The Vault Unlocked - Why Most SaaS Startups Get Stuck at $3K MRR (The Real Reason Nobody Tells You)

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

In this episode of The Vault Unlocked, Kayvon Kay sits down with Ken Cox, founder of Inlink.com, to reveal how small business owners can stop missing 65% of their calls and finally take control of their tech stack. Ken shares how he built Inlink, a CRM + office suite designed for solopreneurs and small businesses who are drowning in SaaS costs and disconnected tools. But the real game-changer? His concept of the AI Employee, a 24/7 virtual staff member that answers calls, texts, and even Google reviews. You'll discover: -Why small businesses lose thousands by missing calls (and how AI fixes it overnight) -The difference between Go High Level's agency model and Inlink's end-user support -How to replace 5+ tools (ActiveCampaign, Calendly, ClickFunnels, Typeform) with one platform -The elevator pitch that turns missed calls into closed deals -Why AI employees will change how Main Street America does business If you've ever felt overwhelmed by juggling multiple apps or frustrated that your staff can't keep up, this episode will show you how to cut costs, protect your data, and grow without adding headcount.

You're listening to The Vault Unlocked, where the real secrets of success are revealed. Every episode, one founder, one confession, one strategy that created income, scale, and unstoppable growth. The code is cracked. The vault is open. Today we have Ken Cox. How are we doing today? I'm wonderful. Kavan.

Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for being here. I always appreciate another business owner, solopreneur, in this case, SaaS owner, founder. Is that correct? That is correct. So you're from inlinked. Inlink.com is the company I'm here to promote today. We are a CRM and office suite.

Who I really like to serve is, you know, solopreneur is smaller, medium-sized businesses, but I serve clients of all sizes all the way to, you know, some of the biggest companies on the planet, all the way down to your local yoga studio. Okay, interesting. So a CRM software. Before we get into that,

I always love to know a little bit more both the business owner themselves, you know, a little bit of the journey, how you, how you got to this part in your business. All right. Yeah. So we founded our hosting company in 2000. Yeah, 99, 2000. It's when we founded our hosting company.

And that's called Hosting, and that's all fortune, like big companies, data center, kind of stuff, co-location, which most people don't even know about, right? So that's what I do all through the day. And but the businesses that I love serving are mom and pop Main Street. And the gap is pretty big difference, right? So we found it at nlink.com last year to bring products and services to that medium mid-sized market and solopreneur that were to take all the software packages that we had for the big companies being served by a privately held company, not a publicly held company. So I have different needs that I have that I can have different needs. for your data. I don't have to sell. I don't sell it. I'm a big privacy buff, right? So

it was important to me to create something that was affordable and easy to use for that small and medium-sized business, that solopreneur, Main Street America, and also give you all the privacy and all the bells and whistles of the Fortune 500s. Okay, so let's go into a little bit more of what this is, because I'm unclear. I hear CRM, I think completely different than what it sounds like you're saying. So I want to understand And, you know, when we say CRM, what does that mean to you? What, you know, the product we understand is smaller business owners, you know, like the mid-SMBs. Yeah.

And it sounded like solopreneur. So medium, small scale, $1 million a year. Absolutely. Businesses. Okay. Absolutely. That's who I really love working with. Online.

It's kind of like, is it retail businesses, traditional businesses, service-based businesses? So a lot of what I've been doing lately, some of the verticals that have been very popular for us lately, auto glass repair technicians, guys that are doing their construction companies, pool installers. We do a lot of gyms, a lot of yoga studios, that kind of stuff too. So brick and more. But we also do some podcast guys. We have CRM for the podcasts, and we have CRM for real estate, you name it. We've got about 67 different snapshots that we, for industry-specific, needs.

that we can just drop in there at no additional charge. Okay. And what is the CRM do? Like what's like what's it for? Like what is it? Does your calendar, books your leads. If you do the AI employees, it'll answer your phones. It'll AI agent.

They'll do call textbacks. If you want you to build a course for your, for your business, pretty much we took everything that we've ever done and put it under one hood. And we're giving it away at 90s. seven bucks a month. Okay. So I'm going to ask the question. Yeah. I think I have the answer, but I'd be surprised if I don't. We are doing a white label of go high level. We're doing a white label of go high level, backed with the hosting of Hosterian, backed with the support of our team so that we have, so that we're answering the end users questions, not the agency's questions,

right? Inlink is here to cut the agency out. I believe that a small business ownership should own marketing strategy and be able to deploy it. But we've also coupled that with an office product. So imagine your Google Drive, your email, all of those products and services. So you really have one throat to choke, you know, where all of your data is being stored and who's managing that data. So let's go in deep in that now that we know what this is. So this is a full suite CRM product like a Go High Level.

Yes. But we partner with Go High Level for that. We've also got some other people in there. Yes. But then you've added your own customer support on top of it. Correct. I heard some about compliance, but I could have been wrong. Something about security.

Was I picking that up in the beginning? Yeah, I mean, our office product is HIPAA compliant. We're stocked to like all the bells and whistles that you would, all the compliance issues that you would go for. And being a hosting company, you know, our insurance is a little different than your average agency out there. So what's the difference between me just going to go and get a $97? you know,

uh, subscription with go high level, for instance, and then going with you. I want to understand that different. The biggest difference right out of the gate is going to be the support, right? High level direct is primarily,

they're great support. Absolutely. But they're primarily geared to the reseller and to the agency. All right? They're not going to help you build your web page or they're not going to, they're not going to update your WordPress for you. They're not going to assist you with Yaxx or any of those other. tools, right? And we're there to help you with all of those things.

Okay. So this is very important. See, this is very important. So I'm a solopreneur, let's just say this, smaller business, right? And I'm in, I have my leads are in, say, active campaign for emailing. I use click funnels for my data. I'm using school for my videos. You said I'm using type form for my, you know, quiz funnels, application funnel, all of that. Schedule once for Cali-Late-Picking. I got to integrate the Zapier into all of that. And then I'm using something like, you know, for the, I'm just thinking for the data visual board, right?

Something like a B-I. I was thinking, like a, you know, B-I for the data. And I got all that stuff happening. And we know this is all a one and done in go high level. Or here in this case, this is called it in-linked. Correct. It brings all that down to one place, one centralized. place. Now, going with you, I might still have other things that I'm using. Like for my website,

I'm not building my full website on Go High Level. I'm building that on like a WordPress or I'm building that on some other platform, but I still need some of that data to connect into in-linked. Is that correct? Correct. So we have a separate back office than high level, right? So we have our own back office that you go into. It gets you to your office suite. It can get each of your WordPress hosting. If you need dedicated servers or dockers or other stuff like that, we're here to help you with that stuff too, but that's kind of way, way higher level as your business grows and you have more, I think long term you're going to have more GPU need than anything.

But as you mature and you get out of that million dollar and you get to the $5 and $20 million range, you don't have to jump providers, right? And you're with the company that understands how to manage, a workload for, you know, my largest email client is a top five biggest companies in the planet. Okay, so this is interesting. Are you using the LinkedIn, sorry, the, Nlink mail? The Go High Level platform to deliver email? No. No, that's part of the NLink office suite. There's NLink CRM and NLink Office.

So your linked office is a better deliverable, deliverably, email deliverable system. It'll say, I mean, it saves a company with, you know, call it 2,000 emails. It'll save them about a half and $5 a year over Google or Amazon. Over Google and Amazon or

active campaign or some of these other guys. This is your office products. This is like your inbox where all your employees are getting their mail, sending receiving, all that you're talking about. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Not mass email. Like, we don't do both mailing. We're corporate you know, email that particular case scenario.

Oh, okay. So, corporations. So we took those tools that we do for Fortune V's and brought them down to sell them to Main Street America.

I got it. So you're not stuck on Google or a hotmail as a platform to deliver you. Correct. A lot of companies today, most of your mom and pops are using like a C-panel,

pop the I-Map connection or something like that. So if they wanted to graduate outside of there, once they get to, you know, 25, 30, 50 employees. They need something a little more robust. They need, they're starting to understand that, oh, as I'm making intellectual property inside of Google's ecosystem, if I've not properly protected it before I shared it with them, I'm not exactly sure what my rights are with my data.

Yeah. Right. And that's where I heard the data. Yeah. Right. And then, and this is part in link. Like, this is also part of the white, like the white label. This is not part of the white label.

This is not part of Go High Level at all. This is a completely separate. This is an office product that NLink deploys. So when I buy from you, I get access to all of this. Correct. Okay, I want to just make sure I understand that. Yeah, the CRM is part of that. So our Soho package comes with five office products and a full deployed go high level white label solution.

You're a Soho product. Our small office home office product. Okay, I love it. Small office. So it gets you five email. accounts with Google, not Google Drive, an NLink Drive, very similar to Google Drive. So you can share and collaborate and all those things,

but you know it's in a spot. It's not going to be using your data against you. We don't use it to pull and make ads, right? We don't do any of those kinds of things. So it's pure, you know, I'm an old school internet guy, right? I grew up before we could target you with ads. So I like that kind of ecosystem, and that's the kind of ecosystem that I built for my clients.

Yeah, okay. And how are you selling it right now? Like, how many scrored? Podcasts. podcast. I go on podcasts every day. Are you podcasts and it's working? Yeah. Love it. Love it. We do a Tuesday webinar, right? It's a little slow. Right now. We launch in January.

We do a, every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Central, we do, you can come on, go to, we do Zoom and we, like, set up a bogus phone number and call it. Right now, I think a big gap for those people are answering the phones, right? Sixty five percent of all calls go on answered. So, you know, we do the podcast. And we do some traditional marketing campaigns. too, obviously, right? Like, hey, how many calls are you missing and that kind of thing to the procurement managers of the planet? And it's a good time. So when you say missing the calls, who's missing the calls? So there's a big gap when you talk to the Main Street, America, front desk staff, right? There's, it's transient, it's turnover, it's high turnover and all those things. So one of the things that I really like to do is say, hey, let's have the front desk

person stop being the first person to answer the phone. and let's let an AI employee answer that phone, answer 80% of all the questions that they might have, send them text messages, right? And what we see is that generally sales go up a little bit because they're always getting the right text message, they're always getting replied to, and then have that transient front desk person,

spend more time with the clients that are there and face-to-face and do that kind of stuff. And that's what program do you do use that off of? We're using the N-Link CRM for that. Yeah, that's your N-Link. And we partner with Toolio is the partner on the backside for that. And it's a, it's a really not, 2024, I would not have tried to sell that product at all.

But in 25, it's there. It's solid. It works. I've got it set up in my own companies. My wife's company uses it. We've got to done this down because it's not confusing to me, but I can tell you right now, half the audience has no idea what we're talking. So traditionally on phones, and, you know, forgive me, because I've worked with.

with, you know, back offices for Sprint and AOL and all those guys. But interactive voice recordings are what we're used to, right? Press one for this, two for this, three for this. It's very binary decision making. So you come up with your entire script and go. But an AI employee, trademark pending, is it can answer the phone with AI. You tie it with, it's actually integrated with chat GPT. You use your keys there.

and it will answer the phone as your AI employee, answer any questions that come up. We can train these now in like 20 or 30 minutes with your website data really quickly. And answer the phone, it will send, so are you open this today, right? Yes, we are. Would you like me to text you a link to our calendar? How do I sign up?

This is like to sign up. Would you like me to text you an onboarding form? I need to cancel my service. Do you want me to put you on hold don't let somebody call you back next week, kind of thing, right? So let's just put this perspective. I like to make it like so clear,

because I feel if I can have it, if it's clear for me, it's clear for everybody. If it's not clear for me, how can it be clear for anybody? You said auto glass, you said auto glass. You said auto glass technicians are a big. So an auto glass technician,

let's just say they have a small shop, right? A couple employees, they're on the road, but they have Susan that sits at home at the head office. Susan only comes in at nine and she leaves at five and she takes her break at one. And Susan can only answer the phone one time and people are calling email and sometimes Susan isn't perfect. She has a bad day and comes in with a bad attitude. It's we're humans. It's all good. No offense, Susan. We like Susan. We respect her. But that's just the reality of the business. And the owner of that business is out. He's working. He's installing.

He doesn't, he's just like the last thing I need to do is worry about all this shit we're talking about. You will come in, you'll implement a system where every lead will come in and then that system is powered by AI. So every lead that calls, every lead that gets reached out, every lead that emails, text will be responded to so you don't have to worry about Susan and having a bad

day and you don't have to worry about what happens on the weekends. There's a 24-7, I'm going to use your word AI employee. Yes. That's work in your CR. That alone, if you've done nothing else, that alone, surely, does that get you more business? Think you'd have to be living under a rock to say no to that, right? Yes.

Absolutely. Okay. And then on top of that, now you're helping them with, okay, how they're email, like the emails are using, the data they're using. Yes. And then maybe some marketing advice maybe in there or some. Absolutely. Yeah. We want to be one throat to choke, right?

So for your internet stuff, you come to me. You come to NLink. You need websites. You need phones. Whatever you need. We want to be your one throat to choke. If you need. And you'll fix all the, you'll fix all the.

solutions for them. Yeah. So a typical stack, if you get our unlimited AI employee package, it's $500, but you come to the Tuesday webinars. You generally get a pretty steep discount. That's 500 a month for unlimited AI employees. You get two onboarding sessions. We set your phone up. We set your Google review AI up. We show you how to do your funnel AI. We show you how to do your conversation AI. We get all that set up. Is this one to one or is this group? One on one. One on one. One on one. So I'm going to pay you, I want to be very clear. So I'm going to pay you $500 a month.

Or if I go to the webinar and wait, I'll get a discount, some sort of discount. Love it. Correct. But I'm going to spend 500 bucks a month with you and you're going to set up all my AI agents. Not all. We're going to spend two hours with you showing you how to do it. One of the problems that we ran into really quickly with an AI employee answering the phone. Same problem we're going to have with a real life employee is the guardrails, right?

the difference is whenever I got to correct my AI employee, there's no emotion, right? There's no little girl that's just out of high school answering the phone. I'm like, hey, kind of did this wrong. You just log in. And it's important for the business owner, whoever's managing that AI employee, to be able to make quick changes.

And we want to make that super simple for them. So that two hours, we're going to set up as many agents as we can. And we generally get the phone, maybe an email agent, maybe your Google, phone and Google reviews are the absolute necessary, right? So when you say Google reviews, tell me what you mean by Google reviews. So the review AI is going to watch your Google and watch your Facebook for reviews and then answer

those reviews. Using AI instead of the can kind of thank you. And we, depending on your tonality and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? We want to just cater that to how your business would talk and it does a really great job. So you know that every review is getting answered by somebody. Now, I like ethical work, especially in AI.

So I typically tell people, let's name your AI agent something AI so that whenever they're replying, whenever they're talking to somebody, know that it's right out of the gate. And they know how to get to a human and close that way fast. Okay. So what's the, to me, I get it. But it seems like it's still, it seems like it's a lot of work or complicated or overwhelming, right? So what would you say like the elevator pitch here? If we were to say like, you know, you're in the elevator and I'm your ideal client, which is a small business.

Let's say I'm a small business owner. I have CR, you know, we talked about this, right? My data is half a tier. It's on five different platforms. My systems costs, right? Just my SaaS cost alone is $3,000 a month. Right. To run everything, right?

Yes. You're coming in and what's the elevator pitch? So, I mean, you're going to have to do it. anyway at some point for the new guys, right? Or my elevator pitch for a guy that has a small business right now is you're missing 65% of your calls. We need to get those answered. For the solopreneur we're getting started is you're going to have to do all this stuff

anyway. And we've dropped the price. It's such a commodity price and software is going to drop. AI is going to drop the price of software across the board. You don't have to implement every single piece. Like just start looking at your gaps, fill your gaps. And with InLink, we have so many tools. We fill almost all the gaps.

I can't think there's not many gaps. We're not accounting software, right? You still got to connect it to QuickBooks or whatever thing else you need. But your entire online persona, presence, all that stuff, we've got you covered. And you don't have to go to a marketing agency over here or a web hosting guy over here and a developer over there and a UI guy over here. We're a one-stop shop. We've been doing it for 25 years. So the elevator pitch is as a result of, as a result of 70% of your phones being not answered,

we're going to build you a full AI 24-7 answering an email machine. That's all that really matters, right? That's it. Yeah. Well, it's a bread. And, you know, I don't have to, I'm super fortunate, not looking to onboard. thousands of customers. I know what growing pains are. I don't like them. You know, we like a good, solid, steady growth business, and that's what we have.

So how many clients are you like, you know, customers, new subscriptions are you bringing on right now on a monthly basis? New subscriptions? Yeah. We're bringing on like five a week. Five a week, okay. And then, and what's the turn rate? I don't have a turn rate off top of my head. It's mixed in with all my other numbers. My overall turns about 2%. Okay. Okay. Why would someone churn on something like this? Because it can't be expense wise. It's not expense. They gave up.

They stopped doing it. They just didn't do the work. Yeah. The other one is they've been sold by a web developer or some marketing firm. And the marketing firm needs to take it all under their belt. Right. For whatever reason. Right.

So if that's the case and they're using Go High Level, we'll give you your Go High Level transfer. and you can move all the go high level stuff over. But some of the stuff that we do specifically won't go, right? Like your web hosting, if we're doing your WordPress. The web hosting, the email hosting. Yeah, stuff like that won't transfer over. But your go high level CRM pipelines, workflows, all that stuff. If you know what I'm talking.

If you set up like the DMRK and all that with their emails for deliverability and all that, do you make sure that that's all set up and working? If you're with us, yes. Okay. Yeah. We've got a 24-hour support team that's here. So it's just, you know, on the onboarding, we do all of that, right? And then, you know, if you have a problem, just jump in the chat and they'll jump on a

Where can people find you just so we have a better understanding? Nlink.com, I in L-A-N-K, I like to think of that as the link between web 2.0 and 3.0 services. And or if you want to know more, just Nlink.com. And more about me is just Penncox.com. Yeah. So inlink.com is where if you are a small business owner, your or a solopreneur, your systems are in different multiple software products, and or you want to replace it because it kind of seems like there's a lot here.

And or you want to replace your front staff or empower them to do better with their job by empowering them with AI product that will be able to answer the phone 24-7, answer email 24-7, and Google Review 24-7. This is a place to go. Absolutely. One stop shop. Like we said, a choke hold on everything, would you say? One throat to choke. One throat.

One throat to choke. That finger point in game, right? Like, oh, it's not my fault. It's their fault. Why did this campaign work or, you know, the email's not going through over here. It's exhausting to chase some of those things down. And you guys help set all that up or you teach how to do that? We do it.

I mean, if you're a client, then we do it all with you. That's what I'm saying. If you're a client, you keep, but you'll do it all with me or you'll do it for me? we're happy to do it all for you, not for $97 a month, depending on what the scope of work is, right? Yeah. So with the 97, you're going to get the software

and you get one hour of onboarding and then technical support. So if you're running into an issue and you need to solve that issue, then we do that at no charge. On the onboarding, some of those things can get a little, setting up a campaign would be an additional thing.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you know, it's, There's a lot to it. Yeah. That's why I didn't think you can be doing that for $100 a month. Correct. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, that's it. Any last words for the audience here? Get to work. That's about it. Get to work. Get to work. I love it. And that was another episode of the Vault Unlocked,

where Proven Builders, real strategies and unstoppable growth happens. Subscribe now. The next Unlock could be your success. The code is cracked. The Vault is open.