Ryan Shank of PhoneWagon walks through his final Techstars stretch in NYC, showing how he got a warm intro to Wix's CEO using the "bunt" tactic, tested pricing models ($25 for 10 numbers versus $6 for 4), and built financial models with his director on cash flow and cost-per-lead.
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This is where I think I want to come out with a semi-conservative thing so I can beat it. Well, I guess once everything's ramped, and Dad's like $10K in net new— Alright, fam, what's poppin'? Vloggin' airs, wagon airs, pioneer airs. Alright, so this is the intro. I'm doing my intro. Doing my intro, here we go. So what I've been doing recently, by the way, we've been doing like these future intros and kind of narrating them. I kind of don't mind them. Usually I like same-day intros, but it's cool because it's like the day after, and then I can kind of like watch the vlog and then tell you like exactly what happened. So anyway, during this day, the first call that I have, It's cool. So by the way, like the Techstars network is pretty insane. So I literally requested an intro to the CEO of Wix, which is by the way, like one of the largest website, like do-it-yourself website makers. I get an intro to the CEO of Wix. He responds, start talking to him about like, hey, ways to work together. He introduced me to someone else on his team, which by the way, I wrote an article in Forbes. It's called like how to land a big partnership or whatever. And it's called the bunt. When you go like to the top person and then they bunt you down to someone like underneath them. When you're doing deals and stuff, the thing is if you get bunted because like, you know, CEO tells like the VP to like talk to you. The thing is, they're more likely to talk to you than if you try to go up to them or try to go to them directly, because they were basically told by someone like above them to talk to you. So they're going to want to do that and then kind of report back like, yes, you know, I checked it off, I talked to them and stuff. So blog is dope, check it out. And if you guys are new here, my name is Ryan Shank. This is our journey building PhoneWagon from the ground up. We don't have any outside funding and we're going through Techstars. There's only like 9 days left of Techstars in New York City. Um, it's a 3-month accelerator program, it's pretty cool. But I hope you guys are out there working hard Being pioneers, being wagon ears. Welcome to the vlog. We have the whole 9 yards. Whole 10 yards. We used your code insertion tool. HTML. Yeah, yeah, the HTML. So our entry-level point is $25 a month, and that includes like 10 numbers. We could do like a 4-number plan, so it's like the minimum dynamic number, because 4 numbers is the minimum number of numbers you need in the pool. We could do that for like $6. Do you think that's too expensive? So do you think that's the best? Is there any other ways to work together, or do you think that's like kind of the best thing to do? Awesome. Are you gonna make the intro to the, uh, at marketplace, guys. So I went to the CEO of Wix, he bunted me down to someone else. I had a call with them, that's who the call that I was doing. I was like, hey, what are like ways to work together and all this stuff? 'Cause they have like 70 million websites and 70 million people that they're working with and they're adding like a ton of people. So that was the first call. Alright, sounds good, and next time I'm in Tel Aviv, I'm gonna hit you up. They open the door, he falls out. So then these are like kind of like the letters. So it's like, all right, if we spend this much money, this is our cost per lead, this is how many leads we'll get. So like, this is going to be like our total expenses, and then this already is kind of like net. Your EBITDA should have your all your— yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, it's going to be your net cash flow. EBITDA. I was working with KJ, one of the directors of Techstars, to, we were building like our financial model, 'cause we're going through investor week right now, so we were like trying to figure out what are these different levers. So Darko built our initial model, it's amazing, and then we were just trying to add like some more like cash flow stuff like at the bottom so that's like we can inject like an investment at a certain period of time. And then we were also trying to account for, the biggest thing that I still don't have in the model by the way, is that we were trying to account for salesperson ramp because basically you incur the cost but the salesperson, it doesn't actually become productive until later. So you gotta kinda like scale the ramp up a little bit. Like they're not just gonna, I mean, fucking sirens in New York, are you kidding me? I'm recording a vlog. Like stop. Like we're recording a video, Jesus Christ. That's gonna like complicate things a little bit more but I think that's what's happening with your model. You're assuming they're super, super productive and you're paying a lot of money. I wanna come out with a semi-conservative thing so I can beat it. Actually, you know the way to solve this Or it could be for the MRR per sale to just grow. Woo! That was the vlog for today. I hope you guys enjoyed it. It was a, I like the edits that Kane's coming out with recently. They're like high, they're like high, high, high, they're not high. They're like high speed, high energy. They're fast but then it's not just like random time lapses so it's like actually goes into a lot of the conversation so I feel like I wanna like deliver value whereas people can like go into it, get sort of this behind the scenes look at like, you know, what's happening and they kinda take nuggets out of it like hey, going through financial models and if you're building a business it's like, oh, maybe I should have a financial model. Or it's like, hey, I'm working on this campaign right here. It's like, maybe I should be doing that. Hey, I'm talking with partnerships with like, you know, and just think through, by the way, like you see the content, you see what I'm doing. I might not necessarily explain why but just see like, alright, they're going after these potential deals right here. They're creating the models. Like the structure of everything is like something that I want you guys to take away. Always be thinking about that stuff with your business. It's like, what are these other partners that we could potentially work with that have the same audience as us that we could do a deal with or whatever. Me and Mike did this yesterday. We were like in here, we were scripting out. We were basically like trying to tell a story. I don't know if you guys can read that. Mark is one of our customers. He's the owner of a gutter company, advertises in over 50 places. So we're basically like kind of whiteboarding this out because we put that onto a deck that I actually pitched today that you guys are gonna see tomorrow. Anyway, that was the vlog for today. Hope you guys enjoyed it. Really appreciate you following along. Again, if you didn't hear it earlier, my name is Ryan Shank, founder of PhoneWagon. We're going through Techstars in New York City. Hope you guys are out there working hard, being pioneers, being Wagonaires. See you tomorrow, peace.
