Latest / Founder Mode / When Founders Show Up

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When Founders Show Up · Founder Mode

0:00
Your PGA, Yeah. And so it's like, so we're like,
0:02
OK, why don't we make a little putt putt?
0:05
At the booth, couple pictures up of the Yeah.
0:07
We rendered that was like a Gemini nano banana render.
0:10
I gave it the booth rendering all purple.
0:12
I was like put a little mini golf hole on here with this
0:14
little thumbs up logo we have right now.
0:16
We ripped it, sent it off and they're like sure, OK, let's.
0:20
I was convinced they were going to say no.
0:22
It ended up working pretty good actually.
0:24
Yeah, From a traffic perspective, we had a good spot
0:26
because we were one of the platinum sponsors.
0:27
And then I would say we had more people pass through.
0:30
We did the math. Like 10 to 20% of all conference
0:34
attendees came to our booth at some point.
0:52
We're. Yeah, this is your idea, and I
0:54
liked it. Today we were going to talk
0:55
about you and I both last week were at an event in Nashville.
1:00
We hear a lot in the 996 community.
1:03
Everybody's grinding heads down. Get to work, don't go to events,
1:06
dinners, don't put yourself out. Just focus on building your
1:09
thing. And that's the conventional
1:11
Silicon Valley wisdom. There's the joke that the
1:13
founders that show up at all the events in the conferences are
1:15
not really working and they're not going to make it.
1:18
I think the truth is more nuanced.
1:19
You had the idea we should talk about that on this episode,
1:21
maybe get into some of the things that we did last week.
1:24
Yeah, I like it. I used to go to these networking
1:26
events and it's the same people over and over and especially
1:30
ones at a law firm or VC firm, I guess less obesity get its
1:33
founder focus. But ones that are general
1:35
purpose like alumni groups tied to something that wasn't
1:37
specifically oriented or even a specific vertical like health or
1:41
you're going to something like, oh, this is folks working in
1:44
network. You end up with a lot of people
1:47
selling each other and you're like, wait a minute, you're like
1:50
nobody's here to learn. They're all here to pitch their
1:52
book. The ones that always got me were
1:54
these networking ones because you would go and it's like, oh,
1:57
this alumni group and it was all Cpas, lawyers, real estate
2:01
people. It was a lot of individual
2:03
service providers. You got a bunch of rich donors
2:05
at an alumni event, right? Like, oh, this is cool.
2:08
You can go back to your school and then it'd be like, wait, the
2:10
three or four people that were there that founded companies are
2:12
getting swarmed. And a lot of them were trading
2:14
leads. The real estate person had stuff
2:16
for the CPA, The CPA had stuff for the lawyers, but that stuff
2:19
really was tough for me. And then I think the other one
2:21
that I've struggled with is ones that are like conference, where
2:25
you go to like a really big conference like Forrest or
2:27
Oracle, you know, even CES or some of these large ones and you
2:31
show up at some company's event or, you know, even tech week, we
2:34
went to a couple events and you show up and it's such a weird
2:37
smattering of people. Hard to find people you actually
2:40
want to talk. To yeah.
2:41
And then and then the ones that are there to find infinite time
2:43
versus I just wanted to go back and work right And I don't have
2:46
that drawing. It's interesting.
2:47
I'm sort of an anti conference, anti network person in general,
2:52
but as a marketer. I think they're important.
2:55
I think you're describing that opportunity cost issue.
2:57
We met at an event at CS, went to a Hampton dinner, sat next to
3:01
each other. You made fun of guys that run
3:03
agencies. I was like, that's me and you're
3:04
like, you're now my friend. I don't know how we pulled it
3:07
off, but we're here now because of an event.
3:09
I've been pushed to go to them. I don't like them either, but
3:12
I've been pushed because I am a service provider and so showing
3:15
up and being president and making connections is my bread
3:17
and butter. It's how I get new business.
3:19
In your case, you're building interesting companies right now,
3:22
it's probably less valuable for you to show up at any event.
3:26
Yeah. And so I think the point of this
3:28
is my perspective changed over the last week where I was like,
3:31
wow, this is the first time where I went to a conference and
3:35
you know, kind of participated deeply, was a sponsor, all these
3:38
things where it actually was impactful to the company.
3:42
And then I think the other piece that was interesting is I went
3:45
to a similar healthcare conference like 2-3 weeks ago
3:48
kind of as a warm up and did a much less sort of was lost in
3:52
the sea of booths. The impact was different.
3:54
We made a few connections, met a few people, but it's like
3:57
handfuls of successes versus out of this week in Nashville, a
4:01
couple 100 connection, very different scale of the output.
4:04
I think it would be fun to talk through how did we get there?
4:06
What did we do and why did we do what we did?
4:09
Yeah, I think that's exactly where we'll go in the context of
4:12
founder mode. How do you do events in founder
4:14
mode? How do you not just waste your
4:17
time and make it a good use of your time as good or better than
4:20
sitting in the office in front of the laptop grinding for sure.
4:23
Yeah, let's get into it. Let me hit you with a question
4:25
to frame it up. You have this business and you
4:28
can talk through how much you're wearing the hat.
4:29
So I don't know if you want to give us like the quick like,
4:31
hey, what is pretty good? AII believe this episode of
4:34
Founder Mode is sponsored by pretty good AI bought you bought
4:36
the sponsorship for this one. Maybe tell us about the business
4:40
and the hypothesis as to why going to events for this
4:44
business was important. The business is healthcare AI
4:47
and so it's really focused on sort of removing administrative
4:51
complexity around healthcare practices and healthcare systems
4:55
and starting with voice because it's tricky.
4:57
We all can do real time discussions, but like doing that
5:01
with AI is hard. And then we've all used in like
5:02
if you answer some questions, you give it some more context,
5:05
it gets better and better, but that's not a real time thing.
5:07
You couldn't have that conversation quickly, especially
5:11
when there's lots of look ups and information that needs to be
5:13
gathered where it's not like you're not infinitely
5:15
intelligent. We started and had some success
5:19
with one of our early integrations with Athena got on
5:22
their marketplace and they're like hell.
5:23
There's this conference coming up like Athena Health is the
5:27
name of the. Company that's like a electronic
5:28
medical record practice. If you get referred from primary
5:31
care or some primary care doctors use this, a lot of
5:34
outpatient ambulatory services. One of our earlier customers was
5:38
on it. We got certified in their
5:39
marketplace. And then as part of that, we're
5:40
like, oh, they're having this conference.
5:42
There's some ways to sort of like market yourself.
5:44
And I came to you and I was like, dude, what if we just did
5:46
their conference? We have three days to decide.
5:48
It was 3 days before the cut off.
5:50
This was about six weeks ago at this point.
5:52
This was going to be in a month. And we're like, I don't know.
5:55
We literally had a logo from ChatGPT that I had typed in,
5:57
like make me a logo and we put it up thumb logo, we'll put it
6:00
on the. Screen with the thumbs up logo
6:02
with pretty good AI next to it. The logo on your hat is cooler
6:04
than. That the new logo.
6:06
I'm an instant of Pac-Man. It's got some interesting
6:08
blocks. Feels good.
6:09
Yeah, forced us to come up with a new brand new logo, build
6:13
merch, tons of sales collateral. We did a webinar, a bunch of
6:17
things. Just get to this point.
6:18
You don't want to just show up at the conference and be like,
6:20
hey, it's me and a laptop. Which is what you had done a few
6:24
weeks prior, you know, wasn't going to be the thing for this
6:26
one. Yeah.
6:27
So we had the practice at this healthcare conference called
6:30
Health in Vegas a couple weeks before.
6:33
And that one, we did just show up literally with a laptop and a
6:36
name, and it was kind of crickets.
6:38
And then we met a few people that were interesting, learned a
6:40
lot, but it was also learned like what not to do.
6:43
Well, then you at that conference, you had the ability
6:45
to get meetings with people, but there was a twist to like how to
6:48
get those meetings right. They had this networking kind of
6:51
market Connect, they call it, where you literally pay, I think
6:55
it was 3 to 700 bucks per meetings for a 15 minute
6:58
meeting, which is insane, but like you're meeting with the top
7:01
people from these organizations and big health systems.
7:04
I did some of them and it was great to meet these people, but
7:07
it was very quick, very forced. They're exhausted because
7:10
they're taking all these meetings.
7:11
I was like, why are they taking all these meetings?
7:12
Are they getting the money? And so you, you know, doesn't
7:15
take much to, you know, look into the model.
7:17
They'd get a free ticket if they take 8 meetings and if they take
7:21
12 meetings, they'll get 750 bucks for travel credits.
7:23
They go for free. They're like, hey, I have to
7:25
suffer through two hours, right? So 815 minute slots of meetings
7:31
to go to the show and defer the cost of going to Vegas.
7:35
They don't. Give money for the slots.
7:37
No, they don't get money. They I give the money the show
7:40
takes. Then they're not like if you do
7:42
30 meetings, we'll give you $1000 to play slots of Caesars.
7:45
No, that would be crazy if you could have the person just
7:47
sitting there for 8 hours made some good connections and have
7:51
some follow-ups working. I think the model was two way
7:54
like you know, sort of like speed dating.
7:55
They had to opt in, but it wasn't as natural of a selection
7:58
of interesting people where they're just walking up and
8:00
actually interested in learning about what you're doing.
8:02
It felt the more like speaking into this paid machine.
8:05
Yeah. So a couple weeks later, you're
8:07
in Nashville and it's like we're actually doing this, right?
8:10
We think being physically present at conferences, it's
8:14
healthcare, like it's a little bit old school.
8:16
Like it's important to face to face.
8:18
It's not going to just happen because you do webinars in
8:21
digital events to get people in, right?
8:23
Like there's a component that you guys felt pretty strongly
8:25
would be real world. Like once you guys decided, hey,
8:30
we're going to go do this, what was the like?
8:33
Let's talk about the idea, the ideation process, What's the
8:38
goal? How do we show up in a way
8:39
that's going to move the needle for the business?
8:41
We're investing a lot of money. We're not just going to do like
8:43
the laptop with the little logo and like one person standing at
8:46
the crappy little booth, like we're going to do the big, the
8:48
big thing. So talk to me about, you know,
8:51
what was going in? Like what were the things you're
8:53
like, we have to do this, We have to learn this or achieve
8:55
this. So it's worth the time and
8:56
money. Yeah.
8:58
So I think for us, you know, teams around 10 people and it's
9:03
kind of remotely hybrid. We meet periodically, but never
9:05
all in the same room together. And so we're like, OK, so if
9:09
we're going to fly the entire team from everywhere, they are
9:12
all to Nashville for three or four days, that's like a pretty
9:15
big expense on its own. Just hotels and airfare and
9:17
food. And then you're like, OK, so
9:20
then that's like call that 100 grand.
9:23
Yeah, in some version of that. We also should make sure we
9:27
don't just show up and not have anything organized.
9:29
So we should do some brand work, some sales collateral, make some
9:32
decks. Somebody you know?
9:34
Your company, Winston Francois, was sponsor.
9:37
Of this episode of Founder Mode. Very rigorous RFP process to get
9:41
this done. No we can't do this in a month.
9:44
This is not how you do it. A full like rebrand.
9:46
A company build all sales collateral.
9:48
Don't worry about it, it'll be fine.
9:49
Let's do it. So we were like, if we're going
9:51
to do that, let's not have a booth in the back with one
9:55
chair. What's the way to get out front?
9:57
There was a beta. Should we get the biggest booth
9:59
or the smallest? And I was like, hey, there's
10:00
this platinum sponsored thing. It's like 60 grand.
10:03
And it's like, that's expensive 'cause it's like bootstrap
10:05
company. We're literally paying for it
10:06
ourselves. Like Google is one of the
10:08
platinum. Sponsors.
10:09
Google was the other platinum sponsor and there was like 6
10:12
others or something. Yeah, like a few, very few out
10:15
of the hundreds that were there. Why don't we take one of those
10:17
spots? We'll get the biggest booth, be
10:20
in the e-mail, our picture of Google all the time.
10:23
Kind of ridiculous. The company's less than a year
10:25
old and we're making that bed. But also like at least have the
10:28
whole team have a cool place to stand and hang out.
10:30
And like at the very least it's a good all hands meeting for 2-3
10:33
days sitting together. You pushed us to do something
10:36
which made the conference people uneasy, which was their view.
10:40
Like hey, everything should be everything should be the same
10:42
purple every. The same there's a table with
10:45
four chairs, a counter, your logo and a screen.
10:48
That's your real estate to do something different.
10:50
Tagline. 52 characters. 52 character tagline.
10:54
I didn't get the words. Right, there were some that were
10:55
three lines in more than 52. They didn't even follow their
10:57
own rules. They clipped, Yeah.
10:59
So the idea was that was going to be tricky.
11:01
And we're like, let's do something cooler.
11:03
And they're like, no, they're going to do prize wheels.
11:05
We talked to other customers that had been to this
11:06
conference. They're like, oh, there's a
11:07
prize wheel you should give out, like snacks.
11:10
The Bootha Cross gave out free cookies.
11:12
And you were like pretty good AI.
11:14
Bought yourself something internally that I really liked.
11:16
Everybody. Called Pretty PAIPGA means
11:19
something else to a lot of people and a lot of people in
11:21
healthcare and just business people in general like to golf.
11:26
So we're like, OK, why don't we make a little putt putt at the
11:30
booth? Let's see if we can get these
11:32
guys that want every booth to look the same.
11:34
We're a platinum sponsor. Do you think we could do like a
11:37
putt putt hole and I'm going. To throw a couple pictures up of
11:39
the. We rendered like a Gemini Nano
11:42
banana render. I gave it the booth rendering
11:44
all purple. I was like put a little mini
11:45
golf hole on here with this little thumbs up logo we have
11:48
right now. We ripped it, sent it off and
11:49
they're like, I was convinced they were going to say no.
11:53
It ended up working on Yeah, incredible, pretty good.
11:56
Yeah, From a traffic perspective, we had a good spot
11:58
'cause we were one of the platinum sponsors.
11:59
And then I would say we had more people pass through.
12:03
We did the math and like 10 to 20% of all conference attendees
12:07
came. To our booth.
12:08
Well, not just scanned it like actually.
12:09
Yeah, scanned their. Badge so so.
12:11
Going back to my question, what's the goal to build
12:13
relationships, get new business, grow the business, get new
12:15
customers? You've already integrated with
12:17
this platform, right? Yeah.
12:19
Yeah, And I think the idea was cool because many people were
12:22
activated by different things. They were like, wow, A lot of
12:24
people were like, oh, that's golf, that's fun.
12:26
I just want to play golf. Great.
12:27
And the actual best response was other sponsors in the booth.
12:30
And they're so bad. Who are you guys?
12:32
Why are you in front? One guy said, I've been coming
12:34
to this for 10 years building this company.
12:36
I've never heard of you. And like, why are you ahead
12:39
creating this splash? And I think that's, in
12:42
retrospect, reinforced all the decisions we made.
12:45
As big as you can go bigger given the time we're going to
12:48
have. The investment wasn't an extra
12:50
10 or 20 grand for this level of sponsorship.
12:52
That was 10% of what we're going to spend to send the entire team
12:56
and take a week off work 'cause we're not all going to, you
12:58
know, very few code. You know, we had some code get
13:01
written that week, but not as much as a typical week.
13:03
I think that investment in sacrificing the team's time was
13:07
well spent. We rented out Putt Shack, a
13:09
local mini golf, and threw a big party for people to come over.
13:12
Leaning into the theme resonated around this idea.
13:15
Great for our team to get together, but it was like this
13:17
incredible way to integrate and interact with a bunch of people
13:21
that are our target customers and introduce them to the brand
13:25
for the first time. Something different here, not
13:28
just about what they're building and how they're taking it to
13:30
market, but also the fact that they're willing to show up and
13:32
the entire team was. Right, I'll give you credit
13:34
because I pushed pretty hard on you and your partner JJ to like,
13:38
hey, I don't know if you guys should be investing this much.
13:42
I'm not sure you're going to get there.
13:43
ROI, you know, it seems like especially the amount of time we
13:45
have and you guys are like no, no, no, we want to show up in
13:47
this meaningful way. And to your point, like they the
13:49
same person saying we've been doing this 10 years came up to
13:51
me and said something like, OK, did you guys have a funding
13:53
round? You're going to announce like,
13:54
what's going on here? Like there's all these people.
13:56
You guys are a platform sponsor. And it was kind of fun to be
13:59
like, yeah, we're legit. For me, it brought up stuff from
14:01
my time at Google. I remembered going to Mobile
14:03
World Congress for the first time, and Google spent single
14:05
digit millions of dollars that first year for the Android
14:07
marketing team. And we showed up and we had this
14:11
incredible booth. It had a giant Android with a
14:13
slide giving out figurines. And the Android team crushed it.
14:16
And I was excited to be there. They gave out these little pins
14:19
and everybody who is an Android partner, which is everybody in
14:21
mobile, even in 2011, that was just like everybody got these
14:24
pins. And so the conference attendees
14:27
were running around trying to collect every pin to come back
14:29
to the Android booth and show us gamified the whole thing.
14:31
That experience 15 years ago cemented my perspective.
14:34
If you're gonna do something like this, and it's funny,
14:36
'cause I told you, don't go big. And like, turns out you, you're
14:39
right. And like now you know the word
14:41
activation and you're kind of like there's burgeoning
14:43
marketer. I'm really proud of you.
14:44
Truthfully. It worked so well and we did
14:47
kind of hijack so many aspects of the event and positioned the
14:51
brand so well to be like the cool thing to do at the
14:55
conference. And then on top of the through
14:57
line of golf and everything, we gave out these golf balls.
14:59
We had these really nice golf kits that we gave to the
15:01
prospects with the sponsorship that you guys decided to get the
15:03
Max sponsorship this meeting pod.
15:05
So we had this whole flow that we developed during the show.
15:07
We're walking people over and they would get the demo in a
15:09
private room. We had a big monitor on the
15:11
wall. It it was all those little
15:13
details. And this is the thing that I
15:14
would say for folks listening, like if you're a founder, you
15:17
don't really know how to do events.
15:19
Like the details actually matter a lot.
15:21
If you can put nice touches at every piece of the way that you
15:25
show up in every surface, at every interaction, it just makes
15:28
it look so much stronger relative to everybody.
15:32
Else that was cool and we made a joke a couple times like can we
15:34
just borrow the meeting pods from the other sponsors 'cause
15:37
they haven't using them, they weren't getting them.
15:39
In fact, there was some of the sponsors there, you know, an
15:41
interesting, you know, ways to get people to interact.
15:43
They were paying the first day we showed.
15:44
It was like, hey, $50 Amazon gift card if you take a demo and
15:48
then. Day 2 What happened?
15:50
Day $200 went up and I was like, look man, I'm talking to my wife
15:54
if this goes to 200. You're taking the meeting
15:57
because could be good. I want to create.
15:59
I am on the wish list. Yeah, I'm gonna wipe my wish
16:03
list with a couple demos. But it was interesting 'cause
16:04
there's a sense of desperation and these were companies that
16:07
have been doing this for a long time of like, man, we're do
16:10
whatever it takes. I think the other thing that
16:12
resident was more month to month.
16:14
If you don't love the software, don't buy it.
16:15
Everybody's trying to figure out these free trials to get them
16:17
into long term contracts and we're like we don't want to do
16:19
long term contracts. And I think there was some
16:22
interesting sort of viewpoints from that.
16:24
And I think the other sort of fun sort of competitive anecdote
16:27
is there was a couple companies there that had raised 10s of
16:30
millions and big money over 100 million.
16:32
Yeah, a lot of younger team members, mostly under 30, they
16:36
were frustrated because they had built an espresso bar in the
16:39
back and they didn't have. They were getting the kind of
16:41
foot traffic they. Didn't get the same foot
16:42
traffic. You've raised $100 million and
16:45
couldn't spend. The difference in the booth they
16:47
had versus being a platinum sponsor was at most 20 grand.
16:50
What are they at work and spent on?
16:52
A coffee bar and other thick things.
16:54
They had more than 10 people, so they'd probably invested again.
16:57
Unless they're all living in Nashville, they doubt they are
16:59
100 grand to get everybody there.
17:02
My favorite thing was they were standing outside of the.
17:06
Came back, they, they ended up standing at our booth because it
17:08
was easier to get traffic and hand out a business card or a
17:10
flyer and walk people back to their booth.
17:12
We gave them a few demos, like couple of play golf.
17:14
I got pictures of their reps playing golf with us.
17:16
You just wonder like if you've done this before and you're
17:20
like, hey, what forest for the trees?
17:22
Like, you know what, what are you?
17:23
You have all this cash to spend, but you're still not allocating
17:26
it correctly if you want to make a big impact there.
17:30
Yeah. I think the way you approach
17:31
everything is this founder mode mentality and tech growth
17:35
mentality, which is like if we're going to do something,
17:38
we're going to do it. It doesn't have to be perfect,
17:40
like 80% solution, but we're going to go hard and try to.
17:42
Max the results. I think what you're illuminating
17:46
is this issue where, you know, it's this oily ocean strategy.
17:49
We can go to this conference sponsor there and send the B
17:51
team or the C team and hopefully get a few leads.
17:54
The net effect is it doesn't work well and you've spent
17:57
enough money where it's kind of a waste.
17:59
And and so it's this like focused big push that's like
18:03
actually the outcome then justifies that investment much
18:07
more. And so the other thing I wanted
18:09
to touch on that I noticed is how you operate, Kevin, you have
18:11
a newsletter in a podcast called Founder Mode, is that there's
18:14
this like first and last out. Like I'm going to, if I'm going
18:17
to go do something, I'm going to do it harder and like work
18:20
harder than anybody else there. And you've got people on your
18:23
team half your age or younger who could grind harder, but they
18:26
just don't. So like, help me understand,
18:28
like when you think about, OK, I'm in Nashville, I'm doing this
18:30
thing. We've invested a lot of money.
18:31
How do you manage your time to bring that Founder Mode
18:35
intensity to a conference? Yeah, I had my 3 best workouts
18:40
during the three days of the conference.
18:41
So got up early, went to workout.
18:42
You know, there's a picture on, I don't know, LinkedIn or
18:44
Twitter. So I had, I, I learned that my
18:47
voice gets crushed at these things so much and loud over the
18:51
crowd. I talk a lot, but conferences
18:52
push it. I lost my voice a year ago and
18:55
I, you know, just from talking too much and I was ChatGPT hey,
18:59
how do I fix it? It's like I'm like there's a
19:00
Starbucks downstairs. What's the perfect order?
19:02
And they're like order a medicine ball and I'm like a
19:04
what? It's basically honey citrus,
19:05
mint citrus tea with honey and steamed lemonade.
19:08
I drank 4 of them that day and it brought my voice back at the
19:11
conference. First day Venti medicine ball
19:14
and then a Venti Americano black caffeine RIP and medicine ball
19:17
every day to set the voice and get the workout done and a
19:20
breakfast in the hotel. Or I could walk to the
19:24
conference early and see who else is early, have breakfast,
19:27
go to over tables, chat with people and 'cause I was like,
19:30
look, if you're going to sit in the hotel and read my phone and
19:32
read Reddit or check the news or skim emails, I could do that
19:36
anywhere. Why don't I go do that where
19:37
there's a chance of running into somebody?
19:40
And the other thing people miss is a lot of times they're like,
19:44
oh, you're just being set. Honestly, half the time I sat at
19:46
the table, I didn't sell a thing.
19:48
I just listened to the conversation because it was
19:51
interesting. Little pods of Teams, twos and
19:53
threes would be sitting at these tables and just hearing the
19:55
things they're they're frustrated or what's what are
19:57
they talking about? They're like, oh, Jimmy didn't
20:00
get this done. Bill's got to get this tough
20:02
with this team. You're learning the challenge.
20:03
They haven't been together either.
20:05
They're getting their chance to bond the problems.
20:07
They were debating about a new rule change in policy and their
20:12
IT team and how they were going to roll that out to the forms,
20:15
forms that were on the website and how they were going to roll
20:18
those out from PDFs to fillable forms and that didn't get routed
20:21
the same. And you're like, man.
20:23
This would never be a debate at a technology company.
20:26
You would just tell the person to do it that way.
20:29
But you can feel the pain of healthcare doesn't have natively
20:33
a technology centric people. My point of these things inform
20:36
your founders of like, hey, you need to remember when you're
20:39
selling to people, like I can't just be like, hey, go do this
20:41
thing. You're like, so now we literally
20:43
introduced with like, let us get our sort of technology person to
20:46
meet with your IT person or your vendor or whatever and take that
20:49
burden off of them because they don't speak tech.
20:51
They don't know what to ask for. It's hard for them to
20:54
communicate if it's not their natural language.
20:57
And the teams they're working with are not the like cracked
21:00
engineers from Google and Facebook, right?
21:02
They're the local IT person helping the realtor and the CPA,
21:05
and they're just working for an hour a week to help this
21:07
healthcare company in town. I like being or if I'm going to
21:11
do something, I like to do it all in.
21:13
I would get there early, take a picture and send it to people
21:15
like your conference. Was open till 7:30 PM.
21:18
You noticed something about some of the other booths.
21:20
Yeah, right. No, I get it, man.
21:22
I was at that conference 2 weeks ago in Vegas where nobody's
21:25
really coming by. It's kind of dead.
21:26
What do you do? Do you?
21:27
And then the conference is dwindling.
21:30
They left and so there was booths again, companies that had
21:34
raised millions, 10s of millions and hundreds of millions
21:36
unmanned. The booth was empty an hour, 2
21:40
hours before the show ended, the exhibit hall ended.
21:43
And it's like, man, they're tired.
21:46
They're not acting like owners. This is the part that hurts me
21:48
the most is that like, you know, they probably like, they're a
21:52
big enough company. They probably have some shares,
21:54
but they're, they're not not material in their thinking.
21:57
And the ownership level they exhibited in those points was
22:01
like so low that you're like kind of tarnishes the brand.
22:05
You're like, your booth is empty.
22:07
You're, you're seeing the Windows loading machine on their
22:09
demo like that's just nobody's home and you've got, you know,
22:13
506070 employees and you can't get two people to cover a shift.
22:17
I made fun about you guys. Your team was setting me up with
22:20
this spreadsheet of like what X and what E and what shifts.
22:23
And I'm like, don't have a problem.
22:24
We're gonna have so many people for most of the points because
22:29
the team. Every other conference, every
22:31
event I've produced, it was like pulling teeth to get people to
22:34
staff the booth. The exact opposite with your
22:37
team, Literally 10 people or whatever it was all wanted to be
22:40
at the booth the whole time. Wanted to talk to customers,
22:43
wanted to talk to other vendors, wanted to learn super engaged,
22:46
acting like owners so different, right?
22:48
And I think that's that is part of like, you know who's going to
22:53
make it? Who's not going to make?
22:54
It it's a culture difference, right?
22:55
And these are engineers that don't go to conferences at all,
22:58
let alone even leave their. And yet they're doing demos and
23:01
selling the product. The level of, you know, you
23:03
always talk about build something or work in a space,
23:06
you understand, understand the user, become the user, all that
23:08
stuff. And I were talking with you
23:10
afterwards and saying even if we got zero leads.
23:12
Yeah, there. Was a lot of connection we got
23:14
as a team, but also understanding the landscape.
23:17
And I would tell people, your company's more than two years
23:19
old and they're saying they're native AI, They're lying.
23:23
They've all rebranded to AI something and the company's
23:25
10/12/15 twenty years old saying they're native AI.
23:28
I would ask a simple question to whoever was in the booth, like
23:31
what model do you guys use or what's the AI and?
23:34
Amazon. One guy literally told me he's a
23:36
COM and he's like I think we use Amazon and I was like you don't
23:39
know what your AI stack is and like what's?
23:41
Your frontier model. And you're just like, were there
23:43
embarrassed to share, but it's just like, man, I was.
23:46
And I told the other guy, I'm like, here's exactly our stack.
23:48
Here's exactly how we built it. It's not about the tools we're
23:51
all using like the best teams. We're all using the best tools.
23:55
And it's about can you put it together?
23:56
Can you execute it? It was shocking to see the teams
23:59
you're competing against, but also understand you never want
24:02
to get into that case where when you do get larger and and an
24:05
older company that you've kind of lost touch with, like
24:08
technology or you've lost touch with the customers and you've
24:11
lost touch with this ability to have like everyone on the team
24:14
feel and act like owners. Yeah, I think that's right.
24:16
You got to watch your team get it.
24:19
Day one was like, OK, figuring it out and day 2 everybody was
24:22
like, I want to give the demo take that meeting I want to sit
24:24
in while Kevin's doing the demo. There was an energy that was
24:26
palpable. I guess the last thing I wanted
24:28
to get from you because this is not something you normally do.
24:31
What were the big things you learned from showing up like
24:35
this? It was big takeaways from the
24:36
few days in Nashville and for other founders out there.
24:39
What is non negotiable? If you're going to go to an
24:40
event, what do you do? What do you think is like the
24:43
big kind of learnings for the PGA team?
24:46
I, I made fun of you guys about the logo and I thought my
24:48
ChatGPT logo was good. And I do think that like it's
24:51
funny because boots next to us clearly had like cartoonish
24:55
looking logos that were not brands.
24:57
And I think it's something that I've thought a lot more about
25:01
recently is that like pretty good AI doesn't even say
25:03
healthcare and it doesn't say like what we're doing.
25:06
Like it's a very like global and sort of scalable sort of mark
25:10
where you're like, hey, this thing could be applicable to
25:12
like pretty good AI for lawn mowers are pretty good AI for
25:15
this. And I think while initially that
25:18
bothered me because I was like, wait, no, we're working on
25:20
healthcare, we're working on this thing.
25:21
No, when we got into talking to people, we're like, what, what
25:23
is it that you guys do? And we're like, no, we can apply
25:25
AI to a lot of these aspects of this thing where I think other
25:28
companies like they put their feature name or initial customer
25:33
in the name of the company or brand.
25:34
One thing where I under appreciated the impact of that
25:38
and then the flexibility to be able to let the brand go where
25:41
the business is. I think the other piece was
25:44
doing the pre work, sending emails, reaching out.
25:47
We had many meetings booked before we showed up in
25:49
Nashville. We had communicated, run
25:51
webinars. We had started to kind of pre
25:53
market to the audience of the conference.
25:56
So when they got there, they're like, oh, I heard of you or I
25:59
saw that e-mail or I missed your webinar, I made it or whatever.
26:02
But they had some connection of like, oh, I kind of know what
26:05
you guys do. And then when we were there, I
26:08
think having a systematic capturing the steps, you came up
26:11
with this acknowledge of PGAI, right?
26:13
Play golf, get a demo, attend the put shack party input lead.
26:19
That was the quick framework for the team it.
26:20
Was simple right 'cause it was 4 things.
26:22
You want to get people to engage with the golf, have fun.
26:24
Make that the first thing and then get the demo.
26:27
Let's show dot right invite you to our cool event.
26:30
Then it was like, wrap all that up and put it into the lead
26:32
scanner. Now we've got this spreadsheet
26:34
with hundreds of leads that we need, you know, hey, did you who
26:38
talked to like the 13th person on the third day, nobody
26:41
remember. So like having this tracked out
26:44
and then now I think the part that you know, we're sort of in
26:47
right now is this like, OK, you've got all of this data,
26:50
organize your follow up and sort of understand what's the best
26:53
action for each lead and then executing on that.
26:57
And again, the pre work of sort of building the brand, the sales
27:00
collateral and the marketing. It's like, oh, some people just
27:02
want to have to share with their boss.
27:04
Yeah, other people want the nine page slide deck to educate their
27:08
team, right. So and being able to have those
27:11
different assets. Other people are like, hey, send
27:13
me the live link. That was other things.
27:15
Crazy, man. Like tons of companies are like,
27:17
great, show me the demo you're doing voice AI.
27:20
Can I call the number phone number to call.
27:23
And so we're like, here's the number, here's the phone.
27:24
You can write on your phone and call right now that again, kind
27:28
of holistic view of being able to not just like show me, tell
27:31
me kind of the whole piece. Let people experience it for
27:34
themselves. Ended up being very powerful.
27:38
Going to that smaller event or having a smaller activation at
27:41
the larger event taught us a bunch of things of like, oh,
27:43
it's going to be noisy in the background.
27:44
We need to turn off all the foreign language stuff because
27:47
it may detect other languages cause of background or hey,
27:50
simplify the form, take away extra validations, make it easy.
27:53
People have 30 seconds, they may or may not engage.
27:56
If they don't, if they hit any kind of friction, they're going
27:58
to bounce. So just practicing all that now
28:01
after the fact, being able to say, do we have the proper stuff
28:03
set up in our case, HubSpot to track all these folks?
28:06
How did we meet them? Multi touch.
28:08
There was two of the kind of most high quality or high impact
28:12
leads that we have or most engaged leads.
28:14
We had actually touched them. I'd sent LinkedIn request to
28:17
them more than two months ago. Yeah, they went to connect on
28:21
LinkedIn. They're like, oh, we're already
28:22
connected. Marketing is reach and
28:24
frequency. But they were like, wow, what's
28:26
your e-mail now? They were like, oh great, we've
28:28
got meetings booked to set up and talk through it.
28:30
And so it was like this kind of multi step thing of like, hey,
28:33
you've touched them. Don't.
28:34
Meet them for the first time. Be out there.
28:36
And they're like, hey, they already had some familiarity,
28:38
but they're like, wait, this was you guys putting those pieces
28:40
together and act locked in and solidified it.
28:42
This isn't just a random serendipitous thing.
28:44
And then we had like our customers, they were also at the
28:48
show and it showed up in a big presence 'cause we were like,
28:50
hey, we want you to come, we want you to bring you to the
28:52
vent. They were out there making
28:54
referrals and it was really easy for customers.
28:57
You already know X. It was a lot of really good
29:01
reconnecting to solidify that. Don't let me tell you about my
29:04
product. Let our customers tell you about
29:06
their experience. Both good in that and let them
29:08
judge. Yeah, thumbs up.
29:10
Pretty good or not good events? As a founder, is it good or not
29:13
good to show up and be present at, you know, experiential
29:16
opportunities where you can get your brand out there?
29:18
I think it's really good. It's pretty good.
29:20
I think the other thing I would close with is picking the right
29:23
event where the density of people you want to meet is high.
29:26
There's tons of events out there.
29:27
For us, finding an event where our technology supports 100% of
29:33
the people attending from a customer perspective obviously
29:36
works better for bigger customers than smaller ones and
29:39
more impactful for both of us to work together.
29:41
The idea that we had 100% coverage is unique, but being
29:46
able to size that incorrectly. If we go to other events, being
29:49
able to identify the best way to show up.
29:52
So you get in front of the customers that you can serve
29:56
today or the ones that you can serve within the next six
29:59
months. Like I think in cases where you
30:02
show up and you're like, maybe I can get to this customer in the
30:04
next one to two years might not be the right timing.
30:07
Even in a slow moving industry, you're not going to get their
30:09
attention, you're not going to want to spend the time with
30:11
them. So I think it is like, you know,
30:13
can you get to a pilot in a couple weeks?
30:15
That's the ones you really want a hard circle.
30:17
And, and again in healthcare, a lot has to happen in person.
30:22
Kevin, that was super fun. I always enjoy our one-on-one
30:25
episodes. Can you give us kind of your top
30:27
five from this conversation today, Things that you know
30:29
anyone listening needs to remember and take away?
30:31
Treat events is high leverage, not distractions, but you need
30:34
to operate those very intentionally.
30:36
Second, go all in on targeted conferences, right, Bold
30:39
activations outperform son of a scattershot approach and really
30:42
focus on ones that hit your sort of ICP and then prepare and
30:47
follow through, right, pre marketing, structured capture
30:49
and then have a way of immediately following up and
30:51
tracking that 4th founder presence, right.
30:54
You want to be there compels that ownership first in last out
30:57
everyday. You know how to sort of be
30:59
immersed in in what's going on, clear your schedule to do that.
31:03
And then really, really for us that was thinking about the ROI
31:06
beyond leads, rebranding collateral, insights from the
31:10
industry and competitors and team alignment.
31:12
Hey, if you got somebody that you know who's thinking about
31:14
doing events, they're a founder, they're building, they're maybe
31:16
heads down and that you want to help them pull up and think
31:18
about how they can show up in the real world.
31:20
Share this episode with them. Give us a like, subscribe, a
31:22
follow and leave a comment. Appreciate you tuning in today.
31:25
And first of all, I mean, Jason, thank you.
31:27
You and your team really over delivered for what we did here
31:31
at the conference. Super grateful.
31:33
That's all for today. Founder mode of events means
31:35
this. Don't just attend.