The Exchanges

Q Well, that, you're, you're reading my mind, right? So that's where I wanted to go. Tell me this, tell me the actual story of the, one that's, one that you obviously can share, right? Uh, uh, of the last customer that kind of used you in real life. How'd they use you specifically?

A So we have one large retailer. Um, they've got about 2500 locations. We just completed a pilot with them and they're using it specifically for in store. So you go into one of their locations and you have questions about something inside of that store. Uh, you can actually send a text message and it goes directly to their own customer care team who's already there answering things from online and stuff like that. So you're able to, to, you know, from a brand perspective, Improve sales in store without having to hire more people. You can just use the people you have already. Uh, and so we kicked off that pilot with a hundred stores, uh, and then we'll be rolling out to 2500 before the end of year. Um, on the total flip side, another client, online only, a large telecom provider.

AI assessment note: “we have one large retailer... they're using it specifically for in store.”

Q my own thing? How much should I anticipate to put towards the business? Take us back. Now that we kind of talked a little bit about the finances, take us back and tell us more about kind of the emotional side of the story. How old were you when you launched this? And, uh, and, and, and, uh, was it, did you feel comfortable leaving Your job to do it.

A Really good question. And, and the thing is, you know, I started it when I was in my late twenties. I think I was 28 when I first started saying, okay, I'm going to, to create this and start doing something with it. I was still working full time for seamless Grubhub. Uh, we were going through a merger and an IPO. You want to be a part of something like that. So I didn't want to leave too soon. I wanted to have that experience and be able to add it to my resume. As well as grow the company and we were well funded and had a really great customer base. So for me to leave, it was more of, um, I had it kind of planned out as to when it would happen. There's obviously vesting and you don't want to leave right after an IPO because you'll end up losing some of your shares. So waited for, for those golden handcuffs to come off. Was that a six month or a That was six months, fortunately. A lot of companies, it's 12, but there it was six, which was great. Um, so, so I left, and I still had lots of money on the table, lots and lots of, of shares that were vested, obviously, after a merger. They're gonna try to keep everyone on board, uh, and, and, you know, as someone who was on the senior leadership team, um, it would have been great to stay, and it would have been a large chunk of money, but my drive to do this was so great.

AI assessment note: “I think I was 28 when I first started saying, okay, I'm going to”

Q Okay, got it. And how many team members total do you have?

A Right now we're at 13. Uh, we have the, uh, right now we're, we're looking to, to go up to around 15 by the end of this month. Uh, and we're adding at least two people a month right now. Uh, so a lot of inside sales, a lot of tech. Um, we just, uh, we're, we're talking in final stages with a CTO, a permanent CTO to join us. So, um, yeah, we're, we're growing pretty fast. And with this next round, You know, our board is saying, don't think three X or five X, think 10 X. How can you, how can you grow this company 10 X in that next round? Cause that's how much, uh, business there is. That's how, how many, you know, businesses are interested in this.

AI assessment note: “Right now we're at 13.”

Q Good morning. Thanks for joining, man. So tell us real quick. I always like to kick off with this. What do you guys do specifically and how do you make money?

A So, um, what we do is, is we like to say as a sales organization that we sell happiness. Uh, we found that in customer service, things like web chat, email, and phone is, is really, really quite expensive. So our value prop to businesses is this, that we will save them a bunch of money by switching to text messaging, and we create the software to let them do that. And on top of that, Uh, their customers are actually significantly happier using SMS as a channel over other channels. This is something that I, I learned while I was at Seamless Grubhub. So what we're selling really is a really great ROI, as well as that improvement and happiness to the customers. And we're using our software, uh, which is something that we created in house here in New York City. Uh, and, and we do that with, um, a mixture of bots and AI and things like that. That's super helpful. Uh, For those customer care teams. So we sell that and that's how we actually make money. We have a monthly subscription plan, depending on the number of messages used, very similar to a mobile phone plan. So most companies we work with, they get it, uh, it makes sense. And we just kind of mimic what you have on your phone, but for really large, uh, enterprise organizations for customer service.

AI assessment note: “We have a monthly subscription plan, depending on the number of messages used”

Q So how does Betterment use you? Since we all know who they are, how do they use you? Yeah.

A If you're, if you're texting with them, whether it's through a notification or replying to a notification, um, or working with, with someone there, you know, just asking questions about your finances and things like that. Um, we, we created the system, uh, that goes back and forth securely for them. So, um, you know, that's, that's, that's basically what we're doing for them. That's the core base of what we do is the two way SMS. Um, it's totally encrypted. We've got things like bots and whatnot, but they're using it just to build human to human relationships. Um, And so when you normally receive an SMS from a company, like a notification, your, your stuff is on the way or whatnot, you can't reply to those. There's no software to pick that up and then kind of put it, you know, in someone's hands. So we created that software. So that's, uh, you know, with Betterment, that's an example of one where the notifications that you receive, um, you can actually reply to them and it goes to a human.

AI assessment note: “That's the core base of what we do is the two way SMS.”

Q Yeah. Great. Okay. Um, what about, uh, I know you want to be a little bit kind of, uh, keep some economics close to your chest, but this is also valuable learnings in past episodes to our, to our listeners. That's what they value the most. Some of the economics. Have you gotten a good sense of things like churn and acquisition cost yet?

A No, I wish, I wish I did. We've had one client leave us so far. Um, and it was because of something that was kind of out of our control. So, um, so we don't really know what churn looks like and the acquisition costs, obviously it's the cost of everything. We haven't done a ton of marketing even to determine, you know, what that looks like. So we're, we're still early on. I've, I've laid out a foundation for a one year plan to have all of that information Between the marketing and sales, uh, you know, we, beyond the sales salary though, there's not a lot that we're doing, um, other than PR, you know, just to, to really raise that top level awareness on the funnel and then drive people to the site, do the typical retargeting and things like that. We tried doing, um, Google AdWords and we spent around 10 K on that. And it was about 2000 unqualified leads in, in one month. And it was just taking all of our time and not what we were going after. So, um, You know, we're focusing on, you know, just getting the awareness to those large companies. And, and, you know, that means I travel a lot. I, I get to meet with a lot of C-suite. Um, it's quite time consuming, but fortunately I'm the lowest paid person in the company.

AI assessment note: “No, I wish, I wish I did. We've had one client leave us so far.”