Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Welcome to the Victory Show.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Hey victors. Welcome to this episode of the Victory Show. If this is your first time joining us, I'm Travis Cody, best selling author of 19 books and the creator of bestseller By Design, where I've had the privilege of helping hundreds of business consultants, founders and entrepreneurs write and publish their own best selling books. And through that journey, I've discovered a fascinating pattern. Most businesses really struggle to break past seven figures per year in revenue. So on this show, we sit down with some of the world's most successful founders, CEOs, leaders and business owners to uncover the strategies they use to scale way past that mark so that you can do the same. So get ready for some deep insights and actionable takeaways that you can implement in your business. Starting now. Now, today's guest is solving one of the biggest challenges in modern sales. Getting the right content into the right hands at the right time. Paul Paikin is the founder of Bablet, a powerful sales enablement platform that helps sales teams share and present content seamlessly, even offline. With deep experience across life sciences, manufacturing and other highly regulated industry, Paul understands what field teams actually need.
Tools that are easy to use, that are secure and are built for real world conditions.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: Go figure.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: That's exactly why he created Bablet. To take the tech headaches out of sales and replace them with practical solutions that actually move the needle. He's passionate about simplifying complexity, empowering sales reps. More importantly, helping companies close more deals with confidence. Paul, thank you so much for being here today. I appreciate it.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: Travis, thank you so much for having me today. It's a pleasure being here.
[00:01:52] Speaker B: I always love talking to sales guys because, you know, there's some stigma around some sales. And so I always like it when we're bridging traditional sales with tech to make the process more enjoyable for everyone across the board. But before we dive into that, we were chatting right before we started here and I want to kind of back up a little bit where we're talking about this concept of lifestyle business and, and especially what your parents created. So let's go through that story again because I think it's important. I think it gives a really good background for, for where we're at today.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: Sure. Actually, it goes back further than my parents. It goes back to my grandparents.
[00:02:31] Speaker B: All right.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: So my grandparents came over in 1904 from Europe. And in fact, in the Triangle Fire, which is famous for seamstresses in New York and the launch of the Union, my grandmother was in that building. She Jumped and she survived.
[00:02:47] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: So people came and they had material skills. Right. They. She was a seamstress and then she had a dress shop. And my dad, when he was 14, started working for the dress shop and she was like, don't go into retail. Retail's just too hard.
Go into manufacturing. Right. Just a better way to go. And then sure enough, my dad opened his own dress manufacturing business in the 60s.
And then they decided to. When they, they got married in the. My parents got married in the late 60s, but the dress business had a different name on it.
So they closed it down for a year, did a reset, and they rebranded it for Richelien, for Richard and Eileen. Concatenated was their name.
[00:03:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: And my dad ran operations in the back and my mom ran sales in the front. So I guess my psyche was, how can I make the life of a salesperson easier? Selling is not easy, whether you think it's just convincing somebody to buy something they don't need, which is really not the case, or keeping companies compliant, which also is really not normally fun, but it's a thing.
So if we can, you know, I guess secretly. Right. If I can make the life of a salesperson easier, I'm making the life of my mom easier. And what son wouldn't want to do that?
[00:04:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:08] Speaker A: Right. So that's. That's our name. So the genesis of where we are and is in the year of 2010.
I was visiting with a friend of mine from high school who I had not seen in like 29 years. And we'd reconnected because of Facebook.
[00:04:25] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:04:25] Speaker A: And it was the day before the iPad launched.
And my friend Alain said, I think the iPad is going to help people communicate.
And his Specialty was teaching PhDs how to be more collaborative. I go, interesting. I get on my JetBlue flight, flying back from New York to California. Steve Jobs is holding an iPad on the COVID of NewsWeek magazine saying, 6,000 apps work for the iPad and it comes on the market tomorrow. This was in the heyday of the Apple line, where the three hour lines really weren't three day lines.
So with my. My daughter heard me up at 6am because I woke up and I had jet lag. And she was like, dad, what are you doing? I go, I'm going to the Apple store to buy an iPad. She was like, oh, it's just a big eye touch, but can I come with you? So there's always that fear of missing out.
So my daughter and I head off to the Apple Store. The line is long, but Apple did something very unusual. They let two Apple people stand in our place in line and we had five minutes to go in and experience the iPad so we could see if it was worth do you want to touch it? And I copped for IBM when they launched the PC and I had one but no one would say hey, do you want to touch my computer? It just seemed really weird.
Yet with the iPad that was a big selling point. And then I walk in, we touch the device, we're like this is really cool. We get back on our lines, I go to buy two immediately, one for one of my developers and one for us. And I go, what's a cool game? And they said, plants versus Zombies. This is all true.
And it was only.
It was 999. I'm thinking that's much cheaper than a Nintendo cartridge and I'm not going to lose it.
So we start downloading Plants vs Zombies. We drive an iPad to one of my programmers houses and I'm like Mike, I don't know what we're building but here, I'll let you know in two days. We'll figure something out.
I then hand it to my 7 year old son who's never of course seen this device before because no one had. And he's instantly figuring out the UI and he's playing Plants versus Zombies. We get in our car, we drive from Orange County, California to the LA Science center because we are all geeks and not one are we there yet?
I'm thinking any parent will pay $500 to not hear are we there yet?
So I go this is a winner. And then I went to bed and my daughter, I downloaded the ABC Player app onto the iPad.
So I woke up in the morning, we had the ABC Player app and my other daughter was a film student at nyu. And I'm thinking that's what I want to do. I want to be able to take videos because I believe videos for the future of selling.
Mind you guys, this is 2010.
[00:07:21] Speaker B: 10.
[00:07:22] Speaker A: Yeah, this is a while ago. I want to get videos onto that thing easily.
So. Well, okay, Tablet, tablet, tablet, video, tablet, tablet.
So it was a domain that I could buy.
[00:07:36] Speaker B: That was the birth of it.
[00:07:37] Speaker A: It was it. And I. But as you talked about entrepreneurships and going. So we pivoted. My, my first vision was actually pretty simple. I thought when you'd walk into a doctor's office you'd like hand in your insurance card, they would hand you a tablet and then you'd watch a video on whatever medical procedure you were going in for. Was I going in and I'm going to use dental because we have dental clients. An abutment or a bridge or an implant.
And I figured, who would want to give this spiel over and over and over again?
Wouldn't it be great? Especially in California, we're multicultural.
So imagine an English button and a Spanish button and then you watch this video in whatever language I go, wouldn't that be cool?
So we had an architect valve from the start to be handled handling large content. So we didn't go after PDFs. PDFs are easy, right? I want to be able to handle a three gigabyte movie.
So we were built for scale off the get go. And then we take it to market in December. We find a dental organization that said, this is cool. Our sales reps can use this to go visit dentists and then play how do I take an objection to a $5,000 veneer project or a tooth or an abutment? And then we figured, oh, selling to dentists is going to be really hard.
Selling to companies that sell to dentists, like distributors, that would be easier.
So the business model that we had will just gain 500 customers per month. We're B2B. Everything is cool. Got tossed when we decided we're going after the big whales, right? We're going after Global 100 companies because we know they're. If we go in life sciences, you'd see a farmer up. You still do that. Would have that wheelie bag behind them full of papers.
And I'm thinking, we have to get off of carbon once again. 2010.
So. And then you learn, right? So discovery. Always do discovery. And I'm like, okay, so what's the process? Well, we get an updated. We have to go to our garage, throw out the old ones, replace the new ones.
I go, what if it was digital?
So we were starting to show off bablet not only with videos but with PDFs. And we did a very gorilla. This is the early days of the iPad. So we would go into Apple stores all over the country, find the people that were B2B specialists at Apple and say, hey, here's a way that you can put content onto iPads remotely, securely.
And Apple liked us because we helped Apple sell thousands and thousands of iPads.
So it was easy. And then Apple reps, we would like get a call from Abbott saying, hey, we saw you in the Apple store in Temecula. Do you want to do a demo for us? And we would say, sure.
And all of a sudden they got it. So they would pay for us out of their print budget.
So within one year, not only did it pay for the iPad, it paid for our software, it paid for them doing more digital content.
And so we were able to help one major company go off of it. Then another major pharma company that we still have today said, well, we have a problem with our reps in Asia where their devices aren't on the Internet easily.
So we're like, no, that one solves it. Because we went, okay. The architecture that I put into the product was offline.
And I know that people think the Internet is everywhere and cellular is everywhere. In the year 2000, I took a ISP public.
So I've gone through the dot com public thing and that was with dial up. And I'm thinking in New York, it still pings around rooms. If you're in a building, you can't rely on the Internet. It's better now, but it's not still perfect by any way, shape or form. So having all your content locally in an environment where they're selling a high value sale and they have like five minutes to present, that's like the pain. They have budget and it also, if you're selling with a digital sales aid. Right. They used to call us the dsa.
The company was like, these guys are kind of cool. They're kind of innovative.
So risk and compliance like dust. No CAPA violations. A violation is what happens when you show outdated content that instantly goes away.
So we figured out what the pain was and that's where we launched.
What we didn't factor on is B2C sales. You'd go into the app store and boom, you know, good chain. Right. And flappy birds and all that. But with B2B, getting your contract approved can take three months or six months.
Getting vetted by a Swiss bank, it took us almost a year.
Wow.
So the cash outlay for the business. We did not take VC money. Yeah. Was kind of staggering, but we really believed in the course we know. How many? Once again, do your homework. How many people are, you know, salespeople in life sciences? That was the niche we went after. Our competitors went after, like fintech.
Fintech, Fine. But I wanted. Okay, I didn't even know the term until just recently. We wanted to go after frontline salespeople. Frontline is any. We call them the deskless workers. Right. These are people that don't work at a desk. And for me, the iPad is still my favorite computing device. I can watch movies on it. It lasts 10 hours on a charge. It's got a big screen. I can put a keyboard on it. And yeah, from working for Deloitte where I would travel with my heavy leather padded bag with my Toshiba laptop and that thing they called a brick, it earned that title. You know, I didn't want to do that 1 1/2 pound device for 10 hours and I don't have to charge it. It's perfect. So we, like I said, we locked in on the device, we locked in on the market that we went after. And with medical device, there's no ego. Once again, leave your egos at the door. Another motto that we have, I learned that from Pixar and Ed Catimal was really, if you're a 10 person medical device company, you could be a 400 person medical device company in two years.
[00:14:22] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:14:23] Speaker A: So it was much easier for us going after medical device companies, albeit very large or very small, because there are a lot of very small and especially today, more than ever, there are tons of little innovative medical device companies. They have the same compliance as the big guys, but they don't have a fraction of the staff or marketing material.
[00:14:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:47] Speaker A: So we, we really try to picture what we would do. And we also know because we didn't raise money and we were watching what our biggest competitors, Big Tin can and Chill Pad, and now they just merged like a month ago, they'd raised like, I think she'll have had to raise like 100 million.
So they're trying to do everything to everyone. They're trying to have authoring tools and LMS tools and content prep. I'm like, no, if I want to use Canva to write content, I'm going to make sure that Valve can use Canva content. I like Visme. Visme makes amazing interactive PowerPoints into HTML5. So we decided, oh, you want learning content? You have to train your staff somehow. You can have a dedicated LMS or you could use whatever LMS tool you like to author content. But just give us, and it sounds really funny, but LMS content has a zip extension. Just give us the zip file and we'll, we'll. Tablet's not an authoring tool for lms, but we sure can display it, we can grade it and then we're going to add value added to us as workflow. You're a brand new sales rep, you onboarded, they're going to give you a training class. You take it when you can and the minute that you pass, all of a sudden now you get all your sales collateral.
It should be that matter of Fact simple and, and right. So then Covid.
Right. Just slowed everything down in the, in the sales world, of course. But training changed because it used to be you'd bring all your farmer reps back into your office twice a year for training or you'd go travel to doctors and train them.
So by us having LMS capabilities, which was on par with our competitors, we just did it a little bit different, cheaper and I think faster way. Now you can train your sales reps. And one of our clients is training doctors with our platform for the same use case we have now. The doctor takes the learning cast, they pass it and now all the collateral they need for XYZ device is instantly available in their office. So we're constantly ebb and flowing with where the needs are.
But we're true to compliance.
Right.
Is our core really. We want to make sure that none of our customers get into any regulatory issues.
We have fun clients that like to make the bags you put oranges in and you're like, well, how is that anywhere similar to selling a knee brace? Well, the answer is you're in the field, you're visiting somebody at a factory and you're saying, I have a machine that does this. So here's a video of this machine that can pack grapefruits. Here's what that machine would look like in your office.
No different than a cataract being replaced in your eye what that video looks like. And go. But we've really kept it to the life science realm. And we also, my other tip to young entrepreneurs is listen to your customers.
And so we once again, everybody knows to have steering groups and focus groups. Well, our customers aren't exactly oil and water, but they won't come into the same meeting together because they all seem to sell similar products, whether it's heart or renal or wherever. But they'll tell you, hey, we've seen these three ideas. We like them. What do you think about them?
And I go, we'll take it under advisement. And then we build a little list. And then we talk to our major customers every single month. We have a monthly meeting with them and saying, here's what we have on the roadmap. What do you think you would like?
So our, our customers really are fueling our, our innovation. Or they're saying, I saw a sales data room over here that I thought would be very helpful.
Can you help us with that? But what where different? For example, I can train somebody in France with English materials, but they're forbidden from sending the English materials to Their French doctors, who knew?
But once.
Once you have the rules built, it's fine. So we're constantly trying to push the envelope. And the oddest part of this whole world is AI is all around us. Our coders have embraced AI from the minute that we could put AI in. And our biggest clients have forbidden us from adding AI into valvet because of privacy and secrecy. So we're building our own offline AI. So I could be in a waiting room about to talk to a doctor, record the meeting.
I'm never transmitting the doctor's voice or the rep's voice. I'm going to transcribe it locally.
And soon, hopefully next month, we'll have the equivalent of, like, teams, notes, but all built locally. So the voice of the physician and never left the room. Right.
[00:19:52] Speaker B: Stayed right on the device.
[00:19:54] Speaker A: Stayed right on the device. And to me, offline adds a whole bunch of pain that people just don't realize.
Okay, to be fair, we have Valve natives, iOS, Android, and Windows, and then we do have Valet Web.
But even with Zoom, like we're doing now, if the content sitting on my Mac and I'm presenting from my Mac, that's better than a web experience where it's streaming down onto my Mac and then I'm pushing it back out again.
Why not just have the content travel the least that it needs to to give the best experience? So we.
We're very focused on how easy can we make. When you brought this up, how easy can we make this for our person, which is the salesperson, they want to turn it on, and it wants to synchronize, and you're off to the races, and it's sales enablement. Enablement is the word. I'm trying to make your job easier.
And if I could give every salesperson a Swiss army knife, which had everything they needed besides training and presentation and emailing and CRM, you know, if we can think of more things to do to fill out that Swiss army knife analogy, we will be glad to.
[00:21:12] Speaker B: I love it.
[00:21:12] Speaker A: Isn't it.
[00:21:12] Speaker B: Isn't it interesting all this time, right? You look at the late 90s, early 2000s, and the push to get online, get online, get online. And now we've hit the point where everybody's like, no, we need stuff offline, we need stuff offline.
Maybe it's not a good idea to have everything online. All right, so it is. That is really funny.
[00:21:30] Speaker A: And my kids grew up right the minute there could be a webcam, we had one in our house right, in the early 2000s. And my kids were like, I'm not really that trusting of the Internet. I'm like, well, if you post a picture on the Internet, they go, we can delete it. I'm like, well, you can delete it, but it's been backed up and replicated.
It's there. And as long as you know that it's there and you don't care, then it's fine. But at least be aware of the evils of. Right.
[00:21:56] Speaker B: Well, at least they're aware of that. My wife and I joke all the time. We're just like, boy, I'm glad I didn't have social media when I was in college.
I'm glad those pictures don't exist anywhere except in my little photo album.
[00:22:09] Speaker A: And in the early days of Bablet, we were working on a Snapchat, okay, this is before Snapchat launch. We didn't know, so we called it frat chat for what happens in the house, stays in the house.
So imagine GEO encoding all the pictures. So as long as you're within that perimeter, you can't do anything else. But we once again, you as an entrepreneur, you got to look at how much burn is that? And we were watching at this point the financials on Snapchat and they're burning 100 million, 200 million a year at this point. We're like, no, I, I, I don't have a wherewithal to handle that space.
[00:22:46] Speaker B: What, let's talk a little bit about when you, when. So you get the iPad and you go to your developer and you're like, this is what we're doing. Like, walk me through that first like six months of like, what was your strategy of going from just an idea to getting like a workable product? Like, how long did it take you? What did you go through? Like, how were you. Because you didn't take any VC money. That's also a huge deal. But let's just talk about the, the first little like six months of idea to getting a ready to use product. What does that look like?
[00:23:13] Speaker A: Well, it was fun. I had a consulting firm already geared, so we've been doing products. We were doing actually TVs and doctor's offices where we could change the content to engage people while they were waiting the digital out of home experience. So I architected what the app was to look like loosely based on the ABC player, which was kind of fun.
And then something that I did, which was really a radical departure is I architected it from the cloud from inception.
This is very early days.
[00:23:46] Speaker B: That was radical. Back then.
[00:23:48] Speaker A: Right. And we had been consulting since 2000. We're not really a new company and everything we did was on Microsoft. We were NET shop.
We started building baby and what the tools that I knew. Microsoft SQL Server.
NET.
But then we had a native app on iOS and then a native app on Android but it was just web services so nothing was really radically new.
And then I actually found a web company that began to build a prototype for us before we took an in house in January. So the goal was we had the UI planned out.
The secret for us was really building.
We went after the hard stuff. We went after the synchronization of the videos first.
We know if I could get like a 1 gig file or 3 gig file to sync. So we had to figure out how to chunk it so it could stream. And it's funny but when we launched the consulting firm in 2001, our first client was a school called Young Champions of America. Now they're called Active Stars.
We had to have a teacher fill out a roster on AOL dial up.
So this is using IE with a modem IE 4.5. I'm going to go way back. So we've been used to dealing with being throttled by the Internet from in.
[00:25:17] Speaker B: The early days since the geek go.
[00:25:20] Speaker A: So by being geeks we were doing it. So we just kept architecting it, figured out how to get the videos to come down.
I had a friend that was a UX designer. So that's where we traded a little bit of stock for ux. We thought instead of a company called Meiotic which was kind of a play on words for my incorporated, which we did after like the dot com bubble burst and I wanted to build something so we thought wouldn't be cool to have a company called Absolutely App.
Absolutely. So we did. And then we learned that there's a company called Absolutely Software that gave us kind of a cease and desist letter. So we kept marketing under Biotic, but from day one it was always called Bablet through video tablet and now we kind of recall it. Versatile. But we kept true to our vision and once again because we were a smaller team, we'd been together for about 10 years at this point.
The, the six of the. The coders that were on the core we focused on what we could do. So we, we were focused on building a very strong mobile app. We did iOS first and that was kind of a tip that I've been given. Android at this point was going from Froyo to gingerbread to ice cream sandwich. And they were revving like every nine months.
[00:26:41] Speaker B: Yeah. And it was all completely different. Yep.
[00:26:44] Speaker A: It was all. I think when M hit, it got more stable or n. But no, the Android kept breaking on us. IOS was fairly stable.
[00:26:53] Speaker B: Stable.
[00:26:54] Speaker A: So. So once again, and now we say, don't boil the ocean, launch an app first on iOS, it's going to be easier, more consistent hardware.
And then we jumped onto Android and then we jumped on to Windows. But there are so many people that have iPhones now. Okay, there are billions of people with iPhones and the billions of people with Android. So as a startup, just picking one of these two markets is really.
It's enough.
[00:27:22] Speaker B: There's a few. There's enough. There's a few people there that you'll be able to find.
[00:27:26] Speaker A: Right. And if you do a cross platform tool, we happen to like Maui or React. Right. It'll work on both platforms, but then you really have to be an expert. And with us, encryption, every file that's put down on these iPads, it's encrypted in more than one way.
So Apple has hardware encryption. So to unzip a file or open it really quickly, it has to be decrypted. Can take a few seconds. But on Android it was much harder.
Right. And then Samsung was coming out with knox, but we were trying to be agnostic to Android vendor. So this encryption thing. So we learned a lot. Yeah, things took a little longer than normal.
Our first bank client took us longer to deploy, but they had an unusual request. They're like, we don't trust the cloud. Everything has to run on prem.
Well, we were unique. We wrote it on the Microsoft stack so you can install us on prem. It was fine.
That worked to our advantage.
So by having once again, good architecture, good design, but. And also then QA started probably if we started coding everything in April.
Yeah, QA was starting in June. It was just testing after testing.
[00:28:44] Speaker B: So you just got going fast. That's remarkable.
[00:28:46] Speaker A: We got going. Right. And Seth Gooden is my favorite marketer. I've met him a couple times. I read most of his books and it was like in a minimal viable product, but now with AI, you can do MVPs faster than ever before.
[00:29:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:03] Speaker A: So it's so amazing. And because not only, like I said, does VAL do videos and PDFs but we also do HTML because we figured what do salespeople do? I have to train them, they present, they have to take an order.
So we added form capability back in 2013 and it could be an HTML form or it could be a PDF fillable form. We don't tell our customers how to run their business. We just support it. So I really love HTML. Well, now with ChatGPT, I can be in the back of a car and somebody will say, hey, we can use.
There's a way you can detect if somebody's on PCP with a camera. What do you think? And I'm like, okay. And then I'll have Chat GPT spit out HTML code. And then in, in the back of an Uber, I've taken HTML code cut out of Chat cpt, dropped into Bablet, and then I'm prototyping an app right there in the back of a car.
So. So AI helps us do ideation now I think much quicker and it helps us do research. But everybody now is adding a million features to their product.
[00:30:11] Speaker B: Yeah. So they're taking something that's overall simplistic and they're making the complexity of it all. And I'm like, isn't the whole point is we're supposed to be getting rid of complexity to make things simpler to use? I just. It's funny to see the cycle a few times, right. It started with the Internet, started simple, got complex, and now we're back to simple things. And AI started simple. Now it's getting super complicated. And it's like, yeah, it's been interesting for me to see the evolution of that stuff.
[00:30:37] Speaker A: And I saw that from the Apple iPhone to the Apple Watch, because I belong to this really big iOS group in Southern California. And one of my friends talked about there was a Chipotle app that launched like the day the Apple Watch shipped, and you would pre program it with your favorite burrito settings and your location. Then you would tap your watch and your order would go in.
And that simplified everything. And I'm thinking, okay, we don't need phones with bigger and bigger screens. Well, denied, they're still doing that.
So sometimes you can think, but I do think the smarter that voice gets. And now we've added, yeah, voice notes. You walk out of a meeting. My vision, you take your meeting notes, you hit send. If I'm not on the Internet, it queues up and then it sends. If you add Salesforce, we add it to Salesforce. If you have SAP, we added to SAP. But now reps don't even want to type. They want to dictate a note. So we added voice notes. You walk out of a meeting, tap, just do a little voice note and then you associate who the notes for. So now we can build you A little history of all your notes that you can do just by speaking. Because in sales I'm more of a technologist than a sales dude. I have to write everything down, you know, and, and as I get older, that's actually having no ego about writing stuff down. I take notes. So I, I had notes in Bablet when we launched it just because that's how I like to sell. And if you can memorize everything, I, I think it's phenomenal. I'm, I'm not one of those people.
So just write it down. But if you write it down and you don't share it, well, it's good for you.
But if you have a piece of content, you're like, I don't get it, this doesn't work well.
Rate your content, send it back to the person who put it in. It's not rocket science when you add the content. If you want to be notified if people have a comment on the content, you drop in your email address and it doesn't matter if it's six months later or a year later.
Valve knows who put the content in and it will send them an email notification with the, the rating on it. It's not supposed to be rocket science. It's not supposed to be difficult. Life is difficult enough just learning iOS6, right? There's a lot to unpack just in that thing and let alone unpack it on a phone. I got it out on a device and I gotta look at, oh look, what's an Android 14, oh look, but then Windows 11.
So if you keep it simple, that's also another. Yeah, and what's what we all learn when we're young. Keep it simple, stupid. The rule of Kiss that also goes with proper planning prevents piss poor performance.
The 6P rule.
So once again, these are just don't make life complicated for anybody. And that's, that's another one of my entrepreneurial giveaways.
[00:33:34] Speaker B: Well, I've been following a kid who's, who's fairly steeped in AI and he's building apps. And he said something, I know other people said this now, but he was talking about as we move forward and maybe it'll happen sooner than this, but he was saying, you know, by the end of this decade we'll be seeing billion dollar unicorn companies that has a team of like one.
There's the one guy who just knows how to use AI and build the systems with it and he can, you know, run everything. And I'm like, and I thought about that and I said, you know, Depending on the industry, that'll probably happen. It's really, it's fascinating to me that we're, we're getting there. Right. And again, what is it doing?
He's taking a lot of the complexity out of the systems.
So whether or not we get there or not, it seems like that's something reasonable. I mean, hey, you know, talking about Elon Musk becoming the first trillionaire by the end of this decade, a single person, billion company doesn't seem that big of a stretch.
[00:34:28] Speaker A: No, and, but, but one. Okay. So once again I, I say have somebody on your team that understands finance. And I'm, I'm spoiled. I have an MBA in addition to having an engineering degree, but my co founder. Right. A former forensic accountant. So from the get go.
[00:34:45] Speaker B: Oh wow.
[00:34:46] Speaker A: Make sure your books are okay. Accounting seems like a scary word because they, they try to make it that way. Accounting is really not scary.
It's really half of the equal sign and the other half of the equal sign. You got to make sure they balance.
Or to me, accounting is blood is money and blood are the same thing. They're the fluid that keeps everything going.
And yes, businesses fail, they run out of cash flow, people die. If they get drained of all their blood, there's no difference.
So a one person company, but definitely a four person company.
So you get the visionary, you get the sales guy, you get the accounting guy, you get the QA guy, person.
Right. And one could be a bot. Not saying but, but yes. We're going to see more and more companies that are smaller and smaller companies were smaller, they're nimble. And then you learn that I can hire for expertise that we don't have. For example, we have integration with Slack.
You know what, that'd be something we'd write once and maybe like one and done. So I found people that are experts at coding Slack and they did our Slack integration for us. So my grandmother taught me let the experts do their jobs. So you just find an expert to fill in for things that, oh, you know what I need? Outlook integration. Maybe I don't need to know the Microsoft Graph API, but you know what?
[00:36:08] Speaker B: Maybe I do one of my favorite quotes and whether or not this is true or not, I don't know. So I'm, you know, it's a secondhand. But it was Henry Ford had gotten sued some, gotten solved some lawsuit in the early 1900s and the guy that sued him was basically trying to prove that Henry Ford was really kind of a dumb guy. He wasn't really smart and, and so, you know, the attorney gets him on the stand and they're dickering back and forth and the guy's asking him all these really complicated questions and, and finally Andy Ford just stops him, is like, what's the point of all these questions? The guy's like, well, I'm trying to prove that you're kind of a dumb guy. And he's just like, look, on my desk, I have two big boxes that's got 37 buttons. At any given time, I can push a button and call the world's foremost expert in this history.
Why do I need to waste my time and fill my brain with that thing when there's somebody out there who's already expert on that topic and I can just bring them in to solve the problem for me? And that was it. Like the, the, the rumor was that basically ended the lawsuit because everybody went, oh, he was just focusing in on what his strength was. And then like you said, right, let the expert be experts.
I, that, that's interesting you bring that up because there was as, as I've interviewed people for this book and on the show about, you know, what, what prevents companies from scaling to the, the heights that they could. And the 95% of the responses have been founders not being able to let go.
They come in and they start, and there's one or two, and they're in charge of everything. And as it starts to grow into a team, they still want to be in control of everything. And a lot of times that comes down to ego, right? There's some sort of ego attachment into all of that. But to, to your point, right, they don't, they don't trust other people to, to, to do what they, they need to do. So this has been fascinating. I want to respect your time, find sort of final thoughts here. If somebody's, you know, to say somebody's a senior in, in college and they're, they're, you know, their side hustle right now is starting to work on their, their own startup. What, what's some advice you'd give someone who's just starting the, the entrepreneurial journey and they're, they're deciding they want to try to do it on. Do you make their own company or product?
[00:38:18] Speaker A: Okay, so three short tip one, if you think you're going to come out with the next Flappy Bird app, right, that just took look in the App Store. Do your homework. Search Google, search Apple. If you find an app that's similar to your app, look to see the last time it was updated and how many Reviews that's not been updated in three or four years. It could mean that it was not a good idea or it was a bad app. So one, do your homework.
Two, don't be so close lipped. If you have friends, get your little inner circle. Parents could be involved, other friends could be involved. Show them what you're building, but leave your ego aside. And if they say that's a dumb idea, ask them, probe them. Why is that a dumb idea? What don't you like about it? Don't get defensive.
You just got to ask them questions and find out, oh, if I did this, would you like it better? Or they may say I'm not your target customer. And then lastly the target, the tam you know now with with AI, how many people that are from her in frontline sales in the US it'll spit back 32 million. Do the research on your market on Shark Tank. If you build a product and it's only for males, they'll say well you just got half the market away from you.
So you really look at your market. So you have to get whatever you design. You should love it's. You think it's, I don't know, it's. You're not going to be able to work with the same, I worked with the Same product for 15 years day in and day out. And whether we have little offshoots of it, which we do, you got to love the. You gotta, you gotta believe in it. You gotta be the best advocate for your tool.
So that's one. But if the world says I don't like it, but you know what, maybe it would help over here.
You gotta check the ego and pivot.
If I thought the waiting room entertainment system right would be Perfect. We had one client that had 1600 iPads pre Covid that went to no iPads during COVID and they never really put the iPads back in the lobby. And I thought what a waste of metal.
But so just leave your ego aside. So figure out what you like, do your homework to see if it exists. If it does exist, don't be discouraged. See what can I do better or different?
And it's not just moving a button. It's fundamentally what do you think would make it better? Run it by your friends that are sounding boards and then tam, understand who you're going to market to. And as you go down the TAM market, whether it's B2B or B2C if it's B2B what's it going to cost you to find a customer? What's it going to cost you to acquire that customer and then what's it going to cost you to maintain that customer? Everybody will tell you keeping a customer is much cheaper than finding a new customer.
I agree.
Keep your customers very happy. And then you may also learn that some customers are, we call them time vampires.
You can try and you can try and sometimes you know what, I'm sorry, but we tried. I just, I can't play a 3 gig video on a 64 megabyte Android phone. I'm sorry, but be prepared to say no and walk away. And you could think, well, they are paying me $500 a year. You have to say, is it worth the aggravation?
And this is once again.
Added us a quarter million and then they didn't use it two years later and we could never recoup that investment.
That was before my companies.
So once again, be prepared to walk away and sorry. And the last one though it's the least positive is if somebody's not a fit on your team, it to be able to fire somebody and say, look, we tried, it's not a good fit, it hurts.
You know, these people, they're your friends, they're your co workers, you've broken bread with them.
But if it's just not a fit, it may be in your gut. Bring it up to them. Maybe they will change, but maybe they'll say, you know, it wasn't a fit. I thought I was helping you out and have the difficult conversations. Because if you don't have it today, you will have it. And it could be a less opportune time than taking advantage of just communicating.
[00:43:00] Speaker B: There was a book I was reading where he was talking about when you have a company and it's just you and one person and you're scaling, you know, you're trying to put butts and seats, right? You got all these seats you got to fill. And he's like, but you need to stop thinking that way and think the right button, the right seat.
And he was signing with his companies. There was a couple of times he's like, add this person in this chair. And they were horrible. And we were going to let them go. And then we realized like, oh, thank were in this chair over here.
And then it was like they suddenly became an a player, right? Just because they moved him in the seats. And he's like. And then he's to that point, right? Sometimes you just hired somebody wrong. And they're not a good fit for what you need. And you just, you know, you just got to move on and get the right person there. So.
[00:43:37] Speaker A: Or you just stay in your lane and you do what you do. And, but, but yes, if I've invested in a person, I like them. You know what, maybe QA would be good for you. You don't like talking on the phone.
You know, I've had friends that have transitioned in a QA and they, they've loved it.
And when we had our dial in kind of running out of time in closing and our, when in my dial up days, our favorite QA question was, we were like, okay, do you have the disk to put in to set it up? Where do I put the disk? Like your computer. Everything in 2000 had a, you know, AOL on it. See?
Oh, you mean the cup holder?
Because the CD tray was out and he kept his cup on it. It was really funny because we're like, oh, it's not a cup holder. I'm like, no, it's a CD player. It's just a very funny kind of thing.
But once again, these we Learned Running an ISP, we're charging 15amonth and that tech support call takes three hours. You've lost money on it.
So you have to automate everything. You can get that script right, refine that process. So, and I can do discovery in maybe 10 minutes. Some people will talk to you because they've got nobody else to talk to.
But don't make it hard to find tech support. And if the AI agents aren't working. Well, if that's an email, just respond quickly. I would rather have a good response that takes up, you know, a little longer than an instant response.
That's just wrong.
[00:45:09] Speaker B: Yep. Well, Paul, thank you so much. If somebody is listening and they, they, they're super intrigued by what you guys are doing at Valet. How do they find you? How do they find the company to learn more about what you guys do?
[00:45:20] Speaker A: So now that you can remember about tablet with a vablet, you can go to our website. You can find me on there, but also on LinkedIn. Right. Just look for Bablet, send me a message.
I respond to everyone on LinkedIn. And if you're an entrepreneur and you've got a question, you know, I, I coach people all the time in, in STEM and in high schools and in colleges. So to help start another entrepreneur, it's really my, my, it's my pleasure. And it's really my core is we need more entrepreneurs in the world.
And, and I, I agree with you. This five person unicorn would be amazing.
And you never know who's got an idea. So run an idea by me, and I will tell you my honest opinion. And if you don't want to share digitally and you want to hop on a zoom, I'll make sure I have no note takers, and we'll have an authentic conversation. And I'll at least give you almost 40 years of geekdom.
It'd be my pleasure.
[00:46:24] Speaker B: Thanks so much, Paul.
