Nick Tomic Reveals the Story Behind Face2Face | The Biz To Biz Podcast

Welcome to the Biz to Biz Podcast, your number one source for all business news. Hey everybody, welcome to today's episode of B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Kopelman, better known as the Merchant Maverick of South Florida. And today we have a really interesting guest coming on the show, Nick Tomik from Face2Face.io, and he's got some really cool technology that we're going to talk about today. For businesses, especially B2B. And it's a really cool, um, business that he has created. He is the founder. He's located in Montreal, Canada. And welcome to the show, Nick.

Thank you, Allen.

All right, so tell us a little bit about, you know, Face2Face. How long have you guys been around?

So we've been around for as long as humans have existed. I'm kidding. Um, we've been around for a bit less than a year. It's been 10 months now. And yeah, we've been in beta since mid-November. We're rocking and rolling, close to 60 paying customers, most of them B2B SaaS. And yeah, that's cool.

And then, and then what led you to— you told me a little bit, we're going to dive into the product, but what drove you to create this product?

I was building another product before that, and I kind of prototyped the first version of this because I needed it. I was getting all these signups, right? Like hundreds of signups a day. From random sources, mostly Discord, Reddit. And I, I really wanted to see what these guys were doing. So I installed Hotjar and then I saw them getting stuck in the app, right? And when you're an early stage SaaS founder, there's nothing more frustrating than watching your users kind of come in, complete step 1, complete step 2, and then they get stuck and they leave and they never come back. So I thought, What if I could freeze their screen, jump in front of their face and say, hey, I'm the founder, can I talk to you? So I kind of hacked that together and yeah, I was able to have over 10 hours of conversations with my first users in the first couple weeks of implementing that. And about 10 months later, I decided, you know what, let me turn that into an actual software.

Wow, that's pretty cool. I like that. So, you know, it's, it's obviously using some kind of AI engine, right? To—

uh, it's not actually.

Oh, it's not? Okay. Well, how would you detect that there's a problem going on?

Um, you don't. So initially the hypothesis was we'll let the agents call the users, right? And that's what our MVP was. And I sold like 15 of those. And then I watched my clients kind of, you know, click call, call, call, and basically get ghosted by their users. So we realized we need to create a button for the users to call the agents when they want to talk to them. Oh, okay.

That's cool.

Yeah.

As it is today, I'm on a website. And I get to a point where maybe I have a question and there's a button call. I hit the button and then all of a sudden they're on a Zoom call with me.

Yeah, exactly. Right on the website.

Wow. That's pretty cool. That's, that's pretty cool. What's the cost of the, of the doing this?

Well, it depends. Theoretically, very soon you'll be able to start for free. And then we're going with a usage-based model with some SaaS fees. So depending on how much you use it, what you need, it'll scale from there.

Wow. I think I'm going to have to look into getting this for my website. Try it out.

Yeah. You think— can you handle it? Can you handle it, Allen Kopelman?

Yeah, we're a B2B company. We're on Zoom right now. We're B2Bing.

If money's calling, got to pick up, right?

Exactly. So like, you know, we're a bit, you know, we do a lot of B2B, we work with a lot of B2B merchants, you know, and obviously, you know, the sales cycle is a lot different when somebody's buying a product for their business than like, oh, you're on Amazon and you need to get a mug, right?

It's a pretty cool mug.

Thank you. Or a microphone or something, right? And you're just buying something, you know, B2B, sometimes you're buying expensive software, like you were saying, could be a few hundred, could be thousands of dollars in a purchase. And, you know, do you want to sit there and fill out a contact form and wait for somebody? We kind of have the same thing. You know, we're, you know, we're in the merchant processing business and somebody, they have questions about merchant processing and we'll send them a link, hey, book an appointment, blah, blah, blah. Maybe it's easier hit the button and then talk to somebody.

100%.

Yeah.

And I found that like the more expensive the software is, the more complicated the solution, the more consulting is needed in order to get to the deal. And so it's like adding all that friction, like you're basically just saying, hey, go find someone else, right? Whereas when you're saying across your website, hey, we're available, talk to a— get on a free one-on-one consultation right now, right? You're basically screaming at your buyers, we're here to help you. We're confident that our solution is great. We have people accessible that you can actually talk to. And yeah, if you can put the right people in front of them, it'll build trust, it'll accelerate your sales cycle. It'll basically just, just close more deals and close them faster.

No, definitely. Yeah, we had a— we were looking for a social media software a couple of years ago, you know, to do all the posting and all that. And we had tried a couple out and then we saw this one that had a lot of good reviews. But the thing was, is they want you to pay for a whole year. Up front, like, is there a— then finally, like, after a few emails, they're like, okay, you qualify. I don't know how they figured out we qualify, and they gave us 2 months for free. And then after 2 months, I go, obviously now you like it, you know how to use it, you're using it, now you buy for— which I thought was a really good selling point first. And it's not cheap, it's like over— it's like 3 or like $300 a month for the year. But, you know, that's a lot more expensive than other software, but it does a lot more. So, you know, I think when you're doing stuff B2B, you know, you really— a lot of these companies like Stripe, Square, PayPal, you can't get anybody on the phone. Me, at least you can call me. You know, I— you can call the office. There's people here, but that's really cool to talk to somebody on the— so what type of companies are, are using this? Mostly SaaS companies right now?

Uh, I'd say it's like, it's split 50/50. So I'll give you the first 50, which is my favorite. Uh, so those are B2B SaaS companies that typically have a product-led growth motion. So they are self-serve. You can go and click start today, right? Start for free, whatever. And then they also have an upsell where they have like an enterprise plan or they have something more expensive, you know, $300, $400 a month, $1,000 a month, $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, $5,000, $10,000 a month. These guys are a perfect fit for us and especially like our more advanced features that allow you to like segment users, show popups only to specific users, blah, blah, blah. Those are the guys that get, you know, like in the first week of having the software, they have the ROI for the rest of the year. I like those guys. Most of it is, is that segment, I'd say from that 50% and then the other 50%, it's a bit of everybody. And this is where I see the product really evolving. I started like I've been in B2B SaaS for 7 years, which is sort of how we have that initial mode of customers. Um, but it's really scaling out of it. Like, we just signed up a real estate agent, we signed up some— we signed up a bank, we signed up some life insurance guys. Uh, all kinds of—

sounds like pretty awesome for banks. Like, your product, that would be great for banks.

You wish, right?

Yeah. I mean, how many times do you— you're calling the bank, calling, calling. I mean, That would be awesome.

Yeah, it would. So it's like a super long implementation cycle, but yeah, it's, it's definitely something.

So when somebody gets this and they want to put it on their website, like, what's that? How is it very complicated to integrate to your website, or is this something that can be done in a day or a couple hours? Like, what's the implementation process? Yes.

So like the most basic implementation is like just like a popup. That one takes all in all from signing up to installing it, maybe 60 to 90 seconds.

Oh, yeah.

You add one line of code in the header of your website. Most people can do it without talking to their devs. And then, yeah, you hit publish and it works. And then we have that.

Yeah.

And then we have like a more intense implementations, like the ones we do with B2B SaaS where we connect it to their HubSpot, their Salesforce. We do all these different kind of like setting up on the back end, right? Replacing their existing forms, doing all kinds of stuff. And that typically takes like a couple of weeks just to get everything set up.

Right. But first, for simplicity. But so let's say somebody's got, you know, 5, 6 sales guys in the office. How does it segment like that? Like, how does it work?

Okay, so interesting thing that we found out is that the round robin method is cool when you're working with a phone system, right? But because we're working inside like Slack channels, Teams channels, Discord, right, you have multiple people inside one channel. And so what we do is we send the notification to the channel and everybody sees it, and it's on a first pick first-come, first-served basis, right, where we actually create that kind of like that sports mentality where like everyone's like competing to get the lead. So yeah, that's, that's kind of what we figured out.

It's like when they put the food out on Hell's Kitchen and everybody's got to run up and grab which meat and vegetables they want to go make their food.

Yeah. Isn't that so much fun?

That's good competition for the sales— salespeople, right? For sure.

I mean, that's what you want in a sales department, right?

Yeah, you want people to be competitive and to go for it. So like, what's the— so, so you just like link it up in their Teams and then they click the button and I guess you're using Microsoft Teams at that point, or is it using Zoom?

Um, it's using our own proprietary technology.

So it's using your camera stuff, not— you're not using like Zoom or Teams.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

We use like Twilio, like they're, they're providing us with the technology. So like everything goes directly to them.

Okay.

And then basically when you click talk now, like let's say a call comes through on Slack and you see it and you're like, okay, talk now. It's going to open the browser, what, like a tab. And then on the browser, you'll be able to see that user's screen, what they're seeing at that moment, and you'll be able to accept or decline the call, right? So I don't know, let's say you're trained to only deal with a specific type of customer. If you see that that guy's like on a page, the page of a product that's not relevant to you, then you can leave it for the next guy. Okay. Because you could see where they are and what they do and what they've done in the past. You kind of get a history of they're browsing on your website.

Wow, that's really cool. It's pretty intuitive. You're getting a lot of information. Do you have like any other information like on that customer? Like, I guess you don't even know their name, right?

Yeah. So on the website, what I've been pushing for is like I letting the customers kind of like fill up a form before calling.

Oh, okay.

So that way you get their name, you get their email, you get their phone number, and like in case you can't pick up, you can always call them back later. Plus it helps you kind of validate that they're serious about calling, right? That's one thing.

So you're not getting crank phone calls, you know, from people.

Yeah, like before we had like, uh, um, so before I had the, the form, like I was getting ding dong ditched, like 60% of the time, right? I felt like it was karma for my teenage days. But yeah, yeah.

When— or when you were making crank phone calls, is your refrigerator running?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You take the Yellow Pages like, hello, Mr. Wiseman, how's it going today?

Yeah, we don't— I mean, listen, we get enough crazy phone calls as it is of just telemarketing for all kinds of stuff in the office. As long as we don't get a bunch of telemarketers on there, it'll be fine.

Yeah, but you'll be—

we don't want them, you know. So that's really cool. So when people are using this, are they seeing like having better relationships with the customers? Are they seeing like— are they using this for customer service also?

Yeah, so two main use cases really. Um, you can add support to it, but the two main ones are, uh, sales and customer success, right? Okay. Getting the lead in and then making sure that the lead stays and that they're activated and they're getting results with the software. So really, like, I'm a big fan of this, like, consulting approach, right? And sharing your unique insights with your customers. That's, you know, oftentimes people come to you because they have a problem, they're looking for a solution. It's not— your solution is not just your software, it's also your knowledge and your ability to transfer that knowledge to your users is what's going to make them successful. And so we're effectively giving you maybe like the highest leverage with like the lowest leverage way of doing that. But the highest output, right? Like consulting is extremely time-consuming, but the ROI is huge.

So that's why you're having a conversation with somebody. If you needed to get some like paperwork from them or anything like that, are you able to like send them like a sign-up link through the conversation or that's all done on email?

That's all done through whatever method you want to use. We don't have any like built-in DocuSign or payment forms or anything like that. Yeah, not something that we have built in.

Okay. Now I was just wondering like how— but that's pretty cool.

Listen, we're less than a year old, so we might get there eventually. We're less than a year old.

So yeah, I mean, listen, I think it's a pretty— I think it's a pretty cool advanced tool. I mean, I could see installing it on my website and Do you put like a timer on it? Like, okay, we're in the office 9:00 till 5:00 PM Eastern time. Boom. That's when you can reach somebody.

Yeah. And on the more advanced plans, you'll be able to actually sync it with your calendar. So it'll read the calendars of whoever you want to put on, on the, on the round robin or on the roster, let's call it. And yeah, like if nobody's available, it'll hide it.

Oh, it'll hide it. Okay, interesting. That's pretty cool. What else can you tell? What else do you want to tell me about it?

I don't know. Like, let's dive into it. What do you think your use case would be?

I mean, I would like to have it like I would put it on my website. So if somebody is on there, they're looking at, you know, looking at the website and maybe they're not sure and they don't want to book an appointment. Let them fill out a little form, click the button. Then the next thing you know, it could be you're calling me. You need to get set up with credit card processing and we're having a conversation. Hey, what do you do? What does your business do? Tell me about your business. What, you know, we ask what kind of pain points you have, you know, determine, you know, then we go into, you know, we could probably— can you even do a demo on there?

Yeah, you can share your screen.

Yeah, so that we could run a demo for somebody and go, okay, here, let me show you the, you know, our dashboard and how it works and, and all that, and explain to them, you know, how the different software works. Or let's say they need a full-blown point of sale system and we have to get a specialist on the line. We can, you know, we can also schedule that for them while they're talking to us. We don't have to go back and forth with emails and texts and everything like that.

So You know, I think that would make a difference.

The only way to find out is to try it, right? I'm a big fan of, you know, if something's not super expensive and it's worth, you know, it's worth trying, you know, it's definitely worth trying. I mean, can you imagine you put a video out and say, hey, this is Allen Kopelman, CEO of Nationwide Payment Systems. Want to have a conversation with me? Go to my website and click the Call Now button and you can have a live appointment with me. And then somebody sees that on LinkedIn and goes, okay, or even on my LinkedIn page, I have the link to it. Somebody goes, oh, I want to talk to this guy. So sending him a LinkedIn message on this call, I mean, that's crazy, huh?

It's maybe something to try at the beginning or at the end of your video.

You can make an ad Like, yeah, to say, oh, you want to call me, click the link below. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I mean, is it helping your business when someone comes to your website? How is it helping your business?

It does. Yeah. I've had over 500 calls on my website since the beginning of the year. Okay. It's so about 150 demos booked and 500 calls on the website, right? That's roughly the— and I, yeah, I answer about 60% of the time. That's my, that's my average, I think 62 or 63. And yeah, average call lasts 10 minutes, right? So it's sometimes these things last pretty long. But yeah, it's helped tremendously. About 10% of everyone who's called ended up buying, right? So there's a lot of people just trying it out, you know, curious to see if it's going to work. Right. And a lot of ding dong ditchers as well, like, like I said before.

So, well, I mean, that's, you know, and but, you know, so if you took your numbers before that, right, on some other kind of product, maybe you were selling, you probably weren't getting as many inquiries.

No, no, I was, I was never getting as many, as many inquiries and they were never as curious, you know, like nobody, like the level of qualification. That's something that I found out. The people who are going to call you right now on your website are probably the most qualified people you can find in your, in your funnel, right? They're, they're basically saying, I don't want to wait. Right. I had one of my customers complain to me that people were calling them. So they were like in the first week of their pilot and they're like, Nick, you know, like they had no filtering setup. It was like super basic setup. They didn't want to like pay to have a proper setup. They were like, let's just put it on the website and see what happens.

Yeah. Right.

And, and what happened is they got like 70 calls. Right. And 60% of the calls were either existing customers or people that booked a demo. They had about 5 or 10 people that booked a demo, and then they realized that they could talk right now. And so they clicked talk right now. And when the lady answered the phone, the SDR, she was like, hi, how can I help you? They're like, oh yeah, I booked a demo 5 minutes ago. And then I realized I could just call you right now. Can we do the demo right now? And they were pretty pissed about that because it skewed their numbers and I don't know what. But bottom line is I told them you should put us on the demo page as like a second option next to the regular book a demo.

Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's so new, it's trial and error. But, you know, a lot of people like, you know, I feel like they go to— they come to your website and they're like, well, Like, I look at buyers and I split buyers up in two categories, right? Somebody that's 40— I'm older, so I just turned 65.

No way.

Yeah. Thank you for saying no way.

Oh, I can't believe it.

Okay, so people that are like 40 to 45 and above, those are the kind of people that are going to book a call. They're going to fill out your form. They're going to talk to you on the phone. Younger people don't necessarily want to do that. So I think this could be a really good way to engage with the younger audience that comes to our site because this way they have this, I want it now thing, right? I need it now. So that gives them that I need it now kind of thing, you know?

Yeah, 100%. This is a really good— you're one of the rare people who actually understands. So I'm Gen Z, I'm 25, I'm like right at the border. Like most people have the assumption that the, the young people don't want to talk, right? And that they somehow just want to text or they want to just try it right away. But that's not true. Young people want the time to value to be super short. Right. They want to filter through things like the way that they swipe on their phone. And the shortest way is not for them to go in necessarily and sign up for your product and install it and try it out. The shortest way is probably just to see it work or to talk to you and answer it, get you to answer their list of 5 questions. So it's pretty cool that you, that you actually understand the younger audience because a lot of people don't.

No, because we'll see, you know, we did a survey and we see a lot of people, like especially younger people, they go right to Stripe. And then, you know, I talked to a guy yesterday, he's like, oh, I'm really frustrated. I have these two websites, one is a skin cream and one is some other kind of like gummy vitamin thing, right? He's like, oh, Stripe, you know, messed around with me for the last two weeks, they wouldn't approve me. And he was on Reddit, you know, and whatever. I said, hey, I'm in the business 20 years. You want to talk to me? Here, great. Here's my information. And then we had a phone call yesterday, sent me his number, talked to him on the phone. And, you know, and I engage with him and I started to explain to him, you know, what's the difference between what we do and what Stripe does. And most of the time, I think Stripe does a bad job of communicating what's on the restricted list. You know?

Yeah.

And, you know, we try to, you know, we explain to them while it might be restricted by Stripe, we have 10 different banks. Somebody is going to take that kind of business. You know, you just have to supply a lot more information to us than you do to companies like that. And, you know, but, you know, we put out a lot of blog posts so people can see that we know what we're talking about. And all our blogs, we try to give people good educational information. Show them how long we've been in business. So they have a trust factor in that. And, you know, it's super important. So I think this is a really great product. I want to definitely try it out. We're going to talk.

Yeah, we're going to hook you up.

Okay. I appreciate that. All right. So let's wrap it up today. So if people want to get in touch with you, what's— are you on LinkedIn? Are you on LinkedIn?

Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn, Nick Tomic. I'm on Instagram, exactly the same name. And on X, I'm @DropoutSanta. And I'm also— yeah, DropoutSanta, because I dropped out of high school. So yeah, and I'm on X. Sorry, no. And I'm on my website, Face2Face.io. So you can go call. Okay.

So if you want to get in touch with Nick, that's all the ways that you can find him everywhere. We'll be posting his links in the, in the podcast notes so everybody can get in touch with them. And we'll prob— and we'll put it— well, after the podcast comes out, we always put an article up on our website. We post it all over. And I really appreciate you coming on. I learned something really cool today. I think that's a really cool product. I mean, if you're in the B2B space, I would definitely recommend you reach out to Nick and try this out. Hopefully we'll get it put on our website because I think it's definitely needed to attract more clients to our company and give them the opportunity to talk to us without, you know, them feeling like, oh, they got to wait and all this other stuff. We want to be able to deliver it now. So I think it's really, really, really cool. And listen, not everybody goes on the journey to, to college and, and things like that to create a business. There's a lot of people that have created businesses that didn't finish college, didn't finish high school, and they went out and they created, you know, great entrepreneurs. You know, I have two children. My daughter is a chief meteorologist with a master's degree on television, and my son didn't He did a GED from high school and now he's general manager of a very large and multimillion-dollar operation, retail clothing store. So success is all about working hard, great ideas. I think Nick has a really great idea and he put it to work. And while he's in its infancy of a new company, he's showing me, look at him, look how happy he is. He created a great product and we're letting people know about it. So everybody check out Face2Face.io. Thank you for listening to the B2B Vault. Thank you to Nick for being on the podcast today. And you can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, any other places you listen to podcasts, LinkedIn, B2B Vault, or Allen Kopelman on LinkedIn. And we're on YouTube so you can watch the video. We also post the video on Spotify. A lot of people like that. So peace out, carpe diem, everybody. Have a great day. Peace.