Ryan Shank of PhoneWagon explains why early-stage SaaS founders should embrace scrappy workarounds: manually porting phone numbers, configuring features outside the UI, importing data by hand. Customers care about results, not elegance. Non-scalable one-offs win deals and referrals.
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What up guys, it's Ryan from PhoneWagon. We are here, day 13 of our morning updates. We're back, we got Blue Bottle, super excited. Today is Wednesday right here in, it's kind of weird today, I was gonna say gorgeous New York City, but it's kind of like in and out of rain and like warmth and then it gets cold and the weather here is crazy and it's supposed to snow tomorrow, who knows. But today what I wanna talk about is workarounds. Okay, so what I mean by workarounds are things that you can technically do, but you can't do directly. It's not a core product offering, but there is a way to get it done. Let me explain. Okay, so what's a use case that I have that I can actually talk about? So, Okay, for instance, PhoneWagon, one of the things that we offer, so we're built on top of Twilio just like nearly every single other call tracking applications out there, they're all using some type of telephony API, okay. So Twilio doesn't offer 800 numbers, right, 800, they offer like 844, 866, things like that, so technically, and a lot of these, a lot of the, my, our competitors just like, we just don't offer it, it's like not an option. But it is an option. So inside of Twilio and PhoneWagon, you can port numbers in, okay? So what we're doing is we have some customers that are, you know, they want 800, 800 number, they want 800 numbers because, and it totally makes sense, 800 numbers statistically are proven that people will call those numbers at a higher rate than like 866 and 844, okay? They're just more comfortable with them, they know them better, and they will call them. So there's higher conversion, if you will, own 800 numbers, okay? So instead of just saying, nope, we don't offer 800 numbers, it is what it is, do an 866 number, which then it's actually a poor experience for the customer because now they're gonna have lower conversions even though we know that 800, 800 is a better experience. So what we're doing is we're partnering with a company that provides 800 numbers, right? And what we're doing is we're grabbing those numbers, we're porting them into PhoneWagon, we're putting them into the customer's account, And now they have 800 numbers. It's not that hard. It's not rocket science. And it gets, and it ultimately gets the customer what they want. It's a little bit of a workaround, okay, but it can be done. And then once it's in the account, they can operate as usual, but we just have to kind of take an additional step. And that's one thing that I've noticed, you know, that I'm willing to do, you know, in order to win customers. Look, at the end of the day, it's whatever, well, It's kind of a balance, but it's whatever the customer wants as long as a lot of customers want it, if that makes sense, right? If it's a one-off, it's kind of difficult to do. However, if it's a one-off and there is a workaround, then of course, let's do it. Another thing is that we're kind of doing a workaround for— it's not really a workaround because it is a core feature that we have, it just wasn't out yet, but we're just, we're expediting the build on it, or since it's not out, we're gonna configure it in one of our customers' accounts. Just because we don't have the front-end UI, but that'll sort of make this one feature work for them, and it helped us win business. So there's a lot of workarounds though that you can do in your own life that maybe, you know, it isn't a core product offering, or it isn't something that you technically do, but there is a way to ultimately get it done, right? You might not get it done in a way that's scalable, but if there's a workaround, so for instance, a lot of times, I know at kind of, if I'm like an invoicing company, right, and my customer's like, I need all my historical invoices, you know, pushed into here, and if I didn't do that, what I would do is I would manually put every single invoice in there. I would hire a data entry person and I would manually do that, or whatever it is, or if they needed just like historical data of some kind into some system, and if there wasn't a direct integration, then We got to figure out a way to manually do it. That's a workaround, right? There's not an integration, but there is a way to ultimately get the same result, and that's to get the data from one place to another, which is what the customer wants. At the end of the day, the customer doesn't care if they push a button or if someone else manually enters it, as long as one, they pay about the same rate and it takes— and then it gets the job done. If it takes a little bit longer, It depends on the customer, it depends on how long, but usually they won't care as long as the ultimate result gets achieved, okay? So anyway, think about that. What are things that you can do in your own business that are workarounds that would help you grow your business, help you win more customers, help you make a customer happier that will then leave a review, that will then refer you to someone, and then that snowball word-of-mouth effect starts to happen, okay? So think about that, think about workarounds. Not everything needs to be scalable, especially at this point when you're just hand-to-hand combat, getting one customer after another, just fighting to grow your business. Okay, workarounds. That's what it is. Wednesday, love you. See you tomorrow.
