In this informal vlog, Ryan Shank walks viewers through a typical day at Phone Wagon as the startup gears up for its upcoming Techstars cohort. He highlights the decision to base the company in New York for talent, emphasizes a 40% cost advantage as a core market hook, and details aggressive outbound sales efforts—including cold‑calling, demo scheduling, and a 30‑day money‑back guarantee backed by competitor‑brand AdWords campaigns. Ryan also discusses product development progress (Mike on product, Kane on edits), the importance of continuous feedback and individualized sales coaching for new team members, and the overall hustle culture that drives the team’s daily operations. The vlog ends with a quick recap of the day’s activities and a sign‑off for tomorrow’s update.
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They're out of snacks, bro. They're out of snacks. Good morning, Wagoners. It's Ryan here at Phone Wagon. Day 7 with the new vlog. Hope you guys are enjoying the new vlog, the new vlog format. We're having fun. I hope you guys are having fun. Working hard, being a Wagoneer. Mike's killing it with the product. Kane's killing it with the edits. The thing's coming together. Techstars hasn't even started yet. It's gonna start in 5 days. Here we go. Welcome to the vlog. Cool. Any— why would you decide to bring it to New York versus starting it in Maryland? Oh, just the talent. So there's a lot better, uh, a lot of talent here. Plus I like being able to be in the city. How's it going?
It's good.
Um, I like him. We are 40% cheaper down to the dollar because once you get higher prices, so I feel like that can be our hook.
And it's true, right?
Like it is.
And make a story out of it. Like our founder Ryan Shank realizes that this could be built a lot cheaper and a lot more simply.
Yeah.
So I'm curious to hear what you think.
Yeah, that's great.
See if this fits all your needs for a fraction of the price.
Doing outbound cold calls. I've been doing the demos. I'm getting him trained up. His first day was yesterday. And now I'm gonna go back and talk with Michael at The Mike Horton, and we're gonna go over some product stuff, and we're gonna try to clean up a lot of this stuff so that it makes sense to the users going forward. But I'm about to call this dude. I gotta chop salad first. The guy still didn't show up. We've been waiting to do a demo with this guy. He, by the way, He reached out to us. Yeah, but I'm doing the paid search right now. I'm literally doing AdWords on my competitor's brand name. With a 30-day money-back guarantee, they can give us a shot, give us their credit card, they can start using us, and if it doesn't work, they can come down and get all of their money back. So it's 100% risk-free. And then after that, it's month to month for the entire life of their account. So if we don't deliver them value, any month they can come down. Any of our customers can leave us at any time. But guess what? They don't, because they're getting value from us every single month, month after month. Every single day, it's like, you know, we're testing different things, right? We're cold calling, literally cold calling companies. We're testing scripts. If they tell us no, we're figuring out why they told us no. So that in our next script we can get a yes in that next script. So today I had someone that was supposed to do a demo, he didn't show up. So in my head I'm like, why did that guy not show up? I should have sent him more confirmation emails, I should have done another confirmation call, a text message to get that guy to show up for that demo, because I know if he showed up, I have a high likelihood of closing that person into a paying customer and increasing the revenue of the company. So one of the things that we're going through right now is is I have a lot of team members that are just starting to really get their, you know, hit the ground running, get their feet wet, that sort of thing. But I want to, you know, it's like constantly giving them feedback, giving them that training, giving them that constant attention that they need in order to perfect their craft. And the other thing though to think about is that everyone has different styles. So, you know, when I'm on the phone, I'm doing sales, my style is more, I'm more like loud and enthusiastic, but that doesn't mean necessarily that that's everyone's style, right? 'Cause, you know, I know plenty of amazing people Sales reps, they're more soft-spoken, but they're fucking snipers. Alright guys, thank you so much for joining us today. Today we had a massive day. Today it was huge, getting everyone up to speed. We got Mike on the product stuff, he's figuring it out. We got John hitting the phones, I was hitting the phones, Nick's hitting the phones, we got everyone hitting the phones. This is Kane, day 3, just sitting on couches, just hanging out in the living room. Unbelievable. Kane's just hanging out under chandeliers. Do you remember When I'm pretty sure you and Logan— See you guys later. Thanks for following us, and we'll see you tomorrow. Peace.
