Users Are Drowning in Complex Features! (Talk w/ Mike Andes)

What's up guys? Christian here with Copilot. We got Mike to sit down for another five minute increment. We're going to be talking about, you know, Sequence Automations again. I know we talked about that last video but that is a huge point for us going forward with innovation with Copilot we just want to make sure that we ensure good value with communication with throughout our software and just add good functionality. Even though it's very easy to navigate the software and it looks nice and simple to use, we still want to have those, you know, in depth features and functionality. So when it comes to automation, in our recent update we added some triggers, actions, some condition points, you know, and kind of just extending, you know, what you can do with it. I know we talked about the marketplace and putting bundles on there. Kind of just elaborate on what's to come to as well with Sequence Automation because I know we have some further updates too as well.

Yeah, it's like the goal of Sequence Automations is essentially anything you can think of, it can be done and a big piece of that is using the tagging system. Because if you can have a tag be the initial starting trigger of any automation, it means that I can it just infinitely what I can think about like I can do reminders for certain customers that I tag because they are picky. I can do it based upon certain services, based upon like just anything you can think of. And so the world really does become your oyster with Sequence Automations if we have enough triggers and enough actions. And so we have doubled that amount over the past week. And so essentially now Sequence Automations are out of beta. We are going to be releasing one more time next month based upon more feedback that we've received. And this feedback is like very, very much in the weeds now. And it's mostly for operators that have 50, 60, 70 automations that are extremely detailed. They want to be have multiple actions, they want to be able to have the ability to skip certain actions based upon certain filters. So it can get confusing for people. And that's why we've decided to keep the regular automation still intact. And Sequence Automations are an optional thing because I really do believe in the power of automations. But Sequence Automations just get more complicated because there's a flow, there's multiple days that you need this to run over the course time and you check back and see. Okay, is this estimate accepted? Is this estimate accepted? If yes, do not send this email. If no, then I do want to follow up. So the goal is to like you Said have the simplicity of the UI and make it really simple to use Copilot but then if you want to go deep, you can drill down and really make something super customized. And so I'm happy we kind of finally finished this last big chunk of sequence automations because the next big chunk is price matrices and job costing. And so even this morning we finally were starting to put the roadmap on that feature specifically so that we're finishing that in October as well.

Yeah, yeah. And we also maybe stop action being optional if you can give us, you know, an Augusta situation or just, you know, something like that on why someone would want to have that to be optional versus actually putting a stopping point every single time.

Yeah. So for example, when we use one click estimate emails, we're going to have the trigger be that when a tag is added that it triggers off this email to the customer. Now I need to remove the tag, but I don't want to stop the action because I want it to be able to happen next time. So for example, I do an email link, it says, hey, we sent one yesterday to Bellingham shop for like 12,000 emails. And it was, you know, correlation. Here's the benefits. Here's a really cool graphic image of Max showing that nutrients, water, sunlight get into the ground using coration. Click here if you want an estimate for that. If they do that, it sends it off to Command center. That's the email link. And that email goes to Command center says, hey, this person wants an estimate estimate and they either measure their property and give them the quote or they take their existing price that they have for mowing and extrapolate out and give that price. Now the second part of that is yes, the email goes to Command Center. The other part is there's a tag that is added that person's account. And so some people want that tag to stay on there, some people want that removed. But ultimately I need to make the option to allow that tag to keep getting added if they want that. So that's why we removed it where we made it the stop action as option again. It's like super in the weeds, but it's for the fact that next month I want to send another email and allow that same tagging and same trigger to occur. And I don't want to see the automation to really end or stop and I don't want to take any actions when I end the sequence automation. So these are very much in the weeds type of things. But it's one of those deals that especially if you start Using, you know, talking to other larger companies that use automations for like a lot of things in their business. It just, the customization just gets, it gets deeper and deeper the more you think about it. And so it was just something that we thought we were going to get done a couple months ago, but we just took a little more time on it.

Sure it's in the weeds, but there's also people that aren't exposed to it and they're never going to jump into the weeds until they get that exposure. And every time I have these talks with some of these people about secrets automations I feel as if they don't necessarily understand the full benefits of it. So therefore it's just kind of something we brush, brush past, right?

Yeah, but that's really why too though we keep the regular automations in there because I want them to get them a taste of what automations can do in their business on a simple level and then they'll dabble with sequence automations. And that's my problem with other softwares we've used in the past is creating automations was so daunting for a lot of people and customizing them was so daunting that they just didn't do anything with it. And so it left a very powerful tool unused. And so the goal of having both types of automations is wet your beak with the regular automations and we give you like is it 20 or 30? Yeah, 30 plus that that are free and it comes with, with every single subscription and wet your beak with that and realize like just one or two of these could potentially make me thousands of dollars a month. Therefore I should probably invest a little bit of time and energy during my slow season to build some sequence automations that are also going to help my business a lot. And I think down the road, especially after October, once we release the last part of Sequence Automations, the refinements, we will probably allow for some bundles to be in the marketplace for enterprise level users to, to download those.

So they'll be able to download them and be able to use them out front to see the actual result and then maybe they can now see the in depth like you know, to be able to design one for themselves. Right?

Yeah. And there'll be other you know, preferred partners of ours that will build customized sequence automations and then be able to give it to their clients. So you know, simple growth ready growth systems, other you know, leaders in the industry that build automation as their, their jam and they make very intricate ones. They'll be able to Pass us along through the bundles inside of the marketplace as of last week. Those can now be distributed.

Yeah, I'm just kind of thinking, you know, currently kind of speaking out loud. I don't know if this is something that we're actually going to end up doing, but I can see value in us maybe doing a webinar one day where we, you know, Parker or Steven, one of those guys, kind of actually just goes deep into Sequence Automations and building them and, and you have, you know, our users on that live and they're asking questions. I think that would be super beneficial to expand the way that we're doing some of these webinars. I know we haven't gotten a ton of traffic yet just because people are busy. We're still growing all the above with these webinars. But I think that may be a cool tool to be able to, you know, touch base on some of these features in our enterprise level that maybe like I said, people are kind of brushing over. What do you think about that?

I agree. Work I think like a Automations workshop would be fun. Similar we're doing next month the bug fest. I know you want to talk about but like I think something similar where it's like a live environment and people can come on and share automation tips and, and tricks and ask questions in support of how to build automations, et cetera. Super valuable. And then there's, there's also the layer of like you don't want to spend, you know, if you're running a business that has 5,000amonth in revenue, don't be spending 20 hours a week working on automations. Like go get more business. Right. Build a couple automations that are going to bring in more customers and following like follow up Sequence Automation for example and then go get more work. And so that's the thing I also toe the line of is like I don't want to make it where people get so in the weeds in these deep features. And I've just seen it time and time again. People should spend 90% of the time they spend on their software and just go get more customers or like train your team so they stop leaving.

Sure.

And so I want to like run this fine line of like have very complex and in depth features. But then we're even with Sequence Automation it's an optional tab as well as with like cost, job costing and price matrices. It'll be an optional thing that you can add and it'll add a layer to the whole software. Yeah. Instead of having it on everyone's account and then you got newbies like trying to figure out job costing on $5,000 a month in revenue. It's like that's not what you should be doing now.

That's what deters people away from some of these softwares and they end up coming to Copilot because things that we do have are optional, not necessarily the standard for that software. And now it's harder to use.

There just needs to be layers. There needs to be layers in my opinion of how deep do you want to go and if you don't want to go deep and you're more of a beginner that you shouldn't be overwhelmed with all this other stuff that just keeps you from using it and honestly kind of you push things away that really are helpful for your business because not presented to you in a way that is layer deep. And you should be able to choose that based upon revenue, based upon your experience level with software. And I just think that unfortunately the power users of the CRM software world sometimes have two or three $400,000 annual revenue businesses and they're spending, if they just spent the time they spent on like all these custom craziness with job cost and price measures and tagging and automations, if they just want to spend that on their business, they double or triple their business. Like oh man, my close ratio on my big 5000 day follow up process might not go through. It's like, well, yeah, well go focus on doubling the number of leads you get. So there's that balance that I want to play because like ultimately I just want them to win. And so we just got to make sure that from a user interface perspective as we continue to add deeper features, it doesn't distract people from using what's important for their business.

Yeah, that's real man, that's real. When it comes to the exterminator or the whatever. Well, I don't know what word we're gonna make for it but I've been, I've been talking to my people that I have, you know, conversations with every day about the kind of back end of things people don't realize every time, you know, what it takes to develop a software in the coding side and the development team and building systems for that too as well. So we're going to be adding Sprints where we're just crushing bugs now. You want to elaborate on that a little bit?

Yeah, like I've talked about with the internal members on the Facebook, on our Facebook group about like what the priority of Copilot is Going forward, you know, uptime being the most important, the very bottom of the pyramid. And as you move up, it's like page speed or page load time, then bugs, then you have features, and then at the top you have use or design. Yeah. And so ultimately the most important is uptime. Like, you got to have your servers up. So we've been really, really feature focused for the past little bit because we needed to get all the features available to accommodate larger companies and most importantly, Augusta. And so we did not want to have to change a whole bunch of systems moving 130, like I'm the founder of the company, I wanted to move Augusta in and have that option, but without them having to change a lot. So in order to do that, we had to make certain features that would allow that accommodate that transition. And so.

That has been like our big focus. And I was clear as our members, like, I know that's a little bit out, that is out of sequence of what we should be focused on. And so now that we have, as of this week, kind of finished what we think is required, like the baseline requirement for Augusta to be able to move in and move our larger companies in. Now we're taking a step back a little bit on the feature side and really focusing on some other things that we've been pushing off and that we want to get done. And so one of those things is every four to five sprints will just be a bug sprint. And it'll basically be like, we are going to clear the system of bugs. And in those sprints, we're going to have what we call bug fest. Maybe we call it the exterminator, we don't know. But, like, we're going to have an event that's live on Zoom with all of our members, and there'll be kind of a game of, like, find bugs. Like, find bugs, you get rewarded. And it'd be more of a game side of things because, like, ultimately our users are helping us build this product. When we're moving as fast as we are in terms of feature development and developing the product, we can't test every single sequence automation because there's literally tens of thousands of ways you could make it break. And so we do our best, but like either A, we take two years rolling this out or we do it in two months, like we have, and we depend on our users to give us feedback and we iterate and we fix the bug as fast as possible. And so my hope is that as now we can slow down a little bit on feature development. We can focus on the base of that pyramid up time. So like we're switching over to aws, away from our previous provider. We are focusing on page speed and load time. So even this week we're optimization of scripts, removing certain cron jobs, technical stuff, JavaScript and certain things that we're working on to be able to make the load time faster as you move up that the next one is bugs and move up that pyramid. And so our hope is that every couple months we stop development and literally just focus on bugs. We purge the system to where we, based on what's reported, we think we have everything covered and then we have a bug fest. And in my opinion we will open up 20 or 30 more bugs. Sure. During that event. And those are important because those are otherwise frustrated users that wouldn't say anything because they don't want to be a nuisance or they don't have the time to on a live chat or guys out in the field or something's bothering them. And it would just be bugs, not features. Like, this is not like, hey, I want this. It's like we're only looking for bugs. Let's go squash these bad boys. And if you can find these, live with us. You'll get rewards and prizes.

Yeah, I think it's a brilliant way to get people to open their eyes up to why there is bugs. Everyone says, I want this feature, I want this feature. When is this feature coming? Well, if we keep pushing to get these features, we may keep creating bugs too as well. So we have to find that happy balance. And I think that these bug fests or whatever they're going to be called is going to educate people, but also build our software to be more ultimately.

New features bring in new members and having a bug free system retains and makes people happier that are inside. And so we've had to get to a certain level of features to be able to accommodate these companies. And now it's a matter of, and this is a funny thing, when I say slow down, people are like, oh, they're not going to develop as many features. We're actually going the opposite direction because now our team is so much better. Like everyone's production is. People are understanding the code more. We've optimized a lot of the code base and stripped out a lot of stuff and simplified things. And so as much as I'm saying that even we go into the bug fest for two weeks and we just focus on bugs, my hope is that we can purge out the ones that are in there. Yeah, but more importantly, I actually think that like, by doing that we allow our production, like for our dev team to go like through the roof. So like we've, we now finally finished hiring. Like, we have a really good group, we've really like. I just feel like our production has gone through the roof. So I actually think we're going to accelerate in our development cycles and at the same time having those every couple months, those bug fests will keep the existing members happy and prevent unsatisfaction.

I think so too as well. And that kind of, you know, you know, this kind of building stage you can call Copilot, whatever the case is, you know, we, we've been really hammering transparency. You know, the founder guarantee the communication. Now we're doing bug fest too as well to make it, you know, more of a rewarding thing to find these bugs.

And I don't know if you, if you've met, we've mentioned here like for the public people, but like, you know, we have a flight log which literally means you can see everything that we're working on. Both features, bugs, design tickets live in our dev environment. Like, I don't know if anyone else doing that because it is kind of like software suicide to let your users see what you're working on.

That's what they say though. That's what they say. No one's ever done it. You're not going to see what the actual, you know, result or good in that until you do it though, right?

Yeah. So our hope in doing that is that like when people report bugs, we don't take it lightly. We talk about every single one. It's debated, it is tested. And when we are working on it and we say we're working on it, we are working on it, we are not just putting you off. And so to make that radically transparent, the goal in having the flight log is like, it literally shows you a direct reflection of our software. Like, like we use Jira as our project management. We're not like manually editing that. We're working on your ticket. We are, it's in progress and it might take us some time because it's not always easy to find certain things and replicate stuff. But we are working on it and we will tell you when it is fixed. Yeah. And so we, even the past couple of weeks have gotten a little bit better at making sure that the users that report bugs get automatically notified when those things are fixed. Yeah.

And like these operators, these businesses, they understand budgeted hours. Some of these bugs take, you know, 30, 50, budgeted hours just for one of these bugs.

So just to on our end, just.

To put that in perspective, it's like yeah, these things aren't just you know, a squash, right?

Yeah.

But that goes into my price lock talk. I know price lock talk. Price lock talk. Price lock talk. I'm not a rapper. No, but you know price lock. This is going into our transparency again. Just talk about the price lock. How long is that going to be for? What does that look like?

Yeah, so we're on hundred if it's gonna be February 1st or January 1st. But for everyone that joins prior to for Now I'll say January 1st. Sure. We are gonna lock their price in forever on their monthly subscription. So there might be down the road and I don't want to like state this too quickly is there are any things down the road where we do add ons and stuff? I don't like those. That's why we don't have any copilot. So But I don't want to like I know that down the road there might be something that a lot of users want and they're willing to pay more but a bunch of people don't and they're an add on might make sense. Yeah. So that would not be included in this price lock. What we are locking in for Whoever joins before January 1st is that monthly subscription number. It will not change as long as you stay subscribed, it will not change. Now if you leave for a year and come back, you will be at the new price. And so I did this mostly to say thank you to the members that have been with us throughout 2023. It hasn't been an easy road and even next few months we're still iterating at a very, very quick pace like moving over to aws. We're launching multiple tiers of and layers of testing groups now inside. So that'll be good in the long run. But for the people that are going through it now, there's bumps in the road. Last week when we launched some big features the server really got bogged down and we obviously we learn from that and make sure it doesn't happen again but it caused emails to like get queued up and so.

My, my the price stock is my way of saying thank you to everyone that joins earlier and the early adopters and down the road the software will get more expensive. It we will be a premium product in the marketplace but for the people that join now they'll lock in their prices and so yeah just lifetime guarantee on that monthly number It'll never go up if you have joined before January 1, 2024.

Yeah, no, it's going to be good. And I and I want to talk about one more thing before we close out today and that is another big update that we had. In those are wiki pages. This is something that other CRMs do. I don't know if it looks very similar to what you've seen in other CRMs or if you had a particular thing that you wanted to add to it that would make it how it's supposed to be in your mind.

Yeah, it's funny because wiki pages, in my opinion there's not a lot of innovation like anything new or groundbreaking about them. It's literally a Google Sheet with less capability. But the thing is it keeps all of your information on the software instead of multiple places. So like we'll never compete with Google Docs on just the functionality of editing and customization and sharing links and all the rest of it. However, having all your passwords, all your referral list of other vendors based upon services you do or do not offer, your estimator availability, your, your SOPs, when it comes to your standard operating procedures for like payments and credit card information and how things should be handled. Having it all in one spot is really nice and we made it as a pop up so that when you're throughout copa, you can always just go to the wiki page, click it, it pops up. So it's really good for your office people. Yeah, if they're using the desktop version throughout the day. Again, larger companies are typically use this so that you don't have to have Google Docs and Copilot and another place to store your password. Keep it all in one spot. It's editable. You can see a history of when people have made changes. You can make multiple pages, you can do bold and italicized and underlined and make links to videos. So for example, I'd recommend people like for their office staff have all the different things that an office person does. Right next to it is a link to a YouTube video of you doing a screen share of walking through the software. Exactly how to do it. So it just keeps everything in one spot. And you know if you give a user access to Copilot with permissions to see wiki that they are going to be able to operate inside your office without having to go to YouTube or go to a separate drive folder or Google Docs, et cetera. So just kind of keeps everything in one spot. That's really the goal of it.

Yeah, Wiki pages is nice. You're starting to see some of these different features and things that we're putting in for admin users. So that way we can start to branch out with our software more than just landscaping. Right. You know, any, anyone of any home service can use some of these, you know, admin functions.

Yeah. I'm excited because even like last week we have our first public user starting to use multiple locations and you know, using the command center portal to where office people can log in and then quickly change between accounts. And if you are across different states, it shows the time zone of that state. And we'd like to one day have it where it actually gives the weather existing of that location. So, you know, if they're in a snow event, like if we start talking about like something. Augusta has 135 locations and then one central office. Like you need to know certain things and be able to tell people like, yeah, they'll be in an hour, but it's. They're two hours ahead. Right. So these are the type of things that we have to figure out for Augusta and will be beneficial for all the users because we have to think about it like a very scaled out version. Sure. And so my hope is that with Augusta being so large that people that are trying to scale their businesses can come behind us and the systems are built to scale all the way to that size. Even if you don't get to that size, like two or three or four locations, I think Copilot will be the best in the world at managing that because we have to manage hundreds down the road, if not thousands. And therefore we will have to figure out 1, 2, 3 and 4 locations and do it really well. Sure.

And I think that you see that in our subscription levels too as well, in the way that we, you know, what features we provide in them. It really helps the small man. The small man gets to that starter, that starter goes to the Pro Pro, to the enterprise and all that in great fashion. And I like to get on those calls with those people before they make those jumps to ensure that they're going to maximize those features going forward. So I think it's just a. It's a good way of doing things so far and I personally really enjoy it.

Great segue. People should book a call with you.

Yeah, no, for sure. Guys, we're going to close this out. We got some other stuff to get into today. Hope your work day is going great as well. If you're already with Copilot, fantastic. Reach out to Parker if you need anything, he's there. If you're interested in co pilot, please go ahead and book a call. I would love to learn a little bit more about your business and yourself and see if your business needs match what co pilot provides. So thanks.

Go to the website. Go to the website. Bottom left hand corner says book a call. That's who you're talking to.

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As well.

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