The Exchanges

Q So what are you paying? I mean, we're talking about 50%, 10%.

A Yeah. So usually, um, in, in this stage, because it's a flat fee, I'm going 50% down to about 30% on upfront sales to any, uh, affiliates or anybody who brings me in. But Honestly, if, if, if you're an entrepreneur and you're looking to go that route, my biggest suggestion is everybody always hates the idea of giving away revenue right out the, right out the gate. Um, what I did was I used those joint venture partners to build up an audience, basically to feed my pixel for Facebook, feed my pixel for YouTube. And then you take that audience, you create lookalikes, and now you have amazing startup audiences for Facebook ads, for YouTube ads. And it makes it way easier than just having to jump in and, and, you know, go at it cold.

AI assessment note: “I'm going 50% down to about 30% on upfront sales”

Q Okay, so that's what I'm trying to get at. Are they expecting to then, are you expecting them to then pay that whatever that is again at the end of 12 months?

A Uh, yeah, well, so it's kind of up to them. The people who ended up getting into those programs, they're going to have an option to upgrade, but they wouldn't upgrade at that same cost. They would upgrade at a lower cost, obviously, as being one of the first ones in. And so, um, technique there was, was straight up. Like when you're, I knew that the software itself was going to cost multiple six figures or high six figures to build into completion. And, um, at least with the team and the way that I wanted to do it versus my competition, uh, And, um, you know, being a Silicon Valley guy, the, the private funding space is something so foreign to me. So what I did instead was let me go out and generate a bunch of revenue in pre-sales, use that revenue to fund the development of the projects and then go out into the mainstream.

AI assessment note: “they're going to have an option to upgrade, but they wouldn't upgrade at that same cost”

Q payments of 700 bucks a pop, and if you assume those are basically annually, if I divide by 12, then that's about 58 bucks for those 2000 people each month, you could argue you've built a base of about a hundred grand in monthly recurring revenue. Do you look at the revenue like that, or no? Are these people expecting, you're not expecting them to keep paying year over year?

A I would say that in, in any sort of projection that we've run, I'm probably more along the lines of a 25 to 45,000 a month when it comes to them, for them to actually recur, like, for them to actually continue on and to upgrade, because a lot of people, uh, I mean, they, they just, they're gonna see that, hey, maybe this one wasn't for me, and, and they might not use it again in the year after, but, uh, the nice thing is, what I've really done, and this was sort of my goal, my goal wasn't actually to build any recurring in this first year, which we're just about to finish this year, Uh, it was just to get the product out there, get the point where I can actually, uh, develop it where I want it to be, because now basically I didn't want to embarrass myself, right? By releasing a product that wasn't what I wanted it to be. So now we're getting close to actually at the end of December, releasing it to the, to the, you know, stature that, that I was hoping for. And now I have, you know, way more audience that I can actually go out and reach more ads that I can run in a better, you And, uh, yeah, try to sort of corner the market on a yearly recurring fee versus a monthly, um, and just make it unlimited feature sets instead of the ladder where you kind of, you know, pricing goes up as you get more quote unquote subscribers or you do more.

AI assessment note: “I'm probably more along the lines of a 25 to 45,000 a month”

Q Which also means they get opted in, right? I mean, if they, if they get a reply, they're subscribed.

A Technically, yeah, so as soon as that one, it's a one-way message originally, but then as soon as that customer comments back, it would be a subscriber, an actual subscriber. Subscriber that you could then have more engagement with. Um, but right out the gate, a lot of our customers like, you know, e-commerce, for instance, a great example, Shopify customers are promoting different products with Shopify and saying, Hey, if you comment below, I'll give you a 10% discount or I'll give you this. And so they're using those incentives to, you know, lower their costs for ads and do all this. So we're making it to where that function is the easiest one to use because it's the most common. So as soon as you log in, that's what you're going to see.

AI assessment note: “Technically, yeah, so as soon as that customer comments back, it would be a subscriber”

Q So do you know yet? I mean, you've, you've obviously, it sounds like you launched this just a year ago, right? Yeah. Okay. Do you have a good sense yet in terms of what your churn is annually?

A Yeah, no, I don't. I mean, like, I know that, so what I also did in order to, in an effort to decrease the churn, and a lot of people don't love doing this, is I created a buyers-only Facebook group, kept it active the entire time, make sure that we actually, like, discussed things, gave people new ideas, and so our group is still incredibly, incredibly active. That being said, I, again, I You know, when it comes to my, my churn, my drop off, anybody who's not going to be there in the new year, if they have to return, um, it's, it'd be a guessing game, but thankfully I wasn't banking on that piece just yet with the new feature set. Thankfully, we're going to be able to change the churn rate just because Everything's gonna be, uh, built in, and the way that we're doing it, and you guys will see, hopefully, as it comes out, but you'll see, um, uh, it's a lot more sticky. It's gonna be integrated with your buyers platforms and your notification sections, and the one thing about Messenger is, it's not like an email platform, right? Like, I can't go from AWeber to GetResponse If you wanted to do that, you could export your list, you know, your email list and move it from one to the other. The problem with messenger is it's based on where you get the authorization. So you can't move a messenger list from one place to the next. So the idea being, um, you know, creating a stickiness of…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, no, I don't.”

Q I'm a little wait, Travis. So I'm confused. You just a minute ago said that only 60% are active and you said that they've done at least something, but then you just said 80% have gotten at least one subscriber. Why?

A So when I say active, I mean that are still Using it on a regular basis. Most people were going to, they're going to go in, they might set something up and then they, who knows that they log in again. We use, um, I'm sure you're familiar with intercom, obviously. Well, we use intercom to kind of track when logins were and when was the last time. And, uh, so based on that, I'd say right around 60% are still active, but we've seen that about 80 to 85% of our accounts, and I don't have the actual number because we did this like three weeks ago, um, have at least one subscriber. Got it. The good news is, you know, we're, we're right now with 2000 ish customers, somewhere around that, uh, that, not that line. We've, um, we've had bots connected to, I believe right now about 44,000 fan pages. So obviously those 2000, a lot of them are doing it for other people. They're, you know, they have multiple for themselves. Um, And then we also had a, for a while, we had a free trial where you could get in and then leave, so obviously some of those customers attached fan pages and whatnot, but, um, just seeing all of that data even was super helpful for us to see what they were doing in the first 24 hours, and the biggest thing that I learned was, yeah, you know, I, I made a ton of mistakes, and I'm probably still gonna make a ton of mistakes in the new one, but, um, you know, you learn and ju…

AI assessment note: “So when I say active, I mean that are still Using it on a regular basis.”

Q they're going to be sticky. Yours is pretty obvious. They have to set up a chat bot. They, maybe they have to get their first five subscribers. I mean, you can look at your current base and tell me of the 2000, how many have done that. And you can basically assume if they haven't done that, they're going to churn. So How are you looking at that data set?

A Right. So, uh, again, the software itself was a little bit more complicated. I've kind of schooled myself on UX going through it kind of trial and error, to be honest. And so it was a little bit more complicated when we first launched it. Um, but the good news is I would say within seven days, 60% of our members are active doing something. Now, the first thing that we changed was that was one of my first questions in the new UX was when I log into the software, what do I do? Um, thankfully there's a couple of things that Even if you, you know, fall backwards through it, you're going to end up having some stuff going on, getting some momentum. So it's not necessarily creating a bot as much as it is using a bot because there's a lot of cool features that a lot of people don't know about with bots that you can do kind of automatically.

AI assessment note: “within seven days, 60% of our members are active doing something.”