03: Impress the Sharks and take down Industry Giants with Fintech Founder, Cody Barbo

This is Dan Hightower with Product Market Misfits talking about one of my favorite industries, fintech, and an amazing company in the space founded by Cody Barbeau, Trust and Will, which you can find at trustandwill.com. Trust and Will makes estate planning simple, affordable, and accessible so you can live comfortably knowing your affairs are in order in case something happens. I'm extremely excited to welcome Cody to Product Market Misfits today. For those who don't know, Trust and Will is a Series A stage company, having raised $8 million from some amazing investors such as Luma Launch, Halogen Ventures, Lynk Ventures, and Techstars. I'd also like to thank Laurent Grill at Luma Launch for the question suggestions. And for all those podcasts with a little too much noise and not enough signal, I recommend Podshots. It's SparkNotes for podcasts. They tweet the top ideas from amazing podcasts and send a digestible newsletter. So it's as if I listen to all my favorite podcasts in just a few minutes. As the saying goes, most books should be a blog post and most blog posts should be a tweet. And now most podcasts should be a Potshot. Check them out today on Twitter @podshots and subscribe to their newsletter at substack.potshots.com. So Cody, how's it going, man?

Hey Dan, thanks for having me.

Yeah, the, the, the day I first heard your name was 3 or 4 years ago when our mutual friend Daniel Goldstein was like, hey, would you like to make an investment in a new fintech company? And I was like, sure. So, I mean, we've— I've followed the journey.

You're part of the journey. Yeah.

And it's been a pleasure, a real joy to watch you work and watch you grow this company. And for that reason, I am incredibly excited to You know, peel the layers back and dive in. So as an opener, I love to break the ice first. I'd love to just hear how you got to where you are today, a multi-founder of like 3 startups, how you think about your journey there, and then what has been the biggest mistake or 2 that you've made along the way there?

Yeah, yeah, happy to unpack it. So I'm born and raised in Southern California, so I've been here 31 years. I started first half of my life in Huntington Beach, so I was a long-haired surfer growing up, which most people wouldn't assume seeing me now. But you know, that was my lifestyle back then, and I loved growing up in that area. Close friends and family still there, and I made my way down to San Diego in 2007 to go to school at San Diego State University. And my time at SDSU was pretty unique. I mean, I, I was, you know, obviously excited for college. I think anybody is, but I was working at the Apple Store. That was the first year that the first iPhone came out. So I always had kind of this passion for tech. I was kind of a geek at heart, but my time on campus, I really grew out of my shell as I was kind of your introverted, quiet kid and started getting involved in leadership roles, whether that was student government, my fraternity. other student organizations on campus. And the reason why I'm sharing this is that by the time I was a senior, I was student body president. And the unique factor about this role is that I served as Chief Executive Officer of Associated Students for the full year, which is a $30 million umbrella organization to the university. We have 80 full-time employees, 1,000 part-time. We manage and operate 7 on and off-campus facilities. And the big project from that year was building the new $100 million Aztec Student Union, which is one of the most sustainable buildings in the country. It's double LEED Platinum certified for its sustainability components, and being really involved in that project along with many other student leaders and campus leaders kind of like rewired my brain. And never having that level of responsibility, being able to set such a large vision to impact such a large organization, but also knowing that I had to replace myself in the next year— it was only a 1-year term— And seeing one of my execs take on the role of president the next year was really fulfilling. And the reason why I bring this part up is that I think it is the catalyst to why I became an entrepreneur and I didn't go and pursue a job at a big corporation or become a doctor like I think my parents wanted me to become. And it just rewired my brain to have this mindset of like, set a vision, get the right people on board, and be relentless about your ability to execute. Now, I had 4 years prior to this role to learn the organization, to learn from mentors. So it wasn't I just stepped into it day one without knowing everything. I still had a lot to learn as I went through it and had a lot of reflections as I moved on a year out. But instead of going down this path of going to work for a big company, I went headfirst into entrepreneurship, started my first company right out of school. It was called Niche, or Niche, however you want to pronounce it. I have some lessons that I'll share about this one, but effectively The super quick pitch of Niche was that it was like Pokémon Go for video content before Pokémon Go existed. But the concept was you go to these places, whether it was the bar down the street, Coachella, you have your friend's house that you'd go party at on the weekends. I was 22. Yeah. And you didn't want all these photos ending up on Facebook, which is about the same time that Facebook had opened up their platform to our parents, family, friends. So, you know, I didn't want them thinking that's all I was doing. I was still a responsible young man. So we created this kind of geofence around places. You could draw on a map a geofence, and when you walked into it, or if you allowed your friends through your contact list to walk through that geofence, that's what unlocked the content. So if they missed the party the night before and they were at the house the next day, because they're physically present, they could see the content. But if they never made it to that physical location, they'd never be able to see the content. Thus the Pokémon Go for videos and photos, kind of like—

Yeah, cool.

As the core. So that's the concept that hopefully for the listeners, it's easy to digest with the Pokémon Go reference. But, you know, it took us a year and a half to really make any progress or traction. It was really hard to raise fundraising at the time. I didn't know how to run a funnel, how to run a process, how to pitch angel investors. And I really didn't have that mentor network of entrepreneurs the way that I had a mentor network of student leaders back on campus. And instead of trying to figure it out all myself, I went out and recruited like 6 people with MBAs on their resume, which is also not something I recommend doing. 'Cause an MBA does not bode well. There's, there's a lot of good MBAs out there. I'm not trying to discount it, but like just recruiting people for the sake of MBAs to fill like a finance role, chief marketing officer role. You're not filling out a C-suite when you are really just there for one reason, to get a product to market. Don't even worry about everything else and test it. If it works, it's sticky. You can drive revenue or drive growth. then build a business around it. But we tried to just build the business without any substance at its core, which is no real product, no real customers, no revenue. And I think that in hindsight, that's why we never raised capital, ended up disbanding, dissolving the company in 2014. So it was a fun ride. That was a year and a half of time and savings. But those are the quick lessons on niche.

Yeah. So have a product. That's— yeah.

Or at least have a case study as to why you're solving a problem. Yeah. Or at least people to take a bet on you. The other thing about— the other big life lesson about niche that I recommend is make sure you look up that there's not a lot of other companies in your space with the same name. So niche, N-I-C-H-E, or niche, however you want to pronounce it, there is one that was acquired by Twitter for like $30 million in 2013, 2014. And my LinkedIn blew up that day because it was obviously not the same niche. It was like an influencer marketing platform, one of the first that ever existed. And sometimes when a company has the same name as you and you don't have the trademark, you don't have the .com, you don't have that web authority, that domain authority, you don't have anything. So not even a brand.

I've had the pleasure of watching you like pitch live so many times. How do you— how did you get good at that live pitching? And, you know, would you have any recommendations?

So I'll kind of bring it back to the story too. So industry, my second company, I'd done a small stint in the restaurant industry. I was front of house, so kind of just natural in, you know, being, you know, trying to work the tip money, so to say, and engaging with such a diverse audience, man. People coming into the restaurant, you have just people of all different types of backgrounds. And then I complemented that with my undergraduate leadership roles. I mean, when I was student body president, I was speaking in front of student groups as small as 30 and as groups as big as 13,000 people at convocation. And you have to learn to cater your speech to the time that's allotted, the audience that you're talking to. Do you talk a little bit faster, a little more casual, a little bit slower, a little more professional, cordial? So I'd taken kind of a little bit of the student leadership days, the hybrid of the restaurant industry experience, and then injected that into industry, my second company. And the reason why I'm transitioning back to the story is that we did a lot of pitch competitions. At that company. And there's a variety, there's endless startup pitch competitions. Some, there's no prize money, there's no product, it's just feedback from the local startup community. Some startups have prize packages worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. And then some of them, I've seen them, there's this one in Syracuse, I think it's Syracuse, New York, and there's some global startup pitch competition. There's like $1 million cash, not even just an investment, up for grabs. So if it is the right— like WeWork, WeWork does a million-dollar grand prize. Syracuse, like the City of Commerce for— I think it's Syracuse or Buffalo, one of the two. I think it might be Buffalo actually. They have these huge prize packages. They want you to relocate to Buffalo, New York, which is— Oh, I see. They're putting big money up, but it is the real deal. And if you're not mindful, you don't care where geography is, you can build a great company anywhere. That's pretty serious incentive to want to sign up for these competitions. And we've done it with Trustmole too, but the reason why I use industry is that we had a couple that were really killer. One is an— it was a— the industry we were in was hospitality, but really we're an HR tech platform. We had done this accelerator. It was kind of a multi-day conference up in the Bay Area, and we entered the pitch competition and there was $100,000 up for grabs and we won. And it was hype. We got one of those big Happy Gilmore, like golf check.

Big check.

Photo, got to post it on social, got to pop champagne. We also did a big pitch event up in Los Angeles at this event called VaynerSplash LA where Mark Cuban was one of the judges. So like not Shark Tank, but literally the Shark Tank guy. And I had a photo with Mark Cuban when I was 15 years old. It was Clippers-Mavericks in Los Angeles at Staples Center. And I showed Mark the photo before we went on stage, which is probably not the wisest thing.

Oh, you didn't put it in the pitch deck?

No, I should— I didn't know, I didn't know he was gonna stay back.

Yeah.

We won that pitch event and less so, I think it was like $25,000 in prize packages, which included like a private plane flight, which was the most random but cool prize package ever. No purpose to the company, just kind of an ego flex. But Mark Cuban, winning that pitch competition with Mark Cuban and still having the second photo now in history and the journey was super cool. And whenever I have these pitch events, there's probably a half dozen bigger ones that we won. In the first 2, 3 years of industry is, you know, driving up from San Diego to LA or flying up to the Bay Area, knowing exactly how much time that was allotted, getting to the venue beforehand, looking at how the stage setup was, how I could pace myself across the stage, make good eye contact, almost as much of an investment in the nonverbal piece of the pitch itself as in the verbal, along with what's on the screen coming from the pitch deck. And knowing the audience too. Is it going to be a small audience or a big audience? Who's voting? Is it the judges or is it the audience or the open internet? Sometimes they do it through Twitter if people are tuning in live. That's kind of the equivalent now with virtual pitch competitions that are still going on, is it'll be virtual audience, but knowing who, how many people, etc., and trying to always cater the pitch towards that group. And with industry, we did all these pitch events, They don't materialize to too much. I mean, the prize money is helpful for a lot of startups in the early days, or the services, the prize packages. Sometimes it's like an AWS credit or coworking space for 3 months, blah, blah, blah. But it does help because in the early days, if you don't have the capital, if you don't have the resources, those little prizes add up and they can get you 1 month further, 2 months further out, or give you a space that's not your living room where you have roommates or family at home. And so I'm happy that we participated in some of them. Yeah. That's my long answer to your question. No,

I mean, it's a good segue because for you it meant a lot more down the road. I connected with Laurent Grillot at Luma Launch and he told me the story of how you met. You met while you were pitching Industry on stage.

Yeah.

Yeah, so he was like, yeah, I didn't really love Industry, the idea, but I loved Cody as a founder. So I approached him afterwards because I wanted to meet Cody, which is great because you got one of the two, right? Founder.

Right.

So you guys talked, you took his business card and put it in your pocket and then 5 years later closed Luma as an investor in Trust and Wealth, which is like some serious Rolodex management.

Yeah. So Laurent, you met him virtually. I'm 6'4. Laurent's 6'8. So like he literally is the tallest person you'll see at almost every startup event unless it's like some of the golden State Warriors for an LVC. It's like, he's the tallest guy at every event. You can't miss him. But there's perks of being the tallest guy at every event is that you just kind of naturally spark up a conversation with people. And we did, it was either Silicon Beach Fest in Marina del Rey, or it was another LA, it was the LA Venture Summit, maybe at the Fairmont. I blur between the two. But we connected and just, you know, most VCs are, they're friendly. They're getting pitched by dozens or hundreds of founders over the course of a couple of days at those types of events. But yeah, I always, at the time, you know, I used to try and seek out a business card. I always carried business cards with me then. I still do now, despite it being the digital age. There's something about that tactical handoff to someone else that you can make a great first impression and you don't have it forgotten because you sat next to them on the plane and they're going on with their life, that it ends up in a briefcase or a pocket. And then my preference is to get a card from them and always look them up on LinkedIn in real time. If you're talking to them, they're like, hey Dan, so great to chat. Hey, like, how do you spell your last name? And I'm pulling it up on LinkedIn and telling them, hey, I just sent you a LinkedIn request. So that way, as they're looking through their inbound connections, they're not just like, who's this random person? They just, oh yeah, I met him at the conference or so-and-so at the airport. So LinkedIn for me is always step 2, get the card or get their contact info, go to step 2, send them a personalized invite on LinkedIn. I don't know why people don't take advantage of sending just a blank connection request. It's like sending an email with no subject line. If you don't know

the person.

I'm not going to read this email. Delete. Personalizing the LinkedIn invite is always helpful, and for me, it's always a timestamp. It's a timestamp because when that person accepts the connection request, it's timestamped on LinkedIn in the contact info section. Then the reason why I always personalize the invite is I try and leverage some context. Where was I meeting this person? What was the context of the conversation? That always lives in the history of the messages between those 2 people. So I think, you know, I was connecting literally earlier on looking up on LinkedIn today. I was introducing our head of engineering to a CTO of a very successful startup here in town. Connected with the guy back in 2017. I saw him speak on stage at a tech conference here in San Diego. That was my timestamp. I remember the exact event, matched it up. I always take photos of those events. I could go back into my Photos app, match it up to the same day. It kind of takes our weak memory as we get older and it brings it back into full clarity. And that's been just a little life hack or professional hack for almost everybody that I meet is go find them on LinkedIn. And if they're active on Twitter, go find them and follow them on Twitter and start to engage with their content because to bring it back to the example with Laurent, Laurent at Luma, we had no contact really other than just being digitally connected for probably a year and a half or so, 2 years. And then when we started TrustedWill, we incorporated in October '17, went through Techstars in early 2018. We went out and raised our seed round in like July, August of 2018. He's one of the first people I reached out to, because I know he invests pre-seed and seed stage. I know he's in LA, which is where most of my venture network is. And on top of that, I know him. Like, I've given him like a couple years of my timeline with my previous startup, as well as this startup, to at least show that I can execute to some capacity in some fashion. And while there's never a guarantee that someone like him or Luma, the fund, will invest, at least it's a less hard intro to get when I'm ready to pitch. And that's how that kind of came full circle. And he's been a friend, he's been a mentor now. I mean, they've been on the cap table for 2 full years and have participated in subsequent rounds. And the fact that I can text him for anything as if he's a friend, not just an investor, is something that's really refreshing. I can use that example with a handful of people, but that's the connection to Laurent and managing the network.

Yeah, it's huge. It's that whole lines, not dots.

Yeah, yeah. Which those monthly updates that I send out, I mean, that is more than anything. Like, you want a pro tip if you're an entrepreneur out there? Sending out a monthly update to every single person you come across that you know could be a potential investor, that could make a potential introduction for you to a partner, a new hire, And then sending out those updates religiously the first day or the first Monday of every month, asking people for questions or help, thanking people that have helped you, updates on the metrics, the team, marketing, PR, product updates, partnerships, miscellaneous category. We used to have a travel category pre-pandemic. 'Cause like those updates is your track record. Like Laurent obviously became an investor through Luma, but there's hundreds of people on that update list that know the journey of Trustmullen, even if they said no, to investing, or they said no to a partnership opportunity. All we get to do is pitch them a vision and then they have a year, 2 years, and some people have 3 years of updates on the company. So it's like, what good are we other than our word that we can execute on a vision? And that's what gets the company going in the right direction for the long term, not just 3 years in.

How did— how do you think about, let's say I've got 5 ideas in a backlog, sussing through them? And then, you know, I guess I'm asking that question within the context of of Trust and Will? Like, how did you pick this one, and how did you know this was the, the thing you were going to invest your life in for the next several years?

I was kind of toying with the idea of like, do I go work for a big company for the first time in my life just to have like a really substantial income? It's like the reality of being an entrepreneur is it's not that glamorous until you have an exit event. Like, you're just scraping by for the first few years. There's no guarantee of success. Startups have an insane failure rate. And like, even if you raise venture, like, you don't want to pay yourself some huge cushy salary in the first couple of years because you want that to go to your team, you want that to go to acquiring customers, yada yada. And I was like, do I go be a company man or do I stay true to myself? Which is just go at it again and hope my wife doesn't

leave

me. And that's the timing of it was really unique. I make light of it with a joke, but my wife, we were engaged at the time. in summer, late, I guess like late summer, early fall of 2017. And I wanted to kind of take that next step in our own journey, getting a financial advisor in front of us, setting up life insurance and writing a will was just one of those things on my to-do list. I was like, I think people do this when they get married. And like the obvious inclination is to go to an attorney, but attorneys charge you $3,000 to $5,000 for an estate plan. Like that's ridiculous. Like why can't it be as simple and intuitive as TurboTax, which I've used for like a decade now of my life. I trust it, it's legit, and it's dealing with something you do not want to mess up— your taxes. You don't ever want the IRS knocking on your door. And, you know, just like coincidentally, you know, Daniel and of course our third co-founder Brian, they're the same life stage. Like, they're also married now, all 3 of us are dads now. And the reality of our network, which I call the elder millennials, we're like 30 to 40. We're not kids anymore. Everyone's getting married, having kids, buying their first home, really building their wealth for the first time. So when Daniel and I were catching up, it was August 4th, 2017. We went to breakfast at Mission Cafe in East Village, I think, or actually we got coffee. We got coffee at Monaco Commons and we were just kind of spitballing a bunch of ideas. We were talking about crypto, which was kind of crazy at the time.

Mm-hmm.

And like literally that afternoon he texted me when I was at breakfast, a later breakfast with another contact, hey, what are your thoughts on this idea for like a trusted wills platform, like kind of a TurboTax for estate planning? Because we talked about it earlier that morning. And like, I have that text screenshotted, I have a timestamp, I included in a couple decks just to remember the journey. And it's crazy that that led to literally 2 months of us meeting at my apartment complex's like boardroom thing, whiteboarding, figuring out how large is this market, how many people have an estate plan, how many people don't, what's the average price point that they're paying, what's the average time that they spend from reaching out to creating it. Who is in the landscape today? Do most people do this offline with attorneys or do most people do it online with LegalZoom? What are the startup players? So going on Crunchbase or looking up any TechCrunch fundraising announcements and then looking up the founders of those companies, like what's their story? Why did— what makes them advantaged to start an estate planning startup versus guys like Daniel Bryan and I? And we spent like literally 2 months just figuring this kind of baseline out. And then on the most important subject is like, do people even care? Like, do people our age care about estate planning? Or I'm just like, I'm one data point. So we went out and surveyed like 200+ of our network, which, you know, Dan went to school in Baylor, which is obviously his whole network's like married for like 8 years now. I'm kids number 3 or 4. My network at San Diego State, a little less responsible, but you know, some people are getting married and having kids now. And it was such a reflection of people that had kids. This is like an oh shit moment. I don't have an estate plan. I know I need one. Where can I get it done? How much does it cost? Versus people that are single or maybe married but don't quite have kids yet, they're like, yeah, it's like nice, nice to have but not necessary.

Right.

So then we're like, talk to our parents' generation, our parents about their estate plans. And that just created like a very uncomfortable situation for them because they're not just thinking of their own estate plan but also the estate plan of their parents. If they— if we have a grandparent that's still around, they may have had an uncomfortable or a bad outcome with that estate after that person passed.

Mm-hmm.

We're like, you know what, let's, let's bring it back to your last question. Pitch competition. San Diego's big— biggest pitch competition's coming up. Let's put in the idea. Let's see if we make it on stage. And out of 200 or so companies that applied, we made it on stage. Top 10 companies in front of 500 people at Qualcomm's headquarters. At their auditorium, and we ended up taking 3rd place, and the rest is history. So

I mean, what I'm hearing in that story is this: do people care about their estate at this early— what'd you call it? Millennial? Aging millennial? Elder millennial? It's like, uh, oh my God, I've got a family now. This value prop, which has historically been this like long-term useful thing. This, this work that I'm doing today will be useful when I die.

Yeah, I mean, it's an act of love. You're, you're doing their death documents, but you don't do it for yourself. Why would you care about yourself? You care about your family. And that's why people—

Just like fascinated by the, the way that you've taken a long-term useful product and made it way more accessible, but more importantly, you've turned it into a short-term useful product with

It's a peace of mind. It's a peace of mind builder. Yeah. Like, if you pre-pandemic, like, if you are a parent with minor children and you're getting on an airplane without them for the first time, whether it's for work or it's a vacation, you and your wife are getting away for a number of— like, it literally is in your head whether you want to talk about it or not. It is weighing you down on your shoulders. And people do these scrambled Band-Aid estate plans off other sites that I won't name the night before the flight. Like, that's not the mindset you should have going into this? Because it's not just who looks after your kids, it's who gets your assets. How do assets distribute over time, over age ranges? And who can make healthcare decisions and financial decisions on your behalf? All these things that go into it. And we're like, if half the population doesn't have an estate plan, for the half of the population that does have one, when's the last time they updated it? Do they even know where it is? Is it reflective of their wishes today, or is it reflective of their wishes from 10, 15 years ago when their kids were born? So when we set out to do this, it wasn't just go after half the population that doesn't have an estate plan. We wanted to open up the funnel, create a larger market than exists today for everybody, since this affects every single living adult, whether you're rich or poor, you own a home or not. If you have kids, if you have a family member that you're a caregiver to, you should need estate planning. Cost should not be a barrier. Education should not be a barrier. The experience should not be a barrier. And that's why as we've gotten— like, you hear the emotion. Like, we're 3 years into this. Like, we've made some meaningful traction. We've got 150,000 families that have signed up with TrustAmal. But we're just like a hair— just one hairline on the impact of reaching millions, hundreds of millions of people and how we want to help them think about estate planning. So they're not thinking of an attorney. They're not thinking of LegalZoom. They're not thinking of estate planning at all. So our first impression of TrustAmal is oftentimes the consumer's first impression of estate planning and how it impacts them.

Mm-hmm.

And for us to have an easy-to-use product, 5-star customer support, you can chat with our team live on site, hop on a phone call, email us. We're monitoring all of our social channels. That's what's reflected in our 5-star reviews. But most importantly, the ability to come back and make updates as life changes. You get married, have kids, buy a home, move states, you're dealing with the loss of a loved one, or you're dealing with a liquidity event, you sold a business. All of these updates should be reflected. And it shouldn't cost you an arm and a leg. And that's what we're doing is we're democratizing the industry for people that would naturally go do this as they go through life, but also people that never thought they would ever set up an estate plan until they came across a trust.

Yeah. Okay. So you're whiteboarding it out in your apartment, like boardroom, and you're like, okay, well, there's obviously this company called LegalZoom. And, you know, we may as a team be 100% sure that we're gonna beat them in this space, but we're gonna have to like go out and convince like investors and/or customers that we're the obvious solution for this. So can you walk me through how you— okay, so we've got this great idea, but there's this like incumbent. We're not afraid of them because we're, you know, intimately aware of how we're gonna beat them, but the rest of the world doesn't know that stuff yet. So like, can you think through Is it like, what is the likelihood of our ability to convince an investor or the market that we're better?

So LegalZoom is one example of many. They've been a private company for 21 years. They've had 5 or 6 CEOs. They've tried to go public, I think, just as many times. They are a marketplace of legal documents and services. They're not an estate planning company. So our pitch from the beginning is they're not an estate planning company. Like, they have a ton of brand equity for small business owners that are looking to create an LLC, trademark, copyright, all this other stuff. And then on top of that, not the reviews on their website, but the reviews on Consumer Affairs and Better Business Bureau and Trustpilot, they're ranked horribly, like 1 star, 2 stars across the board with words like scam, fraud, cheated. Like, that's not me saying it because we compete with them. That is literally what their customers have said for lots and lots of years. And so I was like, okay, there's another thing we can be better than that is customer support, customer service, just kind of thinking through how do we be better than even at the earliest days. Their product is kind of clunky. It's kind of dated. Honestly, its estate planning product in particular has kind of been untouched for 5 or so years. It felt like it at the time, just looking at the modern— what a modern best-in-class fintech app would look like versus kind of a clunkier dot-com era tech company's product. So that was, it was like, we can compete with product. And Brian and Daniel come from that background on the agency side, building better products than big companies could themselves. And then on top of that, a brand, like a, like brand matters. trustandwill.com was available. @trustandwill on all social handles was available. I was like, the stars aligned. I've never seen this. It's like a unicorn moment for anybody trying to build a brand day one. 'Cause I had to go acquire all those assets at industry. We got everything. Except industry.com. We had @industry on every social channel for my previous company, but it took me 3 years to make that happen. I had to flex the trademark in some cases to get it. Yeah. And I had to go find people that had the accounts and try and communicate with them offline, blah blah. But with Trust Wealth, all, all the digital assets were available, so I knew we could lead with a brand. And it's very obvious, we're called Trust Wealth. It's what we do is in our name versus LegalZoom's kind of umbrella term.

Yeah.

And one thing that I didn't think would happen is I reached out to an investor who his firm invested in LegalZoom 10 years ago, and this woman introduced me to the CEO of LegalZoom at like 10 o'clock at night. This is like— I'm not even joking, this really happened. Like 2 months into us starting this project, and he's like, come up to LA and meet with me. And we got— Daniel and I drove up, we got sushi with him, we spent like 3 hours with the CEO of LegalZoom, this huge company. Because who are we? We're like 2 guys, 3 guys with a vision and that's it. And he told us his whole career and journey and the LegalZoom story. I mean, it was pretty inspiring despite us saying, hey, we're going to try and compete with you. And in his head, he's probably like, good luck, kid.

Was he asking for a job?

Yeah. No, I think he just knew that we're too early or too small for him to give a flying F about. And he's like, yeah, good luck. He's like, get to some meaningful revenue and come knock on my door if you want to have a conversation. But that didn't need to happen. Yeah. But it was really cool that that, as one example of competitive landscape, was my dissection of LegalZoom as a company. But then on the flip side, getting up and getting an introduction to the CEO of a huge company, thousands of employees, they've been around for 21 years. That says a lot about their success despite my critique. We got his time and that's something a lot of founders don't do. They don't reach out to their competitors and try and look at it through their lens.

Yeah. Your definition of product is different than just the .com. You send out super high-quality printed materials, you know, the actual printed version of the will in a very nice binder. It's a super awesome experience outside of the .com, like tactile. Trust and Will is real. And I always thought that was really cool because, you know, you looked at your competition, LegalZoom, and it is putting your credit card to get this PDF. And the quality of the PDF was to be determined, but you know what you're going to get with Trust and Will. Yeah.

We wanted to be very transparent. Like you can go to the full test drive, trustandwill.com, go from literally signing up to 100% completed estate plan, still without payment. The only— we put payment at the end so that you can take as much time as you need, review it with your spouse or partner, review it. With our support team through chat, educate yourself through our learn center content. Like, that's what we're doing is we're building trust. We're competing against trust until people register. And then from registration to payment, we're building their trust. We're educating them. We're trying to get them to not procrastinate this thing that people are not required to do, which is set up an estate plan. Mm-hmm. And that's what gets you to the finish line. And we've really thought through, like, how do we— as much as I can say that your estate plan can be like a delightful moment when you unbox it and get it in the mail for the first Then you go sign and notarize it. But like, that can be a pleasant experience. And for most people, it's not. Whether they go through LegalZoom, they go through an attorney, we've really tried to elevate that because that's the hardest thing in the early days. You're trying to win the trust of customers when you don't have any. So we're like, how do we give people that best first impression as early on as possible? And then of course, now here we are 3 years later, and it's now a defensible pillar of our business, is our customer experience, is our brand. is the package materials that we ship our customers' documents in. And it's just something that you either invest in or you don't, and you can still be successful without it, but I'd way rather prioritize it and encourage it to other founders out there is what that customer experience looks and feels like as early as possible.

Yeah, you came out early with a really well-scoped product wrapped in a really great customer experience, which enabled you to, you know, test product-market fit really early relative to a company who's got this like vision, they're testing their vision at the same time they're trying to roll out a product. Switching gears a little bit here, but I'd like to get down into like the weeds on early customer acquisition as an early sign of product-market fit. How have you thought about adjusting the price point and managing your cost to acquire?

It took us almost a year to get our real product nationwide. raised a $2 million seed round. It took us another 7, 8 months to get the trust product out nationwide. We just started it with California and Texas trusts, and then we expanded to more states. And estate planning, state-specific. So I think we took a really thoughtful approach in why we didn't— we did things that didn't scale early on. And then as we started to figure out our product, we started to test pricing. We always, you know, always testing pricing competitive to what the current online landscape is. But I don't think that's always the right way to approach pricing. Pricing should be determined on the quality of your product and the expectations that a customer is receiving as they go through it, whether it's a digital or physical good. And I think we have a lot of opportunity to increase the cost of our prices. We increase the service layers beyond the initial purchase order because our product is a set of documents upfront, but over time, the ability to come back, make changes, upgrade to an attorney, Adding— I don't want to say the bells and whistles, but adding a more comprehensive estate plan as your wealth and assets grow is part of our long-term vision and strategy. So pricing adjusts appropriately the same way that your pricing would adjust appropriately with a financial advisor or your insurance would price appropriately over time. Mm-hmm. The first year with paid acquisition was also— we just needed to get people to the website. I mean, that was like really the ultimate test. Like, we can kind of get people through the product through our own network, but how do we even get people to the site, get them to register? And here we are, you know, 3 years later, we're getting hundreds of thousands of visitors monthly to the Trustmole website, which is amazing. That's our investment in SEO, our investment in our brand, the partnerships, the press that's come along with the fundraising announcements. But we still have to convert people on site. So like now we're like methodical about our conversion optimization from getting the site visitor to registration, site registration to a paid customer, working that funnel over time through retargeting. Drip campaigns, just any engagement that we can have with people to get them to a paid customer. It's, you know, that's what our whole company is built around now with 23 people.

Was your pitch early on that like, did it include any mention of cost to acquire a customer early on?

No, I mean, we could have done some, you know, back of the napkin math to try and calculate it based on the hourly rate that we were paying ourselves, which was next to nothing, the number of customers we acquired over a certain period of time. Like, we could have figured it out. It just would have not looked that clean. And I think that when you're in the earliest days, if you're going the venture route, which is going to go raise capital from private investors, if there's 5 things that they're investing in, the first 3 better be team. Why you? Why now? Why are you the team that's geared to do this? The 4th might be the market size, which in our case, estate planning is a massive market. It literally is the transfer of wealth and assets, $1 trillion passing between generations every year. And that applies to every living adult in this country. But then the 5th is meaningful traction or revenue, any sort of partnerships or IP. And that's always the variable when you're probably seeing a pre-seed pitch deck or even a seed stage pitch deck is that some companies might have none of those things. We were one of them. We didn't really have any revenue, any substantial traction when we raised that first half million, when we got into Techstars, but we had the team. We had me, the entrepreneur, Daniel, the business development operations guy, Brian on product, and very quickly hired another engineer and our in-house attorneys. So a team of 5 as we kind of started the Techstars process in January 2018. And that helped build confidence. I hope it built the confidence for you to participate as an investor, but also for us to get into Techstars, a highly competitive accelerator. And then once we were in Techstars, it was just like complete shift of mindset of like, okay, we're going from things that don't scale to like, we need to figure out how to operationally scale. tracking our KPIs and OKRs, being diligent with invest— mentor updates or investor updates, or those monthly updates that I was sending out and letting people poke and prod. I mean, I still remember some of your— you're the first person probably to poke and prod on those first couple of emails that went out on the numbers. Like, break this down further for me. Like, this doesn't make sense. This doesn't add up. You look back through previous months' updates. And sometimes that's what it takes, a little bit of a kick in the ass from an investor or supporter to dig in and be like, How did you calculate this? Versus like, did you just make it up out of thin air? Like, how did you calculate this? And I feel like that's the job of an investor for sure, is to ask those types of questions. But it's also the lens that a founder should look at is, if I get asked this question, how am I going to explain it? How am I going to back it up? What are my data sources? How do I just not lie and make it up? And it's okay to not have an answer and to not know and get back to someone. Yeah. That's what's taken me as an entrepreneur, I think the longest to do is just say, it's okay. Like, Hey, I don't know. That's a great question. Let me figure it out.

Huge sign of maturity. Yeah, I have no idea, but I'm gonna get back to you on that. To wrap up, let's do secret weapons. The things in your life and work that give you an unfair advantage. Your secret weapon for personal learning?

Yeah, sleep. Get 7 hours sleep every night. Like, it's such a stupid thing to recommend and how obvious it is, but like getting a full night's rest has changed my life. And will make you much more refreshed for the challenge ahead.

What about, uh, team culture? Secret weapon for team culture?

Yeah. Treat everyone as if they're family. And it's such a cliché thing to say, but like, we have such a winning culture at Trustmall. And I think with the environment that we're in with virtual, we're all virtual, you know, across the country and across the world, but personal and professional are one in the same. They used to be very different things. You could be someone else at home. You could work, go to work every day. And I think really understanding people's family dynamics, like I'm almost positive I could name every person on the team's partner, kid's name, dog or cat's name. And those are details that sometimes leaders don't care about. Like I care about people's birthdays and anniversaries and like their kids' birthdays, or if they got a new roommate or if they had a new life milestone that they hit, because what, like, what else matters if you're not celebrating someone's personal life wins? Why should they want to celebrate the work and company wins? And I've tried to keep that mindset, you know, for many, many years, not just with startups, but even in past organizations. It makes a big difference at the end of the day.

That's huge. Okay, last one. Secret weapon in your tech stack?

Carta. Having an organized cap table is the greatest thing on the planet because it just makes your life way easier if you're gonna go the founder, venture-backed founder route. Bringing on co-founders, bringing on a team, raising money from investors. It keeps everything organized and compliant. You are selling securities at the end of the day. So if you want the SEC or the IRS knocking at your door, I don't recommend it. It hasn't happened to me, but I don't recommend it. It always goes south. And if you find success in taking your company public or through large acquisitions, having a crystal clean cap table does wonders for you and your business. So shout out to Carta.

Thank you, Cody. Thank you so much for listening. Please subscribe for more amazing conversations with venture-backed founders like Cody, and you can find the notes and the newsletter from this episode at productmarketmisfits.com. Thank you.