The Future of SaaS & Business Growth

Auto-generated from the episode audio and lightly cleaned up. Expect the odd misheard word.

1. 0:03
   Wes Mathews

   This is the unfiltered truth about entrepreneurship. Raw, no BS, no sugarcoating. Welcome to Entrepreneur Intel. I'm your host, Wes Mathews. Each episode, we'll learn from experienced founders and uncover the top 5% learnings that led to their success in all things personal, family, and business. This show is sponsored by Stealth Consulting, delivering clear marketing strategies, ROI, and no surprises. Awesome. So super excited for today. Want to introduce Nathan Tyler. Nathan, thanks so much for coming on. I appreciate it.

2. 0:37
   Nathan Tyler

   Yeah, excited to be here.

3. 0:39
   Wes Mathews

   A lot of things to talk to you about. So first, are you, so we've been trying to get this podcast going. Are you near the fires? What's going on there? Are you, are you by there or?

4. 0:49
   Nathan Tyler

   I am in an area that I never thought would even remotely be threatened by fires. I'm several miles south of the foothills, but we actually did get an evacuation notice. They evacuated up to about a half mile above us. And so we went ahead and went down south for a few days. Everything was fine. Like we're really on the perimeter. I think it was precautionary, but we were without power here for like about a week and then we came back. But yeah, all good.

5. 1:20
   Wes Mathews

   What's crazy is like I'm 43 and I just, I don't know. It seems like I was in Southern California for a short stint when I was 19 to 20, which was amazing, but it just seems pretty insane. Just like the fires and have you guys experienced that in your area? Is that just totally new or?

6. 1:38
   Nathan Tyler

   No, yeah. I mean, I grew up here, so I've, I've always kind of every couple of years there's like a fire and there's tons of smoke and the air quality degrades and, you know, some, some really nice houses in the foothills burn, but like 10 houses, right? And they evacuate and then it gets rebuilt. I've never, it's never really descended this far into the cities and really, really decimated entire areas. That's never seen anything like it.

7. 2:06
   Wes Mathews

   So jeez, crazy being in Michigan, like it's a something we never think about, right? Yeah, at all.

8. 2:15
   Nathan Tyler

   I don't think much about tornadoes or, you know, hurricanes and other parts. Everybody's got their, everybody's got their thing, right?

9. 2:22
   Wes Mathews

   Yeah. Yeah. Ours is a winner. I guess it's not as bad as a fire, but it like for nine months, it's extremely cold here. Yeah. Still not as bad as a fire and what's going on out there, but well, thank you so much for coming on. You know, so your background, right? As I want to talk about, I think it's really interesting is, is the word and term SAS, right? And like your experience in the SAS world. So can you just explain what that means to you for, for individuals that may think they know or they're hearing that term for the first time?

   I mean, unless you're living under a rock, you've had to have heard SAS, but I think it's coming from you who's lived it has the experience. I'd love to get your take on what it actually means. Yeah.

10. 3:02
    Nathan Tyler

    SAS, I think really popped up as a term for us older folks. I think if you were born in the last 20 years, like everything is SAS, so it's just doesn't mean anything. But back in the day, they used to sell software in boxes and you would go to the store to comp USA or to one of these places that no longer exists and you would buy the box of software and take it home. And you could buy like Microsoft project for project management or something.

    And then one day as the web was evolving, right there, somebody had the bright idea that, oh, I could sell this software in a webpage where I go and log in and I could just sell monthly access to it. And so Basecamp was a project management software. That was like one of the first big ones that really came out and started making viable business model is, okay, you don't buy, you know, this project planning software in a box for $500 every couple of years, you instead pay me $50 a month, and then it's all online.

    And, you know, you log in. So that's, I think, software as a service, that's kind of how it originated. But now nothing gets bought by boxes. And kind of by definition, almost everything is a SAS.

11. 4:14
    Wes Mathews

    Yeah, I think I remember when I was like, I don't even know, maybe 20, maybe not, but like buying a big box of like QuickBooks from like Best Buy or something. And I'm trying to load that baby on my gateway computer that was the size of my desk. It never worked like properly, like you're always like crashing. And so you've been in this world, I mean, so you were sort of in this world when everything started to transition into this SAS thing, right? Like, is it something that you saw coming down the pipeline?

    Or was it just like an abrupt, here it is.

12. 4:49
    Nathan Tyler

    So I mean, I think I started seeing it. But before I was really actively in the business world, I was like seeing, I was seeing that start to play out while I was still in school. And right as I was graduating, like, web was becoming a viable place to like do business and have these software packages. So yeah, you could kind of see it developing. Because you like, how long you've been tooling around with websites and doing software, like you've been doing that for quite a long time, right?

    Yeah, I mean, basically, I was always tinkering around even like through elementary and middle school, like tinkering around with stuff, but like desktop software. And really, the web software was evolving. And then when I was in college, I think Google Maps came out like Google Maps, Gmail, kind of this explosion of what they called Web 2.0, which was like real dynamic applications in a web browser. That's when you could really start seeing the shift. Because actually, up until then, like when I was in high school, I like make desktop application software.

    And it was really in college, there was this huge shift is like, oh, no, we're gonna, we're just gonna build in the web browser. And that became kind of the obvious transition.

13. 6:04
    Wes Mathews

    So you started doing this came out of college, and somehow some way you landed on like creating a website agency? Or is that sort of like your first thing after college getting involved in web and software?

14. 6:15
    Nathan Tyler

    Yeah, so I mean, I'm only a few years younger than 40. So I was graduating in high school in 2003, and then college in 2006. So it was right around that time, I was actually working, I worked my last two years of high school, like at a computer store doing sales and support. And I was working with a lot of small businesses who were coming in buying equipment. And I would kind of end up freelancing, or they would also need a website, or they would need some little custom software application.

    So I was doing that part time through all of college. And then when I graduated, at 2006 was not exactly a great economy anyway. So I thought, well, I'll just keep doing this and go up to full time because by my end of college, I was already working like 2025 hours a week. And then I just ramped it up to full time, just getting whatever website project I could. And at the time, there was no Squarespace drag and drop, you know, like people who just even had a corner coffee shop and needed a website, needed somebody to do it for them.

    So that was kind of how I started getting into the web.

15. 7:22
    Wes Mathews

    So it's crazy, because I think we kind of both started around the same time. And yeah, back in the day that you had like platforms like Joomla, I mean, WordPress really wasn't even talked about. And Joomla, even for me, like I'm not a techy guy, but it was really difficult to navigate around. But now, right, like, it's crazy to think in 10 years, like the quality of a website that you can build in like these self serving DIY. I think for me, there's this intimidation factor around the DIY.

    But there's these platforms and SaaS platforms out there that'll build you a phenomenal website.

16. 8:00
    Nathan Tyler

    Yeah, you know, the line has really moved like something that we used to charge a few thousand dollars for you could now get for like a $9 sign up fee with a 30 day trial. Like you can get up and running in an hour yourself.

17. 8:15
    Wes Mathews

    You know, with like zero experience, right?

18. 8:17
    Nathan Tyler

    Yeah, zero experience. Anybody.

19. 8:20
    Wes Mathews

    I used to joke way back in the day, like when I was like full blown into my agency, you know, talking to prospective customers, and I'd say, you know, you don't want your sister's cousin's brother's nephew's neighbor, right, managing your website, because you're a real company. And they get that they start to laugh. And they'd be like, yeah, I totally get that we're a real company, we should, you know, move into a professionally company for like you guys to manage. Well, the problem is that same person today is kind of the person you want managing your website, because they can do a really good job.

    Yeah, it's like it's completely shifted upside down.

20. 8:52
    Nathan Tyler

    Yeah, yeah, exactly.

21. 8:54
    Wes Mathews

    I mean, you have things like Canva. I mean, it's just crazy what, which I want to get into with you and kind of pick your brain there. But so you got into the world around like 2014. And then what did you grow that company sell it or

22. 9:09
    Nathan Tyler

    Yeah, so my agency, I would have started I think I took my first contract thing in 2004 2005. And then I ran it started as just me. And then I kind of built a small agency out of that. Did a lot of, did a lot of websites and heavy data and web application projects, a lot of custom business applications. So we got really into the kind of back end side of it. And automate and improve the workflows of different companies. So it was kind of our focus.

    But as the as the years went on, like running an agency is a really tough business because there's ever there's always like not enough work or not enough people to do the work. The balance is never right. Even from month to month, it kind of goes through peaks and valleys. And it's really hard to get clean systems in place internally, because every client's like a little bit different. And every project might be a different technology stack or something. And I feel like I'd finally gotten to a point where I really had a good system.

    And I had people would give me Photoshop files, and we'd slice it up into a website. We had this whole process. And I was like, I've cracked it, like I finally have this agency that does what I needed to do. And then the iPhone came out. And all of a sudden, that Photoshop process was completely broken. Now we have responsive design, it has to work on a tablet and a desktop and a mobile. And all the people and processes I had, completely useless now, like when now we need to have design in the browser, and you need to have a developer and designer in one who can do that totally different client process.

    And kind of that was the moment for me around, I guess, 2007 or eight when it was like the iPhone is clearly going to become a thing where I was, I decided, okay, like I need to get out of this client services, endless loop, because I'm not actually, I'm not actually getting anywhere. So and that was a slow transition. So I started taking on dipping my toe into software, not by building a full on SAS, but by building some WordPress plugins. So building, you know, a little small plugin within an ecosystem, you didn't have to build as much to get started, had some traction with some of those, and then eventually started building a SAS company that I exited in 2019.

    And that was really kind of the final end of my client services agency days, and shift full time into product and software. It's interesting.

23. 11:47
    Wes Mathews

    It's kind of like it gives me chills to think about at one point, like as hearing you talk, I just remember, at one point, like we had the desktop version, and the mobile version, like at one point, we, and there was actually companies out there that I mean, there's people out there that we would talk to, and like, you don't have a mobile version of your website. Like that was a thing. Now it's like you wouldn't even think twice about like, that's that's that wouldn't even enter a conversation.

    Yeah. You know, like you and I kind of have some similar stories, like I got out of the agency world, and my crystal ball that normally fails me was like, man, what's coming down the pipeline and digital marketing is it's going to completely disrupt. So like that, you know, you see talk about like getting out of client services, right? Because that's a different beast. I mean, that's its own animal. So now on the SaaS world, and these WordPress, WordPress plugins, and kind of what you're doing from a SaaS, is that more than targeted, you know, on the B2B of like the agencies who are then serving that to their client?

    Like, is that what you're, you just want to build the best software and support that?

24. 12:50
    Nathan Tyler

    Yeah, so I mean, I think the common thread, I've done a lot of different projects and stuff, the common thread is really building really good software that has a real focus on user experience. Because I think there's a lot of, you know, enterprise big company software, and then there's lots of small kind of indie projects. But typically, it's like the developer just enjoys the developer and they're kind of like an artist in that way that they just love the chase of the problem. But there's no focus on how the actual user experience is the software.

    So we've always had a deep focus on like trying to really tackle complex difficult problems, but really make it exceptionally easy to use. And, and for, you know, a small business, they have a million things going on, they really don't want to interact with your software, right? Like, it's just one moment in their day. And so you really want to remove as much friction and frustration as possible and help them become successful. And a big part of that is also customer support. Famously, a lot of software companies will outsource their support, or that's just a very secondary thought.

    But we've also always really hired aggressively for the best customer support we can provide. And in many cases, in the early days, we've done it ourselves, our customer support team will like jump on zoom calls with customers, they'll write, you know, snippets of code, whatever it takes for the customer to actually be successful. So those are really the pillars of our, our software side. And, you know, I did enjoy a lot of the agency work we did. And we did a lot of really complex setups for, for customers.

    But, you know, I think we're primarily like a product in a software company, and that my background and my interest has always been there. And agency was a vehicle for that. But what I discovered was a lot of agency work was, you know, helping people write their content, help them figure out the photos, project management, navigating the organization of that client, dealing with the politics of the two co founders that are my client, trying to figure out how to help them become successful. A lot less, you know, the software was like this much of the project, and there was everything else.

    And so I think, in this model and going into SAS, like we really can focus on building a like very good and scalable product. Right now we have, you know, 100,000 users across all of our product base, right, they're all paying us a little bit of money. So the business model is completely flipped from agency. But I think it's a better fit for my interest experience and tolerance for certain things. Yeah, it's interesting.

25. 15:31
    Wes Mathews

    So like my partner and my business now he's been my partner for a long time. But you know, he was the CTO, the software developer. And we used to laugh and joke. I mean, it's he's like building the software is easy. Like that's the easy part. It's like that when stuff breaks with the troubleshooting. I mean, because the clients are trying to navigate through your software. And they're pressing the wrong buttons doing the wrong things. Nothing's broken. It's just the user. It used to get so frustrated.

    I mean, we actually got out of that business because we were like on the opposite side, because I'm like, you can build really cool tech, but we have to support it. Yeah, like that's a big thing. Like you can't just build software and leave people out to dry like you have to support it and take the feedback and get better. So you know, we kind of got out of that world. So like how then you talk about an emphasis on like customer support and, you know, because usually in the SaaS model, this is my take, and maybe other people's take takes a lot of money to create that thing.

    But then on a SaaS platform, you're licensing a little bit of that, right? So they're able to pay 50 bucks a month, 20 bucks a month. But if they were go out, if they were to go out and buy that software and build it internally, you're talking hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars, right? Like to me, that's the concept. Yeah, now you talk about customer service, like how do you differentiate yourself or like really build that relationship with your client? Because, you know, everything is just getting cheaper, and there's all these widgets, and there's so much noise out there, right?

    I mean, I'll start with that question. I got a good follow up because I want to start to talk a little bit about some of the things I use, and maybe pick your brain on some of the things that you're like, hey, for 10 bucks a month, this thing completely changed my life. But how do you differentiate? Or is that the differentiator that you actually deliver a high level of customer service?

26. 17:16
    Nathan Tyler

    Yeah, I think that is the differentiator, partially. So we started in WordPress world, everything's kind of freemium. There's a free version and 90% of your users are free, and then some portion upgrade to Pro so you literally can't afford to like, have support be an issue. So I think it starts with the user experience and trying to plug all of those holes and like, and every kind of assumption or, you know, you watch people go through your software and like, they click the wrong thing, well, then you need to change the thing or make it so they can't click that or like, you know, reduce elements.

    I think a lot of it is this kind of cycle of like, oh, we're seeing this in support, like, how can we put this into the product so that it never happens in the first place. So there's a lot of emphasis on that software itself, but then also digging in on customer support and like, you know, don't just send them the canned reply. Don't let AI just take over and copy paste your, you know, your response, like actually try to solve the person's problem. And that takes the right kind of person, which is you have to hire pretty specifically for that and you have to go through a lot.

    There's a lot of people like a lot of standard customer service jobs like if somebody has done help desk ticket based software, those typically are not the people that actually end up working out with us as support. You know, people who've done phone support or people in unrelated industries, but if they're really focused on people and solving a problem, then they're the right fit. So I think that's really, it's not easy, I know, I guess, but it is a differentiator and people like there are comments in our reviews and stuff saying best like soft, best support I've received from any company ever in my life, right?

    Like there's people who put that in our in their reviews of our software and it is a huge differentiator and the bar is not even very high. Like if you even just respond to an email in a way that you show that you've read their email and you respond the same day, like that alone puts you in like the top 10%. So I think it's a differentiator, but sadly it's not very hard to be different in that way. And that's kind of how we started out.

    I think it really fueled a lot of our early growth.

27. 19:36
    Wes Mathews

    So I think the best thing I pay for if I had to think one of one that changed my life is Calendly, right? So for me, I don't know if you don't know what Calendly is like, it's a simple link that will book on your calendar. And it just eliminated so much back and forth, right? You're emailing somebody, Oh, when can you meet, Oh, that time doesn't work. Two days later, like put your link out there. But I also think that there's a challenge because it's a little informal, so I don't use it all the time.

    Right. But so like to me, that's a SaaS product. I don't even know what I pay 10, 15 bucks a month. I'm sure they've invested millions in that tech, but like, and I don't even know how I heard of it or how maybe I found it. Somebody else used it many, many years ago or like a zoom, right? I think I pay 150 a month per license, my team, but the way we conduct business and what zoom does, I mean, if they charge me 10 grand a month, I would have to pay it.

    Like, it's that inclusive of our business. But for you, I know you're working on, I don't know if blink metrics is like the baby or the, or the one that's kind of your lead off, but I want to talk a little bit about that because I think it's really, it's a great, it's great because I think as an entrepreneur, you know, as a leader of a company, like you just want the data and you want the metrics and there's a lot of noise and I know often myself with my own teams, I'm like, they're talking about something or making a decision.

    And I'm like, give me the data, like show me. And then people say, well, this or that I'm like, I trust you, but I want to verify it. Give me the data, right? Yeah, but there's so many moving parts, whether it's like paper click or this or that. There's so much noise for me to sit down and gather all the data. Like, I can't even do it. So talk a little bit about like blink metrics and, you know, how you thought of it, right? Because I think it was a problem you had and you just said, I'm going to solve it.

    So we'd love to learn a little bit more about that.

28. 21:29
    Nathan Tyler

    Yeah, yeah. So we've had a number of these different software products and we're doing some professional services with multiple lines of business. So this company is 10 years old. There've been multiple products, the WordPress plugins and things that we built along the way. And after the acquisition and after my SAS acquisition, me switching fully into this into this company and Square, which is all the products are under. We really kind of had a challenge of like, how do we keep on top of all things? Because we have the small business problem of, like you said, everything going on, you know, ad spend and Google Analytics and my CRM and our help desk software.

    Are people responding quickly enough? Like all the departments of the business, each of them have tools, each of them have reports for me to look at one business and figure out how it's really going. Like you can't even do it. You'd have to open like 20 or 30 tabs and kind of spend five minutes in each one. And that's only one line of business for us. So we had that multiplied. Or if you're an agency doing this for clients, you have to multiply times your entire client portfolio.

    And there really was not a good way. And we did adopt some systems. We adopted EOS internally. We set up a scorecard for each one, which was a great process for us to go through. It was like, what numbers matter? Like, what are the three numbers we need to know from customer support? What are the three numbers we need to know from marketing, the three numbers from sales, the three numbers from development? So that was kind of a that's a soft skill to kind of figure out exactly what the right numbers are.

    But then how do we measure them? Right. And most people, ourselves included, it's like we are going to fire up a Google sheet and then like once a week I'm going to copy paste this number from Google Analytics and this number from Calendly, how many bookings that I have and this number from my CRM. How many deals do we have? And this number from help desk, what was our response time? Like all of these numbers times multiple product lines. And so the first version of Blink Metrics was internally.

    This is ridiculous. Like we're going to like let's at least automate the copy paste. Like we'll use the API. We'll, you know, write a little code and we'll go grab the number of copy pasted into Google Sheets. And then, you know, I have a bit of a data science background and a lot of the projects we've done have been like business intelligence, big data projects in my agency days and said, OK, how can we actually do this properly? So we'll store all the data granularly so we can report on it any way we want.

    And then we can still paste it into Google Sheets. So if like the first six months, Blink Metrics was literally like us just logging into Google Sheets but not doing the manual entry. And then we started building the interface and tools around this that we'd always wanted, which is like which numbers are on track, which numbers are off track. How do we know if, what should I look at? Basically, where should I focus my attention, get all the data, just the raw collection is the saving of time, but then also help me, you know, color code it green, red, what do I need to look at?

    And then when I want to look at it, jump directly back into the source where that data came from so I can quickly like act on it or do further investigation. That was really how it all started.

29. 24:46
    Wes Mathews

    So for those that aren't familiar, EOS is the Entrepreneur Operating System that it's like a simple methodology on how to successfully run an entrepreneurial focus company. So out of that, right? So there's a lot with EOS, right? But a big part of it, it's setting KPIs, key performance indicators, goals, rocks, all these different things. So like, I do feel like an EOS or sometimes people have a hard time, like, what is a good KPI? Like, I have no idea. Like, is that something that you guys help the company with or do they need to have that stuff figured out before they embark with you?

30. 25:25
    Nathan Tyler

    Yeah, I think there's it's definitely a journey for each company to kind of go through that. And we can help a little bit. Like, I think oftentimes they already have a scorecard. It's very clean because basically like, OK, we can automate all of that and you can have a company scorecard and one for each department. And we just take away all of that kind of pain. They already know what they want to do. Some people a little bit earlier in that journey. And so we have some templates and some suggestions like, oh, you've not really done a scorecard for customer support before, like, here's a great one.

    And it already integrates with your tool. And we can do a little bit of that education. But there are people whose entire job is to like go into companies and implement these improvements and coach the leaders and all that, like, you know, we're a product in a software company. So I think us making an introduction to somebody who can really help with that and with the organization specific things is often a better fit, like if they need a lot of hands on time.

31. 26:29
    Wes Mathews

    So I want to ask a question because I think it's important because like, what's a typical like in the SaaS world, like what you deliver, is it like a per license fee? Is that what you refer to it as? Like, what's a typical fee for the solution? Yeah,

32. 26:45
    Nathan Tyler

    it would be like so we have a workspace which would be like for a company for them to connect all their data. Right. And that's going to be like a thousand bucks a month down to even like two hundred dollars a month. You have a few scorecards and a lot of people will start at that that basic point. So they may already have a scorecard or we can help guide them a little bit on templates to start with and say here, you can you can know everything that's going on with your business and like where to focus your attention all in one spot across the 50 SaaS tools.

    You know, your Calendly subscription, all your different subscriptions that you use to run your business. You can actually get the data out of them. There's a sea of data in those tools that nobody has time to look at or like parse together and you'll actually be able to harness all of that.

33. 27:31
    Wes Mathews

    So is the true value then is it is it more of hey, you're paying for a tool that's going to just save you time and efficiency or like I know it's a lot it can mean a lot of different things for different people, but like from a pure SaaS is it like it's a time saver?

34. 27:49
    Nathan Tyler

    I think it's more I think there's a lot more growth and opportunity that are left on the table by not looking at this data. Like, yeah, it can save some time, but like you can hire somebody to copy paste some numbers for you. And sure, if you have a ton of numbers, there is some cost and time savings, but really just practically a lot of this stuff just doesn't get done, right? It's not staffed or it's cost prohibitive if you do it at a tremendous scale.

    So people just kind of stop at like, OK, well, I only need to know these five numbers, but it doesn't really cost anything additional to pull all this data at once. And it can happen real time. Like I can open it up today and see the status of everything rather than waiting for the end of the quarter for, you know, somebody to go pull it all together. You know, you can catch those problems earlier, right? Like I can see the traffic to my website you know, it's just humming along at green like where it is.

    But then all of a sudden it goes to red. Like I find out about that, you know, four days after it happens that like last week, our traffic was a third of what it's been every other week. And then I can jump in and say, oh, these ads turned off or oh, like our best partner pulled down our landing page like and so you can actually solve those problems and act on them much quicker. I think that's actually the real value and opportunity more than the time and cost savings is being able to really be on top of your business and know what's going on.

    And even so growth externally and also just execution and accountability internally. I think it's helpful. That's often an even bigger gap, right, like you're not most people don't have really good data on anything, let alone like their team and how their team is performing and how this individual is performing and doing their job, which is good from an accountability standpoint. And also just for a career growth standpoint, a lot of small businesses are really bad at providing career paths for people because there's just so much chaos going on.

    But if you can say like, hey, like here's where you are and by next time, this time next year, we'd love for it to be here. We're not going to live and die by these numbers. We're not trying to grind you. But just like if we look at this quarter over quarter, you should be answering more support tickets faster, harder support tickets. Your volume should be going up. Your response time should be going down. And we can we can actually automatically collect all of that and show it very cleanly and give somebody a career path without the administrative nightmare of doing it manually.

35. 30:22
    Wes Mathews

    Yeah, I know I laugh because I just I know where you're at. I mean, and numbers don't lie. People do right in my experience. And also who hasn't had the horror story about somebody who's responsible for cutting and pasting and it's the wrong data or the yeah, that only has to happen like twice and then you don't touch trust any of it at all. It's to be like, yeah, like I'm getting PTSD right now just because I recall of just wrong data. I've had people paid for payroll that were no longer with the come.

    This is like many years ago, but just anything I can put into a system. And the reason why I asked about that is because, you know, kind of mentioning earlier, like when you're paying for a SaaS product, like paying you guys a couple hundred or 1000 a month, I mean, you're basically paying a really small fraction of like your guys's capital investment and time and expertise.

36. 31:08
    Nathan Tyler

    Yeah, we've got like 30, 40,000 hours into this. Right, right. Getting a very small fraction

37. 31:14
    Wes Mathews

    in like 15 years ago, right? Like we're talking about web and going back. You know, there's companies that I would come up against and they're like building dashboards for entrepreneurial companies and they're charging hundreds of thousands of dollars. And I remember these projects like never ending, never like it. They would just be huge messes. But I want to ask you because, you know, you come from the world that I come from, which is do you find though, like what you guys are offering right for a couple hundred bucks, five hundred called a thousand doesn't really matter.

    But like the way people view it and the objections they come up with on why they shouldn't do it or I've seen people spend like 50 grand on a billboard that got nothing. And then you present them with something like a blink metrics that could potentially change their company and make it a huge success and they will like fight you tooth and nail and be like, I don't see the value of this $200 a month or $500 a month. Like it just, it's like a twilight zone.

    It's mind boggling to me.

38. 32:14
    Nathan Tyler

    Yes. Yeah. Some people definitely have different mental budgets of like, oh, software, I only spend this much on software, but I'll spend $10,000 for a weekend, like self-improvement course about how to like grow my business. It's like, well, this, this is the best way to grow your business is like you can see every piece of data about your business and where you should be focusing your attention for maximum growth and impact. And so I think there's sometimes a disconnect there and people can make that leap or if they're in that growth mode, like they get it, right?

    Like you're, it's not really just the time savings cause it's, that's a very like logical mindset and you start, you know, moving the little mental accounting. But if you think about, you know, what's one mistake that my business had last year that I found out about five months late, if you could have known about that the moment that it happened, like it would pay for itself 10 times over. And even the thing that you were saying, like somebody puts in the wrong number or like, even if you're doing some of this, but you don't truly trust the data, then you're not really going to use it.

    You have this internal mental resistance. And so that is really one of the values is like, if I can trust, I can trust everything in here. And if I don't, I can click any number and I can see exactly where it came from. And I can confirm it instantly. Like then you can actually really start acting on this data.

39. 33:41
    Wes Mathews

    Which I always try to share with anybody that'll listen like it from an entrepreneurial perspective, like what are the three to five numbers that if we're on an Island and you're having a margarita that you care about, right? And like use simple logic of like green, yellow, red. I mean, if the number is green, you probably shouldn't care, right? If it's yellow, you can dig in as an entrepreneurial leader and kind of figure out if it's red, you probably miss the boat. But like come up with those three to five numbers and then figure out what those are feeding into.

    I'm just shocked that so many entrepreneurial companies just they don't do anything here. And yeah, they'll go to a Tony Robinson or insert any type of trade show and spend thousands at the bar, thousands on that. Yeah, throw up a bunch of egg on. Yeah, 250 a month just doesn't really make sense for our budget right now. It's like, you can't afford not to do this.

40. 34:34
    Nathan Tyler

    And I think some of that also comes down to that soft skill too of selecting the numbers. Cause I think if people haven't thought much about it, they're like, oh, you know, dashboard data should be like my revenue. And it's like, well, no, that's like the very, that's the final result. Like the game's already over by the time you see what the revenue number is, like you should be focusing on steps ahead of that, the leading indicators of like, well, not, not how many dollars do we get, but then how many opportunities and people do we have in our sales pipeline?

    How many intro calls did we book? How many visitors came to my website? How many people filled out that form, right? Those are the numbers that you can act on because I think if you look at a number in there and the number is red, like the revenue number is red. If you're responsible, well, that's too bad. Like then it doesn't really belong there. And that's also some of the battle, all the internal kind of resistance that we get from people is like, well, I don't really need this report.

    And it's because you're not actually looking at the numbers that drive the business. You're looking at the result, which I agree. If you're new to that, just go check your bank account once a month and see if it's going up or down. But if you actually want to improve your business, you need to kind of look at those leading indicators and then watch them like very closely. And you do want to be like, if there's a number that goes red, you should have an action that you take from that.

    And if you don't, you should take it off the list. Yeah, it's like, what's the emergency route to get out of this situation, right? Like when that alarm goes off.

41. 36:00
    Wes Mathews

    Now, what are your thoughts on like, what are you guys doing? Like, what's all the rage right now? AI, so are the infancy stages of what that is and all the stuff coming out from China and cryptocurrency. Like what's your, do you have like a 2014 moment now where you see this big like change coming in terms of what's next?

42. 36:19
    Nathan Tyler

    Yeah, I think what AI can do is really powerful. I think the kind of consumer use case of like ChatGPT is like, it's a jack of all trades. It's not terribly good at anything. Everybody's type something in and it gives back kind of nonsensical responses. AI, I think is really powerful and very narrow use cases with a lot of context given. And that's really where I think it's gonna emerge as transformational in our lives, right? It can analyze an X-ray, right? In a nanosecond and can do just as good as like X-ray text because it has, you know, they have 500,000 other ones that they're comparing it against, right?

    So in a very narrow use case, it's good. I think there's, we've seen kind of the first wave of AI startups, which is basically like a startup that calls the ChatGPT API in the background and then feeds it back. I don't think AI itself is the product. I think AI will be like killer, killer features within another product. So like in our world, we don't have any AI in the product at all. I think eventually, like what we were building is the perfect foundation for AI to bolt onto because, and we do have customers that are using it that way, we enable it, but we don't have it in the core platform at this point.

    But basically we can ingest all of the data from your business. So imagine every visitor, your website, every lead form that's ever been submitted, every support ticket you've ever received, every response that your team has given, all of that data, all your documentation, all of that can be sucked into one data warehouse and then AI can come on. And now it's not just ChatGPT, but it's an AI that knows every single thing about US and everything about your customers and everything that you've ever sent to them and what their account looks like and how much money they've spent with you and if they've paid on time.

    And like now you could ask it a question or have it work in a really narrow use case, say like take every email this person's ever sent me, use their tone of voice and like, help me craft this thing. AI will be transformational in that way. And so what we see ourselves as is the helping curate and collate the data in such a way that you can use AI in an actually effective deep way and not kind of just a general purpose use case.

43. 38:53
    Wes Mathews

    Yeah, what you just explained, I'll buy that. So when that's ready, I'll pay a monthly fee and I'll subscribe to that. Because I do use ChatGPT, right? And it does, I think I've gotten a little better in terms of like my persona and all these different things but to me, I kind of use it as like, it's training wheels, it's kind of a way to kind of, it's an idea generator.

44. 39:14
    Nathan Tyler

    Yeah, it's a really good first strap. Like it's a really good hardworking intern who's just like, you know, ready to go and like, and it can be used in a lot of good cases but you've probably experienced the best way to use it is to give it a bunch of context and feed it an example. And like you're doing that manually and a lot of times I do that, like I'll do a paragraph of stuff and then you can kind of channel it to give you the good thing that you want.

45. 39:40
    Wes Mathews

    Yeah, I find myself like getting mad at it and like saying, no, you're not listening. You know, sorry, you know, it does make me as like a visionary entrepreneur like flush out my thoughts, get some ideas. Yeah, no, that's really cool. I mean, I think that's coming, right? Like, how do you take the metrics of your company and then like, say you run into a sales challenge, right? Like here's the metrics I'm tracking. How do I get better in this lever, right? How do I pull these levers properly?

    Where they can give you that, you know, to get from red to yellow or green or those predictive or I'm sorry, the pre things that you could implement before you get to that point. I mean, there's some fun stuff that you could really do. Yeah, that's really cool. So what's next? I mean, is Blink metrics like the core focus of your time or any other cool SaaS products you guys have coming up or no, that's really the core focus. I mean, I think it's a much more ambitious project, right?

46. 40:42
    Nathan Tyler

    So like, we could, we will be working on this for years and years, like, there's so many directions that we can continue to go with it. Like, I think step one is really just get all the data in there, which we're kind of finishing and now it's more analysis, like we're working on how can you see these, see these in the scorecard, see these in different report views, all the different ways that you can get this data out. So it's actionable and relevant to your business and so you can slice and filter it in whatever way so you know what is going on with your business and how you can act.

    And then AI and like really deep insights will be kind of the next phase beyond that, but we'll be working. This is the core focus and kind of what my whole career has been triangulating towards, I think. So I'm excited.

47. 41:35
    Wes Mathews

    Yeah, so I would say that if you're listening and you are on EOS, this is a really effective solution to roll your data into. People that are on EOS just get it and they know how hard it is to manage and keep track of all this. In my world, I always ask people and I'll say, you know, what's your lead acquisition cost, right? And they're like, I don't even know what that means. And I'll say, well, how much does it cost for you to acquire a client like leads and opportunities?

    And they have no idea. And to me, like there's simple metrics that you should just have on hand as a business owner if you wanna grow or, you know, so for me it's, so how do people, yeah, I think it's, we work with you guys, you guys do some great stuff, your customer service is super patient and you guys really do help lead the client through this process. So it's not like a super intimidating process, but if somebody's interested, right, they need to clean up their data, they know they need to do something.

    And if you're on EOS, have the phone call, have the discussion because it'll just flow so well. Your EOS implementer will praise you, your team will love you for it. But how do people like connect with you guys or like, what's the first thing that somebody should do if they're interested?

48. 42:46
    Nathan Tyler

    Sure, sure. Yeah, if you go to blinkmetrics.com, you can just say book your demo, it's up in the corner and you can grab some time with me. I would say if this is interesting at all, definitely grab the time. I think the other hurdle people have mentally is just like, oh, I don't need a data product or I'm too small of a business. And I think, because traditionally this is really, this kind of data and insight has always been available. If you have a business intelligence staff and you have a thousand employees, like these problems get solved, but we really are trying to solve it.

    Like most of our customers have like five to 50 employees. Like it's a very small, we have solopreneurs that are just like really focused on growing their business. But if you have less than 50 or even a hundred employees, you don't have a data team, you don't have any of this. And maybe you don't even think of it as data, but you have data everywhere. Like you have data in your Calendly account and your Google Analytics account and your CRM and your help desk. And if you're using one of the standard software packages that everybody uses to run their business, we can bring things out of there.

    So yeah, I love to talk about this stuff all day, even if it's just like helping you think a little bit better about what you should measure. Happy to chat about data all day, any day. Well, I think as an entrepreneur, right?

49. 44:07
    Wes Mathews

    Like many entrepreneurs wear many hats and you could spend your days or weeks just like aimlessly on a lot of different things. And I think focusing on specific KPIs and I think what you focus on is what you start to move the needle on. And simple analogy I have is like many, many years ago, I bought a Jeep Wrangler and I'll never forget when I drove that thing home from the dealership, I couldn't believe how many Jeep Wranglers I saw on the way home. And I had never paid attention or seen a Jeep Wrangler a day in my life.

    And I share that because it's like, once you like get that number in your focus or like what you're focused on as an entrepreneur, like things start to solve themself and you start to like move the needle because once you see some of the problems and the data points, you can't unsee that. And now you can kind of help prioritize your focus as an entrepreneur. And maybe these other things aren't as important, right? And you'd even know to your point, like there was a heavy leak over here and you didn't even realize it.

    So you're trying to pour money in the organization here, but it's going out the back door. There's something that you never even knew existed. You know? Yeah.

50. 45:15
    Nathan Tyler

    And as business owners, we really are like, we latch onto everything, right? Like we've got signals everywhere and we're chasing, we don't know what we're focused on. And at least for myself, I was bad at letting certain parts of the business go, right? Like when I was letting go of customer support and that just frustrates your team. You know, like people who are working for you or it's like feel micromanaged. And so that was also a great channel for me was like, okay, how can I let go and just enough, but still know that it's going well and know what's going on.

    And if you can have that data and you can see customer satisfaction and response time and like whatever numbers matter to you, you can step back and help your team be more successful and the business will be more successful. And your team will be happier that you're out of their way and they can develop more. So I think there's also that angle of it is, it's a huge multiplier for the business in all of those ways.

51. 46:15
    Wes Mathews

    That's great. That's really cool. So Nathan, once again, people can go to blinkmetrics.com. And then how do they, can they email you, find you on LinkedIn, Nathan Tyler, as it sounds? Yeah,

52. 46:26
    Nathan Tyler

    Nathan Tyler on LinkedIn and blinkmetrics.com. Just go to book your demo and I will grab, we don't even have to demo. That really just means like, let's talk about your business and see what we could do and then. Yeah, I love it. I think you're a great dude, you have a great team. So if you're an entrepreneur,

53. 46:46
    Wes Mathews

    I would take you up on that offer because I think you'll definitely learn something. So Nathan, appreciate the time. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much. All right, thank you Wes. This has been another episode of Entrepreneur Intel. Thank you for joining us. For show notes or other episodes, please visit us at entrepreneurintel.com. Until next time.