We're oversubscribed on our fundraising round *crazy* | Vlog #59

I feel like I know this space really well. I know the playbook really well. This isn't my first, like, go-around. Like, I know— I feel like I know what I'm doing and like all of that. I want to get that across in a really concise, direct way. What's up guys, it's Ryan from PhoneWagon. Today's Wednesday. It's actually not Wednesday. I'm not even gonna front with you guys. I'm future Ryan right now. We just put out a video. This light game is super strong right now, and you guys saw the video that came out yesterday. It was absolutely insane. We're working on some cool stuff though to just spread awareness about employee fraud. The video you're about to watch has nothing nothing to do with that and is actually the day before that happened. We wanted to hurry up and get that video out because it was so fresh on my mind and just like we want to just make sure that everyone got it as soon as it happened. And while we still were like emotional, we wanted to record the video about it. But that said, the video you're gonna watch today is— can't, can't— what's the video today? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so with Techstars, uh, one of the things that— so Techstars is like a structured program, right? And it's broken out into chunks. And I guess we're in the last like 3 or 4 weeks right now and we're— and basically everyone's raising money, so they're helping structure everyone with like their pitches. So there's like a formal— and they actually, it's like down to a science now. And by the way, Clemson plays today because I'm future Ryan, but you guys are watching past, past Ryan, but future Ryan. We'll talk about that later. So basically they help you get your pitch down and all of this stuff, then there's pitch practice, and then they help you create like a deck and then like a video, and they introduce you to investors, and then everyone gets all of this money and it's just so easy. Um, but anyway, so the video you're about to watch, I was sitting in this room and I didn't, um, because I was out of town, so I didn't get to go to, I guess, formal pitch practice. So anyway, me and Alex, managing director of Techstars in New York, we sit down and he kind of just like, we're going over, hey, how should you like structure structure your like intro, because you want to hit your intro with like something hard and heavy. It was like, you know, you could just say X, Y, and Z, these 3 things. You guys will see in the video. So anyway, he sat down with me, he was just dropping a lot of knowledge because he's worked with— he works with I guess 20 companies a year, 2 classes that each have 10 companies in them, and he obviously sees a ton of companies get funded. So if you're new here, my name is Ryan Shank. This is our journey building PhoneWagon from the ground up. We don't have any outside funding, going through Techstars in New York City. We're out here doing 7 days a week. Hope you guys are out there, even though it's Saturday, hope you're out there working hard, being pioneers, being wagoners. Welcome to the vlog! Chris, so basically I called him and talked to him about the call tracking, but then it didn't necessarily show up. Yeah, well, we scraped the list from Google Search Network, so the display actually— I know it's not ideal, but if you just take that scroll bar and move it down. We include Hey, Jim, Ryan Shank here over at PhoneWagon.

How are ya?

Cool, so I just got off the phone. The David Shapiro, not a good fit.

Modern, super user-friendly call tracking software that includes these top 3 features. Let me show you how it works. When our customer signs up, they can really easily set up a phone number once they— I'm making this shit up. Once they set up the phone numbers, they can do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, nerd out on the product, like a lot of like cool features, cool shit, cool shit, cool shit.

I wanna tell them why there's like, it's founder market fit, you know? Like why that makes a lot of sense and why I think that that's like super important. 'Cause it's like, I feel like I know this space really well, I know the playbook really well, like, all right, so this isn't my first, like, go around, like, I know, I feel like I know what I'm doing and like all of that. Like, I wanna get that across in a really concise way.

Yes, so we can do a lot in the team. I mean, you heard Sophia, she did a good job, like, she was just like, so then this is kind of, you start with this. So force yourself into the structure because we actually then gonna get unstructured, but initially we wanna be structured. Because it's just gonna be like a simpler way for you to start. Then once we nail this, we're gonna figure out like, okay, what's your attention grabber? So for example, it's like, hey, What's up, party people?

That was the vlog for today. So as you can see, I have a lot of work to do actually, and I met with Alex. I actually went to this pitch practice for our pitch, whatever it is, you know, for basically like raising money. We're supposed to like practice the pitch and have the decks done and have any of it done. Because the thing is, I'm like super focused with just building the business. I'm not really worried about raising money or trying to raise money right now, but it's like part of the program. So it's kind of like not really part of my program. My program is like I just want to do demos and, you know, basically basically close customers and build a beautiful product and that sort of thing. So I just have a hard time, I guess, like basically sitting down and like allocating my time to like creating like these like pitches and stuff. But I knew it is important. One, it's important just so I personally have like structured thoughts on like business and like the problem and solution, you know, that we're going after and the size of the opportunity and things like that. Like it is important. But, you know, I really just want to get our revenue numbers up. Like I want to get to $25K in MRR by November 1st. And I mean, it's going to be a stretch now. And that That said, that's my— what I wanted to talk about today is actually the importance of like managing expectations and just being like brutally honest. I feel like I am actually very, you know, honest and upfront and I try to manage expectations well. I've seen in certain companies where people, you know, they'll fluff it or they'll create stories and everything's this story and, you know, you never really like have the bad news. And like a lot of times in huge corporations, you know, you're submitting this budget and like, you know, you under-submit so that you can hit it and stuff like that. And I try to just just like manage everyone's expectations. Like, guys, like, this is exactly what's happening. I don't know, I don't know a lot of this stuff. I don't know how big this thing could be. I don't know where we're gonna be, but like, I know I'm gonna fucking kill it. Like, at the end of the day— ooh, getting a lot of, getting a lot of action for the video yesterday. So that's the other bet, is that in startups, one, it's arguably, it's not a bet, it's a partnership, but the bet is really on like the team. It's like, do you think— if you think I'm gonna do it, then, then you can come in, and if you don't, then don't come in at the end of the day. So, but it's important to manage expectations so like people know exactly where you are. Like, right now I'm trying to just tell everyone everyone like, hey, our numbers are down. And then it's like, okay, well, why? Everything also has a reason. It's like, why are our numbers down? By the way, like I'm telling you guys, like our numbers are down right now. For the past 3 weeks, we've only added $200 per week in net new MRR and we were adding $1,000 a week in net new MRR. So it's like, okay, well, what changed? Well, a couple of things changed. Changed headcount. We changed sales reps. And one of them, as you guys saw in the video yesterday, was literally setting bullshit demos and faking like he was the person. So of course, one, they're not going to show, because it's him. And then for two, they're not going to buy. So our demo show rate's off. A bunch of these things were happening. So there's like, you know, the thing is it was like shitty that it happened, but at the same time it like explains why we're down, right? When you have a sales team of one and one person is stealing, then 100% of your entire sales team is underperforming, obviously. So it's good that it kind of shed light on it. It's like if nothing had changed, everyone was being honest and really trying and like we still weren't getting the demos and getting the sales, and it's like, oh damn, like what actually happened? Like, do we exhaust all of our leads? Is the product not there? Is our cold you know, like what's going on. Um, but it's not that, luckily, you know, it is this very fixable problem. So boom, you flush out that rep, you get in, you know, you get 1, 1 rep, 2 reps trained up, and then we can get right back to where we need to be within, you know, 2, 2, 3 weeks. Um, but, you know, and again, it's like managing expectations, the partnership, uh, that's the thing where it's like, hey, you got to rely on like the team, um, to, in order to be able to fix things, identify problems, fix problems, and go after and stuff like that. So anyway, I feel like I'm brutally honest. You saw the talk with me and Alex. He's helping me kind of like structure, you know, how this pitch should go down. You know, basically you want to stand out, get attention. You know, he's like, you should just start off by saying like, look, I've personally invested $300,000 of my own money into this company. This is a huge problem and this is why I did it. You know, so we just have these like heavy-hitting facts like that that we're gonna start off with. Then it's like, you can, you know, if you want in, then you can come in. So anyway, if you guys want a more detailed version of that talk and of that video, the link is in the description. if you want to click that and watch it. But otherwise, I'm gonna go out. I'm gonna be out. Go out, go out, be out. I'm out. I'm just out. I don't know. I'm out here, but I'm out. And, uh, we'll see you guys tomorrow. Do this every single day, 7 days a week. ¡Gracias!