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Make Firm Knowledge Work for You (Jeanne Hardy and Jamie Schneiderman) · Unstuck Pod

• Jamie: Hi everyone, welcome to the Unstuck Pod today. Really excited to have Gene Hardy with us as a guest. So Gene, thanks coming and please, I'd love you to tell everybody about yourself, about Levy and your background. It be great to go. Great from there. Jeanne Hardy: Great. Well, thank you. Thanks, Jamie. Excited to be here. So my background is a little bit unconventional, I think, for where I ended up. I actually started off, I went to art school, so I was like a starving artist. ⁓ from that, ⁓ started working with other artists that were more successful than me and started as like a business manager for them. And through that work, kind of fell in love with, with, you know, working alongside, you know, creators, builders and helping them build their businesses and really seeing very clearly that there was some huge gaps in the marketplace, in the service marketplace for creatives. not as much of a, ⁓ a lot more creatives in the world, but back then in, you know, the early aughts and the late 90s, business services, banks, lenders, ⁓ people just didn't take those businesses seriously. And now, of course, that's a totally different story. So we have some really successful creative entrepreneurs. And that's how I grew business is really working closely with these creative entrepreneurs. And I built ⁓ Creative Business, very name, but... to help them. So ⁓ do all the back office. So a lot of like bookkeeping, ⁓ so just think business management, cashflow management. So my role was more of CFO in their worlds and we kind of holistically supported whole operation, including like HR and helping teams. So we grew, Creative Business, my firm grew over the last 15, 16 years to about a 25 person team working with 150 companies. through that growth, I to notice a pattern of pain that we were feeling ⁓ every we tried to grow. ⁓ It like, three steps forward, two steps back. And couldn't understand, I couldn't crack the code of like, why is this happening? Why can't we get this right? We're a hardcore star process team and we couldn't get it right. So it took me down, I went down some rabbit holes, ⁓ practice management, productivity tools, we tried a bunch of things. And ⁓ really it came down to for us is like the visibility of not having enough visibility across the whole firm. Meaning that the kind of visibility that we were looking for was not do step one, step two, step three, step four process. It's more like, how well do you know this client? How well do you know their personality? What they're afraid of? What they worry about the most? Like what their goals are? Where is that client knowledge? Where is it and how are we using it? to support our clients. At the same time, who's good at delegating? Who's not good at delegating? Who has too much on their plate and not speaking up about that? Like who's about to go underwater and how can we help them before that happens? ⁓ So I like advanced data ⁓ on ⁓ operations opposed to looking at things like time data and stuff in hindsight. I needed it like real time. So we built Levee to create that visibility across the team. So I went from a firm runner to a tech founder in the matter of like three years. so here we are now, we've grown Levee to support accounting firms and bookkeeping firms around the country and around the world. ⁓ we're looking to grow ⁓ into this. ⁓ Now we're kind of moving into our agentic workflow phase, rolling out some more AI tools to help the firms that we work with. So very long and did answer to. ⁓ Jamie: I love it. No, no, no, that was great. Listen, it's a, it's a very interesting story. And again, you know, there's, think, you know, I've heard from people in a lot of different businesses and backgrounds and things, but what's most interesting ⁓ what I love about yours is we had this problem. So we needed it. We needed help. And so I built something that would help us. And I knew that if it would help us, it would help others. And that's kind of where, you know, where it goes. All right. So. So, I've got it. So, so you've been building it. How, let, let me talk first about what, ⁓ how a feel is it between running an agency? you, right. Running, running that side versus being, like you said, a tech founder and what that feels like, ⁓ where those differences articulate some of the differences that you've experienced between the two? Jeanne Hardy: So, I mean, ⁓ it's not a mindset necessarily because being a CEO of a firm and then being a CEO and founder of ⁓ a tech company, you're thinking in of culture, like what are we building, who are we building it for, why do we ⁓ exist, why ⁓ is it and really ⁓ those? those ideas throughout the organization. What the biggest difference is that ⁓ know nothing. so I tell when I'm in my firm, I know everything. And that's the problem, right? Like the problem is like, how do I get this out of my head and how do I get it into the hands of my team and try to be the bottleneck, right? So, my team ⁓ it's They're learning, they're learning. I'm teaching them, I'm mentoring them. They're learning my managers, you know, came up in the firm and now they're mentoring. On the technology in Levy, I'm the one who's like, and so the team ⁓ is teaching me is, teaching me and And it's just so, it's so much more fun, I have to say, to be the student with an incredible group of great people. Jamie: So what do you hold on? So tell me what kind of things you feel like you're learning, right? Like you've been in business for a long time. You've been a CEO for a long time. So, yeah. Jeanne Hardy: Okay, so. Yeah, so I know how to run a company. know how to like I do, you know, I had all the finance, I handle all the compliant, everything around, you know, but and like the vision for levy is mine, I'm the subject matter expert. So I can actually validate the the solutions that they're proposing and say, you know, and I can even say like, that's, that is a huge problem that we have to solve. Or I could say that's not really a that's not quite the problem. The problem is more like A, B, and C. And so the team loves that. They love the developers, love that I get into the nuance of like, and also the hierarchy, like let's solve this first because this is going to unlock a lot for our users just because I lived it for so long. I don't know. what I always in the beginning with the team is I said, look, I'm going to give you my ideas. I'm going to say, you know, this is what I want. I want to be able to, you know, I want all this information surface. I want it real time. I want like, Levy to be smarter than me and be showing me things that I need to see when I need to see them. But if I tell you that I want something, don't just say yes to me don't know what order to build this in. I don't want to find out, you know, six months from now, like when I'm like, ⁓ let's get, you know, email integration going. They're like, ⁓ we can't do that because we should have done that, you know. Jamie: I see. Jeanne Hardy: back in the beginning, right? Like I want you to listen to what I'm saying and hear it as if this person doesn't know anything about building technology. Jamie: Technology. It's, it's, it's one of the great challenges of, well, ⁓ just want to do this and this and this. And then someone goes, okay. But they're not necessarily translating the, or they're giving you everything back. Right. These are builders, right? Everyone's got their skills. Right. So it's a very interesting difference. Sure. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Jeanne Hardy: Yeah, and I'm the boss. And so they're like, don't do that. I want you to tell me that's a crazy idea. That's going to take us a thousand hours. You know, we're going to have to rip everything out and do that. Like, don't just say yes to me. Jamie: Yeah, I've done that. I've lived, I've been in your shoes many times, unfortunately, where I've been told after it's like, what, what do you mean? Why didn't you tell me that before? Like, what? Anyway. So, all right. So, so you're learning the tech side, the technology side of building a So it's creating a physical, like a physical technology based product is a new and different thing. It's not necessarily like you said, it's your thing, but it's but you're learning it and figuring it out and the team is delivering it. so are you now? How do you look at the business now? What's next for the business? Where are you taking it? Jeanne Hardy: So we went to market. So I put my accounting firm on it for 10 months in 2023. I was like, also, again, this is a thing where as a ⁓ not move fast and break things kind of an approach, it's a And I'm asking firms, I'm asking firm owners and professional services businesses to move their company over to my platform. So for me, needed to have something complete. We needed to own the full workflows in order for somebody to ask somebody to do that. So we probably kept it in production for, we probably kept it in development for longer than most tech founders today ⁓ would that. So we built this beautiful thing, but we didn't go all the way because we built it that it was what my firm was using and finding a lot of success and really enjoying. But we built it to the point where we could still get a lot of feedback on how to finish or build out some of the features. So we had some restraint there. So that was in 23. So the end of 23, we decided it was working amazing for us. That was when I was like, let's take it to market. We did a quick beta in 23, and then we went to market in 24. So we're new. And we've been growing steadily. Jamie: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Jeanne Hardy: Product market fit, that go to market is pretty, it's tough. It's a, it's it's a, it, that's a very pain. I'm sure that tech founders would, would appreciate that. That's a very painful phase for our software. Jamie: So, so like, let's talk about that. Cause I think goes through it. So when you describe it as a painful phase, talk us through what, ⁓ are you, you're there, you're past that you feel like you're past that now. Yeah. Or. Okay. Jeanne Hardy: Yeah, I feel like we're past that. ⁓ don't know how like how feel like you're kind of always in this like, are we getting it right? Are we getting it right for everybody for our so ⁓ go to market was, again, it's sort of you're going in with a lot of assumptions, and you're you're talking to your users. So you have a small group of users, and you're talking to them, and they're kind of shaping, like how you're going out to the market and talking to other users. Jamie: So in what way? So let's talk about. Yeah. Jeanne Hardy: And I think it, and Eveline, you feel like that's a building. You feel like you should be like getting some momentum and build, you know, you should be building some traction there. ⁓ what, what we experienced was like, we got like a bunch of users on, we're working with them and then half of them left. Right. And then it was like, not lot of traction. then ⁓ another burst of people would come on. It was a very, it was like an emotional roller coaster ride, to be honest. was ⁓ for me. ⁓ then of course ⁓ users are leaving and they're like, Jean, I'm, you know, we really like Levy, but it's not, we really need it to do blah, blah, blah. Like we didn't have enough certain people to Jamie: Founder life. There you go. Okay. Jeanne Hardy: they were missing their old tools. Like there was a tool in their tech stack that we didn't have or we couldn't replace. And we're learning those painful lessons. Like we made choices to go to market with this feature set ⁓ maybe didn't get that right is kind of what it was. So really just getting into it with the users and just keeping, you know, kind being really conscious that. It's a small set of users that you're talking to and they might not have like, you know, I don't know. For me, it just felt like an emotional roller coaster ride. And I was like, it's over, we're done. like, this is great. This is good. We're going, we're going, we're going. And then it's like, no, we're done. Jamie: Yeah, yeah. The I used to refer to it as also staring into the abyss, right? Like the all the things that you know, you're like, yes, yes, yes, the roller coaster. And then all of a sudden, everything goes wrong. And you're like, oh, it's over, like it's done. And then it comes back. And it's like, Jeanne Hardy: And then you're like, okay, I had, I've been a CEO for a long time. So at least like, I understood that I could be devastated ⁓ scared out of my wits about what's happening, but that, you know, I had to show up the next day and be like, let's rock and roll people. Like, you know, let's go. We don't have time. Let's moving. What are we going to do next? Jamie: Yeah. Yup. Jeanne Hardy: Let's try this, let's try that, you know, ⁓ and just be super positive. Like we, we, we, we're going to turn this corner. We just got to stay on it and, to be expected, you know, of course I like crying inside, but, ⁓ but, ⁓ showing up and saying like, all right, this is what happens. Let's keep going. ⁓ and, know, I'm, lucky cause the team is just so good and so nimble and they're, they're like, they're, Jamie: Yeah. Yep. Jeanne Hardy: they really kind of embrace the fact that also guiding the process too, along with me. And so they have best practices from their experience too, and saying, know, this happened, you know, when I was here, this happened to us, here's what we tried, you know, or let me call a friend who does some lead gen and let's talk to them about, you know, what we can do. So I felt like it was, Jamie: Okay. Jeanne Hardy: Yeah, it was was one of those times that I'm like, I wish somebody would have told me that this was not going to be like, yeah, it was going to be like, Jamie: ⁓ it's never easy. So, so, ⁓ and let me make sure I understand. Cause so for you, it was a, there was, some product, obviously some product challenge, some go to market challenge. that fair? Okay. So you're ⁓ a of both ⁓ and you're to gain traction, right? You get some go to market. Some things work. You get in with product, you get a feels like it's working and then ⁓ churn okay. Let's fast forward to now in terms of just how you're looking at those two pieces, right? Because this is an ongoing, it never ends. People are like, I have products done. Like there's no such thing, right? Or go to markets done. There's no such thing. So, so Let's talk about those two and how you're thinking about where you're at right now and what's been going on. Jeanne Hardy: So When we first built Levy, one of the things that I said to the, when we were building the MVP and this was with a previous ⁓ was like a ⁓ team that I worked with initially, not my current team. I said know, what cause knew that like, know, automation and AI were, you know, were ⁓ coming. I know, automation and AI to be fantastic for Levy. It has to be fantastic. Like we have to be like, cannot wait for it to be here. you know, even now our users are not asking for AI features or, you know, ⁓ mean, we have a, ⁓ the, platform's totally auto, it's like fully automated, but we have in our roadmap, we always had, ⁓ know, a genetic workflows and like these layers. and basically the architecture of levy is built for AI. It's like the kind of the. of a firm, and all the information's organized in a way that makes it really accessible and powerful when you start to add automation and AI. AI ⁓ is basically our features will once firm is on there, if somebody our AI practice manager will train the next person. Like that's how deep the knowledge is in terms of Jamie: Okay. Okay. Jeanne Hardy: the vertical and then also the firm itself. it's an amazing, It turns ⁓ firm knowledge into a very valuable asset for the firm. That conversation is so easy have right now today with firm owners that we're selling to. ⁓ Even six months ago, ⁓ eight months, months, they were like, what are you talking about? Jamie: ⁓ huh. Jeanne Hardy: But now they're like, we want, that's where we're headed to. We don't know how to get there. So, so right now we, we basically had a 12 months of roadmap that we just kind of set aside and went to the net to the 24 month roadmap and just brought that forward. Um, so it's really exciting. It's like, you know, you're literally thinking like, do we build that or AI can just do that? Jamie: Cut it. Got it. Okay. Yeah. Jeanne Hardy: Yeah, well, that's an AI feature. That's an AI, you know, so it's a lot faster, which is so exciting. Like this type development is, it's really exciting you can, as before, you're building something and you're testing it and you're testing it and then you give it to your users. At this stage, putting it out there. ⁓ shipping stuff so fast, ⁓ we're able to iterate in real time. ⁓ kind of like magic to be able to work in this way, to be able to build in this way, I think, after building so slowly. Jamie: So now, so product is going out fast, much faster. Jeanne Hardy: Just idea iteration. let's, like, let's try this, you know, it's. Jamie: Yeah, for sure. You can send stuff out in the world way faster. that doing for your go to market for your customer acquisition chart, like all those pieces that you were talking about, like how are the two working together? How is that working better for you like that? ⁓ Jeanne Hardy: So we'll see now, like now, so we're in accounting, we just got through tax season, so it's been a little slow, but now we're like launching these, so in terms of like what the announcements are for this year, I think it's gonna be, be, we've got some big like kind of milestone things coming out, so TBD on that, ⁓ but people are excited, but what we've actually used is we've used, you know, a lot of the vibe coding, Jamie: Okay. Jeanne Hardy: We've been like vibe coding with our users basically creating features with them or kind of demonstrating the feature in like lovable or in, know, Kurtzer and saying like, okay, this is what we're thinking. Is this, does this, you know, is this the change? ⁓ Jamie: ⁓ it's a way much more fast, rapid prototyping, right? So you can go show, say, what do you think? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Jeanne Hardy: We literally throw it. it's less a, and when we take that prototype and give it to the dev team, there's like no back and forth. It's, it's, know, what's like move this, like it was always like the visual thing, you know, that. Yeah. So now it's like, there's nothing gets lost in translation as you're explaining it and the reading the PRD, like it's everyone's visualizing it differently. Jamie: Yeah, Interesting. I just. Yeah. Jeanne Hardy: our head of product, Li Lingyang, she's incredible. you know, she just builds these things and takes them through it. And like two days later, it's ready. It's so fun. Jamie: You're you're no, that's amazing. I that's that's exciting when you start to see stuff go out like that. It's great. So okay, so you've gone through you've obviously been a CEO, you've been a founder, you CEO, and and now you're in the tech world and you're doing this, what advice, if any, would you give to others who are coming from wherever they're coming and whether they they're thinking about this? What what should they be? What advice would you give them? Jeanne Hardy: Well, I mean, what I like to tell people is if you have been working in, so vertical, know, deep vertical knowledge. So anybody who's worked in any industry for 10 years or more start to build some software for that vertical. Because I think what's always missing and I the vertical ⁓ AI like, Jamie: Interesting. Jeanne Hardy: like a, you know, a technology as a service, what is it? Task now, right? Where your professional services, but you're actually going to have this kind of bench of agents doing the work with you, right? It's, and that, without that deep vertical knowledge, the products aren't going to be that great. They're not going to be, they're only going to be surface. If you can apply that vertical knowledge to software development today, I feel like with AI and with a lot of the agentic AI, you can move mountains. it's so accessible for people like me who are non-technical to be able to articulate what you think is important and why to a development team. Like the barrier between explaining something to a developer is minimal now. Whereas, you know, even, you know, three, four years ago, it was, there was a lot of iterations, but you know, there was a lot that was kind of had to be revised, but now it just seems so seamless. So I tell people like, If you're getting into tech you know, the, the benefit to ⁓ Jamie: So much fun. Jeanne Hardy: to the world is to get a tool that actually works better. I don't think we need so many general tools anymore. I think we actually need some deep, deep knowledge capture tools that will continue to learn take on more and more and more. The vertical I think ⁓ going to be where it's at like real estate, real estate development, medical practices. There's a, you know, The company Jane, Jane AI from Vancouver. It's like small medical practices. heard, I heard her speak. And I mean that's an incredible, like that knowledge ⁓ to a small business owner is world changing, right? To be able to say here's software to run your small like medical practice or your yoga studio or your you know, pilates practice your therapy practice and have it be this like end to end solution where you're, you know, from payments to scheduling to analysis to knowledge, you know, client knowledge, capture notes, capture marketing, like it's, it's pretty powerful. ⁓ Jamie: When you're looking at it like that, it's interesting. It's an interesting perspective and it's probably where, clearly it's where you're seeing it, you're living it, where things are going. So where can folks who are listening, watching, how can they find you? How can they follow you? add links into the description after, but. ⁓ Jeanne Hardy: Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. I'd love to if anybody wants to talk about life as a non-technical founder in technology, can reach out to me at gene, J-A-N-N-E at levy.com. ⁓ Happy to speak with anybody. But yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. I'm very accessible on LinkedIn. So I'd love to meet anyone who wants to chat. ⁓ Jamie: Well, thank you, Gene. Appreciate it. And for everybody who's listening, watching, thank you. And until next time, we'll see you then. Jeanne Hardy: Thanks, Jamie.