Ryan Shank hired Owen, a former SEM agency employee who became a PhoneWagon customer, to run the company's AdWords campaigns. Shank argues that building community around your product creates a defensive moat and two-way feedback loop. PhoneWagon has 120 paying customers, zero outside funding, and plans to publish transparent data on cost per lead and retention.
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Jesus, man. Hey, Scotty. Jesus, man. What's up, guys? I want to thank you guys so much for following along on the journey. Today's vlog, one of our customers— let me just rewind, okay? What we're doing is like we're actually trying to build— and this is where, by the way, like anything that you build, company, just anything, if you build a community, that is such a moat. They say, by the way, the word moat in like a startup community. It's basically where you have like, you're able to section things off and you're able to really create a ton of value because like other people can't come into your ecosystem. So if you can create a community, or a lot of times like software products will create platforms where they'll have like all these things like integrating into them and then people are, it's just so sticky. That's why Salesforce is doing so well. So many things integrate into it and you wanna be able to like basically have that data pushed into all these other platforms and it's like so hard to leave. What we're trying to do and what we're starting to do at like really, really, really, really small scale is like we're building like a community. Actually, in this vlog today, one of our paying customers, who by the way found us at the New York Tech Meetup, right? He came, he was just in the audience, saw us present. We started chatting and everything, shoots me an email. He used to work at this like massive SEM agency, you know, doing like PPC and all these different campaigns. He's breaking out on his own. He signs up for PhoneWay. He's a paying customer. He's using it with a couple of his clients. And then, you know, I started just talking to him, and he's actually came into our offices in New York, and I'm actually gonna work with him on setting up our own AdWords campaign. So we're like literally now hiring one of our customers to do AdWords. AdWords and PPC for us. And that's what I'm talking about with community, right? So not only are we able to help each other, but now we're able to get feedback from one of our customers. One, now we're gonna just be able to get a product in his hands, and now we're gonna be having this really, really engaged two-way dialogue. I'm super, super excited. One, to work with a customer, but then also to actually get up a really good AdWords campaign, to be able to deploy capital against that, to be able to acquire inbound leads, and then once we get them to our site, You know, it's really working on conversion rate. Like, all this super fun stuff is stuff that we're about to get into right now, which I'm super, super, super excited about it. We're gonna go really, really hard on content, putting out blog posts, guest blog posts, videos. Like, we're going hard. Like, we're gonna still do sales, right? The sales stuff's, like, working, but I really wanna go super, super deep on community and content, and I think that's where we're gonna win. We're gonna, you know, build up the SEO juice. If you guys are new here, my name is Ryan Shank. This is our journey. We're building PhoneWagon from the ground up. We have zero outside funding yet, and we do this every single day, 7 days a week. We went through Techstars in New York City. Whoa, in New York City. It's a startup accelerator. We're done now. We're finished with that. Now we're growing the business. 120+ paying customers. We're adding new customers every single week, and it's super, super exciting. So I hope you guys are out there working hard, being pioneers, being Wagoneers. Welcome to the vlog. Yeah, thanks for coming on board. Yep, absolutely. PhoneWagon123. Let me just double check. Oh, it didn't work. Give me one second. Okay, try it now. Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's the right URL. Give me one second. Can I try to reset something on the backend and then either give you guys a call back and then we can go through the setup? Is that okay? Okay, yeah, what's a good phone number? Okay, awesome. I'll give him a call back in just a minute. I just need to reset something on the backend. Yeah, yeah, I'm wondering if that like delay thing is happening. Great little meeting with, with Owen. He's one of our customers. He's actually gonna help us out with AdWords. We're gonna crank that spend up and we're gonna start acquiring a ton of customers. See, that's what we're doing. We're a community now, a community of Wagoners. We help each other out and we're gonna blow it out of out of the park. So that was a great meeting. I was like, yo, I need 5K a month. I don't think it's gonna show up. And then with Max, but then I gotta do this. Hey, it's Max. Just talked with, uh, with Mike. Um, I was wondering, can we do our call in about like 30, 40 minutes? Only if they come to your— yeah, only if they come to your website. And he's like gonna be like $1,500 a month, which is like, I think, super— a lot of people charge like 5K a month or something like that minimum. So he's gonna do $1,500 a month plus 7% of ad spend. I pushed back on that and I said, well, I want there to— I was like, I'd rather it be based on like sales numbers or like cost per sale or like do some type of blend because like, again, like we need to make sure that it's like working. I mean, we kind of toggled the numbers to come in at like 4K, you know, be able to generate $4K a month from it. But like realistically we could probably do like $1,800, call it, I think we call it $2K a month from AdWords, but with spending like, at a blended average cost per sale of like $800, which is high, but hopefully we try to be pretty conservative with a lot of the like, we'll probably be able to start next Tuesday or Wednesday, and then sort of have them like, it'd be great to have them shipped by a week. So that's a good question, but it's a lot of tightening up and dropping off things that aren't converting, like really go into it and say like, alright, So that's what his day-to-day is going to be like. Just kind of upkeep and kind of refining things as he goes. Jesus, man. Yamakatos. Oh! Oh! A yamakatos! King. What? Like, there's— it's not like it's this huge intricate thing. It's just like, I gave him money and he delivered. I'm trying my best. We standardize toll-free and local, plus we don't have usage barometer. Is that the right word? What's a barometer? Yeah, we're measuring the atmospheric pressure. What? Derotation. I'm just trying to get a sense of the flow. So you're doing a bunch of campaigns, you start off with AdWords, but you're still just putting this number hardcoded onto That was the vlog. That was it. That was it, guys. So thank you guys so, so, so, so much. Oh, by the way, his name's Owen. I'm gonna put a link to his agency in the description if you guys want to hit him up. Owen, if you're watching, my man. But I can't vouch for his skill set yet because I only want to do that based on results, and we don't have results yet. So actually, scratch what I said. I'm not going to put his link in the description yet. But once we have 3 to 6 months of data, I'll be super transparent with the numbers— cost per lead, cost per sale, retention of those customers, segments, things like that, average MRR with, you know, retention curve, all that stuff. Be super, super transparent with it as long as he's cool with it. And then we'll just see. And then my recommendation will be based on the data. It's going to be data-driven recommendation. Okay, so see you guys, have a great day. Thank you guys for following along so much. I'm out of here.
