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Transcript

Build or Buy Your Buying Signals · After the Demo

0:00
Kate: A guy says his bot found twenty-one buying signals for under ten cents.
0:04
John Arndt: I believe him.
0:05
Kate: Then what exactly are people paying for?
0:08
John Arndt: Okay. That's the episode.
0:10
Kate: I'm serious. I've lost more than ten cents in my couch.
0:13
John Arndt: So am I. Serious, I mean. Not about your couch.
0:16
Kate: Leave the couch out of this. You believe him? Just like that?
0:20
John Arndt: His run, his numbers. But yeah, nothing in it sounds crazy to me. I'd guess the ten cents holds up. It just isn't where the money goes.
0:28
Kate: Then where does it go?
0:30
John Arndt: Three places. And one of them is a person.
0:32
Kate: That's a terrible tease.
0:34
John Arndt: It's a great tease. You're still here.
0:48
John Arndt: This is After the Demo. I'm John Arndt. I run about fifteen small software products out of Sacramento, most of them built and run with AI agents, plus an AI consulting practice.
1:00
Kate: And I'm Kate.
1:01
John Arndt: So. A guy posted that he built a prospecting bot, says he gave the code away, and it runs for pocket change. And the AI models underneath it just got cheaper again. What does that change for a sales team, and when do you build your own instead of paying for one?
1:15
Kate: Let me ask it the way somebody listening would. Say you run a sales team of four. You keep an eye on a few dozen companies. Do you still need to buy anything? Or do you need one person who's handy with a laptop and has a free weekend?
1:28
John Arndt: Ask me that again at the end.
1:30
Kate: Deal. Two house rules before we start. I'm pricing everything today in gumballs. A gumball is a dime.
1:37
John Arndt: Fine by me.
1:37
Kate: And when he gets long, I stop him.
1:40
John Arndt: That's going to happen a lot.
1:42
Kate: I know. I've met you.
1:44
John Arndt: Start with what the bot actually does every morning. Because it's smarter than it sounds, and it's also dumber than it sounds.
1:54
Kate: So who's the guy? Give him his name.
1:56
John Arndt: Alex Vacca. He helps B to B companies grow revenue. He posted that he built a prospecting bot on Claude Haiku five point five, which is Anthropic's small, cheap model. And he says he open-sourced it. The code's in his replies, he says.
2:10
Kate: He says.
2:11
John Arndt: We haven't opened it. We haven't run it. Everything I'm about to tell you is how he describes it.
2:16
Kate: Back up a second, then. What's a buying signal, in plain words?
2:20
John Arndt: Something that happens at a company that usually means they're about to need what you sell. A new sales job, say, if you sell sales training.
2:27
Kate: Fine. Walk me through his morning.
2:29
John Arndt: Seven in the morning, it wakes up. For every company on his list, it checks three things. The company's job board, four pages of its website, and the week's headlines.
2:39
Kate: Four pages. Let me guess, the careers page is one.
2:43
John Arndt: He doesn't say which. Just four pages, plus the job board, for every company.
2:47
Kate: Every company, every morning.
2:49
John Arndt: Yep. And it compares what it finds to yesterday's copy.
2:52
Kate: Wait. It keeps yesterday's copy?
2:55
John Arndt: That's the whole trick. It saved what the page said yesterday. If today looks the same, it stops right there.
3:01
Kate: And the AI never sees it.
3:03
John Arndt: Right. You don't pay anybody to read a page that didn't change.
3:06
Kate: Huh. That's just sensible.
3:08
John Arndt: It's what you'd do by hand. You wouldn't reread a whole careers page every day. You'd look for what's new.
3:13
Kate: You wouldn't. I would. Then I'd go to lunch.
3:16
John Arndt: Which is why it's a bot.
3:18
Kate: And the headlines? Same thing?
3:20
John Arndt: Yep. A new headline is a change. Old news costs nothing.
3:24
Kate: Got it. So something changed. Then what?
3:27
John Arndt: Then only the pages that changed go to the model. And the model gets one question. Is this a buying signal? Like a new sales job, or a funding round.
3:36
Kate: One question.
3:37
John Arndt: One question.
3:38
Kate: That sounds too simple to work.
3:40
John Arndt: Simple is why it's cheap. And the other reason one question matters is
3:44
Kate: Because you can tell when it's wrong.
3:46
John Arndt: Yeah. That.
3:47
Kate: If you ask it twelve things, you can't check twelve things.
3:50
John Arndt: Right. One yes or no, you can look at it and go, nope, that's a marketing job, try again.
3:56
Kate: Who decides what counts as a buying signal, though?
3:58
John Arndt: He does. He gave it examples.
4:00
Kate: So the one question is only as good as his examples.
4:04
John Arndt: Yes. Remember you said that.
4:05
Kate: Oh, I will. So it says yes. Then what?
4:09
John Arndt: Then it quotes what it found. The actual line from the page. And it saves the date and the link.
4:15
Kate: So it shows its work.
4:16
John Arndt: With receipts. You can click through and read the job post yourself.
4:19
Kate: I like that more than I expected to. And then it fires off an email to the company.
4:24
John Arndt: No. It never sends anything. What you get is a spreadsheet. It doesn't even fill in email addresses unless you add another tool for that.
4:32
Kate: What's in the spreadsheet?
4:33
John Arndt: The company, the signal, the date and the link. Plus a column with a line you could open the conversation with.
4:39
Kate: So nobody gets a weird email at five past seven.
4:42
John Arndt: Nobody gets anything from this bot. A person opens a spreadsheet.
4:46
Kate: A robot with manners.
4:48
John Arndt: A robot that knows its place.
4:50
Kate: Numbers, then. That's the part everybody was passing around.
4:53
John Arndt: His numbers. On eleven companies, he says it found twenty-one signals for under ten cents.
4:59
Kate: Has anybody checked that?
5:00
John Arndt: Nobody but him. It's his run and his numbers, and I want to be clear about that.
5:05
Kate: But you said you believe him.
5:06
John Arndt: I do. Nothing in those numbers surprises me, given what the small models cost now. We'll get to prices.
5:12
Kate: Twenty-one signals. For one gumball.
5:16
John Arndt: You're doing the gumballs already.
5:18
Kate: That's the first entry in the gumball count. I'm writing it down.
5:21
John Arndt: You don't even have a pen.
5:22
Kate: I'll find one. Eleven companies, twenty-one signals, one gumball. Which sounds a lot like your thing.
5:31
John Arndt: Pretty close, honestly.
5:32
Kate: So you're worried.
5:33
John Arndt: I'm interested. The checking got cheap. That part's real, and I'm not going to pretend it isn't on my own show.
5:39
Kate: That's very calm for a man whose thing just got cheap.
5:43
John Arndt: It was always going to get cheap. Reading a page and asking one question was never the hard part.
5:48
Kate: Okay, but then you're saying the hard part is somewhere else, and you still haven't said where.
5:53
John Arndt: I haven't.
5:54
Kate: You've teased it twice now. Once more and I'm leaving.
5:57
John Arndt: Okay, one real clue. Funny thing is, the most useful thing his bot did didn't use the AI at all.
6:08
Kate: Didn't use the AI at all. Explain.
6:11
John Arndt: Once a month, separate from the morning run, it does something with no AI in it. Plain code. It checks every company against his ideal-customer list.
6:20
Kate: His ideal customer. Meaning what?
6:23
John Arndt: Industry, size, region. Plus one must-have. His example is having a sales team.
6:29
Kate: And if a company doesn't fit, it's out.
6:31
John Arndt: Gone. Then for the ones that are left, it checks how old each signal is and scores them out of a hundred.
6:37
Kate: Why would age matter? A signal's a signal.
6:39
John Arndt: A sales job posted yesterday and one that's been up since spring are different news.
6:44
Kate: The one up since spring, nobody wants that job.
6:47
John Arndt: Possibly. But you see the point. Fresh beats stale.
6:51
Kate: And in his run, I'm guessing it cut one. Maybe two.
6:54
John Arndt: Six of the eleven, he says. All over five hundred people. Outside the size on his list.
7:00
Kate: Six? That's more than half.
7:02
John Arndt: And five of those six were hiring salespeople.
7:05
Kate: Oh.
7:06
John Arndt: Yeah. His line was, with only a hiring alert, I'd have emailed all five.
7:10
Kate: So five companies would've gotten an email over a job post, and they weren't even the size he sells to.
7:16
John Arndt: Five.
7:17
Kate: So the filter is the product.
7:19
John Arndt: The filter and the proof.
7:21
Kate: Which is a little embarrassing for the AI.
7:23
John Arndt: It did its job. Its job was reading. A plain rule decided who counts. Remember the one question?
7:30
Kate: Is this a buying signal.
7:32
John Arndt: That was never the hard part. The model can answer that all day. Whether the answer matters to you is a different question, and plain code, no AI, answered that one.
7:41
Kate: So the clever part was a plain rule.
7:43
John Arndt: The clever part was him deciding, ahead of time, who he actually sells to. The code just remembers it.
7:49
Kate: That's the least exciting sentence you've said all day.
7:52
John Arndt: It's my favorite one.
7:53
Kate: Okay, but every sales tool ad I see is selling me more signals.
7:57
John Arndt: They are. And you can see why people believe it. HubSpot's fall release came out in September. Their Prospecting Agent now monitors more than forty buying signals and pulls together the buying group.
8:08
Kate: Forty.
8:08
John Arndt: More than forty.
8:09
Kate: Forty is about thirty-five too many.
8:12
John Arndt: Let me defend them a little. Different businesses need different signals. If you sell to hospitals, you care about stuff a software company never would. Forty is a menu.
8:21
Kate: A menu.
8:22
John Arndt: A menu. You pick what you need.
8:24
Kate: A menu with forty things is a diner. Nobody orders well at a diner.
8:29
John Arndt: That's unfair to diners.
8:30
Kate: Is it? Have you seen the pancake section?
8:33
John Arndt: Okay. Half. You want the menu to exist. You just order three to five.
8:37
Kate: Fine. The menu can stay, as long as somebody picks. And for the record, the diner line was mine.
8:44
John Arndt: Noted. Framed, even.
8:46
Kate: So the gumball question. Forty signals. How many gumballs?
8:50
John Arndt: The checking's cheap, if his numbers hold. Which is kind of the problem. When watching everything costs almost nothing, nobody bothers to pick.
8:58
Kate: Then walk the person in the truck through picking. Out loud. Right now.
9:02
John Arndt: Right now?
9:03
Kate: They're parked. They've got a napkin.
9:05
John Arndt: Okay. Say you sell scheduling software to dental offices. Pull up your last ten closed deals.
9:11
Kate: Pull up how? They're in a truck.
9:13
John Arndt: Your phone or your sales software. Ten deals. For each one, write down what happened at that office in the few months before your first real conversation.
9:22
Kate: Like what?
9:23
John Arndt: A new hire. A new location. That kind of thing.
9:26
Kate: Why the few months before? Why not the whole year?
9:29
John Arndt: Because you're looking for whatever kicked it off. Stuff from a year earlier is mostly background.
9:34
Kate: Let me guess. Circle the ones that keep showing up.
9:37
John Arndt: Three or more times. That's your three to five. Those are the things that came before your actual deals. Nobody else's.
9:44
Kate: And the other thirty-five?
9:45
John Arndt: Ignore them until a deal proves one matters.
9:48
Kate: What if I don't have ten deals? Say I've only closed three.
9:51
John Arndt: Then use three.
9:52
Kate: Three is not a pattern.
9:54
John Arndt: Three is thin, I'll give you that. It's still better than forty guesses. You're writing down what really happened, instead of what usually happens to somebody else.
10:03
Kate: That I'll take.
10:04
John Arndt: And you'll notice something when you do it. Most of what you circle is boring. Somebody hired. Somebody moved.
10:10
Kate: Boring's good. Boring I can check.
10:13
John Arndt: Exactly. That's the whole job of the filter. It throws out the exciting stuff that isn't yours.
10:18
Kate: Like five companies hiring salespeople.
10:20
John Arndt: Which would've looked great on a dashboard. Five hot leads, all the wrong size.
10:25
Kate: Fine. Now tell me why ten cents isn't ten cents.
10:29
John Arndt: Because nobody runs it once.
10:36
John Arndt: Good news first, because I've been sitting on it all episode.
10:39
Kate: I could tell. You've been vibrating.
10:42
John Arndt: On October seventh, Anthropic released Claude Haiku five point five. Their small model, built for, in their words, high-volume, cost-sensitive tasks.
10:51
Kate: So, this.
10:53
John Arndt: This. And it's priced about ninety percent lower than the last Haiku, for most requests.
10:58
Kate: Ninety.
10:59
John Arndt: For most requests. Then in September, OpenAI put out its new GPT six models, Sol and Luna, at roughly half the price of the last ones.
11:08
Kate: Roughly.
11:09
John Arndt: Ballpark, and that's against the old models' promo prices. And Vacca says the model he uses reads seven hundred fifty thousand words for ten cents.
11:18
Kate: That's a lot of job posts.
11:20
John Arndt: He also says the bigger Sonnet model would cost twenty times as much for the same pages.
11:24
Kate: So it's free.
11:25
John Arndt: Close to it. Per check.
11:27
Kate: Wait. I read the fine print on that ninety. Anthropic's own average is more like seventy-five percent less, right? And it chops text into slightly more billable pieces, so a task uses a bit more.
11:39
John Arndt: Right. You did the reading.
11:41
Kate: One of us reads past the headline.
11:43
John Arndt: Still a huge cut. Still per check.
11:46
Kate: And that's my problem. Nobody gets a bill per check.
11:49
John Arndt: No.
11:50
Kate: You get a bill per month. And then you open it.
11:53
John Arndt: And there's a survey on exactly that, out October twelfth. It's from Pax Eight, which sells AI and cloud software to small businesses.
12:00
Kate: So the people selling it asked about the bills.
12:03
John Arndt: Vendor survey, yes. Grain of salt. Among businesses that paid for AI in the past year, forty-nine percent said they got at least one bill or usage charge higher than they expected.
12:14
Kate: Nearly half.
12:15
John Arndt: In the U.S., fifty-seven percent.
12:17
Kate: More than half. In this country. Of businesses already paying for it.
12:22
John Arndt: And Microsoft just made it real. Starting December first, new Microsoft three sixty-five Copilot Business licenses bought through a Microsoft reseller or IT provider come with pay-as-you-go usage billing switched on by default.
12:36
Kate: Switched on. By default.
12:38
John Arndt: They announced it at the start of October. There's a default monthly spending limit per user, and an admin can change it. It covers the features Microsoft bills by usage. Ask which of those your team actually uses.
12:49
Kate: So somebody at your company had better know where that limit is.
12:53
John Arndt: And who's allowed to change it. If you buy through an IT provider, ask them.
12:57
Kate: You've got a look. That's your I did something look.
13:00
John Arndt: Guilty. Can I tell you?
13:02
Kate: Please.
13:03
John Arndt: So, my own bill. Back in August, the database one jumped. I had scheduled jobs checking things way more often than anything needed.
13:11
Kate: How often?
13:12
John Arndt: More often than any of it needed. That's the part that matters.
13:16
Kate: Dodged. Fine.
13:18
John Arndt: That's the whole story. Too many checks, on a schedule nobody had a reason for.
13:22
Kate: So what did you do?
13:24
John Arndt: Slowed them down. Every thirty to sixty minutes. And I wrote a rule after. Every automation gets a cost ceiling and a reason for its schedule.
13:32
Kate: So each check looked harmless. The schedule ran up the bill.
13:36
John Arndt: Yep. That's better than how I said it.
13:38
Kate: I know.
13:39
John Arndt: Now put that on the bot. Vacca runs his once a morning. And job posts don't change hourly.
13:44
Kate: Nobody's posting a sales job at nine and pulling it down at ten.
13:48
John Arndt: So if you ran it every hour, by my math that's twenty-four times the checks for the same job posts.
13:53
Kate: But remember yesterday's copy. If nothing changed, nothing goes to the model.
13:58
John Arndt: Right, and that helps a lot. His design already refuses to pay for nothing. But it's still looking at every page, every time it runs, and the schedule decides how many times that is.
14:09
Kate: So what's his real bill?
14:10
John Arndt: His own guess, at API prices, a thousand companies would run about fifty cents a day.
14:15
Kate: Which is?
14:16
John Arndt: By my math, about fifteen dollars a month.
14:19
Kate: A hundred fifty gumballs. I'm keeping track.
14:22
John Arndt: And that's a fine bill. That's a bill somebody chose. Once a morning, on purpose.
14:27
Kate: And if somebody cranks it to every hour because hourly sounds more serious?
14:31
John Arndt: Then they'd better know their own numbers before the bill tells them.
14:34
Kate: So if I'm listening, I go through everything I pay for that runs on its own, and ask why it runs that often.
14:40
John Arndt: And write down the number you'd be annoyed to see on the bill. Set that as a cap, or at least an alert.
14:45
Kate: And if nobody knows why it runs hourly?
14:48
John Arndt: It runs daily.
14:49
Kate: That's a good rule. Did you steal it from yourself?
14:51
John Arndt: From August me. He paid for it.
14:54
Kate: August you sounds expensive.
14:56
John Arndt: August me was expensive. Briefly.
14:58
Kate: Fine. The bot's cheap, and the schedule's sane. Who reads the spreadsheet?
15:03
John Arndt: That's the part nobody priced.
15:09
Kate: Rapid fire. Short answers.
15:11
John Arndt: I can do short.
15:12
Kate: You can't. But go. Does it make mistakes?
15:15
John Arndt: His own post says you still check its work. On day one, it was only fairly sure an Account Manager job was a sales job, because that title wasn't on his list of sales titles, so the model kind of
15:26
Kate: Shorter.
15:27
John Arndt: Yes. Sometimes.
15:28
Kate: Two words. That's a personal best.
15:31
John Arndt: Don't get used to it.
15:32
Kate: And there's the part you told me to remember. The question's only as good as his examples.
15:37
John Arndt: Told you it'd come back.
15:39
Kate: How do you check it?
15:40
John Arndt: The project ships with a test. You label a hundred page changes by hand. It runs the cheap model and a bigger one on the same hundred. If the cheap one misses too many, you move one setting and you're on the bigger one.
15:51
Kate: A hundred. By hand. Who's doing that?
15:54
John Arndt: You.
15:55
Kate: In what afternoon?
15:56
John Arndt: A long one.
15:58
Kate: And if you skip the hundred?
15:59
John Arndt: Then you're trusting it on day one. Which is exactly when it wasn't sure about Account Manager.
16:04
Kate: So the test is the part you can't skip.
16:06
John Arndt: Yep. Look at me, short.
16:08
Kate: Next. Doesn't a smarter AI just fix that?
16:12
John Arndt: Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor who studies AI, posted something close to this. He says GPT six Pro finds supposed errors in academic papers all the time, just while it's doing other work. And confirming them, and figuring out whether they even matter, still takes a lot of time.
16:27
Kate: Supposed errors.
16:28
John Arndt: His word. He thinks the confirming gets faster. He also says we don't have the right way to handle a flood of corrections yet.
16:35
Kate: And your read?
16:36
John Arndt: My read, and this part is my opinion. A smarter model flags more things. Somebody still has to look at every one of them.
16:43
Kate: So, more homework.
16:45
John Arndt: Better homework, maybe. Still homework.
16:47
Kate: How much time are people really spending on this?
16:50
John Arndt: Pax Eight again, same survey. Fifty-five percent of the decision-makers they surveyed say they personally spend three or more hours a week reviewing, editing or fact-checking AI work. Seven percent say ten hours or more.
17:02
Kate: Personally. The decision-makers.
17:05
John Arndt: Self-reported. But yeah. The people deciding what to buy say they're spending their own hours checking.
17:10
Kate: Three hours a week is a lot of gumballs.
17:12
John Arndt: You can't count that in gumballs.
17:14
Kate: Watch me. More than one.
17:16
John Arndt: Next.
17:17
Kate: Is anybody serious actually using this for real work?
17:21
John Arndt: Phoronix, a Linux news site, posted that Linus Torvalds, who created Linux, is using Claude Code on a hefty performance improvement to the Linux kernel. And that he used Claude to help draft a test program and the commit message.
17:33
Kate: The guy who made Linux.
17:35
John Arndt: On the real work. And look what came with it. A test program.
17:39
Kate: Like Vacca's hundred labels.
17:41
John Arndt: Similar idea, maybe. All we know is what the post says, and a test was part of it.
17:46
Kate: That's actually a good sign. Last one. What happens when
17:50
John Arndt: Oh, and this is why the price drop is such a big deal, because the model checking costs next to nothing now, so you can run it on
17:57
Kate: No. Stop. The bot's checking is a gumball. The person's checking is three hours a week.
18:03
John Arndt: I was just
18:04
Kate: You were doing the price story again.
18:06
John Arndt: Okay, but the price matters. If checking were expensive, nobody would run it at all.
18:11
Kate: Sure. The price got it in the door. Now it's a gumball, and gumballs were never the problem.
18:16
John Arndt: Right, but if you buy a tool instead, the tool does the
18:19
Kate: Somebody still reads what it sends you. Throws out the wrong ones. Decides who gets a call. That's hours, every week, built or bought.
18:28
John Arndt: Not every tool sends you twenty-one.
18:30
Kate: Then fewer hours. Still hours. And remember the five companies he'd have emailed over a job post?
18:36
John Arndt: Yeah.
18:37
Kate: The cheap model didn't save him from that. Somebody sat down and decided what counts. That was a person.
18:44
John Arndt: I opened this episode excited about the wrong number.
18:47
Kate: You said the ten cents isn't where the money goes.
18:49
John Arndt: I did. I just didn't want it to be this.
18:52
Kate: A person.
18:54
John Arndt: With a calendar. That's the expensive part, whichever way you go.
18:58
Kate: So what's the move?
18:59
John Arndt: Before you build or buy anything, write down the name of the person who's going to check what it finds. And how many hours a week you're giving them.
19:07
Kate: And put it on their calendar.
19:09
John Arndt: As a meeting. Or it turns into the thing they do when they have time, which is never.
19:13
Kate: A meeting with who?
19:15
John Arndt: With the spreadsheet.
19:16
Kate: The spreadsheet's going to be a terrible meeting.
19:18
John Arndt: Better than no meeting.
19:19
Kate: So if the checker is the real cost, and I'm paying the checker either way, why would I pay anybody else?
19:25
John Arndt: Okay. That one we fight about.
19:33
John Arndt: Okay. I'll take the pay side. And I'm going to start with somebody else's argument, so you can't say it's mine.
19:39
Kate: Convenient.
19:40
John Arndt: Liam Ottley, who sells AI work to companies, posted that the question comes back after every big AI launch. Why would business owners pay you, when they can do it themselves?
19:50
Kate: I'd ask it.
19:51
John Arndt: His example is Facebook and Instagram ads. People can run their own, and they still pay agencies.
19:56
Kate: Some of them.
19:58
John Arndt: Sure, some. And his rule of thumb is that doing it yourself gets you about a fifty percent result. A specialist gets ninety, or ninety-five. When it's a key part of the business, owners pay for the gap.
20:09
Kate: Where'd he get fifty percent?
20:11
John Arndt: His estimate. He gives it as a rule of thumb, and he doesn't point to a study.
20:15
Kate: My gut says sixty.
20:17
John Arndt: Your gut's generous.
20:19
Kate: My gut's very confident.
20:21
John Arndt: Second exhibit. Investors think people will pay. Clay, a sales-data and prospecting company, raised a hundred fifteen million dollars in September, at a seven point one billion dollar valuation. Wellington led it. And their CEO, Kareem Amin, said, quote, now we're building agents that can help grow your company for you.
20:41
Kate: For you. I always love for you.
20:44
John Arndt: To be fair to him, he said help. And a lot of teams want exactly that. My guess is more of these tools are on the way.
20:51
Kate: I'm not knocking them. I just get suspicious when anything promises to do it for me.
20:56
John Arndt: And Ottley's point holds somewhere. If signals are a key part of how you sell, a better result is real money.
21:03
Kate: If. With eleven accounts, the key part is the phone call. The spreadsheet's the easy bit.
21:08
John Arndt: Hm. Keep going.
21:10
Kate: If I've got eleven accounts, I'm building it this weekend.
21:13
John Arndt: Just like that?
21:14
Kate: Eleven accounts. Fifty. Whatever. A bot somebody says he's giving away, plus one person who owns the checking. That's enough.
21:22
John Arndt: And the signals?
21:23
Kate: You want forty or three? I want three. I can write three down. We did it on a napkin earlier.
21:29
John Arndt: You did.
21:30
Kate: And the filter did the real work. You said so. So I keep yesterday's copy like he does, and I write my own filter. Size, region, has a sales team.
21:39
John Arndt: That's a short filter.
21:40
Kate: Whoever's calling those eleven knows them better than any tool does.
21:44
John Arndt: And the hundred labels? The test?
21:46
Kate: With eleven companies, I'm reading every change anyway. The labels are just me, reading.
21:51
John Arndt: Fair. Okay, my last push. Maintenance.
21:55
Kate: Go.
21:56
John Arndt: Job boards change how they're laid out. Pages move. Somebody redesigns their website and one of your four pages isn't there anymore. Job posts don't change hourly, but websites do get rebuilt, and somebody has to notice when the thing quietly stops working.
22:10
Kate: For eleven companies, I'll notice.
22:13
John Arndt: And if it's five hundred
22:14
Kate: Then I'm not eleven anymore, am I.
22:17
John Arndt: Okay, but say you go on vacation. The bot keeps running, and nobody reads it.
22:21
Kate: Then it's a spreadsheet nobody opened. Which is also what happens to tools people pay for.
22:27
John Arndt: No. You're right.
22:30
Kate: Sorry, what was that?
22:31
John Arndt: You're right. With a short list, build it. And budget for the person who checks it. The model's the cheap part.
22:37
Kate: Thank you. That goes in the gumball count.
22:40
John Arndt: It does not. But fine.
22:43
Kate: So who's the paying side actually for?
22:45
John Arndt: Bigger lists. Which is where my thing lives.
22:48
Kate: Pretty close, honestly?
22:49
John Arndt: You remembered. Pretty close. Intakra is one of mine. It watches job posts, SEC filings and federal contracts for a team keeping an eye on roughly a hundred to twenty-five hundred companies, who'd rather not keep the checking running themselves. Companies only, no people.
23:06
Kate: And it finds the companies for me.
23:08
John Arndt: No. You bring the list. Which, after today, makes sense. Who's on your list is part of your filter.
23:14
Kate: And somebody still reads it.
23:16
John Arndt: Every time. And the honest part. A public event is proof of that event. What it usually leads to is only usually. Nobody outside a company can see a buying decision.
23:27
Kate: Including you.
23:28
John Arndt: Me especially. I'd love to see it.
23:31
Kate: So. You told me to ask again at the end. Sales team of four, a few dozen companies.
23:36
John Arndt: Build it. You already have the napkin.
23:38
Kate: On your own show.
23:39
John Arndt: On my own show. Napkin first. Then a bot, and a person with a calendar.
23:44
Kate: And when does somebody pay?
23:46
John Arndt: Count your accounts. If it's a short list, build it and read it yourself. If it's hundreds, and nobody on your team wants to look after a bot, that's when you pay somebody.
23:55
Kate: And either way, somebody reads it.
23:57
John Arndt: Either way.
23:58
Kate: Okay. The homework. Slowly. Somebody out there is driving.
24:03
John Arndt: Slowly. This week, on paper. Your last three deals. For each one, the one public thing that happened at that company before your first real conversation.
24:13
Kate: Like a new hire.
24:14
John Arndt: Or a new location. Three deals, three events. That's the start of your filter, whatever you do next.
24:20
Kate: And write down who's going to check it.
24:22
John Arndt: And give them the hours. Then decide if you're building or buying.
24:26
Kate: In that order.
24:27
John Arndt: Yep. Alex Vacca's post, the price announcements, the Pax Eight survey and the Microsoft change are all linked in the show notes.
24:34
Kate: And send this to whoever on your team is about to buy a sales tool. Or about to build one this weekend.
24:40
John Arndt: Especially the weekend one. They'll want the napkin part.
24:43
Kate: And the riddle from the cold open. Twenty-one signals for under ten cents.
24:47
John Arndt: And I still believe him.
24:48
Kate: You said the money goes three places. I counted two. The schedule, and a person.
24:54
John Arndt: Third one's the filter. Somebody sat down and decided who counts.
24:58
Kate: That's a person again.
24:59
John Arndt: Fine. Two places, and one of them is a person twice. This has been After the Demo. I'm John Arndt.
25:06
Kate: And I'm Kate. Final count: one gumball, somebody's hours, and a napkin.
25:11
John Arndt: Bring a pen.