What is up everybody? This is Ryan for the scale up show. You're not gonna want to miss this one I have Richard White on who is the founder and CEO of Fathom video. Check this out he had never heard this before. He was employee number one for one of the founders of Twitch. And they later sold the company on eBay. He then went on to create another company grew close to eight figures plus, and now on top of it started another company through Y Combinator during the pandemic and he unlocks his keys to virality, which he told me after the show he's never shared with anyone before on a podcast, so you're not gonna want to miss this. It's got the nuggets, it's got the goods check it out. How do you bro like a VC backed company without taking on investors? Do you want to create a lifestyle business or performance business or an empire? How do you scale to an exit without losing your freedom? Those are the questions and this show is the answer. Welcome everybody to the scale up show. This is your host, Ryan Staley, and I have a very special guest with me today. I have Richard White Richard is the founder and CEO of Fathom video, which is a free app that records transcribes and highlights your calls, you can focus on the conversation. He's part of a Y Combinator and 21. And he's he's basically part of the 50 Zoom app launch partners as part of his company. Richard, happy to have you on the show, man. Ryan, thanks for having me on. I kind of bought your intro again, I botched it before so I'm not gonna rerecord it. We're gonna roll with what I got perfect. Is that does better than perfect. Right? So yeah. So let's get right into it. So people understand where you're at in your journey. I love your backstory man, you have really, really cool things that I think would be inspiring for other CEOs and founders to hear. So why don't you talk about let's do that real quick revenue rundown. So in terms of your revenue, where are you guys are at in terms of AR?
We're at a big fat zero right now, Ryan, we were doing, we're doing kind of, I think kind of a consumer model to a certain degree for b2b products, where we focused on growth, like growth and virality. First, and you know, a strong plg motion, and we're only now starting to look at bolting on kind of monetization.
Okay, that's awesome. I'm excited to hear why you chose that in a little bit. So that's your zero? Where what's your what's your primary go to market strategy? In terms of increased? Or about? Yeah,
so we, in terms of how we find, folks, we, you know, so you mentioned, kind of, we're one of the 50, launch partners for this new zoom Apps Marketplace. So there's now like an Apps tab inside of zoom that launched about a year ago, we are one of 50 companies that were on that we're basically the only startup on that. So we had to kind of like beg, borrow or steal our way into that program. Because everyone else is like, you know, Asana and JIRA and stuff like that. And there's like fathom, and we've roped into leverage that we're the number one app on that marketplace. So we get a lot of signups through there. And then we have a very strong, you know, referral and virality viral loops, right? It's a product where, when you're using on a zoom, call, your other people could see like, Oh, you're using a thing to record this call, it kind of naturally leads to, you know, you're kind of dragging us into your meetings, which gets us to you get your attendees to sign up. So those two things combined are pretty powerful growth engine for us,
and how, and I love that. So how many users you have now, roughly?
If you're, well, we're in the 1000s of users? Yeah. Okay.
So can you explain a little bit deeper? What your solution does exactly from a notetaking perspective, and how it's unique? Because there's, there's a lot of different options out there right now in regards to it.
Yeah, I think, you know, I saw that like, taking, like, I'm really bad at taking notes, I'm honest, people were like, if you put me on a call with a customer, and I just take notes, like, I stopped talking, when I take my notes, it's very awkward. And I also know that like, you know, you got this time pressure, okay, to clean them up after the call, make sure they make sense. And then, you know, even after doing all that work, I'd often find that, you know, I will get those notes two weeks later. And I don't remember exactly what was said here, right, or I've read the notes for my sales team. But I don't understand what's said here. So that was kind of the key insight. And you know, we focus on real time recording real time transcription. But one of the key things for fathoms we also allow you to kind of like, while you're on the call, say like, this is an important moment in the call. And so there's a bunch of tools that maybe try to like automatically tell that we just don't think the ad is good enough to know this is an important part of the call. But we think that you always know like, Hey, this is an important insight that I want to share with my product team or, Oh, this is important objection that I want to show my boss later, things like that. And so you basically would give you this little kind of like almost like a, you know, control panel when you're on a zoom call. And so instead, I put your hands on the keyboard and type whenever you hear something important. You just click that button and Fathom and then from that we use AI to summarize the transcript, important moments and basically build out like a call summary. automatically fill out your CRM automatically ship the right clips to Slack, kind of do all that kind of like POST call, you know, shipping things around. And so I think, to kind of what's unique about us is Why don't we do all that stuff in real time, you can get a someplace, they'll give you a transcript, but they won't give you the video. And we think we really want to see the person saying the thing like that, you know, emotions they have in their face, right? Like, we're humans, right? Like, we like seeing the other human. And yeah, it really adds context to what's being said. So we do the video as well, the transcript, we do in real time, we give you that transcript with about five seconds of the call ending. So you can immediately do all your postcode work, and we do all this for free. So I don't know if anyone else in the market is doing putting all those things together.
That's awesome. I'm, I'm sparking ideas here that I said, maybe use it for my podcast as well. I do a lot for podcasts.
I you know, it's funny, I want to go on every podcast going and just gonna like, oh, my gosh, I should be using this for my podcast. Yeah. So I think we've got a handful of folks that use this for podcasting as well.
All right, well, as a friend of the pod, I commit to you that I will try it out. Now. I will give you live feedback. But I think it's awesome, because that's one of the things literally, if you're watching this on YouTube, one of the things you're going to see is my screen was bouncing up and down, while Richard was talking because my wireless keyboard went out. And like a Jack in any I have had fat fingered it. So my screen was moving all around. So I will I will make a huge effort not to do that this time, and I will get some get some Fathom on my, my computer. So alright, I'll get back on track. Are you how big is your team size? 12. Us? Okay, so you're 12 small team, which is awesome. And then are you bootstrapped or backed?
We're funded. We've raised about five and a half so far. Nice. Congratulations.
So you went through Y Combinator. And now you're back by five mil. So So walk us through that, what's your journey, and I want I want to share this, this is really critical, because, you know, there's other companies that you founded and started and, you know, I had one of your previous companies founders on here, Matt Yun just went live Actually, today, the day we're recording this. We're actually it was yesterday. I'm sorry. So it was not that ironic, but still pretty ironic that we're recording goes, yeah, it was a walk us through the history about how you got here. Because to just explain your story and how you got here today.
Sure. So real high level, my original background is computer science programmer, turned kind of product designer. And then early in my career, I kind of have an opportunity where I can like cold email these guys who were doing what I thought was pretty cool startup and told them their product was really technically cool. But the product, the design was terrible. And to their credit, they didn't just delete that email, they actually responded I ended working with them. And that led to me working with something called Kiko, which was in the first batch of Y Combinator, many, many years ago. And so that was great, because I got to meet some really, really great folks. The Reddit was founded in the same rooms Kiko, the guy that did Kiko went on to do twitch. And then that was kind of like, how I kind of broke into the startup startup world. Soon after that moved to California started User Voice ran that for 12 years use voice was also kind of VC backed, and then started Fathom fall of 2020. And it's interesting, because, you know, being kind of the second funded startup I've done, it's completely different than the first one, I feel like, especially, you know, the big time difference between the two. But the biggest difference is, I feel like, it's like playing a video game again. You know, it's quite say playing an old video game again, the second time and this time, you're like, way better at it, because you kind of can speed run it, you know, kind of how to play the game this time, right? I feel like your first time like when I was starting UserVoice, it's kind of like playing Minecraft for the first time where you like, get dropped in this world, you're like, I don't know what to do. And it takes you two hours to figure out like, Oh, you got to punch the tree to get wood from it, right? Like you just don't know, right? And second time around, it's like, oh, I made a drop in the game. I know exactly how we're gonna try to play at this time. And so it's kind of been fun to be speed running startups, if you will, this time around. So started with a good team, start raise money, like from day one, you know, start to think about go to market from day one, start building out the product from day one. So a lot of things moved a lot faster with further which has been a lot of fun.
So Richard, can I stop you right there? Because I want to ask like, you, I think that's a great analogy with punching wood on Minecraft and big gamer myself back in the day, not a big Minecraft or mind you but you know, I got an old school video game machine in my basement with like, 500 games on it, you know, some of the classics. Right? But here's the question I have for you. What is the single biggest learning experience you had from, you know, startup one to now?
I think that, you know, my background is like product engineering. So I think going into even UserVoice I had a good idea of like, how to build product, right? Like or had some sense of it. I think that the challenging thing was, you know, being a product founders, I had zero understanding of what it meant to what marketing meant, or what sales meant, or like, you know, other than the intuitive stuff, right? Like, I'll talk to you I'm trying to convince him by it right. But there's, you know, what are things why companies generally tells you to do is like to figure out which billion dollar company which billion dollar companies like go to market you're gonna copy because, you know, there's only so many kinds of go to Mark get different options, right? And usually, you know what those lanes are, and then figure out which one makes sense for your business and know how to execute against that. And like, I think this first time around, I had no idea what the lanes were, what the options were, it was kind of like, you know, I don't even know, it turns out, I was ordering off an ala carte menu, but I even know what the what the menu items were. And so I think one of the nice things is, he's always gave me an opportunity to work, I ran a marketing team, like I hired him people and worked with good marketing people. And I like ran the marketing team for a bit hired and good salespeople and worked with them. And now, you know, understand what that means. And so that's I think one of the biggest unlock is now and again, more like a T shaped entrepreneur, right, where I still have depth in building products. But now I have some breadth and understanding at least at a real high level, here's how here's what the other components of business need to be. Here's, we need to bring them on. Here's the types of, you know, programs we want to run here. And here's the type of programs that don't make sense here. And that just speeds up a lot. Okay.
I think that's a great summary. And I think the other thing, too, is you're being a little modest about user voice. Just because I mean, user voice isn't just like a tiny little startup. I mean, you grow it and it's approaching, you know, eight, eight figures, eight figures plus right in that area, right. Yeah, range. So like, it's not like it's a you know, you haven't hit a million yet. I mean, you did a great job with that before you decided like, Hey, I'm going to start another one, you know. So, and here's what I would say, too, is like, from your perspective, you mentioned there was, which billion dollar go to market strategy are gonna copy? How many go to market strategies? You think there are?
Less than 10? Really? Can you name? Yeah, I mean, think about every large company that started in the last like 10 years, you know, marketplace, like, you know, ad marketplaces, SEO, viral, you know, DTC. Yeah. Like, basically, you could take every marketing channel. So I think it's the interesting thing that that this, that question also underscores, which is, if you look at most large companies, and you look to see how they're doing go to market, they're doing all the things right, if you look at like HubSpot, they do all the things, right. They do like blogging, they do that they, you know, outbound they do inbound, they, they do it all. And so I think most startups, or most founders make the mistake of saying, like, Oh, I've got to do it all. But if you go back and look at the beginning, HubSpot was all about Inbound Marketing, right? Like, they break, they built out an audience, they did all content marketing first, and that's how they built their brand. But if you'll get Now you wouldn't know that, right? You know, similarly, like, there's, there's things, you know, other other companies where they got their complete start, like we did on a marketplace, right? And then they branched out from there, but all their first, you know, 10,000, or 2000, people came through a marketplace. And so, that's where I think you got to find one channel, like, that's gonna, like, get you almost like, it was a cold sore channel, like what's gonna get you like, 1000 users, and then what's gonna get us from like, 1000 200,000, right? And it's not going to be 13 different channels, it's gonna be like one. And so that was a new thing about fathom. So once we saw this, like opportunity open up to, you know, get on the Zoom marketplace, marketplace opportunities open up very rarely. And so when they do, you really gotta like, run, not walk towards jumping on them. Yeah.
So like, that is I mean, that's super unique that as a startup, you're like, Yeah, how did you make that happen? How did you get on Zoom's marketplace is like one of the there's the only startup right or one of the very few startups to get on there.
Yeah, it was it shaped we tried a lot of things. So we, you know, we started the company, we started building this. And then like, Zoom announced this and we kind of had this like, freakout moment. So it's like, oh, my gosh, it's perfect for us. But we're not involved at all. We actually went about like, trying to intentionally get investors that had connections to zoom. I like went through my network to get insurance people with Zoom. But at the end of the day, actually, the thing that worked, was I just send a cold email, I figured out who the the like programmet like manager was for this project. And I emailed him directly, and I just wrote this very, like, hey, are what your platform think it's great. Here's, I think we'd be a great fit for it. Here's why. And, you know, kind of like that email I sent to the Kiko guys way back in the day, Justin Emmett, and kind of got into the startup. Yeah, he was like, oh, yeah, that sounds great. Yeah, let's get you involved. And it was kind of like, you know, it was one of the things right, kind of like punched a wall for like weeks trying to get in and then just sent one email and great, it's all it's gravy. So the power of cold email.
Fantastic. Do you still have a copy of that email? Yeah. Can you can you share it? I would love to see it, man. Like I don't have to share it with everybody. I wish I could share with everybody if you're open to it, but I think that's absolutely amazing. Like, I would just love to see that like loved. I mean, you could block out the name or whatever, but just the content right. I think that's a good idea.
Yeah.
Would you be open to that?
Yeah, I'll take a bad look back at it. Make sure there isn't anything in there but
yeah, you that but that's like one of the coolest sets okay. So massive respect and then the Kiko side and the, the other thing that you glossed over with Kiko right As you got in there, when did you co found the company then were you one of the co founder, I was actually I was one of the like, the first I was like the first employee. Okay, so you're an employee, and you work for the guys that eventually created twitch. Right? Correct. Yep. But here's the cool part. You didn't talk about eBay. Right? What happened with eBay? That's the part you left out?
Oh, yeah. So So Justin Kahn, who is one of the cofounders of Kiko, one of the cofounders, Justin TV turned Twitch has always has these like crazy kind of like marketing schemes and want to, for this one, we decided to sell the company who's actually we decided we didn't want to work on this company anymore, and didn't want to get Aqua hired. And so he's like, great, we're just going to sell the company on eBay. And I was like, okay, and just didn't think anything of it was like, okay, that's not gonna work. And then it kind of didn't work. It was like a seven day auction. And, you know, the first half of that auction, people were reading articles being like, what are these idiots? Like, what a joke, right? And they're kind of making fun of it. And then it sold for like, a quarter million dollars on eBay. And then they were reading articles, like, is this the future of m&a? And people were like, you know, so it was kind of a hilarious turn of events. Right. And, you know, I don't think it was like a significant outcome for anyone, but it was kind of like, created a lot of awareness. Actually, like, you know, I did like a freelancing career for two years after that, just based upon the exposure, that selling the company on eBay, and all the press that came with it got.
That's awesome. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's hyper creative. And I just, it's funny, it's,
it's really a great start on it's not by the way, if in case you're wondering, it was not the future of m&a.
But that's, I mean, that's, that's fantastic. I mean, here's the weird thing. You'll see collectibles listed on there for a million dollars now. I mean, like sure, which is insane, right? But beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Hello, this is Ryan here real quick. If you are enjoying this episode, please hit the subscribe button and leave a comment or review. If you want more help or just want to learn more about what the top SAS CEOs and founders are doing, check out my website at WWW dot Ryan staley.io. join my newsletter. Check out other free content resources I have there. And let me know if you want to scale your business. Now back to the episode. So let's get back on track here. We got a lot about your history, some really cool things that you did. So let's talk let's talk about Fathom right now. So you are running a company, we're in the middle of the pandemic. And then you decided like, Hey, I'm going to I want to do this, or how did that happen? Exactly. Because that's really cool. And then I want to get into just how the solution works and the outcomes it creates and things along those lines.
Yeah, I think, you know, I had an epiphany. I think, the year before we started fathom that. It was probably time for me to step aside, right? I've been running user voice for 12 years. And every year, I generally asked myself two questions like one is this company uniquely qualified to teach me something? And 2am I uniquely qualified to lead it? And I think just 2019 was first time I said no, right. I'm one of those. And so, you know, had some Yeah, had a great executive team, you know, which Matt was a part of, and kind of was like, Look, maybe I should, you know, actually before thinking about stepping down, I actually we started kind of like a skunkworks team just build out new products and do product new product investigation. And so I kind of took a small team there, which is kind of nice allowed to have kind of this transition where I could step into kind of a startup like role that provided it to user voice. But while also kind of elevating kind of the the future, you know, soon to be leader of the company into the role without giving them the pressure of the title and all that sort of stuff yet, it's really great, you can start doing the job. And so there's kind of this nice transition period. And, you know, I think through that I realized, yeah, oh yeah, I really liked the zero to one phase, I love building new products. Unfortunately, the products we were testing didn't test as well as we would have liked. And so they turned into features rather than whole products at user voice, but instead that kind of got me the edge for Okay, it's time to do something new. And also, like my experience doing that was, I think I was in service of this new product research, I was on hundreds of zoom calls. And we're testing out this other product we're building. But while we're doing that, that's where I was like, Oh my gosh, doing hundreds of zoom calls, taking hundreds of notes and try to communicate that back to the team. I was like this is this is really painful. And like this is a big problem that probably more than more than just me has. And so that's was kind of the genesis for okay, we're already starting this transition for me to exit the company, right and just transition to a board only participation. And then I kind of stumbled on this idea and was like, oh, okay, this is the next thing. That's awesome.
I love that and so take Take it from there, like, What's your path to monetization? Because like, user voice for those of you that didn't listen, the episode has a totally different go to market motion that I that I'm seeing, right. It's it's more, it's sales orientated. So it's a kind of a mid market deal size. And so to go with a freemium model, like, What's your path to monetization and your vision for it, I'd love to hear that.
Yeah, I mean, I think we think this is kind of a really, you know, we've kind of thought about this business in two phases, like a the single player mode, you can tell, I've got like, my video game now, which is in a multiplayer mode. And the single player mode is like, you know, we want any sales rep at any company, just to be able to go up to the top of the website, you know, immediately get value, start using it, experiencing love it, share it with their team. And then we kind of see this natural transition where at some point, enough people on the team start using it, where we go have a conversation with the manager and say, hey, well, if there's like a, you know, you should roll this out across your team. And that's a more of a natural place, I think, to, you know, ask someone to pull out their credit card, when it's like, oh, we're gonna help you as a manager, or as a team lead or, as a founder, CEO, be able to kind of, you know, this empowers your team. But now you also there's like a side of it, you want to say you want some visibility into what's happening on these calls, and you want to really jump into the parts that matter to you. And so it's kind of a natural progression there where we see kind of, we put up a paywall, or some monetization while maintaining a free product right on the front end, which is important for that viral growth.
So what's your timeline for that? And like, how do you decide when to introduce that? Like, how do you decide, now's the time we make a shift in that paywall? Like, what KPIs are you looking for? How do you plan on kind of implementing that?
Yeah, I think, you know, I think sometimes it's tough sometimes, because a lot of times in startups, you have this tendency to, like, do everything at once. Right, massively do everything parallel. But I, I think it's sometimes important to like, Okay, we want to first prove, and before we even worry about monetizing, we want to, we first tried to prove out retention, right, we want to prove out, like, if we get people start using this, well, what do we let's make sure we build a product that they just naturally come back to and use over and over. And so kind of focus on retention first, and then we'll focus on Okay, now we've proven that, once we get people, you know, to some level of usage, they stick with it. Now it's focused on growth, and figure out, can we grow this? Because if we can't retain them, they no sense grow them, if you can't grow them, there's no sense monetizing them, right. Because I think for you know, we're trying to get some of that has real escape velocity. And so it's focused on growth. And all these things are really hard. Like, I think, you know, we spent, you know, we launched last fall, like August of last year, and I thought we had like a pretty good product, a pretty good onboarding process, yada, yada. Turns out, we had like a terrible onboarding process, we thought was pretty good. But like we to external onboarding, like success rate over the next five, six months, but we had to spend five, six months of like engineering time constantly improving it, reading the numbers, and proving again. And so I think also, in the venture world, it's like better to not do a thing than to do it poorly. And then, you know, you'd hate to kind of like, halfway do monetization, and then you get kind of these middling revenue numbers, and then you're gonna get dinged for middling revenue numbers. So we kind of think about taking things in serial, and like making sure we, we've basically checked one stage. And so now we feel like we've really nailed the growth stage was now now we're ready to like, let's focus on monetization revenue.
Okay, so let's, let's dig a little deeper on that. So you're saying the, the, the customer success or the implementation phase is what you really your customer experience really needed to nail? And you said, you, you started off, you thought it was good, what were your metrics when you thought it was good?
Yeah, so it's a Stage One was I was make sure we nail retention. And so we just looked at week over week retention, right, and look to see whether we get some like, you know, honestly, even anecdotally, in our beta period, we got to a point, we did like a nine month beta, private beta, and we saw at some point, okay, once we put people into this beta, they keep using it. The next metric we looked at was like onboarding rate, right. And we got, you know, once we have our onboarding rate to like, above industry standard rate, we can focus on growth. And then for growth, we focus a lot on like week over week growth. But we also just looked at also like k factor, which is virality. Sorry, how many for each user that signs up? How many users do they generate? And trying to get a k factor? That's over one. And so and then, you know, now or, you know, after you check all those gates is now we're looking at in terms of monetization? So yeah, that's right. Retention rate. And k factor would be the three metrics you'd be looking at. Okay.
And so what we're looking for for a retention rate,
you know, they're looking for does it plateau, right? Or is it plateau, right? Like, yeah, product so that product market fit usually see these week over week retention cohorts, where they just kind of like it's a diagonal line just kind of goes keeps going down to zero. And what we're looking for is like, what's the time to, like when it starts plateauing? We actually can hold P All right, you're never gonna get on to percent retention, right? But at what point? Do you find some point where you find a floor, right, and you find a footing and people just keep using after that. And so it took us probably five or six months to kind of get to that point too. And retention is difficult too, because it takes longer to get the data, right, like, right onboarding data moves very quickly. Even, you know, viral data moves pretty quickly. retention date has moved very slowly. So it takes a while to really like see those results to a certain degree.
So walk us through. Okay, so I think that that makes a lot of sense. And so when you're talking about K factor, can you just explain that for folks that haven't heard that term before?
Yeah, it's basically just, you know, for every person that signs up how many other signups do they generate, and you know, a product that's considered viral, or if it's like a factor is over one, which means for every user that signs up, they generate at least one more sign up themselves, right. And so what and that could be, you know, they, back in the day, you know, the original, kind of like Facebook apps and stuff like this, if you remember, like, the farm bills and stuff like that, they achieved virality by like, oh, you saw this app, and then it like, tries to trick you into like, spamming all your friends with it, or, you know, post stuff to your feed constantly to get other people to like, click through and sign up. And so they were tracking kind of like, what the K factor was there. And so, so that's it, that's k factors, how many users does each user generate?
So where are you guys at k factor wise? Now then,
we're over one. The interesting shooting thing for us is like, whereas a lot of this other, like, like a, like a Farmville type thing? You know, I think a lot of their virality was upfront, where it's like, you know, one out of 20 people will spam 100 people, right? And like, of those people, enough, people will, you know, sign up, right. And so it all happens pretty quickly, are so little more elongated, because what happens is, you know, there's some percentage chance that any attendee have a meeting where 1000s being used will turn into a sign up. And so, so we've been working a lot on like, how do we increase the rate at which attendees sign up for fathom, but it almost arcades are virality, it's more like an annuity, right? Like, every month, each user generates, you know, you know, some number of you have some percentage of new users, right. And so it just continues to stack up as time goes on, as they stick with the product. And so when you combine that with some sort of floor on retention, right, as long as you can retain those folks at some point, then they're just constantly generating, you know, throughout their lifetime, constantly generating new users, which is different than the like Farmville virality. Right? Where it was like all front loaded, so you have extremely steep curves up front. Ours is more like kind of backloaded. Right. So it's like all over time, you aren't every every month, our customer base by the gets larger, and they're on calls with many 1000s more people and those turn into larger, more signups and stuff like that. So it's a pretty fun flywheel to see start working, because we always hypothesize it's our work, but now we actually have the data to back it up.
So did you design that then from the get go so that people could see it like that weren't using it, that was like the initial thought, or did that kind of happen organically as you're going along?
They kind of have I mean, that's kind of the only way to do it, there's really no way to like really effectively do this kind of product without everyone in the meeting seeing it. And then for like, legal and compliance reasons, it would be, there's probably ways you could technically do that. But then the legal and compliance liability of like allowing people to like record anonymously, or like without consent, it's pretty scary. So just a function of how these products work is kind of, you know, makes it kind of work that way. But the problem is, like, I think a lot of products that do recording, if you're familiar with like things like a gong or something like that. They're not free products, right? They're like, very expensive products. And so, you know, we looked at that, and they're like, oh, there's a potential for virality here, but certainly no virality if you're a 60k, minimum product, right? Like that's not going to work, right. So we knew we had to build a, you know, when we that's when we knew we had to build a freemium model on this, and just get really good at driving down the operational cost to be able to afford doing a freemium play.
So I think that's wicked smart. And I love the analogy, you're dropping some great analogies ratio here. Like, you know, you got single player mode multiplayer mode, like former Video Game Nerd myself. The other one I like to see annuity though that you're like, basically, the virality is like an annuity because as it goes on more people they meet with see it, and then more people adopt it. Is there any kind of incentives you're leveraging for people to share with their friends at all?
Yeah, we do a number of different things. I mean, one we, we have a point system. In the app where we give you points for doing different things in these points are basically raffle tickets that enter you into a drawing to win $1,000 every month. So we do some we do a point system. And we find some people get incentivized by like potential to win the raffle. Some people just like having more having points more than their to their colleagues. We also do a thing where we have a kind of a program for like our top users. And like we kind of have a bunch of singles identify who our top new users are. We get them on the call. We send them swag boxes, and For our top to top users, people that are sharing, you know, advocating for us on LinkedIn talking about a swishy, give them small equity stakes in Fathom itself show up. Yeah.
That way. I've never heard of that before. But that's, that's, that's wicked. Cool. So how does that happen?
Yeah, we're really just kind of, you know, a lot of startups have advisors, right. And they generally have like, Yo, we got a couple of like industry experts that are advising the company, we give them some small stake in the company, but usually have like three to five, and we're just kind of, and we kind of stole this idea from a few other sharks that have done this, but we're just gonna say, Look, we're gonna have hundreds of advisors that are going to be our top early users that are giving us great feedback and advocating for us, right with their in their networks. And so you basically just give everyone, it's basically through advisory agreements, right? You're basically putting giving everyone an advisory agreement, so they can get equity in the company.
Love that model, man. Appreciate you sharing the details, too. That's wicked, smart, and very, very unique. So So what would you say right now is your biggest challenge that you're running into?
I mean, the next big challenge for us is gonna be monetization. Right? Like we're just starting off into this next phase and right, there's a, we're still figuring out like, what are the right, what is the right pricing model? What are the right price points? You know, the, you know, what is the right packaging? Right? That's, I think there's Yeah, pricing is, I think, one of the hardest things to do in SAS, right. And so, and that's kind of why we didn't want to do it, until we had enough people to go really price test this with and understood the product, but that's going to be the next big challenge for us.
So, so we're just about up on time. And, you know, I could talk to probably for another hour and some of this, I love nerding out on this stuff. So we're like, let me ask you a couple of questions. And then we'll give it a wrap. We'll tell people where they can find you and where they could get fathom. And, you know, we can even put it in the show notes. If that's helpful for you. We put a link. So if people want to sign up and get it for free, they could they could leverage it. How does that sound? That sounds great. All right, ma'am. So what's I guess, like a couple questions for you like, what's your favorite tech tool that you use right now that you wouldn't want to live without?
Favorite tech tool that I couldn't live without? That's a good question. I mean, we've started use, we built a lot of our I mean, my initial answers are kind of boring, right? They're ones that can't live without like Slack and HubSpot. Because we've built the whole company around that and as a fully remote company, right, like, a lot of our draw nations. It's all about like, having good Slack channels and grooming them and stuff like that. So but that's it. That's a pretty boring, boring answer. Yeah, I don't feel like I've got I mean, outside of our own product. I don't feel like I've got a ton of like I like I use I don't even use like a to do manager. I just use Google Docs for this sort of stuff. So I'm old school in this way. But I we use HubSpot for the first time. But I've been really impressed with HubSpot, especially building out automation spot. So much organization runs through automated automations, in HubSpot that are like routing things in the right place.
Awesome. And then where would you say the future of tech is going over the next few years? next three to five years?
I mean, I think I think there's a lot of advances being made in AI. It's interesting because a lot of like aI Philly's, like heavily marketed five years ago. But all the things are initially market is AI, we're not AI, they were all behind the scenes, a bunch of like, hard coded, like, you know, basically if then statements. And so for the first time, we're starting to see like this stuff kind of hit a tipping point where it can be really useful. Like we just started, when we started, we didn't even have aI summarization. We could do the transcript, but we wouldn't, you know, we just give you that, like you said, like, oh, this part of the call is important. Great. Here's a transcript that protocol. We're now using AI to say we can take like a, okay, you said this one minute clip was important. We got the one minute transcript, but we can compress that transcript into two sentence, a two sentence summary using AI. And it's actually pretty accurate. And so there's a lot of things we're finally at the point where the AI tools and models and stuff like that are getting good enough that very quickly, I could see us, you know, a lot of things will become truly automated in the next year or two.
Excellent. Well, we're unfortunately we're up on time. Richard, where can people find you? Where can they find out more about Fathom video, and then we'll have it a wrap.
Great. Yeah, if you're interested, check out the products it's Fathom dot video, actually go to fathom that video slash pod. You'll be able to skip our waitlist. We have about 50,000 people on the waitlist. And so we're always trying to bring new folks on but if you go to that link found that video slash pod, you'll skip right over that. And I'm on LinkedIn. I'm not much of a Twitter person. So if you want to reach me, just ping me on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to chat.
And he's got a digital headshot too. So that's the Richard White I'm sure this Other richer whites out there, but he's the one that looks like a video game, right?
Yeah, yeah, everyone thinks it's an NFT. It's not. It's just an eight bit like headshot.
That's cool. Okay, I get it when we wrap up and ask you where you got that because I like it. So anyways, was awesome having you on the show, Richard, thanks. I love the nuggets that you dropped your journey and then where you're going. So thanks for being on man.
Thanks for having me, Ron, it's been fun.
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