What Drives a SaaS Visionary? A Talk with Kevin

Yash From Momentum (00:00)

Hello and welcome back to Building Momentum, the show where we peel back the curtain on the exciting and often chaotic world of building a successful SaaS business. I'm Yash, your host for this show, where every episode we bring you the stories and strategies of founders who've been in the trenches, conquering churns, scaling their teams, and building products that people and businesses love. In this episode, we'll be chatting with Kevin from AhSuite. Ahsuite is a platform that helps you build client portals that you can use to share reports.

presentations, and everything else in a way that your clients will love. They're excited to hear their story and the lessons they've learned along the way. We'll be dissecting the wins, the losses, and everything in between. So buckle up, grab your headphones, and get ready to dive in the world of SaaS. Hey, Kevin, thank you for doing this. Thank you for joining us. How are you doing?

Kevin Frei (00:46)

Thanks for having me on and doing great. How are you?

Yash From Momentum (00:49)

I'm doing great as well. so we'd love to start off this conversation with just trying to understand what's the big problem that you're trying to solve at Ahsuite.

Kevin Frei (00:58)

Well, it's for people who want to share things with their clients behind a password in an organized setting. So this could be agencies or accountants, designers, freelancers, any of those sort of people who work with clients online and just want a sort of convenient organized space for sharing assets and communicating with them and assigning tasks and that kind of

Yash From Momentum (01:19)

Got it. so traditionally, before client portals, we would use emails, and then we would use task management or project management systems. What is it that a client portal brings to the table that, as an example, a task management system or a project management system, think like Asana or something like that, wouldn't be able to do?

Kevin Frei (01:37)

I think primarily it's a simplified client view. So you can invite somebody, you can invite a client into your project management system and you can configure maybe access permissions for them. But a client portal lets you wrap it in something that's just dead simple and user friendly for an end client who might be somebody who's really not that tech savvy. Another benefit is that it does consolidate various tools into one.

so that you're not kind of hopping between different things and tries to get you out of your inbox and put your messaging and your ticketing system and your document sharing all in one place, so just fewer logins.

Yash From Momentum (02:14)

Yeah, so this is like, Client Portal brings a lot of different tools at different dimensions. So because I don't just work with my clients across a document, but I also do some designs, and then I also do some work related to coding, or probably some work related to graphics or social media and so on and so forth. And so this allows me to bring in all of those things into one single platform. So the client can log in into one place.

And one of the other things that I really liked about Ahsuite is also the fact that can, on a particular plan, I'll also be able to completely white label it. So it will be on my domain and it just allows me to appear a little, if I'm an agency, it allows me to appear a little bigger than I am, which sort of helps us build trust and things like that as well. Fun fact, we also had built parts of client portal as a part of our company.

Client joy which got acquired and we used to look up to the work that you were doing at Ahsuite at the time as well.

Kevin Frei (03:08)

work I was doing. I looked up to you guys and I don't know if you remember, but we interacted on LinkedIn once. I thought you were really gracious to talk to me because you guys were much further ahead than me.

Yash From Momentum (03:14)

Yep, yep.

were trying to grow, but it's good, right? Because the market is like, one of the things that I always realized is that the market's so big, and there are so many interesting things for us to build that, and there is inspiration almost everywhere, and there are a lot of memories with building client portals, and that's why was extremely excited to have you on for this conversation as well, right?

So help us understand a little around the stage of the status quo at Ahsuite. So where have we reached today?

Kevin Frei (03:51)

Yeah. So this has been a long journey. was a pivot from I originally was trying to build, you know, I had a background in as a pay -per -click specialist. And when I left that agency, I'll just give you a little my background. I started a defensive driving company, just an online thing in Arizona. And that had let me leave the job at the marketing agency and given me enough, enough revenue that I could start trying to bankroll the next thing. And I thought, okay, I'm going to make

I'm gonna make an agency that where I've automated a lot of the back office work because I felt like at the agency where I was they were always trying to automate, automate away my job. So I thought I'm gonna away them. So anyway, that led to making a lot of software to automate those processes, but I couldn't get the agency off the ground. I just was the wrong guy for it. not, you know, I wasn't out there hitting the bricks making sales. I'm just not for it. So I said, let's shed the agency. Is there something here that

I can preserve and spin off as its own product. And that was the basis of Ahsuite. So then I, you know, I, I, I focus on the client portal aspect of it. And I've been working on that now for two or three years developing this. But I'm always feeling like, I'm just starting or I'm about to start or it's, know, so I, definitely haven't really had, had takeoff. We've had, you know, our active users are in the low hundreds.

Most of those are unpaid on the free plan. So revenue -wise, we're in a deep hole, but we're just pressing forward. So anyway, guess just to kind of...

Yeah, to give context to my comments, it's like, definitely haven't figured it out yet. It's been a long building process. I mean, I think from a development standpoint, it's fairly mature. And that's why I'm kind of bewildered that it's been so slow to take off. anyway, yeah, that's kind of where I'm at.

Yash From Momentum (05:29)

Got it Got it interesting. So this is great for us to sort of try and understand and put everything that we're about to have a conversation about in context. And the other piece that I'm a little curious about is one of the few SaaS companies who's not, like any SaaS company that I look at these days, they're talking about AI upfront. So in some cases, they have the AI domain or they have

Kevin Frei (05:50)

Mm

Yash From Momentum (05:54)

that is part of the main H1 tagline on the website, or it's part of their name, or something like that. At the minimum, they have it as part of the H2. But Ahsuite does not talk about AI. I want to understand and probe this a little more as to is that a conscious decision? What's the thought process?

Kevin Frei (06:16)

Well, suppose, I mean, there's the marketing aspect to that and there's the product aspect. I hadn't really thought about whether it would be useful as a marketing strategy to put that kind of language on the site. And maybe that's something I should think more deeply about. I don't know if that makes a big difference in conversion rates for people signing up. From a product standpoint, definitely have plans for it. I didn't want to get too side tracked. What I've done right now is I've...

I've created custom GPTs in chat GPT and I'll put those in the support docs and stuff and basically say, look, if you've got a GPT plus account, here are some tools I've made to facilitate some of the things you might want to do with Ahsuite. And with the idea that eventually I'll start building those features directly into it, kind of where I'm thinking in the next, by the end of the year, what I want to be doing is I want to basically

have more of a chat interface with a lot of the tools within the platform. So basically, you've got these different context windows of, say I'm a user and there's certain things I'm restricted to see, that's the context window for the chat interface. so, on the roadmap, well, I would love to be doing it now, but I'm trying to get through some other milestones before I get there. But that's basically, it's not necessarily a conscious decision.

Yash From Momentum (07:27)

that in.

Kevin Frei (07:30)

And yeah, probably updating the language on the website to at least use the word AI maybe wouldn't be a bad idea.

Yash From Momentum (07:36)

Yeah, no, because almost everyone that I've spoken to basically say that it adds tailwinds to whatever it is that you're doing. It gives you a little bit more of a push. People are a little more forgiving. They want to try out the product. And then it doesn't lead to conversion as a paid customer, but it does lead to a higher conversion rate from website visitor to signups.

And it just ensures that a little more number of people actually experience the product and the experience. So that's an interesting piece to think about as well. The other, yeah, please go ahead.

Kevin Frei (08:06)

Yeah.

I was listening to another podcast you did in the person you were interviewing was talking about just sort of the pricing struggles of incorporating AI and now they're, know, that's in their variable costs. it's, that's something I haven't really delved into. I'm kind of going to be curious to see how that works out.

Yash From Momentum (08:26)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, so that is also, so like it doesn't come without its own challenges for sure. And like just the previous episode that I recorded was with a true generative AI company, which actually is what, so they are, and I have a question for you from them towards the end of the episode, but they essentially are in the business of helping e -commerce store owners.

create product photographs through AI. So if I have a photograph of a dress, I can have an AI model wear it. And same for accessories and for watches and for anything. And so it just takes your product photography to another dimension. And one of the things that they are trying to fix is how can they, is.

How can they make the AI -generated images look a little more imperfect so that they seem natural? Because whatever they see from mid -journey is just too perfect. And so you feel like this is AI -generated. So they are trying to work on that front. the challenge that they are facing is, people, and this is another question that they have, and we discussed this in that episode, is do people pay for AI?

Kevin Frei (09:24)

Hmm.

Yeah.

Yash From Momentum (09:43)

Everybody wants to use it for sure. And they'll pay open AI and they'll pay a couple of other products. But for a use case from a B2C sort of a use case, do people actually want to pay for very specific AI? And so that's still up in the air. And so we'll find out what happens over there. The other thing I want to understand from you a little more is as a client put in, this is a challenge that we faced ourselves as well.

Kevin Frei (09:45)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yash From Momentum (10:08)

At ClientJoy, we had a lot of customers in the digital marketing agency space. then about half of our customers were digital agencies. And then we had design agencies and then IT agencies and very few independent consultants and coaches and lawyers and accountants and things like that. And one of the challenges that we had was to design the product in a way that it fits workflows for these different use cases.

Kevin Frei (10:22)

Mm -hmm.

Yash From Momentum (10:32)

And so how do you think about your go -to market or your product as well? Do you think of building the product that is horizontal so it fits 80 % of all use cases? Or do you think of building a product that's 100 % going behind a particular use case, a particular ideal client persona, and then just building for it?

Kevin Frei (10:51)

It was been, it's been, excuse me, it's been horizontal, but I'm kind of rethinking that. I started, thought, okay, this is for, again, my background is a Google ads specialist. So I thought this is for PPC people who want to put together a lot, know, multiple performance dashboards in one package. but that, but you know, I did app sumo and from that you get people from all over the board.

And they're asking for all kinds of things. in some, maybe in some ways that stretched me to think in different ways and broaden the platform. In other ways, maybe it was a distraction from the original intent. So, so definitely, you know, probably a third or half of the development has been just responding to what, what I'm hearing people requesting in terms of pressing forward. Yeah. I have some, I, some basic features that I want to polish in that.

are kind of, are not focused on a specific industry. But I am kind of thinking maybe going forward I do need to start honing in. Lately I've found myself getting distracted thinking about accounting because my accountant uses a client portal. It's really nice for accountants. It's really expensive, but it's really nice for accountants. And I've thought, man, you know, I'd have to do a lot to compete with that for an accountant, but I can certainly

Yash From Momentum (11:51)

huh. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kevin Frei (12:01)

do way better on price and maybe with these few tweaks. what I'm currently working on is to nudge it in that direction, even though that's probably not, I probably should be focused on like agencies and designers and marketers. But I find myself getting nudged in that direction. yeah, that's, probably, clearly the ones that are, I've seen a lot of really successful niche portals that.

just focus on one industry. And that's the advice I've gotten from lot of people. That's probably what I should have done or what I should be doing, but it's not what I have been doing.

Yash From Momentum (12:29)

Got it. I'm sure if you're not focused on a particular ideal persona, like a client persona, can you talk us through some of the GTM mistakes that go to market? Not mistakes. would say experiments that didn't work out. yeah, so what are the channels that you have tried to acquire customers? And what experiments have worked for you? What experiments have not worked in any?

first principles learning that you have gotten from this.

Kevin Frei (12:55)

Well, we've done ads, Google ads and Reddit ads. In the past, I tried some other platforms, but I've held back on that because something in my funnel wasn't working. so I'll probably revisit that when I feel more confident and I see my conversion rate improving. Continue to invest a lot in SEO, which is the content and blog and that kind of thing.

I'm using an affiliate platform called First Promoter. I don't know how much I'm getting out of that. I have a real problem with just visibility into my own metrics. I probably will end up needing to build some sort of analytics dashboard for myself, unless I can find some. I've kind of looked into various tools and experimented with things and always kind of hit a wall. I'm using Intercom for my...

chat widget and a ton of things really. And that I can kind of, I've kind of configured to use to kind of get an idea of like, you know, like user sessions and those kinds of things. Who's hitting, who's reaching certain parts of the application. But one of the things I've been trying to solve is really figure out, okay, I can get someone to the website for this price. I can get them to sign up for this price. Where am I losing them on the path?

Yash From Momentum (13:38)

support them, Yeah.

Kevin Frei (14:02)

Where can I optimize and how? So I guess I guess to answer your question. It's just that I know I've tried spending money on getting traffic but found that there are too many too many broken spots in the track that I need to fix before I return to that so that's basically it.

Yash From Momentum (14:17)

So exactly the same story for us. One of the things that worked for us was laser sharp focus on the ICP. And so everything that we did within the product, even in terms of SEO. So since we found out that half of our customers are digital agencies, 11 to 50 US and Canada.

Kevin Frei (14:41)

Mm

Yash From Momentum (14:42)

all of our content efforts, all of our ads, everything that we did was catered to answering questions of founders of those agencies. 11 to 50 US, Canada, digital agencies. So that is the first thing that sort of helped us. The second thing was we started fixing bottom of the funnel first. So ability, like in -app tours, accelerating time to value, onboarding, all of those things.

Kevin Frei (14:51)

Yeah.

Yash From Momentum (15:08)

and then went on to improving website to sign up conversion, and then went on to landing page to sign up, like an ad landing page to sign up conversion, and then went on to optimizing ads. So just making sure that when you are filling the funnel, the funnel should not be leaking. So that sort of work, was a lot of hard work. It took us about eight or nine months to.

to get there, both of them sort of realigning the marketing effort and then realigning the product effort as well. I think for four, five months of those eight months, we didn't release any new feature for our existing customers. was just making sure that the onboarding is as smooth as possible, the speed is as good as possible, people are able to book demos, find answers, and things like that. So it was an interesting eight, nine months that happened.

Kevin Frei (15:31)

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Can I ask you, how do you, I sometimes it's gotta be intuition, right? Like, there must be parts where you go, well, why am I losing somebody here? I mean, are you then surveying people or are you just kind of using your gut? mean, because for me, a lot of times I've tweaked, I've worked a lot on sort of the onboarding process and that kind of thing, but sometimes I'm like, maybe it's a product thing. You know, maybe this is not compelling or to the right people. So how do you approach those questions?

Yash From Momentum (16:19)

So one of the things that, so surveys we realized, we tried surveys, we realized people don't answer, yeah, they don't respond to unless they're extremely happy or extremely unhappy. And if you're only going to get responses in those two states, then it just makes your survey biased. So the way that we went about it is that every person who signed up, so we had about,

Kevin Frei (16:25)

They don't respond.

Mm.

Yash From Momentum (16:44)

At the time of our acquisition, had anywhere between 120 to 150 people signing up every week. so we had a couple of three main things. We tried 10 different experiments, three that worked. First was SEO. Second was resources. So we had free resources for digital agency owners.

Kevin Frei (16:56)

What was your acquisition channel?

Yash From Momentum (17:09)

And then we ran ads for those resources instead of running ads for client jet. And then the third one that we had was our newsletters. So we had smaller ones as well. like affiliates brought in some things, paid ads brought in some things, competitor ads brought in some things. But these were the three major channels. These were contributing like 70 to 80%. These three put together were 70 to 80%. The other 20 % were small little things that were.

that were on autopilot of sorts. So that was, they would happen if and when they happened, not predictable at all. So we had about a thousand unique weekly website visitors. Out of that about 120 to 130 people signing up. Out of that, we were converting, I think, 13 to 16 or 17 paying customers who were purchasing anywhere between 35 to 45 licenses. And then this was happening week after week.

And so the first piece that we fixed was the purchase of licenses that started to happen. like bottom of the funnel and then middle of the funnel and then like top of the funnel. But I would say that all of this we were able to get only because we were laser focused on the idea. We are only going to go after these people. And then our product also reflected that. So even the copy within the product, all of those things sort of reflected that.

Kevin Frei (18:31)

My impression was that there was that you guys sort of pivoted from Client portal to more like a CRM sales enablement kind of thing. Is that right?

Yash From Momentum (18:32)

See ya.

It was the other way around. So we were CRM and sales enablement and then moved towards client portal and invoicing and all of those things. So we started with CRM and proposals And then we moved towards a little sort of, that was essentially the idea was to land and try and expand across our customers org. So instead of having just a sales team or the founders using the product.

Kevin Frei (18:42)

okay.

Gotcha.

Yash From Momentum (19:05)

Can we get the fulfillment people or the project managers also to use it? And then can we get the accounts team or the person who's raising the invoices also use it? And then can we make have one place from the agency standpoint to sort of look at it? Yeah. So like for the first, we were on the market for four years. the first, like our first AppSumo launch doesn't even mention client portal. We didn't have it.

Kevin Frei (19:09)

Hmm.

Yeah, yeah, Okay.

Yash From Momentum (19:29)

So when we launched, so we didn't have client portal for the first two years of our existence and then started sort of building that as well. But the other piece that I'd also like to understand from you is how do you sort of try and maintain a, I'm sure, so when you launch an AppSumo, as you also mentioned, there are a lot of people who come in and then there's, and then there is,

requirements in terms of features and products, and they are very, very loud about it as well. How do you, I'm sure that as a founder, you also have certain things that you want to build that no one's asking for, but you know are good and bad, and like will make certain things better for your customers. So when your customers are asking for faster horses, how do you think about focusing on selling cars? So like, how do you split your time?

Kevin Frei (20:00)

Right, right.

Yash From Momentum (20:15)

between building for things that people are asking for and building for things that you know are going to be like a Delta IV of sorts for the customers.

Kevin Frei (20:23)

Yeah. I mean, I, it's probably like, like, you know, 60 40 or 50 50. I, I, if I get the same, if it's a small request, I try to rush it through because that can make somebody really happy. If it's really small. if it's, and maybe I shouldn't do that so much, but, you know, I, I get so happy when somebody talks to me, so one of the users talks to me, you know, it's like, I'm happy to, to, to.

If it's something can be knocked out in a couple hours or something, I try to do it. If I hear the same thing a lot, then that's real clue. I try to kind of, I'm always trying to think of how to integrate what I want to do with what people are asking for and try to, I definitely have some long -term ideas that I'm working towards. And I guess for me, that's most of the work is just trying to figure out.

the right way to prioritize and how to think about the features in a way that advanced sort of my getting to where I want to get to, but also responding to what people are telling me they actually want. And I try to be humble about like, maybe people don't want what I think that they want. So I try to listen and hear that feedback. But yeah, it can really derail you. if I had somebody...

Okay, let me, I'll just give you one. Somebody said basically, hey, know, this is great, but I can't use it because I really need recurring tasks. And I've always kind of wanted recurring tasks, but this is the first person ever asked for it. And so immediately my mind goes, I got to get those recurring tasks going. But I'm like, wait, this is one person. One person has asked for this. Someday, I'd like to have it. anyway, I can't say I'm super good at it. It's just, for me, it's just been using my gut, you know, and.

Yash From Momentum (21:45)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Kevin Frei (21:57)

I should probably have a more systematic, disciplined way of doing it.

Yash From Momentum (22:00)

So this reminds me, so I'm so sorry, I think I talked about some metrics, I didn't answer the question that you asked. So to get back to it, so one of the things that I would do is I just make, like I'll reach out to, so as soon as they signed up, we would use their email. We had an API internally set up. use their email, send it to ZoomInfo, get the LinkedIn profile if that was available.

And then I would reach out on LinkedIn and essentially just beg for a 15 -minute call. I would say that I promise I will not sell. If you can give me 15 minutes, this is a founder -to -founder conversation. I'm sure you started a business. You understand how difficult it is to get it off the ground. I'm trying to do the same. Can you give me 15 minutes of your time? This will help me immensely.

Kevin Frei (22:27)

Mm -hmm.

Hmm?

Yash From Momentum (22:46)

I would do typically anywhere. And these had decent conversion rates. I was able to get about 10 % of people on the call as well. And so on the call, I'd ask them a couple of questions. But then the final question would be, What does the product need to have that you go ahead and give your credit card? OK, this is something that I've got to purchase. So we're telling you that we have like 150 features.

Kevin Frei (22:56)

Okay.

Hmm.

Yash From Momentum (23:13)

But what is it that the product should do, would do that will make you go like, I just need this today. And so just back to back asking that questions I was doing, think typically two calls a day that would last 15 to 30 minutes. And just having this conversation, trying to build insight out of those. All of those were recorded and stuff like that.

Kevin Frei (23:20)

Right, right, right.

Do you find it is useful? I know Zoom info is like super expensive. Do you find it's, it's, it's useful doing that outreach via LinkedIn versus, I mean, you could have it in your app or email. it, was it worth paying for to be able to reach them in LinkedIn?

Yash From Momentum (23:53)

LinkedIn was, so we had an email sequence, we were also using intercom. So we had a drip sequence created in intercom as well that was already sending them emails, which would ask them to book a call, book a demo and stuff like that. But actually reaching out on LinkedIn, like we saw had the best conversion rates. And so the...

Kevin Frei (23:59)

Okay.

Yeah, yeah. Right.

Interesting. OK.

Yash From Momentum (24:12)

And as it is, like I was going on those calls with the understanding that I'm not going to be able to sell, I just want to ask them this one question, that what should we do that will get them to say, OK, you can have my $9 a month or something to that effect. that was what. And ZoomInfo is not that expensive. So we were using the API, not like an account. The API is not that expensive. So getting 100

Kevin Frei (24:21)

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

Yash From Momentum (24:40)

100 to 110 email IDs per week. That would have been, I think, what, $15, $20, not more than that.

Kevin Frei (24:48)

wow, yeah, I talked to them years ago when I was trying to do the agency and it was like a $20 ,000 year.

Yash From Momentum (24:54)

no, no, no, no, no, no, this is significantly cheaper. Yeah, this is significantly cheaper. yeah, so that was what we had. The other, I also want to explore a little more because this is a direction that we never went into at ClientJoy. I wanted to, but we never were able to get there, which was the marketplace piece, right? Which is where a user of Ahsuite can search and look for other users of Ahsuite.

Kevin Frei (24:59)

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yash From Momentum (25:18)

Can you tell us a SaaS plus marketplace? How do you think about it? What's the use case over there? And how did you come across this as a requirement?

Kevin Frei (25:29)

Well, this was kind of a, to some extent it's like a, if this thing doesn't work, then I'm gonna pivot to that. Like so to some extent it's okay if I can't, it's interesting, know, hearing from you sort of the kind of numbers you guys saw with ClientJoy, because man, that's the delta between your guys' success in getting clients versus Ahsuite is huge. I think that you guys have a really great,

product and it's ahead of Ahsuite in most respects. But the delta in the product is not as big as the delta in the signups. I you guys were killing it. I mean, clearly, I need to learn how to make that happen for Ahsuite as a client portal. But the thought was always, well, if I can't get that to catch fire, then maybe this other route, maybe it's an alternative to like an Upwork or a Fiverr.

Yash From Momentum (25:59)

Yeah.

Kevin Frei (26:15)

Basically, the concept was, is that when you hire somebody on Upwork, then you've got to integrate them into your tool set, or you're working with them on Upwork, which the interface is, I find it frustrating. I've been using it since it was Elance. And so I kind of thought, well, maybe an ideal user is just somebody who's a freelancer, works with people on Upwork or Fiverr, and they move them to this platform for actually doing the work.

And I also envisioned it as something where like, if you're a small agency or an entrepreneur, you can staff out your team for different projects. that was, anyway, that's how I imagine it being used. How much are people actually using that aspect of it? Again, this is one of those problems where I don't have good visibility into it. And so I don't really know that that's a feature that people love, but it's definitely something that, you know, and here's something that I want to work on.

I want to develop that side of it a lot further. But I'm trying to weigh that against, know, again, I don't want to get too sidetracked, but that's definitely something that I want to, I would love it to be a place where someone signs up so that they can potentially get hired or they can staff out their team as an alternative to going to Fiverr or Upwork. And they know that anybody that they bring onto their team is already using the same stack. So there's...

It's just an easy fit. That's kind of the thinking.

Yash From Momentum (27:27)

Got it. Interesting. Extremely interesting. so from, we've never actually thought of having, so the reason why we, there was, I don't know if the URL is still up because now the company is being run by another larger firm also based in the US. They acquired us earlier this year. But we also had a market.

Kevin Frei (27:46)

Congrats, by the way, congratulations.

Yash From Momentum (27:48)

Hey, thank you. Thank you for that. And so we had marketplace .clientjo .io as a URL as well where you could go in. It never took off. We were not able to build a good go -to -market motion for it. And it was available within the product and a couple of other things. But one of the things that we also realized was that the market is full of

very feature -rich, good products with no users. And it is also full of half -decent products that have great go -to -market motions. And so in the first year of ops, we realized that all of the company objectives, whether it is the engineering team, design team, or the marketing team, the company objectives have to be around how do we get this in hands of people and just be distribution obsessed.

And so that would mean that even our engineering team was working on building apps for marketplaces and they were building growth related features within the product. So they would build in -app checklists and they would build referrals. We use First Promoter as well. So referrals using First Promoter affiliate program using the First Promoter. Anything and everything that will get ClientJoy to more people. So if you had opportunities to talk to more people and ask this one question as to what do we do that will get you to pay.

Kevin Frei (28:43)

Okay, interesting.

Yeah, yeah.

Yash From Momentum (28:59)

And then only if, a lot of people said, that if you do this, we'll pay, then we would go ahead and build an additional feature on top of it. The other advantage I would say that we had was that everything's just cheaper over here. I would say cheaper. It's more economical in India. yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So nice.

Kevin Frei (29:17)

Yeah, My developer is in Delhi. I'm going to his wedding in November.

Yash From Momentum (29:22)

Yeah, so like the 26 people team that we had would probably be equivalent to a seven, eight people team or less probably in the US or any developed economy for that matter. So that was a great advantage as well. Awesome. So Kevin, this brings us towards the end of our conversation. And one of the things that we do is I ask you a question that our previous guest has asked.

Kevin Frei (29:34)

Yeah, yeah.

Yash From Momentum (29:49)

And then you should also ask a question that they'll ask our next guest. so as I shared with you, our previous guest is Lynn, who works on the product called WeShop .ai. And one of the challenges that she's trying to solve for at her organization is how do they make sure that every feature that they build within the product, how do they make sure that that is

being adopted, that is being adopted. Sorry, how do they make sure that every feature has an ample opportunity before you as a founder decide for or against it? So whenever you build something and you launch it, and then how do you make sure that it goes out to the right people? What are the steps that you take so that you announce it or whatever it is that you do? How do you make sure that, OK, this feature

has had ample opportunity, now it is the time to either take it out or double down on it and then build more things on top.

Kevin Frei (30:42)

Interesting. Well, it's got to be hard to take it out, right? Once you give it to, if one person likes it, then it's like, that's interesting. Well, in terms of how to announce it, you know, I just put it in my Discord group. I'll usually, know, and there are sometimes I don't and I should announce it. You sometimes I just put it in there and don't say anything. But.

Yash From Momentum (30:47)

Yeah, it's difficult.

Haha.

Kevin Frei (31:04)

But yeah, mean, wherever you talk to your users in your Facebook group or Discord group or whatever, with Intercom, they have kind of a cool way you can have new features pop up and you can kind of manage all that within Intercom. I haven't really made use of that though, but that might be one approach. yeah, guess if it's about making sure the announcement is made to the right people, if they're using Intercom,

they have a solution for that. Right, right. But as for how do you decide whether to... Boy, that's tough. What do you think?

Yash From Momentum (31:28)

a segment or something like that that you can.

don't know. So this is, by the way, a question from the founder. WeShop .ai has 350 ,000 users who are e -commerce merchants. And this is a growth that they've seen in the last 15 months. so they launched in May last year. that's like, I just did a very back of the hand calculation. And that's like 800 merchants a day.

And so that's a lot, right? 350 ,000 merchants in 15 months. And so I didn't know. I I've never seen that scale. The max that we had was 13 ,000 total users that we had over four years. And this is like this. And this is a 10 people team. Can you imagine? Just a 10 people team in total.

Kevin Frei (32:12)

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

What are they doing? How are they doing it? Has this gone viral or something?

Yash From Momentum (32:23)

So they are an extremely verticalized large language model for e -commerce shop owners. So if I'm selling watches or something like that, and if I have, let's say, 1 ,000 SKUs, typically what happens is I would have photographed this watch in 10 different angles, put it up on my website. What they do is they take this photograph and then allow the shop owners to

to have a person wear it through AI, so that you know and you realize how it could look like. It improves conversion rates drastically. So as an example, I'm not what you would conventionally define as a fit person. My waist size is 36. So when I click on the 36 inches waist size for a lower,

for a pant or something like that, I would see an AI -generated person who has 36 inch waist size. And so I'm not looking at a model who's like really, who's like jacked, like whatever, right? So they are ripped and stuff like that. So it actually shows me, and if I'm an Indian person who's shopping on some US tour or something like that, I'm able to do all of that. So how will it look on my skin tone and stuff like that.

Kevin Frei (33:28)

Hmm

Right, right, right, right, right.

Yash From Momentum (33:47)

So as a user. So that's the product that's a SaaS that they will build. And from a tech standpoint, as I shared with you, the challenge that they're trying to fix is what Mid Journey is also struggling with, which is AI hallucinations and stuff like that. So how to make sure that when I generate my avatar on the platform, it doesn't have six fingers and stuff like that. So yeah.

Kevin Frei (33:59)

Right.

Well, so if they've got like, do say, 35 ,000 users? So I mean, just ask them. I mean, I would, you know, have some kind of voting system. I mean, you got that many people. I mean, the problem I face, and it sounds like you might've had some of this too, is just that you put something out there, even if I incentivize feedback, like it's amazingly low response rate, but you've got 350 ,000 people. What do you guys think? That's what I would do, you know?

Yash From Momentum (34:14)

350 ,000 merchants. Yeah, it's a lot. Yeah.

You'll have, yeah, you'll have, for sure. Cut it.

Kevin Frei (34:39)

and have some way to kind of filter the responses. don't, know, maybe it's a survey or I don't know, but yeah, that's what I would do. Congratulations to that person. My gosh, that's incredible.

Yash From Momentum (34:47)

Yeah, yeah, they're just killing it. And so it is such a fun conversation in terms of getting insights in how they grew and what are the things that they did. It's scheduled to come out, I think, just before yours. I mean, we'll be some thousand merchants. Yeah, not users, merchants. Like they have Shopify integrations and they have, I think,

Kevin Frei (35:03)

350 ,000 merchants. Is that like all the merchants in the world? mean, my God, that's incredible.

Yash From Momentum (35:14)

Presta Shop integrations and like all like Magento integrations and all of

Kevin Frei (35:17)

So that's probably it. It's probably all these people with Shopify see that, okay. So that's their, okay. They're not just like running ads or, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, cool.

Yash From Momentum (35:19)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's their primary GTM. yeah. That's their primary go -to market. are like, they're second. If you go to Shopify App Store and if you search for apps, like just search for apps across any category, any category, they are second in the world. So yeah, yeah. So that's their biggest acquisition channel. Yeah, for sure.

Kevin Frei (35:38)

Wow.

Yeah, yeah.

Yash From Momentum (35:43)

What's your big question? What's the challenge that you were struggling with that you would like our next guest to answer?

Kevin Frei (35:49)

Well, I mean...

Okay, okay, there's a lot of, you know, I get a lot of advice and there's a lot of different ideas of how to, of what to pursue to grow the company and to turn from something that gets, you know, one or two signups a day to, you know, 20 signups a day or something and then make those convert. How do you prioritize that decision making? Like what to focus on?

I guess that's it. How do you make decisions about... No, I got a better one. got a better one. What are you using for good insight into behaviors in your application, on your website? What are you using for your own internal analytics?

Yash From Momentum (36:22)

Okay.

about it.

I can tell you my answer, but I'll ask this to the next guest as well. So for the website, use Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity. Both of them are free. For in -app, we were using Amplitude and Mixpanel. Amplitude is a JavaScript -based. So Mixpanel is, it takes a couple of weeks to implement, not more, because it like

Kevin Frei (36:34)

Great, yeah.

I've looked at Mixpanel. Okay.

Yash From Momentum (36:56)

It works on top of your database. It's like accurate. It's basically a GUI of your database, you can run queries and stuff like that. Amplitude is much simpler. It's like a 30 -minute install, like a JavaScript. So you just put it into your product, and then it starts showing you results. amplitude is not like Mixepanel's. Amplitude is error -prone. Because it is JavaScript, it depends heavily on the browser and the system and the cookies and all of those things.

Mixed panel directly into your database. Whatever's there, just tells you that. So these are the two platforms that we were using. And for the marketing team, though, had access to, we had given them access to Intercom also. So they were able to see how many, they were able to build complicated queries within Intercom also and create lists. How many people signed up 90 days ago and logged in in the last seven days and have more than 30 sessions and stuff.

Kevin Frei (37:50)

Right, right, right,

Yash From Momentum (37:50)

So they had created those lists. And then every week, we would talk about how can we push this number, which is 500 today, to 550 or 520 or whatever that is. So that's sort of the tool stack that we had at our scale. But I'll ask this question to our next. Yeah.

Kevin Frei (38:02)

Right, right.

Do you feel that, do you think, so amplitude, sounds like a context mind. Yeah. Three weeks of development just to get that going is a big ask. But I'm sorry. Amplitude sounds like that might be a, okay.

Yash From Momentum (38:21)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mixed panel is a couple of weeks or more. Amplitude is like 30 minutes and it's free up to a million events, which is like way into the future. So that's okay. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Do check it out. But thank you for joining me for this conversation, Kevin. I think it was a pleasure speaking with you and for all the people who joined us. Yeah, absolutely. And for all the people who joined us on YouTube or on Spotify or wherever you were watching or listening to this.

Kevin Frei (38:28)

Okay, I'll check that out.

Likewise,

Yash From Momentum (38:49)

You'd be able to find the link to Ahsuite in the description. If you are an agency and if you have a lot of clients, you're looking for one central place for them to log in and see all the updates, all the really good, brilliant things that you've been working on, sign up to Ahsuite and check out the platform in the portal as well. And we'll see you again next episode. Thanks.

Kevin Frei (39:10)

Thanks, Yash.

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