Scaling SaaS from 0-$800M with No Marketing | Hunter Dickinson

0:00How much have you sold? I think I've personally sold 300 million. How old are you? 23. And you've done all this from 19 to 23. You moved across the world to do it. Yeah. You're one of the like most high performing people I've ever had the pleasure to work with. Thank you. And you've literally scaled a multi-billion dollar company from 2 million a month to hundreds of millions a month. So, there's over 15 people on my team. Um, and we're about 11 sales reps and then four full-time account managers. I really want to go through like let's kind of like go through that theory of like if you were to at a brand new

0:33company, you're a brand new software company. Yeah. How are you going to go about getting the very first customers? For sure. So I think for me like how I think about like really anything is in a concept called peer groups. So I think for example oftent times like SAS companies or for me like I originally started making money in NFTs like it's taboo but like my start was really just like scale NFTs. I end up scaling to like 80,000 followers. I did a project I made 3 million. That was like my first

1:00internet money before I got into SAS. And what I would do is I would pretty much just like segment people either by geography or like business model, but ultimately really just by by who their friends are in their friends group. And so that's as simple as going to like a Twitter profile, going to the mutuals, following all of those mutuals, noting down who's important or who are commonalities, like go to the next profile, see if there's strings attached, and almost make like a mind map of, okay, if I get this one person, who else do I get? And so whenever I'm tackling a new market, what I always

1:35like to do is I always like to first like if it's social media selling, which most SAS people are doing either like Twitter or email, I always like to find the people that I really care about that I know are influential and really and compliment them. So I for for example for you if I was trying to get into like for example podcasting or maybe like SAS or AI I would just be I would find something and I could just run an agent now on you and I could be like what are some interesting things about you and I could just be like yo what up like I

2:05love the podcast you recently did with let's say RNG like that was that was fantastic you're one of the best people I've ever met at podcasting and that's it and the only goal that I'm trying to do out of that is get a follow from you so when I start going after your friends. I've now got almost like a portfolio of mutuals so that when I go to pitch you or whatnot, a I'm already in your inbox because I just gave you a compliment and b you give me a higher social status because I'm followed by people that you already deem as socially

2:33big and like has socially high status. And so that's what crushed for me especially in NFTTS like I used to run that and then also [ __ ] like I started in the trading space and that was predominantly B2B selling Twitter selling and all I would do every day would just like hammer compliments to all of these traders and eventually I'd have like 40 mutuals. So then when I reach out to someone new, they think I have my opinion is higher social than if I was like some random agency saying like, "Hey, can I do 10 thumbnails for you? Like I'm the cheapest on the

3:06market." So you're calling this peer groups. Yeah. And so you're super on top of, okay, I'm going after a market. These are the most influential people in this market. And so I need to infiltrate that group. And so I'm going to find who are like the top players, who are they friends with. And you're doing that by going to their Twitter accounts, looking

3:20at their mutuals. Yeah. Then you're going to try to infiltrate. Really, your first goal is just to get a follow. So then you have their mutuals follow you. So they're more likely to engage with you. And to do that, you're just sending out compliments. I mean, it's like really manipulative, but it's like I I was doing like what I

3:34was doing when we f GPT first started. We were going after like sports sports picks businesses. Like they're running paid communities selling sports pickics. And I would take their logo on Twitter and they [ __ ] suck. Like some of the worst logos I've ever seen. And I would just put it into chat and be like, "Make

3:51this logo better." And I would actually dead ass DM them and go, "Hey, our internal Ukrainian designer just made you a brand new logo. I love everything you're doing. I just want to use you to use this for free." And I would just send them and I would obviously chat GBT or like make it with AI. And I would just hammer them with these logos and they'll be like, "Oh my

4:12god, dude. This has changed my business. This is so phenomenal." And I would just they would all follow me aggressively. And then what I would like and so from there like now I've built social proof that like I am an influential figure in this market. So like for maybe in your sphere if I'm thinking about Twitter I'm thinking like how do I get Greg Eisenberg to follow me? How do I get maybe Corey Levy from Zfellows? How do I

4:33get maybe Arib from you know 21 Labs? Like how do I get those people to follow me? And so when I speak my opinion or when I outreach to you, perception's reality that now because all these people that I deem are important follow me or are engaging with my content, my outreach or therefore the value I'm providing is significantly better than

4:52others. Yeah, dude. This is incredible cuz I literally saw you launch a project, make $3 million, and you didn't have a lot of Twitter followers. Like you were doing this one by one, but then this was kind of like a growth hack in a way for Twitter cuz then the most influential people now follow you. If you tweet, there's a good chance they'll retweet it. people see the retweet, see that they actually follow you, then that help you like really build momentum on

5:10Twitter as well. It's funny cuz like it really started in like if you're building a SAS and you're deciding what stack to use, I highly recommend you use [ __ ] to process your payments. With WP payments, you can accept payments from customers in over 194 countries and it takes less than 2 minutes to get set up and start accepting payments. [ __ ] also has authorization built in, so it's perfect for indie devs that are trying to build apps rapidly. If you want to use [ __ ] to process payments for your software, go to wop.com/sell or visit the docs at dev.wop.com. Back to the episode,

5:42this whole thing and and there's no shame in the game like like I didn't scam anyone, but like when you were launching a new NFT project back in the day or even like a new company, what people would do is they would have these essentially groups of like people like these group chats, Twitter groups and and they would say follow this account. And so when people see there's a new coin or a new project starting and they'll see, oh my god, 200 of the most influential people in NFTs or crypto follow this one account, therefore it must be a good project. That's kind of the same thing you're trying to

6:15replicate where it's like, okay, if I'm trying to get into, let's say, for example, like I want to launch a new AI email sending tool like a a list kit or or like a LM list, I'm going to make sure that I have all of the agencies that are sell like would use those products and sending mass emails following me so that when I speak about my platform or my no code SAS or whatever it is, they go, "Oh my god, everyone, all the ICP that actually cares about sending in cold emails follows this individual. Therefore, that product must be good even if they're not

6:48subscribers. Gotcha. So, you're really laser focused on like the top of the top most influential people in any peer group, no matter what it is. So, any new business, you go for the most influential people, infiltrate the peer group to be perceived as one of them. And then you're just getting referrals on top of not only are they engaging with you and

7:04following you. So, what happens after you send them a message and you're compliment them, they all start to follow you. What's the next step? Yeah, for sure. I think the next step is really like trying to continue the conversation with someone that's shown a level of interest. So for me it's like okay I've just I've gotten let's say let's run a scenario like 40 people that are following me as mutuals. I'm starting to put some content out like they're starting to deem me as somewhat

7:30valuable. That's when you start to pitch. That's when you when you start to and I wouldn't say like hey I just built this platform like I would say more so hey I'm starting to experiment with an MVP here's like the idea that I'm trying to put into market I'm really mainly targeting like people that are interested in like cold email sending what do you think if I did this right and so you're almost like you're almost like coming to these people as if they're like giving you advice versus actually selling them on things and what you'll find is that if you're asking them for their advice

8:02one, they're probably way more you're already in their inbox because you already complimented them. It's not going to work for everyone, but it'll work for some. You're coming from a position of I want your advice. They're probably more likely to engage with you versus like if you came from defensive, one, they're just going to shut you down

8:16or not reply. But also, if you're coming from a perspective of you're my big brother, I want your advice, that actually might be valuable for your product. And you can be like, oh, Brett told me that I really like I really need to improve my landing page. I can go improve my landing page and come back to him be say hey I improved this and then you can start to pitch him and be like hey I built this out I think this is really useful like would you like to try it or what would it take for you to maybe use this so I think when people are starting like from

8:45bottoms up it's often times from a position of like I want to sell this person versus like I want your advice because like I I've always and this is what I try to do internally is like whenever it comes to like cold outreach or even if you're on a sales call like like let's say you're like you always want to come from a standpoint of like one knowing as much context as you possibly can. So like if I'm having a sales call with you or like I'm starting outreach I want to actually know exactly pinpoint what your issues are before I go and pitch you. And so

9:16for me what I I've always found that works more more than anything else. How do you I'm curious because if you you reach out you ask them for give them a compliment then you're asking them for like trying to build a relationship asking for advice which is really smart. You're not asking, you're like trying to give them an opportunity to help you instead of like asking for

9:34money. So, how are you because you're doing this with a lot of people like how are you managing all of these conversations cuz you're doing it very tactically and you are doing it very intentionally. So, how are you managing all these people? Like did you like make a list and then you reach out and you like say talk to this person this is what I talked about or like how do you organize

9:51everything? Yeah. So, I think you're asking more like how you manage sales reps at scale. Not even sales rep, just your sales process. Yeah. In general. Yeah. So, I think for me it's really just like you want to build like you want to define what you view as segments. So, like for example, in our in our business model there's like for for us we're selling B2B like oftent times processing

10:10or like a creator platform. You can segment in a couple ways. You can se segment by business model. So for us it's like coaching agencies, their platform, their brickandmortar, their SAS. Like you can segment in that way. You can segment in vertical. So you can segment like trading, sports betting, reselling, real estate. And then you can segment in um what I've found really well distribution platform. So like YouTube, Twitter, Instagram. And oftent times like how I like to do it is I like to park specific people on the segment of okay, here's the business model. It's coaching. Here's the vertical. It's trading. Then it's YouTube, right? Or or

10:46then it's Instagram or then it's Twitter. And that and then you you segment through how they're doing the distribution platform. Because if you think about it, like more often than not, like they're not, if you think about like our ICP is like a coach. If you're a coach that's doing real estate, you're not like you could assume that all coaches that do real estate all know each other and all look up to each

11:08other. For sure. That's a false, I think, assumption. But if they're a real estate coach that's on YouTube, 100% they're going to be comparing themselves to other YouTubers. 100% they're going to be comparing themselves to other ex accounts. So, it's more segmenting by the distribution platform more than anything else. And then you park someone

11:25on that. That is so true. So, I know all the YouTubers. I have zero clue who does software on Instagram whatsoever. That makes a lot of sense. But you're still leaning into that peer group method. Okay. So, once you've infiltrated the PE, so you've segmented that way, do you track conversations like granularly or is it just like everyday wake up, check

11:40your DMs? Yeah, I think it's more like you run a CRM. Like I think like more than anything like I I think there's some weird aversion to a CRM because it's like oh I'm just another like enterprise like cog in the machine. But for me like even when I was doing like like the NFT stuff and I I would say I crushed it pretty hard. Like I end up I end up launching a project and then I was I was making like 200k a month off my agency alone. And that's actually how I found [ __ ] They were a client of my agency and what I did which is like

12:12probably very autistic was like I made a for myself a CRM of every single influential person in what I cared about which was NFTs at that time and I found all of their ex accounts and I did a notion I had about 200 and I would make sure every single day every second day I would hit them up every other day and I would be like yo what's good or like or I saw you did this and this is really interesting and for me that was that was pretty fantastic. because that's how I pretty much did all of my like agency work because I knew what

12:42projects were being launched. I knew what what coins people were talking about, what NFTs were talking people were talking about and I knew what the market sentiment was. And so for us like we now from an enterprise SAS level, we kind of taking that same thing that I did for just like myself and we're just productizing that where it's like, okay, let's say I'm Sam on my team. I'm in charge of real estate creators on Instagram. I'm gonna like even if I've for example I've got them on [ __ ] I actually own that segment. So it's not only about closed deals. It's also about like the segment generally and I'm going

13:15to try and stay up to date with the entire segment because our business today like most of it is referral based and that's because you just own that segment. So you can say like okay Jim I just closed your real estate entrepreneur on Instagram. Who else is up and coming that's crushing in real estate. Oh you know them. Can you introduce us? So, it's more like full ownership end to end of a segment, which we use a CRM for and and both focus on like existing deals and already deals

13:41that were closed. How do you ask for the referral? Really, it's just saying, "Hey, like, do you know anyone?" You're really direct. I've witnessed it a lot. Like, you are super direct, but it's like it comes off in a fun, playful way. Like, there's something about the way you say stuff that's just like,

13:54"Yeah, I guess." I mean, it's really like if you were to evaluate yourself, it's like, "Am I providing entertainment or value?" Yeah. like like saying saying question mark or following up like like just doesn't work like hey just just circling back like hey just follow that just [ __ ] does not work like I mean if you look at me you probably can't see on the podcast I'm like a 6'4 skinny dude like I'm not your traditional macho like you know basketball like or or football sales rep. I'm like a a skinny dude and like for me I take a very like for for sales or like in general like I take a more

14:29like internet approach where it's just like you don't it's not about hard selling it's not about like these like talk tracks that you're doing it's more just like for like what are the horistics you're following and it's like am I providing value am I being entertaining am I am I guessing like am I not guessing and as long as you follow those you're normally pretty good at what you do like for for you, for example, like I'm sure your inbox is blown up by like so many people trying to reach out for for your advice, whatnot. Like if I'm like, "Hey, Brett, like I can like I can give you, you

15:03know, hundred new leads right now." Or if I'm selling like leads, like you're probably going to be like, "No." Right? Or like, but if you're like, "Oh, hey Brett, like I found your favorite CSGO team and I just secured you front row tickets to that CSGO team. Do you want to come with me? We're best friends." you that that's like whoa like you're providing me value and that's somewhat entertaining like who the [ __ ] DMs me with CSGO tickets that you know and as an outreach method and now and so that's always kind of the heristics I try and approach to entertainment is funny too like you were

15:35just very funny the first few times I met you you had the best emoji game on Discord you see like these like crazy ass random gif animated like I'm waiting it's like um it's Patrick Baitman with his headphones on with like his walking in and like I would start all my conversations with that like especially when we were early in like like Discord days for W selling Discord and like crypto was obviously very Discord heavy honestly like the best follow-ups were just like a gif every time I saw a message from you I

16:06would just laugh. Yeah. I'd be like, "Damn, I want to talk to this guy again." And it crushes. Like, so I would I would say for anyone out there, like try and lean on, am I being entertaining or am I providing value? And if it's neither of those, like probably move on to the next

16:18person. Well, I love how you're like also not only are you like focused on the first most influential people. I like how your mindset is mainly for product feedback. Like you're not even trying to ask them to be a customer or to make content for you. You're like actually asking them for product feedback, which is a good

16:31signal that you're serious. Yeah. Yeah. So, not only are you getting you're focused on the most influential important people to use your product and be your first customer so they give you feedback, but now in the future they'll either refer you to their other friends and simultaneously if you do need them to do some sort of like promotion or whatever, they'd be more open to the conversation for sure. So, it's like the most high leverage like precise impactful thing you could do when you're starting a software or any type of

16:53company. Thousand%. So smart, dude. Okay. now that you've actually because you're now you're at WAP, you're like flexing your muscle because you're going after I like how you've systemized it like you're in the peer groups because now we're going across so many different verticals. So, it's just really cool to see how that evolved from when you were like literally an 18-year-old kid in

17:07Australia. Yeah. Staying up an American hours overnight, making millions of dollars, coming here, and then scaling this company to billions of dollars from like as a teenager, bro. It's just insane if you just say that out loud. It's pretty cool. So, very impressive. But I'm curious now, like you're building out the actual team. How

17:22long was it that you were just solo? Like when did you guys actually start hiring people? About a year. A year. Yeah. And then you I I would be interesting to hear how you cuz I know you've like we've kind of landed on this system now of like referrals and everything, but like what are all the different things that you tried as a salesperson that like oh man like different systems when you were trying to figure out how to scale a team because now you have the system down

17:43like 10 plus people. Yeah. I mean for me like I'm an kid like I don't like going out and talking to people straight up. like I don't like going to these networking events or anything and I honestly think they're a waste of time straight up. Um for me I mean we've tried paid ads and it didn't work too much for ICP. I mean for me like there was things like we would send edible arrangements. So we would look up like Brett Malinowski your address and then we'd find your registered address and we'd send an edible arrangement. That actually worked a couple of times where it's like we

18:14would send a gift and then we'd have a note on it. We obviously tried the GPT, like I just made you a logo, like here's what's really working for it. Like the like gift giving is like uh crushed pretty hard for us in all honesty. It depends on the ICP you're going after, but like for us, we were going after like really like people that are selling courses or like info products and like they're often sold like it's when you actually think about and you if you were to break down their inbox, it's like agency services number one people targeting them. And so if you think

18:44about like differentiation, it was very much gift giving complimenting gift giving because like especially now that you've got agents and you've got AI and you've got all these services that are outbounding like it's often times just like pretty lame. It sucks like like if you think about your inbox like you'll probably reply to a fan that's like saying giving you a compliment. So that one worked for us and then also layering like gift giving

19:06was a huge part of it. Yeah. You said something interesting differentiation. So you're saying you know you're trying to understand what typical people are reaching out to them. Yeah. What type of person is typically reaching out to them? What message they're typically getting and trying to specifically come up with the differentiation strategy to get their

19:20attention. Interesting. Thousand%. So like you might have seen this and like there was that guy that was like um he was like he's outbound. You might went viral on Twitter like he was saying the nword. What? Different guy. Yeah. He was like I don't know. Maybe cut that out. He was like he was like um you saw that he was like he was like saying like I'm going to [ __ ] if you do not reply to me and let me sign like 10 clients I'm going to end it all right

19:44now. Okay. I did see and then he and then he started following up with N word and he was like and and I was like oh my god this like yeah it's like really bad and like why would he say that? But like I checked that 100% check. Yeah. Thousand%. Did it convert? No. But like am I the ICP? No. But like if you think about it, it's like an inbox drowned of

20:06like like of just like absolute rubbish. I'll get you 100 leads. Like that's the worst. Yeah. I'll get you 100 leads. I'll book 10 clients for you. Please let me try for you. Please let me be your first client. I'm just starting. Like it's just drowned, right? And so it's like, okay, cool. Like, okay, if I think about you, it's like if I pop up in your inbox and like Instagram and Twitter both do this. They see the mutuals. Like it will show you in the inbox request there's mutuals. If I have mutuals and I'm giving you a really strong compliment and I don't look like a bot, you're

20:34probably gonna open that DM, right? So, it's like really any angle you can do for differentiation. I mean, even for for cold outbound, like we we've been trying that working on email and that's been crushing and we're we're we've found that like for info products specifically and info product businesses, the bigger ones have a CRO, a chief revenue officer and we're just starting our like our subject of CRO inquiry adding split it, which is like a financing option to your stack to get a

21:0120% increase um on on your spend, right? So that's been crushing because it's like it's really just like what is this person getting dayto-day in their inbox and then how do you make it so that they want to click it and that's it. You just call the ICP, you tell them the outcome that you're going to offer. Yeah. And that's it. And it crushes for us. I mean we've done we've done cold calling never really worked. I don't find that works too much for like modern internet businesses. Like I don't like I don't know how many people like get cold call and that actually works. Um,

21:32but our biggest strategy has really just been paying highly connected people in peer groups to then refer us businesses and finding incentive structures. So like for example, if you think about like an email an email sending tool, there's probably like a maybe proxies certain people use or like maybe certain like um certain uh I don't know agencies that set people's emails up. I would try to find what the common like like denominator is across whatever your ICP is and try and partner that. For us, it was like funnel builders. Funnel building is huge. Agencies, sales agencies was massive because if you think about course creators, especially

22:10higher ticket ones, they all have sales reps. Who's going to go out and build a sales team for a course? It's probably going to outsell to an agency. And so we're like, okay, instead of going to a hundred of these different like individual businesses, we're just going to partner with the sales team so that their go-to like payments platform is us and what we're using. And so I would think like okay, how do I differentiate myself in the inbox? But also two like the faster way is what are the common denominator servicing my ICP and how can I honestly pay to play to to like target

22:38that ICP. So you literally will find you'll go you'll infiltrate infiltrate a peer group. Yeah. And you'll find a high value peer group and at the certain level we're a B2B SAS so we make a lot more money per customer but you'll pay people like 510 $20,000 something like that to literally refer you of to their friends 100%. And it's not like it's not like an affiliate like we've we've tried like a percentage of our revenue. We've p we've tried like just straight c like straight like cash like as in like based on processing volume. But what's worked for us is honestly just being like, "Yo,

23:10here's 25 racks. Make group chats." That's it. That's insane. And that and that and and that just like and it's not like it's almost like you're selling like people think about an affiliate is like they have to hit a conversion for you especially in B2B SAS where it's like oh why doesn't if I'm paying you 25K you should be setting them all up on who you should be putting them on my SAS do like you but we've just found like okay there's only so many high value people

23:34that actually matter. Just make group chats. That's the hardest part. Like it's just like I was so shocked when I learned this because it's like I know 25K might sound like a lot of money to people and people are like, "Oh, that's like a lot." The people that you're offering this to are making

23:48millions of dollars a month%. And so I'm like I am shocked that people would do something for 10, 15, 20K. I know. It's crazy. And they're but they're willing to do it. It's simple cuz it's you're taking all the work away from them. So it makes sense now. But like that's just a crazy like I would have never thought of that. I could just pay someone $1,000 and they'd introduce me to someone who could be a $20,000 client. The hardest part like like for example if I'm I'll use the same example like Greg Eisenberg or like a Blake Anderson if I am able to like get them

24:16on my side and I'm doing like an AI SAS that and and the hardest part I would often say about like Greg Eisenberg or or Blake is probably starting a conversation to be honest. And so for you, like all we're doing is we're arbiting your influence with those two specific individuals. And we're just saying to you, it's as simple as like, Brett, we're going to give you 25K. Just make a group chat. But for us, it's Brett, we're going to give you 25K to arbitrage that they see you as a trusted figure,

24:46right? To then put us in a group chat so he replies and entertains. The warm intro. The warm intro is everything. It crushes. It comes with weight. If I'm going to introduce you to these people, they'll take the call out of respect for the relationship. Yeah. And I mean it works for too, right? Like like think about like who is like the most individual influential person that promote can promote your business or use your business and then reverse engineer that like like it doesn't have

25:10to just be for B2B. Interesting. Bro, what's your Twitter handle? Oh, Gronquiz. Gr. You still rocking the Gronquiz, bro. It's my Black Ops 2 gamer tag. Nice. That goes hard. Respect that. Just so everyone for context, I cannot express how valuable what you've just said is like the last 20 minutes has been boom boom boom. WAP went from zero to an $800 million valuation with zero marketing. Only you and Cam like and everything that you're discussing. So I hope everyone understands just how like this might be the most valuable information I've seen on YouTube regarding sales for software. So thank you. You're sharing everything. I didn't know if we were going to go this

25:43deep into the actual details of what you do, but holy [ __ ] I'm kind of mind blown. Now was the gift giving something that you actually like now that you have a sales team is like everyone like on protocol to like give gift for sure. Yeah. And then and then once they have a good network to then pay for referrals essentially 100%. So like for us it's like okay we're we're we're servicing people that are making like very very good cash flow businesses like $500,000 per month, right? Like they're making stupid amounts of money. They've barely got any stuff. And but what's amazing that we

26:19found is if you give them like a custom engraved like like cigar case or like or like a bottle of champagne and it says like their business or their logo on it, it's 500 bucks like online service, deliver it in like two days, one day, they go nuts because they're an underered like ICP that really are just like behind their laptops every single day and never get catered for. Like I mean there's even I think the most nut stuff is like a custom rug with your logo. Like you can get those ordered so easily. Like it's nuts. Like if you think about like some of these people

26:54like golf and it's like okay we're going to get you V1 Pros which are like I don't know [ __ ] but like accordingly these are the best golf balls with your like logo on it and people like oh my god you like care about me and this is unbelievable. And that's not to say like I love giving gifts. I love their reactions. But if you're talking from like a pure like no emotional standpoint, it's an incredible arb where it's like you're just getting like a small minute thing in relation to and you could think of it as like they make so much money. Why would they care? But

27:21it's like the sentimental value associated with that and like oh my you care about me is one of the greatest sales things we've ever done. Interesting, bro. It's probably a normal thing in like the corporate world, but like all the creators were such Yeah. such an informal thing new like that that really would stand out to me. I mean even just like on our organic side this is what wasn't so much sales but from we were for a long time like using like an auto pen whereas like you write like a auto like handwritten card it looks like a handwritten card and any as soon as someone makes a dollar on [ __ ]

27:51we would just auto ship a handwritten card that is just like from our founders and then people would be like oh my god I just made a dollar on our platform and you guys get me sent me a handwritten card obviously it's not handwritten it's an auto pen but like personal touch most people won't realize that it wasn't

28:06They would think it's handwritten. It feels like a personal touch. And so it's like and that the loyalty you get associated with that is just unfathomable. Like I haven't found anywhere else. Are there any other little like details like this that you can remember trying or that have worked well for you when you earlier on especially

28:22buying people's products crushed. Yeah. Actually buying the product. Yeah. Like like I bought your like let's say like for paid groups especially or like courses or anything like if you're selling that I was like oh I bought your course like just joined. Excited. I just joined. And then it was like, "Okay, I'm in your community." Like, "Hey, I just bought your product. Like, how do I get in touch with you?" Like,

28:40and and like that crushed pretty hard. Like, whereas like, "Oh, I just bought whatever you had or like or even like if you think about, let's say you're servicing, I don't know, like roofing companies and you're building a SAS for roofing companies, even just as simple as filling out their if they have like a for an intake form. Filling out that intake form being like, I filled out the intake form. here is the feedback I had with this that form or how you did it is a it crushes his outreach because you're almost like you're taking a position of authority because you're actually like using their product or like taking and

29:14then and then from there giving feedback on it and they would say and you can position that as like hey Brett I just went through a YouTube channel um your thumbnails what I noticed is you're doing you're not using XYZ technique which I've seen is crushing for people this is what this is what you would see like just a heads up like and that's the outreach like or like hey I just went through your SAS product I noticed that you guys have no customer support I found amazing success with decagon.ai AI and that's it. That's your outreach and and it's like giving value,

29:44but you have to give the answer. Yeah. You have to give the answer. You have to you have to know what you're talking about. But for us, it was like you would maybe go through let's say their product or or their funnel or their webinar and like oftent times for our ICP webinars are made by really the same people like a Jason Fladdlin or a Russell Brunson. They've got the same style of selling and we'd go through it and we'd be like, "Hey, we notic you're selling like a Russell Brunson style webinar to a higher ticket product. What we realize is that you are not embedding

30:13a checkout and so your conversion rates are probably going down by 10%. And that's like you can do it in a very casual way like I wouldn't do it in like a very formatted but providing value or like hey I just bought your product this was my experience that crushes really hard as outbound. It's a really important nuance is that I get a lot of those where people are just insulting me. I'm like bro like like dude your thumbnails are like basically

30:33they're saying your thumbnails are bad. I'm like tell me what to do better or give me an example. they don't like actually give me the answer which pisses me off. I'm like [ __ ] you, bro. Yeah. And it's just like but like you could easily reposition that and you could just be like thumbnails is quite

30:48saturated so it's probably a harder one. I' like if anyone has a a thumbnail SAS right now, I'd buy you some CSGO tickets to a tournament. probably I'd go a different route. But like um but like if if it's more like an underserved niche or or um even B2B like for us it's really just like it's what $19 for ebook or like 20 bucks for a course like you just buy it and be like I watched I watched it I learn it or now you can just [ __ ] get a virtual credit card off like Slash or Ramp put it on an agent get the agent to like buy it and

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32:27or go to ringley.io. That's r i n ly.io. Get the app now before your competition does. There's a link in the description. Thank you for sponsoring today's episode. Us right now, we're doing a lot with scraping. So, we're we're scraping pretty heavily, but and also categorizing. So like we're we're like we're we're doing a few me personally I'm doing it for like hiring funnels. So I'm getting it to like go through my applicant funnel and be like autoreject for these reasons or approved for hiring. So that's one of the main ways to do it. And then I'm also doing it for sales analysis. So I've got a ton of

33:00sales reps. So I'm just logging it into like my CRM platform and using it to analyze like this deal is overdue or this deal is is should be lost or here's a lost deal where you're losing revenue. And you can easily just put like a manis or a chat GBT on that with some smart

33:14prompting and analyze it pretty quickly. That's been a recent iteration. But for us, like what we're doing right now for AI, which is crushing, and hopefully this doesn't become saturated, is we're just saying what's our number one competitor. So like a competitor could be F like Patreon as an example. And we're just saying in Twitter, put the key term Patreon, go to search anyone latest, anyone that referenced Patreon and just auto go to their inbox and just say, "Yo, what's up

33:41from your account?" From my account, how are you connecting your account? Just give the login details on chatbt. Yeah, there's on agent mode. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Damn, bro. I'm behind. That's insane. And I just give it the detail. And sure, there's I'm sure there's some like data like, "Oh my god, I'm going to lose my

33:56account." Whatever. You got to take the risks the edge, but like Okay. Sure. Like I like I would just spin up another account, but this is like way easier. And so you can open like five different or even like a hundred different like tabs of like Twitter with your account in it and you can put all your different competitors in it and be like your job is to search this key term, go to the inbox and DM yo what's up or whatever your form of c like yo what's up crushes for us because we've got so many mutuals in our ICP that like they'll reply to a yo what's

34:25up more often than not. I think we get like a 80% reply rate on that for our ICP and that's it. And then now you've done all the cold outbound for you, right? And that's literally takes like like a couple minutes to set up. Interesting, bro. Any any other cool AI use cases or tools? Those are those are sick the game. other than like making job descriptions really quickly or or like meaning like managerial test or like um or for example like doing cold outbound for emails and like scripting like you can put like some of us is like for us for example like we use Wapalizer which is like a technology

35:04build stack plugin which I think it uses built with underneath and it'll go to a website and it'll be like okay this platform uses Stripe or this platform uses X course platform or Y we'll we'll you'll put the agent to use Walizer and identify what the tech stack is for that website and then we'll put that into like a cold outbound campaign. then they'll draft an email again and then you can then give like AI your API credentials for Apollo or like um you could just log it into Apollo I think I don't think they have Cloudflare um but we use the API for it and then it's like

35:37okay all I need to do is paste the website in which you can scrape and then it will auto make the agent will auto go and see what the text stack is and what funnel they have or they're building it. So maybe it's like a sales team or like a VSSL or or like a video sales letter or like a challenge funnel or a webinar and then they'll take those factors in and make the cold email and they'll find the emails associated with that website through the Apollo API. So now all you can need and it just sends it for you and then you can use superhuman which

36:05you can just see like oh they opened the email or not right and that's like a really easy way you can just like quickly spin it up. Yeah. I didn't know superhuman was doxing my email opens but that's so smart bro. Yeah. So you're saying like if you like if anyone offered a service, let's say they do web flow development, they could use this tool to figure out if it was built with web flow, automatically find their email through Apollo and then automatically send out

36:25the email automat. Exactly. Right. Yeah. See if they opened it. Yeah. And so for us it's like or they reply and for for what we're trying to do is we're like we're looking for CEO, head of sales, CRO, marketing. You just put the job titles in and say go crawl this. Like it's I think there's like a general perception of like AI is too complicated or I need to code or do this and it's just like dude just sit in sit on chat GBT for like five minutes and like put some brain power behind it and like I don't know how to code. It does

36:55like 95% of the things I needed to. Yeah, for sure. Okay. Crazy, bro. First, I didn't know that and that was like very insightful and honestly one of the simplest ways to actually be using AI agents. I think agents are getting real, right? like agents are like actually here 100%. I'm sleeping on it, bro. Okay, so I'm curious because we sell primarily payments as like a company now at [ __ ] and at the start it was borderline just like a Stripe rapper like no real key difference at all, but now it's evolved into so much and you've really

37:26spearheaded like the Evolve. I don't know if you knew much about payments when you were 19. Nothing. But now you're like probably the biggest expert on payments I've ever met and you've evolved the product so heavily. Yeah. So, I'm curious though just like how a when you were starting out, how were you able to pitch people on w payments over

37:42whatever competitor? Yeah. And then how you just what evolved it made because now it's getting pretty like we have a very competitive product. That's kind of what it's evolved into. Yeah. So I think for us I would say the number one thing is building around somebody like pick a singular human being ideally someone smaller in your ICP or in a peer group you care about and just build a product around them like whether you pay them $100 an hour or $1,000 or or you you've established some sort of value to them that's not financial to build around them just do that. And like for us, like

38:20even today, we're trying to we're we're like, "Oh my god." Like we've had moments where we've gotten away from our customer and we're like assumed everything they've wanted and completely missed the mark. Like we've done that countless times and and I'm sure we'll continue to do that. But like for us, it's more like if if I would say my advice is for anything anyone and when we're starting off, it's like pick a customer and build around them. It's exactly what you did for content rewards where you found like a small group of people that care about a certain product and you just ask them what do you want

38:50or or what do you care about or what is valuable to you and you hyperfocus on that individual. I'm like calling them three times a day. I would check up on them regularly. I'd be like is this actually important or valuable to you? That's what we did in the beginning. And so yes, it was a Stripe rapper but we would hyperfocus on hey we we focus on specific peer groups. So we first focused on trading and we focused on reselling and people selling Discord with Stripe. And so we hyperfocused on what those customers wanted. And what we realized is yeah, all these people are using Stripe, but they can't

39:23automatically fulfill a Discord role or add someone in automatically. And so that was the tiny little edge we found in that market. We're like, oh, this is what they find valuable. And then we hyper obsessed about it. So it was like, okay, you can process payments. You can now order auto fulfill a Discord role. now they want affiliates. So now we build in affiliates and then it's like now they want they get a dispute. How do you handle that dispute? And so for us it was really just like an an and I think it goes for all businesses. It's just an iterative process around like you're my customer. I really care about

39:54you. What is actually valuable for your business and not assuming what they need. Interesting. So that's kind of how the like you saw people were paying for Discord servers just through Stripe but then they had to manually add the role. Let's add a little UI front end where you could purchase the RO automatically get assigned when the payment goes through and then remove it when the payment stops. Super simple, but it gave you a lot for act this like tiny little market. Yeah. And you built out affiliates and you built on offerings from that. And so I can imagine once you probably you guys infiltrated the high

40:23ticket space probably like a year and a half ago, Stripe was kind of like kind of like an underserved area for them. There's a lot of payments. There's a lot of money at hand. So they were very upset. But then you probably got the idea is that where you got the idea for financing? Like how did that all come about? I think it's yeah, it's the same thing. It's just like asking a customer base like what do you actually need and what do you care about and and deeply understanding what they want? And and I think like it sounds like a copout, but it's simple as

40:45just like ask calling a creator and being like, "How's our platform servicing you today? What do you need or what are you noticing that's important?" And like for us today, what we're what we have kind of evolved into and like with iterative conversations is we've realized that like businesses really care about accepting money and paying out money and how can we do that most effectively and and that's and and and realizing that okay businesses at this current stage don't really care about the bells and whistles of like maybe I don't know like we've we've tried rolling out like a leads feature or like a tracking links

41:21feature And they it didn't it didn't really like crush for them. Some of it sure some people care because we just got a lot of users. But like when you really boil it down is people care about accepting money and they care about paying money. Okay cool. What do they care about in that? They care about rates. They care about the most

41:35efficient way of accepting those funds. They care about failed payments. They care about u which is payment acceptance. They care about um what are the different options people can pay. They care about the fees. So, it's like all of those things they care about and like how can we be number one in that I think is what it's evolved into. But for us, it's like we're we're in payments now because you can't run a business if you can't accept a customer and collect the money. Once we've nailed that, which we're getting really close to doing, then it's like, okay, you can accept your money. We're the best place to do

42:06that. We're the best place to pay out. What are you actually fulfilling? Right? And that's the next step. And then it's like, okay, now you're fulfilling this. How do we get that in front of way more people? which is distribution, right? Interesting. So, and the only way you learned this was by doing sales calls, pitching something that people were not interested in, taking that pain of them just being like, "Fuck off, and then realizing, okay, people don't care about the affiliates that much or the tracking stuff." But when I mentioned this thing, I heard on a call, they

42:31mentioned they had financing over here. What's that? Let's look into it. And you just really like perfected this like crap, this offer. The greatest like the I've had so many people shut me down like so aggressively. And one of my all-time favorite lines that's worked is you'll be like doing a 100k a month and you'll think you're God's given gift. You'll you and I'm like I'm like on the back end I'm like brother like we have

42:54businesses doing $10 million per month. You're not him. Right. I love asking like okay Brett you're doing $100,000 a month right now or whatever amount of money. Why aren't you doing $3 million per month? Mhm. And I'm going to be clueless. And you're going to be like, and you'll be like, well, like, and you drill into that and and like it's funny, like a sale, like a sales call or like a product feedback call, an interview, or even a date with a romantic partner really comes down to just asking questions and double

43:22clicking in into it and and that's it. You're you've almost been on so many calls that you're like treating like a consulting call. Yeah. I'm just going to teach you how to do it. That's it. Where it's like like like I always like to say this analogy. like being on a date with a girl where it's like, okay, if I speak at you the entire time, you're going to come away and say, "You're the most heinous, egotistical man I've ever been on a date with." But if I just ask you questions and I continue asking more questions and let you speak and then double click and have

43:46genuine curiosity into it, you're going to be like, "Oh my god, he is so good at listening to me. He's the best person I ever met." And I probably didn't speak at all like any of my opinions. And so I would almost treat it as like for whenever I'm teaching like a sales rep or even just in general in life how I operate now is I I use a principle of never guess where like I could assume like like let's talk if you talk about fees like I could say like oh you're paying 12% processing fees right now on Patreon that sucks. We can get you at

44:153%. Or I could be like Brett what how much are you paying right now for in fees? And you'll be like oh I'm paying 12%. And then I'll be like, "Oh, have you ever thought about getting that cheaper or if we could get that at 2%, would you care?" And then you might say, "No." And then then I might be like,

44:28"Okay, what do you care about?" Right? So I think and it's it's more just like and even with interviews like I could come up with like a whole list of interviews and like what was a moment where you felt like you were adaptive or like those cliche interviews or I could just ask you like tell me about yourself for 5 minutes and then drill you aggressively on that because what you'll find is like one I learn more detailed information about you two in an interview context like most people can't go three layers deep on anything and you can tell if they're you know full of it

44:58or not. And then for product feedback like you actually you just ask why why why why and you get into actually the key crux of the issue. If you said if I was to you like what's your biggest issue with what you you would be like oh it's payments. Okay. What am I going to

45:12do with that? Yeah. Okay. So I think it's like your ability to triple click into things is like probably the most important thing and that's how I guess I do all of that. That's so interesting, bro. But really digging into the actual like reason that they're having problems with payments because usually the problem that they think they're having is not the real

45:27problem. No. Like like I like Cameron loves this analogy and I'll steal it from him. It's like if Henry Ford was like if if Henry Ford listened to customer feedback, he would have a faster horse, not a car. Exactly. Right. And so I don't know. That's a good No, that's a perfect way to think about it because people don't know what they don't know. And like I'm clueless with payments. So I'm curious because I I'm probably I'm like I probably understand payments way too little for the fact that I work here. So like that's a problem. I'm very curious like when you were starting like we're

45:54ramping up like growing the fastest we've ever grown. Shout out to you. So, you've been here for three and a half years though and the compound growth is like absurd. Like this is like the most we're like hitting like escape velocity thanks to the sales team. So, it's like what is different about the offer right now that's like leading to like such exponential growth because now you have a huge team and so like what has like if you could just explain the evolution of like the payments product and how you pitched it

46:16that'd be very interesting for me. Yeah. So, originally we're like a Stripe Connect product. So, we we were pretty much wrapping Stripe as as a product. Um, now we have our own like KYC, we have our own payin. So, for example, if a payment um, you know, will fail on Stripe, we'll actually route that under the hood to a different processor so that the customer doesn't notice and you get more payments acceptance. And then we have our own payout system. So, we'll pay you we can pay you out in Bitcoin or or Venmo, whatever that is. I think our the real differentiator is really just like can you collect payments? So

46:51like we've rolled out financing options where now like maybe like a traditional like education like almost 90% of traditional education is built on student loans. If you want to for example sell a course or you sell a product, you can now apply to be able to do like a soft credit pull or or like a hard credit or new lines of credit to be able to buy products. That's one. I think the other side is like rates. So for us, we want to try and be cheaper than than anywhere else. And I think especially on sales, we can move a lot of levers compared to like sticker

47:18price. Um, and then three, like can you like like I could argue with all day of fees, but if I can tell you like you get 10% of more of your payments to go through if you were in on your existing on us compared to your existing setup, that's a huge amount of value. So I think it's iterated from that. I would say like what's funny about in general like payments is it's never actually Stripe that's the issue. I actually love Stripe. Like it's funny like we people

47:44are always like WOP's built on Stripe. Like this sucks. like Stripe's the enemy where it's like actually no it's Visa, Mastercard and MX that are often times the the problems the card networks and I think Stripe gets a lot of heat for that and I and I think like from from our end it's it's it's communicating that is often times where the disconnect the disconnect comes I I would say but I don't know it's funny like we I get a lot of kicks out of whenever someone's like oh [ __ ] you know held my money or something I'm like dude you have a 7% dispute rate if you

48:16withdraw all your cash from our platform and then you got another dispute for let's say $5,000, WAP would lose $5,000. And so it's like there's sometimes a disconnect there. It's just like how it is. But it's very interesting cuz like these like big payment processors like obviously they're like very quality what they do, but like we're kind of like stacking them to make sure that people like internet entrepreneurs, whether you sell a software or a course or whatever, if you sell online, you have a global audience and there's different ones that are accepted in different countries for like legal reasons or whatever. Like not even like a technical thing, just like

48:45literally jurisdictions. And so we've just been able to stack all of them, but then from the front end for the user experience, it only feels like one seamless experience. One checkout, multiple processors under the hood. And so like previously, if you were if I was going to sell a course on my channel and I had people in Brazil watching me, they wouldn't be able to buy my product just straight up. But W has basically enabled that for all software. And yeah, the payment game is really interesting. Like if you look at NAND today, they're using Paddle as how they're processing transactions. And and the reason why they use Paddle is

49:11because Paddle has registered itself as an entity in multiple different countries to collect tax and remit tax. And so like from a sales lens like we come we can come to Paddle and this is why Never Guest is so important and we can drill in and be like actually it's not rates, it's not the payment options, it's actually tax remittance that you really care about. And so when you get into the payments game, it's really just like it becomes so important to like ask what the actual issues are because like for us like a value proposition that people don't realize is we have an entity in Europe and we can acquire

49:46accept customers in Europe and we only make we can make you pay as low as 1.5%. Because the actual domestic card rate of Europe is 1.5%. M versus if someone doesn't have an EU entity, you not only have to pay 2.9% which is sticker rate for accepting a US domestic transaction, you also pay a 1% international fee. So now the value proposition is okay, am I going to pay 3.9% as a US company to accept an EU customer or can I pay 1.5? And if you're doing volume, that becomes a huge value

50:16prop. Yeah. Yeah. It's like huge businesses are starting to use [ __ ] software enterprise software companies. It's very It was so surprising. I never expected this. Like I thought it was like a little creative platform, but now it's like we're at the size now where it's like we our biggest business does like $10 million per month now pretty consistently. They're they're like a a bigger SAS. I I would argue and and we're from a sales side now I'm trying to think through okay I've got all these reps. How do I expand business models not just from coaching to now like any way people make money? And so like I

50:47think we as a company WP is often seen as like either like a content rewards platform, a course platform or doing too much at once. But what what we we really are is we're a business model platform where it's like, okay, content rewards is the most popular business model. We're going to go after that. Coaching is a really popular business model. We're going to do that. And now that we have really good payments, now we can go into other business models like a SAS or like brick and mortar even where you know tradition or even e-commerce where like Shopify's value proposition is like they have checkout

51:22links that are really high converting. That's what they have. They have checkout pages that are really high converting and they have really good like building a product's really easy and like I some would say it's hard but I let's give them the benefit of the doubt. It's easy. It's straightforward. And then they have fraud. So anti- payments fraud so they don't lose a lot of money and they have anti-eller fraud and they have a bunch of third-party apps that they fulfill. So when you boil it down it's like okay Shopify has really low rates and a couple bells and whistles but like

51:53nothing I would say revolutionary. They've just gotten to like the size of a platform where they can say like it's 2.4% processing rates and $999. And so now that we've got our payment stuff in order and you know we're able to go super competitive on that, we're now thinking, okay, and I think it's making our product a lot clearer and our offering a lot clearer is like, okay, we can service any business model now with our

52:17payments. Let's go do it. And and and and then you have the the obviously the app stuff which you're really huge on is now that we have payments, we don't even need to think about that. Now it's focusing on how can anyone do like um I would say like the engagement layer of things like what products did people want to sell on the internet what's trendy and then hopefully the marketplace is more just like an index of what online business models like working trending or

52:39like in fashion right now. Yeah. I think it's the coolest product in the world bro. Yeah. I don't know. It's interesting. It's like we're almost like open sourcing the key fundamental ingredient. Like to make a cake you need like flour, eggs, baking soda, sugar. Like you need payment processing, tax remittance, a dashboard, affiliates. Like those are the key core ingredients. And you could decorate your cake in like red. I could decorate my cake in pink. And that's kind of what we're trying to do for business models. And I think from the outside, it doesn't make sense yet. But if you think about content rewards, all you're really doing is you're accepting

53:20payments and you're paying out people and you have engagement associated with that and that's and you have distribution and that's like your ingredients of the cake. And so now it's like, okay, that could be a content rewards or it could be a coaching offer or it could be like merch or it could be a prop firm or it could be a funded sports betting challenge is now a huge thing where sports betterers are saying, I don't want to do a paid community anymore. I want to make the prop firm for sports or now the new thing is like a lovable no code SAS. And so we're

53:54trying to race really aggressively to make sure that us as a platform, which we haven't really seen too many people do, have all of those elements to make the ultimate cake, which is how you make money online. Really, we're just getting like the skeleton like the chat, the form if you communicate with your customers. So, it's

54:09pretty cool, bro. Yeah. Not there yet, but we're on our way. I think it's the the platform of all internet business. Yeah. Or just use payments because you'll be able to finance your coaching offer just like the colleges do. Level the playing field for the coaching people. For sure. All right. Well, my dude, I think this is probably moving forward the first podcast I will be sending to anyone getting into software and sales in general. This is probably the I would safely say one of the most valuable podcasts I've ever shot. So, thank you for coming on here. There's no one else I'd rather be in war with. You're an

54:38exceptional human. You've absolutely built an amazing empire and it's really just started. So, very excited to continue doing this with you. What is your name? Where can people find you? Let's close things out. Yeah, I'm Hunter Dickinson. Um, you can find me as Grunkwiz on Twitter or or Grunkwiz on Instagram. And uh, thank you

54:54for having me. Of course, bro.