Richard White – Your Team Must Understand your Why

Tim Melanson: Hello, and welcome to today’s episode of the working home rockstar podcast.

Excited for today’s guest. He is the founder and CEO of fathom. And what they do is they’ve got an app. The app helps remote teams take notes automatically during their zoom meetings, so they can focus on the discussion at hand, excited to be rocking out today with Richard White. Richard, are you ready to rock?

Richard White: I’m ready to rock Tim. Ready to rock?

Tim Melanson: Good. So let’s start off with a good note. So tell me a story of success in your business that we can be inspired by,

Richard White: um, early in my career. You know, I think, uh, I was really interested in doing this like one, this one sort of idea. And then I saw that it, someone kind of launched that idea and I was kind of bummed my coworker at the time, showed me this like news clipping news clipping showed me this, this article online.

And instead of, kind of like gave me ejected by that I actually cold emailed the people that, that built that, that were building that app. And I emailed them and said like, basically like your product is like, technically really impressive. But like the design is really bad and I wanna be a designer and I think I can help you.

Uh, and it actually, you know, I was kind of just a random cord mounter and turns out they actually read it. They responded. And I ended up like working with them for, you know, good amount of time. And actually that was a company that was in the first batch of white Combinator, which is like now this pretty famous seed fund seed funding organization.

And it kind of made my career. That’s kind of how I met all the people I know now. And, you know, got me into startup. Wow. Okay. You

cold emailed somebody. a potential competitor and ended up working with them. That’s really, really cool story, right on. Um, okay. So then, you know, that worked out really well but sometimes things don’t work out well.

So we do talk about the bad notes. So tell me a story of something that didn’t go as planned, uh, on your journey and how we can recover

or avoid. Yeah. A couple years after this, I had started another company called user voice and we were doing decently well, we had raised some money. Um, but we were, you know, one of those classic startups where we were, you know, spending more money than we make every month.

And that was fine. We kinda had a plan, uh, and I had delegated all of the finances to my co-founder and just said, okay, you’re in charge of this. I was the CEO, but I was like, cool. I don’t like doing finances. I like, I like, just like, you know, I’m like a designer. I just like making pretty software and, you know, So we were burning money.

Burning money seemed fine. Seemed fine. I, I think I remember at some point I was like, it feels like our bank balance is lower than it should be. I don’t know. And I didn’t really follow that thread. Um, and then I think one day I actually was like, you know, dug into the finances myself and realized that my co-founder had like, oh, like misestimated something like very wildly.

And we were actually like honor trajectory to run out of bit money, like in a few months. And it was kind of like this, you know, Don’t, I don’t think I’ve ever panicked more of my professional career when I was like, oh my gosh, like we we’re, we’re gonna go out of business. And because I just, just screwed up.

Right. We just got the math wrong. And thankfully, like we’re able to get some, some folks to put in much extra money and like retooled a number of things. But I think the, the lesson I learned there was. Or things in your business, like, you know, your finances, you can’t delegate to someone else, or you can delegate, but you will have to like trust, but verify and check their work all the time.

And I think in general, I’ve seen that where a number of things throughout my career, I’ve that I don’t like to do, like marketing or finance or whatnot. I can delegate to other people, but I still have to, I can’t just completely check out that part of the business.

Tim Melanson: Yeah, you need, you need at least, you know, regular reports from that business.

I mean, that’s what a CEO and a big old company would do. Right. They, they have their people and then those people sort of report with the, you know, the summary the executive summary.

Richard White: Yeah. I was so young at Eva, just like, oh, sounds like you’ve got it. Right. Like that’s even think to ask for these things.

Exactly.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. And, and I mean, I think, uh, I think you are kind of demonstrating the opposite of what a lot of people. On this podcast and, and even listening, I do like a lot of people have a hard time delegating. You actually went and got and delegated quite easily to people, which is really impressive.

Richard White: Yeah. My over of delegated.

Tim Melanson: Yeah, but there’s, but that’s, it’s, it’s a really good lesson because it’s, it’s one of the reasons why people have a hard time delegating is cuz they want to be involved in everything and you, you can’t be involved in everything, but you’ve gotta have some sort of idea of what’s going on.

Right. So like where would you find the balance?

Richard White: Yeah, I think about it being, I call it being like, I think the, the term’s like T-shaped right where it’s like, you know, I’m a couple inches deep across all the disciplines, right? Marketing, sales, finance, you name it. And then I’m super deep on one discipline, which for me is like product like product design and how we build the product.

And so I think it’s, I, you know, and I think most of the families, I talk to have the same sort of like T shape, right. Where they’re kind of generalists. They have their domain of expertise, but they’re, they’ve kind of learned over time to be generalists. So. At least they have enough background to have the conversation with the head of marketing, the head of finance, the head of sales and not completely not have zero idea about like what the other person is saying to them.

Right. I think it’s kind of important to you understand how all the pieces kinda work, even if you’re not, you wouldn’t be an operator of those pieces yourself.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. And you know, part of the main topics on this podcast really is that when you do become a business owner or even self-employed, you tend to wear all these hats of areas that you might not have expertise in, like finance or like marketing or like sales.

Right. And, and I mean, you know, you might get into business because you’re really good. You know this skill and think, Hey, you know, I don’t need to have a boss. I can do this myself and you end up having to do all these other things. Right. Uh, but that’s a good thing because if you learn how to do all these things, even though you’re not great at them, you at least have an idea so that when someone tries to, you know, when you try to hire somebody, you know what you’re hiring for.

Cause that, that, that can be a challenge too, is hiring. Somebody to do something that you don’t know how to do.

Richard White: I, I think that’s like the hardest challenge, right. When you’re getting started. And, uh, you know, I think my original strategy for this was like, okay, I’m just gonna, I’m not even try to do it all.

I’m gonna immediately delegate and hire someone do this role. And what I evolved to do is like, I’m gonna try to do this role. For a little bit, just so I like I have to get in there and try it myself. Right. And am I gonna do an a plus job? No, I’m probably gonna do like a C minus job, but at least then I’ll have an appreciation for like what the levers are and how this thing kind of works.

And then I’ll be so much smarter when I do go hire someone to do the, a plus job for me.

Tim Melanson: And the other thing is you’ll be a lot more grateful for what this person is bringing to the table, you know, cause I know as a service provider myself, you, you get that quite often that people don’t understand what you go through on a day to day basis and they’re asking you things going like, oh yeah, you just whipped that up, right?

Yeah, yeah,

yeah. No, no problem. I’m like what?

Richard White: that’s a good point too. Yeah. I think people, I, I was a much better person to work for or work with because I had some appreciation for like what that job.

Tim Melanson: Right on. So now we talk about fans and, uh, I suppose, you know, nowadays with social media, the audience is everywhere.

Uh, but, but I like to make a, distinguish a distinguishing between what an audience is and what a fan is. And so how do you go about, you know, converting the audience into a fan or, or how do you go about even getting the audience in the first.

Richard White: Yeah. I mean, I think so we, with fathom, we kind of had a very fortunate situation where, you know, we’re building an app for zoom and then zoom announces.

They’re building out this, launching this whole new marketplace for apps. And, you know, those types of opportunities only come around every so often. And so that was a, a great way for us to kind of boot strap kind of. The audience, if you will. Right. Uh, and get a bunch of folks trying our app for free. Um, but I, I, I really think a lot about how to build fans because I do think not enough companies, I think so many companies just think about getting users like, oh, we just want people using the product.

And I don’t want people using the product. I want people like loving the product. I don’t want people liking it. I want people loving it. And so, you know, I mean, one is first and, you know, step one is like, there’s, you have to build a great product. Right. And for me, the hack for that is always, I’ve always built products, that solved problems that I personally had.

And so it’s like, if it really crushes the problem for me, I have some confidence that, oh, like crush for the folks and obviously to do research and stuff like that as well. But obviously I have a big, great product, but I think the other two things that people tend to miss is we also try to pair a good product with like really, really good customer care.

And so I. Most free products. It’s impossible to like contact anyone and get any help with it. Right. It’s like, there’s always just like, oh, go to the knowledge base. Or they like try to like hide from their quote unquote users. And we really early on invested in, um, you know, Making out a really good customer care team, making it really easy to make them accessible, making sure they’re incentivized, not to just give the most, you know, pat answer, but give a really detailed answer, incentivized, even jump on the phone with you and talk you through it.

Um, and I always talked about giving five figure, like five figure support for $0 product. Right. Um, so that’s one half of it. And then the other half is really when you do find people that. You know, kind of power users, right? That really love the product that are, you can tell, are telling their friends about the product, like find ways to get them, you know, to bring them into the fold.

So we actually have a thing for fathom called fathom founders club. And after we see people get to a certain level of usage, if we’re talking to them in the super excited about it, we invite them to be joins club. And of course we like send them out like swag and stuff like that. We send these big boxes, like shirts and hats and whatever.

Um, but we also give them a small piece of ownership in the company itself. Um, and this is a kind of a new idea. I’ve seen a few companies do. But it’s still pretty, like, it’s still pretty rare. And so a lot of companies have advisors and we just look at our, like our power users as advisors and we treat them as such, um, because they’re giving us good advice about how to make the product better.

They’re telling their friends, um, and it’s been kind of a, a huge, you know, huge success for us so far to have kind of this like army of fans. Right. It’s very similar to music, right. Where you can marshal to like go tell their friends, rally folks online, just keep water.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. I mean, your best sales people is happy, is happy customers.

Right. And it’s funny that you say that, cuz it’s like, it’s, it’s kinda like coming full circle with how you contacted a company because of, you know, a similar, you, you would’ve been probably a power user to them. yep. You know, and you actually ended up bringing a lot to the table, which makes sense. I mean, people are, who are fans of your product.

You’re gonna bring things to the table.

Yep. And we’ve had fans turn into investors, you know, we’ve, we’ve had, you know, it’s, it’s there it’s I think probably the most important resource, right? It’s not enough to have just like people that like you right in this day and age, there’s so many products out there.

People really need to love you. Yeah.

And you said it like this day and age, there’s so much competition in just about every market. That there’s gotta be something that distinguishes you from everybody else. And like you say, the customer service, Hey, I, I, I know what you’re talking about, cuz I mean, there are some apps you cannot get a hold.

Of yeah. Whoever, you know, wrote it or, or did it, and, and it is interesting that you say that because, um, I’m a developer myself. I do, I do development for websites and I actually contacted an app maker because there was feature that I wanted and I, it didn’t do. And I was like, so I sent it to the, to him and.

Turns out. He did it. I was surprised that he responded back, but this is awesome. Now I have a really, really cool feature that I’m gonna use on multiple websites and I’ve also sent it to him and now he’ll be able to probably promote that same feature cuz no one else offers it. That’s why I asked him for it.

Richard White: That that’s another great point. I think. There’s one, like one level it’s like just doing good customer care, like solving problems, but it’s also another level of like, oh, you actually have a good system internally for like how to like manage and organize product feedback. Cuz most companies don’t like most companies you fill out their survey or you tell ’em some of their, their product.

You never hear anything about it. And it’s funny, my last company user voice. So in 10 years on this problem. So like we’ve got a really good process for that internally, but. It blows people’s minds still when you’re like, you know, they fill a survey and two weeks later you’re like, oh, we built that. You know, the thing you asked about in your survey response, we’ve actually built it.

Right. And it, you know, it, most companies just kinda drop that on the floor, just goes, gets filed somewhere and, you know, never sees the light a day to be able to like tie back. You said this, because you said this, we did this. That’s a game changer, I think for most people’s experience.

Anik Malenfant: Hi, my name is I’m from mastering Ascension, and I’ve been working with Tim Melanson and the creative crew agency for a number of years.

Now, Tim is my go-to guy for all things technology and his team have helped me to really. Create the platform that I need that represents my brand, my message, and connects me directly to my ideal clients. What I particularly love about Tim is before he starts to dive into the technology, he always makes sure that he understands what your global view is, what your ultimate goals are.

So then that way you’re not wasting a lot of time back and forth. Switching around technology or platforms. He creates something from the get go that is scalable, which is highly, highly, um, beneficial for any business. What I’ve experienced from Tim and his team is they’re highly responsive. They are a wealth of information, and they’re gonna offer you the tools that you need to really make the mark that you wanna make in the world.

So that’s my recommendation for Tim. He’s awesome. You’re gonna love every. You won’t regret it

Tim Melanson: three a hundred percent cool. Now, so let’s talk, uh, I mean, we’re, this is a great segue into the next topic, which is talking about the band and talking about the people around you. Uh, I’m wondering, like, what is your approach to, you know, to building that, that, that band around you and, and actually, what was the first thing you delegated?

Richard White: It would be another question for you. Oh, that’s a good question. um, you know, it’s kind of changed throughout my career, right. I think, you know, early on in my career, I was more hands on like writing code myself and, and pushing pixels. Um, and first things I delegated, obviously, like I told you was kinda like finance and marketing, all these other kind of aspects.

And now it’s actually kind of like inverted. Where I actually, you know, now that I’ve worked with a number of good developers over the years with fathom, you know, my previous company voice, I started and I wrote code kind of day one, myself. I have had a friend that started doing that with me, and then we try to find people to do sales and marketing for this company.

Now that I’ve got, you know, spent 10 years in market and no good developers and stuff like that. I actually first delegated the program. And I focused on doing all the other little things that I had, you know, learned over the years to do like I do, you know, I’m a couple of just deep in marketing sales and whatnot.

So, uh, I delegated out customer care and actually engineering and I’ve stayed on marketing and, uh, product design. Interesting. And

Tim Melanson: I mean, I can speak directly to that because that’s something that I have not delegated and I’ve considered delegating multiple times, but you know, it is my genius zone. So I’m, mm-hmm,

Having a hard time dropping the genius Joan zone and giving it to somebody else. But I think you’re on something, cuz if I did, I mean, as a business owner, I mean, I I’ve had discussions with people before, like what is the CEO supposed to do? Right. What, what is their main roles? And actually I can ask that to you.

What, what do you think are the main roles of a CEO that they should be doing in their business?

Richard White: Well, I, I think in a lot of ways to, to follow on the band concept, it’s almost like. You play the music with the, with the, you know, band members you have, right. It’s it’s also kind of a, it’s not a like, oh, I’m definitely gonna delegate this because I don’t wanna do it.

It’s okay. Well, who do I have around me? Who can I get to join me on this mission? And then I kind of like, we, you know, we kind of figure it out based upon that. Right. And I think if I didn’t have great developers to, to delegate to, or if that was still my, my superpower, I think my superpower is product design.

And so. Have to delegate that with, I’ve got some folks that I collaborate with, but I still own that. And so it’s a little bit kind of like, where are you strong? Where are you weak? I think you should always stay. I think one of the 6 million, my last company is I got out of product design too early and let other people just completely come in and they didn’t have the same vision I did.

So I don’t know. I kind of resonate with the stay with, in your genius zone. If that’s the thing that like you wake up in the morning, we really wanna do. Ah, I like the whole point of doing it. Your own business is like, you get to do the things you don’t wanna do. So maybe I wouldn’t delegate that, but depending upon who I had available, I would find those folks to, to work on the rest.

And then what do I think the CEO’s supposed to do? I think that the, I think the most important thing is, is creating shared context. Making sure everyone on the team understands the why’s behind what we’re doing. I think most people focus on like telling everyone what they should be doing. And not enough time to telling ’em why they should be doing this because when you get a good group of people around you, you get much better outcomes from them when they understand the why.

And honestly, if they understand the why, they’ll, they’ll figure out the, what, if they’re smart enough, right. And their, what might be different than your, what would’ve been, or you might combine together to come up with like the better answer. But I think that’s the hardest part, cuz you always have. Kind of like this full omnipotent view generally of like what’s happening and how all the pieces should be working.

They don’t have that. It’s easy to forget that as a CEO. And so you have to be very intentional about finding all sorts of ways to be like, oh my gosh, I need to spend time making sure my team all knows what each other’s doing and why they’re doing it, where we’re going. And when. Wow. Love it.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. And, and I agree.

I mean, especially like you say, if you have really good people around you, you don’t need to tell them what to do. There’s a million ways to do the same thing. So the way you do it might not be the way that they might do it. You’re really wasting your time. , you know, let them do it the way they want to do it.

As long as you get the right result out of it. And like you say, I mean, if you give them the right reason to get that good result and they’re gonna work harder for it, right. Yep. Yeah. And, uh, it’s funny that you said something about the, uh, you know, it depends on who you have around you, uh, a music story.

And, uh, I’ve read it in a book. is that when the Beatles formed, uh, Paul McCartney plays all instruments, he’s a very talented musician and he was back then as well. And he ended up picking up the bass cuz it was too many guitar players. So. You know, he ended up being the bass player for the Beatles only because not, not because he wanted to, he would probably have preferred to play piano or, or guitar, but there was no bass player.

So he, he did it right. He filled in on the, on the gap that was there.

Richard White: That’s amazing. Cool. So

Tim Melanson: now, uh, how about, so speaking of, uh, you know, jamming and practicing and all that stuff, you know, we talk about the jam room as the home office or wherever you get your work done. Tell me how you have found a place to work, you know, O over the years, uh, working from home.

Richard White: So it’s essentially, I might take a pretty, very different tack on this than maybe most, most folks you have on this podcast. At the beginning of both of the companies, I’ve started user voice and now FA. I spent at least a year, most recently of almost two years kind of living nomadically when the company started.

And so rather than having like one space that I go work in, I actually, my whole. Challenge to always figure out how do I find a place to work? How do I have a good workspace anywhere I am. Um, and so there’s a few kind of things. Like one is like, I always focus on making sure I had like a good internet connection me back in the day.

It was like, I had like these, like MiFis now I make sure I can tether to my phone. Um, I actually travel with a good microphone, um, because my team’s fully remote and I actually find. It’s the difference between listening, you know, I’m setting contacts all day I’m meetings all day, talking to folks about what’s happening and here having good audio for those calls just makes it so much easier to listen to me for hours than not.

Uh, so I like my like travel kit is, uh, a battery pack. So I have a battery pack that can like do two full charges of my laptop. I have my phone, which I can tether from. I have a microphone with. I usually bring a like memory foam seat pad. Um, and I also make sure I, like, I actually never use an external monitor and this is also a really weird thing.

Cuz back in the day I would have a home office that I would sometimes. Stay at. And I found when I had external monitor, I get used to like all of my, you know, my like productivity was based around how I use this space. Right. And I get really addicted to the external monitor. And I found that whenever I went traveling and was like working from a car or working from an airport, I wasn’t as productive and I actually get easily frustrated cause like, oh, only I had the big monitor.

I would be so much more productive. And so I almost had to just like for a while she had to give up, use extra monitors because I couldn’t deal with this kind of switching cost between those two experiences. And then I just got really good at working on a small screen and like got some apps to allow me like have multiple desktops and that sort of thing.

So it’s been an interesting challenge, I think for the last few years, No matting around the Southwest. I did calls outta like the passenger seat of my car, you know, with like a virtual background. At times I actually traveled with a tiny little laptop desk that had like wheels. It was a standing desk and, uh, and honestly just worked from a lot of couches in Airbnbs.

And so got really good at like looking at Airbnb listings and be like, okay, There’s a good couch. I can sit on. Oh, it’s got a recliner even better. It’s got a view even better. And so kinda get good at figuring out like, what is my happy place? And my happy place is sitting on a soft, comfy chair that reclines looking out on some view.

Uh, that’s where I’m most productive. So that’s kind of my that’s my jam room. Love it.

Tim Melanson: I’m experiencing that exact same phenomenon. I’ve uh, gone to the two monitors, uh, about a year ago. And now anytime I have to do something on my laptop, I’m,

Richard White: it’s, it’s frustrating. really frustrating. I’m like, ah, I feel like I gotta move this over here.

I can’t move

Tim Melanson: it.

Richard White: Yeah. So good call. And it makes, it makes you kind not want to, like, you’re just like, oh, I don’t even wanna do this till I get home now. Right. And it’s like, oh, it’s just not, not an option. I gotta get this. Yep. Yep.

Tim Melanson: So I guess it depends on, I mean, if, if you want to live that life of, of going to coffee shops and traveling around and working from a laptop, then yeah.

It’s probably better to not have a situation where you’re frustrated. Right, exactly. Yep. Because you’re gonna bring that into, into the work as well. Right? Yep. Wow. So now the, the, the mic that you have, so you just plug that into your, into your laptop

Richard White: then. Yep. Right on, look at that. That’s awesome. And it, it is a good, it’s also a directional mic too.

So like when you’re traveling and there’s some, you know, noise outside, right. It doesn’t pick up any of that. Right. I don’t have to, I used to have to like cancel meetings or moves like, oh, there’s someone Jack hammering outside or whatnot. Right. Uh, and so directional mic is. Yep. And

Tim Melanson: the, I mean, the laptop cameras are very good these days, so you don’t really have to worry too much about that.

It’s mainly just the mic that you’re thinking about, right?

Richard White: Yeah. I do also travel with like a little ring light, cuz like yeah. Sometimes the lighting in these places is terrible. Right. That’s the other piece I would bring. Love

Tim Melanson: it. Love it. Great, great advice. So now it’s time for your solo. So tell me what’s going on in your business that we you’re

Richard White: excited about.

I it’s, I mean, we, we started this company 18 months ago. We launched just under a year ago. Uh, and it’s, you know, I think the first six months, you know, it was kind of a struggle and like we were, we learned a lot about, you know, how to make the onboarding process better and so and so forth. But now we’ve hit our stride and you.

It’s amazing when all the pieces come together and you see all the graphs start really going up into the right. And so we’ve been growing like 30 to 40% a month for the last four or five months. Uh, and it’s, it’s just really fun. Um, you know, has a brings its own set of problems. But, but yeah, and again, I think I wake up every day, mostly excited about.

Getting emails. We have a slack channel called boom, and boom is where people post just like video clips from fathom or like, you know, screenshots of emails where people are just effusive excited about the product. And I always found that far more exciting than like, Even making money, right? Like the idea that people love, the thing you’re building.

Uh, and so I feel like we finally hit our stride where we’ve got tons of people who, you know, a lot of people are on zoom calls these days. Right. And a lot of people had the same experience I had on zoom calls, trying to take notes either on pen and paper. We’re trying to type up notes on a Google doc while you’re talking to someone that process sucks.

It’s not like it’s not fun to try to talk to someone and like also being really afraid. You’re gonna miss something important when you’re like talking to a customer or a client. And so, you know, with fathom, I think we’re not just making a free product that people love. We’re actually making people’s lives a little less stressful because now they can jump on these calls.

Fathom’s recording it, transcribing. Giving them easy way to like highlight the important parts of the call. So like you just have a conversation, uh, and, uh, you know, people seem to love it. It’s changed my work life. So it’s just fun to see something that like was an idea in your head two years ago now manifest into something that, that is really kinda game changing.

Wow. That’s really cool.

Tim Melanson: So, so, so what you’re saying is that you, how you somehow interact with zoom and you’re transcribing the call as it happens. Yep. Uh, I know that for me, I use, uh, I transcribe the calls from all these podcasts afterwards using something like descriptor, whatever. So this would basically take a step away.

Richard White: Yep. Yep. It’ll record the video, record the transcript. And then one of the most fun things is like, if it has the ability to like, while you’re on the call to basically like annotate. So if I was talking to you, you’re a customer I’m interviewing you and you said something really interesting, maybe a piece of product feedback or, you know, something I know I wanna share with my team.

Maybe you got really excited. I can just click a button and fathom and fathom will basically clip out that portion of the call. Like highlight that I can jump back to it after the call. I can. Take that clip, send it to my slack channel. And so it kind of also makes these video calls even more than a transcript.

I can just take small snippets of the audio and video and send it to the right places. My CRM, my slack someone’s email. Wow. That’s

Tim Melanson: amazing. How, how does that work? How do you do that? You just get

Richard White: a button or something or, yeah, you should, we just have a little desktop app. So when you, the, the M map is basically a desktop app or a zoom app, and we just have a thing that’s listening all the time for who’s talking.

And so it just pays attention to the transitions and the call. Right. And so when I hears something important, it like rewinds back in time to figure out when that person started talking listens for, when I start talking again, like it says, great, here’s the video clip for this? And, and I think it’s great.

Transcripts are cool and like kind of helpful in em on, but I actually find like the tone, like seeing the person’s face, like all of that stuff, like hearing the actual conversation is, is the killer feature. Right? And so I, I wanna be on the receiving end of notes from my team and going back to like making sure you have shared context in your team, you know, sharing some notes from a call is one thing, but when you can actually share, Hey, here’s like a three minute highlight reel of this call I had with a costume.

That then gets really everyone on the team aligned in understanding, you know, and excited. I love it. I’m gonna try yeah, please do.

Tim Melanson: Well now, so, um, now I’m curious, so you have a free app, so where does the business make money? There’s gotta be some sort of upgrade or

Richard White: something or, yeah, so we find that, you know, we want it, we want anyone to be able to use it as an imaging for free, and then where we’re making our money is when we see it spread within a company.

And you know, someone in management wants to use it across their. And then they’re like, you know, I want to aggregate all of my team’s calls so I can search across all of my team’s calls and be alerted when, you know, someone mentioned a competitor or some sort of, you know, interesting moment happened.

Right. And so whenever I ask individuals to pull out their credit card, we’re asking kind of like managers and, and executives. Oh,

Tim Melanson: it’s brilliant. So what you’re doing really is you’re, uh, the, the, the individual gets a benefit of, you know, automatic trans transcribing and all that stuff. But when it comes to an organization, they get the benefit of, uh, of searchability, you know, you know, making their teams work more seamlessly together and getting a better picture of what’s going on in the organization.

Richard White: Yeah. It’s like, you. Handoffs between teams, right? Someone bought the product and they got a handoff customer success here. Watch the highlight reel of the call. So you can really understand who this customer is. Um, someone’s ramping up and learning, you know, the business, great watch, watch these calls with this customer or watch these clips.

Um, and then, you know, it’s also fun stuff. Like, again, tying it back to like, how do we get feedback to the right place in New York? Right. Here’s a stream. All of the feedback that we’re hearing from customers on calls or all of the objections. So, um, I, you know, I think we’re finding that most people’s business are run on their CRMs and most of their CRMs are filled with notes.

And we’d like to replace that with video clips of customer calls going the right place.

Tim Melanson: Very cool. Richard. So how do we find out

Richard White: more about this. Yeah, it’s fathom.video. So not.com but fathom.video. And if you go to fathom.video/pod, uh, you will get the product not only for free, but you’ll make sure to skip our wait list.

Um, that’s we do end up waitlist. We have about 40,000 people on the wait list right now, cuz we’ve got more demand than we’ve got CS folks to service that. So, okay. If you go to fathom video such pod, you can skip right over that.

Tim Melanson: Love it. Thank you so much for all this and for rocking out with me today, Richard, it’s been a lot of fun.