Doing Whatever It Takes | Vlog #38

Yeah, but mobile calls to business have exploded in the smartphone era, totaling 85 billion calls annually in 2016.

Wow.

What's up guys? It is Tuesday, August 8th.

I have a couple things.

First thing, this morning we have a CEO meetup. So every single week Techstars puts together a meetup with all of the CEOs for the entire class. So there's 12 of us, 12 companies, and we all go into a room and it's about an hour-long meeting and we basically just talk about like things that we're going through and then we can kind of discuss things. So it's supposed to be just the CEOs and then just the Techstars directors and then we talk about problems we're going through and just things that we're facing and then we kind of like, usually people will be able to relate to it. It's like, oh yeah, you know, this is, I'm going through that as well. Or they can say like, hey, I was going through that and this is what I did so we can offer each other solutions. So we had that this morning. I have one of the mentors that wasn't able to come to Mentor Madness so I'm actually pretty pumped to meet with him because it's actually a really relevant mentor who knows the space. A lot of the people that I've been talking to are either like e-commerce, consumer, so they're not necessarily too relevant relevant to like B2B SaaS or, you know, like marketing lead gen. We've had Brett, who is hitting the phones pretty hard already, and yesterday he hit the phones for a couple hours on his first day.

We went through a lot of training stuff.

He actually did super well, um, and the way he talks on the phone, like, he really connects with the, uh, the person, and it makes it hard to say no to him because it's like he's so nice and he has this, like, uh, the way he communicates and he's able to like build a relationship, it's difficult to say no. So that's really good for outbound salespeople because you want to be able to get through the gatekeeper, schmooze a little bit, get to the decision maker, and then get the decision maker to say yes. My dad comes into town today, so that's gonna be cool, 'cause I don't get to see him that much. He's flying in from, he lives in Iowa. He's here for like a week and a half. It's his birthday on Thursday. Jam-packed day today. If you guys are new here, my name's Ryan Shank. This is our journey. We're building PhoneWagon from the ground up. We don't have any outside funding. We're completely bootstrapped, and we're going through Techstars in New York City. I hope you guys are all out there working hard, being pioneers, being wagonnaires.

Welcome to the vlog.

But like, what's the sort of basic way that we go about giving feedback in general?

Well, I mean—

The answer is super simple. You ask for it, right? This is sort of truth about like all of these things that you have to ask for, right? Like, so sometimes it is— sometimes it can be awkward and like— but you have to like ask for it, right? Like, so, so Who had problems in the past asking for feedback? Another feedback is very subtle, and I learned it from David Coleman. It's a little weird for me, but I kind of got used to it. And it's a feedback where I say, "I feel like something is off." And it's really, really—

You can't argue with that.

You can't argue with the feeling. But you also need to be transparent when you do this, and you say, "Listen, I have no data, but this is how I feel." And I think a lot of, and especially tech startups, is a very confusing and contrived environment where a lot of things are being stated to you as facts and data. However, in general, they're mostly feelings.

Hit demo and then it just captures their information, sends the email to you?

Yeah, sends the email notification to us and then hit demo, goes to the landing page that we're talking about.

Oh, Ryan, what happened? I thought phone calls were dead.

Yeah, but mobile calls to business have exploded in the smartphone era, totaling 85 billion calls annually in 2016.

Wow.

I basically need the HTML of this right here.

Can you do CSS in this or just HTML?

I don't know what that means, Mike. I'm not that smart.

No, it's just like—

it's just HTML, I think it looks like. I just need font and size.

Uh, you can't just make that then?

Click default.

Alright, so where would I put it? You know where I would put the code? Do I still need the A? Where, this code? Yeah, like double-click it or click once and then view source code.

[FOREIGN LANGUAGE] There are a couple tools that will automate a lot of that outbound stuff. I mean, you customize as much of it as you can, like key variables that you need. Like if you need to know that that guy's a money-level person, you can put that in the title. You figure that out in advance. What you're doing sounds like really good, but like if you're not really like exposing the problems and like figuring out the urgency stuff later, like it's going to inhibit your ability to close them, the ones that you can't close now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Looking good.

I mean, that is design right there. Yo, is this like douchey to like say this again? We got 5 sales today. That's like 5.

Can't figure out how to get this guy's number to swap on a numbounce site. It's really frustrating. So this is me being very frustrated.

Today, 241 dials, 7 demos on 241 dials. Yeah, that's almost exactly accurate because I'm in my board, I said 100 dials, 14 DMs, 4 sets, so 4 for every $300, we got 7 for $241.

Wow, it's a little less, but it's close. Check this out. So we just had this customer who we closed, by the way, he closed for $25 a month. So it's literally our lowest package. So we couldn't get the number to swap because the phone number on the site was an image, right? We can't just swap a number in an image because the number's in the image. It's not like a text. So what we did is we recreated the image for him. We went into his Unbounce and we created the image into an actual block and then put text in it. So our number swats on the, uh, on the site. So we spent, me and Mike spent over an hour each. Like, there's no other companies that are doing that level of service for someone. If it didn't work for one of our competitors, I guarantee they would've just said like, oh well, it's an image, it can't work. But we're gonna go above and beyond, and this is where, you know, I've found in the past helps us like win customers and win customers for life, because it's like, we're gonna go above and beyond, we're gonna do a lot of this legwork up front, but guess what? Once we get it to work, one, they're gonna be appreciative, they're gonna be loyal to us, and then it's gonna be hands-off for the entire life of the account. They're gonna be with us for 4 to 5 years. So it is more heavy lifting up front, but look, I wanna do whatever it takes right now to win customers. We only have 65 paying customers, and I'm willing to do that even if you're paying $1 a month. I don't care, 'cause I want them to say, hey, I went to PhoneWagon, it wasn't working, and then it ended up working because they spent time with me and they got it to work. So that's what we did today. It was kind of a pain in the ass, but it was, it's obviously worth it, 'cause it ended up working for him. He can now use our service, and he's gonna be a customer for life, and hopefully a champion.

That's it.

I'm gonna see you guys tomorrow. We're out here every single day, 7 days a week, build a phone wagon from the ground up. We'll see you guys tomorrow.

Peace!