Welcome to the really know your customer Podcast with your hosts Betsy West Schaefer and Tony Boto. Join Betsy and Tony as they dive in with highly successful C suite leaders who have grown successful organizations by creating a laser focus on listening to their customers, and building deep customer relationships. Now, it's time to join Betsy and Tony for the really know your customer Show.
Welcome to the really know your customer Podcast. I'm Tony Moto, CEO of Tony moto International. And
I'm Betsy West taper CEO of the converted group. We're so happy to have you here today. And we're really excited about this episode.
Absolutely, we've got Richard White. And that's the I've got to tell you the one phrase that in all the stuff we talked about, which there's a lot of really good stuff in this episode, the one phrase that stands out to me is let the humans do what they're good at. And let's let the machines do what they're good at. And, you know, you might be wondering, what does that mean? Well, I'm gonna let you get into the show. And you can hear where we're going with this. But what I really love in this interview, and it is also reflected in several of the most recent interviews that we've been doing, is these entrepreneurs, these leaders, the CEOs that we're interviewing, they recognize that AI, and the machines we have around us can help us live better lives more fulfilling lives at work. And I think this really falls into that category.
Yeah, absolutely. We're speaking today with Richard White, who is the CEO of fathom, and Fathom is a really awesome tool to integrate into zoom calls that can take notes for you, but at a super high level. And it has all kinds of integrations, Richard speaks far more eloquently about it than I do. But one of the things that was really cool, as he was telling us, the story it started off is a note taking integration for zoom. And what they're evolving to is how do we make meetings in general? How do we make these zoom meetings, higher value, less friction, gaining these insights? How do you share those insights throughout your organization, and just really building a ton of value and business value into this tool, rather than it just being a quote unquote, note taking tool. So with that, let's go ahead and jump into our conversation with Richard White. Richard White, we are happy to have you on the show. Thanks for being here.
I'm really happy to be here. Thank you. Yeah. So
Richard, um, just so our audience can get a chance to know you tell us a little bit about your journey, your background, how you got to the place you are, and then tell us about fathom.
Yeah, so I'm originally a programmer, by trade, sir programming, probably when I was about 1112 years old. And after college, I actually really found a love for building operational systems, workflows and got really deep into product design. Most of my career for about 12 years, I ran a company called user voice ever seen the little feedback tabs on the side of websites, that was what we invented that can't really patent that. So you know, you're welcome world. So really worked on that for 12 years and got really deep working with, gosh, hundreds of if not 1000s, of companies helping them figure out how to set up a really high quality feedback program. And then more recently, in the process of doing a lot of customer research myself, I was this was probably right before the pandemic. So early 2020, I was doing a lot of customer calls, they did 300 customer calls in the first month of January 2020 per month of 2020. And I was just taking notes on every call. And I was like cleaning up those notes. And I was sharing the notes. My team was like, here's what I'm hearing from our customers. Here's the interesting feedback and insights. And two things I really realized. One is, that process is terrible. It's exhausting to try to talk to someone and you know, you got a short amount of time. And you got to try to like, you know, talk and quickly type stuff out, clean up your notes. And the worst part of it is, after I'm done two weeks later, I don't really understand what those notes mean. And my team, even more does understand what those notes mean. And so that's kicked off the wheels turning my head, which led to fathom, which I've been running for about 18 months, which is an app for zoom, the free app for zoom actually, that we record in real time, core, transcribe and allow you to highlight like the interesting moments in your zoom calls, which may be you know, customer pain points, insights, product feedback, and instead of passing around notes, we can pass around short little video clips of our customers.
That's awesome. So tell us who are the customers that are gravitating to what you've built some use cases, some of the feedback that you're getting from them, and we've had the opportunity to see it and it's it's amazing. Can't wait to dive in and start using it. But tell us about your customers and how they're going about using it. Yeah, I
mean, I think there's two big use cases and users one is just anywhere One who's on auto zoom calls, especially on a lot of customer facing zoom calls, right? You know, it's one thing to do internal meeting taking notes, you can always follow up with them, if you miss something, you know, you have 30 minutes with a customer, you can't get that 30 minutes back, you miss something, it's gone. And so, you know, I think majority of our folks are, you know, salespeople, Customer Success clients, success consultants, you know, anyone who does, like I said, a lot of zoom customer calls every week, and a lot of what we do really is just make your life, you know, living on zoom a little less stressful, it's funny, when I'm not using my product, or when I have an in person meeting now I find it very stressful, because my oh crap, I gotta pay attention here. And so that's one side of it. And the other side, our founders, you know, team leaders who want to see what's happening on these calls at UserVoice, my previous company, I had a stint where I like ran our sales team. And one of the things I found the most challenging about running sales team is getting them to like write good notes, or they have all these interesting calls. You know, some of them wrote, like three words per hour, some of them almost was a full transcript. But no matter how good or bad their notes, were, I constantly found myself saying, like, give it how did they actually object to our pricing? Or what do they actually say about that competitor? And so I think, for founders and team leads, that's the other side of question are killer features, you can, you know, kind of double click in, or you can still get those notes in your CRM. But now, when you're like the rep says, of not buying based on price, you can click the link, go into Fathom and watch that 30 seconds of the call. And so creating that kind of transparency across organizations, I think is really killer, right? Because there's something about hearing a customer firsthand, that just doesn't translate into a couple bullet points, right? It's their tone, their inflection. And it's just something that's just human about being like, this human has a problem, I wanted to solve the problem for this human with my product that you can't easily kind of ignore as much as you can when it's a few bullet points in your serum.
Yeah, that is just amazing. Because there's so much more than just the words on paper, right? In context, and facial expressions, and all of those things. And, you know, on the other side is Who doesn't want less stress in a zoom call? I mean, I know, everybody I've talked to is pretty fatigued by it. But you know, if that's a way to make that better, that's awesome. How are you going about finding your customers,
you know, we got involved zoom with Zoom Zoom is a new kind of app store for their they've just kind of new plugins for zoom called Zoom apps, we were fortunate to kind of get an early into that program, we were one of the first 50 launch partners. And I think last time I checked, we were the number one app in this app store. And so a lot of people were just finding us through that. And I'm really happy to say that now, you know, very quickly becoming our number two, channel is just word of mouth referrals and invites from other users. You use this on a call, you know, you kind of announce, okay, I'm recording, Hey, what's that app you're using? Right? So we just see a lot of kind of organic word of mouth referral. And I think word of mouth is, is back. Right? I feel like, you know, we went through, gosh, you know, the last 15 years of SAS where there was like a new, you know, there's a new hot demand gen channel, every couple years. And so every company built on that. And now with social media with all this stuff, you know, word of mouth is back to being I think the best channel you can ask for. So those are the two big ways we're getting folks today.
So I'm really curious, we talked about your customers a little bit here. But I want to dive in deeper and really look at what are the ways that you really see the software, helping your customers get to know their customers, I mean, it's a really perfect fit for our show, really, because you know, it's all about getting to know your customers. And I heard you say a couple things. So I just want to kind of dig deeper here. It's like a founder or a CEO, wanting to know, what's the exact language that's being used? Let me see that exact, you know, segment of the call. But let's go deeper. What does it really mean when they get to know that about a customer? How does that help them?
I mean, there's a number of different mentions, right? So one dimension, like we have a channel called Boom, right? In our Slack suite, I think a lot of us are using slack, right. And so boom is for anything like create that happens, right? And it's generally like a list of, you know, excited email messages. But it's also when someone's on a zoom call, we do interviews with all of our users after their first call with fathom, we actually pay them to take that interview with us, even though we're a free product. So we'll pay you to give us feedback. And so us and a bunch of times to talk to you, we'll set it up so that like there's a button Fathom that's like, positive moment, and, you know, clicking that, and it automatically will send that highlight actually, in real time within like, 20 seconds to like a Slack channel. So I've heard called, like golden nuggets, or wins, we call Boom, right? And I think that's one thing that kind of drives morale, like, okay, it's working, or people like we're doing like, you know, it's hard to put your finger on the value of that. So that's one another one would be just simply like product feedback, right? So we have another button, and it's kind of on the standard buttons, we provision tags, we provision and found them you click and sell this product feedback. And so we actually use our voice, my last company product along with them. So we will actually walk that feedback. You know, here's what they said. Here's our paraphrase and what they said and here's the clip, and all of that goes into it. Different Slack channel, you know, that's another common thing I've seen is just having a shared company, Slack channel, where all the most common pieces of feedback come in, I think it's really hard at times to be super diligent so that you've got this perfect view of all like, here's, here's all the feedback UserVoice helps a lot with it. But it's still really hard. It's also good to have an ambient stream of here's all the things that are coming in, especially if it's like, not just all texts, right? It's like a, here's a 15. second clip is customer asking for, here's they need this setting, or why they need this integration or something like that. And I think the human mind, we're really like, each of us has a great coalition machine, if everyone, your company got the same kind of input, we've generally come to some of the same conclusions, or we at least have the same context to have really good discussions. And so I feel like, that's a great hack of like, just cool, have an AB stream, you're not everyone's gonna monitor it. But enough people monitor that you've now got 15 25% of your company has a good kind of mental model of what we're hearing on the front lines.
That's a really cool concept, because it really can build the culture in your organization want to be that customer centric culture, because you're actually hearing that feedback. And I'm guessing that it kind of gets a little viral, like when people put something out there and it starts spinning out there. And then someone's like, hey, I want to go share what I'm hearing. So they start sharing, you know, so it's that behavior boosting element to it. And then the other piece that I'm hearing is, you know, and this is something I was talking with a client just recently, and they said, We got to make sure we really understand. So the product engineers, we need to know exactly what's being said in your session in your interviews. And that's something that that I think is so valuable, get but get so lost, especially if you can't can't have the engineers in the room with you, because you're trying to really conduct a limited interview.
Yep. Yeah, I often always think of companies that kind of being like, you know, they have two hemispheres of the corporate brain, right. And there's like, the one side of your brain that is your corporate, and it's like, on the front lines of the customer sharing the things. And then there's like this choke point between the two halves of your brain, and the engineers where, you know, a lot of this stuff gets kind of lost in translation. And it's a shame because when you do allow engineers, product, people, that visibility into what you see on the front lines, you get such better outcomes, because it's just far more credible to them to, or they're inherently skeptical of, especially with like salespeople, incredibly skeptical of like, yeah, I don't know if I believe that. There's a bunch of people that really need this thing. But you can't really argue with Slack roomful of people saying, we need this thing.
I'm telling you, this reminds me of what we talked about in our book about unfiltered listening. And you know, playing that game of telephone where, you know, by the time it reaches the person that it needs to reach, it's been filtered through somebody else's lens, and the message gets muted or distorted or lost on the way up the chain, or damaging
effect. At some point. There's certain people in the org that felt like the job was totally paraphrase this stuff, right actually paraphrasing it, generally, it's like, we lost too much signal. And so now it doesn't have, you know, it doesn't have the same impact. One of
the stories we tell in the book is that we had a client that asked us to present to their sales team about the launch of the customer advisory board, and that we were looking to the sales team for nominations of people to serve on the board. And most of the sales people were like gunning to get their people on the board. They wanted that visibility. They wanted them to have the relationship with the C suite. They were all about it. And this one sales rep like No, no, my clients are too busy. And I talk to him all the time. You don't need to talk to them. No, no, no, they wouldn't be interested in serving Well, she protested too much. And they start diving into it, they invited this one customer of hers onto the board, we'll come to find out what the C suite was hearing about this customer relationship from the salesperson was completely different than reality. So it really exposed that. Where if if they had had a tool like fathom that, and I'm not saying all salespeople are like that this was a an outlier, that just wasn't playing the game, right. But, you know, if they had had a tool like that, where you can't hide behind your filter, when you're talking to your C suite, that would be really impactful. I think
it's really important. I do think I guess I ran our sales team for a while I think sales people get a bad rap. I think in general, they actually do. They are a great signal. It was funny, we did a survey of product managers, this was like three or four years ago. And we asked them, because one of things we didn't use your voice was to figure out like, how do we set up a nice, like a channel for Customer Success support implementation specialists, and salespeople to all have a good way to like, share the feedback they're hearing and I'll get coded into one system. And then we can allow the PMs to like, dial down. Like I want to hear more from this department less than this one. We asked a survey, like whose feedback do you trust the most? And it was kind of like, you know, they're all kind of bunched together, success support. And then there was like, 50 feet of crap. And then it was that like the credibility of the sales team. Right. And so I think that's unfortunate. I don't think that's reflective. But I think if you're in sales, it's something you have to be aware of, you almost have to overcorrect. Right and like by then showing clips from the call and just be like, hey, look, don't take my word for it. It's really important because there is this implicit bias almost always product people against what you're hearing?
Yeah, I think it would be a great tool for for great salespeople, you know, to say here, let me share this with you let me share this with you. I think it could be a real asset for the salespeople.
Yeah. So we got somebody remote first companies right now, how do you see this playing out in that space? I mean, especially with Omicron happening right now, you know, we're just getting into that spike, whatever all the audience is listening, we're probably not through COVID yet. So how do you see it playing out? I mean, it's been an interesting shift over the last 18 months or so to remote first economy. And I know you started this, because kind of because of that.
Yeah. I mean, I think we, you know, my last couple years, we're doing remote first, and then we went to an office. And then with fatha, we're committed to being always remote first. And I think it's interesting, because one of the key things you have to do is remote first company is you got to build really good asynchronous communication channels that are automated, right? So like, you know, you can't rely as much on just like, we're gonna have a daily stand up, we're gonna have a bunch of meetings, because they're just not as effective as an in person meeting to a certain grade. But if you build out the right processes, which looks like you know, Drosophila, you know, we've got a Slack room for every little operational thing we do, we use a lot of HubSpot automations. And so I think there is a remote first company, you have to kind of do a lot of work to build this ACH communication that doesn't require any human intervention, right. And so like, that's one thing we built by one, the first integrations we built actually, without them, what's the like, what send these clips to certain spot channels in real time, because we know that's where they need to end up, right. And we don't want you to have to do the legwork to get it that last mile. And always for these roofers companies, what we're trying to do, again, especially as we focus on sales and success teams, is replicate the good parts of the sales floor that you don't have anymore. Like it is nice as a sales leader or successful leader, to have that Ambien awareness, you walk through the forum, you can overhear how people are talking about it, which is good, because no one really wants to rewatch all of your direct reports, calls, right? This is, I feel like watch your calls is like eating your vegetables. Everyone says, oh, yeah, I'm watching a lot of these calls, you're not right. And so if we can give you bite sized pieces, or you know, we can give you, here's this call your rep just had. And here's the 15% of it, that was noteworthy and interesting. And now instead of having to review 30 minutes of calls, you can review four minutes of the call, right and feel like you're on top of it. And so I think it's a way like we have to find ways to compress down communication and make it automated asynchronous. And that's a lot of like, what we're focused on,
I love the expression you used about last mile, you know, just getting that that message last mile delivery to where it needs to reside, I think is so huge. And plus, and just the ability and the time savings of being able to put your fingers on it, versus going through pages of notebooks and old notebooks, and oh, that notebooks would be office and you know, all of that. And I'm guilty of this, I was traveling one time using my notebook while I was waiting for a plane, left the notebook in the airport. And then I got nothing, because you know, taking the time to recreate all your notes is just painful and doesn't happen. And so, you know, just the increase to the bottom line based on productivity seems like that would be really significant in so when you're talking to companies, what are some of your talking points when you are, you know, like, this is why you need to use our product. And here's the business value for it, such as increased productivity.
Yeah, I mean, I think everyone also in our first environment is really focused on well, one, how do we like reduce the fatigue? How do we increase productivity. And so it's funny, we've actually expanded our scope a little bit, we started with just this, our goal is to replace notetaking, right? Like, we still kind of autogenerate notes for you, in the same way that Netflix used to send you DVDs, right, it's kind of a bridge to a better world where you're just gonna, here's the two minute highlight reel from this call. But we kind of expanded out not only from just that stream, to anything we can do to help you run the meeting better, right? So we actually will tell you, if you start monologuing for like two minutes, we give you a warning, we tell you what your talk time we tell you how much time is left in the meeting. We're working. We're beta testing right now, I think that kind of when you get on the call, Hey, here's your you're talking to here's the related off, here's the last time you spoke with them. Here's their job titles, here's where they're based, like all that kind of stuff, that all of us that are on back to back to back calls were like, Wait, who is this person? Again? What am I supposed to do in this meeting? Right? So anything we do to help with cutting down the pre call prep, and then really automate POST call data entry. And I think that is the piece that both the ICS on the frontlines and managers was because, you know, like I was complaining about how hard is to get salespeople to enter notes that actually take second place to getting everyone to put their data into our CRM and diligent and log everything. And so one of the things we do is well connected to their CRM since a great sales rep. I had a call, we immediately looked up all the contacts associated accounts opportunities, we auto generate the summary of the call based upon the moments they highlighted while they were on the call, automatically filled in, but all the right contacts did all that data entry stuff that like managers hate kind of browbeating people about but they kind of have to and so I think that's also A big part of it is just like, what's what the humans do the things humans are really good at, which is the conversations and the detective work on the call to really uncover the insights and what's let the machines do what they're good at, which is syndicating these things on to the right places in the org.
I know being an entrepreneur, that you are probably wired to look for opportunities, but the timing of what you're doing must have you pinching yourself with what's going on. And the number of zoom calls and the fatigue that people are feeling and the reality that it's never going to go back to 100% the way it used to be, it must feel pretty exciting for you to be doing this work at this time. Especially when it's just so critical to supporting businesses.
Yeah, I mean, it's pretty serendipitous, right? I always feel bad about it. I'm like, you know, but isn't she because sales was the last group. I mean, we had, you know, teams, people working from home couple days a week, or, you know, it seems that remote. They're mostly engineering teams before the pandemic, right. Sales Managers especially, were, I think, the most reticent to let their teams work from home. And now everyone's done it for long enough that, you know, you're never gonna get, you're gonna put that genie back in the bottle. Right? And so yeah, tight, we're pretty fortunate with our timing here,
I actually would challenge you on the piece about feeling bad about it, I think it's, it's a tremendous support to companies as they're trying to navigate this and making these meetings more productive. And, and again, increasing productivity and making it easier for the sales team and the other users to do what they do best. I think it's a wonderful service that you're offering at a really critical time. That's
fair, and that, you know, like, I think the remote first work from home lifestyle is amazing. Like, it's personally one of the most impactful things in my life. And so if we can make that actually a better experience, not just kind of a, this is a fallback, because we can't do the in person one, you know, like, I actually don't like in person meetings anymore, because I am garbage taking notes in them right now got this pressure, I'm used to be like, Oh, crap, like, I should pay attention, like write stuff on the notepad. And, like you, I remember actually had like, a two day on site and Microsoft, our biggest customer, my last company, and I took two days a notes and left them in the seat back pocket on the plane on the way back, right. And so there's so many ways, reasons where like, especially with stuff coming around the corner, tech wise, I think we're in a place where, right now, I think it's been a bit of a thrash for associates, companies that weren't built for first had to kind of adopt processes. But I think once you do it really well, and with all the tech coming down the line, which is really exciting around AI, it's gonna be even better area, you're gonna say, like, gosh, I, you know, oh, by the obfuscation maybe because I like seeing humans. But otherwise, you know, the tech we've got for remote work now makes it just way better than what we had been before.
I'm going to take a sidebar here for a second, because I'm just thinking about using this technology in education environments. I mean, that would be really cool. Because teachers can go on and on. And the students are like, Wait, what was the key? What was the element? You know, they don't know how to take notes. And I mean, it may not be your core market, but it's just one of those things like me, and my kids could really use this this tool.
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we're starting with this focus on people talking to customers. But we've also seen, like, recruiting is another good place where the recruiting process super weird, too, right? Like, you have a conversation in person, then you try to explain to me the interesting parts of that conversation. And I try to dig in further. And, yeah, so like recruiting education, you know, especially like healthcare, there's a lot of areas where having this kind of like, thing backing you up. So if you miss a thing, you come back to it. So there's a lot of compliance reasons to and like I said, in the future, I think you're gonna get to a place where the system can keep adding more and more assistance to the system, right, the system will be able to start telling you things that you should be telling a person, like, for example, I do think one of the things we've lost her in person meetings, if I'm in a conference room with you, and I'm demoing something to you, I have a keen awareness of when I've lost you, right, cuz I can kind of glance over at you and tell like, oh, I need to like engage him ask a question. Well, now when I share my screen, you're like this little tiny thumbnail on the corner of my screen. I don't know if I want I don't know if you're still alive. Right. But you know, we now have videos controlled. So one of the things I think we'll be working on the near future here is, you know, we can look at the we can analyze people's faces and do the same stuff that humans do, right, looking forward tells of disengagement, and alert you on the call, Hey, it looks like you're losing Tony. Right? Like, ask him a question or like, you know, like, and so there still are places where the person is superior. But that's what I'm saying. Like, I think the tech is gonna get there soon enough that we can can replicate some of those things, even remote.
But I find it really fascinating because years ago, I've been in the customer experience space for probably 15 years now. And years ago was we were looking at what is it facial emotion recognition, software and things like that. I probably got the name a little bit off. It's been a while since I've talked about it. But you know that even what was possible then, and you mirror that, like some of the we wrote some articles talking about like Google Glass, and what could you really do with Google Glass, you know, as a fad for a while. But if customer service people on the front lines in a hotel had to google glass and you could tell who was approaching you and all this, I mean, obviously privacy issues, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, what you're talking about is basically the same thing you're talking about. How do you make the human being smarter In the moment so they can accomplish more. What's been going through my head the whole time here is you've been talking is, what's the speed of innovation going to turn into now? Because you can eliminate, like, if I have a meeting with Betsy, we talk for 30 minutes, I come up with an idea that I got to go have another 30 minute meeting and then someone else have another 30 minute meeting. We could just say, hey, here's the clip. Watch this clip every within five minutes. Everyone's like, got it. This is what we need to do.
Yep, yeah, it's getting pretty cool Roshi. Our system. Right now what it does is like it kind of works, we break up the call, right? So like, you're talking to Betsy, and you hear something insightful. You click a button, we figure out when Betsy started talking, when Betsy stopped talking, right, we transcribed the section we turn to highlight. And now we're actually using also AI to like, summarize the transcript so that we'll even have like a paraphrase short version of it too, which is also helpful. And you know, pretty soon we'll be able to do audio analysis of Betty's tone, she says this, like, you know, not just text based sentiment, but audio based sentiment and actually send them in all sorts of fun stuff. So, yeah, I feel like a lot of science fiction books from my youth are, you know, very prescient, and I feel like I'm certainly living them more and more, you're making them happen.
I feel like you should have called it Jetson. Where like the George Jetson? No, I think it's really exciting. I was thinking of another use case, Tony, for us is, you know, these podcasts, there's so much gold in these podcasts we're up to, I think, today, we published our 39th episode. So there's so much great content from all of the people that we've talked to. And so Tony and I are in the process of writing another book, and we're pulling out some of those pieces of feedback from these podcasts. And I'm just thinking, if we had had fathom, when we started the podcast, this task would be so much easier, especially if we were filing them in Slack channels, you know, right. Yeah, around all the different topics that we generally talk about,
oh, what I really want for us, Betsy, here is I want to link directly to her LinkedIn account. And so as we're having this live conversation, you know, this is this is being recorded. We hit that two weeks before it goes live. Everyone's getting the preview of like, here's a snapshot. I mean, I think that would be really cool. Getting excited. Oh,
yeah. From a marketing standpoint, that's huge.
Yeah, I think videos tend to be a thing that requires a lot of effort to manipulate historically. Right? And I think that's our goal here. So how do we make this like super lightweight, rational? Oh, yeah. Like you should be able to like queue up, here's five highlights, we should tease out, send out a highlight reel to LinkedIn, and gotcha, be awesome. If you were right now be able to go back and look, oh, what is every remote first comment insight we've had over the last, you know, 39 episodes? Great. What's the 20 Minute highlight reel that look like?
Yeah, that's awesome. So Richard, what are? What are some of the things you do with your team to keep that focus on customers, that customers interested in culture, talk to us about what you intentionally do to really make sure that you really know your customers and that you're engaged with them?
Yeah, so I mentioned kind of the boom channel, and I mentioned your feedback channel, right, which is kind of the user voice curation, we also make sure that all incoming support messages, not the entire back and forth, but just the initial message is seen by everyone, including engineers, I think it's good for them. Also, just to see, here's what people are struggling with, we have obviously separate processes for like Eskalene, engineering affection, we actually need their help. I think one of the things that that is probably the most, I kind of briefly mentioned earlier, but one of most impactful things is our initial recall, kind of like user interviews, it happens after you first have a call with them. And so you know, someone will reach out to you and say, Hey, how'd it go, can I get 15 minutes of your time, I'll you know, send you an Amazon gift card for 30 minutes of your time. And so, you know, I was really inspired by the folks that the superhuman has this, you know, kind of very notable onboarding process where even for like a $3 month product, they do hand holding onboarding, we didn't really want to do that, we wanted to give you the keys to the car and give you a little like self service tutorial. But we really wanted to find a way to like, Okay, after you've taken the car up first time, with 15 minutes with you what's learned what, you know, questions, you still had what's feed that back into the team. And so that workflow has been tremendously valuable for us. And it also from that workflow, it helps us highlight people that are, you know, we think going to be really awesome advocates and early adopters for us, right? It's like, you know, to pick up on their volume of calls, their excitement for the product, their role, the company, etc, etc, we then kind of put them into like an advocacy advocacy group, right, and we give them kind of a, you know, VIP support VIP feedback, and send them like, you know, bi weekly updates on the roadmap. And so that also helps to have like this curated for smaller folks that are really engaged. And, you know, in kind of consideration for that engagement, we send them like a swag box, of course, but we're also giving them kind of a nominal stake in the company itself, especially giving them a share of equity in the company, and so creates this really awesome advocacy group that gives us very honest feedback about the product about what we're working on, because they feel like she really invested in it, I think more than the average product.
Wow, that's a solid answer to their question I asked. You keep your customers engaged. That's awesome. So quickly. for you, if you were just overhearing someone, either in a coffee shop or on the street or in your, you know, I started saying your lobby, but I guess you don't have a lobby here remote first. But you know, if you overheard some people talking about fathom, what would you most want to hear them say?
Oh, gosh, it's a great question. I mean, honestly, I'd most want to hear them say things I don't like about the product, because that actually teaches me the most, it would hurt my soul a little bit. But like, that's what I've learned to like lean in on. Yeah, I mean, I think we see this a little bit organically, like where I hear organically from friends like, Hey, I've got on a call. So when they're using fathom, and they were just a few Civ about it, I do think, like, I like building things. Like I actually just like, from a personal perspective, what fills up my soul cup is those comments of people being like, this makes my workday so much easier. This like, this gives me more time to like live my life, right, as opposed to, you know, keeping me at work longer. And so that more than like usage metrics, and more than like revenue numbers, and you name it is the thing that like, fuels, I think me and a lot of the folks on our team. And so yeah, that was also what was great about YouTube was we had the same thing. And we're walking around, just going often hearing like, oh, my gosh, have you heard this cooling product? And like that? I don't know, that stuff, to me is what makes gives me purpose in life here.
I love that. That's the type of answer that we hear from true entrepreneurs is like, you know, how many are the bad stuff first? So I know what to go fix. But I don't wanna hear the good stuff. Because that does fill me up. Right? You know? Yeah, it's exciting. This has been phenomenon. And there's so many ways that I think people are going to find uses for this beyond what we've talked about. And obviously, you're going to keep growing the capabilities in that, what do you really see, let's say three to five years from now. I mean, you're 18 months into this journey, you're very early on, but you've been in the space for a while you're familiar with it. So where do you see three to five years from now?
Yeah, I mean, I think there was a lot of kind of head fakes or false starts in the like, AI front, started about two or three years ago, where people, you know, started claiming, like, you know, if then logic was AI, but we're like, you know, I think everyone kind of got like, turned off to the whole concept, rightfully so. But, you know, we're probably three, your timeframe is probably right, where we can actually do a ton of automated assistance, I think we're further away from the generalized AI that's gonna, like, do the call for you, right? Like, I think we're still decent ways from also feel beyond a job because there's some AIAG can talk faster for you, right? I do think there's a lot we can do assistance wise, because even we started 18 months ago, a lot of stuff was still very nascent. Like I mentioned, audio analysis, we've thought we were gonna build in 18 months ago. Turns out, there's like, no good data sets out there. For audio analysis, the only data set we could find was someone's watched like, 1000 hours of the TV sitcom Friends, and like, labeled it with various emotions, this is sad, this is happy. You can imagine what happens when you try to take that data set and train an agent and then apply it to a business meeting. If your business meetings are as like, you know, over the top as a friend's episode, you've got different problems, right. But I think, you know, we're generating that data, there's other people starting generate that data to allow us to start figuring out some these things. So you'll have even more of a leanback experience in the future. Right? There are a lot of companies couple years ago that tried to automatically detect action items in your meeting, I think they got about 85% accurate, which in AI means like, it's useless, right? Because if I can't trust it, not gonna use it. But I think we're not that far away from it being you know, there's no false negatives in this analysis. And you can really lean back and just have a conversation and it'll pick out here's all the actions, here's the feedback, here's this. And that, I think is, you know, that would be the next big evolution, where we don't have to have the human in the middle of training us telling us, this is what this thing is.
This has been an awesome conversation. I can talk about this all day long. You know, Richard, one of the things we'd like to ask our guests is, if there is a nonprofit or charity or some kind of great organization that you're familiar with, that we can give a shout out to put a link in our show notes. Is there any organization that you would want to shine a spotlight on?
Yes, organization for a while the EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation is great about there's a lot of things always going on in the web in terms of like, privacy and big companies doing things maybe they shouldn't, and more so like government's doing things they shouldn't. So EFF is a fantastic organization.
Awesome. Well, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure. We're gonna be watching we're gonna be using fathom, I can guarantee you that in spreading the word. And, you know, maybe we can rise up to the level of being in that community of advocates that get swag box. So
you play your cards, right? I'm sure you guys will. Oh, yeah. If your listeners want to try them again, we're a free app. You have found that video, actually go to fathom video slash pod. There is a waitlist about 70,000 people on it right now. We're pulling people off on it regularly. But if you go to that length video slash pod, you will bypass that completely.
Wow. That's amazing. All right. Well, thank you so much. We appreciate your time. We know you're busy. I really appreciate you sharing what you're doing and we will definitely be watching the progress.
This has been a ton of fun. Thank you for having me. Great.
We'll see you soon. Bye.
Betsy. I absolutely love this app. So, a couple things that stand out to me, as I'm reflecting back on what Richard said, number one, it's really fascinating how they have gotten to know their customers so well that now they're developing the tools to really make meetings better. And I think that's really important, because so much of what businesses do happen within meetings, whether it's meetings with your customers, or whether it's meetings internally, this can really help the organization get on one page much faster, you get a little clip of what happened in that meeting, or five little highlights or something like that. And everyone gets on the same page very quickly. So that's one piece of it. Then the other piece that struck me which we didn't even get into this, because we had so much other stuff to cover is if you think about this, from a customer experience perspective, the very experience of meetings is changing. I mean, this is we're at the threshold of something brand new here. And it is radical. I mean, we talked about zoom a year and a half ago, when we started our podcast and how everything was happening on Zoom. Heck, you and I wrote profitability back in 2018. Over zoom, we didn't meet in person, all the write that book we did over zoom and Google Docs and such. And so we've been living this way for a while a lot of other people had to adapt, and they had to come up with these, you know, understand what this experience of remote first was like or school remotely whatever it may be. And so the experience that they're really pulling out here is one that's phenomenal, because, you know, being able to read the facial expressions, being able to give you clues when your your audience may be disengaging. Any of those types of things that they're building into their future. toolset, will change how we meet that, in fact, we might actually prefer meeting on something like a zoom app, because it helps us to have better meetings helps us to connect more as human beings, which is an irony when you think about we're doing this over a software.
Yeah, I agree. And to your earlier point, just the idea of internal alignment and sharing, not just someone's filtered version of what happened, but the actual clips where it still doesn't take them an hour and a half to watch a video of a meeting. It's here the highlights straight from the horse's mouth so to speak. And I just think it's incredibly power. I'm very excited about this and my wheels are spinning on how we congruent he can incorporate this into a lot of the different aspects of our business. So with that, Tony Always a pleasure we have so much fun thank you for being here. We so appreciate our audience please if you enjoyed this episode, give us a thumbs up be sure to hit the subscribe button and we'll see you next time on The really know your customer podcast
thanks for joining us for this episode of really know your customer. We hope you gained a lot of value from being here today. If you want to learn more about the work Betsy and Tony do to help their clients thrive. Visit Betsy at V congruent group.com and Tony at Tony botto.com See you next time on The really know your customer show.
