This Week in Startups - Uizard’s Tony Beltramelli on text-to-UI & PMF + building a Notion CRM w/ Kelly Schricker | E1722

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

 Uizard CEO Tony Beltramelli joins Jason to demo Uizard’s AI-powered UI designer (6:01) and discusses how he iterated on Uizard’s product-market fit and the competition it faces (21:20). Then, Kelly Schricker from Founder University breaks down how to choose a CRM and how to build one yourself in Notion (42:54)! (0:00) Jason kicks off the show (2:21) CEO of Uizard, Tony Beltramelli, joins Jason  (6:01) Tony demos Uizard’s text-to-UI platform (13:52) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (15:09) Uizard’s target market  (21:20) Attaining product market fit (29:25) Embroker - Use code TWIST to get an extra 10% off insurance at https://Embroker.com/twist (30:56z) Uizard’s competition  (35:03) GPT4’s impact  (37:52) First impressions of Google’s Bard (40:32) Trovata - Go to https://trovata.io/TWIST/ and use code TWIST for 30% off premium features for one year (42:54) Choosing a CRM  (48:18) Understanding how to set up a CRM (54:18) Demo of a CRM in Notion (58:48) CRM management (1:00:35) Top 4 failures when implementing a CRM FOLLOW Tony: https://twitter.com/tbeltramelli FOLLOW Kelly: https://twitter.com/kschricks FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1 FOUNDERS! Subscribe to the Founder University podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/founder-university/id1648407190

Okay, everybody, we've got a great show for you today. Remember, AI is changing everything. It's moving at a pace that we've never seen, and you need to listen to every episode of This Week in startups because I am bringing a different CEO on almost every day to talk about this AI revolution today. We have the co-founder and CEO of Wizard. It's spelled U-I-Z-A-R-D.

It's basically jitterative AI, you know, build stuff for you, but it does it for UI design tools. So you can take a sketch on a piece of paper and make a pretty decent website in just minutes. It's very impressive technology. This is stuff that used to take, you know, days, weeks, and now it takes minutes. It's a great interview. And then we have another amazing segment for you.

Kelly, on my team, who co-runs Founder University, that's our 12-week course. She's going to show you. We like to do some practical, tactical stuff. She's going to show you how to build a CRM inside of Notion. We did this ourselves. I can tell you from experience, building a customer relationship management, system inside of Notion is brilliant. And this Notion CRM that Kelly is going to do has saved us.

I kid you not, $100,000 in software costs and it's made my team bionic. This is a very short talk. It's only 22 minutes, but it's going to save you a ton of time and money. And that's what the Founder University series we're doing is meant to do. It's a 12-week course, plus it's a podcast. Today's going to be a great show. You're going to learn a lot. You're going to get inspired.

So please stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by lemon.io. Need to speed up your product development without draining your budget? Hire vetted engineers from Europe at lemon.io. Go to lemon.com slash twist to get 15% off for the first four weeks. Embroker's startup insurance program helps startup secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. Save up to 20% off of traditional insurance today at Embroker.com. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist.

And Trovada. Starting up is hard. Trovada makes managing cash easy. Start automating your cash management at trovata.io slash twist. Use code twist for 30% off one full year of premium features like AI forecasting. All right, everybody. There are incredible ideas that have been floating around about, you, an individual, talking to your computer, and having the computer design and make beautiful

things for you. We saw this in Star Trek when Captain Picard would say to the replicator that he wants Earl Gray T, right? Well, one of the holy grails of voice interaction with a computer would be to build an app or build a design, something beautiful. So instead of taking out Photoshop or taking out Canva or taking out any Adobe figma, all of these great tools. Bubble comes to mind, envision. What if you could,

instead of learning all the layers and learning how to use all the tools and the plugins could simply speak, could simply speak to your computer and have it build magic for you. Well, we're going to see a demo of that today on this week in startups. Joining me is Tony Beltrameli.

He's an Italian who grew up in France. I'm a French that grew up in France. you're a French who you're French but an Italian last name as we're talking about It's super confusing Thanks for having me

What's the penultimate Like or I should say the ultimate What's the ultimate Italian dish that the French do Just as well I'm always interested in these crossover dishes Because the Japanese do a number of French and Italian dishes particularly well

What would you say the French With an Italian dish The French do particularly well Well, you know what? I think I'm not going to be able to judge really well because my Italian ancestry is just so far in the few in the past. But I will say anything with cheese. I think both countries kind of nail it.

They nail it on the cheese front. I agree. I agree. All right. So you have a company called Usard, as in Wizard. Am I pronouncing it correct? Usard? Fantastic, Jason.

Okay. So is it Wizard or Uzard? You know what? We like to say whatever people like to remember it, because, you know, ultimately that's what they speak. You know, that's what they say to their peers. So we like to call it wizard internally, but some people call it user. Some people call it U-I-S-R-A-S-R-D.

It doesn't matter. Okay. So U-I-Z-A-R-D. I-O is how you're going to find this app. So you've been working on this for a couple of years now. This isn't part of the chat GPT-4, 3.5, boom. You raised money, you know, back in 20, well, you raised your Series A in 2021, but you've been working on it for a year or two before that.

Is that correct? That's correct. We started in early 2018. So it's been a while. Okay. You've been out of for a while. And so when did you first become aware that AI could help with voice to product, voice to product interface? Or did you just start free AI with voice to UI interface?

We actually, so this company actually started as a research project. So, you know, I have a computer science background. I've always been frustrated by the way we were designing. and building software. And so all the way back, it was not voice, like, or text to design. It was like sketches or screenshots to design. And the idea was, can we use machine learning to kind of like automatically generate design from my dirty napkin sketches or from, you know, a screenshot from the app that we

pushed last quarter and kind of like automated design process. And I was, you know, way before text to design was. even close to be practical for productive use cases. And so let's just do a quick demo of the product because I think once people see this, they'll understand how far you've come from the initial idea. So maybe you can share your screen. And remember, a lot of people are listening.

Not everybody's at YouTube.com slash this weekend watching this episode. But I'll help you sportscast it. So here we are. We're on a simple screen. And maybe you could start walking us through this. Yeah. Yeah, so you basically select the device you want to design for, mobile, tablet, web. Okay.

And you basically describe your project. So we have a form. And the form is asking you, what do you want to design for, mobile, tablet, or web? Which one did you select there? I selected web. Okay. Well, except if you have a good idea, but I thought it would be fun to generate a website for the Olin Summit. Great.

Let's do it. All right. So then you described your project, a website for the Olin Summit. which is a tech conference from the hosts of the All In podcast. And then you describe this style you want to go after. Oh, okay. So how about cyberpunk? Cyberpunk.

I like this one. Cyberpunk. I guess also techie. Techie, Las Anne, classic Hollywood and modern, postmodern Los Angeles. I'm just throwing out. I'm just throwing out wild stuff here. Let's go. Let's go for it.

And then you generate, you go get your second coffee of the day or whatever that is. And what is happening here? Because we just filled out a simple form with, I think, four fields or so, three or four fields. And then the UI Wizard is doing something right now. What is it actually doing?

So we've built some of the building blocks, you know, from 2018. And we have an engine to understand the concept of layouts. within user interfaces. We have a model that can understand styling. And then all of these kind of like work together to basically generate the entire thing. And then we use a large language model

to just understand the text and generate text. So now we have our all-in website, Olin Summit, The Future of Tech, buy tickets. I don't know if this is not going to be accurate. Location San Francisco, I guess this is Miami. but here we go you gave you some text like chat GPT might

are using chat GPT for the natural language model or a different one? For the content, the text in the content is actually a billed with GPT3, correct. Yeah, got it, okay. So you have access to the GPT3 API, but you need to get access

to GPT4's API shortly. We have access. We haven't integrated yet in the tech you can see right now. Okay, got it. And so this will get dramatically better as it keeps going from there, but it gives us a bunch of different website designs.

And these are classic website designs with a contact form and just various amounts of copies. So this is going to start, and it has here, one of them looks like a, more like an iTunes or a Spotify kind of interface.

So you're just throwing different interfaces at us with different styles, yeah? Yeah, exactly. And so once you're there, you're there, you can basically modify everything, customize it to your liking. The goal of Wizard is to make design accessible to everyone. So the entire editor was thought of, you know, thought as it needs to be easy to use. If you can use PowerPoint, you can use Wizard. And so the goal of other designer is really to overcome the blank page syndrome that so many of our customers are facing every day. I want to get something to start from and instead of a blank screen for like, you know, an hour. And it actually pulled in illustrations. Where does it? these, so we're looking at these illustrations, and it has like a nice stock library, I would say, images of people walking around with their laptops

and talking to each other and you know, some people like sort of collaborating around a desk, it looks like. These illustrations, were those made in some stable diffusion or something? Are they unique images

or are these pulled from the web, from clip art libraries? Where did the images come from? Really good question. So, if the model actually also make his own prediction whether to use our stock imagery or whether to actually generate its own. And so these illustrations we see here were

completely generated by the model to kind of fit the conference theme. So these are actually completely utter generated. We basically fine-tune our own stable diffusion to do that. And then you can see others that were pulled from unsplash or some of these online libraries.

Got it. Now, it seems quite random here as a starting point. It doesn't feel like exactly what I asked for. I don't see any cyberpunk, for example. So I have to give it a second round, a third round, and kind of do some reinforcement learning here in my mind. Is that built into the product yet? Could I pick one of these and say, okay, now let's work with this one, but let's add some cyberpunk elements to it, including the city of Los Angeles as the background. Can I just talk to it like that and give it more prompts and edit the screen or am I now just left with, okay, now it's time for me to start typing and moving stuff around?

Also, what you can do, you can't like type and you prompt directly in the editor just yet, but you can use all the other AI features that we've built over the years. So you can also say, for example, we could actually go and pull out the All In Summit existing website. I use that as a prompt. And use this as an example. So All In Summit, I guess you already have one for a lot. last year.

Dot com. I think it should be always. Yeah. And you can take a screenshot of this and then go in and say, you know what? I want to create a new screen from the screenshot. And then basically start from, again, something else on just a blind screen. And this enable our customers to just, you know, not reinvent the wheel when you

already have something to work with, oh, and port it as a mobile screen. Let me just do this again. We want to build this for the web. Fascinating. So I could pick five websites. I like on the web. I can pick five other people's websites and say,

hey, these are ones that are inspirational to me. Let's start with theirs. And that wouldn't be necessarily stealing. It would be a starting point maybe and you'd have to make it your own. Starting point, yeah, exactly. And so, you know, here the AI is doing the work in the background and then once it's done,

we'll basically have all the element from the screenshot, editable, customizable. You can just change the color, change the style, change the copy. And so if you are a marketing team, a product team, it's just so much easier to just, you know, kind of like modify what you already have, tweak it to your own needs

and then, you know, ship faster, basically. So you're going to make this so that each element I could do a prompt for, right? That's the next shoe to drop. So instead of doing like a starting prompt, I could say, okay, let's go to the contact page. It opens the contact page. Okay, let's make the contact page include

your Twitter handle and your LinkedIn handle, and boom, it adds those elements. And I could just, you know, rework one page at a time. with more prompts, right? Or generate one screen like, okay, no, we have build this flow. I would like to have the sign up flow, you know, improve with more, you know, attractive color, for example.

And it will just generate that one screen for you. And so you can see here we've imported the screenshot from the All In Summit, like 2022. And we can go ahead and just modify everything, the text, the imagery. Yeah. And, you know, it would have taken some, a long time to recreate this in the design tool if you don't have access to the, to the source file. But no, we can actually go ahead and change apps. absolutely everything. And we have done this in under like, you know, 10 seconds.

Imagine this. You've got the greatest idea ever for a tech startup and it's going to change the world. But you got a problem. You don't have the engineers you need to make this a reality. Why? It's hard to find engineers, right? Everybody's in competition for those great engineers. And you've got to manage your burn rate. You don't have unlimited resources like those big slow incumbents. You've got to be efficient. So now imagine you had a partner who could provide you with more than 1,000 on-demand engineers. And these devs were vetted, experience, result-oriented, and passionate about helping you grow. And they charged competitive rates. Sound too good to be true? Well, you need to head to lemon.io right now. It is not too good to be true. Startups choose lemon.io because they only offer handpicked developers

with three or more years of experience and really strong portfolios. Only one. percent of candidates who apply get into lemon.io. A couple of great launch founders have worked with lemon.io and they had great experiences. So here is your call to action. To learn more, go to lemon.com slash twist and find your perfect developer or tech team in 48 hours or less. And twist listeners get 15% off the first four weeks. Stop burning money. Higher developers, smarter, faster. Visit lemon.io slash twist. Fantastic. This is very powerful. People are paying for this yet? Who's buying this? And which market are you going after?

Because it does seem to me that this is pretty early. If I was a design snob and did this for a living, I would be offended that you even built this product. So some high-end person who is, you know, doing, not doing Kevin. A high-end person doing Figma doing this for a living is like, this is going to be more work than me just coming up with my own ideas. And then I could see people who are really early.

They might just prefer using Squarespace, picking a template, making something beautiful, and being done with it. So where does this land? Who is this product for? Because it seems like you're maybe too advanced for people who just want a simple website for their portfolio or restaurant or project,

and then maybe you're not advanced enough yet for the Figma design head to want to give up Figma or Envision. That's a great question. So our customers are basically the folks that don't have the skill set to use Figma or Invision or Adobe. these are imagine like product leader, head of product, them maintaining Slack and just want to have an easy way to just put a few ideas together, communicate to the team

and ship, or a marketing team. You are spinning out new landing pages, new ads, and you basically want to have a quick and easy way to do that. And what we see every single day that these folks have a need to the design, but they don't have any idea on how to use Adobe, they don't have any idea on how to use sketch, they don't know how to use Figma, and we basically provide them with a better tool

to kind of like turn their vision into some shareable ideas that ultimately can be built by the product team. Fantastic. So all of the business people who are not part of the design team and the wire framing team can now start annoying the people who will eventually do the word by coming to them with a bunch of designs that are 70 or 80% let's say of what the designers will eventually get to.

And so in the way, this is me as a CEO, sketching stuff on a napkin and then handing it to the design team and saying, hey, why don't you guys run with this from here? Yeah, pretty much. I mean, we see two things. Like, some design teams are really frustrated to just get some really rough, really weird requirements

and would rather get like a design file that's kind of like workable so they can see where are you going with this vision. But we also see some team that are like, okay, our design team is already way too overwork. They don't have time for anything new. So I'm going to go create this in Wizard and then I will just give it directly to the developer.

who is going to implement it using their library of component and basically save time to everyone. How do you make money? Subscription, Google SaaS. People pay, you know, seats per month, depending on the volume of the month. First tier, the 12 bucks a month, and then the business tier of the $39 a month.

Got it. So if the 10 people on a product team want to use it, $400 a month, $5,000 a year, and everybody can make reasonable designs and go faster. So have you seen anybody be able to, let's say, reduce their workforce or maybe fire their outside design firm because this was good enough for the non-designers to make product? Have you had those stories yet start? And then what are your thoughts on, you know, the elimination of, you know, people having to have

this as an in-house job function. Are you there yet? That's a good question. So what we've seen is startups that would basically not have to hire an expensive agency to build their first MVP. This has happened a ton.

So it's not someone getting fired. Is someone not getting the job? Got it. So this reminds me of logos. In the old days, you would hire a logo firm. They would charge a minimum of $1,500, probably on average $3,000, maybe in high-end cases,

$7,500 to $25,000, a series A firm would typically take of their $3 or $4 million. They might spend 1% of it, $30,000 or $40K, building a whole design logo. So here instead of, and now we know everybody just makes logos on their own to start or they hire somebody for $500. And they're done. Yeah, and it's done. And at least you get something to start from. And then you can iterate on it pretty cheaply as well.

Got it. So normally what would people, what would a startup spend, making this sort of mock-up design of their prototype, and then, yeah, we can compare that to what you're charging, which for a startup would be, I don't know,

five people times 40, 200 bucks a year, 200 bucks a month, $2,500 a year. Yeah, roughly, and we've seen everything from, you know, like agencies charging a startup like 10K

to, you know, even more just to build like five screens MVP for a SaaS or like a mobile app, which is pretty insane when you, you know, you don't even know exactly what you're building yet. You just want to explore ideas, get the first few users or paid customers.

So it's, yeah. I like that. I think you figured out who your customer is. This is, this was the big question I had coming into our interview was, who is the customer here? I think actually that makes a lot of sense because there are design firms right now saying,

$2,000 for a screen, we're going to spend three or four days on that screen. We're going to spend a month on your project. We're going to put, you know, we're charging your $10,000, but we're going to put 100 hours into it. We put 200 hours into it. It's going to be like 50 bucks an hour for us.

That's barely a living. That's $100,000 salary. Like, that's what a great does, designer, or at least a very good designer should get. But what they don't realize, I think, in this calculation is now there is an easier way. And then your customers, just like the logo, if the logo is 80% of what it will eventually be, that's fine for now. That 500 bucks is fine for now. The $2,500 are going to spend with you is fine for now. This is a very smart strategy. And it's not, how did you come to figure out that this was your customer? Maybe let's talk about

that. And you also used Raou, Vora, from Superhuman, previously. of reportive, an amazing founder I've invested in twice, and LPN is fund. He had a really great product market fit machine blog post he did. You read that. So maybe you could talk about how you found product market fit, how you made sure it was strong product market fit, and found this group of customers.

So actually, the product market fit engine, although Rahul has been the one kind of like turning into a machine, the core question of that survey is actually was done by Sean Ellis, which is like asking your customer, how would you feel if you could no longer use a product? And then, you know, if at least 40% of them will say, I would be very disappointed if I could no longer use a product,

then you have a measurable sign of product market fit. And early on, we know, we've built an alpha, we've built a beta, and we've invited a ton of people, and we've measured that very number. How many people answer very disappointed to how would you feel if you could no longer use Wizard? and then we used this as a way to basically segment customers,

ask the right question and basically iterate. When we started this company, we thought we were building a tool for designer and developers. And then we realized through this journey that actually people benefiting the most from the AI automation we were building were the non-designers, basically everybody else in the team.

So it's been kind of like an interesting journey building for the wrong people and ultimately finding that there is a market for the product we've built. But no, although it's, this was a great way to measure early son of product market fit. Or like

Rino or ultimate product market fit check or validation is basically long-term retention. How many people keep using their product over and over again after 12 months, after 18 months, after 24 months? But this engine was amazing to start from when you don't have a lot of data and you kind of

don't really know where to go. Amazing. Yeah. It's such a great question to ask and to just be absolutely brutal and honest with yourself if you've hit it yet. How depressing is it to deploy this inside of a company? Talk about how

the emotional wreckage the reality of strong product market fit is. In terms of us as a company trying to find product market fit, do you mean? Yeah, because it's one of these things where it's really hard, is it not? When you don't have it and it takes

years to get to it. So maybe you could talk about you as the leader of the company with your co-founder, keeping your energy level high in the face of day, week, and month after month, not having strong product market fit, not having a product that people would care if it went away. And then eventually, do you feel like you've gotten there that people actually really care if it went away? I was going to say, like, what's interesting about product market fit is that it's really

hard to know when, you know, if you have it, once you have it, you know, right? You can sit in the data. It just works. And so when did you know you had it? we knew we had it when we opened the beta in February 2021, and we saw the adoption. And then we thought we, and then, you know,

you think you have it, growth is on the right direction, and then you hit another infliction point, and you're like, oh, no, that's how product market fit looked like. We thought we had it,

but it was actually just the early sign. So it's actually interesting how it goes in like phases. So that first wave was just people signing up, downloading, and then the second phase was, this group of people who were just using it a lot? Was it the engagement that turned it over for you in the second phase? People using it a lot, people telling us that this is too cheap for the value they get. Oh, really?

That's an interesting sign. So people telling you your idiots for your pricing model. Yeah, that was really interesting to hear as an engineering background founder. You know, you're always too scared to charge too much. You know, I'm a developer. I don't pay for anything. I'm spoiled by the market giving me free stuff. And so realizing that, oh,

people are willing to pay more for what we offer. That was a good, like, in-section point, like, okay, we found product market fits. Did you ask a follow-up question to those people who said it was too cheap? Like, why do you think it's too cheap? What would you pay for it? What was their reasoning? What did they say? I'm curious because this is something I have been working with the founders we invest in.

We invest in 50 to 100 new teams every year between Founder University and the Accelerator and direct investments. And one of the great lifts we have as a firm is having candidacy. discussions about pricing. And man, sometimes we will see somebody increase their price and usage goes up. And adoption goes up and more people are interested in it because they were starting at $10 a month and people didn't see value. But when it was $199 a month, people put more effort in to using the product, learning how to use the product, they were more committed to it. So maybe you could talk a little bit about your price discovery.

That's something that was the most surprising to me is how much psychology is at play when we discuss pricing and actually just when we started we just had free and pro and just by adding a more expensive business tier had an impact on how many people convert to pro because they felt like okay there is a more expensive package I'll just sit in the middle just this trick helped also convert more people to pay and then to answer your first question when we you know got into a conversation with a customer and they were like this is too cheap of course we'll ask you know what would you pay for it and and then try to figure out exactly

where would be the falling point like how much would be too expensive how much would be too cheap what do you think would be the right price and then when you do this over a thousand of customers you start kind of have a bold park

of what the price should be but you know full disclosure our current price is still lower than what those discovery highlighted we should charge for because you know it's always a tradeoff between charging and optimizing for revenue

versus slowing your growth So it's kind of like, I mean, pricing it to change on a regular basis, but it's always hard, easier to say than done. The good news is, you know, at the price you're at, it should be sustainable for your company. You have a company you tell me, 45 people. And there's definitely, you know, 10, 20, 30,000 seats that are out there waiting for this product at 40 bucks a month. And if you can get but 10,000 of them, you know, $10,000 times $4 is $40,000. And at a zero, if it's $40,000, that's $400,000. and that puts you right in the break-even space

with 45 employees in my experience. So somewhere between 10 and 20,000 paid subs, your company's break-even, you're playing with the house is money. You raised a bunch of money, so you'll be in just absolutely great shape. So I would just say in the March to 10,000. And then you get the data, right?

I mean, that's the other thing. If you charge too much, you have less users, you might be more profitable, but then you get less data. Yeah. And you get less use cases. So one of the things that has influenced me a lot is watching what happened in skiing over my lifetime.

it used to be 60, then 80, then $100 for a lift ticket. I know in Europe it's much different, right? Way cheaper in Europe. You guys are insane. $50 a day. Yeah, pretty much like that would be a good resort. Like skiing is so expensive in the U.S. It got so crazy.

If you walk up to a Lake Tahoe or a Colorado resort now, it's, you know, $175, $250 per day. But in the same time, they came out with the Epic Pass and the ICON pass, which are for just a local area, just if you did Colorado local or Lake Tahoe local might be $4, $500 for the entire year. In other words, on day three, your break-even. Then there are like no blackout dates

and it's $700, let's say. If you ski 10 days a year, 20 days a year, with even one of those passes, you're way into the break-even and it's just extraordinary how it's changed skiing. Now there's so many people at the mountain and they get the money in advance. So they've discovered their own sort of SaaS model

where you have to buy these before the season starts, which gives them, they don't have to take loans or money to maintain the mountains, they get the money in advance from the user base, which was Elon's big thing

with taking pre-orders for cars, right? So it's all kinds of great learnings here, I think. I think the same with conferences that always sell the tickets, you know, on the year before, the actual event.

One year out, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's a great way to do it. It works. Yeah. Listen, we work with super early stage

companies at my investment firm launch, you know, pre-series A, maybe you got a couple of thousand dollars a month in revenue, you've raised a couple of hundred thousand dollars, maybe a million dollars, right? That's the early days, year one or two of a startup. And I'll be honest, a lot of times startups, they don't have their insurance. They haven't set that up yet. They haven't set up their accounting properly. They're getting things cleaned up. In fact, I was recently had a great startup, but they didn't have D&O insurance. That basically protects your directors and officers. That's the D, directors, people on the board, officers, the people who work at the company, right? Directors and officers insurance is super important. So what do we do?

We sent them right to and broker. Our friends over it in broker are a business insurance company that's built specifically for startups. You just fill out a simple application, right? And then startups get four quotes for four lines of coverage in 15 minutes. Four quotes, four lines of coverage, 15 minutes. Easy, breezy, lemon, squeasy. That's right. They connect you with one of of their expert brokers for unmatched service that goes beyond your policy. And listen, you might think, oh, it's too early to have insurance. It's not that expensive. It's not that complicated because Inbroker makes it easy. So here's what I want you to do. Try in Broker today with the code Twist. And you'll get 10% off their startup package atmbroker.com slash twist. That's inbroker.com

slash twist. We love Inbroker. I use Inbroker. They're an amazing team. They do a great job for startups. Whether you're in year one or year five, go use imbroker.com slash twist. So what do you think about competition now that you have, you've already starting to see, Adobe has their own stock image, generative AI product. Canva lets you replace images and do some AI on them. Figma will obviously release things. It's part of Adobe. Adobe's got a big push on AI. So how do you think about competition when the world now is onto AI and applying it to every article and certainly applying it to design because generate design really is a function of topography,

copy images, illustration, and layout and not much more, right? So all of those things, logos, stock images, those things are all being iterated on. So how do you survive and carve a niche for yourself when all the big lumbering elephants are right behind you and they're going to release products? I think the issue I have with products that, are plugging an AI element on top when it's not built in or like, you know, where the product is not designed

for being AI first, you create this really weird user experience shift where the user has some really easy to use feature, the AI powered feature, but then I have to cope with all the complexity of the existing products. And I create this really weird, you know,

dissonance in the use experience. And so the way we believe we have advantage is that our assumption and our vision has always been to build an easy-to-use tool. And then the AI element just becomes natural as an extension to that. So I guess if those companies you just mentioned need to really want to enable AI inside of the product, they're also going to have to rethink the rest of the user experience, because ultimately who is the user of this AI?

You mentioned it earlier. If you're a professional designer, do you want to just type text or would it be faster if we just create a screen from your existing library of components? And so it seems to me that there is a dissonance between the user of this AI-enabled features and the rest of the product and who that serves. Actually, Canva is a good example. I think they are the one that can nail it

because they've always been an easy-to-use software. And we are often called the Canva for product design. We do the same that Canada did for marketing design for product design. So they're probably the one that I think will just execute the best on this front. Yeah. But you'll

You obsess over your user base. They pretty much, yeah. We'll probably find Canva too simple and they already think Figma is too complicated so they probably want to have this AI first and the great thing is you can really cater to them

in their needs in a way that the other products maybe don't. And I guess something that's also interesting that if you are Adobe, you sell to designers. But if you make design easy, don't you replace or like get your own customers all of job? You know what I mean? So there might be this weird like you cannibalize your own customers if you are.

It is an innovatist dilemma. You're absolutely right. Wow, what a great profound insight, Tony. If you're Adobe, the more you incorporate AI, the less you need designers. And the less designers there are, the less or the two arguments would be the more, like you're saying, there'll be less designers because, or less dedicated design positions because everybody can do design. Just like now, you don't need to have copy editors. Everybody can do copy with chat GPT4. I'm pretty convinced between four and six, the idea that you would

need to hire a blogger or a copywriter or somebody to write a press release, that's out the window. I think anybody in the organization will be able to write a serviceable press release, just like everybody could write something without spelling or grammar errors, thanks to grammarly and, you know, just the grammar tools built into word processor. So this is a brave new world. and then Adobe's customer base would have to shift from designers to everybody that's kind of a hard thing to do I think right

wild definitely yeah time will tell but that's that's going to be tricky to solve man it is going to be a brave new world and super excited to see what you come up with when chat gpd4 gets incorporated into the product and plug-in so have you started to play with the plugins

that are available for chat gpt4 and do you have it? any favorite ones or crazy ideas that have inspired you since you started playing with the plugins? Actually, we went really deep into the plugin API because we wanted to figure out how to build our own. But I must admit, I haven't used the plugin myself much. I'm using chat GPT every day, but not the plugin just yet.

Do you think chat GPT is going to replace search? What do you think the impact will be on search? Have you found yourself using Google, replacing a Google search with the chat GPT4 chat session? Oh, that's an interesting one. I find myself oscillating between the two. I mean, for programming, I use chat GPT. I mean, I need to tweak things, but I will need to tweak things from a Google search either way.

But I find the level, the communication experience is so much better. Like, hey, tweak this. That line was wrong. Maybe you should actually, you know, I can re-specify my requirements and code changes. When I'm going for very specific information, I'll still use Google. Got it. But I think what I find interesting as an entrepreneur is that, of course, SEO and content is a big part of our acquisition play in the long run.

And no, the big question is like, do we keep optimizing for ranking high on Google search? How do we start optimizing for ranking high, you know, in a database that ultimately will be used for training chatypt. It's kind of interesting as well that the entire game of SEO is also changing for companies. Well, and what's the point of SEO if people are going to stop searching and just get answers? and then the answers don't have links in them.

So it basically means, you know, and I think that's going to be the big rub that's coming soon, which is I think chat GP4 is going to be forced to put in citations to where they got information from as part of their reasonable negotiation with content holders, because they just serped up the entire web from what I understand. But they're not going to be allowed to use Quora, Reddit, YouTube transcripts, tweets, Facebook, Craig's,

Amazon reviews, all of those are going to be siloed out, and you're going to have to license that data. So chat GPT's performance could go down because the model will have to remove that training. I believe the lawsuits will be such that they'll say to chat cheap before. We know you learned a lot. Now you have to go back to 3.5 and redo your model, but you've got to take out Reddit. You got to take out Quora. You got to take out Wikipedia. You've got to take out this open source project.

And you've got to redo chat chaptop4 in chat chep5 with citations. and with a licensing deal. And I think that's going to be the really interesting part. Have you played with Bard yet? Do you have any early thoughts on bard.gov.com? I love Google product, but Bard is not one of them, I must admit. It's so shocking to see that Google was the one building the transformer architecture, and then they got completely outpaced by Open AI.

It's kind of sad to see, I must admit. Especially with all those employees, all those employees and they can't build a better product yet. would you say Bard is where 3.0 is of chat GPT or 3.5, obviously it's not four. It's hard to tell it. As a machine learning researchers, is the fact that, well, Google might actually be very

secretive on the research now because of this and that's kind of like penalizing everyone. So, yeah, that's kind of like, I think the side effect that people don't talk enough about. Like, are these companies still being willing to share the research with the open, AI community, if they are scared that someone will use it to basically kill their business. It's a back to Innovators dilemma.

We had the innovator's dilemma with Adobe with designers and more they innovate, the less designers will be necessary in the world, possibly is one argument. And then here, the argument is, yeah, if Google does a better job with Bard, then people do less searching and then less ads get clicked on. Because if you get the answer, you don't need to click on an ad. Except if they figure where to just embed the ad in the in the in the in the in the in the in the in the results that's what I think they're going to do I think they're going to put them right in the results so when you do something hey I want to design a world class logo logo it's going to be like from this book yeah world class logos and this book that and this article and those are all going to be paid links and then there'll be other you know somebody who bought the term logo design their ads and we'll say for more resources here's this this this and this and it'll explain what that page is in a sentence so it'll give you 10 bullet points at the end of search, that'll be like a really thoughtful description of the page that the AI will write with the link and those people will pay per click.

Why wouldn't they pay per click to be at the bottom of your discussion, right? This chat is brought to you by these five related resources. All right, listen, Tony, great job. Continued success. Thank you so much. If anybody wants to check out the product, the URL again is. U-I-Z-A-R-D dot com. All right. Europe-based company.

You're scattered all over Europe from what we talked about. And are you hiring right now? Any positions that you need to fill ASAP? Not at all. We believe we have all the right folks until series be. Perfect. All right. I like it.

A little austerity. We got the right team. We just need to put our heads down and build. It's not about the size of the team. It's about the impact the team has. Absolutely. All right. Continued success.

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That's T-R-O-V-A-T-A-O-S-T-T-E-S-T-T-E-S-T-T-E-S-T-E. Okay, everybody, Tony did a great job on the show. You got a lot to think about, but I want to get into some tactful work now. Kelly from my founder university team is going to show you a nice tactical talk on how to build a CRM, a database of people,

so you can manage those relationships inside of Notion. By the way, if you enjoy these tactical demos, you're going to love the Founder University podcast. I'm going to put some Founder University podcast at the end of this week in startup so you get familiar with them, but all those tactical talks are available on YouTube or your favorite

podcasting app. Just type Founder University. Go subscribe. If you want to rate it and write a review, you, that would be super helpful to me. I'd really appreciate that. Or if you go into the descriptions here at this week and Start Up, you'll find all those links tucked away for you. Take some notes. Pay attention. Stick with us. This is a great tactical talk. Hey, y'all. I'm Kelly. And in this episode of Founder University, the podcast, we're talking all about setting up a customer relationship management tool or a CRM for short. As you scale your

business, you'll need to implement new processes to create visibility and avoid things falling through the cracks. A well-set-up CRM is a bit of work up front, but when done well, it'll save you and your team a lot of headaches. So in my first full-time job, when my boss left, I was stuck going through her email to find important client information and all of the history that went along with each of those folks. And I managed all of our major accounts. I actually ended up with more email than the CEO. And since then, I preach that nothing should live only an email for this reason. And this is where a CRM will kick in and save the day for you. So I've implemented various CRMs at about a dozen different businesses now.

And I'm here to share with you today some best practices I've learned along the way and some pitfalls to avoid. All right. In this session, we're going to cover what to consider when selecting your CRM, how to set it up. And we'll wrap up with the top four most common failures that will lead to a useless CRM so you can avoid those. All right, let's go. With literally hundreds of options to choose from, how do you begin to narrow your search for the right CRM? Here are three steps to finding the right tools for your team.

First up, we want you to think through who will use the CRM and specifically why they're going to use it. So let's talk through a few use cases here. If the CRM is going to be used by your sales team and the goal is to streamline your revenue operations and create visibility into your sales pipelines, then you should probably start looking at different sales CRMs. There's really great options to choose from.

And these are going to have reporting that really largely focuses around things like deal flow and pipeline projections. And having that all in mind and having it pre-set up for you is going to help you get a successful process at the end. Now, another example here could be if the CRM will be used by your customer success team. So in this case, they may be tracking ongoing relationships, in which case you'll want to find a tool that focuses on that customer support. And they're going to probably have features like chat box, team inboxes,

canned snippets, and even email templates that, again, are going to go back to helping that customer success team be successful in their roles. And so you'll want to pick a tool that has that preloaded already. All right. Another use case here is if your marketing team is going to use the CRM, you'll probably going to want to pick one that focuses on more robust marketing features like campaign tracking and has social media integrations.

And there's also a ton of other use cases. So just a couple off the top of my head, you may want to find a CRM to track your investor pipeline or even your recruiting efforts. And then once you've determined the who and the why, you'll want to narrow down the search even further. And a good way to think about this is thinking through the features that are non-negotiable for you.

So you may need to focus on an industry-specific CRM, which often will come preloaded with customer work, workflows that, again, are really specific to your industry. So for example, here, you might have an e-commerce CRM that includes, let's say, a cart recovery workflow preloaded that you don't have to custom create. It's already in there and easy for you to set up with just a couple clicks. Again, this is going to take out a lot of the customization and sometimes just entire roadblocks later on, again, if you go with that industry-specific option.

Another great example here is some CRMs are actually going to be built out with even more specific features like HIPAA compliance for health care companies. Again, that might be critical to your business and the decision you make. So keep that in mind as you're looking through the options up front. And then there's going to be some multi-use tools that will have CRM capabilities like your Notion, Airtable, Google Sheets that if you're looking for a lightweight option, you don't maybe need some of these bigger workflows and customizations with the industry specific tools that might end up actually working out well for you.

All right. Now, there's no wrong answer to the who and the why in helping you pick those non-negotiable features, but having a clear understanding of this before you jump into looking at the options is going to help you really narrow it down and not get lost in that sea of different options that, again, can be very noisy early on in this process. And once you have this short list of CRMs that you want to consider, you're going to want to be sure to set up a demo and ask a lot of questions. So, for example, some tools won't offer support or a dedicated contact unless you're at a higher tier. And having a human to ask questions too early on is really going to help you save a lot of time and energy down the line. So make sure you get on the phone with somebody. Again, ask for that demo.

Make sure you understand how it's set up in the features it has and also the limitations that go into it. A last point here, I can't move on without saying this. Be sure you ask about costs at scale. There are a lot of really great tools, and most of them will have a freemium option. And if you're not careful, they get very, very expensive as you grow. So make sure you have an understanding of what it looks like for when you'll need to upgrade the package, what that looks like for you in your business and what the associated costs will be.

Again, that way you hopefully won't have to move off of that platform later on and have to redo this process. Awesome. So now you've selected your CRM and it's time to get it set up. And it's really important to understand how the CRM you, chose, structures, contacts, and how accounts have relationships between the businesses and people within them. So let's dig in since this is a really important part. So for B2C companies, you may only have one main profile for each customer and really no relationships between

people and companies that you need to consider. However, if you're a B2B company, you'll probably need to be tracking by the company and then by the person. And you'll want to make sure that you can link people contacts underneath the company and understand how your CRM you've selected handles these relationships. So in each organization, you might have one contact or, as you can see in the example here, you might actually have many contacts. So, for example, you might have a decision maker that you want to keep their information so that in the future your sales team knows exactly who they're looking for.

You might also have another sales contact or a customer support contact who takes over the deal after it's closed. You may even have some marketing contacts to get logos and approvals from, right? So there may be a lot of different people within this organization your team has to interact with. We want to make sure there's a way to account for those within this CRM and make sure that all of those relationships and titles are very clear. All right, another factor to consider as you're looking at these relationships and how your CRM handles them, one thing to consider is if you have parent or umbrella profiles that will be needed. So sometimes, when you're working with enterprise companies, there'll be multiple divisions within that

company you'll work with. Sometimes they act very similarly and you can lump them all under one organization like we just saw on that last screen. However, if they have entirely different processes, different contacts, and there's not a lot of overlap, you may want to actually have these fall under one umbrella, but act as two independent organizations. So an example here might be like Dell USA and Del Amia under one Dell umbrella, but again, visually and the way that the system should set it up could potentially be entirely different organizations under that parent company. As you work this through with your customer support person at the CRM you've chosen, they'll be able to tell you the best way to handle these situations and how to make sure you're setting it up successfully. Okay, we're going to dive into a few best practices for setting up company profiles. So one thing that I always like to mention early on is to standardize your naming convention.

So set rules around how you're going to name each profile in the CRM. So for example, HP might be listed as HP or you might always require your team to use the long form name, Hewlett Packard. The reason you want to think about this up front is because if you don't set rules and people aren't searching for the right names, you could end up in a situation where you end up with multiple profiles and then having to de-dupe this later on, which is going to just create another layer of work and additional tasks for your team. And so go ahead and get ahead of that by just making some standard rules upfront on how you're actually going to name these profiles. All right, in these profiles, you may also want to include some generic contact information for the business, phone,

address or location. You'll also want to include, you know, potentially billing information so that you have all of this information, again, out of email and into an easily searchable, easily findable place so that your team doesn't have to go digging for this later on. A few other fields that you might look to consider here are who is the account owner and also who is the salesperson. You also might have some custom fields like status and health that will go through in a few moments when we go into an example as well as some free form notes. All right. Now over to people profiles. Here are a few best practices for setting these up. You should always include a field for the first name and keep this separate from the last name

so that you can customize emails later on without having to manually change the first and last name into different fields. From there, you'll probably want to include details like department and title. Sometimes how you actually work with that contact again. Is this the marketing person? Is this our sales contact so that your team knows exactly who to go to for what questions? And then here's one that I've seen also create a little bit of a mess, address, It seems like a simple thing.

What is a physical address for this contact? However, I've seen sometimes where sales folks or customer support people just trying to get it done, rather than asking the question to the contact, they will just search online and pull the corporate headquarters. And if you're going to do that, just know that if you decide to send holiday or thank you cards, gifts later on, you might be sending those to the wrong place. Again, if you're not asking the actual specific question. So just set up rules internally for what is going to be included and also what you're not

going to include in each of these. Also, if you don't plan to ever send anything physically by mail, you might not want to include the entire address to save your team a few steps, but you probably would still want to include things like city, state, country, so that you could eventually pull a geographical report later on if that's something that is needed. Let's pause here and talk a little bit about custom fields and free form notes, because this is going to be really critical as you're getting set up and could save you a lot of headache down the line. So I've noticed that folks tend to default to freeform notes when in doubt. And unfortunately, these should probably be used sparingly.

And I'll show you an example for why in just a moment. Instead, what you want to do is think through the information and the data that you're inputting into the CRM and really understand if this is something that you might ever want to track or report on. If you think that it is something that you might need to be able to get an entire list of or again, pull that data, pull that report, then you're going to want to enter this as a field or a tag because if it lives only in freeform notes, you're never going to be able to pull that out and get that list.

All right, let's jump over and look at an example together. Okay, so here I actually have a just dummy customer CRM that I created this morning to show this example. You can see a few different things here. One, we've got a list of all of our customers, and you can see just general top line information on these. If I click into one of our profiles here, you can see this information broken down in a bit more detail. And a few things I do want to point out. So again, have a naming convention for the company. Have a status column that helps you understand exactly the health of this account. I like to do red, yellow, green because the coloring is really helpful when you're talking about

this in a meeting to understand where you should spend your time. So here, we've got green is happy, the client is in good shape. We don't need to necessarily do anything. Yellow, this is going to be for the accounts that need a little bit of help in the moment, a little extra TLC. And then I also have read here, which in this situation is for your unhappy clients, the ones that are going to need the most attention. You're going to want to be able to pull reports and to understand exactly the health of each of these accounts as well as the action plan from there. I always like to include an account owner so the person knows exactly who owns the account and who is the primary contact internally for them. Last day contacted, follow-up scheduled just to create some visibility.

That way, if somebody in the company leaves, you know exactly where they left off with the last communication, as well as if they're able or if they've already scheduled a follow up and when that will happen. Again, I've included location here because in this situation, I don't need a full address. I just need to know where geographically they're located in the states. I've got the sales rep here. So again, when in doubt, if I have a question, I know. on the team who I can go back to because when your teams get very, very large, you might not know exactly who closed a deal at scale, right? I've got primary contact information. Remember, first and last name should always be separate email, title, phone number. And then I've included a few notes here.

So I have in the note, the account first closed by Matt in 2021. Kelly took over account in 2022. Now, this is the type of information I don't necessarily need to be able to pull a report on, But I also don't want to lose that knowledge just because I don't have a field for it. So that's a type of thing that you can include in a free form note. And then I've included also some call follow-ups. So in this example, I have an update from February 27th. I checked in. I shared the data on the conversations we're having and I linked the report that we covered with the client on that call.

And I've also included a note here that the client is happy and that they would like on our next regular check-in to cover the conversions from their entire program and we should review renewal options. Again, this is really a helpful tool so that when folks get busy or again, if somebody leaves the company, you know exactly where everything was left off. But again, this information doesn't specifically fit well into a field. And so that freeform notes is going to be your key. Again, use the freeform notes as sparingly as possible. If you think you might ever need to pull a report and run the data, you want to make sure it is in a field or a tag. All right, before we leave this example, I want to show you how useful being able to pull all these reports is. based on those fields and tags.

All right, so you can see I have a couple other reports pre-populated here, which my CRM was able to do with just a few clicks. And here you can see, in addition to all customers, I also can pull a report of accounts by owner, and I can see who on the team is maybe reaching capacity on the accounts that they're managing and who has room to take on some new accounts. You can also use this view, again,

if somebody leaves the company to make sure that all of their accounts get handed off and nothing falls through the cracks. You can pull reports by status. Again, happy, helping, or unhappy. So in your one-on-ones or if you have team meetings that you like to go through all of your customers for, you can really focus your time and energy on the companies that are listed as yellow or red, as long as your team understands those fields and is using them appropriately. Next up, we have accounts by sales rep.

Again, just an easy way to see exactly who has brought in what. And then I have accounts by location here. Just another way to show how these different tags can be incredibly helpful. Let's say I was headed out to the West Coast. I want to quickly get a list of all of our accounts that are on the West Coast to reach out and see if I can meet them in person. This is the way I'm going to be able to do that without creating hours of work for our team to research these folks on LinkedIn or wherever else they may be able to find that information. Go ahead, pre-populate it into your CRM and help yourself out.

Next up, I want to talk a little bit about internal ownership and workflows. And this is really important to think through because when everybody is responsible, nobody is. And so you'll want to have answers to this as you start to roll this out to your team and getting them into the CRM and using it daily. So you'll want to have answers for questions like, when does the profile get created, who actually creates that profile, who updates the profile, and then who's going to pull reports and when. Again, if you have multiple teams and departments using the CRM, this may differ between groups. And there's really no wrong answer. as long as you set clear expectations with the team and then follow up to ensure that it's getting done. Unfortunately, I've seen time and time again, we set up a CRM, folks get busy, they move away from it.

And again, when it's everybody's responsibility, it's no one. And so if you want to have a CRM that is useful to you and actually beneficial to your organization, you want to have clear understandings of who is going to be updating these when that happens. All right, very quickly here, once you get all of your data into your CRM, You want to start playing around and implementing the automizations and customizations that the tool you've selected has built in. Those are going to be the easy wins. They're usually a little bit easier. But you can also look to do custom workflows using tools like Zapier and GPT tools.

Again, this might take a little bit more work and effort. But if you can offload ongoing tasks and relieve your team of a little bit of that manual labor involved in managing the CRM, it's going to help them out in the long term. All right. Last up, we have the top four failures I have seen that are going to make your CRM slightly useless. And we don't want that to happen since you're going to a lot of work and trouble to get this implemented. So these are the things I recommend avoiding. The number one thing I see happen with CRMs is a lack of enforcement. And frankly, nobody really wants to spend their time doing data entry and updating a database.

I've seen this with sales folks, customer support teams, even the CEO managing their investor list. they just don't want to do the data entry or they just forget to put it on their calendar and block time for it. So as the business owner, you need to communicate how important the CRM is and set the expectation for how often it's updated. The best practice is to update it in real time and have your team add 30 minutes to the end of every day to force the behavior. And I promise this will work wonders. If it's on the calendar and they have that reminder, even if they miss one day, it's more likely that you're going to have success more often than if it's not on their calendar. and it's not top of mind, they're going to miss it every time.

All right. One more best practice with enforcing your CRM. You want to, whenever possible, default to using the reporting, the tracking, and just pulling up the CRM in your team calls and your one-on-ones. If you're defaulting to in-app use, you're going to force the team to have the information updated there versus having it updated in two or three different places and then none of them are accurate and nobody's defaulting back to that CRM. So when in doubt, open up the CRM, have that be the default view that you're looking at all of this information in.

Next up on our failures is garbage in, garbage out. The CRM is only as good as the data you have uploaded. So you need to be maniacal about having your team put in accurate information, having them update it frequently, again, hopefully on a daily basis, or definitely weekly, if daily is a little too much. you want to make sure that you also have a process and a cadence for de-duping and cleaning up the CRM because eventually there are going to be problems. There are going to be things that got duplicated and you're just going to need to spend a little bit of time to clean it up to make sure that it's as valuable as possible later on. Anytime somebody leaves the company, ensure that, one, they put time on their calendar to clean it up to get all of their notes in there and make sure

that the CRM is accurate. And then you'll be able to hand off those accounts and just to sign it to a new owner and hopefully they can pick up exactly where the last person left off and not create any headaches for you and your clients. All right. Our third failure here is choosing the wrong CRM will lead you to endless customizations and sometimes the inability to achieve the goals that you set out to accomplish with your CRM. So as you're thinking it through, as you're really looking at your different options at the very beginning of this process, please be super mindful again of the who and the why for the CRM

as well as those features. So if you're trying to enforce a lightweight sales-specific CRM, but you're really trying to force it to do more robust, complex customer relationships, you'll drive yourself nuts. And sometimes you just won't ever be able to get what you need with the views, the reporting, and the automations. So, again, be hyper, hyper diligent in looking at CRMs

and make sure that the one you're selecting early on is going to be able to grow with you. and will have the features that you need because you might not be able to build them in later, even if you're willing to go custom. And last here, it's so important to focus on what is allowed to be included in freeform notes and then what has to be labeled and tracked in fields and tags.

When in doubt, make sure your team knows that the freeform notes should be used sparingly, and anything that you want to search or pull reports on now or years in the future needs to actually live in a field or a tag. All right, everybody, thank you so much for joining me

on this episode of Founder University as we talked through how to select that CRM, how to actually set it up, and then those four most common failures that I've seen

that will lead you to a useless CRM. Thanks so much.