Ryan Shank walks through a day at his bootstrapped startup PhoneWagon, including product demos, a $300K investor call, and a sponsorship negotiation with the Online Geniuses Slack community of 8-10K marketers. He's testing unlimited pricing this weekend.
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Everyone's so fucking expensive. It's humans. Good morning, people.
What is poppin'? Today's gonna be a good day. About to have a massive day. We got a ton of stuff going on today. We started the day off at an 8 AM demo today, a 9 AM demo, and then I had a 10 AM call with this investor that is probably about to come into the round for $300K. That's what you got to do when these guys come on board. They have a lot of questions. They have an entire team that they're all asking questions. They want to make make sure we're super buttoned up and legit. We had a good meeting with our friends over at Fanduel. You guys saw the office, check out this office.
We're gonna— I made $35,000.
Dope office. I was playing basketball when I got there. I don't know how professional that was, but I was like shooting some hoops. I was making like my first like 10 baskets, so it was dope. Oh my God, I haven't missed.
Oh, I still haven't missed.
Anyway, though, later today we're about to go meet with these guys who have this community called Online Geniuses. So me and Mike are about to go have lunch with these guys. So they have like 8,000 marketers in this Slack channel called Online Geniuses. We want to do it so it feels like super organic, and we want to get the blessing of the owners of this group. And then, um, and then we're bringing in this outside QA firm. You guys are going to come along with us for the day, okay? It's Friday. Hope you guys are out there working hard, being pioneers, being wagoners.
Welcome to the vlog.
Ready, Mike?
Yeah, Mike's ready.
So we're gonna be able to meet up with them and figure out a way to promote phone lagging to their community. So we are going to have lunch with them.
I'll see you guys in a little bit.
All right, this is where we're meeting up with We met with the guys from Online Geniuses, Stephen and David. Basically, we're trying to figure out a way to work together. We're gonna be like the exclusive call tracking kind of provider sponsor of their entire community. So we're gonna do a live event. We're gonna bring in like a guest speaker, like I'll speak. It'll be like a nice, cool live event. Drinks, food, hoarders, hoarders. And then I think there's one more thing that they were gonna do.
This whole phenomenon of these types of Slack communities is still relatively new. So it's like, how well does that 10,000 actually convert to something?
The thing is, when you have a community like this of 10,000 marketers all coming from agencies, some in-house people, some independent entrepreneur marketers and stuff like that, you're gonna get this mix. And everyone's using Call Tracking, it's getting talked about. They were even saying, it's getting talked about a lot right now, it's up and coming, it's super hot. So, curious to like see how this works. We told them like for this deal to make sense for us, like we need to get at least 20 customers from it for it to make sense like economically. So, you know, that's their goal sort of with us is to kind of promote it in a way where we're gonna get at least 20 customers like from the deal.
I'm thinking this, this.
I just like entered it into this like cost of living calculator online, and it, according to this little calculator, it says your equivalent income in the city you are moving to is $152,788.
Oh, who's paying that?
Everyone's so fucking expensive. It's humans.
This could be interesting, but maybe he gets like a piece of expansion revenue because it's like arguably he's driving expansion revenue. And then he's more incentivized to like really make sure that they're good and make sure that they hit like—
follow up.
Yeah, follow up, like check in, sort of what you do with like EAG. That could like work for sure, and then we're sort of like de-risked. I don't know what I announced.
Put a new logo out in the universe and see what happens. See what happens.
No, not that, uh, uh, Odin.
2 slices?
4?
4 slices. Whoa. I personally like one of this though.
One?
Yeah, just a tiny little—
but that's like, we're like more than just one slice of the pie.
Hey, what's up guys?
That was the vlog. We had an amazing day. We have a lot of work to do through the weekend. Thank you guys so much for following along. I really, really, really appreciate you guys coming out here every single day, swarming with us, uh, grinding with us, just building companies and letting us, you know, share our story. I'm about to go. We're launching a new homepage this weekend, so that's gonna be really cool. We're also launching, uh, we launched unlimited pricing. We're just testing things, we're just testing things out and we're figuring it out. I'm gonna let you guys go. Hope everyone has a great weekend. We're gonna be here, we're here if you guys need anything. My name is Ryan Shank. This is our journey building Phone Wagon from the ground up, no outside funding. We do it every single day. I hope you guys are out there working hard, being pioneers, being wagoners. Have a good weekend, guys!
