Bootstrapping to $5M with Richard Hollingsworth from Fyxer.ai - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNgpG2fP4zY

Transcript: (00:02) so Richard what we've been doing at the beginning of these which is really fun is we get somebody from the crowd to pitch everybody oh nice they're doing yeah because it's like we're probably like 75% Founders so we did it last week it was great guy pitched I think we got him four demos booked we nice we kind of like roast so so what we're gonna do today is we're gonna have some volunteer pitch for two minutes we're going to roast him the three of us ask questions and then in addition to booking demos we're going to have a survey that (00:49) says buy or not buy would you buy this yes or no because it's kind of like if you don't sell the founders then our audience is like maybe you wouldn't book demos with you which is like what the second the second person we brought up was um but like the buy or not buy is is is a I think a more uh pure indicator of the quality of the pitch like it sounds good man we got people rolling in it's 2:01 PM um 30 people so far 30 3 um oh what's up George hey Rebecca George are you in a now somewhere else I'm calling in from home from London so Richard you're in London yeah (01:49) I I was actually I was actually talking to to to George uh mongia who was the first comment in this chat you can open up the chat and see people who are you know chiming in harassing us ATX brother me too it's cold as balls so in Austin there is this uh weather right now it snowed overnight yeah it doesn't doesn't really have it was like 60 degrees on Sunday or whatever you guys AR built for that right yeah it's it's very cold it's 35 degrees right now it's going to be under 30 all day tomorrow um which which yeah and then I think it'll and then I think it's done (02:28) um but right now it's cold I don't know whether the cold had something to do with my internet not working but um you know the um Arie my co-founder was in New York at the moment he was like it's uh it's like minus5 cels I don't know what that is in Fahrenheit but it's like pretty cold yeah what was he doing there by the way did you guys sell to somebody who just ipoed or something like yeah yeah yeah they've actually they've iPod before but they they are ringing the bell today uh and Archie got like the founder and Archie have become good (03:01) friends so he was like come out and like ring the bell with me so he like flew out there uh last night um has been there today um and is now like they want to we we have this like big contract which I I'll get into on the call but um they wanted to announce that partnership today at the NASDAQ so yeah archers uh yeah couldn't turn down that opportunity yeah I I can't I can't wait to talk about this so how long have you guys been in business with the SAS product uh so we launched the product about a year ago yeah that was to Beta users though we launched the paid users in May last year yeah May last year you (03:44) did eight months already yeah already on on a PG $18 a month per seed product $30 a month yeah yeah yeah uh incredible um Harry G thank you for binging my YouTube today um yeah did you watch any of the uh the episodic stuff or did you just watch these these workshops um I made a whole I made a whole docu series last year oh you watched them all you watched the whole docu series too wow that's amazing uh George let's let's let's just start firing question George George says Richard what type of agency were you (04:28) running before this will be very very interesting for George yeah yeah well um nice question so before this for the last six years I've run the UK's largest uh executive assistant agency so that's offering fractional executive assistance uh to companies mostly based in the UK um or remote rock and roll okay let's get started what based in the UK George says yeah based in the UK like we were in the UK the assistants were based like around the world because we'd offer them like the clients 24/7 coverage and uh but the companies were mostly UK based we work (05:08) with some East Coast us companies as well um and yeah we bootstrapped that business to like five million in AR um over the course of that six-year period and then have used the kind of profits and learnings from it to invest in uh this new software product that we have that's a AI executive assistant and that is what I would hope for you to have said for your intro oh no I mean like like you just did it that was that was perfect so uh now it's 12:05 we're going to roll in this thing um so uh let's do what hey uh audience raise your hand if you want to pitch us and and play (05:48) this game um I saw George's first so let's bring George up do a second one of these by the way at the end of the show so if you need button yourself up do your hair get camera ready uh do that we'll do that in about 40 minutes say but George yeah so um so we're George what's up dude so here's the game George is gonna pitch us he's got two minutes we're gonna run a survey that says I either would buy this or I wouldn't buy this so as he's talking you fill that out and then if you want a demo from George at the end of his two (06:32) minutes we're going to see if anybody books demos okay man all right I'll take it Elie are you ready with the timer yes y all right all right where where is it where are we saying this oh wait yeah D it's rolling the timer's on I feel like I'm like Richard but like maybe four years younger or something I don't know man but I I'm currently running a executive assistant agency so we specify in B2B SAS uh my dream actually in the next probably 45 years is to go into B2B SAS I worked in that beforehand uh and I just found that there's a ton of problems and I was just (07:17) wasting a ton of my time and I figured out I just hated doing all the stuff that uh you know Founders don't like to do so managing my inbox and Richard you already built an amazing software to fix that but there's a lot of other St stuff that like AI agents and other AI tools really can't solve and that's stuff within your personal life so what we do is we build complete Sops and processes where it's more of a productized service so you can just choose something right where your inbox can be completely managed for you it's personalized we have them label it sweep it they can (07:49) also book your flights uh you can have management of uh your whole whole travel schedule as well as your calendar and anything in between um also they can take care of your content doing Outreach scraping data for you uh scheduling dates for you and your wife I mean come on maybe getting a babysitter as well we have all those processes already made for you uh and also anyone that's on the call I'll give you 40 hours of free work I'm going to put my money where my mouth is if you guys want hit me up I'll throw my Linked In in the chat and you guys (08:21) just try us out for for a week uh because I I bet my bottom dollar it'll absolutely change your life you will definitely save those 40 hours in that week um and then man hopefully I'll be like you guys dude in the next four or five years have a cool hair do and a cool beard and then be building cool sass [ __ ] so that was like a minute and a half we have 18 people so by the way crowd audience there is a w you buy chat that just popped up so opine please my question is where are these people located these people are in the Philippines starting at $14 an hour and (08:54) they have worked at places like slack Zoom HubSpot Airbnb and they have to have at least minimum of 2 to three years of experience and we vet all of them and it's completely white glove for you that's pretty solid any Richard how does it work George like what's how do you get like all of those Services delivered by uh like those Services all require very different skill sets how do you get all of those things done oh dude I mean I'm not kidding you I took two addal and six cups of coffee yesterday and just (09:25) created a ton of Sops so it really is just creating pages and pages is a worth of Sops to train all of our people on actually how to do everything um and then testing that and iterating for different clients so it's it's a lengthy onboarding well not lengthy about a week week and a half uh but after that I mean you're you're good to go and we already have like a suite of stuff you can choose from so I just work with one person as the as the client yeah yeah that's it and it's like having kind of like a I like to say in quotes quote employee on (09:57) subscription you know so you just pay per month you can cancel whenever no no long-term contract no fee nothing like that dope what's it what's it called coconut VA so try coconut.com hit us up try coconut.com okay so you got 63% yeses 38% knows uh pretty good so if you want 40 hours of free high-end Philippines assistant work hit us up hit chat who wants a demo who wants a demo I'll dude we got one Stephen Bates thank you he'll demo take it who wants the free 40 hours who wants the free 40 hours M there we (10:45) go wow boom boom boom we got five uh I would say that's pretty that's that's pretty successful six I'll take it there you go so moral the story is you C by the way we're gonna we're gonna change the name of this show from the inbound let outbound live Workshop to unfuck my startup there you go and and and then this is gonna be this is gonna be part of it so uh stunning CL says okay so boom George I would also put my information in there my calendar link or something if I were you I'm throwing it in right now just so people can just book it and then you can go back through the chats and DM those people who said (11:31) they were interested and thank you very much for participating in our second hitch roast I don't know we need to name this something because pitch Ro demo book is like not really D I'll I'll take what any feedback too I'll take it man I'm All About Learning appreciate you D okay so um yeah clib we are going to go back to Richard now that was just a little bit of a distraction but Richard is our guest Pete and I are the host uh our goal for today is to share Richard's Journey because I love bootstrapping but you need money to bootstrap and these guys figured out how to make money to then build a software (12:11) and successfully bootstrap at a pretty rapid rate so I will turn it over to Pete to kick us off with our guest Richard Hollingsworth of fixer.com they may even give you another week if you care uh it's kind of an amazing thing right when you connect it there you really nailed this like wow but I don't want to get distracted Pete take us into the show I agree I agree the Magic Moment is pretty incredible I still have fixer live connected with Archie early on and uh yeah you guys are great so let's started like started an agency first that was your first kind of (12:54) successful you know journey into the seven figure ARR world before we get into that transition into fixer and building that can you take us through the starting the agency starting with like ideation into this world of bringing on clients yeah absolutely um and thank you guys for for having me so for context this was probably six or so years ago maybe maybe seven years ago now and uh my brother and I uh were both working in finance at the time um the two of us grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere in in the UK and we knew that we (13:33) wanted to work in a really fast-paced environment uh so we thought that like the city and finance was what that was um we both got there like working in different fields but both like immediately hated it and we started like meeting up at lunch here like in London the kind of financial districts were very close together so we' go for lunch like a couple of times a week and just like talk through different ideas and we really like the idea of getting into startups but we just didn't know anyone in the space like having grown up in the (14:05) middle of nowhere we just like weren't like uh in the right Network so what we decided was that we would build a service company that would support startups that would give us like a front row seat into like the best startups in London and would allow us to build a network in it and at the time in the US there was like several executive assistant companies that were starting out like companies like zerel that you might remember um that were doing really well and the same thing just hadn't transferred yet to the UK so we thought (14:35) like why don't we be the people to do that and what would be really cool about it is that we'll get to build a network with the sea level people in each of the companies because you know that's who an executive assistant supports the really the premise of it was just like how do we learn and build a network and we really quickly uh started making money from it uh which was not something we had like anticipated happening very quickly um and we started scaling it really quickly to we got it to $5 million an AR after about four years so um all like totally bootstrapped um so (15:12) yeah that was kind of that was the Journey of like ideation how it came about and like how we kind of got started in it yeah tactically tactically how are you finding these you said you were doing networking but like how are you getting customers how did first of all what specifically does that mean networking in the SAS world and second how did that turn into people actually paying you yeah so I the intention was to for the business to help us build a network I suppose and just like get a foothold in like the startup world we thought (15:44) that meant like going to event and stuff like that but really like just by selling to people we started building relationships with people and we were just like we're going to be like totally unafraid of just getting on the phone with people and just like pounding people down so I remember used to write like handwritten notes to people like we would just try like quite um kind of Scrappy tactics to get our first clients and then we would give the first clients a like totally unscalable service that (16:11) would just be like completely ludicrous so that they would then shout about us and then they would share you know their experience with what's quite a small Network in London and just quickly word gets around that you're really good and then you just keep delivering on that basically and and what was the what was the core was there like like George sort of talked about some workflows that he was his his agents service like was there like I mean you say EA and my eyes gloss over like were you like specifically about like you can these people can do X Y and Z for you you know (16:50) so actually like what we realized quickly was that every executive assistant job description is totally different and it's like completely unique because like the needs that you have Adam will be the diff different to the needs that Pete has and so like you need a human ultimately to deliver that experience for people who have as like broader needs as you guys do um so actually when we came to build the AI product like we thought we would focus on a different user to like Founders and SE level people um because like we (17:22) needed more narrow guidance as to like what to focus it on um so yeah there wasn't like to be honest like we had the most premium product or service in the market so we didn't focus on like we're going to do this particular workflow or that one we were like we can deliver anything you want um you got to pay for it and where were you finding the agents so our model was to have like a top tier like 120 Grand a year UK based assistant as your point of contact and they would work almost in like uh how it works in a professional service firm you then have like a team around them of (18:01) lower cost people so your experience is oh I get I'm working with the best EA in London um and then sitting behind them would be a team of people mostly based in South Africa which if you're in the UK is like about on the same time zone people in South Africa have often come to the UK before and the like cost of Labor there is about a third of what it is in the UK so we were able to get like excellent people uh and or me them with people who were like on the ground in London that's cool I didn't know that yeah it's like you know really key in this game for yeah how many how many (18:42) exacts spread across one 120k ukk top tier a depends on it depended on them a lot like we would give them bonuses for like obviously how much they could like how many clients they could handle at one point um but it' go up to anywhere up to like 10 wow um yeah it's like we also we did some clever things in that which quite fun where we realized like biggest problem in bootstrapping is cash flow and we were like how are we going to get the cash from these people if they pay us 30 days late you know after the (19:18) invoice is sent then we're just not going to be able to finance this and what we realiz is like we were supporting exclusively Venture funds um you know Venture funded companies so we were like what if we like they will have the money in the bank like they're not constrained by cash themselves so we just made one of our terms was they had to pay three months in advance and we just never negotiated on that yeah and we would be more happy to negotiate on price than we would be on that and as a result of that we were able to scale as (19:49) fast as we wanted to um because usually like the profitability of the staff was like obviously lowest when a client start and then over time we would make it higher and higher so that cash like allowed us to scale at a really good speed yeah and you were you doing any like paid marketing or anything like that or was it just like yeah you guys it's all like all sales really I mean we did lots of like cold uh outbound email actually like did loads of that um but didn't get into PID marketing did you do like did you do it (20:27) gangster style like the D Ms and instantly and like all that stuff or was it like more straightforward it was probably more straightforward in those days yeah yeah totally we were doing C years ago too we were just like sending off the primary domain no big deal exactly yeah yeah was it was Wild West days right yeah yeah yeah cool back I've asked all the questions that I had yeah there's a question in here how many clients did you work with and what was the average contract per year uh that's a good question we (21:06) had overall we must have worked with 2,000 different companies and they ranged from like seed stage startups to uh like we worked with PWC they were our largest customer we had we had like a know1 and a half million dollar a year contract with them um and what was the second part of the question sorry uh average contract per year this is from CL bus that he's working on like the standard package would be like $60,000 a year okay that's usually supporting like two maybe three exacts and I want to like highlight too (21:44) you had mentioned this is something we talk about all the time like doing unscalable things in the beginning both you mentioned it from like a product operation standpoint but also from a go to market standpoint um like Adam and I were talking about something this morning talking somebody in community that we have you know got their first client they're like all right now I need to scale up ads and email like Adam what do you think I should do and Adam's like you should look for your second F like you should just try to go from one to two like write them a letter or see if that first one will spend more right (22:14) yeah instead of trying to so um Michael ask as a young company how do you convince a big corporation like PWC to trust you this is such a big thing for folks whether you're an agency SAS you start out small you want want to get that big you know those kind of larger deals but they kind of require a little bit more proof trust things like that how'd you go about that we've we've done a few of these kind of deals in our like careers and what I'd say is like it's very difficult to tell which of like I've been in lots of situations where they haven't come (22:48) off and it's very difficult to tell the difference between the two until like the result or the outcome happens and what it say is like you just got to be in the mix and the other thing is like I think about it a little bit like dating sometimes it's like if you're dealing with this person like instead of just like playing it cool and like treat him me keep him King kind of thing it's just being like really direct and like really really forward and moving Heaven and Earth to like get a deal done um I'll (23:21) talk a bit uh talking a bit about a deal that we closed last month which is like a $1.2 million contract with our SAS business and like that's very much the approach that we took um was just like going all out to get the deal done what next got weird man we got more questions about PWC though yeah like like what I'm also kind of curious like what specifically did you do like what was the kind of deal story of PWC and it so what year of your company was it in and then what was the sort of like yeah we first met them in uh probably three years into what we were (24:08) doing I met the head of uh workplace operations um who manages all of the executive assistant team for the UK office uh he's got like for contexts like an 80 million budget to do that with um and so I met him on a pan where we were talking like to a team of executive assistants about like what we thought about the space and built a relationship with him afterwards and then like berated might be a bit of a strong word but like didn't leave him alone until he let us show him how our team could help solve their problems um we knew that they had this issue where like just from talking to him we knew that (24:57) they had this issue where um they had because they had a team of I think it was like a thousand executive assistants something like that they we knew that there was always people that were going off on holiday or uh sick leave or leaving the company all these sorts of things and they needed some support with this like interim cover and so we were like moved Heaven and Earth to demonstrate to him like how we could solve that problem for him and that included giving him uh one of our executive assistants for free until we had proven that point to (25:33) him I mean that's amazing and that started from you being on a panel at an industry event yeah exactly and he he came up to me afterwards and was like oh you know we'd be really interested and we should chat and stuff and like I've been in lots of those kind of situations and they don't actually lead anywhere um but you have to treat every single one of them as though it is going to pay off because you just need one of them to and it transforms like everything because not only the money but also the brand that we had from that um was incredibly (26:08) valuable for us getting more and more clients so just leverage that for social proof did you get referrals from them too totally yeah and we then used him he was like in a network of other companies like that um who you know they would all be talking about how they were solving this problem and he would share about us and we would take him out for lunch every every like quarter and get business advice from him as well so that he felt like he was a part of our company's journey and like involved in its success (26:39) or not so all of that stuff became really really important um again we we kind of like we always try this like you said we did approach where we'll like ask him for some advice take it away and then like make sure that we have actioned something in in relation to that so that when we come back we could be like l time you told us to do this we did it and this is what happened and that like really makes them feel like a part of it because particularly if you're working in a compy like PWC it's pretty boring so really fun to be (27:11) involved in a kind of exciting fast moving startup absolutely I love that by the way though like you said we did like that's a really good way to engage people if if if for no just Pander to their ego right like EX yeah and like we were you know in our like early and mid 20s and he was in his like 50s 60s maybe so he there's kind of a paternal relationship was kind of the dynamic we were going for I love how like this we're getting a lot of questions about like inbound tactics and some fixer stuff we're about (27:48) to move into the fixer story but like all the biggest examples you gave were like true relationship building these are not growth hacks it's like I met a person and nurtured that relationship ship and then got referrals through that and it's like for some reason everyone's talking about ads email and the absolute lowest impact Impressions you can possibly make whereas you built your business making a smaller amount of very high impact Impressions and you were able and grow that Network and do literally execute on the vision that you and Archie were hypothesizing just you (28:22) know years yeah it's it's really easy to get caught though speaking to the wrong people and so when you're speaking to these people in these companies you need to know that the person that you're dealing with is has the authority to actually sign it off because I've also been caught up in where that hasn't been the case and you're then just dealing with procurement for six months and you just don't get anywhere yeah uh and so like that's so important to know that if the person if you persuade that person that they'll take care of the rest of it (28:51) for you how do you find that out do you literally ask them like do have the yeah I'd like literally ask them I mean sometimes it's obvious um you know if they are like the CEO uh that's really straightforward but like with this guy we when we spent time like taking him out for lunch and stuff we would understand like exactly how much budget he had for this like how much Authority and sign off he needed and who needed to sign it off Etc and like would we have that buy in before we like progress to procurement because once you get thrown into the cue of other tools and services (29:29) that are like going through the procurement process um the whole thing slows down so much unless you've got somebody pushing it through each step of the way yeah now I want to so built this agency you got to 5 million a year bootstrapped is that right that's right yeah am how long did that take to get to that Milestone four years okay and then and is that agency still running it is today right that agency is still running yeah and then you fixer came along comes along somewhere in the story you now have the successful agency and then can (30:07) you can you bring us through how like even the idea of this email cleanup came about like were you just so frustrated with marking all of your emails as red in the morning because that's how I came across fixure I'll tell you so um well so we always knew that we wanted to transition from a sales business to a tech business and not least Because by the time we were doing you know 5 million in AR we were doing like we had a team of 80 people and I was like I want to get to 10 million but I do not want 160 people in the team in order to do that and like (30:44) that was the only way that we could grow was like completely linearly so we would constantly be looking at how we could use Tech in order to augment and leverage our team better or reduce the cost to be able to offer it to like a wider group of people and ultimately we tried about three different tools that could automate different things for an executive assistant in order to make them more efficient learned a whole lot about it spent uh you know a fair amount of our money like each year the profits we (31:13) would just put towards experiments like this um and what our like takeaways were ultimately that just the software wasn't there to be able to like accurately replicate the quality of an executive assistant uh because in the context of our customers like quality is the most important component because if somebody is going if you're going to trust somebody to act on your behalf it needs to be to the standard that you would do it or higher and if it's anything less than that then it's not worth them doing (31:44) it for you because you know particularly when it in the context of email it's like it is your relationship with your customers uh you know it's it's how you interact with them so you can't afford for it to be anything other than how you would do it so until uh chat gbt came along like we were like in that space um and once that launched it was like very obvious that there would be some really clear applications for that technology that could be better than a human executive assistant and so we got to work uh one of the smart things that we had done is (32:19) in the agency we had uh got all of the team every task they did they timed it they uh labeled it it and they described what they were doing so during the course of the six-year period we gathered like 500,000 hours of customer data that told us what customers use an executive assistant for um and like the way in which they like to interact with them and so we like spread that out over like a two-year like broke it down task by task and worked out like how you would automate an executive assistant um (32:56) like yeah one task at a time um and the first thing that we thought was like the most amable to AI that was also like incredibly valuable we could see customers were using like 40 minutes a day uh was organizing inboxes into folders so we could see that was a task that people were doing and we were like oh okay well we are being paid $60 an hour to do this task uh in the agency if we can get an AI to do it in exactly the same way to the same quality or higher we can easily charge $30 a month like there's Nob (33:31) brainer that people will pay for that so we went back to the agency and we got the assistance to film themselves doing this workflow and Archie and I and our third co-founder Matt we watched uh like 120 hours of footage of uh people sorting emails into folders um just like an incredibly boring 120 hours but it was really really valuable because it showed us exactly like only what to build but exactly how to build it like what folders to have how did people like organize how did the workflows like how should the workflow work and then we used a team of executive assistants to (34:09) train the system so that we knew that it was more accurate than any one of them uh because we had gave it so many gave them so many examples to train the system with um so by the time we released it we knew that people would really would buy it because like it was so obvious that they would because the price was you know 2% of what people were already paying it for us um and the quality was as good after you had that like sort of MVP built first of all that's one of the coolest ways I've seen somebody identify a problem for a SAS product is like literally just going through a massive (34:48) set of data that you already have and parsing out this thing that you can actually build what was after you launched what was that initial sort of user feedback like like you have MVP now let's see if it can be you know in a real world situation actually be as effective as one of these um you know executive assistants and how did you collect that feed look like so initially lots of people what we realized was that in order to optimize for Quality we had to reduce the amount that you could customize the tool if you were able to customize the tool and you were essentially like writing the prompts (35:23) then the AI would be far less accurate than if we did it for you and having watched all the recordings we knew that basically everyone organizes their inbox in the same way uh they call the folders different names but basically everyone has the same folders and so people got people were like when we first launched the product were like oh I don't want to do it in your folder system I want to do it in my folder system but we knew having had this like having watched this footage that that was like not something that actually mattered so we ignored that customer (35:56) feedback um and like waited and people didn't churn or they started paying after the free trial and we were like confident that actually we could say no to customers when they started telling us like the things they wanted being able to sift between uh like what was valuable that they told us and what actually was a bit of a distraction was really really useful that's really inter that's one of the hardest things about building products in my opinion by the way like I totally agree I was like go ahead I just say like I was like I found it harder to say no to customers than (36:35) like our CTO mat was just like I've watched like the footage I only saw that like example of that folder come up twice out of the 200 examples therefore we won't do it and was just like so rigid about it um I found that like challenging yeah uh we had this issue with rbb where we have this like horribly nonfunctioning web interface but like Diana and I have a high level of conviction that it with the way we want people to use the product the web interface is irrelevant so like it's hard because the only thing that we have for people to (37:19) use is this web interface so of course we're getting feedback that it sucks right and that we should add filtering and we should add labeling and we should add all this [ __ ] but like you know with retention. comom or other business we had this realization a year ago we're like the only thing we're doing for people is making money in their clavo accounts we shouldn't even have a UI the numbers that we have in the UI they go and check in their clavo accounts anyway and like we kind of think that like rbb is the same thing it's just like the whole thing should happen in people's crms we shouldn't be (37:51) filtering and routing in a web app anyway that's not how you should use this so it's tough this is exactly the issue it's tough when everyone says you need to listen to your customers give them what they want and make them happy but like having the awareness to to do something like that which is like well in our case it was well this is like entirely not how you should be using this product in the first place at least that's our hypothesis I'm open to being wrong about it but like we got to test hypothesis first and in your case it's like I have (38:26) so much conviction from watching these [ __ ] videos that like these people don't yeah yeah that's that that was basically it I mean it's not dissimilar to like the you know you read online like the best advice tells you listen to customer feedback and listen to what your employees tell you and like to a certain degree there's there's truth in that but also like it's really important to be clear and Direct on what it is that you want to build um like yeah I've definitely learned that lesson over the last year for sure yeah yeah there's (38:57) this big like contextualize everything people do this with go to market playbooks they do it with product advice it's like if you took a bunch of hockey fans to a cricket match they're going to say there's not enough physical contact this just doesn't mean you need to change all the rules right it's like you got to meet people where they're at and understand why they're saying what they are and I mean Adam nailed it on our our experience from RvB um and speaking of the go to market let's dive in there we got 20 minutes left okay so you launched (39:25) this thing you have all like this well of data that you're using so you basically already have threee like PR uh collected you know customer feedback data essentially based on the actions from all of your your executive assistants so um as you're going to Market can you tell us like you know how you initially went to Market were you trying to sell your agency customers are you trying to sell a new group what did that look like yeah so initially we launched it to uh the Network that we already had which was founders of tech companies and we ran into this problem where we (40:02) realized that they had all these like very bespoke specific needs and that it would be really hard for us to just like product is their experience of what they wanted um but they lots of them handed it to their salespeople and they were like oh my salesperson like can't get an executive assistant but has the same like volume of emails and meetings problem that your product would solve and so we just started watching that happen more and more and more um and we had committed to so for context we had funded this business ourselves using the profits from the agency business so we (40:42) were limited in scope as to how aggressive we could be when it came to marketing and so what we decided to do when the product was ready to launch to paid users was we realized that we needed to buy cred ility uh we need to get our hands on some credibility because no one had heard of us and no one had heard of our tool and if you're going to trust us with your email it's really really important that like you you know that you have that trust up front um because like you know it's it's it's a big uh responsibility on our behalf so what we did is we gave (41:19) it to a collection of really uh people that we've found to be like incredibly impressive and had always been really supportive of us that were like uh had kind of influence in the sort of particularly B2B SAS like sales space um and we're like can you you know you said we did be like can you tell us what you want from the product like how would you uh what would stop you from giving this to your team etc etc um and like made some iterations on their feedback um and eventually got to the point where people were happy to kind of like um to share and post about us and so in like May (41:59) last year we had like lined up a whole load of people to like start sharing about fix RI and got like initial customer traction at a very low cost through like that kind of bespoke experience for people who had the correct credibility to be able to like put us on the map if you like and how did you incentivize those people like how do you incen how did you incentivize people to post did you pay them did you give them free products what that you know what does that look like so it just depended on the person to be honest we'd (42:29) separate them into like different categories so uh like typically the like the extent they to which they want to get paid is determined by the size of Their audience but actually we realize that like a large audience isn't very useful for us because uh what we want is like somebody with quite a small but very focused audience where people actually really listen to and trust that person um if you got somebody with like you know 500,000 followers let's say they're going to charge you loads of money it's all transactional it's quite obvious that it's (42:59) transactional and that like their their following won't be very like focused it won't be people who really like buy into this stuff it's just kind of like you know somebody that they kind of are interested in a bit so actually the people that were really really valuable were people like smaller much more focused networks so what it ended up meaning was like more often than not it was like uh like we'll give you six months for free or we'll offer this to your team for free Etc Etc um was like kind of worked better in the (43:32) end so yeah we we did um we've done a whole workshop on ugc we had Bruno from clay and we had uh my favorite D Toc story which is this this guy Ryan bean and he has this showerhead company called Jolie and he got like 30,000 pieces of ugc created over the last three or four years and that exact act like the way bab and xan said it he's like somebody asked a question kind of like that should I go big or should I go little with my ugc efforts he's like let me put it this way if you have the choice between spending $500,000 for a post or $500 for 1,000 (44:13) posts there's absolutely no question that you should spend $500 for 1,000 posts every single time it's just the the the the breadth of small audience is the way that you make this work you know um so yeah I just yeah particularly with the way LinkedIn works and like the the posts which LinkedIn was the platform that we did this on and like the post don't last very long anyway so if you only do one it's just like it's going to be a week of signups and then you know you run out of money I got a sh I got to shrink my [ __ ] (44:47) audience kidding yeah um so we okay so you went through kind of the influencer um you know route can you take us a little bit through so right now I have fixer installed Adam has fixer installed it's been very helpful it's made my mornings less um chaotic I start I tried it for free also uh and it was awesome so another another plg success story if you I mean that was the similar thing to what you're talking about the agency if you can just provide something for people that shows them value uh it it becomes much easier for them to to open (45:25) their wallets um where' you go from here you started an agency that's running you started fixer fixer blew up is there like stuff on by the way did you did you wind down the agency or you still have the agency do have the agency but I don't work there anymore so what we what we decided to do was uh when we started working on vixer we moved uh Archie straight out of the agency um so that he was just like completely not involved at all he started like doing groundwork on like pulling the data together and like kind of doing all of that work and um I then (46:05) started transitioning myself out of the agency that probably took like four months um but we were like very uh decided on us like getting out of it completely and that there wouldn't be like me spending like one day a week doing it or two days a week and kind of splitting my time or anything it was like really important that this was like all of our time into the new thing um so yeah that was like probably December last year I like got that um not December 24 but December 23 I kind of moved out entirely got it and who who did you get to run it did you did you have any (46:43) existing kind of managers yeah we we'd been sort of putting the groundwork in place for us to uh step out of it anyway so I'd hired a salesperson to take over from Archie's role so that was quite straightforward like they had been working in tandem for like six months um and I promoted our like most senior person uh into kind of managing director role behind uh behind me in in audience for what it's worth uh their brothers we didn't mention that Archie and Richard yeah yeah that's how's that been by the (47:15) way it's um it's actually just such a pleasure uh like we've been you know doing this for like seven or so years working together now um and I think honestly like if it can work it's it's unbelievable um the real key thing is like and everyone will tell you this who works with their family is like you can't let family stuff ever creep into word so you know if you've got a grudge with your sibling because of something they did when they when you were teenagers like you can't work with them if that's going to come into work at any (47:48) point yeah yeah yeah if you can keep the family out then it's just a real pleasure cuz like the trust is insane yeah most powerful force in business for sure go ahead Pete what' you say I was just saying I've not taken that leap yet to working with friends or family and I'm not uh I'm not sure I'm ever ready to but that's encouraging I'll say to say the least um we have a bunch of questions rolling through we're going to do in the last 10 minutes we always do our Q&A so folks who have posted questions we'll get to those in a minute do we want to do our second uh our second Pitch the audience um I think (48:27) this is a perfect time uh yeah let's do it Okay who wants to all right yeah hand raise we're trying to figure out this roast part like we don't want to be mean but like we want to be entertaining and we also want to help out like sometimes people tell us what their business are and like I don't really get it and um I'm gonna start being vocal about that and uh by the way if nobody's raising their hand we can just go right into uh Q&A yeah Q&A all right let's start Q&A if someone raises the next couple minutes we can uh we can have them um have uh so let's (49:04) let's let's stop start with questions Clen says would love to know what is next for fixer what's on the road map any changes coming anything big that uh you'd like to tell the uh folks about on me um so where we left off was like we built the labeling feature we then built draft responses we then built scheduling we then launched a meeting assistant in September uh and a slack feature that's coming in q1 this year and the goal for us is connecting each of these tools together so that like an executive assistant um we're able to like sit in (49:44) your meetings for you and take actions in your internal messenger tool your CRM or in your email so um you know you'll have experienced a little bit of this if you're using fixer where today uh after the meeting it'll draft a follow-up email for you taking these like proactive actions from one platform and to to the next is like the next Frontier for us is that going to be like I mean you have a front row seat to this and I'm just hypothesizing out of entertainment but like where are we in the world of (50:18) everybody like right now everyone pretty much writes all their emails slowly my AI is like starting to just autofill what I'm trying to say based on all things I've had before are we going to get to a place in the next couple years where like no one's actually writing emails like what do you think about that so we tend to work with like midmarket sales teams um with real estate brokers like Professional Service firms like lawyers and recruiters people whose lives are dominated by email and meetings and who typically follow like quite a clear process in their day so (50:57) their day is dictated by email to meeting uh to internal messenger tool to CRM and for those people that have a relatively clear and repeatable workflow we think that we're going to be able to automate like the line share of their Communications um and their admin tasks so we recently signed a contract with um a company called exp realy they're the largest real estate broker in the world um and that that contracts like $1. (51:31) 2 million and to to work with like 5,000 initially of their 880,000 real estate brokers and like they're what they're thinking is we need to do like their lead indicator for revenue is the number of viewings that they can do so for their Brokers like how many house viewings can they do per day per week and currently the thing that is the biggest Gap them being able to do that is scheduling and organizing the viewings uh replying and responding to customers updating the CRM and uh and kind of updating their team (52:08) internally on slack so we very much see it's like our job is to automate as much as possible so in the future like they can do 40% 50% more viewings where we are like currently is we automate uh like our users send 53% of the emails that we draft for them we're actually over halfway there to automating uh people's inboxes yeah and I someone to point out if you're an inbox um organization tool and you just broke down your benefit all the way down to the amount of viewings for Real Estate professionals like that is how you do it like have you carved (52:48) into specific niches like that um where you're trying to speak directly to those people or are you still kind of the email app for everybody so it depends where you look uh on the marketing site like it's email app for everybody uh in sales conversations it's like much more directed and we uh like have S of for context we're until Christmas we were a team of only four people so we're very limited as to like the scope of being able to uh kind of update things and that sort of thing so like we just hired a team to help with (53:25) like things like the marketing site um so there'll be much more of that coming now if people want to I mean I think everybody after the show should try out fixer for free I assume you're still doing the free uh free motion people can hook it up and and try it out in their inbox yeah absolutely yeah exactly how much did you have to pay for that domain you used to be fixer AI right or were you always fix yeah I actually already own the domain which was use um yeah sneaky sneaky know but you started with fixer AI or was it always fixer.com yeah so so the agency (54:02) is also called fixer and the agency owned fixer.com um so we started at fixer doai and then we were like we need to be. um and so we just you know transferred it across did you change your agency name no it's fix of do people at the moment um there's a like decision point to make there around whether they want to change it or not there's a real benefit now like the name fixer is like out there much more than it was previously so there's a benefit there but there's more confusion for them because people think they are something to do with the AI company so there like a decision that they need to make around (54:44) like yeah how they move that forward yeah yeah sweet well Richard where can uh where should people follow you what should they do next what anything you want tell the wi world out there we're going to post this recording tomorrow for folks wondering at uh it goes live at 9:00 a.m. (55:07) Central Time um so this will go live on YouTube and uh where can people follow along Richard yeah so you can find uh find us at fixer.com uh check out the product there's free trial uh no credit card needed or anything you just get up and get using it um and if you want to follow on our journey we like try have tried to replicate uh some of Adam's building in public and uh Archie and I both post pretty regularly on LinkedIn about like what's happening in the journey and where we're up to dude um awesome thank you for joining us this was this was all that I could have hoped for uh when I asked you to great story man I mean I just love (55:51) thanks for having me everybody kind of does a little bit differently I think the way you did it is like to me it just strikes me as an unbelievably lowrisk way to start a tech startup it's like not only did you have this thing making you money which is like the biggest risk right because it always takes longer than you think you just automated stuff that you already knew people wanted because they were already paying you for it exactly I mean that's just a beautiful like of course and the question would be how do you get in that situation but like yeah uh you know that that that that is (56:29) phenomenal um thanks for joining us dude so next week we got Veron from clay uh he is the chief business officer he's like the number two dude there he's goingon to tell us what it's like to have worked at clay for the last five years which I'm sure has been very wild um I think I just said this about to make a big announcement like tomorrow so we can talk about that big announcement um and uh yeah that's about it I don't know Pete you got anything else no well uh we're going to rename this thing we're trying new things everybody come next week ready can't believe we have (57:07) one is it unfuck my startup or your startup what's the something like that we'll figure it out we'll flush all this out liveand everyone come next week with a ready to pitch we would love to see it I want to see people like starting to come with like whiteboards and you know dress up I don't know you don't have to but you know you'll book more dyal um no that's all I got man I mean it's a pretty good hit rate with George earlier we got him seven demos out of the 72 total attendees um not bad and uh Richard I'm sure you're gonna get a lot of love out of this too by the way U I feel like our highest number of (57:48) attendees I'm still trying to figure out like what drives the attendees I think it's a subject matter like we had Jeremy Horowitz who no one knows anything about but the title of the show was like why you shouldn't do ABM if you're under 20 million of Revenue and it was like maxed out like like there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people on it so anyway that's on us we got to figured out but this was great dude um I really enjoyed it guys thank you so much it was Prett fun yeah I'm happy you guys are (58:19) crushing it and uh you know anything I can do to help let me know we we'll do man thanks a lot cool thanks everybody see you next week