Henry Bee - CEO of CoPilot AI

When you think you're doing everything right, reading all the right blogs, reading all the right books, following all the different videos and tutorials on how to find product market fit, but it's just not happening. You're just not seeing success. Today on Founder Journeys, we're going to talk about those type of frustrations, but we're also going to talk about realizing the opportunity to pivot and into something new, a new opportunity for your product and your business and executing on that pivot while you're running out of Runway. 3, 2, 1. Back at it again with another episode of Founder Journey. Today we've got a really exciting young entrepreneur. He's been a launch academy member for quite a few years now. So I've seen him kind of grow over the years and pivot and change his company and finally get to a point where he's really get some good results and some success. The team is now over 30 people. Please join me in welcoming Henry Bay from Copilot. Copilot AI Copilot was actually named by Canadian Biz as one of the fastest growing companies in Canada. Henry, welcome to Founder Journeys and please tell our audience a little bit about yourself. Tell us about Copilot and the industry that you're in.

Yeah, good to be here, Ray. Yeah, we're Vancouver based company currently undergoing hypergrowth. We initially incubated as part of Ray's launch Academy space actually. So it's great to be back here chatting with Ray. We are a sales acceleration company focused on SaaS and focused on recurring revenue model and targeting sales professionals, marketing professionals, helping them connect with customers more easily. On social media we actually went through a pivot and this is a complete, almost like a completely different company that we're running today than the company that when I met with Ray. So yeah, I hope that gives you some background.

So maybe that's actually a good segue into. We want to talk about the Founder Journey. So where did that journey begin? What was the original concept and what was the motivation for that? And then what kind of lead into where did you come to that realization of how you could pivot and change it into something that was in demand?

Yeah, the original concept is totally different. It's a fintech company specifically focused on wealth advisors that leveraging my background as a. In finance and also as a quant. And so we did that in 2016 to.

Stop. Stop right there. So for our audience, what is a quant? And maybe you're talking about quant trading and what that was.

Quant really just describes a Quantitative investor. So looking at numbers, think of it as sabermetrics for investing. So looking at metrics to decide how much to invest in, what to invest in, whether it's publicly traded companies or other instruments like bonds, futures, et cetera, how much, the position, size, how do you measure risk, all of it can be quantified and hence the term quant. It's quite a different way and philosophy than your typical kind of investor who tends to meet with management, looks at the company in a very qualitative manner. So quants kind of the opposite end of that spectrum. So that was my background and it was just natural that having worked in the industry for 10 years, I felt like the pace of change in the industry is quite slow in finance in particular. At the Same time around 2016, we had a huge cohort of fellow budding entrepreneurs who started in that space. So fintech was a newly kind of booming sector. I was part of that cohort as well. Unfortunately, from 2016 to about 2018, we did not find a lot of demand for the product. And so even though we managed to raise about a million dollars from friends and family and angels, we burned through that with about five engineers in a matter of 18 months. So we then had a choice to make. Right, because we.

Again, I'm going to keep interrupting you here, but what was that product? So quant trading obviously know a little bit more about what the product was before our audience. So you were a quant, you wanted to build a fintech solution, you looked at quant trading and connecting wealth managers. What was that original vision of the company? What was it that you're trying to accomplish?

Yeah, right. So the original company really we wanted a very simple platform for financial advisors to be able to manage all of their clients portfolios in a quantitative way. Since currently they would recommend investments without a lot of foundation and grounds to recommend those investments. And sometimes you have portfolios that are very mismatched to the investors risk preference or risk tolerance. So the platform is really to make it easy, something over the Internet that they can log into together with their investors or their clients and just see their investments in real time and see the risk. And if there's a change in the risk that causes the risk profile to mismatch with the investor, they can very easily make adjustments in real time. So something like that is used by professional hedge funds and especially the more quantitative ones every day. But it's not, it's not a technology that is very common still amongst most retail investors and also their advisors.

So you as Somebody that was in the industry, you knew firsthand what you wanted to build, why you wanted to build it, and where the advantages of it as a product would be. For somebody like yourself, that was a quant. And then you built it, you started getting out to market, you raise money, you got your engineers working on it, but it wasn't sticking. It wasn't going as you had originally planned. Walk us through that feeling of coming to the realization that, okay, shit, this is not working. What did you do? How did you pivot it? How did you change it? Or did you try to keep going with that idea? I obviously want to get to Copilot where it is today, but I want to focus a little bit right now on that oh, shit moment of trying to figure out, this is not working, how do I salvage this? Or was it a immediate, oh, hey, this isn't working, but there's this opportunity, or was it a kind of drawn out journey?

It's a little bit more drawn out. You know, here's the thing, right? Like we. I actually read a lot on how do you validate a product and find product market fit, right? So I'd read I devoured everything under the sun and we did everything by the books. So it's not like we did things wrong per se. We validated it by talking with customers, interviewing them, walking them through the product, the design, before we actually spent any money on coding. That was something that's very important. And we did all that. And basically we sold to customers. We started selling to customers after we build the product. What we noticed is that the feedback was really good. Even though the feedback was really good, there was no significant amount of traction because people had to switch from what they were using. And that switching cost was quite high. And so if you're, if you're providing something that's better, whether it's design cost efficiency, which we actually ticked all three boxes. But if they already had a software that kind of works, it's going to be very, very hard for them to justify that cost of switching to you. Even though you're more efficient, better design, easier to use. So that's what we ran into.

One of the things you probably always heard me saying is never underestimate the laziness of humans. It's one of my number one rules. Even though your product was better, more efficient, it's going to make their lives easier. That lazy factor. I'd have to make a switch, I'd have to change my workflow and work processes to use this product full time. That's not worth it right now. Like, that was one of the stumbling blocks that you had. And I've seen again, I saw the product. I saw what you guys are building. I saw the feedback. It was a great product. It was a great solution. It just didn't have that traction that you were looking for.

Yeah, it didn't have that zero to one moment. Right. Like, everybody on, you know, in Silicon Valley talks about that book, and I appreciate it as well, even though I don't quite agree with some of the implications of growth at all cost. But zero to one does highlight the fact that if you don't have. If the segment of the market that you're targeting already has something, then it's not a zero to one. Right. It's a marginal improvement from there. It's a better mousetrap. And that fundamentally could work, but it would require basically a rip and replace. Where you're going in there, you're ripping apart what they're currently using. You're replacing what they're using with, with your solution. That's a much more costly way to scale. And I basically experienced that in real time. So according to 0 to 1, you should actually approach a market that does not have anything that's a zero, and then taking it from zero to one, which is your solution, and then everything kind of scales much more easily. Porter's five forces kicks in. You're going to enjoy all the benefits that Porter talks about. So I learned about all this stuff in business school, but it was just all theory and graphs on paper. Until you experience it, you don't truly understand it, I think. Yeah.

And so how did you cope? How did you deal with it? Did you have mentors, advisors? Did you just bury your head in your pillow and cry yourself to sleep at night? What was that journey of coming to realization that this is. I've done everything right, but it's not working.

Yeah, like the mentors and advisors would, which were there, you know, I had all of them. I also read blogs of, you know, people who are part of Silicon Valley and have done that. But ultimately, when it came down to it was the Runway. Right. So it was getting shorter every single month until we could no longer pay everybody. And so that was the moment when I had to look everybody in the eye and say, look, as you know, I've been transparent with you. Our Runway is getting short. This is a time when we need to, you know, kind of stop paying, paying your salary. So if you had to leave, I completely understand. But I'm still here Because I still believe we can make something happen. I think everybody other than one person remained with the team at the time. We then had to go through a very, very quick, almost like a lightning, lightning round, type 30 day reinventing of ourselves. We started throwing offers, test offers at our audience, which we kept it the same, you know, kept the same ICP. And we just emailed them, broke it into 12 different campaigns, and thank God one of them actually hit. So that campaign lit up like a Christmas tree. There's a lot of responses on that single campaign, so we knew there was something there.

So you had an install base, you had a user base that you knew you could monetize in some way because they obviously were willing to pay money. They just didn't want to come over that lazy hurdle of adopting this platform. So you marketed a bunch of ideas to them to see what would stick and what one of them did.

Exactly, yeah. So that angle turned out to be quite simple. They just, you know, these financial advisors, all they wanted was more clients, right? So new clients. And even though our old solution is all about efficiency, helping them do their jobs better, helping them manage their clients better, they don't care as much about that. So when it comes to willingness to pay, they're not as willing to pay for that, as opposed to a, if we brought you 10 new clients, they'd be willing to pay for that because each new client brings them new revenue. So it almost like it pays for itself. So that's the angle that we found. And so next next step was really just to validate whether or not we can deliver on the, on the offer that we offer them. And we looked across the social media landscape very quickly, crossed out some of the options like Instagram, it was not the right demographics, crossed out Facebook and, you know, basically came to the realization that LinkedIn might be a good solution here because it's got professionals, it's got people who are a little bit higher up on the, on the pay scale. I guess you have doctors, lawyers, etc. Professionals on that platform, which the financial advisors are always looking to talk to. So over Christmas, we basically tested by ourselves, our team sent out manual imitation messages and tested it out with one of our existing customers, just offered it for free. And then over the next two weeks, he couldn't believe it, because every time we get a message that came in from LinkedIn, from one of these people, we would send him an email saying, hey, you got a new message, Go in there and respond, right? He got a new lead and we had probably like 25 of them over the next two weeks. And he was just like. He was amazed because he didn't think it would work. He was like, henry, okay, I can be your guinea pig, but I don't think your project is going to work. I remember him saying that. But it worked. And it was over Christmas, and it was in one of the seasonal kind of lulls. Right. Of the year. It's a very slow period during Christmas, as you know. Right.

So if you pull those type of numbers during that period, imagine what you do in and high season.

Right, Exactly. And that kind of carried itself through January. And he closed a number of customers from that cohort of leads that we brought them. And that's what really solidified the angle for our team at Copilot, because they saw with their own eyes that this is indeed working. This is not just an offer that we're testing. This is a real customer willing to pay real dollars and getting real results. So January was when we fully committed to the pivot. Still, not everybody was 100% convinced, but.

This is January 2020.

Or, sorry, January 2018. Yeah, 2018. So about two years ago. Yeah. Actually, it hasn't been that long, I guess, since we pivoted and we couldn't keep up with the demand. We put up a landing page. We got people to sign up, just like our email campaign predicted. People were basically signing up left and right and they were willing to pay with their credit cards. Right. So we had to find a way to kind of fulfill demand. But as you know, we didn't really have a product because we're pivoting. So the engineers got to work in the back, kind of like backfilling, while I kind of came up with a hacky solution, which is to use virtual assistants in El Salvador. Hiring them, training them, putting them on an Excel kind of schedule, just brute forcing it. Right. At least we have the ability to deliver the service, even though it's a manual kind of painful process, until the engineers can catch up, until we have a software that automates the whole process within a span of five months from January to May, we have been able to deliver a quick MVP and automated the entire process and thanked our virtual assistants for their service. And yeah, never looked back from there.

Were you able to reuse any of what you already built or did you recognize that that was going to be a mistake and you needed to build from scratch?

Well, we had to rebuild from scratch. Right. Everything is a rewrite because it had nothing to do with our wealth, tech and fintech. Angle. So it's completely different product because a.

Lot of people would try to see how they could jury rig something out of what they already have. Like that's the natural instinct, is to say, okay, well how do we salvage what we had? But the tough decision, sometimes the most prudent decision is to rip it off like a band aid and say, no, we need to actually build from scratch and start over or we're going to constantly fill the hole or plug the hole because the system was not designed to do this.

Yeah. This is the funny thing, Ray. Like if we were better funded, like if we had $10 million in the bank, we probably would still be failing today. Right. Because we didn't have to make that tough choice. But because we had our backs against the wall and because we're not the best funded company, we had to just basically, like you said, rip off the band aid and just make a decision.

Well, a lot of times money doesn't solve all your problems. This required you to be more resilient and explore new opportunities and find new ways to monetize the team that you had. So it wasn't so much about the product, it was about the team that was able to execute and make something that people wanted.

Yeah, yeah. I would say thinking back, if I can just reflect for a second here and for the sort of entrepreneurs that are listening in, funding is not important until you find product market fit. And I truly believe that now because I've lived it. I used to believe, oh yeah, just get the best funding. You know, use your experience, your career to leverage that off. Build a product, sell it. It's actually about picking the icp, not changing your ideal customer profile, sticking with your icp and then just throw all the different offers that you can think of. You want to test at that single icp. Don't shift both, because if you're shifting both your ICP and your offers, then there's too many degrees of freedom. So you actually want to just focus on one icp. Who do you want to solve problems for? Is it financial advisors? Is it farmers? Right. Is it professional real estate people? Like, who are you solving problems for? And just stick with that icp. And then you can throw all the offers and test them all you want until you find that moment I was talking about that customer really responds to that offer and then just basically keep iterating on that offer until you have a product that sticks with that icp. And then it just comes down to scaling. At that point, you can raise capital, but I would say earlier than that, just raise enough capital for you to figure out that product market fit.

That's such awesome advice that I obviously know that, but I have never had somebody really break it down the way you just did there. Kudos to you. You've had to take the bumps and bruises over the years to come to this realization, but you've had this realization and, and you're able to execute against it now. I do want to shift gears a little bit here. And so copilots, now your team of 30, we kind of talked a little bit earlier. There's still lots of challenges to building a company, but you guys are rocking and rolling, you're moving things forward. Where do you see yourself as an entrepreneur? As your company starts to grow, your role start to evolve and change?

Yeah, it's changed a lot. Like I would say, it almost feels like I'm doing a completely different job. Right? Because as you kind of scale, as your company scales and the team grows, you can no longer do work, in a sense. And if you, if it took me a while to realize that when I say work, I mean actually doing lot of grunt work. Like whether it's code I used to code, building landing pages or building product briefs, you can't try not to do those as you get to a team of 20 or 15. It's more about leveraging your team, right? Allowing the team to do great work. Not that you don't. It's not that it's not a good idea to get, get your hands dirty, but at those scale, you really want to get everybody on your team to be at 120%. That's going to give you a much better payoff. So having scaled, I finally realized that all the things that the great entrepreneurs say, I always hear them in interviews and they're always thanking their team. One of their biggest advice almost universally is, oh, I couldn't have succeeded without a great team. And it couldn't be more true. At the time, again, it just felt like they're saying that just to be humble, but they actually mean it, right? Because it is, you know, you have to have a great team. And I finally experienced that firsthand. And because to be honest with you, if your team is not happy, your customers aren't going to be happy. They're going to feel it. And if your customers aren't going to be happy, how can the investors that invested in your company be happy? Because then your revenue is not going to grow. So I used to think of it the other way around as a quant. Investor, keep your company focused on the investors and making them happy. And it's kind of. I used to have this opposite philosophy about, I guess, the priority of the stakeholders, but I've now that I've done it myself, it's actually completely the other way around. Focus on your employees, then your customers, and then finally investors. So, yeah, that's something else I've learned firsthand.

Yeah, no, I totally, hands down agree with that. I've had numerous conversations with people, and some naive people think it's the people that are investing that call the shots. Like, no, no. If your team is not happy and if your customers aren't happy, it doesn't matter how much money gets thrown at the problem. Never going to solve it. Exactly. But as important a team is, the entrepreneur at the center of it is very important as well. And the desire to be an entrepreneur is really important. What does entrepreneurship mean to you?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think. Yeah, entrepreneurship, it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For me personally, I think entrepreneurship is. Is ownership. Right. There's a lot of different things you can do in life. And I think having. Having genuine desire to solve problems for people and owning the outcome is basically entrepreneurship for me. Right. Again, you may have different definitions of it, Ray, yourself, but I think if somebody who is not curious and passionate about solving and helping other people, it's going to be an uphill battle to be an entrepreneur. If, for example, a lot of people think, oh, it's a glorious kind of journey. You get featured in media, oh, my God, they just reached this milestone. Look at them growing like crazy. Look at all these VCs throwing money at them. All that stuff is vanity metrics. Right. Because at the end of the day, if you're not really solving problems for people, I don't think that company will last. So people who are entrepreneurs to just be entrepreneurs and to get, you know, do it for money, I think if they succeed, it would be short term. Yeah. So that's something I learned. Yeah. I don't know if that answers the question.

No, like I said, entrepreneurship means something different to everybody. And that's a solid answer as any. This has been an awesome conversation. A lot to kind of digest here for our audiences. I do want to kind of wrap it up. We're with two questions that are kind of standard questions for our founder journeys. The first one is for you as an entrepreneur. What's a tool or an app or some approach that has been instrumental to making you the entrepreneur that you are today.

Yeah, there's so many. There's never been more quality SaaS applications. Right. Zoom. We've discovered very, very early on, even before the whole pandemic and Zoom kind of caught fire, that it was the best, it had the best codec. A lot of people don't know this, but we had an office actually that didn't have the best Internet connection. And so we tried six different tools and Zoom was the only one that actually could hold a sales meeting, allow us, our sales team, to get through the whole demo, even. Even though the connection was so poor. So that was pretty amazing. So when Zoom actually went ipo, I bought some stock myself.

Smart.

Convinced that it was going to be the next big thing.

Well, it's smart if you held onto it.

Yeah, my girlfriend did. I held on to some of it. At least one of us benefited. So Zoom is something we use every day and it's been instrumental for our entire team. Not only the sales team, but CS team, but also internally. So that's something I think has paid dividends. Other than that, I think LinkedIn is a great, excellent platform right now, especially in this times of pandemic, to connect with new people, to connect with second degree connections of people that you know and their network. And that's something that I use actively. And our company, Quite frankly, Copilot AI is, is leveraging the LinkedIn network to come to help businesses connect with their customers. So. And Twitter actually increasingly has been my new favorite and I guess the year 2020, and I didn't use it that much very actively before that, but I've. I found a few lists and it's been, it's been an eye opener.

Yeah, it's kind of like a damned if you do, damned if you don't, like, you fall in love with it. But you can have little belts of depression by going through so many negative tweets. But then you find some gems in there that'll brighten your day or lead to something that can be beneficial. That's an awesome list of suggestions there. Last question for you. As an entrepreneur, what would you advise a new entrepreneur, even a seasoned entrepreneur, building a business in today's world? Something that you wish you had known or something that you've realized or an epiphany or even realization. With today's Covid and everything else, what would you advise on towards building their own company?

Yeah, I think I wouldn't give advice unless I'm asked. So it really depends on the person and their company and what they're trying to build. But I wouldn't say this is advice, but I think what's important if you're starting out as an entrepreneur is to just really be focused singularly on one thing at a time. Right? There's, there's so many things you could be doing, right, but by doing them all, you're actually setting up yourself to fail. So. And focus, focus more on the customers. Like do things that don't scale at first, I think is very important in order to scale later on. Premature scaling is going to cause the startup to fail and to burn a whole lot of your time actually. So, yeah, I would just say, yeah, focus on one thing only at a time and do things that don't scale like talking to customers and figuring out what it is that they want, throwing offers at them and yeah, focus more on that.

That's again, more solid advice from Henry. All right, we want to wrap this up. You've been really giving some valuable information and generous with your time. How can our audience help you? What's your call to action? What can our audience do for you?

We're a fast growing team. We're constantly hiring new members onto the team to help us grow. So I would say, yeah, if you're like, if you know somebody who's, who's always curious and, and just driven by a motor like always looking to do better than maybe come to our page and copilotai.com and yeah, take a look at our team page and take a look at our careers page and maybe join our team. If you know somebody who needs to connect with customers on LinkedIn, we're probably a pretty good bet. So book that demo, hit that button on our copilotai.com and we can see if we can help you.

True entrepreneur. You got to keep plugging your opportunities and job boards and demos if you can. Henry, really want to thank you for taking the time today. The website is copilotai.com Henry, you've been really invaluable insight and we look forward to seeing great things coming from you and your team.

Yeah, thanks for this opportunity to chat. Ray.

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