, which is give you a couple, like, on the empty stage, there's 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 help. You know, I have noticed, I think an increase in or a decrease in churn, increasing conversions, and definitely less of the comment like, oh, it's too complicated. That combined with Cat being there to help people. [00:14:32] Speaker B: Right. But it didn't work the way you wanted to, the very guided experience, because. [00:14:39] Speaker A: We always think, let's guide our users down a specific tiny tunnel because we. [00:14:45] Speaker B: Want them to do exactly this and. [00:14:46] Speaker A: Then this and then this. But 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 want to funnel them down a track and they cannot leave that track. But I think more times than not, at least from what I'm seeing, and, like, customer behavior in general, people are more savvy with SaaS tools. 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 fall over to here? Then how do we handle you? [00:15:22] Speaker B: That is a challenge, man, because 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. No choice. We paid for it. This is what you're using for customer support. Therefore learn it. Self serve and SMB, you have a lot of choice. If you don't like it within the first 60 seconds, 90 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 should need a tooltip, the app should do it for you. And that just feels like a really high bar 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. [00:16:12] Speaker A: 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 did make a lot of sense. Like, the notion of, like, we do wanna point them down the path that we want them to go. But I also think that that adds friction. Like, 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 interview. Right. [00:16:47] Speaker B: This is an inbox. It should feel like, feel like an inbox. [00:16:50] Speaker A: Just use existing patterns that people know, you know? [00:16:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's, it's, so when I think about that, I have two competing issues. On one hand, I'm a believer in the Nikita beer school of get them to the aha 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. My mantra to the team is we're gonna get this thing to a point where it can take on. It can onboard 100 people a day. And because of that, 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. [00:17:47] Speaker A: So between, I wanna push back on you on that. [00:17:50] Speaker B: Okay? Okay. Give me a second. So between those two, I am willing to sacrifice some of the experience to get them to the AhA 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's almost like that aha moment might need to be out in the marketing experience before they get into the account. [00:18:15] Speaker A: I agree with that. Okay. So I agree with you that, like, show them and make them feel an aha moment as soon as possible and. Yeah, maybe part of, like, the marketing funnel. Yep. Um, or, like, the onboarding, you know, thing. But the, I think that the point of the, of that aha 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. [00:18:45] Speaker B: Right? You've convinced me it's worth it. [00:18:47] Speaker A: You've convinced me to, like, spend more time and more time. Might be weeks, you know, to fully adopt a tool in their business. [00:18:54] Speaker B: Days, weeks. What's your pushback on the hundred a day? [00:18:59] Speaker A: I mean, nothing against the volume, but I think that. I think that this type of product with the type of customers that you're going after, they do need handholding. And I think that's. People just put a person on it. Service like, I know it's not self serve. Maybe you can still have a self serve option. I just think that you're going to convert so many more of them when you have an official rally, not rally. Rosie, expert on the team, ready to help you design your AIH prompts and get you all set up. [00:19:37] Speaker B: And I am, you know, that's, that's a different company, that's a different product. That is $500 a month. [00:19:46] Speaker A: And I think it's more of a setup fee. I picture that more as like a paid first month is like a then, and then, and then charge whatever you want for the next. Just set them up. [00:19:59] Speaker B: The, you know, Sam, who has been talking to the most people in terms of support, success onboard and so on, he said the same thing. [00:20:09] Speaker A: Because it's like, I agree with you, it's the dream to have a self serve thing, but I just think that this product in this market, which is cutting edge, we're in cutting edge territory here 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 they, it does require, like, it's not just an interface problem, it's like a business consultation problem. Like they need to be consulted on, like, well, how? Because, like, it's probably not even just about taking whatever they currently do on the phone with customers and copying that over to Rosie. I would bet that a lot of these small businesses have really crappy current phone. Phone thing. Like. [00:21:04] Speaker B: Yes. [00:21:05] Speaker A: They haven't even figured the old way out. [00:21:07] Speaker B: Yes. It's not nearly as optional as upload and whatever else. [00:21:11] Speaker A: 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, Rosie should offer that, and while you're at it, you're consulting, but you're automating it with AI, and 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, they're charging whatever you're currently charging. [00:21:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, man. I think it's going to be a challenge. I know it's going to challenge because I don't know. Two things. One, I don't want that. Yeah, I actually don't want it. You know what I mean? That doesn't sound good. And we can definitely get to a place where we are outsourcing that to a service outside of the company. There are a lot of agencies these days, one in two person agencies, that are getting SMB set up with AI products. It's like a new category. So we could definitely outsource it. We 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 product with the least friction in the market and sacrifice some of the complexity and power and figure out a way to make it self serve and what we've started to do. [00:22:38] Speaker A: Sorry you got finished? [00:22:39] Speaker B: I was going to say, what we've 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 going to work with self serve. It is a conversation. It turns out everyone does appointments differently. For example, plumbing, 30 minutes consultation, appointment, no problem. But 75% of those turn into just getting the work done right there. Obviously, if you have a plumbing problem, you're like, I don't care how much it costs, you have to fix it or we can't go on. So then that 30 minutes turns into 60 minutes, and then that screws up your calendar. So you can't have Rosie booking 30 minutes appointments when a lot of them turn to 60. So as soon as you dip into the nuance of an industry, you realize, oh, this feature is not going to work, self serve. So what we're doing is we've shrunk it down and we're launching this feature with just a calendar link. You want an appointment? Cool. Enter your calendly, your savvy Cal, 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 and then we can reserve the full complex feature for when we're ready to open up a 200 $5500 a month tier and then we're game. We'll do the customer success. [00:24:06] Speaker A: That definitely is. That's literally what we just built in. Clarity, flow, the whole appointment booking with the buffer time and all that. It's super complicated. To build it took us several months to get it out. [00:24:20] Speaker B: And then imagine an external service tapping into your API and trying to get it right by just throwing appointments on. It's kind of easy to throw an appointment onto an API. It's not easy to start looking at the rules. And what about this buffer thing? [00:24:35] Speaker A: For sure. [00:24:35] Speaker B: So that's later. [00:24:37] Speaker A: All right, one last quick point to push back. This is not even on you. It's on. Cause I hear this from so many people. I don't want to do services in my staff. Look, I totally get it right, but I think that people wrongly, and this goes back to my productized services days talking about that. I just think that people wrongly conflate. Done for you. Done with you SaaS onboarding services with what we all know is consulting. What I do with clients right now, building mvp's on rails, that is pure consulting. Every single. Yeah, I 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. The thing that to me, it's not like I'm not. 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 we have our own tech to supercharge that. [00:25:58] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, the nuances as you go, as opposed to trying to build. [00:26:02] Speaker A: But that's the thing. Like, you can't. 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. 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 that. 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 3 hours each, you know, because we have our own tech to make it easy. Right. [00:26:40] Speaker B: And then you get a high LTV because they don't churn out. [00:26:45] Speaker A: Yeah, because they pay for it up front. So that's the. I just think that there's a very different thing between done for you SaaS onboarding and what we all know is like, services. [00:26:58] Speaker B: Look, it's not, you know, I've done it. Right. Hard hook at the end was a forced demo, $500 a month and helped them get onboarded. [00:27:09] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:27:10] Speaker B: And that worked. But I want 100,000 customers and the only way to get 100,000 customers is none of 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 have, oh, you're in the healthcare field. This company specializes in getting people on board at the rosie in the healthcare field. [00:27:42] Speaker A: Right. [00:27:43] Speaker B: And I think we can get there, but at least for now, I'm going to shoot for the actual goal. Maybe we won't be able to reach that ideal, but if we design the product to onboard 100 people a day and keep the North Star as, like, what would we do if we wanted 100,000 customers? I think that will drive us toward decisions that are very different on the product itself. [00:28:08] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:28:08] Speaker B: So we'll see over the next few. [00:28:11] Speaker A: Months, and you have the resources and the time to execute on that. So, yeah, go for it. [00:28:17] Speaker B: We'll see. If it's right, then great. 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 voicemail and a third party answering service. [00:28:32] Speaker A: Right. [00:28:33] Speaker B: Can be, like, blitzed in that way to growth, even though. Right. There's effectively. There's effectively no, there's no incumbent. [00:28:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I do like the message aspect of it. 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 what you need out of the customer and then recording it. Like, that seems like a really powerful win without needing to build a lot, you know? [00:29:02] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's still 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, 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. [00:29:31] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, yeah, you could sort of maybe like the. Anyway, we're gonna get into, like, product design here. Like, I can go all day with this, though. Yeah. [00:29:43] Speaker B: What else you focusing on? [00:29:45] Speaker A: 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 up front for whatever plan they want. [00:29:58] Speaker B: Respect for sticking with it, you know. [00:30:02] Speaker A: Again, I talked about it last time, I thought 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 if it continues, then September is going to be the second pretty good up month in a row. And then maybe it becomes a third. We'll see. You know, can you trace? [00:30:31] Speaker B: It's like, what's working? What's doing? Is it, is it the traffic going up? Is it the conversion? Is it. [00:30:37] Speaker A: We have some traffic stuff now finally working. I think the product is in a good place. It's not perfect yet. It sort of never is. But cat on, customer success has been awesome. We have. I mean, we still have churn, you know, and I. 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 not that it's all over. It's. It's just like, you know, some percentage of coaches are, they don't have serious coaching business and others do, or some of them are like, oh, I love the product, but my coaching is on hold until next spring. Like, okay, well, I don't know what to do with that. So it's like a combination of getting the coaches with the really good businesses in and those are all the customers who do really well and stick with us. And so that's, you know, I don't know. So then what else? We did finish and ship our, we call it appointments feature. It's essentially the calendar booking feature. You can, you know, it's a, it's like essentially a calendly built into clarity flow. Like fully, seamlessly integrated. So, like, it can do some pretty. It does all the things that you would expect. You can connect your Google calendar, you can set your availability windows. Lots of rules around that. You can set buffer time. Like, don't book me back to back minimum notice, only book this far out. It has actually team appointments, too. Some round robin logic kind of stuff. If you have a coaching company, how did you do? [00:32:36] Speaker B: Because my initial instinct is, did you ever build it, my friend, that's a lot of features. [00:32:42] Speaker A: I mean, that remains to be seen because it's not actually. It's live, but it's behind a feature flag. The only thing we're waiting on is Google verification. I mean, did we overbuild it again, it remains to be seen, but I think that. That we put in what I think to be our essentials, because the goal with this feature is to say, you can cancel your calendly account, or a lot of coaches are coming in and they don't use a calendly or a savvy calendar or whatever. They don't use those replacement. They are comparing us to competitors and they're saying, and we constantly got the question for years, like, can I book my coaching sessions through this? And then we say, like, no, just use calendly or savvy. And they don't like that. They don't want to connect and duct tape multiple tools when they're searching for coaching software. They expect to do all the coaching things in this platform. [00:33:51] Speaker B: And that was an expectation. [00:33:53] Speaker A: Yeah. And I refused to build it for two or three years. I was like, this is not worth building. And just the requests got louder and louder and then it got to a point where it's like, all right, we've built everything else. And I'm seeing churn and I'm seeing non conversions due to this feature. So we pulled the trigger with it. We didn't build everything. It's only Google calendar. It's not Microsoft, it's nothing. Apple. I don't know if or when we'll do those. But it does the things, it does the essentials. The other cool thing about it is that it is integrated into clarity flow. So 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 if you cancel or update the appointment, it all posts into this async. So it seamlessly integrates there and it integrates with our clarity flow commerce. So what coaches really want to do is they want to sell. [00:34:54] Speaker B: Oh, interesting. [00:34:55] Speaker A: That's why it's part. That's why it's an essential for them, is like they're selling their coaching. [00:35:00] Speaker B: If you need a 1 hour session to focus on this hundred dollars, buy it here. [00:35:05] Speaker A: And then that gives you access to my calendar. [00:35:06] Speaker B: Awesome. [00:35:09] Speaker A: So all that is there. And so it's live. It's gone through a ton of testing, but we have disabled it until we get this Google verification. And that's a fun little dance where we have to basically revise our language and our privacy policy to suit Google's needs and get the right scopes approved and all that. But I think we've. I'm still waiting, but I think I. We've responded to their feedback and it should hopefully be live by next week. [00:35:41] Speaker B: Okay. Okay. It's a big deal. Do you have anything else on the horizon on a feature that you feel like is needed or do you get to chill back? There definitely are to pull back on features. That's my hope. [00:35:55] Speaker A: For me? [00:35:56] Speaker B: No, for me. [00:35:57] Speaker A: Oh, okay. [00:35:58] Speaker B: I want to take a step back and not just rush into building more features, but just give it a minute. Listen to everyone. [00:36:03] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. 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 over a year or two and I'm not yet convinced on whether or not we're going to build them. My developer does not yet have her next big feature to start working on, but she'll always have bugs to, she'll always have a queue of bugs to work through. So that's, that's not a problem. But yeah, like, like people ask about having forms, like, like custom questionnaire form intakes. That's a popular thing with coaches. And then the other thing 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 want to do live calls and we certainly would not build a live calling tech, but we could maybe do like a Zoom integration or a Google Meet integration where you're just embedding a zoom inside clarity flow, which again, to me, because we get that request all the time and I'm like, look, coaches just use Zoom and then for your non Zoom calls you just use clarity flow. It's not that hard to have two different tools for that. But again, coaches constantly ask, it's a coaching platform. Can I do my calls right in? So we might do some little tricky integration, embedded zoom call kind of deal. [00:37:42] Speaker B: But yeah, maybe there's a whole universe of white label stuff out there. Yep, 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 100,000 customers? Word of mouth. How do you get word of mouth brand? So everyone we talked to were like, we will do whatever in terms of reselling affiliates, but you cannot take our brand off it. [00:38:14] Speaker A: Yeah, but even those, those features that I talked about, like, I, those all seem like nice to haves at this point. 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, everything else, like, I feel like the product is pretty close to complete. There's always going to be ux. Like, all the features that we have, we're always circling back to make them easier to use. But, yeah, I don't. It wasn't like last year where we just had a long list of things to get us into payments. Yeah. But, like, now. And we have a far less amount of feedback on, like, oh, it's missing this, it's missing that. Like, it's got everything you need. It's just a question of whether you activate and use it, you know? [00:39:08] Speaker B: Yeah. And then some people always want to use features in a slightly different way, and that is feature work, but it's not a new feature. I. Yeah, 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. There's literally endless features. [00:39:31] Speaker A: Yep. [00:39:31] Speaker B: 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? Like, main features have pillars is what you call. [00:39:51] Speaker A: Yeah, if it's like, so simple that it does wander a couple things, like, really well, and it's just known for that. That's been part of the challenge with clarity. Flow is like, it has turned into this kind of a beast of a solid software. I wouldn't say it's like the software tool that tries to be everything for everyone. I think zip message probably was going down that road, but then when I changed to clarity flow and niched into coaches, this market and this type of tool category, 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 build and maintain, you know, but again, like that, this is why SaaS is fucking hard. [00:40:50] Speaker B: Yes. On my side. I mean, that's pretty much it for me. For the weekend, we moved everything over into Asana. We were kind of just, you know. [00:41:03] Speaker A: I never clicked with Asana, you know. [00:41:05] Speaker B: You haven't liked it? [00:41:07] Speaker A: I've tried it. I just never clicked with it. [00:41:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm liking it. 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 other list is like, for next week, you know, 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 want to get to them. So we just started putting things into Asana. Tier one, tier two. Tier three. Tier one we focus on. 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. [00:41:40] Speaker A: 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. [00:41:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I like notion because it's flexible. You can set up however you want, little lists if you want. If you like, you know, lists with sub lists, you can do that or whatever else, and that's it. We are. We're out there. We're in the market. We're trying things. [00:42:04] Speaker A: Yeah, there you go, dude. I mean, the other thing that I sort of want to talk about is, like, the. I've been actually asked about this a couple times from people on my newsletter 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. That's always been in pretty good balance, I think, especially, you know, being able to work at home, being so close to the kids all the time, and, like, 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. It's pretty balanced. But for me, this year and especially now, 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, focused on the future. 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 sort of like, this is every single day I'm trying to increase the number of dollars that I can sell this business for in the future. [00:43:30] Speaker B: Like, you know, like, increased cash flow increase. Just, like, you know, overall enterprise value. [00:43:37] Speaker A: Enterprise value. You know, like, I'm so less concerned about, like, what am I getting paid for this current hour, like, of work? Like, I don't care. [00:43:46] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:43:47] Speaker A: As long as I'm building an app. [00:43:48] Speaker B: 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 ten x ARR. Yeah, you got to get. You got to break a million. [00:43:59] Speaker A: Right. [00:44:00] Speaker B: 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 ten x depending on a bunch of factors. But that's the right thing to focus on. [00:44:13] Speaker A: So this year I opened the doors again to my consulting work and now I'm pretty regularly booked with one or two simultaneous consulting projects. Right now I have two and I've got another new one starting in October. So it's like, and these are just like MVP app builds. And I gotta say, like, I've done all sorts of consulting over the years. I've worked at agencies over the years. I used to be a freelance web designer and then I 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 MVP's, my one month MVP service, it's been sort of a dream in terms of consulting. Like, I can't really ask for a better situation to just really, really cool people to work with. That's been awesome. And the projects themselves are great. And I'm actually pulling a lot of byproducts out of these products, 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. I built a nice, like stripe payment flow yesterday for another client and 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 own businesses. Right. I can maintain clarity, flow and direct the team there, but I know what I want to be building in terms of like my next real big business asset. I have a clear vision and I'm talking to a lot of people, learning a lot about that, but it requires like full time focus and it's, it's just hard to balance that. So that's the next problem I'm trying to solve, I think what it looks like because I've been thinking about really just putting a pause on consulting and just saying I can go x number of months without consulting momentum. [00:46:37] Speaker B: Now though. It's tough. [00:46:38] Speaker A: It is tough because now I'm starting to get clients without any effort. It's just word of mouth or clients coming back for more. That takes time to build up. It does take time and if you pause it like it's really hard to start it back up again, I learned that the hard way. So I think that the answer is just be more willing to bring on my developer and task that person with because these projects are still going to require a lot of me, especially because I handle all the UI, the UX. I think my client yesterday was telling me the big value for them because they are developers but they liked hiring me because I just had an eye for product. I just make these product decisions just like it's my own product and they can really outsource that and work on their other business while I hack away on their next idea. 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 got to wire up this stuff and then sort of start to take back some of my time. You know, I think that's some of. [00:47:56] Speaker B: The margin, but gain back some of. [00:47:59] Speaker A: The time, give up a little margin, but I could afford that and I've got a, the really efficient team at my disposal here. So yeah, like. Cause like literally like every week that goes by and I'm like man, I hate that feeling of like Friday is here and I have not shipped anything new to move the ball forward in this business that I want to, like I need to be building that next asset and I'm just letting time go by without doing that. Doesn't feel great. [00:48:30] Speaker B: That's the fire. Not, not. [00:48:33] Speaker A: I'm getting really, getting really fascinated with membership models, training like training and content, content and training businesses. [00:48:44] Speaker B: It's the business model you're talking about. [00:48:46] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:48:49] Speaker B: It's not software but it is valuable on an ongoing basis. [00:48:53] Speaker A: Yeah, I think for me probably the next thing that I will build as a product will be software templates. Like taking like I have a very valuable components in app template library now I just need to make it into a product that could be part of it. The thing that I'm thinking through is probably under my instrumental product brand, it's going to be some combination of access to my templates or a growing library of templates. Not all from me, but from community contributors. There would be a community, there will be a growing library of courses and training, especially project based stuff. A lot of it, if not all of it is going to be very AI focused. How to build with AI, how to leverage AI and community and maybe even getting into events like in person events. All of that combined into some sort of annual membership. That's what I want to start to really commit to. And at the top of that funnel is YouTube content and growing an email list. That stuff takes a lot of daily work to execute on. But I think that that's the business model that I think 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 seems like more attainable than going all in on a SaaS product to try to do this. [00:50:35] Speaker B: It sounds like you like it. [00:50:38] Speaker A: Yeah, I do. But I think the key, it'll require a lot of work for me up front and probably me creating the first batch of courses and the templates and stuff. But what I want to 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. [00:50:58] Speaker B: Yeah, not everyone wants to deal with the admin of running that business, but they want to, they can contribute. It helps them grow their audience, they can make money from it. [00:51:05] Speaker A: Yeah, it's really interesting because like different businesses 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. Sometimes it's, and then it's like, how do you price it? Is it, is it like one membership price or you're 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? Like, so I've been, I've been talking to a lot of people and learning, but yeah, I like the idea of building for builders. I also, I think that it's the, one of the thing that attracts me to that type of business model is unlike SaaS, people buy access to this kind of stuff sort of all the time. There's always going to be demand for more training. I happen to think that there's a ton of demand for AI based training. [00:52:02] Speaker B: 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 it. I mean, everyone falls for it. I fall for it. Because you want value. Yesterday, you know, 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 than this, but I'm gonna comment because I want these figma files. There's just an endless amount of top of the funnel content to create that that's helpful to people. [00:52:31] Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting and, like, thinking about training a lot. It's like, especially in tech and learning to code stuff, you can find everything on YouTube. It's kind of rare that you're going to come up with a paid course that somebody cannot find the same content for free elsewhere or cheap on udemy or whatever. I do think that there's still a space for offering training, but it's more about connecting to the instructor and also the community support. And I just think that there's a, like, 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 meetups. Like, just benefits of being a member of this and paying an annual fee. And so I'm also trying to think through, like, what are 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 live workshops on the topic of building with AI and starting to learn and understand what the top questions are to turn into courses. Definitely selling my templates library. That's part of it. [00:54:09] Speaker B: Yeah. You do have the beginnings of it. [00:54:11] Speaker A: Yeah. It's like a lot of stuff to think through and figure out how to. Cause I feel like a SaaS has the benefit of you can clearly make a roadmap. All right, this is what the MVP is. Then we're going to build this, going to do that. This is more about, like, just grow the audience and learn from them and then see what direction you want to go, you know? [00:54:33] Speaker B: Cool. I love it. [00:54:35] Speaker A: We'll see if I can find the time. [00:54:39] Speaker B: You are building it as you go, at least to some extent. It's all part of it. [00:54:46] Speaker A: Yep. [00:54:47] Speaker B: I gotta run to a call. [00:54:48] Speaker A: All right, dude. [00:54:49] Speaker B: Hope everyone has a great weekend. [00:54:51] Speaker A: Later, folks. [00:54:52] Speaker B: Thanks for listening.