Speaker 1we hit more than a million dollars this year. So that's super exciting. Yeah. Around a $2,000 setup fee. It's already built. You're just selling it to them. Now it's finally become possible for normal people who aren't technical. So there's no excuse anymore. No, you can automate all of this process. You can, and you should. And then the monthly retainer that you charge them on top of that, you're not even doing anything for that 500 bucks a month. It's doing it for you.
Speaker 2What did that cost you all in? About 50 bucks. Wow. My guest today tried eight different AI businesses in the span of six months while he still had a job. And the ninth one he tried makes over a million dollars per year of profit with no office and three people helping. But the part that should interest you is that people with zero coding skills are charging two to $3,000 to set this up for local businesses and 500 to $1,000 a month to keep running it. And a robot writes the monthly report. And his 19 year old son just signed a client that said his service will save him over a hundred grand a year. So you've got a lot of money. You've got a lot of money. You make over a million dollars a year selling AI services to small businesses. Yeah. By the end of this episode, will people have enough knowledge to start to do the same thing?
Speaker 1Yes, definitely. I mean, selling AI agents is the biggest business opportunity I think of our generation. Yeah, I agree. And we make it easy for you and I'll show you how easy it is to automate that full process and do it without having any technical knowledge needed at all. Well, Aaron, why don't you start by telling me who you are and what you do? Yeah, I'm Aaron Edwards and I'm the founder of DocSpot and we help AI build AI agents for businesses. So primarily they're used for customer support and that's like a huge use case for AI agents for business that provides a lot of value to them. Okay. How long have you been doing this? Yeah, the business has been going like three and a half years. And before that I spent like six months just trying to launch any kind of product I could because I got that kind of entrepreneur itch listening to podcasts like yours and being like, Hey, I need to be doing something for myself. So I tried eight different things in six months and this is the one that stuck. Perfect timing, perfect place, figuring out the right niche and been growing since then. Okay. What were the ones that you launched and failed? Yeah. So the first, I think it was like all AI image stuff is right when AI images started becoming like possible. Right when it became available, I was like, I need to jump on this wave, you know, this new AI wave and images are just so visual and everything. So first time I made the WordPress plugins kind of went viral on Twitter X. Oh, that's cool. But didn't get any revenue from it. At all. Everyone loved it. Yeah. No one wanted to pay exactly. And then we kind of pivoted. I'm like, maybe this could be like for businesses, you know, if they want to do product photos or things like that. So tried that, couldn't figure out how to sell it to anyone. I think the technology was still very early. And then we found it was like the, the AI profile picture, a viral wave. I don't know if you remember that where Twitter. Yeah. Everyone's like creating that. And so we're like, all right, let's jump on this bandwagon. Cause it already does that. And so that was for success. We made 10 grand in two months. Wow. Selling shilling AI profile pictures. That's great. Yeah. So that was fun. But the, the fad died off of course. So you're always kind of tinkering, but with a full-time job. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And didn't, didn't quit anything yet, but yeah, eventually found something that worked and that was AI agents. What was the, like the spark of the idea that led to you trying this? Yeah. Just, I knew that AI was kind of the new technology wave, you know, just like in the past I grew up in the.com area, you know, with, with, uh, the websites and the web and all this stuff and, uh, seeing kind of that wave and how that launched a whole new wave of businesses and then even like mobile, like mobile apps and things like that. And I was like, this time AI is going to be that next wave. I need to be on that. So I need to learn everything I can to figure out how to do it. I had no idea how to code that stuff. It was just like try to hack something together and MVP and see if people would pay for it. Yeah. So what was the very first thing you did? Yeah. So the very first thing, well, I talked about the plugin and things like that. And then after the profile pictures died out, then my wife was like, Hey, I've always wanted to make a children's book. But if we use that technology to do the custom children's book for kids. So we did this one, we called it imagine AI and the kids would upload or a parent would upload the photos. Oh, that's awesome. And it would transform the children into the pages of the educational inspirational book for them. I'm like, this is the billion dollar idea, right? You're merging virtual and physical, right? Yeah, exactly. And parents and they want to see their kids and educating this stuff. And so we sold an idea, but we can not, I can not figure out how to do ads that will convert. It was around Christmas time. I was like, is the perfect holiday gift. And it was just a struggle. I was like, it's, I realized how hard it is to sell to like consumers, you know, they have a limited budget and something like this that actually cost a bit. I mean, paying like 60 bucks, 40 to 60 bucks for a book is a lot, you know, a stretch for some people. Yeah. Cause they're custom printed each one. Yeah. But we did have some success with it. And even someone discovered it in our like local in Southwest Dallas and they kind of did a cover thing interviewing us. And then the Dallas morning show, basically they saw that and the producers called us up and was like, Hey, we want to feature you, you know, on good morning, Texas. Yeah. And we're like, okay, that's scary. A big jump. So we showed up there, did a live interview, showed off the book is really fun. But the funny thing is not a single sale from any of them. Not one, not one. Holy cow. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's just, if people are shopping for something like that, it's going to be like, a click on a website and then make that kind of quick purchase, you know, and if they watch it on TV or whatever, yeah, they think it's cool. But yeah. So after that, the real pivot into what business works is DocsBot and that's AI agents for customer support. So right after chat GPT came out, we're like, I was thinking like, what is the perfect use case for this? That a business like would find value for and pay for like right away. And customer support was one of those because of the company I worked for before I saw how we had so many thousands of tickets, coming in, you know, and they're answering the same questions over and over again. We're hiring these huge teams that maybe have to man the live chat 24 seven. And it's like, AI can do most of that answer a good percent, maybe even 70, 80% of the questions.
Speaker 2What was the company you worked for where you saw this?
Speaker 1Yeah, it was called WPMU dev. Okay. Yeah. And they were my first customer.
Speaker 2Cool. Okay. Yeah. How were you still working for them when you got them as a customer?
Speaker 1Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. It was more like a proof of concept thing for them. And then I was like, I'm not going to, give this to them. This is going to be my thing. So, so there definitely was a transition period, like building this up and getting more customers and things like that before I finally quit and just went full time for myself.
Speaker 2I mean, that's an interesting framework is if you have a full-time job, but you want to do your own thing, what problem can you solve for your employer? Yeah. That might make that your first time customer, right? Yeah. Yeah. What did you charge them? And how did you come up with what to charge them?
Speaker 1Yeah. Starting out, I believe we had like a entry-level plan for like 20 bucks a month. And then, you know, I was like, like 50 bucks a month and a hundred, I think was the max or something like that. Is that like per user or? This was just like for the whole product. So they deploy it like in their company to like start basically create a chat bot. That's how it started. And you put that on your website or whatever, and then it can answer your customer's questions. And then if it gets stuck or it can't answer, then it escalates to creating a ticket or to a live chat.
Speaker 2Yeah. Knowing what you know now, if you could go back in time, what would you have charged them? Or like how much could you have charged them back then? Yeah. I mean, I think it's a really good question. I think it's a really Yeah. Knowing how much value you had adding.
Speaker 1And so I think I was lucky in that I had a lot of influence from entrepreneur, Twitter and things like that telling me, Hey, charge more than you think you should. So we always had some bigger plans, 500 bucks a month. And I always had that thing contact us if you want enterprise. And that worked out really well. Cause even one of our early customers was Sony over in Japan. And I mean, that was a huge customer. Like, what do I quote them? I have no idea. Right. Yeah. And so I thought I shot high now looking back at the numbers and what I learned about enterprise sales. It's like a tiny amount. Yeah. Compared to the contracts that they're used to signing. Yeah. But you learn. Yeah. I spun that out and, and shared it with people that I knew and in that kind of space and say, Hey, is this something you'd be interested for your business? And I put a wait list signup form on there and just sign up if that's what you want. And even had a survey, like what were the core features you would need. So that gave me, I got two or 300 people on that wait list that were business owners and stuff. Yeah. And they told me exactly what features they needed. So I'm like, all right, this is my MVP. Yeah. I just need to do these few check marks just to get something going. And I just worked 24 seven for two weeks and got it out there. Love it. How many Twitter followers did you have then? Then it was small, like a few hundred. Okay. And I'm not huge now.
Speaker 2Yeah. I don't want people to hear this thing. Oh, great. He's this big tech. Right. That I had it. Right. Yeah. Anyone could get 300 followers. Yeah. Right. And that's not to downplay 300, but it's like, we all know 300 people. Right. Y'all have 500 Facebook followers.
Speaker 1So yeah, exactly. And actually what really kicked off the product was going viral on Twitter. So with 300 followers. Yeah. With 300 followers. So I just posted videos, demos of me building it and stuff like that. And some tech influencer in Japan, I have no idea how he found me. He reposted it. He like created like a bot in Japanese and he's like, this is like great AI for Japanese. And so this was like a Sunday and I wake up in the morning and I have like two, 300 support tickets all in Japanese. Wow. And, and the whole servers are Sony, right? Yeah. And the servers are crashed and everything like that. And like, what is going on? You know? And it turns out like it went viral. Like that tweet had like 3 million views or something in Japan. Yeah. Yeah. And luckily with AI, you can serve customers anywhere in the world. So you say support tickets, these are people that had signed up as users and then had support tickets and paid and then something went wrong or crashed or whatever. This was a very rough MVP. We didn't even have really good support for other languages yet. AI could answer questions in that but the dashboard was still in English, all this stuff.
Speaker 2Yeah. You built something and then you were willing to post about that. Exactly. Right. Wanting to share my story. Yeah. The phrase build in public has been played out. And a lot of people are like, oh, there's no benefit to building in public. I've heard that a lot recently. Like it's just, you invite competitors and I could not disagree more. I don't care if people don't like this. I don't care if no one, if I get three views on this, I'm going to post it regardless. Yeah. Because all it takes is one dude in Japan. You never know. Yeah. You never know. And he, he used it and tried it and posted about it because he liked it. What a great story. Okay. So that was like month one. Yeah. Okay. And so you had hundreds of users at this point or thousands, I mean, hundreds of support
Speaker 1tickets. So yeah, probably like hundreds of customers. I think we got three months, we hit 10 K MRR and that was where I was like, wow, this might actually be a thing. And you still had a job. Yeah. Yeah. I might actually be able to quit. And so I talked to my boss and he was real sweet about it. He's like, Hey, you can do part-time and just help with the transition, train up your replacement over. The next year and just act as more of a consultant kind of role. Yeah. So that was awesome. So I had the time to focus on the business more and still have a good chunk of my old salary just in case. Yeah. Yeah. So.
Speaker 2All right. Could you have like today, could you build the software that you have now with like a vibe coding app? Is it possible? You definitely can to some extent and that 80, 90% of the way there.
Speaker 1Yeah. And that's one of the hard things that we've had. Like we've had some, I was looking at my numbers of people who cancel, you know, cause we're software as a service. It's a monthly subscription deal. And what we're seeing over the last year is this increase from 1%, like I'll build my own to like about 13% of cans of people who cancel. Okay. That's the reason why. But what I've found, the people who cancel like that, they really weren't a good fit customer anyway. Sure. Like they're just maybe a single person. Yeah. It's not worth the cost to them.
Speaker 2Indie developer. Exactly. A solopreneur. Exactly. Yeah. Great. Those are awesome. But yeah, for your business, they weren't good customers.
Speaker 1Yeah. And the good. The good customer is like some company that's big enough that they have a support team. They have employees. Yeah. People need a dashboard to log into where they can see the stats and improve it over time. All this stuff that vibe coding doesn't really work for. You could get that proof of concept or something janky out there, but you need someone that can maintain it constantly, keep it
Speaker 2going, all that kind of stuff. I'm smiling because it's the customers of yours that have the most resources, the most talent, the most people, the most money, and the most money to save by building it themselves. Yeah. And the ones that are not doing exactly, they're just writing a check every month, which is great for you. Yeah. And it's the hustlers out there that you said it went from one, 1% of your cancellations initially said, I'm just going to build this myself to now 13%. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. But surely that's a much, much smaller percentage of your lost revenue because they're small
Speaker 1customers. Yeah. Do you have a free plan? We do. We always put a free plan just so we could say no credit card required. And one of the things I love that. That I did at the first is I didn't have a free trial or whatever. And it was just like, you pay us and show us you're serious. We'll give you a refund if it doesn't work for you. Yeah. But like, show us you're serious. And that as like a single founder that probably saved us, I can't even imagine how much time, you know, and avoiding hiring people and stuff. Cause only serious people would actually sign up and try it. Yeah. So what is, what are your pricing plans today? Yeah. So we have a personal geared one for that. Someone just getting started thing or a tiny business at 50 bucks a month. Uh, and then our main. Our main plan, and this is kind of our average customer is on 150 a month. Okay. Um, and then we have like a business self-serve that's 500 and then enterprise if they need some crazy stuff above that.
Speaker 2Okay. So 150 is your most common plan. What is your average monthly price?
Speaker 1Yeah. Our ARPU average revenue per person per user is I think like about 130. Okay. Something like that. Yeah. So it's very close to that standard plan. And what is your churn and lifetime value? Yeah. Lifetime value. Last I checked, it's it's a little over $2,000.
Speaker 2Wow.
Speaker 1Yeah. So like 20
Speaker 2months on average, give or take.
Speaker 1Yeah. Yeah. And then, yeah. And then churn is like our revenue churn is around 3%. So churn has always been hard and we've done a lot this year to like improve that. Um, but there's some things you just can't fix, you know, if there's the wrong customer, it's the wrong customer.
Speaker 2Yeah. Well, if they stick around for a month or two, they're probably going to stick around for years. Right? Yeah. That's the idea. Okay. Do you provide any service? Do you build custom agents for people or just you offer your software?
Speaker 1Yeah. So here's the shift that I've seen in the last year is before, like we got our customers, like classic, like software, like SEO, you know, a word of mouth, things like that, you know, and we've seen that drop so much. And so this year we've really had to push into like more of like a service, like actual talk to people and make it happen for them. Now we can use AI on the backend to automate 95% of that, but, uh, what we've found is the risk. So real op, and this is the opportunity for everyone watching here is that like building AI agents for like small businesses, most of them, they don't have the expertise. They don't want to learn even like how to use a new software, no matter how simple I make it. Yeah. They're installing water heaters. Yeah, exactly. So they need that person that can take like, okay, here's the problem they have and here's how I can use AI to solve it with the solution. And that's really where the opportunity is. Yeah. Are you doing any of that? Um, your company? Yeah. For the company. We've kind of pivoted. There's a lot to that. So right now, like most of our effort goes into like courting agencies and implementers instead of like going directly after customers, because the customers who are kind of technically savvy enough to like sign up and set it up themselves, no matter how easy we make it, that's kind of dried up and there's so many other competitors out there. So now we have a service offering where you have a white glove set up and then the maintenance for the first 90 days or whatever to, to show them that value and really get them onboarded. Uh-huh. And then all our agency partners. And then our referral partners who are spinning up agents and showing them the small businesses for us and making a lot of money in the process.
Speaker 2So are they white labeling that stuff to you? Yeah. Okay. So you're doing the work on the back end and they're your sales arm, basically. Yeah. Your referral partners.
Speaker 1Yeah. So there's different levels. Sometimes they're like white labeling it. So they're just having, signing up with their own account from us, reselling bots, you know, because our platform supports teams and multiple bots and things like that. And so they'll create like an agent, do a pilot for a business, sell it to them and upcharge a big amount. And they can have a monthly fee on top of that for service, maintenance, reports, all that kind of thing. So the business doesn't have to worry about anything. Okay. What are they charging for it on average? Yeah. So the, a good price point we found for a good fit customer is roughly around $2,000 setup fee.
Speaker 2That's what your agencies are charging their business customers?
Speaker 1Yeah. $2,000 setup fee. Okay. And then as much as 500 bucks a month, like, like maintenance. So, and it's going to depend on the size of the business, obviously. Like you have to think. Think about what value you're providing them. If you think maybe the average support agent that a company hires, maybe their seller is 40 grand a year. That's probably like base 20 bucks an hour and only goes up from there. And if you think each support ticket save, or it takes about five minutes of a employee's time, right. To answer, you can kind of like math that out. But most companies, I mean, with the plan we provide, you can do as much as without paying any extra, as much as like 15,000 tickets a month. So, I mean, you're talking about like seven, 10,000.
Speaker 2Exactly. They're saving. They'd be paying an agency 500 bucks a month and theoretically saving 7,500 bucks a month. Yeah, exactly. Two full-time employees. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. And then for that 500 month or whatever, what are you charging the agency? Is it just your normal software fee, 50 bucks or 150 bucks?
Speaker 1Yeah. Between 50, if they're white labeling it, then between 50 and $20.
Speaker 2Yeah. Per agent. So what's changed with you is you're still a software company. You're just trying to better sell your software to service companies. Yeah. Whereas before you were a software company selling your software to businesses directly. Is that right? Exactly. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1Yeah. And then there's people that are just starting from scratch. My son, he's only 19, fresh out of high school, and he started showing AI agents to companies. And he's got his first big contract that he's working on right now, setting everything up for them. And he doesn't know how to code. He's vibe coding the whole thing and using DocSpot for something, stuff like that. Yeah. What type of business? This one is a contractor. Okay. Just local? Yeah. Local contractor. Family friend or outreach? Someone I knew. And he's like, hey, I need AI so bad. And he's like, here's my son. He'll help you out. What's he going to be able to charge for this? Gosh, I'm not sure what it's going to be. But the value that he mentioned to me, this contractor, he's like, I could see this saving me like $100,000 or more a year.
Speaker 2Your son's like, I'll charge him $500 a month. And you're like, no. Yeah. I was like, let's think about this.
Speaker 1Talk to me before you pitch him. A good rule of thumb. I've heard, and this is for software. It may be different for other businesses, but you want to provide 10 times the value that you charge. So if you're charging $500 a month, make sure that they're getting $5,000 of value.
Speaker 2And walk them through the math. Exactly. All right. So you said five minutes per ticket, right? Right. 2,000 tickets per month, right? Right. I say conservatively, we're going to knock out 50% of those. Probably 70, but let's be conservative. We're going to save you $7,000 a month. We're only going to charge you $500. Exactly. That makes it kind of a no-brainer offer, right? Mm-hmm. What are your numbers today? And how have those grown over time?
Speaker 1Yeah. So it's been three and a half years. We hit more than a million dollars in ARR this year. Good for you.
Speaker 2Yeah. How much of that is, well, I was going to say how much is service for software, but it's all software. Exactly. You're selling to service businesses, but you're still software. Yep. Okay. Yeah. What would you have done differently from the outset if you could go back in time?
Speaker 1Gosh. So I kind of had that kind of bootstrapper mindset, like, you know, make the profit, like take the profit. You know, sock it away. Like, I would have, like, assumed. As soon as I was able to like financially, I would have like reinvested a lot more like an ads and like faster growth and things like that i never wanted to go down like that investment path like the kind of vc thing right even though in the beginning like of course they're calling me because they're like want to get an anything ai you know at that point in time maybe that was a bad decision i don't know but i love the lifestyle that's what's important to me i
Speaker 2prefer the lifestyle
Speaker 1business yeah yeah so for me now it's like i can work as much as i want usually 20 to 40 hours a week but this month i probably took six weeks of vacation and this summer interspersed between because so much is automated now with ai and i just love that and now we've grown i hired my best friend from high school going back best man that's when he's kind of joined the company so it's great not being alone anymore just having him helping out and my older son is working for us too fresh out of college and he's like learning marketing and sales and and how to get by in this world and it's great having that opportunity yeah and you can't do that maybe if you're like a vc back hyper growth company right what are your margins yeah so the net margin is like the net margin is like the net margin and the net margin is like the net margin like it's greater than 90 is a gross margin wow yeah so do you have employees yeah just that one partner who have hired my friend and my oldest son that's awesome and but
Speaker 2how long did it take you to get employees yeah a long time yeah you were you were making really good money without any employees
Speaker 1exactly yeah for a long time and i didn't necessarily have to hire them right it was more like a choice hey i want i don't want to be alone anymore
Speaker 2yeah um all right so how much are some of these agencies making i'm doing these services for small businesses what have you heard from your customers
Speaker 1yeah i mean i've heard all kinds of numbers you know i mean that mid price point i've heard is two to three grand for setup and then five hundred dollars a month but you think about that that recurring revenue it stacks you know and what works best that i've found is like usually like it's an implementer agency or if you want to start this for yourself like figure out what niche you want to target and what's cool about this ai agency works for almost any business and even customer support any business that gets any kind of customer support whether it's tickets live chat phone calls and other things like that so it's whatever they need this right and so it applies to almost anyone but we have everything from like a good fit would be like manufacturers product or manufacturers uh so we'll have like companies like a lighting company or one that sells construction panels or one that sells generators right and they have all these product manuals that have all these crazy tables and specs in them and they have customers asking questions all the time about the specs for this or this you know will this work for this use case etc and that's the perfect case for ai you know and i think that's
Speaker 2you know do you know how your these service businesses are finding them specifically are they going to their family friends facebook ads like cold outreach on linkedin what are they doing
Speaker 1yeah i'll tell you some good techniques that i learned so in order in person you can't beat that if you have a relationship you meet someone at the chamber of commerce at a conference whatever that's the best lead you're gonna get because they get to know you face to face so we do a lot of that ourselves you know and that's what works works for those agencies as well next i would say is like a phone call like pick up the phone call and i think that's the best way to do it phone call business you know you want to save money with ai i can help you and you don't have to be like a expert you just have to know a little bit more than them right yeah yeah yeah and then text you can do cold texting that's probably next best and email is possible but it's down there and that's a that's a very hard thing to do yeah so what
Speaker 2are you doing at conferences what what is this guy right
Speaker 1here yeah this guy is fun
Speaker 2so so for those that are only listening you've got what looks to be like a 3d printed robot yeah with the screen and he's moving his head uh left and right and blinking
Speaker 1yeah exactly so i don't know how to build things in real life i just sent this to my ai agent coding agent and i said hey create like the 3d models for me to print and like tell me how to plug everything together and what to buy on amazon and the idea was like we were going to these conferences like in person making leads connecting with agencies whatever i was like i don't want to pay 25 grand for a booth i mean that's expensive and i don't know how i could ever pay that off no matter how many leads i get right so how could we grab attention on the floor and so i had ai help us build these little guys these little robots and they just sit on your shoulder there's actually a magnetic shoulder okay that
Speaker 2changes everything yeah because if you have a big table and it's sitting there you might not even notice it exactly because i mean we're like like six inches tall yeah yeah okay so you put it on your shoulder yeah so it mounts to our shoulder
Speaker 1like with magnets everyone we're just walking around everyone in the whole place under your shirt yes exactly yeah everyone in the whole place they came up and talked to us yeah you can't miss guys walking around with a robot on their shoulder right and it's a perfect conversation starter and also we actually had it connect to our voice agents uh with docspot so you can actually like talk to it and like have a conversation it's kind of a like a live demo of your product yeah so what does it do does it talk yeah it can ask me a question tell me a joke or tell me about your business okay and do it yeah so you can just interact with it yeah you can talk to it and interact with it and things like that yeah what model super cool what model are you using for that internally it's powered by docspot and we're using the latest open ai like voice real-time live models okay what did that cost you all in about 50 bucks wow a lot of
Speaker 2time yeah first one surely yeah exactly the help of ai yeah
Speaker 1how many do you have i made three for
Speaker 2now but we can make that could be a whole business i know that could be a whole business you can sell those for 200 bucks almost
Speaker 1everyone on the floor was like i want one of those yeah maybe we're in the wrong business we should be selling you should just have a second
Speaker 2business right exactly i know you're you're probably not exactly but if you were to sell one of those you're probably not exactly a back of the napkin attribute x number of sales or monthly recurring revenue to that little guy yeah what would you say it is well
Speaker 1so far we've taken them just to one conference but we probably got like 10 to 20 leads from there okay at least two customers so far and we're we're still talking to all those leads you know and these
Speaker 2customers worth 2 000 bucks
Speaker 1yeah and a lot of these there were like agencies and stuff so we're not necessarily selling to them we're trying to help them sell to their customers right yeah well that's quite the uh the roi
Speaker 2yeah it's thousands of dollars from a 50 investment and i love that
Speaker 1you just have to think different that's what marketing it is it's like being unique it's not being like everyone else and even in the age of ai where you can make amazing videos amazing content amazing websites whatever you got to figure out how to stand out so you got to do something
Speaker 2different people could do that for any business it's just a conversation starter exactly that's what a great takeaway yeah are you are you or your customers building any other types of ai agents or is it still like customer
Speaker 1support yeah so our platform is kind of flexible like it can be used for like sales teams collecting leads we have voice agents too so the same like bot that has that can shout on your website you can call it with the phone number or connected to your own systems or app or whatever and and do the full like voice thing as well you know but that's not really our target is like the classic like blue collar service business and he's like an ai receptionist like you can do that probably for cheaper like would go a high level or something like that it's more like if you want that complex like you got product questions things like that that are complicated policies and things you need to make sure that ai follows all that kinds of stuff we're really good at helping with
Speaker 2that okay but like the 80 20 of it is customer support yeah from day one until today yeah most
Speaker 1people yeah we've really had to niche down on that because before it's like oh you can use it for your internal team and that is a good use case actually some of our bigger customers they don't even deploy it to their customers publicly it's used internally like for their team maybe there's a hr bot that people can ask for and they can use it for their customers and they can use it for their benefits questions within slack or whatever yeah you know for the team or different use cases like that so there is definitely more niche than just that customer support thing what models do you
Speaker 2recommend for customer support bots
Speaker 1so it really just comes down to the cost benefit ratio and they're changing all the time so we're always like integrating the latest stuff and figuring out okay what's the best like balance of cost and quality for this use case and we do all the testing internally so you don't really have to worry about that but i love like some of the newer models like gpd6 luna and stuff they're so cheap and efficient and super smart compared to like
Speaker 2when we launched yeah what do you think like the killer offer is that people can give to small
Speaker 1businesses yeah so
Speaker 2i think like both like sorry offering and
Speaker 1price right yeah so the kind of steps that that we do for this and that the people who sell this is like first identify like the need like you need to figure out like first make sure that they have knowledge so you can use an ai agent website find leads or things like that and it's going to find those businesses maybe they have a knowledge base maybe they have old style chat bot on their website and you can use like built with or things like that that actually tell you okay here's all the websites that are using this help scout widget or whatever and there's your niche right there you can target all of them say hey help scout you have customers asking questions help scout just points them to the docs or whatever yeah yeah we can give you an ai agent that's going to solve like 70 maybe even 80 of your tickets so that frees up your team you have to hire less people right but you can prove that value you know
Speaker 2yeah what were your sales over time so it's been three years you're over a million in annual recurring revenue yeah how did that
Speaker 1grow yeah so it's almost like a straight line the whole time of three to four percent per month growth okay which is great it's not like a hyper growth exponential thing but that was great and even like big companies like open ai anthropic like they've hired these big agencies to implement ai because they realize that and we can build the best agent or software or model or whatever but it's still not going to get into the hands of these small medium-sized businesses unless someone actually goes there talks to them helps implement it for them and so they're actually investing billions of dollars in that as well so they know they know the deal yeah and that's the opportunity is is shilling ai agents
Speaker 2to business and i think it's still going to be an opportunity in 10 years i mean there's 30 million businesses in america yeah yeah so two thousand dollars up front yeah five hundred dollars ongoing could be more could be less what all is included with that and how much time do people spend on
Speaker 1week or every month yeah exactly that's that's the thing and with ai it's like become more and more automated so essentially what we do is what we've built it is we made it easy for implementers we have a plugin for chat gbt clod crockbot whatever you use that's the best 20 subscription you can buy by the way you know chat gbt or clod automate so much with that 20 bucks but you connect it to our platform and you can just say hey here's this business website or actually you could say go find businesses manufacturers that are doing this and that have a knowledge base on their website but no chatbot it goes out finds those clients for
Speaker 2you what model would you use for this sorry so yeah plot or open ai fable 5.1 opus 5.5 yeah models
Speaker 1change every day right now opus 5.5 that's amazing and then the gpt like six luna and opus those are great yeah and you get tons of usage from that for your 20 bucks a month yeah so
Speaker 220 bucks a month ask it to go find these customers for you then you're gonna ask for like point of contact i imagine yeah so
Speaker 1you do need to figure out like how you contact these people so one tip that i found is i used to like pay like for hrs pay for like apollo to get leads you know all these different services there's one that i found is called treg and it's essentially a router for all these api how do you spell that t-r-e-g treg yeah so you can
Speaker 2google it like zapier
Speaker 1kind of yeah or open router if you're just put deposit 20 bucks of credits in there it already has they're reselling api access to apollo to all the seo providers you're going directly to the source yeah all the things where you collect get information about leads and stuff like that and so you just attach that to your chat gpt your cloud and then suddenly it has a hundred different tools where you don't have to pay for all these subscriptions that's amazing yeah and you only pay whatever is one cent per lead that it needs to scrape yeah whatever and that's like an mcp
Speaker 2yeah right or a connector yeah right yeah you're you're getting an account on treg you're putting in the url yeah connecting it to chat gpt or or cloud yeah and then you're saying like all right what is the position at this company who is the person yeah what does that contact him it'll find that for you another another
Speaker 1good technique is look for people who are hiring customer support agents and that can do that too it can scrape you know like linkedin and different job websites and find that because you know they're about to invest a bunch of money in a new agent when you could sell them in stead an ai for like much much cheaper that's going to allow them to scale infinitely without hiring more people so they already got the budget they're already ready they have the ticket load they're a perfect opportunity to target if i were
Speaker 2prompting this i would go a step further and say all right linkedin's great email's great they're already getting blown up there i'm sure i want to know their strava link i want to know their paypal i want to know their venmo yeah i'm going to send them a dollar on venmo deep yeah absolutely because you got to stand out you got to be unique if i get their home address i'm going to send them a dollar on venmo and i'm going to send them a dollar on i'm going to mail them a box of chocolates or something a box of donuts i'm going to door dash them some tacos two thousand dollars per customer it's worth investing a little bit because your your close rate isn't going to go from 0.1 to 0.2 if you do these unique expensive things it's going to go from 0.1 to like 12 right like yeah it really makes that big of a difference wow if it's if it's cheap outreach then it's just that it's cheap yeah cold email is free it's cheap dms on it's not effective at all yeah and getting less so yeah
Speaker 1yeah and the great thing with ai is you automate that whole thing you know the outreach things even creating things in real life to mail to them you can automate all of that oh yeah the tools and apis and things like that and then if you're using like docspot i'm sure other providers we have competitors too that you can use different price points but we have like an mcb plugin as well so you can say hey find those customers now i want you to create a bot based on their help desk or they've scraped from the website it'll automate that and then you can automate that and then you can automate that and then you can create that for them create a demo link that you can automatically send to them so they can just click and see it already working yeah on their content on their docs so you don't even have to do anything and then you're just selling it it's already built essentially you're just selling it to them now it's finally become like possible for normal people who aren't technical to use these kind of agent employees though there's no excuse anymore no you can automate all this process you can and you should yeah and then the monthly retainer that you charge them on top of that the months how much value you're providing so you're telling your you just say okay chat should be to your cloud i want you every month this is my client i want you to go through look at all their stats their logs analyze it create a nice pdf report with my logo on it and email it to this customer so you're not even doing anything yeah for that 500 bucks a month it's doing it for you it's identifying okay here's questions it couldn't answer so now you're going to ask that client say hey you're missing a support doc for this topic you should make that it'll make your bot better things like that you're providing that value improving your business and you're providing that every month and you don't even have to touch
Speaker 2anything yeah okay and aaron this has been amazing thank you for your time yeah thank you where can people find you or your businesses
Speaker 1yeah well if you want to follow me on x i'm at ugly robot just one word ugly robot and i'm always building a pellet talking about what i'm building an ai and if you're interested in creating ai support bots and selling those to any kind of business at all we'll help you out we got a partner program we can help you with everything and that's at docspot that's d-o-c-s-b-o-t dot ai all right thank you aaron yeah thank you hey
Speaker 2guys if you're still listening to this it's probably because you haven't had a chance to take your airpods out you're still mowing the lawn you're still driving what have you if you're still here with me i would really really love and appreciate a five-star review on spotify apple or wherever you get your podcast it would mean a lot if you want to go the extra mile share this episode with a friend that might have an interest in starting a business it would mean a ton hope you have the best day of your life today
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