In this inaugural vlog, PhoneWagon founder and CEO Ryan Shank takes viewers through a day in the life of his startup during the TechStars accelerator in New York City. He introduces the vlog’s purpose—transparent, real‑time sharing of the company’s journey over the next three months, including metrics, team dynamics, and operational challenges. The video weaves together casual moments (team dinner, a freestyle rap, a visit to a Pellegrino tasting garden) with core startup activities: pitching an exotic cane, discussing the company’s API capabilities, generating a lead from G2 Crowd, closing a $250‑per‑month enterprise customer, and navigating the administrative hurdle of enrolling two new employees in health insurance before a hard deadline. Ryan also demonstrates live‑chat sales tactics via Intercom, compares PhoneWagon to competitors, and highlights marketing tactics observed at the tasting garden. The vlog serves both as a behind‑the‑scenes chronicle and a learning resource for aspiring entrepreneurs.
Chapters
What's up guys, my name is Ryan Shank. I am currently the founder and CEO of PhoneWagon. I just started this company, it's a call tracking software company, but what we're doing is we're creating a vlog now and it's gonna go through our entire experience of TechStars, which is a startup accelerator. It's one of the top startup accelerators in the world. It's in New York City, we're in the summer class, and what we're doing is we're sharing everything. We're opening up the curtains, we're sharing everything that's gonna happen for the next 3 months, and, uh, and we're gonna be very very transparent about numbers, about metrics. You're gonna see the team and everything that we're doing. We're gonna show you guys, get your feedback on it, hopefully give back to you. And you know, we want you to join us as we build this company. And hopefully you can take a lot of the learnings that we're doing and, you know, apply them to your own business if you guys are interested in building businesses. Alright, vlog, we're out at dinner. We got Rui, @Rui, follow him. Kane's Thoughts, day 1, day 1. We're eating some Mexican food here at Dos Caminos in Vientiane. Ice cream truck's coming by. It's gonna be a fucking Great day! Welcome to the vlog! Help me out man, how much you want? Uh-huh— sell me something, sell me that cane. Sell you this cane? How much can you sell me the cane for? This cane? How much for that cane? This is an exotic cane. That's not an exotic cane, it's made from Himalayan mountains, man! I'll give you $14 bucks for it. $14 bucks for the cane? Yeah. All right, madam with the cane for 14, just went on 14 for an exotic cane. I'll give you one dollar more. What are you gonna do for a dollar? Do something for the vlog. How about a bar for bucks? Bars for bucks? Spit a bar. Hey, run it all, type cat, and done it all. Selling crack, pimping hoes, plenty more. Straight cheese, I can write a book on being a crook. Broke so many laws, they got me up in the Guinness Book. That deserves 5. Like a lil 5. A lil 5. A lil 5 spot. And then we gonna pound it. Appreciate it. There you go. So we were walking down Westside Highway, we were just heading south, and we noticed there's a Pellegrino Tasting Garden, okay? Sort of like a food maze or like a corn maze almost. If you guys know what corn mazes are, I'm from Maryland so we have corn mazes there. And there's different tasting stations so we just tasted the best food. I mean, scallop, oysters, there's everything here. A fried quail egg battered in cornmeal. We have a little chipotle aioli on top. It's like the most amazing thing. And talk about marketing, right? These guys are fucking killing it. So that's huge and they're absolutely crushing it. So this is how you do it right. The walls, the floor, they give— How are you? Good. From LA? Yeah. Thank you very much. Go for another? Yeah. Alright, cool. Don't tell anyone. Back here, back here in the scallop station. Hey Brent, this is Ryan from PhoneWagon. How's it going? So we do have an API. It's not necessarily like a public open API, so I get, you know, I can pull in my devs if you guys wanted. So yeah, the short answer is we can do it. It would obviously, we have to like do some like dev and integration work, but short answer is yes. I feel like if we could get onto that page, then we could probably get some like leads and volume. Just got a lead that came through one of the, like, where we're buying leads from. We buy leads from this website called G2 Crowd. So we just got a lead that came through. Usually there's phone numbers. There's no phone number. They say contact us by email. It's kind of, kind of whack, but I'm gonna email this person right now and just see if I can get them on the phone. And it's all about speed. So it just came through about 40 seconds ago. Hitting them with the email right now. Hopefully we get them on the phone. Hopefully we close right before July 4th weekend. None of the other guys are doing this. Let's go! Ooh, this dude just about to sign up. He's gonna sign up for the enterprise plan. That's what I'm talking about, babe. Hello, it's Ryan. Hey, Ryan Shank. Hey, what's going on? How much are you? Pretty good, pretty good. And I'm actually pretty wide open on Monday 'cause like we're working Monday and Tuesday through the holiday. Obviously sounds like you guys are too, which is good, but I'll send it to you now and then whenever on Monday you activate it, we can jump on a call right after and then just kinda go through the getting the number set up. Boom, so that is going to be one of our biggest customers, $250 a month. He was in negotiations and he was talking with 3 of our competitors. He was shopping for different solutions and he just emailed me about 5 minutes ago and said that they chose us over these large companies. By the way, some companies that are doing like tens of millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue, they went with us, which is amazing. So thank you, Ben. It's literally 3:59 right now. I have a 5 PM hard cutoff. I'm getting health insurance and benefits for the 2 employees that are starting on Wednesday. Literally today is the last day that I can get them on the health insurance for a start date of Wednesday. 4 o'clock, it has to be done by 5 o'clock Eastern time, so we're going back to my apartment right now to go get health benefits for these employees. This is just shit you gotta do, but it's gonna be cool. So I'm actually just super happy to be able to offer them benefits and health insurance, and we're paying for 70% of the premium, which is pretty good. I actually Googled nationwide average is like 83%, so almost at nationwide average, Seed Stage startup. But we're gonna go back now 'cause we now have 59 minutes to get back there and to get them health insurance, so we're going back to the apartment. Alright, so I downloaded it. It looks like it's like 29 pages. Do I really have to fill out 29 pages? Yes, that's correct. Alright, so I just start filling it out. Do I— what do I— alright, so like what's SIC code? So they'll need to see articles of incorporation. Okay. Or statement of— Got it. I mean, they're gonna be set up in my payroll provider. 4:53, had 5 o'clock cutoff. What actually happened was we're not gonna be able to make it by July 1st because supposedly for health insurance benefits you have to actually have the employee have started working for you so that you can prove that they are an actual employee. And since their start date isn't until July 5th, uh, we're not able to get them health insurance benefits until July 15th, which is kind of messed up in the world of health insurance benefits because if they stop working somewhere and they start working somewhere else, there's gonna be this gap and it seems very risky to just live without health insurance. And I guess there's what— that's why they It's a topic of conversation in today's culture. So that's what's happening. So we now have until the 7th to get everything submitted so there's a July 15th enrollment date. So we made the cutoff time, by the way. We made it by 5, but complexities are kind of messing it up. I'm talking to a customer right now on live chat through Intercom, that's who I use for live chat. They're using a competitor right now. They have a ton of numbers. It's an agency. Told them we'll beat them. Told them to sign up for the free trial, and so I'm just telling them right now. Yeah, he just actually signed up for the free trial, and I'm gonna jump on a chat demo with them. Just let them know that, you know, we're around, or we're on all weekend too. Just let them know. Alright, cool, let's go get food. Are we done with the vlog? Yeah. Yeah.
