Ryan Shank shows PhoneWagon's new office and lays out November targets: $2,500 in monthly recurring revenue and 30 new customers. A gutter-guard company using PhoneWagon reallocated $50K in ad spend and generated an extra $40K monthly in revenue, since phone leads convert three times better than web leads.
Chapters
Oh my God, I have missed. Oh, it's kind of missed.
What's up guys, it is Ryan. We are back with another day. We got a lot going on today. So later today, uh, I have a call with the CEO of this company called Quantumind that one of this investor that I was meeting with introduced me to this guy. Uh, they do a ton of stuff like right in our wheelhouse. They get exactly the same type of clients that we do. They work with a lot of lead gen companies and things like that. So I'm talking with him later today. And later this evening, I'm actually going over to Adam Kaplan, one of the advisors, his office right now, which is an amazing office. It's in Fanduil. It's the sickest office I've ever been to. It's two stories. And I'm doing like a, just like presentation to a bunch of our friends who are actually gonna come into the round. We're going to just kind of chat with them about like what's going on with the round, what's going on with the company, just give everyone an update. Just like in life, right? You wanna try to like optimize for time, right? Instead of having like the same conversation, you know, there's probably 10 of them, same conversation 10 times. It's like, let's just pull everyone into a room and then just do it one time. So we're going to do that later this evening. Uh, I'm going to jump on a few demos, uh, later today because we need to get our sales numbers up. We have to have a big November, our November goals. We have to come in with $2,500 in MRR this month. We're going to bring in 30 new customers. So that is a pretty massive goal. We're going to put out a ton of content for you guys. You guys are following along and I'm so, so appreciative. I know you're out there though, working hard, being pioneers, being wagoners, stairs.
Let's go do the thing. Peace.
Alright, so we are about to head to the office of Numberphire, which is in Fandul's office. It's like a couple streets away. A bunch of my buddies are going to invest into our round, and we're doing a, like, a presentation. I used to work with all these guys at Yext, which is like in this space. They're all like homies too, so it's gonna be like really good. They're all in like sales, like in New York, like, in tech companies, so they all are like pretty well connected and stuff, and it's like a super good fit for us, so it's going to be pretty dope.
I'm excited. Let's go.
Uh, we're going to handle it.
Oh my God, I have a fist!
Oh, it's got a mitt! If you could like just take questions, you could play that video deck you have, maybe you start by giving a high-level summary of the business. The phone calls convert into paying customers at 3x the rate of web leads, right? And we're integrating into like Analytics and AdWords, and then we're about to launch HubSpot, which will then push it back into like CRM, and they'll be able to say like, um, marketing spend all the way to the credit. For the next 3 slides, we're just making a use case of like, hey, our phone calls happening. Back in 2011, 40% of searches were happening on mobile. Now 70% are happening on mobile, so phone calls are exploding.
Why is that?
Why is it such a double?
Because of mobile. Because you're already on your phone. Yeah, but they can do so much more than call.
They don't want to do it. Yeah, sometimes you just want to hear. So then problem, with that amount of money being spent to generate the calls, you have to be able to track the source of to the calls, right? You can't just blindly be spending money on ads. What we're doing is we're enabling marketers to see exactly which ad sources and even keywords, especially for AdWords, are driving these phone calls. So then they can kill the stuff that's not working and then reallocate marketing spend into channels that are actually performing. This is pretty cool. This is an actual customer, by the way. This guy might come into our round. So our lead investor is doing customer diligence, and he's calling and called a bunch of our customers, and called this guy, and this guy's like, "I wanna join the round, like we love PhoneWagon." Owns a leaf company in Indiana, he spends $200K, this isn't like just a regular like shitty SMB, this dude spends $200K a month in marketing. Yeah, he's doing like $8 million or $10 million in top line, sells these like gutter guards, he's the man too. So he advertises in like 50 channels, spends a bunch of money on ads, he doesn't know which ones are working, which ones aren't. He's doing a ton of direct and print ads. Doesn't know what's working, right? Signs up for PhoneRag and he puts different numbers on each of his different ads. He was able to identify that over $50,000 of the $200K were being spent on channels that weren't performing or underperforming. So he then basically just reallocated that $50K into the $150K that was working, into channels that were working, and he was able to now generate an extra $40K a month in revenue by reallocating that marketing spend. Yeah.
And the calls are being recorded? Yeah. And then are they able to identify like person by person who it is or not really? Are they just looking for this strobe of leads?
Yeah, I mean you get the caller like information, like the caller ID, and when you tie it back into CRM you're going to have more of that like data nation thing.
Yeah.
CRM? No, we're gonna integrate into a bunch of CRMs. Most of these guys are all charging based on number of numbers and minutes. So just the kind of competitive landscape. So there's a bunch of what I'm calling like dinosaurs in this industry, these legacy guys. That's why I bundled them together. These guys are just like old school, they're established though, like, you know, the experience isn't really good, but they have like a lot of customers and stuff. Then there's this like new breed of call tracking companies. Invoca is more upstream. More of the enterprise kind of clients, which is like fine, I want to get there. It's not intuitive and their pricing, so they have like teaser pricing and this is where I think we can actually win if we're able to nail this. One, we're solving for the experience, so it's like actually easy to use, easy to get a number, 2, 3 clicks, less than 30 seconds you can get set up with a number or with a dynamic number and drop JavaScript on your website.
All these guys The Callmetrics, CallRail, the core of the business is kind of the exact same. You're hitting them head on.
Head on, yeah.
We're currently—
you're about half the price of CallRail, right?
Yeah.
Roughly, thereabouts. Yeah. Some of these little things that these guys can't do with CallRail that these marketers want, you know, I feel like can set us over. But that's the interesting thing is that like it feels like it's a growing market. People, you know, people people are starting to adopt it, but it doesn't feel like, we're not seeing any companies like pop up, you know, it's like you see project management companies like that, it's like, or even when I was at M HealthDesk, like field service companies were popping up all the time, they're getting funded by like big Silicon Valley guys, there's not, I haven't seen any like new call tracker companies that are popping up. We just need to like go fast, and I feel like, they will. Yeah, they will, right?
Cool. Dude, this is really good.
I don't know how much time we have. I'm in for $10,000. I'm in too. That's the vlog for today. What a day, wagon ears. So first, like, I really want to thank you guys for just like following along. I know we have a lot of like moving pieces. The vlog format's changing, like all this stuff.
Like we're—
oh, got a lead, got a lead from intercom. Boom, chatting with them. I'm trying to like also Give you the content to like, one, just inspire you to like do your own thing, 'cause I know you guys like, if you were like me, it's like you just wanted to like start your own company. It's like so rewarding, so fulfilling, things like that. So it's like, this is it. This is us doing it. It's not like that glamorous or anything, but it is fun. Thank you so much for following along. Again, if you're new here, my name is Ryan Shank. This is our journey. We're building Phone Wagon from the ground up. Thank you guys. I'll see you tomorrow, 'cause it's every day. Peace.
[MUSIC] [MUSIC]
More from Ryan
We Analyzed 500+ Contractors. Here's What the Most Profitable Companies Do Differently.
Employee Incentive Programs That Drive Team Performance and Profitability with Ryan Shank
Stop Losing Money! Ryan Shank of ShareWillow on Using KPIs to Reward Field Teams
