In this informal vlog, Ryan Shank checks in with the PhoneWagon team to share a comprehensive update on the company’s recent milestones and operational focus. The team has moved into a new SoHo office, secured $1.2 million in seed funding from a network of investors, and is planning aggressive hiring. Ryan outlines a shift in their content strategy toward higher‑quality, weekly vlog episodes and additional video series. Sales activities are highlighted, including cold‑call numbers, demo setups, and a new sales‑gong ritual to celebrate wins. The team has instituted daily stand‑ups to improve accountability, and Ryan stresses the need for systematic documentation of processes—especially around customer success and onboarding—to enable scaling. A visual whiteboard is being introduced for personal and team goal tracking. Throughout, Ryan reiterates the long‑term vision of growing PhoneWagon to $100 million in revenue within five years and invites the audience to follow and provide feedback.
Chapters
What's up guys, it's Ryan from PhoneWagon. Wanted to check in with everyone. We haven't done this in a really long time, so I wanted to give you guys an update on what's been going on. A lot of things have happened. So we moved to our new office space down in SoHo now. We have our entire table to ourselves, so it's really awesome. We're gonna be able to hire a lot of people. As you guys know, we raised a round of funding, so we raised $1.2 million. Here's the article right there from some really awesome investors, some of my friends and people that I used to work with at Yext and some other companies in New York, so we have an awesome team that are backing us now, and we have a lot of resources that we're able to really go about and do things. We've been filming a lot over the last couple weeks. Haven't been putting out the daily vlogs. Wanted to sort of just regroup and get back to where we want to be in terms of sales and everything. Things are starting to really come together. We have Nick. Nick, how's it going? What are you doing? Are you looking up numbers in Twilio? And we have Andrew.
How's it going working at PhoneWagon?
It's a blast.
How's making cold calls going? Takes some getting used to.
Yeah, it does. Format going forward, we are going to continue filming, we're going to continue putting out the vlog, but we want to have really, really high quality content that you guys want to consume versus like just putting it out daily just to check the mark. I do think there is value in just doing something consistently, but I want to make sure that if you guys are consuming vlog style content, that the vlog style is actually going to be good. So at least weekly right now, we'll update you on the cadence and everything, but we are going to be putting out videos and doing other different series so that we are continuing to put out content and give you guys value and engage with the community. My name's Ryan, this is our journey. We're building Phone Wagon from the ground up. We're sharing our entire experiences and everything that we're doing with you, giving you feedback. Hopefully you come along for the journey and you learn a lot. So without further ado, hope you guys are out there working hard, being pioneers, being Wagoneers. Welcome to the vlog. Mike's on a call right now with our QA team.
QA.
Mike, how's the call going? Oh, you're not on the phone anymore? Full steam ahead. We got the vlog back. Kane's back on the chop. So I was supposed to have a meeting with an investor uptown in New York. I had to just change it to a Google Hangout so we're gonna do a Google Hangout in about an hour. Yeah, yeah.
Mm.
Account that they're willing to sign an agreement that they're gonna move over to us for so like we basically have a guaranteed deal size of over like $15K a year. He read an article that we got seed funded and he like wants to move over to us so it was a really cool example He found us in the press and then he's like, oh, you guys are like legitimate. But anyway, now that he saw that, he's, uh, they're like, yeah, we want to work with you, like we want to move away from the sign. Like he was really—
why, why did he say he want to move from us?
Because the costs are getting out of control. Yeah.
All right, man, have a great day.
You didn't, you didn't do any of the things we told you to do yesterday.
I know not nothing, but like close to nothing. He said good things about you. I just don't know anything about the fun necessarily, so like that's where I kind of, I guess, lack.
We couldn't hear you a second ago.
Were you saying you did pull the data?
Thank you so much.
All right.
What's going on?
Huh? How you doing?
Brought a gong so that after every single sale, like you want to celebrate wins by the way. So like anytime you close a customer or you onboard a customer and they're good or you make a referral, anything like that, you want to celebrate it. And like a sales gong is the perfect way.
Did you okay this with everybody else in the office before you ordered the gong?
Nope.
We are in like a coworking space, so like it's kind of loud when we bring it and other people see it, but like who cares? Who gives a fuck? They can get a call too. We need to be able to ring it.
We can't ring it without it getting sales. Uh.
No, I was just calling because I was curious.
How's it going? What's up?
They have one table available right now. Oh shit.
Gotta go.
Is this recording?
Thank you.
Was that an inbound lead? It was a live chat that Mike talked to and then told me to call.
So basically I got that sale is what you're saying.
Boom!
Then we got another sale. But let's go around and say what we accomplished. We're doing like daily stand-ups every single day, you know. It's like before we would have goals, we would send out like daily sales report, which is basically like, hey, here's the report. But there was never any like accountability with it, or like every single in the morning, we're gonna like meet, we're gonna say, what did you do yesterday? What are you gonna do today? And what's gonna stop you from being able to do that?
Nick.
Yesterday, uh, 21 cold calls, set 1 demo.
I'm looking to do about the same today, probably set 1 more demo, try to get 2, get better at customer success.
For customer success, you know, we should be celebrating when the customer is like good to go. That's like a way to We almost need to say like customer success completed is like a win. I want to make sure that we're doing, putting the systems in place so that everything that we do is scalable because like if we're just kind of doing it ourselves and we're just kind of like ad hoc doing stuff like we're gonna drown, right? Like everything has to be systematized. We have to document every single thing that we're doing so that we're able to, you know, train other people and that they're able to come take what we're doing and do the same thing. Or like the script when you call a new customer that comes on board, like that has to be documented because you're gonna need to hire a team of people and they're gonna be able to need to be able to do that thing. You can't rely on, you know, one person or even two people. Like everything has to be like, hey, buttoned up, here, pass it off. I will do that. I'll send a note I just saw you signed up. First off, just want to thank you for coming on board with us. One, we will definitely beat their pricing, but that's kind of secondary, I would say. As you probably know, you had another website.
You did?
Yeah, they are.
I have a whiteboard that we're actually assembling right now.
How's that going? Doing a really good job with that nut there. Never mind.
And I want to put, I want everyone to put their personal goals on there and then I want to like write the sales. Like I just want everything to be more visual because I think when you have the goals in front of you, and I've started doing this in my personal life too, it's like when you have the goals in front of you, you write them down, you start to see them, you're gonna start to like go towards that goal and then if you miss that goal, like you really feel it. That's the biggest thing that I want to do. I want to like not be, I want to not be missing goals and not feeling it.
There's Nick still building the whiteboard.
This is like just a tiny bit too long.
What's that, is that pliers? It's a wrench.
Made it to the wagon. Set any demos? Set any demos?
Uh, no, but I got a sale today.
Sexy whiteboard. We might need to pivot to a blockchain company.
Wait, what's the, uh—
Gonna ring the gong again with all these people?
Yeah, another sale. Good sale, man. Anyway guys, thank you for joining along with the journey. A lot of stuff going on. I hope you follow us and you give us feedback and let us know, you know, if you guys have any ideas. If you have any questions, if we can help you out in any way, let us know, okay? And again, if you're new here, my name's Ryan Shank. This is our journey. We're building PhoneWagon from the ground up. And we're sharing everything we're doing behind the scenes so you can see what we're doing to build the company into a $100 million revenue company within 5 years, okay? Hope you guys are out there working hard, being pioneers, being Wagonaires. Peace!
