The Exchanges

Q was around, like, what's this one word? And you had built up so much curiosity around, what's the, what's the one word? And I saw Andrew Warner commenting on a Facebook comment thread below a video you guys had, and I'm like, okay, this thing's, like, rocking and rolling. So, You launched four years ago. Walk me through what people pay and, uh, to get in for the six months.

A Our, our first price was 3000 dollars when I was just doing this by myself, and I wanted 10 people to join, and 88 people ended up joining, uh, and it was 500 bucks a month for six months. Second time around was 800 bucks a month for six months. And then the, uh, third time around was another 800 bucks a month for six months. And then the, finally, in the final years, we're now a 5000 dollar program with more, with even more value that we're able to offer at that to give people more of what they were wanting, their end result they're wanting. And it's a thousand dollars a month for six months or five grand now.

AI assessment note: “Our, our first price was 3000 dollars when I was just doing this by myself”

Q So dive into, you know, my audience is heavy, heavy technical SAS, right? So, you know, build credibility with them here real quick, right? Talk about a SAS company. You recently built one of them.

A Well, I love SAS because the business model just makes it really easy to Do everything else. So I've, I've got, I started seven software products. Um, and sort of just intuitively did the lean startup before it existed. Um, you know, I'd connect with customers. I'd find pain that they had. I would build software products that would not modify user behavior. I would build software products around things they're already currently trying to solve. I found all these ways to minimize the risk of starting a software company. And then I started one as paperless pipeline.com is my biggest, which We'll do 2.1 million or more this year, which I've also stepped away from that business. Um, I stepped away from that business actually at a seven, 300, so between 307 100,000, I stepped away from that business.

AI assessment note: “I started one as paperless pipeline.com is my biggest, which We'll do 2.1 million”

Q Any business, SaaS or e-commerce, Amazon, whatever, brick and mortar, restaurant?

A Yeah, yeah. Well, the fundamentals of a business, as you know, as many know, is a customer that uses a mechanism to get a result. That's really a business in a nutshell. A customer that uses a mechanism to get a result. New people that are looking to start a business obsess about their idea. And so they say stuck, obsessed forever. If you're an Amazon seller, you go to Amazon, you look at Amazon products, but you're all looking at mechanism, beginners obsessed with mechanism. As an entrepreneur, once you branch out and look at customer and the result they want, you understand the mechanism would be a hundred different mechanisms to get the same result. So what I do is I get people to focus on customer and result. And what happens is they start building a brain of an entrepreneur. Then on top of that, we install the skills of sales and outsourcing, which are the two big skills I think you need. So you sell, outsource the mechanism. And then you start to like, you start to build a lot of freedom as an entrepreneur because now you're not stuck trying to make a really dazzling, shiny mechanism with all these bells and whistles. You're sitting with a customer because I did this with, I did this with start from zero. I was like, so listen, what would make this product irresistible for you to buy? What would make it irresistible for you to buy? And that's a question you can ask someon…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, yeah. Well, the fundamentals of a business... is a customer that uses a mechanism”

Q Why do people fail in the six-month time frame? Why, why, what happens to the 90%? What do you think the biggest struggles are they hit?

A They're just, they're either not made for this kind of a work, maybe they're not made for this kind of world, or they don't want it bad enough. And, and that's, those are the two. So it, people tend to get stuck, uh, for extended periods of time on finding a painful problem to solve. That's, that's this, that's like, so, you know, people are sometimes will take four or five, six months just to find a single painful problem to solve. And the reason, and the reason it takes them so long is because, well, they, They bring their agenda into the mix. They try to push things onto people that people don't necessarily want. They don't actually have a level of care and empathy for the person they're talking to. They're more, they're more driven by their own agenda.

AI assessment note: “people tend to get stuck, uh, for extended periods of time on finding a painful problem”

Q that brings back memories like crazy because we got in massive fights at hay when we were building it, where in every product release, we would secretly remove at least seven, like some artificial number lines of code. And if no one complained about it, we'd leave it removed. And so you always would get simpler. Do you have any examples of how you did that in, in paperless pipeline?

A Yeah. So, well, I don't know. I don't know if this actually made it simpler, but one of the innovations with pipelines, when people do transaction management software, what happens is in a transaction management, typical transaction management platform is a, is a user has to go in and create a transaction inside the software. Then they can scan the paperwork and then they can go and upload it to the transaction. But the way that that works in the real world is agents will go into an office and they'll lay their transactions on a desk and stack them up. Then the, then the staff will work each one into a transaction. So with paperless pipeline, we didn't change behavior. What we did is we said they, Agents could just go to a scanner, scan, and then it would stack up in a, in a working docs section in pipeline, and then, and then, and the site staff could assign it within the platform. So it worked intuitive just how they did. So that was user behavior. That was, that didn't answer the, the keeping things simple. In terms of keeping things simple, one of the things we found with brokers is they would need to open up these PDFs to look at contracts to review them to see if an agent was missing a signature on a page, because a broker will get screwed by an audit if they're missing a signature. And agents, agents miss a lot of signatures.

AI assessment note: “That didn't answer the, the keeping things simple. In terms of keeping things simple”

Q Because you can cancel your rent payment, right?

A Exactly. And so I, they're like eight or eight or nine or 10 competitors at the time. That I launched paperless pipeline. So, you know, if you're looking to start an idea, what first, what you do is you can look, say, what other, what, what, what software have you been looking for for years, but have been able to find the other one that might probably the best. There's two, there's two other ones I'll give really quick. And, um, it's, it's, what do you use Microsoft Excel for in your business? Cause whatever using Excel for, you can find solutions to. So if you happen to ask like a, an Amazon seller, what are you using Excel for? They're like, well, I use Excel to track all my inventory. Right. You could, so you could help them build an inventory tracking thing for an Amazon seller. But then there's also like, if you ask, one of my other favorite ways to do this is to sit behind someone and ask them about what their, in their email inbox, what's, what's the email inbox like? What emails take you the most time to reply to? What emails are the biggest pain in the ass? These kinds of things. And then I say, oh, I hate these emails. So if you go to real estate and you talk to a realtor, you say, hey, what, what email is the biggest pain in the ass? And they say, oh, this, this thing, I got to print this thing out, print this contract out. I got to sign it. I got to scan it. I got t…

AI assessment note: “Exactly. And so I, they're like eight or eight or nine or 10 competitors”