The Ryan Hanley Show - RHS 147 - How Michael Lebor & InsuranceGiG are Creating Better Data Outcomes

Episode Date: June 16, 2022

Became a Master of the Close: https://masteroftheclose.comIn this episode of The Ryan Hanley Show, Ryan Hanley interviews Michael Lebor, founder and CEO of InsuranceGiG. Michael joins the podcast for a deep dive into how we use data to create better outcomes for our business. Michael is solving big problems with InsuranceGiG, and we’re honored to have him share his insights and expertise. Don’t miss this episode. Episode Highlights: Michael explains what InsuranceGiG is and how it is beneficial to the industry. (8:14) Michael shares that if you are in insurance technology, data is either a weapon or a liability. (11:53) Michael explains that they get their foot in the door with their pricing model and organic platform. (18:02) Michael shares that they recently went live with HawkSoft AMS and explains why it is a game changer. (21:26)  Ryan explains that he sees the tool as very useful in saving time, as the system can do all the work on the same platform. (30:44)  Michael explains that their main drive is not to replace the core policy system but to make things as easy as possible as well as cheap and fast. (34:18) Michael shares that InsuranceGiG has categories like data, operational workflows, and submissions. (40:17) Michael talks about their company and system being able to demonstrate visibility into the flow of data across the entire supply chain. (52:15) Michael explains that InsuranceGig has the beauty of having incredible vendors, like Record Linker. (58:13)  Key Quotes: "If you look at yourself as a company, or somebody in the insurance technology, business data is either one of two things to you, it's either a weapon, or it's a liability." - Michael Lebor "We're not replacing the core policy system. But we really think that we're going to be this really valuable, a creative, secondary layer on top of them." - Michael Lebor " I'm just going out to the best vendors that are out there and saying just connect to me, become part of our data fabric." - Michael Lebor Resources Mentioned: Michael Lebor LinkedIn InsuranceGiG Reach out to Ryan Hanley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today we have a tremendous episode, tremendous conversation with Michael Lebor, the founder and CEO of Insurance Gig. Now, I first met Michael back in my trustedchoice.com days. We were doing some things with AmTrust and Michael was the head of digital distribution, wore a bunch of different hats, innovation, was pretty much a power player in the Amtrust ecosystem, and just got to know him. Loved the way he thought about the business, loved the way he approached problems, loved that even though he was working inside a carrier at that time, he didn't accept the

traditional way of business as the absolute solution and was looking for new methods of growing both agencies and ultimately the Amtrust product. And now, as the founder and CEO of Insurance Gig, he's making major moves. I want you to listen to the episode to understand what Insurance Gig is, but at a high level, and this is kind of a broad sweeping stroke, insurance gig is the Zapier of insurance applications. So if you understand what Zapier is, one tool to connect many, then you understand what Michael is trying to do in insurance gig is provide insurtech, carriers, lead distribution, data sources, with a single API connection that anyone can connect into InsuranceGig and get the resources from all those products.

It's a big idea, but it's also an important idea, and I think Michael's the guy to get it done. Before we get there, I want to give a big shout out to our sponsor, Tarmica, T-A-R-M-I-K-A.com. That's T-A-R-M-I-K-A.com. That's T-A-R-M-I-K-A. Guys, if you're not using Tarmaka to comparatively rate your small business insurance customers, both in new business situations as well as, and this is one of the really underutilized aspects of Tarmaka, your renewals, right? We always say, you know, small business is unprofitable because when it comes to renewal, you know, what do I make on a $1,200 bot that I have to rewrite

to another carrier? Well, I get it. Like rewrite a ton of small business at rogue risk. Tarmaka makes that process easy when it's necessary. So go to T-A-R-M-I-K-A.com, sign up for a demo, learn about the tool. My friends, you are going to be happy that you did. With that, let's get on to Michael Libor. Good morning. What's going on? How are you? I'm good, man. Just got back from the gym, getting my protein shake on, you know. I just started doing that. doing that actually doing a meal replacement a couple meal replacements and to lose like 20 pounds yeah i um i in 2017 when i put on elevate 2017 i weighed 212 pounds wow how tall How tall are you? Six foot three, four, somewhere around there.

Holy shit. You're huge. So I did the conference and at the end of the conference, I was physically toasted. Like I literally couldn't even stand. Like I was just, just absolutely whooped. And I just said to myself, like, I can't have this happen again. Like I need to be able to rock out a conference and not get to the end of it and just be physically exhausted. So I completely changed my diet, went on an anti-inflammatory diet. I wrote a lot about it, talked about it on like different podcasts and stuff back then when I was like super into it and dropped down to 190, got all the way down to 190. And the difference was, and this is, I say this all the time, your physical fitness is a competitive advantage of business. Like I can go all day long from start to finish of a conference, get to 10 PM. Everyone else is like barely standing and I'm still feeling good you know what i mean because like my physical fitness was in a place

where i could have a thousand conversations you know mentally you get a little wiped but physically you know was still there and so ever since then i've taken fitness and diet fairly seriously you know that's super interesting so like like I go to these, I live for these like trade shows and events and I don't eat a blessed thing the entire day. Like not one calorie. I'll have a couple of cups of coffee, A, because of kosher food, B, I just like, I never have time to sit and eat and I can go the whole day. But you know, I definitely, I crash at night. But this time I brought a couple of protein shakes. I brought a couple of carbs.

They're awesome. They taste like Nestle Quick, and, you know, having them as a meal replacement. I hit, like, over 190, and I'm 5'7", dude. You've got a foot on me. And I should weigh 150 I just got down to 170 this morning nice so I but I can't lose like I stopped drinking uh for the month so we'll see if I can keep that going yeah the alcohol is a big part of it but it's more do you track your macros do you count even though no I don So in my opinion, the only way that I've ever been able to consistently

lose weight and keep my weight off is if I am regularly meaning six days a week tracking my macronutrient intake. It's the, it's the only way. Cause what happens is you don't realize you think you're having a serving of rice, let's say, but really, you know, in American portions, you're having three servings of rice or whatever. And, you know, you look at the box and you're like, oh, this is great. You know, brown rice, 17 grams, 17 grams of carbs or whatever. No big deal. And you don't realize realize three four servings is what you actually intake and now you're at 60 70 grams and that's half of what you should be eating for your day and you just had it in one meal and um that's where we get as americans our portion size is so big like

you know traditionally that that's where you get crushed is in portion size so just yeah i gotta i gotta figure something out i did uh porter got me to do like one of those water fasts uh where i drank on water for five days which was the hardest physical thing i've ever had to do yeah it's kind of cool i've never done more than a 16 hour fast i've never done a full 24 hours or anything longer than that. I want to, but at the same time, I work out basically seven days a week doing something physical, not always lifting or whatever. And like to work out when you're fasted like that.

I don't know. You can't do it. Yeah. So. Okay. Let's chat. Let's chat some insurance. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's chat. Let's chat some insurance. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So, so thanks for accommodating the time. Oh yeah. No problem, man. Look, we're both busy. I get it. I've been doing podcasting for a long time and having a couple of

misconnections is far from offensive to me in any regard, since we were both, I think I was guilty twice. You were guilty. Who the hell knows? So, um, so dude, insurance gig, uh, everybody listening has probably started to hear the name starting to bounce around the industry a little bit. What's the four one one. Give us the, give us the 10,000 foot.

We'll start there and then we'll start to dig into you and go from where we go. But just let's kick it off with what the heck is insurance gig? What problem are you trying to solve? What's the pitch? What's the elevator pitch? So at the highest level, insurance gig is an app store. I think having given a thousand plus demos, what I find the message that seems to resonate the most is think about you using your iPhone. You've got scores of apps on your phone. You've got Waze. You've got Uber. You've got Lyft.

You've got Robinhood. I can go through the list. So to use Uber as an example, you as a consumer did not go on to a limo platform. You did not integrate with the limo company. You did not reach out to dispatch to work out your data dictionary and how to integrate. Apple created this platform for you. They created it through their app store, using their phone as this kind of piece of hardware or platform. And you as a buyer of technology are accessing a whole library of open source apps that the creative community has presented to Apple, right? That's how it works. We've just done the same thing for InsurTech. What we've done is we've created this platform.

It's completely open and it takes the form of an app market, we it where i've got a library of different in short text that are there across the entire gamut people very often get hung up on is it only submission you know with comparators or is it data it's all of the above just like apple has this array of different types of apps from candy crush to uh you know to sharing. We are completely open across the entire spectrum. And vendors could come list their service on our app market. And we make it very available to buyers of InsureTech. And there are a couple of nuances that make it really quite unique, which I can get into, but at the high level, uh, insurance gig is an insure tech app store. Um, so one of the, one of the things that I know a lot of people struggle with is, is, and this is going to sound weird, but like the concept of data, right? So you, what you're,

when, when you first described insurance gig to me, however many months ago it was or whenever it was a year ago, whatever it was, you know, I, I kind of said, so is it like Zapier for insurance? And you said, yes. And probably more, right. More. And which, which makes, which makes sense to me now kind of seeing how you're evolving and it's much more, it's data connection, but also app store, which I, which, which makes it's data connection, but also app store, which makes it more. Where data in general seems to confuse people with its actual value, right? In terms of, we understand that data exists.

We understand that people have data. And we understand that being able to get data from app to app is important. At what level does prioritizing the push of data across apps, across different pieces of technology that we use, I see some people getting lost in it. They're spending all their time in data and they're not actually doing their job as an agency owner, like they're chasing data. Like what is the sweet spot between solid usage of data and just data for data's sake? Like if you, you know, I know that's kind of a theoretical question, but this is what I always get. Like, okay, it does data. Great. So does my agency management system. What does that mean? Well, you know, this, you know, where does data start to add value?

Like what should we starting to think about with data that adds value to users? So, you're definitely like leading up to, or you're feeding me a softball question. I know it wasn't intended to be a softball, but that's like so on point with kind of the thesis of what insurance gig is. I'll say it like this, because there's so many ways to go with that, right?

If you look at yourself as a company or somebody in the insurance technology business, data is either one of two things to you. It's either a weapon or it's a liability. I don't see, or I have yet to see really anyone in the middle where it's kind of like they're making a little bit of use of it and it's helping. It's either people don't have a handle on their data and it's a liability, or there are people that are so far ahead of everyone else and they're using it for better outcomes, better expenses, better underwriting. So, you know, that's how I would look at it. The challenge is we live in this Babel-esque type vertical where no systems talk to each other.

So, like, Ryan, can I share a screen? Is that something I could do in this format? You can share a screen. No one will be able to see it but me, but you can share a screen. Okay. screen no one will be able to see it but me but you can share a screen okay so um it's something if you want i'd love to be the first guinea pig i don't know if you're able to like weave in uh you know screen sharing but i'll i want to show you something cool yeah when here i'm going to share my screen.

Check this out. When somebody comes to insurance gig, okay. And I love using relativity six as an example. It's just, it's there. They have a superpower. They're incredibly good at what they do. And it's not this like uber complex workflow where they are really good at providing NAICS data and NCCI data. And it's something that whether you're an MGA or you're a carrier, this is a small commercial, whether it's GL or WorkComp. So Relativity 6 comes to the App Store. The first thing they do is they list their API with us. Now, we don't want to be just a Craigslist of API listings. That's not valuable. But what the first thing that we do when a partner comes to time is this kind of like data alliance where this is relativity six posts they're saying send me address city state zip unit and company name and this is what they'll spit back these four pieces of data but what happens if he calls it company name but my column header when i set up my database was company underscore name, and you use an AMS who calls it company dash name. We're all working with the same data,

but our data headers are different, and we don't communicate, and we don't talk to each other. So what we've done is, and this is just like a mock-up of one of our internal screens, but just to show you, when the first time a partner comes to us, we do this one-to-one data mapping. Now, when people hear about, oh, a new partnership and doing the data mapping, they start freaking out and saying, well, we're a carrier, we're an MGA, we have 82,000 data fields across 38 lines of business, and we have 17 carrier internal writing entities or companies that we work with. My data dictionary is vast. And we kind of like try to say like, let's take a step back. Let's just do this one micro service

at a time. Okay. I just showed you that one service to get NAICS from one of our vendors. I mapped his six data fields and the four that he sends back. That was a mapping that one time, 10 fields. And now anytime I need to work with that partner, I have his data mapped. So I know I'm monologuing a bit. No, you're great. I want to give you an example that people really seem to like. Think about the United Nations, right? You've got 80 people sitting in the same

room. No two people speak the same language, but they communicate and collaborate in real time. So the thing that makes that happen is the fact that everything is translated from its origin language to English and then to the destination language. They do not do 80 to the 79 factorial of language combos. That would be untenable. But that untenable nature is kind of the way that we do it within InsurTech, where every two parties that work together have to build their own connection to each other. And it's incredibly inefficient. So what we've done is we've said, kind of like, just put us in the middle. We don't want any money for it. We're building it out so it's really programmatic and scalable, where you could just

come upload your API. We will auto-identify the data headers. We use AI to do a mapping that we think agency name compares to your agency dot name. We have a human come check it. But now, I speak your language. I have this Google Translate service between me and you for these data headers. So that's like the first fundamental thing that we're doing. So now, if you think across the insurance supply chain, AMSs to wholesalers, to MGA systems, to carrier portals, to core systems, to TPA systems, to claims. These are all siloed systems and none of them talk to each other. And each integration is a one-to-one. We're trying to break that down. So I'll shut up.

But that's like the first core element of what we do. So essentially, insurance gig is the data. It's the universal data currency of the insurance industry. Like essentially, this is the language that everything is translated into to then be translated into whatever, wherever it needs to go. Like this is the English in your, in your example, basically what you're saying is what insurance gigs mapping is the, is the English of how the United Nations translates between all the different, the different languages.

Yeah. So what I would say is I want to be very careful with my words. I would say it can be. I would say we hope for it to be. It doesn't have to be. We're not trying to build this platform where I have to have 72.9% market coverage in order for it to be relevant to everyone. That's where this market effect comes in. We're just working organically one partner at a time. Because when I get to the. You know, that's where like this market effect comes in. We're just working organically one partner at a time where, because when I get to the second fundamental point, you'll see what the driver is. Like the data is this massive problem and we have a solution for it, but that's kind of not how we're getting our foot in the door. We're getting our foot in the door when it comes to the pricing model, which we think we've come up with a whole new way to price insure tech. And people are, I know this is self-serving for me to say, but they're going crazy for how we've broken it out.

So when they come in to us for the pricing and we have this kind of organic mapping where I could say, hey, anybody that I'm connected to, like remember that game like Kevin Bacon, Six Degrees with Kevin Bacon? Yeah, yeah. It's like one degree of insurance gig. If you're integrated with insurance gig, anybody else that's integrated with insurance gig, you can now speak to each other. I love it. So one thing I'll say is you can be as self-aggrandizing as you want on this show because we're not unbiased. We allow you to be biased on this show. So you can say whatever you want about yourself. So go crazy. Again, when we originally talked and I had mentioned Zapier because that has a similar concept, the problem always being most it's not prioritized by anyone in our space because the idea of marketing and data connection and stuff is so foreign. So what you end up getting is all these hacked connections that break every five days and it's never really what you want and it's a pain in the butt. So what you're saying is, say my Raider integrates with InsuranceGig and my AMS integrates with InsuranceGig, just talking tools that a lot of agents will understand, but they don't talk to each other, which has always been something that grinds your gears, right?

Now, because they both connect to InsuranceGig, I can say, hey, I don't care if they ever actually integrate. It'd be great if they did, but if they don't, it doesn't matter because now I can use InsuranceGig to bridge the data from my rater to my AMS and vice versa because there's this universal language

that they use to connect the two. So the answer is, yeah. Let me show you. And I know that the audience isn't seeing this. And Brian, if you're inclined, I'm happy to work with you offline. I'll have maybe my editing team take the footage and insert some video to give that visual effect if you're again, but this is your show. Yeah. Yeah. So this is something that I'll show you very quickly. We just went live. This is the Hawks off AMS. And when the agent is in the AMS, there's an insurance gig button. And when they click that button, we pull all the data out of the AMS, and we actually send it to the comp raters. So we have the ability to send it to, right now we're announcing it, I believe, this week.

We're connected to Talich and SEMSI, so two of the premier comp raters. So we can now give the agent a full comp rating experience without leaving the AMS, because we do the behind the scenes work. We take the submission data. We then, Talich and Sempsey, go to their carrier panels, get the quotes, and then we can take it and put it back into the AMS. So we actually went live with Hawks Off. I think it was last week was the first live production. So it's kind of game changing on a couple of levels. One is quoting in the AMS, which is really quite powerful. That's where the agents want to do it. But it's the concept of just this data in and out that we could take it. Can I show you one other cool thing that we do?

You can show me anything you want. Check this out. Now I'm jumping around a bit and this might get confusing, especially since I haven't even gone into like two or three of the core, you know, value props of what insurance gig is. Yeah, we'll get there. But check this out. You're an agent using AMS 360.

Here's the Boynton Beach construction, right? You see the name of the risk? Insurance gig built a Chrome extension, which is basically meant to be this gateway in and out of all of our backend APIs. So now the agent is in the record and they see they're missing certain data. Like I want to submit this. I don't have the NAICS yet. And I know that the carrier, if they don't have the NAICS, they're going to have to go get it. And it's going to add three days to the quote. If the agent hits our Chrome extension, we pull the data via API out of the AMS. So you see here, I just pulled Boynton Beach construction right here. When the agent clicks the fill the next button, I API to multiple vendors, Relativity 6 and Neural Metrics. I pull the data and I

populated back into the AMS. The agent never left the AMS and we were able to go with third-party APIs. They didn't have to go do a separate login. They didn't have to go to three different systems. We're consolidating all these third-party services that agents want or need, and we're serving them where they want to be. So, but I think that's a killer and it's anything. It doesn't have to be NAICS. It could be any type of data. It could be quoting. It could be scanning. We do some killer work with Sensible. They're amazing at basically what Insurance Geek is trying to do is find the best partners and expose their superpowers as a microservice. There are tons of these amazing companies out there, these huge core policy systems without mentioning any names. They're meant as like big boy tech. And I say that where only people with massive budgets can afford it. But also it's kind of like this all or nothing type thing where you have to buy this whole suite.

People just want microservices. I want that and only that. And that was kind of like the origin story to insurance gig where I wanted certain tech, but I only wanted that tech. I didn't want the whole suite. I didn't want the whole SaaS platform. I just wanted to get the NAICS code. How do I do that? So here, let me show you one other thing that is like really that's the core of what we do. It's really, if I had to break it down to one tweet,

which I'm self-admittedly not really good at being concise. So the main driving point that I found that was the biggest friction to buying technology, it just came down to money. It came down to the buyers of insure tech, whether they're at carriers or at MGAs or wholesalers, or even, you know, the mom and pop retail, people do not want to spend big dollars and make big investments before they're a hundred percent certain it's going to work. So even if you go to POCs, unless I know I'm going to get a 10X ROI in premium or a 10X cost savings in CapEx, I'm very reluctant to drop 50, a100,000 in a proof of concept, even though that's really what the proof of concept is supposed to be. Because nobody wants to go to the

budget meeting at the end of the quarter and get screamed at, why did you spend 100 grand on this tech? I don't see the results yet. So what we've done, and the question that I love to ask is, Ryan, you have an Uber account, I assume, right? Yes, I do. When you signed up to Uber, if Uber would have said to you, prepay $15,000 and leave it on account and you'll have a balance and every $13 ride that you take, we will take off of your balance. Would you have signed up to Uber? No. No. But that's the only paradigm in which to buy insure tech. You have to make big bets. You have to put up big dollars and you have to kind of hope it works. Now there's amazing tech out there. Amazing. And we're just trying to give these vendors a different medium platform to, and a whole different audience to be quite frank, to sell their tech.

So what we do, like the one rule of insurance gig is transactional pricing. Every creator comes to us and in minutes they could list their service, in minutes we could ingest their API, and then they give us their own pricing model, but it must be per transaction. It's per event in the runtime. So if right here, Relativity 6, I'm just making up a number here. They want $0.50 per data call. If you as an agent want that data, if you sign up to me, I have your credit card on file. And if you use their service once, I'm going to charge you $0.50.

I collect that $0.50, and I give 85% of it to the creator. That's our model. We're just like the App Store. You want to buy $100 worth of Candy Crush credits, Apple's going to bill that money and they're going to pay the gaming company 85 cents. I know there's lawsuits around how much it is. Please don't take me too literally,

but that's the structure of what we do and how we make money. So just to recap, you've got that translation layer, which allows us to all talk together, which is really new. You've got this innovative, especially for enterprise, payment structure, which now, here's the value prop. Here's the sales pitch. Go to any buyer.

Hey, try something out before you make this huge commitment. I have certain carriers that have said to me, do you mean to tell me I could put $500 on my corporate card, try out a vendor, see if it works, and then go back to my boss and show him, hey, I have results and I only spent $500? And the answer is yes, absolutely. And let me just show you one more thing, and it'll all come together. Are you familiar on your phone? Apple has this thing called shortcuts. You ever use it? So I'd say a third of the people that I come across, cause I bring it up often know what shortcuts is. So for those who don't, I'll just, I'll repeat it quickly. Shortcuts is this amazing tool. That's an app that's created by Apple.

You have to download it. And basically what it allows you to do, it allows you to string together the different apps in your phone. So what you could say is, hey, in the morning, I want you to check the weather app. If it's raining, call an Uber for me early.

When I hit the Brooklyn Bridge, hit the Starbucks app and order my coffee. And when Uber sends me my ride ended notification, send an SMS to my next meeting, let them Starbucks app and order my coffee. And when Uber sends me my ride ended notification, send an SMS to my next meeting, let them know I'm on my way. You can do that. And you don't have to have this huge engineering team. It's kind of like Zapier or if this than that, but specifically for the Apple App Store. We've built that for InsureTech. So what this allows you to do is you could say, hey, I need to scan a document. And let's say you want to scan in a court form.

We scan it. It has seven pieces of data on it. And in order to send it to Taladge or to SEMC, you need eight pieces of data. So I scan it. I'm missing data. I then send it to Relativity 6, who enriches it with the missing eighth piece of data. It comes back to InsuranceGig. Then I send it to the

comp rating platforms who then get quotes. Those come back to me. And then I could send it back to the submitting broker. So what I could do is I could bundle and cluster different microservices and superpowers from different vendors with no end. There's an infinite, and I'm being super clear, an infinite amount of possibilities of different recipes or bundles that we could create with the inventory of vendors and tech that we already have. There's no end to what you could imagine. And everybody's got something unique. And the fact that we could do that in minutes, like literally minutes, where the current paradigm is it's impossible to do. Could you imagine, Ryan, getting on a tech kickoff call with three parties and saying, okay, what's the cadence?

How are we going to have a weekly call? What are you going to do? Getting three partners to work together is virtually impossible. The company, the buyer has to do their own orchestration internally. We've completely flipped that script. What's up guys. Sorry to take you away from the episode, but as you know, we do not run ads on this show. And in exchange for that, I need your help. If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, whether you're watching on YouTube or you're listening on your

favorite podcast platform, I would love for you to subscribe, share, comment if you're on YouTube, leave a rating review if you're on Spotify or Apple iTunes, et cetera. This helps the show grow. It helps me bring more guests in. We have a tremendous lineup of people coming in, men and women who've done incredible things, sharing their stories around peak performance, leadership, growth, sales, the things that are going to help you grow as a person and grow your business. But they all check out comments, ratings, reviews. They check out all this information before they come on. So as I reach out to more and more people and want to bring them in and share their stories with you, I need your help. Share the show, subscribe if you're not subscribed. And I'd love for you to

leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments. Or if you're on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating review of this show. I love you for listening to this show. And I hope you enjoy it listening as much as I do creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode. So for you guys listening at home, if you can't see the screen and everything that's going on, one of the things that I've, just from a pure usability standpoint, and we track this a lot at Rogue Risk because we're fully remote. So we're not punching time cards or when does Sally or Johnny walk in the office or whatever. I look at the, the, the, the time that people spend on things on tasks, not necessarily,

I'm not tracking call times and stuff like that. Cause obviously I've talked a little bit about my philosophy on call times and, um, but when someone has to do a task, one of the things we're tracking is how many tabs do they have to open? How many services do they have to log into? Right. Like, I think what I've always been intrigued by with insurance gig is that the logins, especially now that multi-factor authentication, MFA is a thing and everyone's all MFA, MFA. It's like, well, you're, you're the fact that I have to log into your system as a separate tab from systems we use most often, and then double authenticate factor in because it's 15 days from my last login. Or now I just don't that time. We just stopped using that service. And what I found is that people in my office have built their own workarounds because they don't want to log into these separate systems. So they're actually creating, you know, we had someone create

their own fillable Adobe. We don't even have Adobe subscription where we do now, but we didn't at the time. Adobe fillable PDF because they didn't want to, you know, it was a workaround to get out of having to log into different systems. So when I'm looking at you in AMS 360, you know, click a button here, push this information there. Now, all of a sudden I haven't, you didn't leave the tab. You stayed right on the AMS 360 tab and boom, all of a sudden that information is in the system. And now I can push that right out to get a quote or whatever. That time savings, that workflow savings is not just important from a pure time perspective, but something that I think is a vastly under-talked about cultural aspect of all our businesses, which is like tool fatigue, right? Our teammates get fatigue from logging in and out of different systems from,

you know, I'm in this for my AMS and I'm in this for rating that I'm in this for records that I'm in this for, you know, NACS codes. And I'm in this to get email addresses. And all of a sudden people's brains like start to come out their ears. And what I'm seeing here is I can hit one service. And what insurance gig does then is actually do all that work for me. Instead of me having to go to relatively six, log in and find the NACE codes, it's being pulled in. Instead of me having to go out to Tallage and get a rate and pull it back, although we do use Tarmaca, it does that. And now I'm not getting as a user or as a teammate of a company, I'm not getting this tool fatigue because this system is actually doing that work for us and pulling the data in. And now what I'm thinking about is how am I going to position the results in order to

help solve this person's problem, which is what our people should be thinking about. Not, well, I used my dog's middle name last time for this login, and now I got to switch it to my second child's, you know, middle name in order to get my login into this system, which just breaks people's brains. Yeah. So you've just put down so many different things. I'm not sure which one to pick up first. The way that we like to frame it is, you know, we're not replacing the AMS. We're not replacing the core policy system, but we really think that we're going to be this really valuable, accretive, secondary layer on top of them where, you know, you mentioned logins and passwords. We've spent a lot of time and energy on being able to use OAuth or SSO to take the credentials from whatever system you use most and use that to log into InsuranceGig, just like you could use, you know, Facebook or Google. So we are building that because at the end of the day, like our main drive is just to make this as easy as possible, as cheap and fast and de-risk.

So you think about, you know, that fatigue. Think about how much worse that fatigue is when you're actually paying a lot of money for these systems that are a pain to use or you might not use at all. That's where it becomes painful beyond fatigue. So we really do think that this, that insurance gig presents a solution to be able to think of us as the last integration, not the last platform, but the last integration you're ever going to need. You know, we have carriers that are saying to us, and this was not our model when we set out, do you mean to tell me I could use you as my compliance hub? Let me, let insurance gig go through your compliance rubric or crucible. And then if other vendors come to them, let me kind of do that. And then I'm not a hundred percent saying that's something that we want to do time and time out because

there's like a huge liability there. But we're that central point of integration. And also think about this, Ryan. When I showed you before the submission, let's assume that this is a one-one work comp. So the quote comes from Hawksoft to me to a comparator. I get the quotes. It comes back to me and I put it back in the AMS. And I've got Tony's Pizza Shop sitting there on January 1st. On March 1st, I want to be super clear about this with the agent's permission because it's the agent's data. Right. So with the agent's permission, I could say, hey, Tony, it's March 1st now. Can I go to a premium audit company that's pre-integrated with us and see if I can get you audit results? Can I go to a loss control company? Can I go to a data science as a service vendor?

I already have the data. I am integrated with those companies. There is zero additional work that you need to do. Look at what I have for you. And the, the creators are super excited to, you know, give it like a freemium or a freebie to say, Hey, the last hundred submissions you did, here's a better underwriting insight, or here's an upsell cross-sell opportunity with zero. And I mean, zero additional work on the buyer side because I'm this very efficient integration layer. I have all those connections.

I've done those integrations. Hmm. I like it. I have all those connections. I've done those integrations. I like it. I like it. So are you seeing, so obviously you've talked a little bit about carriers starting to become interested. What are some of the, I mean, obviously some of the straight insure tech kind of value added service providers like a tallage, like a relatively six. Those seem like a lot of early wins, early adopters of this. Have the carriers started to see this as a potential to give agents access directly into their systems?

Like, could you have they started to open up that far? Are they sniffing around or is it still going to have to be through through comparative raters? Is that kind of step one is comparative raters? Or do you think eventually I'd be able to go to, say, a Hanover or a Chubb or someone and say, hey, like, if you guys are on insurance gig, then we could push quotes directly into your system right from ours using this, you know, without having to do the, you know, what is it, $150,000, $250,000 plus build to get that kind of integration? Yeah. So the way that I would answer it is if you look at all the different comparator or carrier integration solutions that are out there, and we're working very closely with a bunch of them, but I'll mention just three, Talid, Shemsy, and iBind, right? They're amazing at what they do. And Ryan, you know that my job when I was back at the carrier, excuse me, was I oversaw the API integrations. So one thing I'll mention,

and when you talk about being efficient, when I left, I think we had 130 different integrations. Some were with Comprator, some were with wholesalers and MGAs directly, but I'd say 100 of them, we had to do the exact same thing. It was like an identical redundant piece of work. And that was kind of part of what prompted me to think about insurance gig is how do I not build the same thing 130 times? Same thing here. If tech exists out there, I don't want to have to build it. So I am not in that last mile business. I am not looking to go integrate directly with carriers. Talid, Shemsy, and I-Bind are awesome at that. Let them do that. So think of me like kind of like this digital Switzerland in between them, where Taledge, let's say, has 30 carriers,

Shemsy has 30 carriers, and I'm making this up. They've got 15 in common, but they each have 15 unique. How do those guys work and trade with each other? And we're starting to see some of that come to be. But again, Ryan, if you think about Amazon has categories, and this is back to your original question, where they have clothing, electronics, and books, insurance gig has categories. We have data, just pure data. I can get cope. I can get NAICS. I can get crime score. I can get flood data. And we could enrich it. We have operational workflows like scanning and RPA and data normalization and things like that. But we also have a category, which is submissions, where we could work from the distribution

side. Data could come to us. And then we could help, like, think of us almost like air traffic control, where, you know, does the agent want it to go to Tallage? Does they want to go to SEMC? Do they want it to go to Amtrust? Or does, or maybe do we, are they trusting us to help them find the markets and the access? Now, back to your question with carriers. Yeah, carriers are definitely thinking on the submission line, but what about a carrier as a buyer?

What if a carrier needs to get, I know when I was at the carrier, they had underwriters going to websites and looking for pictures of ladders. That's something that a piece of AI could do very easily and inexpensively today. It couldn't three, four years ago, but how do I get that little service from this vendor that I know into the carrier stack without them having to go through an 18-month onboarding process just for that one piece of tech? How do I help them A-B test the two vendors that do that to see which one is better for their use case, which one's cheaper, which one's more accurate? How do I help them build workflows to say, well, now that I saw there's a picture of ladder, let me trigger a secondary, whether it

might be a form or questionnaire, or let me refer it to somebody else who would do something with ladders. So again, there's no end to the workflows. And in terms of the value that we bring, it's not just submission oriented. We're completely open source between buyers of InsureTech and sellers of InsureTech across all lines of business. We're right now being very focused on PNC because that's where I learned and I developed my relationships.

But we have people calling us saying, have you launched yet for employee benefits? Have you launched yet for A&H? And Ryan ryan you know me it kills me to say no yeah and for those who know me you know trying to be focused is a struggle uh but we're trying to be very focused and ryan we launched a month ago uh we've made a lot of noise and people are talking about us but we we went live a month ago so we're trying to balance the create the demand and like you talk about like we're seeing amazing demand because it's a no-brainer. Try it.

No long-term commitment. No long-term contracts. Pay as you use it. And if you don't like it, stop. I've tried to take all the friction and risk out of the tech process of insurance. Yeah. Another concept that I love that you brought up is the idea of being able to test some of these services. That is the part. There's a couple tools that we've kind of had that are in our roadmap that we haven't implemented because the upfront cost to will it work or not, we just haven't been, you know, we haven't been willing to do that. You know, and I look at things like, like a Zywave where one of the, so we subscribe to three Zywave services. One of those

services I use almost daily. The other two, I don't know that I've used in the three-year contract that we have. Zywave won't let us out of the contract because they're, you know, not particularly. That's the business that they're in. The business model is, you know, lock you up and, you know, never use their product again and tell everyone how much you hate them for their draconian practices. But, you know, the idea of I wish I could have tested all three tools and said, oh, you know what? Now that I'm testing them, these two I don't really want. This one I love. I'd like to just use this one. I think will help a lot of people who would love to have add features to their agency, to their carrier, to whatever they're trying to do. But like you said, don't, don't want to, you know, they're, they're worried about kind of sunk cost and all that kind of stuff. It opens up a world to really be, to really try things out and see what kind of things you need.

I couldn't agree more. I don't think that the only reason why I should be paying a software solution provider is because I contractually entered into it, even though it's not useful for me and I'm still writing out checks. And I have that right now with a company that we work with that they're amazing at what they do. I mean, I highly recommend them as a company, but they weren't for me. I made a bad decision very early on that I thought I would need it and ends up I didn't. I'm still paying that contract, even though I don't need it. And that drives me nuts. And so here, I'm showing you a screen. And for those who can imagine, I had a top 100 broker came to us and said, we want to buy data from a particular partner. I'm not going to mention the name, but they wanted to buy data. And they were talking to two for a POC, especially these companies are amazing, but it's only an 80% solution of what we need. So I'm going to have to now go fill in that gap of 20% with a different partner. So now I need two. So they came to us and said,

and I'm showing you a couple of things here. One is insurance gig. Can you go get us this transactional pricing from these vendors, which we did. The vendors were very open to it and we're finding that most are. But look what happened. I went to that top 100 broker and I said, okay, I got you the pricing you wanted. Here are the results that you want. Here's my API, consume it. And they looked at me like I'm from Mars. So Ryan, when I started this, we were calling ourselves an API app market. And in the beginning, when you asked me what I did is I didn't say we're an API app market because we're not just an API app market. Because I realized that once you go to the top broker list and you get past the top 100, nobody's got API resources.

Nobody's got the infrastructure, the engineers to post or to consume APIs. And I said, and actually one of the guys in my team, it was kind of his brainchild is we don't have a solution that will cater to that, what I would call the lowest common denominator of your tech ability, right? So here's what we built. I'm looking at a screen right now where any CSR or any producer could type in the name of a restaurant, okay? So remember in the beginning, I showed you those six fields. Here, I have the name of the restaurant, city, state, zip, and I hit the submit button. Insurance gig went behind the scenes, hit two APIs, and I delivered the results to you in this ready-to-go

format. So you don't need an API. And with that same login that you're coming to us, every one of my services will be available in a user experience. So it's not just this behind the scenes engineering workbench. It's kind of now think of Shopify on top of your system, right? So you could, you know, if you wanted to charge sales tax in New Zealand on your e-commerce store, Shopify could power that. I'm powering all these little services and I'm giving it to the agents in the easiest format. So if you have APIs, I'll meet you. If you have a data feed, I'll meet you. Or if you don't and you just want a screen where you can type things in and get the results back, we'll do that too.

And, Ryan, this is like the main point. If you go to InsureTech Connect or InsureTech Insights or any of these shows, who's there, right? You've got the enterprise sellers, the guys that are selling big tech, and you have the huge entities that are the buyers. The guy who's doing 20 million in premium has never had access to the enterprise tech before because it wasn't worth the sellers to sell these guys,

and these guys don't have the budget. I've now made all this tech available to everybody in the supply chain. I don't care how big or small you are. Dude, I mean, it's the democratization of insured tech. I mean, it's really what it is. It is the democratization of insured tech. And that to me is an incredibly exciting concept.

And it's, I mean, you know, just the user experience. And guys, if you're, you know, I know some of this that Michael's, I mean, you know, just the user experience. And guys, if you're, you know, I know some of this that Michael's been talking through, he's been doing visually for me and we're gonna try to get a video out. We've never done video off the podcast before. So we'll try to get that out and maybe put it on YouTube or whatever.

But the concept here is that the UX is clean. It's simple. You know, I think that, I think the UX is clean. It's simple. I think the idea is as the pace of business starts to pick up and is at a very basic level, and I'm talking to a lot of the agencies, the main street agencies, the regional agencies that are listening to this in particular, because some of these concepts will make immediate sense to some of the larger entities that listen that maybe are already having some of these conversations. But if you're sitting here and you're thinking about features, tools, value-added resources that you'd like to deliver either in helping your team do their job or in providing to your customers. But you like, like, like Michael's described, you just, you know, it's time, it's energy, it's, it's all these logins, it's all these different entities that you have to go in

and out of. It's, it's just, it's just a lot, it can be overwhelming. What I'm seeing here, and, and obviously have understood for a while, just in going through this with Michael a couple times, and knowing him for a while, this is, this while, this makes it much more accessible. It puts these services at your fingertips and gives you the ability to actually do some of the things that you want to do that maybe fell outside your reach for a long time. And that's incredibly exciting to me. Me too. I really, you know, it's hard to like, you know, say something like this and, you know, try to sound humble, even though I'm not a particularly humble person. You know, if I'm good at something, I'll tell you I'm good at it. If I suck, you know, I'll tell you I suck. I'm pretty self-aware at this point in my life. But I do genuinely believe this is how it's going to be done in five years from now. I hope InsuranceGig is at the forefront of it. We're kind of well situated from a timing perspective and a relationship

perspective, but there's no going back. After watching TV in 4K, you're not going back to black and white. And this is, it really is a better way. It wasn't always available, you know, APIs made it available. The fact, you know, you have cloud-based solutions make it available. And we've just taken a lot of like pre-existing types of technology and put them together for this use case to make procuring InsureTech easier. I say that very clearly. We chose our words very carefully. Easier, faster, and we've de-risked it. And it's working.

We're in our early days. And I have more demand on the buy side and the sell side that we could handle. We have a waiting list at this point. We're trying to figure out how to grow this where it becomes incredibly scalable, which is, we'll leave that for chapter two of the Ryan Hanley podcast, which is really cool. But one thing I want to mention, I mentioned Shopify before. This is a platform we built for BTIS, who's a huge MGA. They've got, I think, 25,000 independent agents that submit to them throughout the course of the year as a wholesaler and as an MGA. They basically white-labeled insurance gigs tech app store to give their 25,000 agents solutions. So it's not just,

I have to go to them directly. We have, you know, large influence, influencer organizations that are saying this tool could help my agents be better at what they do. So this service lead gents gives great leads to agents. Lobe helps them mail marketing postcards. They could fill out NAICS NCCI through Relativity 6. We've got Broker Buddha that they could pop in, like you mentioned before, like doing the whole form in a PDF. We've got Broker Buddha and their whole library of forms consumable on a one-off basis. Adapt API, these guys pull data off of carrier portals. So keep in mind, Ryan, these are all different systems. So for the first time, I believe we're going to be able to demonstrate a visibility into the flow of data across the entire supply chain. From the time the risk has it to the AMS, to the carrier, to the core system, to the portal, to a quoting entity.

Back to us, we're going to have full visibility. So you talk about data as like you first opened up. I was on a panel at the Vertifor show and some panels, you know, I sit on and I know what I'm talking about when we talk about digital insurance here. I happen to have been on the panel talking about Accord with the former CEO, the chairman of Accord and the board member of Accord. And I was way out of my element. But they're talking about data and agencies. Do you have good data or bad data? What the hell does that mean? It's so subjective. It's so relative. And there is no industry standard. Not that that's what we're trying to do of rating data. You were just part of an M&A

acquisition, right? This firm came in. They evaluated your data. Did they just part of an M&A acquisition. This firm came in, they evaluated your data. Did they give you a score? How good was your data? How do your CSRs, do they verify the data before they put something in? There's no standard. And the fact that it exists in so many different places, it's been so hard to stack rank the validation of the data across different parties. So there's so much room in the world of insurance for opportunity, for improvement. And we think we're bringing our expertise of streamlining it to play. The feedback that we're getting and the early results we're seeing from our beta customers is really indescribable. We're geometrically faster.

Like I said, they love the fact that they could try things out without the risk. And we're just on to something really magical. I really do believe that. And everyone who sees it, you know, I started recording my demos because I couldn't recreate the reactions that we were getting from people that look on their face when it clicks. You know, the response, you know, you could fill in the blanks, but like I've heard, you know, a hundred times in the past month, this is bloody genius, but they didn't say bloody. So, yeah. Well, you know, I just think about we struggle.

So we use HubSpot for basically agency operations, sales, marketing, all that stuff. And then we currently use NowCerts basically as a system of record for policy sold, premium commissions, that kind of stuff. Just keeping, I'm not even talking about data accuracy, just consistency of data across just those two systems, just making sure the information in HubSpot matches the information in NowSerts. And even, we probably aren't even tracking across those two platforms more than seven to 10 pieces of data.

I mean, it's not even like we have 40 pieces of information that need to be consistent between the two. We really just need, you know, effective dates, policy number, carrier, line of business, premium, you know, like it's maybe seven to 10 pieces of data and just keeping the data consistent, consistent, right? Not even using the word accuracy, just consistent between the two is a freaking nightmare. And you think about that. Now insert any other systems that you're using, any other places, and just, again, not even using the word accurate, just consistent is almost impossible. You're always going to have errors. And if you, if you had a, a connection tool, a set of, I don't want to say pipes because I know it's much more than that,

that could make sure the data was passed consistently between the systems. Once you have consistency, then you can start to think about accuracy. And that's what excites me. It's like consistency first, then accuracy. Because if you don't have consistency of data, then your accuracy is impossible. There's a 0% chance you can be accurate. So that to me is another piece that makes this so exciting. Dude, I mean, you're the right guy at the right time. I think the look, the feel very important only because it adds to usability. I think it seems like you've got that pretty dialed in. If someone's listening to this and they're like, I need to go test it out.

I want to get signed up. I want to get either myself or my people starting to see what's possible, what we can do today. Obviously, there's so much more coming, but where do they go? How do they get signed up? What's the call to action for everyone listening at home? So please go to InsuranceGig, click into the app market, and there's a place to fill out your company info.

You could sign up, you could list your service. It's free, But we currently on May 31st right now, we do have a waiting list. But just get yourself on there and just kind of grab your place in line. Ryan, going back, just one topic to your last point, just to kind of drive home what I think is the beauty of insurance gig are two things. One is we have a vendor. It's called Record Linker. It's created by a guy by the name of Roman Stepanenko, who in my mind is one of the most brilliant insurance data structure minds out there.

He's one of the founders of Risk Match that sold to Vertifor. And he has this amazing canonical data structure matching platform, where when data's coming in, and you write, you know, travel indemnco, and you but you need to have it say travelers indemnity company, he could find those discrepancies and actually, you know, kind of cut and replace the data. And the reason why I mentioned that is I have the luxury of being able to say, yeah, we could do that to a thousand different services because I'm not building each of these services. I'm just going out to the best vendors that are out there and saying,

just connect to me, become part of our data fabric. And I can now make it available to Ryan Hanley and his nice agency. And you could have access to this enterprise solution that you never would have had before. And number two is theoretically, Ryan, if you built that connector between NowSearch and HubSpot, and we're as an organization, our CRM, we're moving at the HubSpot. So I'd love to talk about that offline. But you built this service and you could expose it as an API, as a microservice, because you're not the only person using HubSpot who's on NowSearch. NowSearch has, I think, 1,300 agencies that are on NowSearch. I promise you 300 of them are using HubSpot. Now, if you spent the time building a connector between NowSearch and HubSpot. Expose that on an insurance gig and you can now have 300 agents. You can make money off of that thing that you spent money building. And you now have a trading relationships with 300 brokers. You've brought value to NowSearch. So, you know, I have one of my investors after he heard my whole pitch, which I realize there's a lot going on here.

But his main response was there are a lot of ways to win here. And we really do think that there are a lot of ways to win. So in that one example, you told me I had to take boys there. One is I have an amazing vendor for you that you could use tomorrow. And I recommend that you or anyone else wants to have consistent data. Check out Record Blinker. You know, they have a listing on Insurance Gig. And to your point, sign up for it right there and we'll get noticed.

We'll get notified and we'll contact you immediately. But Ryan, you also could expose the superpower that you created that you spent money on. And you can turn that into a revenue stream as well. Yeah. Dude, I love it. I think that for the individuals who are willing to step out of their business and start to work on it instead of in it, this is the step. This is where their mind should be. And it's, you know, as I've started to, you know, the big move,

part of the move to SIA for me was exactly that, is I'm not adding value writing insurance policies. I'm adding value working on this kind of stuff and high level marketing and that kind of stuff. And this is where you go. I mean, you will could get, I mean, how many companies, and this is the last thing I'll say to be respectful of your time in our audiences is how many companies have been severely tied down and or dashed across the rocks because they tried to do all this shit themselves directly, right? The money, the time, the thought, the trying to create all these things themselves to be proprietary, I'm doing air quotes, no one can see me, when it's all right here. When you could instead have spent all those brain cycles thinking about what you actually

wanted to do and had it in market in days or weeks versus months or years and not have the sunk cost of building it all yourself and all the crap that comes along with that. And you could get to the business that you actually do. And that to me, I think the ego of we need to build it ourselves, I see that not as something that someone should carry as a badge of honor, but rather I see it as a big glaring sign of weakness, in my opinion. Now, some people need to build some things themselves. That I get. But this is a path to sidestep so much of that nonsense, especially for the services that you shouldn't be building yourself. So A, I agree with you. B is, I think as an industry,

we're starting to see that change. C is, I think if you took the staunchest build-verse-buy person at a carrier, which is where I think you see build versus buy more than anyone. They would come to our platform and they saw a hundred services. They themselves would say, yeah, I would build 20% of those, but 80% it doesn't pay for me to build. And we've got that inventory and we've got that library. And people are starting to come around and, you know, two things happen. When you do something once and you fail, you know, two things happen when you do something once and you fail.

You know, do you go try it again? I find that, oh, like we got burned once, like on a buying a piece of data. We're never going to do it again. And that to me is kind of ludicrous where it's I come from a marketing background, as do you. Right. Where failing fast is kind of sign of success. You know, in e-commerce, if you have a 2% conversion rate, you're an absolute rock star. So insurance has always been, don't fail. If you're trying 10 things, you better knock all 10 out of the park. And I want it to be where you could try 10 things and three are going to be killer, but cycle through the other seven bad ones very quickly without a huge capital expense and without a long-term commitment. And we provide that

platform and mechanism. And it'll take some time for people to really get it and see it. But anyone who's listening, I love nothing more than talking about this and giving demos and reach out. And I'm sure there's one value service that we could bring to you to make your current day better for you or your agents or your producers. And just keep paying attention, please, to what we're doing and be in touch. And because we really do think in our own little kind of spectrum in the industry, we're making a difference. We're seeing it. Michael, you're the man. We're out of here. Thank you.

I appreciate your time. I appreciate your sharing access to your audience. I look forward to doing this and collaborating. Let's figure out how this could be valuable to you and helpful to you. For sure. My mind is spinning as always. It's not. With the one-call closed system, you'll stop chasing leads and start closing deals in one call. This is the exact method we use to close 1,200 clients in under three years during the pandemic. No fluff, no endless follow-ups, just results fast.

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