Kendall Hines Rebuilt a Competitor’s Product in 2 Months With AI
Table of Contents
- AI blew up how fast you can build software
- AI phone agents are the easy place to start
- His bold claim: every company builds its own CRM
- Own your own payment processing
- The front end is easy to copy. The back end is the moat.
- What’s actually working in Clicki right now
- When it breaks, own all of it
- Why staying small is its own edge
I just had Kendall Hines back on the show. He runs Clicki, 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. (On another episode, Kendall explained why API keys should be free and what to check before you sign a CRM contract.)
AI blew up how fast you can build software
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 FieldRoutes 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 FieldRoutes 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 Clicki’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 Clicki right now
Let’s get practical. Clicki 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. Clicki 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 Clicki.
Full transcript
Every word of the episode, from the video captions
Live again. It feels good to be back in the saddle. So I was gone for a couple weeks and I got behind on the podcast a little bit. But we're cranking ready to go again. But I don't think Kendall needs an A welcome, but I'll welcome him anyway. Got Kendall Hines with Clicki here?
I call, I text Kendall like, I don't know, two days ago, three, whatever it was. I'm like, Dude, like every single day, I'm answering the same question, Hey Jonas, how do you like Clicki like, Dude?
It's the best thing ever. You have to get it, but I was like, We just need to do a podcast, give you updates. We just looked. It's spent almost a year to the date since you've been on. So, Kendall, welcome back to the show, Buddy, how you doing. Yeah, no, it's good to be back, it's crazy, you know, in software land, when you're working on things, you put your head down. Next thing you look up and you're like, Wow, it's been, I guess, over a year since we last chatted, but.
Yeah, good to be back. And I'm trying to get like, Jonas, Man, I see you just traveling all over the country and doing big things. It's amazing. Yeah, I was gone for five days for Maisy's wrestling, my daughter's wrestling. We had state finals down there, so we're gone to Detroit.
And then I was home for a day, and then I got home on a Sunday and left Monday morning to O. Arizona was gone there five days for leadership retreat. So it was all good, went over a lot of good stuff there.
Set goals and introduce new software marketing strategies that were running things like that. Obviously new cying stuff and then we had a little bit of fun, we went to Sedona. I don't know if you ever there, it's like one of. The coolest places ever. If you've never been to. Sedona Yeah, I haven't, I haven't been to Sedona yet. No, I'll have to put that on the list. I'm look, I'm looking for places, so it's incredible.
We had a lot of fun, so yeah, I was gone for five days there and then back. And then. Next thing you know, we had four offices opening in two days, so it's just been a whirlwind, so good stuff, good stuff.
I saw the badger, I saw the badger in my neighborhood the other day like that time of year. Yeah, no, that's good. I. I was like, Slow down, sir, I'm just kidding he was going to kill some bugs. So yeah, it.
It's crazy that we're down there and it's fun. It's going good down there too. It's a It's a tough market, there's no doubt there's a lot, it's saturated, but it's a great is that that's Arizona, right?
It is. Yeah, it's like two hours. Away from Phoenix, you know what pest control companies in Arizona are like lawn care companies in Georgia?
It's like, it's insane. Last, I heard there's a thousand licensed pest control companies in Arizona. Yeah, it's like your water, right?
You move into a new house, you got to turn on the water, electricity and pest control. So, but it was also late February, early March, whenever we were there. And it's beautiful. It's like 70, 80 degrees like it's not Michigan anymore.
Yeah, has all the snow gone by you? Yeah, it's starting to, you know?
The lawns are still a little bit dormant, they're waking up for the year, but it's still cold, it's like, it's like this. Every year, you know, it starts to get a little sunny and you start getting excited.
And then it's like Boom 25 degrees in a snowstorm. Yep, ex, so we get that into April May. Has grass doctor started yet?
No, yeah, no, they haven't. I think they wait till about April, like first week of April to start their services so. Yeah, they're getting ready, though hiring technicians and getting all that going, they're putting their heads down and hoping for a big year, so that's cool. Yeah, like going back to the Sedona thing of it's like it's almost like it's hard to explain.
It's obviously it's way different than Michigan, obviously. But like there's no grass anywhere, it's just all rock and dirt. And then the hills and mountains are just next level. Like, I've never seen anything like it. Yeah, that was. That was bizarre, being there, being a Michigan boy where you're just surrounded by like evergreen trees all the time and you're out there. In this, like vast openness, it's like a whole new world like for real. That's what I felt like Colorado was like that for me, too.
Denver was like for PestWorld this past year and they I was like, What is going on?
I've never seen so much traffic in a such deserted area in Denver. It was wild, like, Who planned this city?
We need to figure this out like, Let's go for sure. So how's Clicki going?
I know it's going good, but like, How's how's everything going? It's we're super blessed and We have 200 companies now that use the software or like they're in process to use. I say that because we're adding about 20 to 30 logos a month right now in all different verticals and industry. So you think lawn care, pest control, home cleaning, HVAC, plumbing, epoxy floor coating businesses, TR traditional brick, brick and mortars like my wife's business. Mshal Ash Yeah, so we've definitely found product market fit in the sense of just this we've hit. We've hit accord with people that they want, what we're building. I think it was just something that it was a blue ocean like no one was doing it needed to be done. Everyone is looking for it. Yeah, there is some competition now with some, you know, VC back entrance, which has been interesting, nothing that we really run up against.
I think I think the really differentiator is I've actually owned a company like I've actually had to run payroll and go find technicians. And then like. Spend our own dollars on running Google ads and Facebook ads. And it's not just some Utah Tech company going out building software for people that they've they've never had, they've never had to walk in their shoes. So I think that's really our competitive advantage is when I've actually, you know, I haven't built a business as big as Jonas, but I've actually owned a franchise location and ran a lawn care company and had to grow it from 90 accounts to 2,000 accounts. I think there's, you learn a lot doing that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, it's been, it's been a blessing, but also I've never worked harder in my life.
Every day I wake up and think, How can we do it better? How can we get companies more, refer how can we leverage AI and have the AI like?
Reach out to these people and get like referrals in plain language, from people like using agents, or like some sort of texting U method. Or, you know, there's just, there's so much to do. We've come so far, but there's still so much to do, and we're just listening to our customers, their feedback and building what they want.
A good example is our buddy Travis Bottoms at Nice? Yeah, he's awesome. I just talking today, Oh, you did, Yeah, he's he just did this. I think he did like a speaking engagement, one of his first ones recently, and he's at the bug. Bucks Conference. Yeah, the bug, yep, Bug Bux. And he was using, you know, we were on demos with companies and they always bring up this other company.
And, yeah, we use this company for X. And it just cut. Kept coming up, kept coming up, and then Travis came to me, is like, Hey, we don't want to use this company anymore. We want one unified customer experience for our, our customer referrals, our homeowner tipping our Google Review like our Tip, a tech program, and then our NPS surveys. We want one unified experience because if you think about companies, they want like four or five things after every treatment.
And, well, what do you do if they've already left? You a Google review well, you probably want to start pushing for referrals now, right?
So that led to us creating this new product, Bravo, and we had no intention to go build it like I did not want to go down this path. And frankly, if it was four years ago, pre AI, we wouldn't have gone down the path.
But there's a lot of AI coding tools out now, and we were able to recreate this other product in about two months. Identical functionality, but with the added functionality of it's deeply integrated into the Clicki referral system. So now, like in Travis's case, he can turn on at different times in the year. Well, I'm really pushing referrals. Or maybe I'm really pushing Google reviews, or I'm really trying to push Google reviews to this new satellite location office.
And what we've really discovered is, Now you're avoiding this problem. And it's that if I'm using, like, Podium and all the FieldRoutes and HighLevel. I've got eight different people texting my customers after the treatment for, like, eight different things. And we think there's there should just be a really unified, beautiful post service experience, and that's something we're really digging into now of solving.
And so we see Clicki is kind of our external product of where customers are using it. And Bravo is like the internal product of, like, what technicians and employees use. So that's where we're at today. And we used AI to build it in about two months. Like I said, and it's freaking insane, because I'm giving it to Travis and a couple of our other kind of early customers. And I haven't even showed it to you yet because I wanted it to be, I mean, for you. It needs to be like on point, needs to be robust because it's multilocation.
We're just not there yet, but we will be soon and. So we're taking feedback from clients in plain language. And they're like, Hey, I want to do XX and X. We're giving it to the AI, and then that feature is launched like the next day. There's no cycle times, there's no waiting on like road maps and things like that. It's like we're moving at the speed of thought. And that has never been possible up until AI. So I can't sleep at night. Because it's like anything that we can think of now is now possible and we have the best team to do it now.
Like Eric, our CTO, he's using Cursor and some of these other, their AI powered IDs to actually write code. And we're we're moving so fast. It's insane, so it's like you're only limited by your imagination and your creativity now. And it wasn't like this even a year ago. When we talked, I remember like, it was like, We're just like, Oh, trying to figure out this referral like it's, so there's this huge.
Opportunity to be the one brand that customers trust, you know, service businesses trust to handle all of those different things in their business and do it in a really beautiful way. Where their customer isn't receiving eight text messages from different vendors after every treatment because it's overwhelming and honestly, it reduces click-through rate. Because they inevitably they think it's spam, or they think you're spamming them or selling their data or something.
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Yeah, of course everyone uses it. It's kind of like a buzz word now, but it's definitely changing the game for us, for you, for for all of us. But where do you see, where do you see it being used and leveraged the most inside other companies service based companies?
And then where do you foresee it going? Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of people start to get their feet wet with AI phone agents. It's something we considered, but I think it's the people who are best position for. That is like your open phones, your HighLevels where they're already the.
Or, you know, Pipedrive, or whoever, whoever your CRM is, or whoever your phone system is. They're the ones that are best positioned to put their hat into the ring on like an AI phone agent. We implemented one last year and it was good know. Still, need some bugs that need to be worked?
Get a little better, but it's constantly improving, getting better. It's early, yeah, like we're early early days. So I think, but if you don't implement it, you're just going to get passed up by the next person who is. So we're just always trying to early adopt some strategies and just see how they do. You know what I mean, yeah, or like, passed up Slash like, I think the economics are changing. You know, we were thinking about hiring another developer, and now we're like, Probably not, let's just go use these AI tools instead, how can so my?
My new goal is, how big can we make the company without hiring headcount, right?
It just reduces overhead, right, yeah, 100%, or even just like if the AI services, the customer 80% is good and they're still going to be a customer. Well, it's so much more low stress than onboarding a new human, bringing him through onboarding, trying to get them trained on the software.
So that's like the early wins that we've seen people do is like the AI phone agents, and it's there's so much money in the space right now. There's tons of companies that do it. I know Voice for Turf does it same day AI is one of them. And slash. You have these software companies popping up where you can cut out the companies like that, and you just go direct to the model providers. So when we get to that point, where you don't need a thirdparty software company to help implement this stuff?
And you can just, you know, go to retail and build your own agent because it's that easy. I don't know, we're, we're in really exciting times. I mean, you, this is your world, what do you see happening in the next five years?
I mean, it's learning every day. So what do you think this be like in five years?
Yeah, like my big, bold claim is like, I think, or my big hot take, I guess on the market is like up until now. If you look at the history of like SaaS software FieldRoutes, Real Green PestPac and name it, ServiceTitan.
You have these years and years and years and years of learnings built into the software, all of this cost, it takes months to do anything. The road map is so far away. I think there's going to be a day where you have like this Chrome extension and it's watching you in. We'll call it FieldRoutes as we'll use them as an example. It's watching you in FieldRoutes. It's monitoring the API calls that's going in and out of the software, it's doing all this stuff.
And this Chrome extension can essentially rebuild all the functionality of FieldRoutes in your own personal software. CRM. And this is like a very bold claim, and it's has like a 10% likelihood of happening. But I'm like, If you could just wave a magic wand and every business could have their own version of FieldRoutes.
And it got better over time. As you give it feedback, you just talk to it like, Hey, we want your routing sucked last time. Can you like fix the routing this time?
So the properties are always on the right and it goes and refactors the code, and so it does it. This is like way out there, but my big, bold claim would be something like that to where we kind of all have.
Our own we, as in service businesses, all have our own personal CRM, and if you talk to any CRM buyer, they're all. They all don't like their CRM. And that's because every business runs their business a little bit differently from a scheduling routing, invoicing perspective.
So I think that's like a big, bold claim that has a low likelihood of happening. But if it did happen, it could be really disruptive of. I mean, if you look at ServiceTitan, they just went public. They told this story to the market that, like they use our software, you know, we're the market leader and the industry leader. Well, what more disruptive things have happened in the world, like if you look at Uber and Airbnb and all these things. So I think ever I'm on X, that's where I find all my breaking AI information.
Is there anyone that you follow closely on there? Just any if you follow like Elon, obviously be one the only person I follow. Yeah, I, you almost have to right?
Like stuff shows up, no matter what but any like. Once you follow a couple of the tech people it recommends you to like other tech people. Trying to think of somebody, it's most of the people I follow are all the nerds. They're like in the weeds. And like playing around with all like, there's this, there's one that just came out called Manus. So I don't know if you heard about the DeepSeek thing that, yeah, did happened a little bit ago. Manus is supposed to be like 10 times bigger than DeepSeek because Manus actually gives in DeepSeek's case. It actually gives it access to like a computer and like an A.
It can actually like Write software so it can write software and different prompts on its own to accomplish these tasks. So you give it a task to be like, Hey, here's every one of my P&Ls from the last 12 years.
Put together a performa and like a go forward analysis with interactive graphs and whatever. And it goes and does its thing for like two hours, then reports back with fully completing your prompt and has like these interactive graphs.
So that's why I'm like, I just can't even sleep, man, because it's like, even when you think you're up on the nose, something else comes out. And it's like with what we do, just can't even sleep, man. Now we have this API.
The newest thing out is called MCPs. That's what every X is talking about right now, is MCPs, which is like, basically, you. For people that use AI coding is you're giving your AI code tools the ability to go interact with third party APIs.
So you think Google Sheets, Google Drive? But actually, in the this is getting kind of down in the weeds. But actually, in the IDE of what you're actually writing code in. So I guess back to my bold claim is like, Yeah, that's my bold claim is, I think that there's going to be a world where every brand and service providers is going to have their own version of their CRM. And I don't know if that's going to be ServiceTitan that's going to deliver it in Real Green.
It could be some new new entrant. I don't know and service Provid that, and I'm like, I don't know. It just sounds like it feels super heavy. Yeah, and like with FieldRoutes. Because they got bought out by ServiceTitan, it just seems like everything's slowed down. It just seems like always happens when it goes public. Just slow his way down. Well, because they're they're not using the AI tools yet to write because they can't, they're.
They there's a lot in the enterprise, there's a lot of restrictiveness around, like when, when I was in the enterprise, they like, literally. You cannot upload our code to the AI. Yet like it is against the law, do not do it. You will be fired when you have these new startups like, I just said, We rebuilt somebody's product in two months.
They this company went now and raised VC dollars to go. Build this tool that we built in two months with AI and has exact feature. Pair integrates with the same softwares, and it looks almost identical on some of the feature set and functionality. And literally, it's just the AI doing its thing, you feed it screenshots, and it rebuilds all the functionality. So with that being said, people could do the same thing to Clicki. Too, like, that's the scary part that we're in now. It's like that could happen to us and it's funny. Because going back 10, five, 10 years ago, we always said that the first one to be replaced is the labor. Guys.
Yeah, no, that's probably the safest spot to be now. It's like the dude's actually doing the work. Or although it'd be cool to have optimus robots out there, like treating the properties. I think I said this in the podcast a couple months ago, but I was on in Florida at Patrick Bet-David conference. And we were at the afterparty. Talking to this guy who works for Ford, I believe he's like in the robot robotic department, he's like, There's robots right now that could actually do it your job for you.
I'm like, He's like, So? The people who are have heavy C capital that will invest early and notice these things like the people who are going to win. So just be ready for it. You know, it's just it's crazy.
100% Yeah, so these next, these next two to three years, from what I'm hearing from everybody, is going to be really interesting. They think AGI is here in the next two years. And if you have AGI, you could tell AGI to go rebuild FieldRoutes for me. So do you think there's going to have to be like a like a national income for everybody?
They said they did the study on that, right. I haven't spent too much time reading into that, but yeah, I read into it a little bit on. And they said there was no discernable like change in habits based on the UBI. Like they didn't. People weren't any happier things like that. They also said that with the AI, you're still going to need humans to a point, so it's just going to create more jobs.
100%, Yeah, you're going to need implementation. People like, if that CRM thing that I mentioned is real, you're going. To need some sort of, I mean, I'm still helping access APIs and hook up HighLevel to their APIs like, We're, we're the pro. My problem is I live 10 years, or, I guess, five years, because I'm like on the bleeding edge of this. All the information coming in and then like, That's the world I live in, but really like.
There's people that don't even know how to hook up APIs yet. So there's people that don't even have CRMs yet that don't have CRMs. Yeah, they're still in for 20 years. As far from for AI aspect, like, What do you use the most?
Are you ChatGPT guy, what do you like, what do you like to play with?
We just messing around. Yeah, I recently I've been 90% of my queries are in Grok. I like the fact that has access to realtime data and whatever's whatever is breaking. And it's not as woke as some of the other ones, so it doesn't shy away from.
Topics and then also like they're in unhinged mode, is just so fun, like, Did you?
Did you listen to Rogan's new podcast with Elon? Yeah, it was hilarious, it was like it was so funny. So like, you pull out unhinged mode at a party, and that's like a good 20 minutes of laughs for everybody. Do you?
Do you have conversations with it yet? We do bedtime stories with my son, so I try to like, All right, let's think of a bedtime story. And, you know, their storyteller mode is really good. It's way better than GPT's voice mode because GPT, I don't know if they're trying to save tokens over there or what, but they would like. The story would always stop a few sentences in right. And like Storyteller Mode on, Grok goes for like five or six minutes, perfect amount of time for him to fall asleep.
And it's like, Hey, you know, tell us this story about Monster Trucks and Axel and Atlas and Kendall, and this adventure we're having, and that's awesome. I never thought about it that way. That's cool. Yeah, so you kind of get to teach them to use their imagination, and that's really.
I think the world that we'll we'll live in is the people that still have imagination and. Creativity. I think that's where, I mean, you still have to have imagination, creativity, to know what to do with all these AI tools, too. So feels like I've constantly having conversations with it, too, like I. I almost feel like it's the CEO of our company at this point. Yeah, which I mean, there's G to be a day where you can have all the inputs that you would receive via your phone or email or whatever. And you could have like a second brain.
I think a lot of people are working on that problem right now with giving you a second brain. But yeah, the tools wise Grok GPT is like my backup up. And then we're using Claude, Anthropic's models for coding, so their new Sonnet 3.7 models like Phenomenally Good and then on Code Gen products.
There's Bolt, there's Replit, there's Lovable. How do you even keep up with other tools?
Just on X, like, literally on X you get you get into these little. Veins of consciousness on X. So me, I'm in like this techn technology vein of consciousness. There's also this home service interesting, like, you know, the whole Codie Sanchez like Buy Main Street Businesses movement. You know, the private equity and stuff getting into it. There's also that vein of consciousness on X of these private equity finance people, buying these home service businesses and talking about doing PE rollups and stuff, too. So I think I think that's fascinating listening to their conversations on there, but really, it's just being on X. And you're talking to the people, mostly programmers who are all on the cutting edge using these tools. And they all post their demos, and they just talk about, they're passionate about same thing as me. Like I'll work on this until 2. A. Just because I love my whole life. I've always had ideas and they've been, they've been.
I haven't been able to do them because I just haven't had EI. Either the knowledge or the technical training. And now I have both of them at my fingertips, so it's like if I get an idea, even like something simple there like a Google Review widget right to display Google reviews on your website.
There's companies out there that charge $20 a month for that little widget. And you could just have AI. Whip up your own and go get your own Google API key. And it's done in 20 minutes, so that's a very small but tangible example of. Or these texting apps that people are using like Podium and Captivated and text, whip and Zipwhip and all these things.
You could rebuild a TE your own texting app and go buy the Twilio API key so you're paying the raw Twilio cost. Instead of some, companies are charging 10 cents of segment. Things like that, so it's just, I think that's the really interesting thing that's going to happen is the cost for business. Owners are going to continue going down because the actual cost to develop these tools are are going down so.
Yeah, that's I guess that's a long-winded answer to say, That's how I stay up on this. It's just on my next. Like, if you look at my, it's actually pretty sad. My screen time is like 90% x on my phone, so that's interesting.
Maybe you should make me an app for door knocking. Do you guys use anything for door knocking now or no?
I mean, just like, get people actually knock the doors, that'd be cool. Oh yeah, yeah, like a robot. I just went knock doors. For us, that'd be cool, like, how do you get the results of door knocking without actually knocking doors?
That is a problem to think about. It's so fast, right? Like the account you put on is so fast and it's instant, it's instant results. You either made a sale. Or you didn't like, How did you do today?
There's no, yeah, it's immediate, it's there. Is that immediate feedback loop, right? That's also the magic of it. There's always g to be this world for, you know, a trained salesperson who can knock on a door and make somebody laugh and get them to agree to a pest control. You know, program, so, right, did you?
Did you ever read the book, The Elon Musk book? I listened to a lot of it, I bought the book, it's in my office at home. I didn't actually read the book yet. I've listened to it, though. Yeah, I just finished it last week. It was pretty incredible, like just the way that Elon thinks is just ridiculous.
Obviously, next level, he's different breed of human, yeah, he's a big. He's a big inspiration to me personally, honestly, like even from building products and thinking from first principles around. He calls it his formula right, like the first step of the formula is, let's make the requirements less dumb.
And then right. And then it's about deleting parts from the process, you know, oftentimes, when we're building products or services. As entrepreneurs, we always want to add a bunch like we want to add and we want to go build things. But oftentimes probably the better answer is what we, what can we remove, what can we delete?
What part of our script is not really driving any value or conversions. So I really appreciate that about him, and I think he's obviously a super special human. And we have two Teslas. And I knew that, yeah, we talked about that in the last podcast.
Yeah, big, big fan. And is somebody who hasn't come from a typical like educational background in engineering and doing a lot of problem. Engineering today around using software as our main tool. Just a big inspiration and a lot.
I think a lot can be learned just from adopting that. Method of thinking about any problem, taking things back to first principles and really questioning the requirements and ultimately deleting he has. A He has a saying is, If you're not, you're not deleting enough if you're not having to add stuff back in.
So where do you see that most home service businesses are missing out on AI tools currently?
Yeah, that's a good question you're probably talking to, though, is obviously geared towards AI or geared towards software at some point. Cuz, they're reaching out to you, right?
Yeah, people are are using AI. I think it's, I think people are limited by the tool, the other tools they use in the business, really. So if they're using like a CRM, that's really not on the front, like, not on their front foot with using AI, they're going. To be limited by the scope of that underlying system, that's how I feel, like I kind of feel like that's where, because we're using fuel droughts and they're not there yet. It's like we're thinking about obviously making the switch. Maybe some new offices stting something new, but it's like it's going to be such a pain to switch like it. I know it's going to be terrible.
Yeah, yeah, that's. The other thing is people are really stuck when you start talking about credit card processing. Oh my God, that's a that's a obviously a big fear. You know, it's like, Is it worth?
Is it worth switching, or is biting the bullet, or is it just hoping that field routs moves the needle a little bit?
You know, yeah, I think, you know me where my stance is on, it is. My hot take from that webinar was, I think that people should start dis. And I think you guys already have. Is dislocating their sales and marketing from their actual invoicing CRM solutions. Because now you can start, you don't have to go. Wait for FieldRoutes to build AI. You can go connect it to whatever tool, so that makes it nice and easy.
But I, that would probably be the biggest. M is like if the underlying from a customers perspective, if everything's vertically integrated and like my one system, does it all. That's obviously easier for some companies because, but then that that's also a big risk, because now they can charge 10 cents. A text message in the economics for that are really, really skewed to what reality is. Because, in theory, that that message should only cost 0.007, and you're paying 10 cents per per segment, so.
I think that's probably thinking about from just a Where does all of our data live?
What tools are we using? And I think that's the biggest, probably the biggest miss. I got a question for you. If you were to own a pest control lawn care service based company, now, what tools would you use?
Yeah, if I had to start from scratch, I would frankly, I'd probably. We'd probably build our own native CRM solution, and it would granted it wouldn't be as good day one, but the vision would be over time of, like, a Tesla integrated experience. Where the service there's an. There's an app that goes along with our brand, and that's directly tied to our CRM system.
And we probably start off with, like HighLevel or something, for the sales and marketing, just to get traction and stuff really quickly. But over time, the goal would be to have a vertically integrated system where we own all the credit card processing as well. So as we grow the business, and have we use your example?
You know, thousands and thousands of customers and millions of dollars of revenue going through the through?
This funnel that somebody else isn't capturing the value in that because it is a massive value, and not only. Are are those companies receiving a little sliver of the processing revenue?
But they're on the on, the on the flip side of it. When they go to flip the business buiness. That revenue is valued at such a high number and such a high multiple. If you have credit card processing revenue built into your business model, so that would be really interesting. If, like, if you could think about, let's just use Pest Badger for an example. If you could get to a point where you were rolling your own. And it was good and it was good enough to run and do all the scheduling and routing. And like, maybe even better than what you guys have today.
And you handled all of your own payment process in and like this PE firm comes in to. Like value like, Yeah, we actually do all of our own payment processing. Call it Badger pay. Like, that'd be insane, right?
To be like, All right, 20x on that, all that revenue right there, that's like, insane, it's definitely crossed our mind to build our own. You know, it hasn't happened yet, but it's like one of those. Next thing we're going to probably pull a trigger on the next five years. Cross your mind. It's going to cross until the day comes where it's like. We can get this built for five grand, and it's as it's as good as it's probably better than what we're using today.
And the limited factor before was, Well, I need to go hire programmers on upwork and I need to know what to have them build. And they're going to build something. And it's gonna be shitty and we can't iterate on it. Well, what if you could just iterate in plain language to this super intelligence?
And you're just like, Hey, your scheduling routing is off? It's dropping me on the wrong side of the street. And this super intelligence goes off for a week, comes back and presents you with its chain. ES And you say, Yeah, that's good. Click approve, and it moves it to the General Code Base and.
Now you have a better platform. But I just think the way that software Buil software is built historically is not how it will be built moving forward. So what does that mean?
There will be a time when you can recreate FieldRoutes in a month for five grand and have your own version of it. And then it's like, Okay, well, what are they going to do to keep you locked in?
If you know, I don't know if people, I think they've started rolling out longer, longer contracts and things like that, but so. But I'm sure there's something in there, too, that you've signed or somebody has signed is like, Hey, we're not going to re replicate your software so you can't like use their software to, like, build your own. So it's we're, we're going. To be in really interesting times, I mean, honestly. So on the out of that, how do you stop them from recreating your software?
You were, you can't, I mean, like you can't stop somebody from taking a picture of your software, you could just take a picture with your iPhone. And like, I could take a picture of Riverside and go give it to the AI and say, Hey, create me a riverside clone.
And it's going to go and spit out a RI Riverside clone. Now, here's where here's where you're going to run into problems today is the backend infrastructure. What we're talking about is like front end UI UX of what we see and use and experience in the software. But the backend infrastructure is where this gets really hairy and is not simple.
How do you text message 20,000 people today? It's really it's really difficult, actually. From infrastructure perspective and not getting filtered by the carriers and all these things, or even getting 20,000 emails to land in an inbox. That's another big, meaty, hairy problem. In our case, there's 200,000 people on Clicki like at scale. How do we deliver 200,000 reminder emails to everybody, for all the different brands that use us and land in the inbox and make sure people it?
So, you know, we all we all get to get, we like to get excited about like, Oh yeah, it's going to totally re be recreated, but I think there's a world where it could be possible. And that's if they get enough energy in the model, keep getting better and they have enough compute power. And it's at a low enough cost where it makes sense to try some of these things.
So I just don't think that it's going to be like it has been the last 10 years. The last 10 years is you have to go through X if you want to have a robust software for my scale. Business and companies are limited at the speed that these providers can ship, which it has to go through a product manager. And then the product manager goes to design. And then the designer goes to the engineer, and then the engineer builds the thing and then ships it to the customer. They're like, No, I actually wanted the button here and I needs to say X, and then it's another six months before that gets implemented.
And by the way, every part of that chain. It's probably like a million dollars in salary right there for every part of that chain for a button change. So I think about that a lot, though. I'm like, constantly thinking, Is this how it's always going to be?
And I just don't think it is. Yeah, I don't, either. It's moving so fast on a daily basis. Here's if I'm Wrong. Here's the part. All these companies ServiceTitan FieldRoutes, their iteration cycles are going to increase and the product is going to get 10 times better. Imagine if they could roll out a feature, call it FieldRoutes AI Whatever?
And there's this little microphone in FieldRoutes, and you tell FieldRoutes exactly how it sucks and all that feel. All that feedback goes from all their customers and this massive intelligence and goes into some sort of like Master Hopper or something. And it goes into the AI. And it's like, Well, what's our top three things?
Clients want boom AI Go into our stack, build that, give us preview. And so that could also be possible, too. But you have to be on the forward, you have to be forward thinking to think like that. You know, and want to try some of these new, aggressive things, which a lot of companies are really risk risk averse right now. Rightfully so, like they can't just upload their whole code base to GPT and say, Go for it because they just. They just spent years and years and millions of dollars building this thing, so they have to protect it, which they should. Well, US. US. Pest control operators need people to like candle their own. So the people that don't know what Clicki is. If they didn't hear the first podcast, why don't you kind of just?
Let us know what Clicki does, what it started out, what it did back then and what it does now. And then. Give some give me some of the things that we can use it for on a daily basis.
Yeah, so, Jonas, I mean, the product's actually grown even since you know you, we first onboarded you know, when we first launched. It was primarily a tool for your customers to refer you, but it. It quickly grew, with companies using it internally for their employee campaigns as well.
So imagine all of your technicians and door knockers and Csrs having their own employee referral program as well. And being able to bonus them out differently than maybe your customer. So what we see people use Clicki for today is we become the referral system in their whole business.
All their customer referrals your trade and channel partner programs, so that's like for pest control customers that's like home inspectors and Realtors and things like that. You could go out and create a Realtor program and go out and find all these Realtors and have these realitors. Create these programs for reals to refer your business, which are really successful for our pest control, and then you could even create employee referral programs as well.
And essentially, just imagine if all those people had a referral link that they could share with friends and family. And they could share it out to Facebook, text their link to friends. And just makes it really easy for these different types of people to refer the business. And then we loop.
Funny enough, we talk about software we actually loop into your software of records. So FieldRoutes, ServiceTitan, Jobber, Real PestPac, all these tools and we keep track of who's signed up and who hasn't. So that we automatically award the referral bonuses to the person that needs to get it. So oftentimes, companies have referral programs today, and at best, it's on a spreadsheet.
It's nightmare and it's a mess to track, and then it's just hard for customers to engage in. So that's where we come in, and we become the referral system for the whole brand. And typically, like I said, most brands start off like you guys kind of just start off with customer referrals. Then, as they're, they're like, Wow, we have 70 employees, we should probably leverage them too.
And, hey, I want to pay my employees $100 if a referral closes versus 50 for my customers. And you can really easily do that. And then we also handle the cash outs, too. So when somebody earns money, they tap a button to cash out and. If it's a Venmo, it shows up in five minutes. If it's a Amazon Gift Card Visa gift card, it's all instant cash out methods for the customers or whoever's, you know, cashing out. And it's kind of crazy, like when we launched, we were doing like, you know, maybe 50 or so. Cash outs a month, and now we're at like 500 cash outs a month. It's insane, it's actually pretty cool to see, even from our end. I'll be honest, like, Oh, this person, is this cash out like that is awesome. Yeah, so we, yeah, we charge your credit card and we move the money over to the customer. And then they get to go spend it. However, they like something we're working on right now.
Which maybe you know again, based on customer feedback is we're obsessed with listening to customers and just building whatever they want to see.
We've had customers that want to maybe give double the bonus if they use the money with the business, so if they download it. So like, instead of cashing out to cash, I could get a badger certificate and get double my money. And use it as a gift certificate towards Pest Badger, which that also opened up a new feature of basically all of our customers today. There's no way to gift services to somebody, so you think about somebody that has everything they could want.
How would I buy them? A gift certificate for Pest Badger today? I don't think there's a way to do that on your website. So we've seen that even pop up as like something that could be addressed, and we could build really quickly. And ship and allow.
You know, we have 200 customers today to allow them to sell their services. You know, from a gift certificate perspective, like if we're going to go build this gift certificate option, Clicki. Our mind goes to, Okay, we've got this thing now.
This company can now provision gift certificates. How how could they sell a bunch of these like so?
And I don't know if people would even do it. I mean, to me, I'm trying to constantly find gifts for people who have everything. And it's we could build this in like, two weeks, I think, and test it and see if people will do it. And but really, that feedback just came from customers who are like, Hey, I want them to use their rewards with us. And we like, Got it, totally get it.
Some people want the cash out rewards where it's cash, and some people want gift certificates, so we're building gift certificates. And so that will be an option soon in the dashboard. But that's kind of Clicki top we. We just become the referral system in the business. And then, like I said, it's kind of grown. And now we have Bravo, which is our second product, which is Google Reviews.
NPS scores your TIPA Tech program and homeowner tipping if you want to offer that to, you know, Foure technicians. And honestly, I hated the homeowner. Tipping thought it was the dumbest idea in the world. I don't do it. But we flipped it live for Travis for his company, and Jared made an extra $430 in the last two months.
Yeah, we murder it on tips, which could be life-changing right for somebody and then. Based on customer feedback, you know, Hydr Pest wanted to start giving out NPS scores every time they got a 10. Give them a dollar into their their account.
But the huge added benefit to this is it's integrated into the referral system. So as the customers are going through the surveys, if they've already left a Google Review now, they're going to be prompted for a referral. And that referral will be tied directly to that customer's account in Clicki, right?
So you see the whole closed-loop aspect of this, so that's been really exciting and to watch grow. And it's like a no-brainer like we're on demos with people for for Clicki, and then they're like, Do you do anything for Google reviews?
We're like, Actually, yeah, check out Bravo. So what do you see some of the best strategies to use?
Clicki, like, What have you? What have you seen? People do that just super awesome. That's worked really well. Yeah, so I mean, the number one thing is. People always like to look for a correlation between number of customers and like the amount of referrals or new customers generated through the platform. And it's definitely help to have people on the front end of like, Hey, they can refer you, but the people that we see.
That do the best. They really Clicki truly becomes the referral system for their whole business. They're do, they're using it for their customer referrals. Like I just talked about. They're launching a Realtor program, and they're going out and soliciting Realtors to become referral partners for them.
They're they're launching an employee program and adding all 70 of their technicians to an employee program. I just did a call with Mosquito Joe yesterday and we'll do this with anybody, by the way. So if you're a current Clicki client that uses us, or you're thinking about signing up with us, which I highly recommend, everyone does.
If you're not, you're missing out. Yeah, we would really appreciate it, but what we did for Mosquito Joe is they had their spring kickoff and they got all their technicians in a room. And I literally flashed up a QR code on the screen and helped all their technicians get the app installed and get logged into the app and taught them how to generate referrals.
For the business business. So I see that being really powerful, I'm like, Wow, this is really cool, like it only took me 30 minutes. And now I've got 30 of these super promoters out there and I, and the pitch is simple. Guys, it's like, Listen. Pest Badger spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on Google and Facebook ads. They would rather pay that to you, so share this link as much as possible so they can pay you instead of Google and Facebook.
Like that is very easy to understand for people. But so I just did this call and got all enrolled. And people are signing up and then they gave out bonuses right at the end. So we're dropping money into people's account, making it really fun.
Because u, I don't, I don't know if you guys use this feature much, but the manual bonuses on Clicki are pretty cool. You can just drop money into people's account, and they're getting these little notifications. So we see that as being a really big opportunity. So using it for customers spinning up campaigns for, like realitors. Or if you're a lawn care company, create an irrigation company partner program. Go out and find irrigation firms that you guys don't compete. But think about how many lawns they're on in a year they install irrigation system will now that lawn needs to be repaired and fixed, right?
So those would be great. There's so much using it for all of their referrals, right?
So even the referrals that don't happen digitally on the platform but happen. Good example is like Ulta. So they have referrals where their rep is on the phone with somebody. And they ask, How did you hear about us?
And they're like, Oh, John, Doe referred us, and they're actually paying out. That referral reward using Clicki, even though it wasn't generated on Clicki. And the logic behind that is that customer now has to go into the Clicki platform to get their money. And when they're in there, their referral link is waiting for them and they could submit more referrals.
So I think that's one thing we're really working on now is taking all these best practices from all of our customers and distributing them out across all of our other customers that use the platform and let them know how can get the most out of the software. And then, from my perspective as CEO is, I'm like, My North Star is to build a product that you don't have to think about. It just works at on autopilot in the background, so that's where that's what really drives me. Because if we could create the OIC for referrals, then we're G to.
It's going to be a billion dollar company. I agree, I think it's definitely had on our track, for sure. And so my next version of this is the Clicki network. Now that we have 200 nodes in the Network 200 companies, there's a good chance that we have multiple companies and markets now that don't compete. But, you know, there might be like in your example.
Is maybe we have five companies in Grand Rapids that don't compete. We have, we have badger, we've got some epoxy floor coating business. We have an HVAC partner, so it's almost like we have these little mini BNI groups in these these LOC local areas.
How do we unlock these these referral opportunities between brands that are really gray and vetted?
And they all use Clicki and they speak the same language, but they don't know each other yet. How can we help them know each other?
What does that look like? We see that as probably one of the most exciting things for us. Because, like I, there's clustering in Mark now and there's. There's owners that need to meet that haven't met and they need to form a relationship.
And if there could be a strong core group there and like, what does that even look like?
How do we cross promote each other? If Badger has 5,000 customers and this epoxy floor coding business has thousands of customers, what does that even look like to be partnered?
Do we show up in each other's app? Do we like, Do we? I don't know if you've ever seen it, but like on Chase Bank, when I log in, they show me a bunch of other special offers around Uber Eats. Sometimes they show you special offers from Amex and.
Factor meals and all these things like, Maybe it looks something like that, I don't know. We're. We're starting to flesh out that network concept and idea, but we're really well positioned for that and it just gets the.
The case study gets more prevalent as we add more people to the network. So, like we've seen little glimpses of this in Arizona, in Travis's market. So nice pest, so they've tons of pest pest control businesses, but you know, they've got event companies that use Clicki there. They've got a turf cleaning business, they've got lawn care companies pest control business. So it's like, How do all these brands work together?
And they just so happen to be buddies initially. So it's a good fit to really prove out the case, but it's like, How do we create that in other markets is really exciting to think about. That's really cool.
What's the hardest day you've had with Clicki so far? Probably when it just recently it was like it was like, Hell we had. We had pushed up a new feature with texting and. The we had pushed up some code and it was getting stuck in a loop for a client that we were just launching.
And it was just this client, and it was like we had just signed him up. He prepaid for the year and it was stuck in a loop so his customers were. I probably shouldn't say this, but like, I believe in, like transparency, and it's like, Fixed now, right?
It was stuck in a loop like, and we couldn't get to it until like 6:00 am. The next day. So these text messages are just rolling out. And for me as like an owner, somebody that owned a lawn care company before, I've like, I was like, horrified and like, mortified, that this happened and things happen, and we made it right and the customer still stayed with us, but.
We're like, Well, here's the plus side. Everybody knows about your referral program now because they were texed about 10 times about it. Downside is we will give you a refund for like, you know, your troubles. No questions asked, and we've corrected this. This is like the lifeblood of our business, like I will personally ensure that this will never happen again. I take full responsibility for it, even happening in the first place.
And I called him. I said that, and like, that was my, that's my thing, like everything stops with me. Like whatever happens on the platform, what happened, though, like, how did it happen, why, how did it get stuck like that?
So we were trying to build this feature where so I don't want to talk about it too much because it's kind of some secret sauce. But essentially messages were being filtered and we were trying to get around some mechanisms on the carrier level.
And basically, we built this way to re-trigger the message to be sent after being filtered. And it was just stuck in this kind of death loop. Did it happen like overnight or something like that, why you weren't able to get to it till 6 a.m. Or is that when you found out about it?
That's when we got notified about it? So this customer had referrals rolling in CU. He had just launched, and they had like, I don't know, probably 800 customers or something like that. So thank God it was like it wasn't like 20,000 customers because it would have been [ __, ], expensive. Because we actually got charged for every message that went out Times 10. So yeah, it was. I think could have been a bad day, could have been a worse day, could have been bad, it could have been. It could have been all of our customers, like all of our customers, getting text could could have been like way worse. The problem so the problem in the opportunity of a startup is that you move fast and you break things.
You are able to move fast, but again, these little things pop up and it's not the first time, even back in the lawn bot days like we had the whole system go down like things just. I mean, big systems go down Real Green, FieldRoutes, they service T, they have outages like they just happen. So we made it right for this customer and are obsessed with making sure that nothing like that ever happens again.
And kind of I have grace with people after things like that. Because, you know, if a team member messes up or something like that, they're probably the person that's not going to make that mistake again, right?
And if they do, then we'll have to cross that bridge when we get there. But I mean, this is, it was just, it was just something that you never want to have happen and. We got through it and customers stayed with us and they've been generating referrals since. So sometimes that's how you keep your most loyal customer, too. Like something bad happens, you go through the end of the world to fix it.
On the flip side, too, they just told all their customers that we have this new referral program, we're going to pay you. And then if they were to cancel, they're like, Well, actually, we're not going to pay you. So it's really kind of a hard thing to churn from, which is learning in there, too. But it's okay, just the general concept of [ __ ] up. It happens in everybody's business, right?
Even at the lawn doctor days like we, there was a billionaire in town that we had sold a power seeding to a big. Ass golf course on their property. I'm talking a big [ __ ] job and like going back, I would never, ever do this again.
We sold this power seeding we did a kill off Reed in like July. And if you're in lawn career, you know, like you never do a kill off. Reed in July. Because the germination is going to be so slow because it's so hot out like you seed in the fall or in the spring. But like, I really wanted to sell, this deal, sold it. We're out there killing off [ __ ] bentgrass in a golf course. The dumbest thing in the world, these bent grass patches we power seing. It's not growing back quick enough, and whole 30 acre estate it's got. It's if you look on Google Maps at this, I'll send you the picture. It looks like a leopard spots in their entire property and I'm like, 24. At the time it was insane and we made made right, it was a mess. But what I've learned from all that kind of stuff is like, If you just take full responsibility, you approach the problem, head on and do everything in your power you can to fix it.
That's all we can do. I mean, nobody's perfect and you try to learn from every mistake, but that was a big one. We've burned lawns before, you know, happens all the time in our industry. You go out, you're not necessarily the owner does it, but the tech, whatever they'll take. A [ __ ] Woods Who knows like I've had some crazy calls in my career of owning a lawn care company. Like your tech. Just pooped behind our shed out back and what?
And then to actually catch him on camera is the best part. I'm like, I'm sorry, sir, like, listen, you know, it's it, ain't it ain't like it used to be back in the 90s. All right, it's we. We do our best out here. Like, Listen, I know the labor pool's tough and blah, like it's crazy, but so dude had to go, Yeah, but just do it in the bottle or something, or, you know, I don't know, it's.
Youd think everyone has cameras these days? You know, people just don't think, yeah, but that's also this thing we signed up for right like, that's the reason why we're in the hot seat as we choose to be.
And I think I think Grant Cardone had a line like that. It's like your income is directly related to the level of problems that you have to deal with in your life and in your career. And it's the I prescrib to that. Yeah, we signed up for it, yeah, and it's a lot, especially when you're a parent, so you have all these business problems coming at you. And then you have like parenting problems happening. At the same time.
You' got a two and a 5-year-old, and I know that you have kids too, so it's just. Like when you're ambitious, I just feel like this constant battle of like, you're not doing enough. And but you still want to be a great dad and make sure you're there for every wrestling match and things like that. So it's such a battle. It tears at me, too, because I never want to miss anything with my kids. But then when I'm gone with my kids, I feel like I should be like, again, like I'm not doing enough. Like I.
I should be doing more. It's definitely a tough battle, for sure, and I've heard, like all like, read all the books, Elon books and Jobs books. And like, they were never there for their kids, and they regret it later on in life. And I just, I don't want to be that either, you know, so it's just a it's definitely.
I get stuck in a rock in a hard place in my own brain, like, What should I be doing, you know?
But ultimately I feel like being a parent at the end day is probably the most important thing. And then once they're little bit older, then. Go down swing at the end. But thankfully I started the business early when they were young or not born yet. So a lot of, you know, like hard times, like grinding away every single day, 90, 100 hours plus a week are behind me. You know, like, as far as labor work, you know, Yeah, yeah, you're you're, you're kind of in ated from that now a little bit. I mean, I still see you out there on the road and stuff. So there's, I'm sure, grinding, but just in a different, a bigger way, a different way.
And, you know, I asked my mentor because I, the first time I like, gave up my office, didn't have my office anymore. And I feel like I delegated almost all my responsibilities away, and I was like, Kind of lost for a moment. I was like, Okay, so I call him like, This is how I feel. What do you think he's like?
That's how you know you did it the right way, you built your business the right way. I'm like, Oh, good point, but it still doesn't fix my problem. It's like you're on the right path, you know, yeah, totally 100%.
What does the next three years look like for your Kendall? Like, what do you think?
What do you think Clicki is gonna look like in three years? Yeah, I think if we can. If we can build this network like I'm talking about and really connect these brands, I think that's where this gets really interesting.
Being the growth partner for the businesses that use use our software, so today it's, you know, primarily like referrals. And we've got the Bravo angle. But I think that using AI tools, we're really going to be able to help brands out in a lot of a lot of ways.
And U be really responsive to their needs. So I see something like a thousand plus businesses that we work with in three years and all different verticals and having the option like it. It would be sweet to exit, but I also don't.
I kind of love. Where we're at today is we're cash flow positive. We get to just work with the customers we want to work with, build the products we want to build. And we don't answer to anybody except our customers, 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. Yeah, how many emails a week do you get about PE companies?
Not so much from PE companies? It's more customers that are on calls now, they're like, Are you taking on?
Are you taking money right now? I was like, We don't need money. My inbox is full daily, lot of money in the space. I think I kind of have this idealistic thing in my mind. If we were to raise money, I want to raise it from our customers that actually use and use our software that create value. Because I think what happens a lot of times, like when ServiceTitan went public, like, I don't think any ServiceTitan customers had shares in service. TI in when these. When these CRM trade, they're valuing the CRM companies based on a multiple of revenue, right?
And that revenue is provided by all of these individual businesses, like Pest Badger and these lawn care companies. Pest control companies that use the tool and have all their credit card processing through their company. And this and that they're not seeing any of the enterprise value created from them being a part of the network, so to speak. So I have like this thing in my mind, if we ever were to raise money, I would want to raise it from our customers and.
Allow the people that make up the network to share in the upside of the company. So that if we were ever acquired by, like Venmo or in it or Chase or something like that like that'd be ideal acquir for us. As in it, I'm like speaking it into the universe here, like they bought MailChimp for like 12 billion or something.
And if you think about them, all of their SBS that use QuickBooks they like need referrals, right?
So it's like it'd be a be like an amazing partnership. So I say all that to say if we solve the network thing and we did need to raise money. I'd want to raise it from our customers like you and everybody else, and give them the opportunity to buy shares in the round.
And if you're using? Our tool and you like our tool and you believe what we're building and where we're going. Then I think your your money is no different than a VC's. It's the same money and a oftentimes a lot of our customers have just as much capital available to invest in things. So that's kind of where we're at on that. And then I think that's we're bootstrap, so that's also our competitive advantage. Not that we tried to be. It's just like nobody would invest when we were looking, and now we're too big to. We're like, We don't need money anymore, so we don't need investment at the moment, so Sky is the limit there. I think that'd just be really cool to have some sort of big outcome. And then, like, have all of the people that actually cu the people?
Your customers are actually the ones that create the value, right? So when they go and value our company, they'll look at our annual recurring revenue and be like, Oh, where did all that come from?
It came from these customers, they're the ones that create the value in the company. And if they could have some sort of liquidity event with us, that'd be phenomenal, that'd be really exciting, smart, like other. Companies like kind of do that too, like big product companies like they'll invest into service based companies or something like that. It's very interesting. Even I've even seen, like in the in the oil space world, like where they own like a quick lube. And then, like the quick lube, you been really good. And then the oil suppliers will invest into the quick lubs. It's pretty cool, it's smart. Yeah, yeah, 100%, It's super awesome. Well, I love, I always love chatting with you. Kind of it's like, Makes me think at a whole new level time. It's like Joe Rogan talking to Elon right now, like just different world.
And I think this space, this space needs people like you canle for sure. So I appreciate all the knowledge that you give us. Yeah, well. I'm just deep in, I'm just deep in the trenches here, like I'm in the freaking, literally in the code. So well, you stay there and I'm gonna stay where I'm at all right?
Sounds good, I'll report back, I'll bring you all the high level like the Manus. I haven't heard anybody talk about Manus, and I just, you know, that's a huge like, go check that out, that's popping right now. I always take notes, which, you know, probably you. I always take notes, and that's I have written down. Manus Right here, Go check it out. It's pretty cool, awesome man. Well, I won't take any more of your time. Went over a little bit, but as always, I appreciate you keep you posted.
And then I'm sure we'll talk soon because we have a lot going on that we need to implement, so we'll be be on the phone soon. I'm sure, yeah, no, sounds good well. Look forward to talking with you soon and thanks for having me on. Yeah, cool, I'll chat with you soon. Bud All right, see y see you, Hey, guys. Thanks for listening to another episode of Pest Control Millionaire. We don't charge any money for the show, obviously, but the podcast isn't free. You can pay for the podcast by sharing it with your friends and your family. So please like and subscribe and give us a Five-star review on your favorite podcast app. These things make a huge difference for us. If you have any specific questions you want answered about the business or your life by me or my guest, send an email to info at pestcontrolmillionaire.com.
And if you want to get in touch with me about any personal business coaching, check out our website at www.pestcontrolmillionaire.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you guys again on the next one.
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