I just had Kendall Hines back on the show. He runs Clicky, and it had been almost a year since our last talk. He pointed that out himself. In software, you put your head down and a year goes by.
A lot changed in that year, and here's what stuck with me after we hung up.
This one floored me. Kendall and his team rebuilt a competitor’s whole product in two months, and they used AI coding tools to do it.
As Kendall put it, “we were able to recreate this other product in about two months identical functionality.” Same features, same look. They fed the AI screenshots and let it work.
The new product is called Bravo, and it came from one customer’s pain. His buddy Travis at Nice Pest kept hearing the same complaint. His customers were getting eight text messages after every treatment. One for the review, one for the tip, one for the referral, on and on.
That’s a mess, because people think it’s spam and stop clicking. So Kendall built one tool to handle all of it.
The speed is the wild part. Kendall said it best: “we’re moving at the speed of thought and that has never been possible up until AI.” A customer asks for something in plain words, they feed it to the AI, and the feature ships the next day. No road map, no six-month wait.
AI phone agents are the easy place to start
If you want to dip your toe in, start here. Kendall is seeing a lot of companies pick up AI phone agents. He tried one last year, and it still has bugs, but it's getting better fast.
His warning is the part I'd write down. "If you don't implement it you're just going to get passed up by the next person who is," he told me. You don't have to be perfect, you just have to start.
His bold claim: every company builds its own CRM
This is where Kendall went big, because he thinks we're heading somewhere strange.
"I think there's going to be a world where every brand and service providers is going to have their own version of their CRM," he said. He gives it maybe a 10% chance, but picture it for a second. A little tool watches you work in Field Routes and learns how you run things. Then it rebuilds that whole system, just for you. You talk to it like a person, so when the routing drops you on the wrong side of the street, you just tell it to fix that. A week later, it's fixed.
Most CRM owners don't love their CRM, because every shop runs a little different. So a tool built just for you would be huge.
You don't have to wait for that, though. Kendall's hot take is simpler. Pull your sales and marketing away from your billing system. Don't wait for Field Routes to build AI, and hook your own AI tools up to the front end now.
Own your own payment processing
Here's a money lesson I keep thinking about. When you sell your business, your payment revenue is worth a lot.
Kendall painted the picture for me. Say you build your own system and call it Badger Pay, and all your card processing runs through it. Then a buyer comes in, and that revenue gets a huge multiple. He said it could be a 20x on all that money. Right now, some other company keeps that value, not you.
The front end is easy to copy. The back end is the moat.
People love to say any software can be cloned now, and yeah, the look can be. I could snap a photo of a tool and ask AI to rebuild the screens.
But Kendall pumped the brakes here, because the hard part is the back end. How do you text 20,000 people and not get blocked by the phone carriers? How do you land 200,000 emails in the inbox? At Clicky's size, that's 200,000 reminders going out for all kinds of brands. That stuff is messy and hard, and that's the real moat.
What's actually working in Clicky right now
Let's get practical. Clicky is the referral system for your whole business, not just customer referrals. You've got employee programs and realtor programs too. You can pay an employee $100 for a closed referral and a customer $50, your call.
The numbers are climbing. They're at 200 companies now, adding 20 to 30 a month. Cash outs went from about 50 a month to 500 a month. When someone cashes out to Venmo, it hits in five minutes.
My favorite story was Mosquito Joe. Kendall flashed a QR code at their spring kickoff, and in 30 minutes he had 30 technicians signed up and trained. That's 30 new promoters out in the field.
The pitch to those techs is dead simple. Your company spends hundreds of thousands on Google and Facebook ads, and they'd rather pay that to you, so share your link.
Then there's Bravo, which handles Google reviews, NPS scores, tip-a-tech, and homeowner tipping. Kendall thought homeowner tipping was the dumbest idea ever, but he turned it on for Travis anyway. One tech named Jared made an extra $430 in tips in two months. That can be life-changing money for a tech.
When it breaks, own all of it
Kendall was honest about a bad day, and I respect that. They pushed a new texting feature and it got stuck in a loop. A new customer's people got hit with the same text over and over, and they got charged 10x for every message that went out. Thank God it was a shop with about 800 customers, not 20,000.
He didn't hide. He called the customer and refunded them, no questions, and the customer stayed. As Kendall said, "everything stops with me." That's the right way to run it.
It reminded me of my own dumbest job ever. Way back, I sold a big reseeding job on a 30-acre golf course estate. We did a kill-off and reseed in July, and if you know lawns, you know you never seed in that heat. It barely grew back, and the whole property looked like leopard spots. I was 24. I made it right, but man, what a mess.
The lesson is the same in both stories. Take the hit and fix it head on. Like Grant Cardone says, your income is tied to the level of problems you can handle.
Why staying small is its own edge
One last thing I loved. Clicky is bootstrapped and cash flow positive. People email Kendall about money all the time, but he doesn't need it.
"We don't answer to VCs, we don't answer to investors, we just answer to our customers, and that's like a great spot to be," he said. If he ever does raise, he wants it to come from the customers who use the tool, so the people who built the value get to share in it.
That's the whole vision, really. His North Star is a product you don't even think about, one that just works in the background. Build that, and you've got something special.
Thanks for coming back on, Kendall. Go check out Clicky.
