Sneak Peak at Season 2 of Vlogs (and PhoneWagon update)!

Is this thing on? What's up guys, welcome back. This is gonna be season 2 of the PhoneWagon vlogs. We have a ton to catch up on. We are now a team of 10 people in New York City grinding every single day. We have over almost 400 active paying customers that are digital marketing agencies that are using our software every single day. We've raised $1.2 million from venture capitalists. Here's the article right here. So you guys can see that. That happened in November of 2017. We're getting a ton of awesome feedback, like these tweets right here. Pop, pop, pop. So those are all the feedback and tweets that we're seeing and reviews that we're seeing right now. But what I'm gonna do now, what I want to do for the next 6 months, 'cause we're gonna commit to sharing our journey for at least the next 6 months for you guys for season 2 of the Phone Wagon vlog, so you guys can follow along. We're at a little bit different of a stage than we were last summer. Last summer, as you guys know, we were filming every single day, 7 days a week. We had Kane that was in the office. He was shooting and he was also chopping it up and editing and everything like that. We shared our journey building PhoneWagon from the ground up, going through TechStars in New York City, no outside funding, okay? That was like the whole motto last summer. This summer now it's like, hey, we gotta do whatever we can to grow the business as fast as possible. We're going for 20% month over month growth rate in MRR, our monthly recurring revenue. We wanna grow it by 20% and I wanna share some tactics that we're doing and get your feedback I can share those things with you. I'm talking to a lot of other startups. One of our investors has a portfolio of just business-to-business SaaS companies. So we're all kind of in this small, early-stage B2B SaaS, and we have a ton of learnings. And we do these monthly calls now, and we kind of share things, and everyone's asking me, you know, I'm actually flying, by the way, to Indianapolis on Thursday to do a talk with one of our investors as well. Fireside chat, we're gonna talk about sales and everything, but I'm hearing a lot of people asking me and talking to me about just going outbound and doing sales, Things like that. I think everyone these days is so caught up on just automation and doing, you know, like using Outreach or Prospect and just doing like a reply and doing like a ton of just outbound cold emails. When people reply, then call them. You know, we take a little bit of a different approach. Someone said to me recently, like, "Oh, it's super old school," you know, 'cause I tell them the tools we use and they're not overly complex. It's like, look, pick up the phone, call the customer, get them interested. It's an educational pitch, and that's the thing that we're gonna do and that I'm gonna, you know, share with you guys. Like, hey, this is how we're building our lead list. This is how we're calling into to our prospects. This is what we're saying to appeal to their emotions, to sell painkillers over vitamins as their must-have, not nice-to-have. And this is how we're getting people that are interested in actually viewing a screen share of our software. And this is what we're doing during those screen share demo walkthroughs to close at 40%. 40% of our demos right now are closing into paying customers. Last month we had our biggest month. We added 57 new paying customers. And we're looking to break that this month. So I wanna share all that stuff with you guys. I apologize for kinda going dark. Everyone says that. So there's no excuse for it. That was totally on me. You know, we were heads down. We had to take care of some business. But now we're ready to share the journey again. We have interns this summer in our office in New York City. I'm gonna be sharing, you know, what they're doing with you guys. I'm about to go into the office right now. I'm in the conference room. But I'm gonna share behind the scenes so you guys can kinda see what we're up to. But I want you guys to follow along. I want you to comment. I want you to share. I want this to be this collaborative journey where we're all on together and that we can all learn from each other. I want everyone to win. I actually saw a tweet the other day from Scooter Braun, who I actually really look up to. I think he's doing amazing things. And now he's all about doing things with integrity and family and stuff like that. I'm gonna pop his tweet up right here. So right there you can see he was like, look, I want everyone to win. Like, let's all win and let's all go on vacation together. I thought it was really cool because he's like, shout out to everyone winning with integrity, which is awesome. And that's what I want to do. Even our competitors right now, it's like, yeah, we're competing in the market, you know, head-to-head, but at the same time we're still both on a mission. We're all on a mission to, you know, help agencies and small businesses track the phone calls at the end of the day. So we're, you know, we have the same mindset. We all want to win. And by the way, we are going to win. But at the same time, it's like, it's nice because like we're all, you know, at the end of the day, we should all be wanting to help the customers and that's what we're doing, okay? So follow along as I go into our office right now. I'm going to show you guys what our interns are up to. Hopefully they're actually on the phones and they're not, you know, like slacking off or anything like that. But they're not, no, they're super awesome. Actually, we had a really competitive intern program. We only accepted 3 and we had about 400 applicants, so we had to go through all of them. And you know, it's a paid internship, so they get paid. It's in New York. And these are all like juniors in college, so the fact that you get, you know, an internship at a venture-backed startup in New York City that has real paying customers, and you get to like actually be on the phones talking to customers, go through sales training from, you know, a sales leader like myself, I mean, it is a pretty cool opportunity. A lot of internships, people will do it just for, you know, the brand to put on their resume and everything, but it's not a lot of like tactical experience. Experience. There are obviously some great internships as well, but I think this is like a really good opportunity to get a no-bullshit internship where you're gonna be in the trenches, you're gonna be doing something, you're gonna be talking to customers, you're gonna learn a lot about sales. So that said, thank you guys again for following along. I promise this is gonna be season 2 of the PhoneWagon vlogs, and we're gonna go behind the scenes as we build the company. I'm gonna share more tactics with you. I'm gonna do different styles, so it's not just gonna be vlog style, you know, time lapses and things like that. It's gonna be me talking about things that we're going through, trying to educate you, and just more like, you know, touch tactical things that you guys can actually take and then apply to your business and we can all learn together. So, let's go check out the interns.

Okay, is there someone, is there someone in digital marketing who might have a better idea? I'm just curious, you know, as far as you guys are tracking those.

That's okay.

They can lower their cost per lead and improve on ROI for their clients. So that's what I was calling about. I thought we'd be a great fit with you guys just based on the fact that you're doing a ton of—

They're not targeting anything?

No.

Are they generating phone calls? Yeah. It's a great fit. Update. So I just did some training with the intern, and today's their 8th day, huh, and I've had them on the phones for about 6 days. They're actually getting into a lot of great conversations with customers. The thing is, they're just too new, I think, to like the industry. It's not even that, ultimately at the end of the day, it's all on me for training and everything, but what's happened, so one, they sound great on the phones, they're getting into conversations and their effort numbers are there, they're making, you know, 100+ dials per day, and actually, by the way, one of, Kevin, whoop, Kevin, has 4 demos that he set today from cold calls, so what they're learning and we're seeing is that, you know, they have their own pipeline, so they're getting callbacks and everything from people that they've called, previously and that sort of thing, and then they're able to set demos on them, on those people as well. But anyway, pulled them off the phone today, kinda went back to the drawing board just in terms of training. So we did just some general sales training just to get these guys, you know, hey, let's, you know, art of sales, act of sales, the act and the art of sales is what you need to be successful at sales. The act is the process stuff, you know, updating the status of the leads, basically updating all the CRM and everything, and then also, you know, sending calendar invites, follow-up emails, tasks, that sort of thing. That's the act, the process. The art of sales is appealing to people's emotions, right? People buy from people they like. You wanna, you know, figure out the pain point that they have and offer them that painkiller solution that they can't live without. So we kinda went back and just did some training on that. I have a deck that, you know, I was going over. And then also just general, like, industry and product training. Like, what is lead gen? What is Google AdWords? What is, you know, a landing page? That sort of thing. You know, what is a lead? You know, is it a web lead? Is it a form fill? Is it a phone call? Is it a live chat? Why does that make sense? What is ad spend? What is return on ad spend? So I think just kind of giving them more like overview of the space of the industry. I think a lot of times, and again, it's all on me, is that I don't— I like will say things as if they're, you know, just like knowns versus, you know, kind of breaking down every little component and saying like, all right, you know, this is what I'm talking about. I think I'll say things too generally as if it's like, you know, everyone knows that sort of thing. And that's what I'm trying to be conscious of and that I'm self-aware of. And then I need to like say, you know, not everyone knows, you know, organic search versus paid search, and it's like rightfully so, you know. By the way, they're like all super sharp and they get it, so it's just really about breaking things down and having the process and documentation needed. But anyway, so we just did some training. It's actually late in the afternoon right now. What I'm gonna do is I'm actually creating another video, so this is gonna be like vlog one, but I'm actually creating like an intro. By the way, this is like a more behind the scenes, like a behind the scenes kind of like intro to the vlog, but I'm creating kind of like a formal intro, and I wanna release this video first, one, just to get content out, to be honest, just to get video out. But I also wanna kinda give you, if you're following along, more like, hey, like a heads up, and then boom, we're gonna release this like pretty heavy video I'm really excited about, I've been thinking about for a while, but I'm gonna record that later today in like an hour, so it's gonna be, it's actually gonna be pretty sick. So it's gonna be me kind of like talking through like, hey, the odds of like getting into a startup accelerator, a top-tier startup accelerator, actually 2%, it's actually 2%, 2%, 2%. And then the odds of raising venture capital is less than half a percent. To raise a seed stage round over $1 million is about half a percent. So it's like, hey, we're overcoming the odds, we're overcoming the odds. And then it's like, you know, last summer, and then I wanna kind of put in clips of like what we were doing with the vlog last summer and then overlay me talking and then be like, hey, we're just getting started and then talk about raising the round and talk about, you know, all these paying customers adding, you know, 60, 70 new digital marketing agencies every single month. And just kind of how we're on this like really long, feels slow to me, But just, this is like a long-term play here. This isn't a, you know, this isn't short-term quick, you know, build it and flip it real quick. I mean, this is like, hey, we're building like a company to last generations and generations. So that's the approach. I'm gonna go. Hope you guys like the first day back of the vlog. We're gonna be doing this. I'm not sure on the cadence yet, so I don't want to commit to you guys a cadence, but I really appreciate if you follow along, comment, be collab— whoa, that's kind of cool. Be collaborative with us. Let us know what you're thinking. If you think what we're doing is just like insane. If you have any feedback for us. We're going to be trying to share everything we can. I hope our competitors are watching and you can see what we're doing and we're still going to beat you. I'm just kidding. I mean, I'm not kidding, we are. But I love everyone. So anyway, I will see you guys tomorrow because I'm going to be posting stuff here on YouTube. I'm going to be reposting it onto our blog and then I'm going to be posting it on Instagram. So follow me on Instagram. Hope you guys are out there working hard, being pioneers, being wagon In ears. Peace!