Inside the GTM Engine Powering One of the Fastest-Growing AI Startups

Welcome back to another episode of the GDM Playbook Podcast. Today's guest is a founder who's done it twice. First co-founding one of Australia's leading trade service marketplaces and now he's building Sophie AI, an AI-powered virtual receptionist and office manager used by service-based businesses to automate admin, capture missed revenue and streamline frontline operations. In this episode, we're going to unpack how Sophie automates the messy operational work that kills efficiency, the GDM plays that work in a credit AI market and the leadership lessons he carried forward from his marketplace days. Jacob Banks, great to have you on the podcast. Thank you Mark, thanks for having me. And I know we go back a little while now, I think it's almost a decade since we were running our previous startups and you were running service.com.au and I was running one of my first startups super draft and we kind of cross paths during that. I don't know if we'll call ourselves competitors but there's a little bit of overlap. I've caught up a couple of times, I remember we caught up a couple of times. I reckon it was even longer than 10 years to be honest. Probably more like 14 years. Yeah, time flies. Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't say what competitors. To keep the peace for this podcast episode, we'll say we weren't competitors. But it's great to have you on and then really looking forward to unpacking some of your learnings and what you guys are doing at Sophie. Let's start by winding the clock back to those times, 10, 14 years ago. If you can walk us through that journey at first, starting your career in sales and then going on in co-foundingservice.com.au. Yeah, okay. I'm originally from Melbourne. I became a scuba instructor down there but it's absolutely freezing so I decided to move up to the Gold Coast and I did it for six months scuba dive instructing and once your hobby becomes your job, it's not so fun anymore dragging tourists along who can't swim. So I thought what I was going to do and I was walking down the streets of of Cavalavan, you at 19 or 20 at the time and this guy stopped me and tried to sell me a pub crawl ticket and I thought to myself that sounds like a cool job like I like speaking to people. So I asked him if there's any jobs going and he's like no, we don't have any jobs going and I said who owns it and ended up tracking down the owner and like ringing him three or four times to give me a job. And it was like well the reason that I gave you the job is because you kept persisting and I thought well if you're persistent well then you might be good at sales. So I started my career believe it or not in the most important role of my life. I say this in a commission only sales role harassing tourists on the streets of surface paradise to go at night clubbing and I had five minutes to convince him to obviously listen to me and I all I had was a ticker book and a little pitch book and I'd have to convince him to give me $150 to come out and meet me the night out the next you know the next night out on Saturday night or Friday night and come clubbing with us and honestly it was the most amazing experience of my life believe it or not like it taught me out of hustle it taught me how to loop it taught me how to take no for an air I don't take no for an answer and from there then I moved into I decided to get a real job and I worked at the yellow pages I mean within seven months I was a top salesperson at the yellow pages but they wanted me to sell print and I wanted to sell digital so I thought it's really hard to sell a product you don't believe in if you've ever done sales before so I decided to leave the yellow pages and I rang back my boss from the pub crawl and I said I need $25,000 I'm going to start my own directory and he's like yeah I'll give you that so he gave me 25 grand and I chucked in 25 grand and we started service.com.au out of my bedroom I knew nothing about technology I knew nothing about websites marketing support all that kind of stuff and over the next 10 years kind of built it out we had over 35,000 businesses on the platform at one stage pushing over a million job notifications to our part and network every single months and build out a tech team sales team support team marketing team but obviously bootstrapping it I bootstrapped it that we bootstrapped it the whole way you had to learn everything yourself so that was a really good kind of what I saw almost like like an apprenticeship in a way to then get me into social you where I am today yeah that's fantastic and I think as a 20 year old that's probably the dream job you know selling nightclub tickets on Caval Avenue I'm sure you got into some trouble but it's interesting yeah it was the money was ridiculous yeah and it's interesting you mentioned like how that initial boss of yours in this job which you probably just took on at the time just because you needed some extra cash yeah ended up becoming your first investor in the business that kick started your entrepreneurial journey yeah exactly I still speak to him today he's still still really good mate now looking back at your time at service.com that are you and and the journey you went on what were some of the real turning points and painful lessons that you'd say fundamentally shaped how you build and scale companies today yeah I think you're a good question fundamental lessons I think when you're a first time founder and you have the vision for the business it's really hard to kind of well it's hard to get that vision into your team or and get your team to see it as crystal as crystal as you do so I'd say I probably I think it's fundamental lesson was I was trying to do everything myself and not really finding the right players for the right positions and that was a painful lesson because you can be calm burnt out you end up doing everything and you know you're not you know you're not the right players in those positions so then you don't scale as fast as you could so from that I've learned to kind of like you know really find the best players for that position drill in the vision of the company the mission of the company so they understand it as deeply as you do and then give them kind of almost autonomy to what to go and do what they do best yeah I couldn't agree boy I think as a first time founder you know you're pretty much higher whoever you can afford right and you know whether that's offshoring overseas yeah or the guy selling nightclub tickets down a couple avenue yeah for the job but yeah I think you hit the nail in the head there you know when you do it the second time round you realize you know what your company's only going to get as far as the people within it and hiring the right people is key for sure for sure 100% that would be that'd be the number one lesson I'd say it's only as good as your team yeah absolutely now after building and scaling service.com.au man that's a mouthful what were the signals or signs that made you realize had been overhead across service businesses was the next problem worth solving and ultimately got you started with Sophie A.I. yeah so I'm a big believer of I see this a lot in failed startups where you know you get the founders they hire a team and then they never speak to their customer again whereas I'm a big believer of like staying as close to the customer as possible so I've genuinely believed but I reckon this is conservative but I've spoken over 10,000 trades businesses over the last 10 years probably even more and the other thing was in my support team I would say one of my roles was to speak to the worst of the worst customer and the thought process behind that was if they're that angry to ring us up and abuse us because they're not happy with our product how many other customers are out there that don't have that have the same issue but don't don't have the kind of care to call or that is cancel or chant so that was my thought process and after speaking with all these business owners I'd say well you know like you've got the lead come through but you haven't accepted the lead if you don't accept the lead it's not going to work you know and that's I well I don't have time I don't have time to follow up quotes I don't have time to follow up the invoices you know I've got my daughter's dance recital or I've got you know weekend with the kids whatever it is and it was always the same problem number one I try to call them and they'd never answer and then when I did get a hold of them it was always like we're just we're great on the tools but we absolutely suck on the admin so I was touring with the idea of how we could solve that and then when I heard the voice tech the AI voice tech come out that was when like the light bulb moment went off and my head not that now's the time never in history have we been able to speak to computers how we speak to each other normally it's keystrokes and mouse clicks but now obviously with this technology we can actually speak to computers and they can speak back so that was the kind of aha moment after chatting with these thousands of trades businesses over the last 10 years and hearing that the problem was the admin burden and missing calls and not following up leads so that's how it kind of came about yeah and I guess for those who aren't familiar with Sophie AI if you can just kind of unpack or explain to us in simple terms like what is Sophie AI what do you do who do you serve and what are the main problems that you solve yeah so Sophie AI it's an AI operations manager that sits at the core of service based businesses it's designed to obviously eliminate admin and grow revenue so from first inquiry whether it be phone call text message email web form chatbot through to scheduling managing the job quoting invoicing following up so we kind of we're trying to eliminate admin within that whole workday process for these guys so when they get home they don't have a bunch of admin they've got to do we started off horizontally very early on the piece because I wanted to let the market dictate who our kind of ICP was which is a risky way to go but we had the demand for it we had people coming in from every different industry so I thought let's just let's just sell everybody and see kind of what comes out of it my hypothesis was it was going to be those trades and service businesses so think high maintenance sorry maintenance trades with high volume of calls and high admin burden so plumbers electricians fire safety kind of stuff and obviously since we've launched we've slowly gone deeper and deeper into those verticals and now our ICP is that kind of three to 15 staff trades and service businesses with a high volume of calls and high admin burden somewhere around that 600 to 3 million turnover that don't have the opportunity or the capital to hire a full-time receptionist they're in that kind of weird sweet spot so that's kind of our customer base and that's the kind of the evolution of Sophia over the last 12 months yeah and I know having been a customer to some of these service based businesses where they haven't had a solution like Sophia I think a lot of customer gripes around you know can never get a hold of that treaty you know they don't call me back you know got away all this time and there's revenue that's left on the table because that customer just jumps to the next person that's willing to answer the phone and deal with my inquiry correct yeah for sure and in these small businesses misting queries add up and it's it kind of can really affect the bottom line at the end of the day so yeah I mean Sophia's great because not only it does it help our customer who's the business owner but it also helps their customers because as you said like they're getting followed up they know exactly what's happening and you know they can kind of be across the job as much as the business owner is without really touching or talking to the business owner the AI does a lot of the heavy lifting and what's surprising challenges have you found you know because service based businesses are traditionally relied on phone and that human touch within what they do how have you found that I guess adoption to an AI first product like Sophie well I think to be honest there hasn't really been too much of a challenge I'll take a step back when we first decided we were going to try to you know build an MVP of this product what we did was we created a script of of a text to speech basically and we basically filled in the gaps in between so it wasn't even a real agent it was just a fake agent I was like that's our first test let's see if we can actually get people to be interested in it and we went and put it on Facebook groups and the demand was crazy so I wouldn't say that it's been a real problem convincing people because the problem is so immediate and acute they are missing phone calls that the admin burden is so heavy for a lot of these small business owners I wouldn't say it's been a challenge at all but I think the years and years of being able to speak to these customers and have the ability to kind of really deeply understand the problem has made it a lot easier for us to kind of go to market and build the product that we kind of always envisaged and from the moment that we found at the company till fast forward 14 months later the vision hasn't changed you know in any way like it's it's literally the same vision nothing's changed we haven't pivoted at all we haven't needed to because I think of the experience that we had in the past and how have you found the end customers sentiment dealing with Sophie AI rather than calling up the business speaking straight to a human speaking to AI how have you found that yeah I mean for 95 to 97% of the customers they're fine with it because they'd rather someone answer that they go to a miss call and the thing is it's you know we actually have to start putting in there like mentioning that's a digital assistant or a digital receptionist because people didn't even know so like people are on the phone they're not expecting to ring a plumber and the plumber have an AI receptionist answer it know all their information book them into a job so a lot of the time people didn't know about it but then after a while they get into the coin you kind of hear them switch and go wait I mean are you human and then so could have to say no I'm an AI assistant so they kind of felt a bit dirty so I would say that it hasn't been too bad I mean we've had a couple of people who are older living in the in rural communities and stuff that said I my customers didn't really like it but the product works pretty well so like it hasn't really been too much of an issue to be honest so the need of that speed to response far outweighs you know maybe their barrier to having to speak to it an AI agent yeah exactly and I mean you can either you can hate it now and that's fine but it's the way the world's going like you're gonna ring up a bank you're gonna ring up you know your internet providers they're all gonna have AI assistants why sit on why sit on hold you know like why do we need to do that these days we don't need to I mean so if we can handle up to 10,000 calls a minute so there's no need to be sitting on hold anymore so it's love it or hate it like it's the way it's gonna go I believe it's my opinion so we've got to embrace it absolutely and there is a lot of these AI voice tools that are flooding the market which I guess is a good validation that there is a demand for the product how does Sophie AI differentiate itself from potentially some of your competitors and you know what's your secret source yeah so when we first started we were probably one of the first if not the first doing it like this is 15 16 months ago more testing it and then in the last kind of 12 months we've really seen influx of of people trying to build these agents I think our secret source is number one we're built specifically for service based businesses and there's no one on the planet and I'm happy to be challenged that heart kind of has the depth and breadth of our agent you know whether it be services products frequently asked questions departments team personality you can change the agent's personality you can get really deep and kind of granular in training your agent and and setting an agent up specifically for your business so if anything it's actually helped us because it's it's awakened the market so when we first started there was no search volume for a virtual receptionist or AI receptionist now there's that the search volumes like you know like up into the right hockey sticking and we rank number one for that obviously and then secondly when people get on to these tools or these you know a lot of them are white labeled third party software a pretty average so once they get on to it they kind of see the potential realize it's probably not right so then they go back out to the market and look for who else is out there and that's where we kind of come into it so if anything is actually probably helped us and rather than interested at the moment the second thing is well we're not just an AI receptionist we our vision is an AI office manager yes we mentioned receptionist because that's the number one search keyword at the moment but and we are you know evolving into that office manager but our vision's always been from first inquiry to final invoice if you've just got a receptionist at hand is miss calls it doesn't really eliminate the admin burden for the rest of the process whereas our goal is to do that we're eliminating that admin burden so a lot of people you can you can you can you can spend you know 200 bucks on an on an AI receptionist a month we can spend a little bit extra and get an AI office manager that does the whole start to finish so that's kind of another thing that we've done yeah fantastic and if you can use that to kind of segue into walking through some real life before and after examples if you can just kind of unpack like or walk us through like what is some of the I guess the your customers pre-existing workflows and what did that workfully look like once they've adopted Sophie AI and then what impact did that have on their business and their bottom line yeah I mean so I've off the top my head I mean we've got hundreds of businesses on board now and approaching nearly a thousand businesses on board I would say I mean one is like rag that's this guy that speaks to quite often Marty from remote area group he has a fire training or fire safety business out in east Arnhem land in Darwin and he's he's got a fly out to these remote indigenous communities to kind of test all their all the fire safety in the blankets and the extinguishes and things like that and why he's flying he obviously can't handle the phones so Sophie's been instrumental in that it used to be where you get home at night so I'm going to have to call him up and he was spending you know 15 16 hours a week on on these tasks so that's a eliminated all of that for him and allowed him to to have the phones man why he's in the in the air flying to these remote communities she can obviously schedule the jobs in straight away now which saves him ringing him up and trying to work out you know when to do it and that sort of stuff so that's just one off the top of my head I can be here all day talking about it yeah and you mentioned you work across a few different sectors like how do you guys handle that with the different edge cases that each customer might have a slightly different workflow and different customers with different requests how does how does Sophie I handle those yeah so we started off horizontally as I said earlier and now we're moving back once we've figured out where the demand was and it really is in that high maintenance trades first there are other industries but also there are other players who are starting to dominate those industries so it's like where are the best industries and where is our kind of skill set best kind of you know where we best to target so we are going to more into those high maintenance trades or sorry high volume of jobs maintenance trades needs yeah so we've got the train Sophie module which as I said earlier allows you to break down each individual service frequently asked questions within that service what questions do you want it to ask you know what how do you want it to respond what do you want it to do at the end send a text message book in the job for transfer the call whatever it may be so in that train Sophie module you can get really really granular across the whole business like departments as I said services products frequently ask questions business details trading hours you can even get as granular as like putting in lead for particular team members so Sophie knows when to transfer and when not to transfer based on their working hours based on their holidays or based on the days they work as well so I mean we've built it so you can customize an agent specifically for your business yeah awesome and you you mentioned there around the approach you guys took going to market around you know going wider to start with seeing where where the pool was from the market and where the need and demand was and then now you've gone and narrowed that in which I think for this and it's like that's a go to market 101 that you know seasoned you know second time founders know where you know they got where big mistake a lot of founders make is where you know they start off broad and they stay broad where you know because I like well you know because end of the day like you're still early stage and so you basically it's easy to get caught in the trap of like I'm just going to take revenue from wherever I can find it to keep this business going and I think it's it's very disciplined to be able to then rein that in and focus on the niche and create the best product for that niche and then use that to then launch pad from so I think for this is the approach you guys have taken I think's a great lesson for us all yeah I learned that I learned that lesson last time in service.com that I use we tried to tackle 350 categories across every suburb in Australia and that was a big mistake because if you've got a plumber in Perth but you've got a lady that needs an electrician in in Brisbane it's like how do you match that marketplace so yeah I yeah that was a big lesson I learned we are we're really tapering it into not even just the trade itself but also the customer archetype who are like how many how many calls a week do they get but how many jobs a day are they doing what's their team look like like getting really granular into that and building for that and then once you've nailed that then you can scale out into other kind of markets that are kind of similar you know whether it be pest control or or building inspectors you know similar kind of thing but no different industries yeah absolutely I think people underestimate how big a niche market actually is because they might think in their own world like you probably experienced during the service.com.au days where you would see so many inquiries for say like plumbing services and you're like never in a million years would you assume that that many people need plumbing services on any given day you'd probably think you know maybe there's a handful but you know there's thousands of people across the country and then if you add the world to that it's it's infinite. Yeah yeah I mean it was crazy being in the US there's a there's 210,000 electrical companies or electricians and 131,000 plumbers that's just that's right there there's really 350,000 businesses just in two trades just in state not taking a consideration in the UK New Zealand Australia and you know the rest of Europe so yeah like I said it's a massive market so it's not something I'm worried about is running out of customers that's for sure. Absolutely now if we just transition now and delve into your own go-to-market strategies within Sophie and you've lived two lives you know one being the GTM era and then you've also lived the marketplace era of service.com.au and like how have you seen the go-to-market playbook evolve and if you found there's certain things that have crossed over that have worked back then in the previous era that worked now and what's changed. That's a that's a quite I could be here for quite a while talking about that but I'll try to kind of condensate all downs. When it comes to market places it's usually a needs-based service then and there especially for what we're doing like like you know I need a plumber. That problem is in a moment in time once it's fixed you don't need that that plumber anymore. So search was really good for us on that front because it's a needs-based they just go to Google back then and they were just type in plumber, service paradise and they'd find a plumber and they'd either post a job or they'd call. So search was definitely the kind of king when it came to marketplaces. When it came to Sophie though because the need or the demand for solving the admin problem has probably been there since they've started the business and it continues to be one of their biggest pain points. Our best channel has been social and Reels. So I saw something yesterday I think it was seven years ago average person person watched 10 minutes of short-form content. Today the average person watches four hours. So that's where the attention is. So for us it's all been social funny Reels really quick hooks and then straight into like what Sophie can actually do on the benefit off the back of Sophie. So that's been amazing for us. Search as well but then moving forward watch changed really getting in the the AI results. So people more and more are going to these large language models into Google to ask questions. If you see now when you do a Google search, Gemini gives you the kind of AI response. It's making sure that you're now in there because people aren't going to be clicking into websites as much anymore. They just they get the answer for what they need and they'll they'll click on that and then from there we're getting more and more traffic. So it's about how do you rank within those kind of AI search results or AI SEO as they're calling it? Yeah, absolutely. Like there's a big shift at the moment like you know marketing is to spend a lot of time really optimizing on page you know trying to work them through this funnel down the page you know first fold and all these all these principles but as you've just highlighted like there's less and less people that are actually spending time on websites now and having to do their own manual research they're able just to jump into an LLM where the Gemini chat GPT called and then start asking questions get do all of their research and it's only literally at the point when they're done their evaluation ready to buy it and they'll go to that website literally just to click a button to request a demo or to to subscribe. I mean even that I think's going to change as well because now with a lot of these LLMs they're now integrating that full checkout mechanism with in their interface. Like you're seeing it now with being out of purchase food you know it'll go and go on to the website on your behalf and go and make that order it can go and book travel for you as well and you never actually have to leave that interface so it's going to be interesting to see even how that shifts further. Yeah I think I think we're we're watching in real time the the death of the UI user interface like with voice you know I think in the next two again I could be wrong but in the next two to three years maybe even less we'll just be speaking hey can you get me a flight to Sydney what are the best prices you're not even actually go to the website Gets does got this versions got this and you're kind of just speaking to an AI or whatever and they're going to be on do it all for you so I think I think UI is is on the way I'm even search in in some kind of capacities on the way out as well. Yeah absolutely and you mentioned Reels are working really effectively effectively for you and incorporating humor I guess that entertainment factor as opposed to just sprucing a service. What are some examples of some of those I guess you know funny Reels that you guys have found work effectively for your customers. So really low-fi content like not polished content at all like on the phone. One of them is is me lying on the couch and it's rubbish everywhere and I'm like hey mate I'm not going to be in today and then Luke spins around on the chair and he's like receptionist calls in sick again and then obviously we go check out this AI office manager we've created and it goes hey I'm Sophie and it's like we've used an AI video to kind of introduce and then she kind of goes through and breaks down I can answer your calls I can put him in a dashboard and it's about 15-20 seconds long that's one of our best performing ads another one is me walking down the street and I go I tap my my pants and I go oh I left my phone at home lucky Sophie's got me covered like we just did hundreds and hundreds of hooks and just dumped it all into meta and then just see what took off and just kept pumping the budget into them and killed the ones that didn't go so well and we just do that every single month it's just that high volume high content fly will get as much content out there as possible and just watch those those kind of ad campaigns and just turn the budgets off the ones that aren't doing so well and then the ones that do well we're moving to separate campaigns and push them even harder and yeah that's been a big game changer for us for sure yeah that's fantastic and you mentioned so that 20-30 second clip length is where you're seeing yeah yeah so that short form versus that long form yep and then just straight into a lead form soon as they fill out that lead form Sophie calls and back on their phone and we straight into a demo and you're actually chatting to Sophie and she's selling herself great and if you guys done much exploration like like tiktok as well as well outside of yeah tiktok so tiktok's not as good as as Instagram and Facebook I think it's probably just due to the kind of demographics the people that use tiktok it's a bit younger but it does work but our best performing is definitely being met up for sure and search as well search we know once they they trigger we trigger their kind of what's the word I'm looking for like interest then they go off and search about it and that's another way that we're starting to get more and more volume coming through every single month but digital is where it's at for sure yeah right and is there any campaigns or plays that you guys have run where you thought you know you may have been trailing and it's just completely flopped in you you've learned the hard way I don't think there's any channel particularly that that doesn't work I think it's how you can kind like we've definitely made mistakes so like programmatic was a big failure for us we spent $10,000 trialing that out like pretty early on and we didn't get too many leads through that but I think it was it wasn't it wasn't the channel itself it was probably the way that we ran it now messaging and the people that were targeting another one was PR but again PR can be fantastic if you have a really good kind of story to run with obviously being in AI it's very saturated at the moment everyone's talking about it so it was hard to get traction in in PR even early on and when before it was you know more of a saturated market so that's another one but I think it's more about what we're probably serving up rather than the actual channel itself I mean they've all got a place it's just how you use them and make sure you learn from it yeah absolutely and have you done much on LinkedIn or is your customer base they don't really live on LinkedIn do that we haven't really done anything on LinkedIn yeah not too many not too many tradis and services we have some partnerships is good like obviously partnering up with like how I would you call them like trading trading courses where they help you manage your business that's been great getting referrals through that but yeah search and socialist that's been king for us if it's done correctly you know it's got I mean it's it took us a long not a long when I say a long time in the startup well three weeks is a long time but it took us it took us a little while to kind of work out what worked and what didn't work but it was just our volume just punching out as much content as you can and you know playing around with those call to actions in your in your Google ads and and like really being you know testing and iterating constantly and and evolving your kind of strategy as you see wins yeah and what about your pricing strategy how did you guys come up with that and was there any learnings and have there been any iterations since you've launched yeah so basically what we did was we we started selling it for a hundred fifty bucks a month a norm was bulking so then we went to two hundred bucks a month and was that just like yeah I was like let's just see what I love for a number we've got a lot kind of better in our pricing strategy now but back then it was just like let's just get it out to market and see what people are willing to pay for it and how much value we can we can kind of deliver from that that price now we're moving into more of a hybrid model so enough you've seen loveable they're the fastest growing a startup on the planet zero to 200 million I think like 12 months which is 200 million ARR yeah making it look easy making it look easy I mean they've got ridiculous turn which is we call it like AI tourism so people jump on the tool if it's cheap and then they tested out and then they turn off but we're going to go for this hybrid approach so we believe that we need to increase our AC across across our customer base depending on the size of the business so you'll pay a flat just kind of SaaS model in a way depending on how many people you've got in your team and then you're going to pay usage or outcome not really usage is more outcome based so the more outcomes that the that Sophie does for you answering calls following up unpaid invoices following up quotes rescheduling jobs with customers whatever it may be the more outcomes that Sophie does the more that you'll pay with the size of the business the bigger the business the more you use it the more you pay and it also decrease for those seasonal jobs or seasonal businesses like air conditioning experts you know they're going to be they're going to be taking 100 calls a week in summer but in winter they're going to be taking three calls they shouldn't have to pay the same amount of money across the year if they're not getting the value out of it so we're trying to tie our tie our pricing to the value that we give to our customer and heavy found is it is tracking those outcomes you've found a bit of a challenge within your business yes so we're started off basic you know I mean it's easy to measure calls it's easy to measure measure text messages and things like that it's just like you know but as as the product evolves and gets more mature we'll be able to kind of manage it a bit better so this pricing strategy is a constant kind of what do you call it? Working progress like it's it's something that you just got to keep going back I think a lot of people make the mistake is they set and not just in pricing but in so much things and go this is how it is and this is how it's always going to be and not actually listen to the customer where I think it's just it's a constant iteration and change and evolve and listen to your customer and find out what they're willing to spend and are they happy and all that or do they think it's too cheap you know like and if you have a good relationship with your customers like I've got really good relationships a lot of my customers I speak to quite a lot of them like and they text me you know I've got they've got my direct line so can be annoying sometimes I call you at Sunday night or whatever it may be but I want to remain close to the customer because the more that I can get out of them the more I can build a product for them that they're going to love and stay with and this one here as well like when I started service.com that are you to be honest actually it's funny I think it was at a talk that you did years I went to a talk that you did in Europe on stage years ago and there was this gray head guy and he's like if you're trying to build a business to make a lot of money you've already failed and I remember thinking at the time going well everyone gets into business to make a lot of money whereas with Sophie I've I've gone of the other way of like I really want to solve this problem my brother's a trade is I see how much of a burden is for them a lot of my friends a trade is if I can solve this problem and I do it really well and I create a great product that people love the money's a byproduct yeah absolutely and I think even the big players are still figuring it out there's this big shift now going from like seat-based pricing across to this usage base or outcome base pricing using credits and you know even the larger companies like I know like we use HubSpotters our CRM and I think they've had about three or four pricing iterations in the last 12 months with the way the credit system works within their system and so it's and it's a new field we're all entering at the moment trying to figure it out but I think the approach of you know making sure you know you got to get that feedback from the customer see what's working in that ability and willingness to evolve and adjust and adapt making sure whatever you communicate or put in your initial communication to your customers you know doesn't end up putting yourself in a position where you can't make those maneuvers if needed yeah yeah exactly yeah I mean yeah yeah yeah well let's let's transition across to leadership and team culture you guys put a lot of effort into this I see your your social rules if your team you know high-fiving each other and all the different things like you know cultures like a big thing in startups where you know building a strong culture often determines you know how successful that company goes and I can see you guys put a lot of focus and effort in this area so like what do you watch your ethos around building culture and what are some of the I guess really rituals or initiatives you guys do to help establish and build that strong startup culture yeah cultures super super important it's really hard to build and it's really easy to destroy or you need one or two negative people in that culture and the culture can be gone completely I think number one is we're all a team there is a hierarchy to some extent but we're all in this together we're all working on the same problem we're all trying to save the set up solve the same problem which is you know eliminate admin for service based businesses it's setting the vision across the team really early on so everyone knows exactly where we're going on what we're doing and the other thing I think is transparency like I am super super transparent with what we're doing in the business there's nothing that you can't ask me with you can look into our profit loss you can go like as deep as you want into anything I've got nothing to hide like I believe you know like people see all this money coming in and they're like oh they're making a fortune but they don't actually see all the costs going out the other side so yeah like have a look like this is this is what we're doing this is where we're going this is what we want to be this is where our goal is this is our financial forecast so I'm super transparent the only thing I don't discuss and this is because it involves the individual themselves is remuneration from team member to team member but everything else I'm fully super transparent with which I've I've had people tell me are that can cause problems I think if the culture's right it doesn't it doesn't cause the problems yeah if you've got the right people and it gives that that sense of like they you guys are on a mission together it's like it's as much their businesses as yours yeah and it sets that mindset the other thing is ESOP as well so I carved out really early on a chunk of ESOP for pivotal players within the business because I believe it's made to go around like if we're doing really well and we're being successful and we're you know growing really fast I think that those key players should be a part of that like I that's a true like value of mine like it's made to go around so a lot of the team have a small slither in the action which which makes them feel like they take ownership and it's it's their business as much as his mind yeah awesome and I believe your company's all in-house is that right you guys all come to the office each day or do you guys run like a hybrid model so well all the goal cause people come to the office and then we do have some people overseas that do different tasks but most of them come to the office what's your view on you know in office in person versus hybrid versus fully remote for a startup company yeah so it depends where you said startup okay so startup versus scale up and you know like corporate very different for startup my view is that you need to be close to the problem so I've hired four AI engineers one of them will happen to be on the goal coast believe it or not which is you know it took me a while to find him I've went through the GitHub and end up finding I was working on voice our voice AI and tracked him down and and got him over but the other three were all over Australia one was in Canberra one was in Newcastle one was in Melbourne and I'd convince them to come to the goal coast and work in the office with us and the reason being I believe this so early on is because when you've got sales you've got support you've got growth or marketing and you've got engineering and product if they're together and seeing the issues and the problems that they're having which in within those teams that feedback loop happens a lot quicker it happens on like a you know a 10 minute kind of basis whereas if you're all remote and you're not seeing the fires that are happening every single day you're kind of you don't know what's happening or you can't see it then you don't really think about solving it so really early on I think it's important to have a core team in the off working together understanding the problem and closing that feedback loop so we can change and iterate you know by the end of the day rather than by the end of the month they're completely agree for that you know that initial phase I try to get something off the ground having everyone in one place all in like I remember one of my previous startups was we were doing or building out virtual reality augmented reality technology went was first emerging a little bit like now the voice AI space back then and we couldn't find a talent anywhere locally like we were trying especially on the goal coast it's even harder and we could not find any world class talent in that space locally and the closest place we could find someone that actually had the talent and the skills we needed was all the way over in Argentina and because we wanted to make sure like we bring these people in for the same reasons you've mentioned we ended up flying them over here paid for their visas everything you know house them to basically be able to create this product and now they even to this day the day now set their whole lives that got children here on the goal coast as well which is kind of cool to know that they've completely reestablished their life here in a different country on the back of it but to your point like having people in that initial phase is so pivotal and what would you say is like that point at which it's okay then to start going remote and having people like you would you say it's a like ten head count twenty head count or would you say it's a revenue yeah i that's a hard question i think it's individual i mean each business is very different really depends on where you are in in the journey like if you're still having the issues and the problems you stay together but the other thing is like as you scale up the the issues and problems just evolve and change and become bigger if anything so it's a tough that's a tough question to answer i don't really have the answer there i'm a big believer of like having the team i think you can have multiple teams in different locations like a us base or a uk base but i'm a big believer of keeping the team together as much as possible now i don't say like you can't work from home like on some days but as long as some days you come into the office and you're in a team environment together where you can kind of see what's happening for sure but in a short term i'm very honest and open with these guys when they're joining i pump them up by charm exactly what we're doing from a revenue perspective how fast we're growing what our vision is where we want to go and that usually convinces people to say yeah you know what this is a really good opportunity i want to come and join this rocket ship and kind of be a part of it so um i haven't had any issues yet but in saying that i'm not i'm not i'm not what's the word i'm not close to um having people worked from home for a few days a week if needed but our our CTOs from Peru brought him over the same thing with the visa and everything yeah it's our second in startup culture you know teams often run into the tension between speed and accuracy or reliability of product how do you guys lead in a way that maintains both momentum with without creating that chaos or sacrificing on quality yeah so for me it's speed is number one especially in the space that we're in obviously the quality has to be there too but i'm not looking for perfect so we as we're releasing features we're releasing the MVP of the feature we have an idea of what we want to build after speaking to customers but until you actually put it in their hand you don't really know so we always release a very very basic version so for any invoicing for example all it could do was effectively you could you could write any an invoice send an invoice and and so if you would follow up that was the MVP now we go once we get the feedback from the customer we see how the customer uses it then we go back and polish it and go deeper into that into that part of the product so i think speed is number one and releasing an MVP blocks in each section of the product because when we first released it was just to just answering calls now it does scheduling quoting invoicing customer CRM all that kind of stuff and we released that based on the kind of next part of the process so we knew that once you answered the call we had to schedule the job so then we did schedule and then we had to store the customer's detail so then we did CRM and then we had to do but once we did that once you schedule that then you have to create the job so then we did job so we kind of just scale it out as the process was happening but the vision we had the vision from the get go and it hasn't really evolved or changed from that yeah and I think it's a sliding scale isn't it like you you can't launch something too scrappy um because otherwise you experience high-churned but on the flip side you know you don't want to go after like perfection because then nothing will launch and what you've probably found is it's often the customer that will help evolve the product in the direction that it needs to to go whereas if you try and wait try and build something perfect and launch it you then realize you know customers didn't need half those features and they actually wanted these other set of features that were important to them yeah or not often always the customer tells you what they want like realistically for us yeah I mean the more customers you speak to they tell you what you want like I'm still like yesterday I did three hours of on the phone with customers just what else do you want to see what is perfect look like for you what would be a game change a really understanding that and then if you do 20 or 30 calls and out of those 20 or 30 calls there's a feature that comes up 25 times well now I know what I'm building next yeah absolutely now with share and decision um to your investment journey I know you guys are relatively early on in that but if you can just help share I know you guys recently did a raise for Sophie can't understand like what did investors need to see before writing a check and I guess what do you think made them ultimately invest in Sophie I mean I'll answer the second part of the question because it kind of answers the first part as well but I think my background my deep kind of knowledge of the customer and what they wanted and then the traction as well like we went to them with some serious traction and like at the time signaling you know I worked at my other business so doing 200 300 sales in a week was kind of sorry in a month was kind of standard so I thought that's what it was and then when we went to the VC and was like you know we're doing this they're like how how are you doing that like how are you doing this so quickly and then I found out that we're one of the fastest growing startups in Australia from a revenue perspective so realistically it was just my background my deep understanding of the customer the product that we built and also the the traction that we had like we had undeniable traction they like people were you know it was it was in the end like it was another subscribe round yeah fantastic and was there any key metric or metrics that you felt the VCs were really focused on and that was important for them yeah I think vision they want to know what you're building and how deeply you understand it obviously and they also you know again like your background like why why why are you solving this and not the person down the road like what do you know about this problem and then thirdly again traction like you know you the traction if you have traction it speaks for itself if you have the demand there and you can prove that people want the product and they're buying it then it shouldn't be too hard to raise like people people talk to me sometimes like I've been trying to raise for six months and I'm like you're missing something major and the thing is as you know Mark like you've dealt with VCs they don't really give you too much feedback they're like oh we're just going to pass on this you know this round they don't tell you why but for us it's and the other thing is as well like our churn while it's higher than I'd like it to be but considering how early on we are in our journey and how how premature our product actually is it's actually pretty good so that was another thing they were like yeah compared to other AI startups like your churn is super low and did you find that they focused more on that like they're more focused on the growth aspect versus maybe the churn or even the I guess growth was definitely their number one factor for sure and was there a specific metric they shared like that was you know was it were they looking for 50% growth 100% 200% growth at your stage I mean if you're doing 25 30 25 to 30% month-on-month growth that that's pretty good that kind of if you're doing that growth you should have no problem I mean it depends if you're going from one to two to four to eight not so much but if you're doing 100 to 200 to 400 to 800 or whatever maybe maybe it kind of yeah I mean for us it was it was just like it was team vision interaction plus also the early signs of product market fit where we were you know we weren't churning 50 60% of our customer base it was only a small amount still higher than I'd like it to be I've got some like as we get deeper into the workflow is that chair and I can see coming right down to even below industry standards is the goal yeah absolutely I'm gonna be going to a pitch night years ago and the founder of this company jumped up on stage to present the company and the first thing he said was you know our company is doing x million dollars in revenue with grew 300% last year he's like that's what you need to know he's like you guys versus it was like a mic drop and that was really it was just like um and they basically stop there I thought it was a joke I thought like they basically just went up there and just dropped their headline figures because they was so powerful and they go I don't think you guys care what the business is if it's going at this amount at this level of revenue I think that proves in the pudding and sure enough they had even been quiet afterwards I don't know how much they raised or how they went but they had all these investors going up to them afterwards because it was almost just like a mic drop moment the other thing is is um in Australia especially the investor kind of community all know each other inside out back the front like everyone knows everybody deeply and they all talk so like once you're on the radar if you're doing you know you're growing really fast like I was getting at one stage when we're trying to raise I was getting five or six a week you know like coming in let's have a meeting like they were chasing us so that was a good position to be in you know when when you're when you're trying to raise or you know like when they're chasing you it's it's it's it's it's funny but like I'd never raised any I bootstrapped service.com there I never raised any money before but we did it in like five weeks like I'd to finish money in the bank on a safe note in five weeks so good and is there any advice you would give to founders looking to raise in today's current investment climate question my advice would be get some customers like get some traction like especially in Australia there a lot more kind of price sensitive and risk averse so I would say prove the people actually want to buy a product and prove the product works that'd be the first thing but it'd be shocked how many people are going out they're raising and they've they've got this idea but they haven't built the product and they could easily build a tiny MVP and get a little bit of traction to show but they don't so I would say the advice would be is get an MVP out to market as quick as possible it doesn't have to be perfect as I mentioned before it just has to work to you know an acceptable level and get some paying customers and prove that you can actually get this to market yeah great advice now taking a look forward into the future like what challenges do you expect to see in the service business automation space over the next three to five years or what change I should say change I'm very bullish on what we're doing like I think that we're going to see more and more automation and AI agents amongst every business and amongst everything we do not just service-based businesses but for service-based business in particular and this is such an exciting time to be you know like in business or starting a business like there is so much opportunity right now to to create an amazing business I see it going deep into verticals so there's going to be a um a doctor receptionist for example or a medical receptionist it not only hands as the phone calls books you're in once you're in there with a doctor she's going to transcribe all your all your kind of notes she's going to write there referrals to you know whoever you need to go to she's going to write up your scripts the doctor's basically just going to sit there and click a button and it's going to kind of go through same thing with with trades businesses from an admin perspective same thing with accountants lawyers all that kind of stuff like I think you know like paralegal and hopefully no one's a paralegal listening but like people like that they're in they're in a lot of trouble because you don't need a paralegal to sit there and write all the all the all the notes anymore like AI is going to do it so I think it's going to go deep into vertical deep into workflows but the exciting thing there's a lot of opportunity out there to do that in basically every industry there's not one industry that's not going to be disrupted yeah absolutely and for Sophie AI like what's on the horizon for you guys next year in terms of whether is it new features expanding into new markets the only verticals so we're going to go deeper into our ICP as I mentioned deep vertical into these ICP deep into their workflows and really really deep to a point where like you know like no one's as deep as we are the second part we're going to do is we've already scaled from Australia to New Zealand now the UK we've got customers in those three countries I want to go over to the States I just spent a month there kind of as I said chatting to the customers and understanding the market and nuances so I want to roll out in the States early next year and then the third thing is probably well not probably it's happening is a PLG motion so a lot of our sales or a lot of our onboarding's done by SLG agents actually calling up and and closing them whereas I want to do more of a PLG motion I've got to be of an idea around that which I'll be releasing in the next couple of months as well which does it it's not a free trial or anything but it gives something a wave of value that's highly value but once they get it in there they'll get a taste of it and then they'll say now that's in there why don't I do the rest of it so that's kind of something we're looking at doing in the first quarter of next year yeah fantastic super exciting now find a question which I asked all my guests if you were to add one page to the gtm playbook whether it's a tactic a mindset or a principle what would it be that's uh you dropped it on me um good question go to market I would just say volume constantly constantly test and iterate as needed like it's it's volume test it measure it iterate so basically that flywheel of a be testing and don't make assumptions and get the data tell you what works and what doesn't correct just get the volume out there like try 500 different hooks and 500 different messages and let let the market decide don't try to come up with one and go with that and then test measure iterate yeah fantastic great advice and Jake thanks so much for jumping on the podcast today if anyone would like to connect either with yourself or learn more about Sophie AI what's the best place adding on LinkedIn that's probably the easiest place Jacob banks on LinkedIn and co-founder of Sophie AI but thank you for having me Mark I really appreciate it was awesome yeah it's been good to catch up after all this time yeah yeah for sure all right mate thanks for jumping on and I'll see you all next time