Humans Aren't Going Anywhere - Magnetic and Quanto

How do I get a digital background here? I want my background, even though my background is very interesting, I think it's distracting. Welcome back everyone to the Bizarre Bruce podcast. This is the accounting founder series we're doing today. Today we have like two very special guests. We have Thomas from Magnetic and Anderson from Konto. Two really good friends of mine. Before we jump off as we do with everything in this series, we talk about like why the question is why these founders like are building in this space that they're doing. First off, we'll start off with Thomas over here. Thomas, you were at, you finished off, you went to Maryland, then you went to Carnegie Mellon, you started a company and you ended up at Zignil for like, for like building a product over there, then you were a keeper where you were the head of product over there. What led you to like start having those experiences in gaming and at the same time into tax and then decided on, hey, I want to like go ahead and build tax prep and your company is doing a different approach where you guys provide an end-to-end service where you have humans in loop as well that are doing it. So why this approach compared to the other people in the space? My compound question. So life story, pitch and other things. Well, yeah, thanks for having me. First of all, happy to be here. All right, I can try to break it down a little bit. So yeah, what sort of my background, what is magnetic through now and how did we, how did we go from one to the other? Yeah. Yeah. So I would say my background is in software by way of maybe entrepreneurship or like starting companies. My original inspiration was I grew up, I'm actually visiting right now, but I grew up in Frederick, Maryland, which has developed a lot actually now that I'm back here, but at the time was a little bit more rural and there sort of just wasn't anyone that I knew growing up that was starting companies until I was like 16. I met someone who became my mentor, my friend's uncle in high school who had a government contracting business and who just was a very interesting person, very well read and sort of showed that you can start a small business and sort of do things differently in your own way. And I just thought that that was very interesting and inspiring based on what I had like seen it be possible so far at that point in my life. So I think that was 20, maybe like 2010 and so I might be getting my years slightly wrong, but I do remember there being like the social network at that point in time as well. The incarnation of entrepreneurship like pushed me sort of towards software, started building websites that were not very good at first, but you know, progressively got better and better at building websites. Yeah, it went to Carnegie Mellon where I actually dropped out for a, it ended up being just like one semester and then the summer to build my first like company that had gotten any funding. And that happened to be in the gaming space, the mobile, like video games, mobile gaming space because that's what the product that I was like most familiar with at the time. That one ended up failing and sort of not failing because of anything we had done related to like building the, building the software, but rather how we were approaching the problem and like how we were trying, basically we spent way too much time on the tech and not nearly enough time focusing on like the customer experience. So that was like kind of a big lesson which drove me into product management, which was at the time like a really good way to learn the like craft of how to build, you know, the great products. So I ended up working at Zingo for a while, which is actually where I met my co-founder Zingo makes like Farmville and Words With Friends and some other games. So I met my co-founder Patrick. So he was like a tech lead on a engineering team and I was a product manager on the engineering team, worked in software for a long time in San Francisco. And yeah, eventually became product at a head of product at a company called Keeper Tax, which is a series A tax filing company originally it started as bookkeeping mostly for gig workers. So we would, we would connect to your bank account if you were like an Uber driver, for example, and we could take all of your bank transactions that would come in and we use very early versions of AI to categorize the bank transactions and hopefully help you do a little bit more bookkeeping than most Uber drivers were doing otherwise, right? Like the default would be that a lot of the Uber drivers were just straight up not used professional to work with because they didn't know anyone or they didn't have the money to pay for one. And as a result, they would be missing a lot of deductions and just straight up losing a lot of money when they, when it came time to pay taxes. So we started with focusing on that back even before I joined, they were doing it in 2019 and I joined in I think 2021 as the fifth employee. And we're using really, really early versions of some of the first open AI models. So they were using some classifier models even before I was there, I think. And then we started using like ADA and Babbage just to classify these bank transactions to try to figure out what actually was purchased and whether that was relevant for that person and whether it could be right off or not. So yeah, fast forward, a couple years of working there, our main focus was building out the attacks filing product to compete with turbo tax originally for these sort of gig workers that had somewhat simple tax situation. So schedule C, you know, 1099 NEC, if it's Uber, it's 1099 K because they're acting as a payment, trying to pretend that a little bit that the term payment processor, which would lose actually a lot of it would fool a lot of people into missing a pretty important tax deduction there. But focus more and more on building an experience for those people where they could file taxes and then move more and more up market over time. So started to focus on much more and more complex taxes. So if you go to Keeper Tax now, it's it's focused on people that have, I would say like medium complexity tax returns and just making a tax filing experience, it's kind of a hybrid of like tech enabled firm. So there's a lot of human touch they have eAs and I believe CPAs that work there as well. But then automating as much of the sort of manual data munging as possible. So we built our own custom intake document intake. We built our own custom like entry into a tax engine. We built our own scanning when we were there. When I was there, they're still doing it. And so yeah, built a lot of what I think now firms are looking at as ways they can automate their own firm in 2022 before a lot of firms were really getting to involved in other than sort of the old OCR solutions of what scan and populate could be. So that's what led me to magnetic. So yeah, magnetic is an AI tax prepare that can take all of the messy documents that taxpayers give to the firm. We scan them are agent. We actually have a multi agentic layer now. So our agent can sort of make a plan from all of those documents and then delegate to a host of sub agents that are going to do not just the, you know, YouTube's and the 10, you know, 1099 ins or anything, but really multiple documents, complex K ones and really complete a large degree of the tax return. And then we enter it into the existing tax engines. So we support a variety of tax engines. And as you said, yeah, we have human loop because essentially our thesis is that the historical like scan and populate solutions, the OCR provider solutions were really focused on just trying to do what was possible at the time to be fair. It's kind of what we built originally a keeper and the technology has changed under our feet to make all of this new stuff possible. But the complaint that we kept hearing from smaller firm owners was that if you just are doing some of the forms and it only works some of the time, 80, 90% of the time, all of the validation work that you need to do to make sure that the forms, the firms that the forms that were scanned or the documents that were scanned were actually scanned correctly and that the subset of like the documents that you actually sent to the program were actually uploaded, you're just creating an additional step in your prep process. So you kind of had these firms would end up having like a sort of pre-prep process, then there's the automated step and there's like a post prep process where they're validating everything. And then it can actually go on to say a tax manager or a partner to do the review and then finally to get the return out the door. And basically firms were just saying that doesn't save me time. That kind of like moves the work around a little bit and maybe I can get a more junior person than what was previously possible to do it. And that's great if you're a top 200, but it's a lot harder for small and mid-size firms to get value out of that. And so the common story we would see is that the small and mid-size firms would try out these OCR solutions but they they would use it for like a year and then they would go back to just doing it manually because it wasn't really saving enough time. So our thesis is that we have to get the returns all the way from just a jumble of documents to review ready. And when we say review ready, we put our money where our mouth is there. So if we make a mistake in that prep process, if it's incomplete or if there's something wrong with it where the firm ends up having to correct that even though we have the information that was you know necessary to do it correctly, they don't have to pay for that return. So it's a free return. And we think that that's essentially like the key to unlocking a lot of the value especially for the small and mid-size firms. And then you where does this human and the loop come and like where does this process like so you have the agents and you have the sub agents. So then once the return gets prepped is that when your internal like person like reviewing it and before sending it to the client? That's right. So from the firm perspective, it's basically just submit documents to us. We process it, you get it back. So all of the human and the loop stuff is handled by us on RN behind the scenes. So they would send it to us, we scan it, the agent figures out what it needs to do, then it enters it into the tax engine. We have a a review team of EAS CPAs in the United States that come in and check to make sure and we have a system basically for them like an admin tool that allows them to focus on things that the system was either highly confident in and say okay we're not going to spend that much time on redoing these basic forms like we know this was can't correctly and but then for much more complicated situations or situations that might require you know human judgment they're going to come in and say you know yes this know this move this around and so when the firm is getting it back they can feel confident that it's been reviewed so so then you kind of like do the more complicated forms such as like the K ones on there as well because you know you have someone actually revealing the return and that's where you could give off. Yeah and I mean at this point things like K ones it's less about specific forms and it's much more about varying niche edge cases that you were you were unlikely to have seen before either something particular to a certain client or something that's just you know Ohio we were just in a tax bosium in Cleveland right so Ohio school district codes and we can handle that now but the first time it was important that we made sure to like update the system to be able to know that that's going to come and make sure our system can cover that and either it's you know there's kind of two ways I think for a lot of these very niche things that AI is not well maybe disorder would be great at looking this up but a lot of times you know there's so many longtail edge cases that the first time you run into it it's either going to be the firm experiencing that as a mistake in trying to tell you about it or we can have an internal quality control process that catches it realizes that we needed to fix that manually and then now the firm is still getting a good result and we're able to improve the system it's a faster execution loop. Okay so basically like yeah so would you consider like classify yourself as like mostly also like the people in the house would be classified as like a tax prep firm or would you say like they're more therefore like data control and quality review. Yeah I think it started as more of a I think it started as very much a hybrid of like a tax prep firm and a and like a software product and now it's becoming a lot more like sort of quality control and increasingly like data labeling and feedback. Okay great on to Anderson so Anderson you have like a really interesting background story so you worked and you started off as an auditor and you went to work in private equity you were also went to Oxford where you gave a speech as like the head over there then you started a bookkeeping firm and finally now you're doing solving one of the most important issues I feel like it's like marketing and like getting people more business and where they're saying like hey we can like start on board them and give you more of a demand you're fixing the demand side instead of the supply side of the tax like the clientele issue. What led you to like get to this thesis and how was that journey like yeah first of all so excited to be here long time listener first time participant I always wanted to say that so I think honestly as Canadians like we always get told we want to skate to where the puck is and we're seeing such incredible folks like yourself and Thomas building like incredible things that's gonna like unlock capacity for fellow accountants and so if we want to skate to where the puck is like we understand that accountants will want more business with all this amazing capacity that's unlocked and in that world where we're already seeing so much AI content out there and I don't know if you both have seen it but I live on LinkedIn quite a bit in LinkedIn caveat there's a ton of AI comments and AI posts but the video format is still relatively human versus on X it's all like so much AI video and it's scary but it's like actually really good and so if we vision a world where there's so much content going to be AI how do people trust that their advisor who they're accounting is is somewhat they want to work with and so that's where we're so focused on creating this personal brand company brand so that these folks can go and find these ideal customer business owners that are also seeing them and seeing that there's a personal human connection here and that came through a lot of pivots and a lot of us working on different things starting as a bookkeeping from ourselves and trying to use all the AI tools and then just really with all the demand that was coming to us from LinkedIn we realized hey why not we do what's working for us on LinkedIn to our customers and that's kind of what caused us to come all the way here which we're super excited about and it kind of feels like our true DNA as a company yeah so then let's go back to like when you were starting that bookkeeping business and I know you guys were able to go I would say while multiple times on LinkedIn just by not doing paid ads but doing a lot of like organic growth and organic marketing also that process like to figure out how the algorithm worked and like what worked for you guys and why were you able to stand out in that initial phase like we've never done paid ads for ourselves to the state what honestly worked is folks are just so intrigued by the founder journey but also your niche so for us it was like just fellow accountants who were seeing an accounting firm being kind of grown so we had an audience of accountants but we also at the time as a bookkeeping firm we're targeting e-commerce and folks that were kind of trades folks that were solo companies but they would work as I can in between so it wasn't like heavy construction companies but it was for folks that were taking on large projects and then kind of working as the intermediary between kind of without going to specifics but that was a weird niche that we found where it was it was project-based folks that really resonated with what we were doing and it came through like our existing clientele but what we realized is once you amplify those case studies it attracts more of that audience and so when we started to do that we were fortunate to grow to over 40 businesses in less than six months and it was just me and my co-founder so just two people and then there we realized for us to just be able to kind of work with thousands of businesses it would have required us to hire more people internally or which we're excited to do work with more accounting firm so indirectly we're able to empower more business owners at the end of the day and so that's kind of what led to us working more with accounting firms and we originally started as like a development agency just working on automations in different fronts so getting to see like all the great tools out there practice management systems month and closed tools and then realizing wow the the market has also never seen this much capital being put onto it whether it's on the private equity side but also on the venture capital technology side and so why can we just like help them be able to ultimately just grow their business which is top line by helping them be able to find more of these customers that the firms want to work with. Okay so then like today how does quantum like come in do you guys like come in do you do a brand audit first most accountants don't even have like a persona online so how do you like get them comfortable like being able to like share this story because accountants generally are like much more guarded and private about their lives over there all right but there are a few like we have these accounting influencers in the community and we like talk with them on the time but like most of them like don't want to they want to get more business in and I saw like people are like start to push in especially when I was at EY when you're at like a manager seeing a manager you're asked to start selling business so how do you train where do you guys come in what's like how does quantum work and then where do you guys help out yeah we we've been fortunate that the folks that are on LinkedIn already are the ones that are coming through our funnel so most people find us on LinkedIn and that just directly means that they're already on LinkedIn too which is great and I know there's like Adam to your point there's a large population of the accounting community that's not on LinkedIn that's kind of unseen right now our hope is folks do see the benefit of being visible through their peers and through his industry conferences and then we're able to kind of help them on that journey but right now it's all been directly inbound through LinkedIn and these folks have already tested a marketing agency to a certain extent maybe it's something of how fast they're moving or it could be something related to like how expensive things have been and for us we're trying to use the latest AI tools internally to be able to support them and ultimately the thing that we say is we're trying to build predictable pipeline for accounting firms similar to how we as tech companies think through how we think of customer funnels and all these different things accounting firms have this amazing kind of historical notion of having referrals which is great because that's what the industry was but we're also seeing a lot of folks now being able to kind of compete with larger firms thanks to the tooling that they're taking internally but that also means not only are you improving your capacity but let's also use those tooling to help you improve your your top line and so long-winded answer is we've been fortunate to be in the position that folks self-select that they want to kind of build their personal brand their company band be able to work towards a world where we're answering to answer answer engine optimization so AEO and know the power that SEO brought over the last five years or more and that's kind of the personnel that we that we work with right now perfect I have a question for both of you guys both of you guys basically have a business that like relies upon like humans in the loop that's like are coming in some other companies have taken the position or are going to take the position like hey there will be no humans most of this work will be optimized or like automated to a sense that humans will only come in as well advisors at the end to their clientele where do you guys stand on that where you guys think that's going to move up market like let's say three to five years so we just stare at each other to see it goes for them I'll just say my opinion I love the human element of where we're at right now and I think because there's a lot of anxiety around not only the tooling but us specifically on people putting their faces out [BLANK_AUDIO] first time or hearing case studies that are kind of sometimes very personal and like why they chose to become an accountant in many ways because of things they've kind of had. It involves human in the loop like I don't think up your software play can help that and our team is a mix of accountants, content creators and engineers and we love that balance because I think there has to be human for what we specifically do in building someone's brand. I think there's two versions of this, right? There's like how we're building a company and then there's sort of like where the industry is going generally. I'm a pretty firm believer that the industry is going to, for the firms that can adapt and sort of add even more of the human element actually than there is now from the customers perspective, they're going to be the ones that really blur it. So if you think about it right now, I think humans at most firms, just talking about tax, they're doing a lot of things that are human that is valued by the customer and then they're doing a lot of things that currently involve human humans that are not at all valued by the customer. So the customer, just to talk about prep, I think expects that they have a completed return that's compliant that saves them as much money as possible that can be explained and that they can check the mental box and feel like the weight of the stress of their tax situation being solved for them, and so I think that the role of the firm really kind of always was to be that human element that is, that you personally know, that is, you have a personal relationship with the person and they can say, yeah, don't worry, I can handle this for you. I can make sure that you're going to be in good hands, but I think like the, I guess difficult reality of that was that to accomplish that, there was all of this, you know, cram basically to be able to put numbers in boxes, basically a lot of the time and just handle all of the operations of it. So, you know, our goal is to take a lot of the difficulty of the operational piece out and hopefully that create even more of the people doing intake calls, understanding the customer's goals, and then sort of on the far end of prep people being able to explain what happened that year, provide planning and advice for the future, which is I think really what the, you know, customer for paying for the whole time, okay, great. Then like shifting more on like this other aspect, I know both Thomas, you went out with like your big marketing push of like your seed round craze, you made the announcement, landed really well, and Anderson has been like talking about like, basically has been an influencer in the community and like talking and like helping develop, where do you think like the role of like the brand in the market for like a CP firms goes now or how far it goes because both of you are targeting the long tail of the market and where do you think how can that help them compete and move up with the other players in the market? Yeah. Well I'll make a, you can check me on this because you actually work at UI, but my, you know, my like pet idea about this is that even the larger firms are a lot of smaller firms in a trend code, right? It's the partner model, you scale up the, you try to, the core unit of value is that kind of client relationship in the case of the larger firms with the partner, and you scale it up, you scale up the number of partners. And so I think the things that they could get with scale were a lot of the, the larger firms used to be able to get with scale that a lot of the smaller firms or mid size firms didn't have access to was some of the maybe like you would consider this overhead or technology departments, right? So if you're small enough firm, you're not going to have an IT team or like engineers, but if you're UI, you're going to have a lot of engineers, right? So I think the more that you get coding agents, you know, automated go to market tools that can help you do a lot of these tasks that used to just be, you know, if you wanted to do all of those, you would just need a lot of people doing a lot of tasks, clicking a lot of buttons. Now you can hopefully scale a lot better. And I think it actually adds a lot of power to the like small and mid size firms to have AI tools across the stack. Here's the interesting things. The comparison, we always love to make in this kind of age of AI where software is like so easily made caveat, not like the enterprise scalable stage, but for lifestyle businesses, we found a lot of my friends who started their own accounting firms are just obsessed with just what they're able to do with cloud right now. And so in that world, we're seeing if you think about consumer businesses, so folks that are able to make, I don't know, I always go to example of teas like I used to sell pet care at farmers markets and there used to be a lot of folks making hot sauces, teas, various different things. And the thing that differentiated folks, even though a lot of people were saying we are great at organically bringing in ingredients, all these different things, they ultimately came down to like the personal brand of the founder. And so a lot of these early stage companies were always put their their stories out there. And we're starting to see that now in B2B where this is why there's the head of CEO content has been come a huge role in these large companies paying like very high salaries because people have seen that folks can build their own kind of distribution channel. And we've had a lot of inbound actually from larger firms, which I was pretty shocked about where folks were like is there any way you can help our emerging partner base be able to build their own clientele just because like Al Thomas said, they treat each kind of partner as their own mini business, but then in that case, each partner will actually need to build their own brand so that they can bring in their own clientele. And so I think this is a trend that's going to be skyrocketing even more. And I think there was, this was kind of mentioned from the folks that kick when we heard the Muscaling New Heights, but they had this analogy of the big four turning into the big 40,000. And I think when Conrad mentioned that on stage, he really resonated to what we were seeing from our discovery calls of folks being like, hey, I want to start my own firm, whether it's coming from a larger firm or they're getting promoted and need to build out a client base. Yeah. Yeah. So I was like going to bring that up like the big 40,000. So these firms, yes, I agree they're their own like mini kingdoms or like these smaller kingdoms of like like all these like before or like, let's say like the pop 25 right in this case, but then they have this overall strategy so they can't go out and like do some of the things that the smaller firms could do, right? They can push because they would need if they have a go-to-market strategy, they would need approval from legal, they would need approval from marketing before they can implement it. I think one of the unfair advantages that smaller firms have is right now the experimentation part on like how much they could push through coming in from there. So are you guys both seeing that most of your inbound customers are coming in from people who were at bigger companies now starting their own firm and now they're saying, hey we want to scale and compete with them and go head to head. I've seen, I think we have two people that are, it's like a smaller firm, three partners all like X big four, but I've seen it really from all over the board, you know, I've been surprised the degree to which it seems more based on the owners disposition and what they're interested in. I've seen, I talked actually at tax bosium to a gentleman that owned, I think there were a 12 person firm in Jersey and it's over 40 years old, 50 years old, he works with his father-in-law actually and you would not necessarily say that that's like the big four diaspora, the people that saw tech in place and then like went out on their own to beat it. But he is, he's on-clawed all day, every day and so I think it really is just about if it kind of scratches the owner's edge and they see just like what an amazing opportunity it can be for their business and obviously I see it all over the spectrum from solo firm owners that are obviously some really compelling use cases for how they can be like a one man band now all the way to, yeah, some of the like larger 50 or 60 person firms. We actually created a form internally just to track the demographic of our calls getting booked and it kind of is divided I'd say if I had to bucket it pretty easily into three buckets. The smallest bucket to be honest is like from the mid size large firms, that's predominantly because all of our imbalance also come from LinkedIn and there's more kind of the smaller one to 10 million firm owners that are on LinkedIn because they're also trying to find business there or trying to hire talent there. So the first one is yeah, the smaller, the mid size larger firms, more like their operating partner or technology person trying to like, invest just trying to learn about other tools that they can maybe bring through their procurement process. The second one, most highest that we get is kind of that one to 10 million firm owner that's either trying to do smaller tuck ins in organically to grow, who also has the ambition to grow organically. And then the newest one, which it ebbs and flows within season to be honest, but a lot of non-accountents, kind of finance professionals that are interested to start either buying a firm or even starting a bookkeeping practice that might not require kind of a designation or don't have the expertise to do tax things, seeing the crazy multiples out there that folks are buying accounting firms with or just how bad the job market is to be honest and thinking in this age of AI can start something and because I'm a finance professional, I understand numbers to a certain extent, which is true. So we get excited by that demographic too, but I was just really intrigued by that. Like we've had a lot of M&A brokers recently reach out being like, hey, can I start a bookkeeping practice? So I can follow these companies throughout their life cycle and then also then help them on the M&A front because I think just helping on the M&A front is going to be quite like commoditized by some of these accounting firms who are starting to do M&A work now that they can have more capacity and to link to do things. So very cool shift that we're seeing in the conversation. Conversation is coming up even at the kind of the smaller stage. >> Oh, so are you seeing that, too, where it's like people coming in wanting to start their own firm? >> Yeah. >> It has no tax background and like, because basically you guys are taking on the risk mitigation. >> No, we have a customer like that, actually, so that like resonates. And yeah, I think it's a common, in some ways, I think it's the new search fund kind of thing of old. That was doing track and dog grooming studios a couple of years ago, and now AI makes it possible with knowledge work. I think to another extent, it is much more of like a, I think of that as being a more like well-funded kind of true private equity play and we see definitely some of that. But then we also see, yes, like the individuals who would, often they would have like rental properties as well. So that they would be, you know, buying rental properties or Airbnb's and they, you know, it's very kind of like grassroots and just like, hey, I can do this. And I think that it helps for them if they partner with someone who has, you know, sort of done it before, that has an accounting background or especially in tax. And they're usually quite aware of that, actually, and are able to, at least the ones I've seen have been able to do a good job of that. And yeah, with the multiples for small firms where they are, there's so much opportunity for them to find something and just start going. So interesting and unique idea. First, it was like the age wax, then it was like the dentist offices, and was like, yeah, dog healthcare centers and now it's like moving into knowledge work will see, but it's like also then there's a push off like the legacy companies to right and then people saying like, hey, you did not a new keep what are you doing here and then I'd probably see that risk as well. How people are pushing your day, but Anderson, I have a question like, let's say I want to, I'm a CPA who's practicing or an year that's practicing. I have a firm that's like a few years old. I've been in the business. I have no brand presence on there. What could I do for the next month or sorry, next week, next month, next six months next year, just to get started the number one thing I always tell accounting to have been around for a few years is clearly there's customers that really like you, which is why you're still alive. And what that means is you have incredible data about why they like to work with you. And that is typically in your meeting notes or you can even be in like your staff or your mind. And so what we first do when we onboard folks is tell us who your favorite customers are and I'm sure it's in the meeting notes and hopefully folks are using a meeting note recorder and there's a ton out there. And hopefully one of them sponsors deserve Bruce one day, but I would say there, there's so much context there, so pull that out. And then if needed, you can have a conversation with those folks specifically saying, hey, I want to build a case study around why you like working with us so much. And then that's the organic content I get really passionate about that isn't like you going to chat GPT or cloud and being like write me a LinkedIn post about how I want to target say e-commerce customers. And so that will give you something generic versus I've been working with X firm and we went through this really balls how period where inventory was super low and we had to figure out working capital in a way that can allow them to kind of be able to get ready for Black Friday or something specific to that extent to with someone's face. Whether you're your customer or use kind of saying that's that content like just to your earlier question atom around virality like I don't know what it is on the algorithm and we all treat the algorithm like it's this special being that we don't understand, but the algorithm understands that's unique and it will kind of exemplify that and so to kind of humans and your potential customers who are seeing it there. I like still think about like how it just clicks for some people and for other people that doesn't click but I think like what the the genesis of it comes down to is like just try to be as authentic as possible. Like try to find unique situation that other people can resonate with and do you think it's also a lot of experimentation before you actually find your actual voice was going to resonate. But definitely experimentation and even for myself it was a little bit of understanding you're going to put stuff out there and it's never about the likes we've gone a ton of calls and barely any like like emoji reactions to things so no likes no support inside or any of those other emojis which I also learned in cases of fun fact if you use one of those other emojis it actually helps the algorithm more than just using a like there's like a more bias towards those. But all to say is folks will see you target impressions matter and even if it's 12 impressions type of that if it's 12 of your ICP ideal customer profile that's like incredible because first of all LinkedIn is free and so that's where we're we're always tell folks like experiment also if it's something that doesn't go well no one's going to see it because the algorithm is going to deprioritize it but also don't put out content that you just is not. I know everyone says authentic but like they you wouldn't back at the end of the day and I think that's where people feel a little bit hesitant to do what is this goes viral so it's like well if you're putting out there and you're worried about it going viral is probably not the right content for you so let's actually go back to like what's working in your firm through your case studies and that's just exemplify that because we know that's working and that's what you're kind of sweet spot is. Okay that's a really good insight I'm like the right to down for my own content your content is great man you're super authentic it's too. Yeah Thomas one last question for you is like what I need to understand is like you're so well positioned and like maybe you can have an extent like you have the human in the loop you have the tech why don't you just become is tax from yourself I get this a lot like yeah so I think I have a pretty unique perspective on that just because of the background keeper so just for the folks listening that are you know accounts there's there's double which is the bookkeeping tool the one that I worked out was called keep is called keeper still and it's a keeper tax dot com so it's a direct to consumer tax filing tool you can think of it as like a I turbo tax in a lot of ways but they have you know they have real eAs that are reviewing and actually signing. So in many ways I worked in that business for a long time and I think one of the things that I'm so excited about is really just the ability to partner with the firm so what I was saying earlier about the I think a lot of the value always really was in but will like even become more weighted towards the relationship that the professional has with the client so the client is coming in and they they need you know they're they made a lot of money that you're maybe they want to make sure they're in compliance there's a lot of things to do that are required to sort of check that box and they want to make sure they're doing it in an optimal way and there is so much that spreads out behind that there's so much that needs to get done to get there they're not even really going to be able to the taxpayers not going to be able to fully evaluate how that's getting done there's a few sort of output metrics of like you know if that's working or not you know how much do I have to pay do I get a letter from the IRS or something like that but ultimately it's going to come to the relationship that they have and the trust in the person that they're you know going to help them the firm to be able to say hey I the firm and managing all these systems there's a lot of things that need to happen there's our internal systems there's all these tools that we're using we understand what the IRS is looking for we understand the tax code and we're going to make sure that we wrangle everything for you to in order to get this outcome that you want but as the wrangling gets more and more automated and it's more for the firms about tool selection I think in general the thing that's going to stay valuable is that that trust and that check mark and so I think having the people is actually critical if I want to build a tech company and I think that the thing that we're particularly good at is you know building the technology that's going to do this piece of the flow that has pretty defined you know inputs and outputs right the input is all the documents which by the way getting those documents in the first place requires a lot of talking to the customer understanding their situation knowing if they maybe didn't send you something that there be no documentation about but you can just kind of sense that maybe they should have that and helping through the process of finding those things which can be pretty you know paying you to check a box can be a little stressful so there's all this mess sort of on the front end the firm does an amazing job of getting it down to something relatively you know defined as input which is all of the relevant tax documents and then the prior year software file we can do something that is still hard but is actually has you know that defined input which is all the in all the documents and then a relatively defined output it's you know a little difficult to like perfectly down what is a perfect tax return but if you show you know 10 professionals they're going to know they're going to know what good looks like when they when they see it so it's still actually a relatively defined output of yet let's get this return in a good spot and then it expands massively again because now it's about the follow up from that tax year to the customer what should they do in the future are they feeling confident about what happened if they're burden changed this year can you explain that to them and and help them understand why that happened why that still might be correct and make them feel okay and like they have a plan going forward and that's what they're really paying all the money for if we try to start doing all of that and we pull the human out of it I don't think the people are going to want to pay for that I don't think that the customers are going to get that amount of value they might still get you a turbo tax or slightly above turbo tax levels of value from that but they're not going to get you know accounting firm prices levels of value around that and they're going to I think a lot of times you're either you're either not going to get retention you're not going to get the price point it's just not going to have the ultimately that feeling of trust that people feel value and feel comfortable paying for and then if we keep all the people in and on our direct payroll well now we're running a firm we're not specializing the thing we're good any more. we're trying to be a tech enabled firm, which I think is a very good thing for people that are actually good at running firms, we're not good at running firm. We're good at writing software. So I think there's an amazing partnership there, and I'd rather focus on that. I think all of the hubbub around, oh, we should just buy a bunch of firms, and we can just do it all ourselves. It underestimates the complexity of building that great customer experience, just because the tools can do a lot of things now, doesn't mean they can do everything. - Yeah, no, okay, really good, amazing inside. I think it's like levels down to both of your guys are really focusing on your core competencies, what are your unfair advantages and really doing really well in the space. Okay, so as we go wrap this up, what conflicts is your team going next to you, where are we gonna catch you next, and how do the users get in touch with you? - I'll kick it off, for those of us in audio, you're just seeing a lot of funny faces. And so you can definitely find us on LinkedIn, Anderson, Peter, George. We'd love to chat with folks on LinkedIn, and we'd love to share tips on LinkedIn as well, and how you can grow your presence. We'll be at Bridging the Gap. We're actually hosting a session on how you can use $30 AI tools to be able to kind of help in various different aspects from growing your firm, to better communication, and I know Adam and Thomas are gonna be there too, so I'll just show you guys out if you'll be in the room then. And we'll probably be at QuickBooks Connect later in the year, and then most likely digital CPA, I'm not sure we're at the base, but those are probably the three we got left for the year. - Yeah, you can find us on LinkedIn as well. Magnetic on LinkedIn. You can check out the website at magnetictax.com. We're going to be more competencies than I can actually count. We'll definitely be at Bridging the Gap and NAEA. I think we're gonna be at Pasba. We're gonna be at several more that I can't remember. So if you're on the conference circuit, we'll probably run into you. But yeah, love to catch up with everyone on LinkedIn. I think we need to work with Anderson to start posting more, so we'll be more LinkedIn friends. - You know, always hear the share tips. - Perfect. Well, thank you so much guys, really appreciated. And it's always as always like really great catching up with both of you. And for the listeners, as always, take care of your guys. This is Adam from Zorbrough, Sunny Love, right? Take care. (upbeat music)