The Exchanges

Q You have a bunch of different things on mailbox mining, LinkedIn, you know, word of mouth stuff. Like there's a bunch of different plans here, which, I mean, does one of this make up like the majority of the revenue? Is there one you're hyper-focused on?

A Yeah, so it's, it's that sort of mid-level word of mouth that is that 2000 dollar a month price point. For 2500 a month, we'll also build the website and maintain it, but what we're doing at that core piece is solving all the basic problems. Are we really doing a good job of capturing the leads and referrals that are coming in? Do we have a nurturing campaign that's going out and following up with every single prospect? Do we have a regular flow of content going out? You mentioned mailbox mining. That goes after a very specific problem, which is So many of the leads and contacts that your sales team are making never actually make it into the CRM, which means we're, we're not, we're not following up with them. We're not selling to them. And yet those contacts are happening. They're happening in your email. So let's just grab those. Let's get them into the CRM system. And, and because we've built, you know, hundreds and hundreds of nurturing campaigns and, uh, and, and regular flow of content, We get the benefit of learning from all that data across several hundred different companies, and that, that's to me what makes this so much fun, right? It really is all about the data.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, so it's, it's that sort of mid-level word of mouth that is that 2000”

Q right? Marketplace to go hire writers. It sounds like you've kind of built your own little scripted inside of the, like embedded into your business and these pricing plans. Why have you chosen to kind of do a lot of things for, for the kind of the small business, right? Or the company that needs your help versus going all in on building like the best marketplace to hire writers?

A Well, there are good solutions for that, but the problem is this from the CEO. Which is where I come from. What I need is somebody to solve this problem. Like I, I, I took every method you can think of in the companies I've worked on, you know, built in the entire team internally, used to external agencies, subcontracted it all out. All of those have challenges. Like to, to have a decent marketing team to actually execute in all the things you need is, you know, four to five roles. That's, that's pretty significant if you don't have a company that supports that. Um, hiring an agency, honestly, that'll work, but A ton of CEOs won't keep writing that 10,000 dollar a check month in and month out, even though it is going to work, because it's just hard to see the ROI. And yet the, the number one problem in marketing is, is the lack of consistency. It's, if you don't commit to a strategy and stick with it, you're never going to get the, you're never going to get the results. You're not going to, you're not going to see the ROI. So what you really need is a solution that pulls all of those pieces together that, you know, that's the unique thing about what we created and I created it to solve the problem that I was experiencing.

AI assessment note: “what you really need is a solution that pulls all of those pieces together”

Q Bill, you've done this a ton. A lot of first-time founders struggle with how to set comp structures for their first account executive, right? How do you structure that? What's the quota target?

A Well, it is tough, particularly when, when you're not totally sure you've got product market fit. You know, we have a huge advantage here in that we know this market really well. We're working with, uh, with the sales, sales team and a sales leader that, uh, so our, our CRO was, uh, was the sales leader at ProLaw, that first company. So it's such a huge advantage to come in with that knowledge of, of what it takes, but, uh, I always build from the ground up and say, okay, well, how many, it's so, so tempting to take the numbers and go into reverse. We need this revenue. We have this many salespeople and we're going to divide up the quota, but that's really meaningless, right? I much prefer the ground up route of saying, okay, here's the activity that I know a sales rep can do. Here's what that's going to translate into a realistic number of deals per month. Here's what that turns into revenue. And that's what creates a quota.

AI assessment note: “I much prefer the ground up route of saying, okay, here's the activity”

Q And so, I mean, from like a cap table perspective, do they just own like 80% and you only own 20? Or like, how did you work for some of those economics?

A Well, it was, it was a little bit of a, of a reverse merger in the sense that part of the attractiveness in doing it was the management team that we had, had created with ZebraWorks. So what we did when we put ZebraWorks together is we brought the original team of that, that first company I started when I was 18 was called Pearl Law Software. And the genesis of ZebraWorks was to bring that management team back together. You know, we spent a ton of time in the legal market. We know, you know, we know this area inside and out. So it was that expertise that we were really bringing to the table. And we built a cloud platform. We tie that to the existing on-premise technology that we have from NQ. And, you know, it's kind of a joke in, in the legal market that the way you be successful in this market is do things today that everybody else was doing 10 years ago. So right now we're moving to the cloud. And so that's That's sort of the, the logic of the combination.

AI assessment note: “That's sort of the, the logic of the combination.”