Voiceflow AI Agency Panel: Start an AI Agency that's Built to Last

Key Takeaways

why don't we get started I'm really really excited I just so hyped that there's such an awesome turnout to this event but welcome to the voo Community AI agency panel I'm joined by some of the top agency builders in our community to chat through questions that they really wanted answered when they were starting out in their Journeys so excited to to learn from them today so let's look at our agency Community outed glance this is something that was really shocking to myself when I looked into the data from our 7,000 community members so far we have 700 of you that are already early agencies and a hundred that are even mature agencies um and so you guys are huge there's a lot of you and we're really excited to create a community where you can all connect and share best practices because at the core of building an agency is really hard but there's nothing harder than doing it alone so again just being able to connect with other folks doing it in all different Industries is invaluable as a part of the event today as we've done our awesome Rebrand we're also going to give away two top engage event ATT attes our limited edition boo Community mugs uh they're very very awesome and pretty so um shop re questions in the Q&A tab down below be active in the chat we'll be keeping an eye out on that and then after the event we'll reach out to those that we thought were most engaged to give away our awesome mugs great so now I'm gonna pass over to Daniel to share more about our agency beta program yeah so excited to to kind of see all you this was kind of nuts because you know came when I we're chatting we were like oh yeah like we like we'll throw this event like maybe 30 people will come like it'll be really cool like Community best practice sharing um and then I think what is it came like 400 register attend yeah it was like 400 I was like that was we were thinking 20 like this is awesome yeah and I think this is really what we've seen uh over the past couple uh of months if not more is that like from the history of voice flow right like we have been around for about five years and we really work with with every industry and every industry from what we've seen um has a need for AI agents or previously what it was called is conversation design and so that was one of the weird quirks about building voice flow is that it wasn't industry specific it was that like every industry so we're working from like people from Like Home Depot and like Walmart to like JP Morgan to like into it to to to like orange or vone um it was across the world and it was every industry but it was really focused on Enterprise um a lot of these teams were really big they had like 20 designers building um their chat Bots their AI assistants or you know back then um and when chat GPT kind of came out and change the world last year it went from taking people like 20 people at JP Morgan six months to be able to build something to two people in like one week to be able to build the same quality of assistant and so from there we kind of saw the world blow up and every kind of SMB and midmarket Company uh who really wants an advanced a agent is now actually able to get them and that's really where we also saw the rise of the agency because a lot of these teams don't necessarily have the resources of the time in a house uh and they'd much rather work with an expert in there and we also get emails all the time for people asking if we do this and and answers we don't but you know hit up our community there's tons of people and so um that's what this slide is just kind of showing that like every industry uh needs AI agents and we're really seeing this uh come across so we're excited to see like how all of you grow the industries you start to focus on and figure out like how we can best support um as this goes on and so part of that is uh we're officially kind of launching our voice agency program this has been in the work for a little while a lot of you been asking about this for forever uh we just wanted to do it right when we did do it um and so there's going to be a ton of stuff in here there's going to be affiliate links rev share agency specific plans expert portals certified tiers private Discord channels road map sessions beta access preferred pricing and a whole bunch more really the goal of this is to be able to support all of you um as you are kind of helping like grow your business and supporting clients so a lot of this coming you'll start seeing some of this pushed like mid April uh we're changing up our Building Systems we're adding this new page to the website uh so a lot of exciting stuff is here and I'm going to be sharing a link to apply to the program uh and learn more about it um in the comments after this as well give you a really quick overview there's going to be basically three tiers so there's a registered agency which is you know uh meant for people who are starting off newer agencies you get an affiliate link and kind of you know get started in this funnel there's like the certified partner program which is you've now started getting a couple of clients um your a growing agency this is where we really want to kind of invest a lot of time and so for a reference like a lot of people who are speaking on the on the panel like everyone who speaking on the panel today would absolutely qualify for this I'm sure ton of you in the audience would qualify for this as well but the goal that we have here is that if you're a certified partner and you're starting to grow uh we want to be able to work with you as partners and really help support you as you grow and then finally is a premium partner this is something that is kind of just starting to pop up uh but this is for folks who are working with kind of like larger clients mid-market a little bit on the Enterprise side uh and again just making sure that we can give you the resources to help as well and just to kind of give you a sense of like what some of these benefits are uh it's really kind of teared towards this we'll be releasing more details on this but we want to make sure that you know once you're at this stage where you have gotone a couple clients you figured out your Niche um that we can get you into the certified program and really kind of invest a lot of time back into you to help grow your business and then finally um in terms of like the actual um joining the beta program or joining the initial launch uh I'm going to share the link in the chat uh we're going to be screening all the applications and we're going to start sending out acceptances and interviews um in mid April once we have the partnership page up um if it's a fit uh we'll go and actually reach show and kind of formally approve uh and then we're planning to really do this in batches so the group of kind of certified Partners uh will be a smaller batch um but we're hoping to really spend a lot of time with you to understand what are your needs how can we help support you and help you grow your business as this industry grows um so that's it for me um I'll pop this in the chat uh but really excited to be able to work with all of you and kind of help grow this together aome thanks Daniel uh I already see the chat is buzzing about this so yeah just check out the link that Daniel's goingon to share and really excited to see some of the apps come in all right so without further Ado gonna queue up our panelists our amazing panelists um so the way today is going to be structured we're going to kick off intros from our panelists then I'll go through some burning questions that we see come up a lot in the community so across things like pricing your first client how to land your first client how to scale a team how to scale your agency um and then right at the end we're reserving around 10 minutes for an open Q&A session so if you do have questions click open that Q&A tab drop it in and then we're queue you up on stage uh in that last segment there um so yeah I'm gonna invite up our panelists maybe starting with the ooto AI team if you guys want to start with an intro and then going across the board thank you kimly so hi guys my name is Alexander I'm the co-founder of ultrai together with Philip ws and we are based in Belgium what we're doing is we're actually a fullservice AI automation agency where we focus on putting businesses and workflows on autopilot we do this through AI chatbots uh for example through through voice flow but also with more complex AI agent systems which are connected together in some sort of an ecosystem um and we also provide AI Consulting uh so that's it for me and uh I hope to have here a good a good time and meet lots of new and excited AI agency owners and also voice flow users yeah like Alex said uh great intro or Alro I'm Philip wers the co-founder for AI um and I'm really excited just to get people excited about AI because I think it's breakthrough like Daniel said it now takes a much smaller team just to get workflows and everything automated and it can make life so much easier awesome pass it over to the web Forge team John do you want to kick it off uh Hey everybody what's going on um I'm Joe Fu uh from web Forge uh here with Ben and James uh James is the glue for me and Ben who are the you know the product people we we focus on the the building the stuff um I'm excited to be here we uh build internal tools for for companies uh we also do uh you know chat agents and whatnot but we're looking to build features and products for teams U that are looking to you know do a startup or or um looking to expand their customer services uh e-commerce Etc um so without taking too much time I know I know we're kind of crush on time um but yeah I'm looking forward to all this Ben and James do you guys want to hop on as well yeah for sure so my name is Ben I'm the CTO at web Forge so essentially what I do is I'm looking for vision the main thing that I do with especially with voice flow and other external builders that we build or use I want to see new use cases and my brain sort of works in a weird way that I start to divert and divulge towards independent use cases for very very small crowds and use cases and purposes Etc so internal tool building really is my forte solving uh process based tasks and Building Solutions for them inside businesses for them to better leverage their team their staff and the amount of hours that they've got at their disposal so that's what I do pleasure to meet everyone likewise nice yeah um I'm James so my main uh situation in web Forge is really running the operations keeping these two rckt Wilders in check pretty much and making sure that we're doing everything we can to streamline our operations as well as our clients so these guys touched on everything we we do from an internal aspect already first I've heard rowi use like that but that's awesome uh and cool Bal do you want to hop on yeah for sure hey everyone my name is Bal uh PRI to creating my agency helpline hero I was doing machine learning research and most recently I worked in big Tech as a software engineer um if you ever bought something from Amazon Prime you've definitely interacted with my code um after Amazon I pivoted to creating my own agency and in the beginning I was doing stuff like websites and web apps but then I realized there's like a huge unfulfilled need in the small to mediumsized businesses um and bring them up to speed with AI and that's when I sort of found voice flow I tried all the different platforms out there but voice flow was the most robust by far and now I do all my Builds on it um I do a lot of projects mostly within the medical and real estate niches so if you're out there and you're looking for a partner or something you know feel free to hit me up yeah hell yeah it's really that's such a flex I use I means I use your code today so that's awesome Emil would you like to come on and share an intro as well yes hello everyone my name is Emil I'm one of three co-founders at omn Fusion so I'm not the only founder on the team uh we specialize in building AI sales agents for Instagram so we have a software doing Outreach and we then take care of all the responses that come back or inbound messages on Instagram set appointments and we really dialed in on that Niche we basically do Instagram only at this point we did some customer service chat Bots as well um we found voice flow during the summer and we were the first ones to integrate voice flow with many chat for example and share that on YouTube so maybe some of you guys know know us from there and yeah it's good to be yet another voice flow event as a speaker thanks Kimberly for having me for sure and last certainly not least David hey everyone my name is David I'm the founder of CIT and we're a small agency focusing on automating customer interactions and we started off of course with voice flow and looking a lot into the text based side of things and now slowly moving also into newer Technologies like voice that is becoming more and more available uh happy to be here super interested what you guys have for questions and of course super happy to share any insights and where this whole industry is going yeah cool well let's do it let's hop in uh so very first question is for those early agencies what are strategies that you use to land your first client David maybe you want to kick it off yeah sure I can I can tell you how I did it I'm not saying it's the best way but this worked for me so when I when I started with voice flow I was I didn't know exactly which kind of Industries and which kind of clients would benefit from such Solutions very well right because each industry each type of clients has a different way of interacting with customers so what I did and it worked really well was to actually go through all this the niches that I thought were interesting all the industries and kind of reach out to these business owners and pitch a project for them and mostly I reached out to bigger companies or things or companies that I would love to have in my portfolio and kind of offer that hey let's build a solution for you let's show you how well this works and we get the advantage of just yeah flexing that we worked with you and basically learning along the way and people were really open to this and very happy to even be supportive like bigger companies like of course time is very important for big companies but uh they were still very supportive in just like kicking a project off and and seeing where this goes yeah for sure and then I know with the osro team you guys also had a very unique strategy with in your first kindli so do you want to share that with everyone here yeah sure uh we had a less traditional way actually because we were lucky that I think one or two months after we started with our agency there was a big Ai and Tech Festival in London named coex at the time uh we applied for it we went there with a with with the team and they had this app where you could meet up with the other uh with the other owners with other business owners and there was this one guy who messaged us and said hey I I like your bio you could have like this one liner of what you're doing doing and he said let's meet up let's see if we can we can have a fit so we scheduled the meeting we went to the nearest Starbucks at that at that place we set the laptop on our lab and we showed him actually uh the AI chatbot that was already uh tailored towards his his website because we scraped it did the night before actually it was around midnight I think because he messaged us at 10 p.m. in the evening and the next day it was already the meeting so we uh prepared this whole chb for him and he was uh very pleased with it and at that moment it was an instant uh an instant click because he could see for himself what the what the real benefit actually was from from voice flow and this AI chat solution so that was our our story no I love that I love that you tailor to build uh to to them and also it's yeah going to conferences and meeting people is really the greatest way for sure to open it up I think definitely in the beginning like in the beginning when you don't have like that much confidence and you don't have a whole portfolio if you can really make this more human connection and show that okay we're not just trying to sell you something but really try to grow with you and help you I think that's uh definitely for starters good sure any any other panelists want to hop in on this one um if I could just uh piggy back on what Alexander was saying I think that he said it was beautiful and I just want to let everybody else out there know that um once you find like your client I think everybody here needs to like look at who their client actually is what Niche do they actually want to service um it's not a good practice to say like I just service everybody like yeah like voice flow worked for almost almost every every Niche you know online but think about like who you're actually trying to go after um and you know connect with that person figure out what their pain points are figure out what their actual issues are on a day-to-day basis and then make some cool for them so like with voice flow you can make something really cool really fast like Alexander did so like we're so full we're so used to people like just bullshitting us like we're gonna expand your business by like 80% by you know sign up for this thing um what Alex did was he freaking talked to the person he understood their need so he actually listened as a human he made the he turned it around and said hey this is the thing you want and they're like yeah like yeah take my money right like that's what that's what sales is is listening to your client figure out who it is go and meet them uh and then show them the that they want and then when you show the person the stuff they want they're going to like if you show something show me something I'm gonna want I'm gonna beg you to take my money X James I'm begging like I beg people to take my money please give us cool I love that that's like yeah it's again something we we chatted about in in our prep before was being really value based so U making sure that you're actually providing value to those that you're your your clients great cool if any any other last points on that one if not we can move forward to the next one um I have one more quick thing I I'll I'll be quick and then I'll let you go um basically we just started doing cold Outreach email Instagram Etc and our thing was we want to build something for you for free and if you like it you only pay the retainer no cost for getting it done and that was our approach that's how we landed our first client and then you get the testimonial from that if it's a bigger business or a bigger Creator or whoever you're building it for you can use that and then start charging with future clients so that's what worked for us so I just wanted to throw that in there as well for sure yeah there's just such a range of different ways that you can land your first client whether it is offering like a fremium uh or doing like direct Outreach it it really is is World your oyster on that and sorry Ben did you have anything else to I was gonna piggy back on what Jonathan was saying just purely based on the fact that I think a lot of people get a little bit wooed of I'm gonna pick a niche how do I pick a niche what Niche do I go for well the beauty of what we're doing here is that we're serving markets on very different levels it could be customer service it could be lead generation it could be complete backend um compliancy training it could be Conflict Management training it could be anything right if you can Niche into the pain point that allows you to then split test across niches to find out where the best Roi is for you as well as the highest amount of well the qualifi the quantitive end result for the client it allows you to split test that one solution that works across industry and see where it has the best leverage that's one thing that I would essentially sound top at that for sure awesome great so why don't we dive into the next question which is around pricing structure um there's so many ways you can approach this would love to know how you first price and maybe how it also has evolved um maybe Bal I know I know we chatted about this I'm I gonna hand this this first one to you sure um so in the beginning I wasn't really sure how to charge or what to charge that was sort of like my my biggest sort of Roadblock I would sort of get into a meeting and be like well you know I think this is sort of what it's worth and I would just roughly base that on um an hourly rate that I'd set in my head and be like well you know I'm building this out it's effectively this many hours so I'd give them sort of that as like a build fee and then you know a monthly retainer that was like a percentage based on top of that um but now I don't really I don't really work that way I I also work sort of backwards in the sense that I make sure that you know that the deliverable that I'm providing them is very clearly defined um that saves just like a lot of headache uh upfront right if because if I say you know I'm G to give you a chat bot that's pretty vague right but if I say you know I'm G to give you a chat bot that's going to interact with your leads on your website and then you know we can expect this percentage of them to convert into booked meetings or calls or whatever it is you know that's there's some metrics behind that that we can you know track and Trace and then we can see exactly you know what's been delivered and does it live up to what we discussed earlier so that's what I do there um and then I really try to I don't really try to work with too many clients I'd rather pref prefer working with like you know the right ones um and working with them long term so I I like to do value based pricing right if I'm bringing you an additional sort of $50,000 a month in Revenue uh you know then I'll take like you know 10% or something like that just you know a number off the top of the head but that's that's generally how I do it um and I also like to give them like you know sort of three tiers like I don't just say you know here's the price I'll say you know this is a service offering this is a second one this is a third you know here are prices for all of them um and then that way they can sort of you know pick what uh fits their budget and and maybe even doubling down what do you consider is the right customer um I I think I I take a look at their business model like is this a company that I think will you know work that I'll be able to work with long term um for example there's like the smaller companies that you know if I let's just say I go to the effort of building out the best AI chat bot for them or you know AI integration for them but they're only getting like 10 website visitors a month that's not really a good fit right that's just sort of setting myself um and them up for failure as well I try to make sure like you know they're getting at least two three thousand visitors a month um they understand the benefits of it they're overwhelmed with you know support related tasks they see that you know this isn't necessarily the best use of my time um and then I just try to see you know where could AI really help them you know I chat with them I get to understand what is their business process like if so if I drove like a 100 leads how much does that make a a difference on their bottom line right what does that look like for them you know um how can we help improve your conversions and then I sort of tailor the deliverable to them yeah it really goes back to like being value based for sure um passing over to the web Forge team I know John Ben James you've have a really unique structure around service Sprints so do you want to share more about that and and how you found success with it how uh how granular do you want to be you want like uh can we talk about pricing like like would it be useful for people to like know like how we price and or actual prices is that something that you want to because I don't mind sharing those if they okay I feel like yeah for the audience but I feel like yeah I would I so so so some of these numbers might like it might be like low ball for some of you out there for most of you is probably be like oh like how's he charging this much and I and I'll explain that just give me time um when I I kind of want to start off real fast and I want to say the three e which is which is exceed expectations every time um it's kind of been talked about here um when you buy from when somebody buys from you from your agency uh part of that like that purchase is going to be trust so like I always say there's there's three things that somebody needs to to to buy from you to do business with you and the first thing is they need to know how to find you they need to know how to pay you so you need to wait for them to pay you with a stripe PayPal whatever but that that in the middle that big old Oreo Double stuff Oreo cream billing is uh trust so the more the person trust you to do the thing which is going back to what Alexander said earlier he showed that person the thing like the trust for that person was freaking crazy he went from a salesperson to somebody who actually does the he does the thing right um I think that structure everybody here I know this is not a sales thing but like everybody here you your job should be when it comes to Value just explode with value your job should be like making them say holy I need to work with this person forever or like be a huge fan so um for going to actual actual pricing uh when we don't know exactly how long something's going to take if there's like some API we haven't dealt with if there's some like uh unique situations that we're not sure of then we're going to probably charge between 80 and 160 per hour okay um and that's going to include like from from beginning to end uh when we sign a contract we have documentation for everything so like when we talk to you for the first time we're going to we're going to send you a document this is what we talked about this is what we think you want this is and then I want you to come back and say this is what you want uh we build requirements we build proposals we build scopes of work um so I'm going say one more time for people who aren't familiar with the lingo it's requirement documents proposals scope of work and then we also send a a communication document with the client so they know when to expect communication from us okay this is all about building value this is all about exceeding expectations right um the the other part of it too is like if we know generally what it's going to take to build this thing then we'll just stop on a full like a a price which is $3,500 for the Baseline for for a chatbot if it's something that we've already packaged we've done before then we can probably go down to $2,500 but 35 is is the where I I like to be at uh ideally I can get up to that 5K Mark and the way that you do this um if you want me to expand on this a little bit more Kim is um I always talk about like when you when you start off with the sales pitch or you're talking to the person you listen to everything theyve said and generally a business owner is going to have when they when they're talking they have like all the emotion of owning that business and so when they're talking to you they're just like what can what can this solution solve and a lot of times like you're telling them I can create this this chat agent to do like customer service and they're thinking how can I get it to run my business so what you do is is you start off with the garage you say like okay listen we're going to start with this first thing first because like in order for them to to buy they need to be a to Envision they need Alex to be able to turn that phone around say this is the this is it this is the thing you're buying uh so you need to build that picture in their heads so start the garage and say listen hey I know you want all these things all right but the first thing we're going to work on the first Sprint the first you know uh thing that you can actually like give us two weeks three weeks and you can actually use this thing is a customer service we're going to take all of your your knowledge bases we're gonna take all the things you already have we're going to put them in this chat bot we're gonna we're gonna make it look good we're gonna spin it up in within two three weeks you're gonna have the that that's gonna take now we all know that that's probably gonna take us about four days all right I'm not gonna give it to them in four days because I want to test I want to test a sh of it so like we're going to make it up in four days but on day three you better believe I'm sending them an email or a loom or something showing them that bad boy working and they're gonna say I thought it was gonna take three weeks holy this thing's already working H and like they they like you're you're still selling them like even though they already giving you money you still want them to like you still like you're still in the the sale period like you still want them to be like oh my God this is exceeding my expectations why why are we doing this well when when by the time that you're finished with the garage you want them to be begging you okay when do we start on the when do you start on the patio right because there's so many solutions where voice f is so Dynamic there so many things you can do you can do just the customer service thing but we want to flip around and say okay look we finished this customer service thing what about your e-commerce like would you like somebody like a AI uh assistant that can actually recommend Things based off of you know whatever you Ed oh my God that'd be great they already have in their heads they already have in their heads that they're purchasing this so like you're turning a $3,500 client into a long-term you know 10 15 $20,000 client and why are they giving you this money well they're giving the money at first because they trust you they you show them the thing within three days they're already purchasing again because you're showing them that it's working right um and then they started just building this massive value in the meantime you gave them using Sprints you gave them first that first taste that first drip of dopamine and it actually works it's it's while you're actually building it or building the second Sprint they're making money in the first one so while they're making money they're they their Roi on on that investment hopefully they already made it back or they see the value like their time is saved uh they're saving money on customer service costs um they're they're making more their their uh per their package rate um for e-commerce is is 20% higher because people is recommending them to buy this extra thing and like they see the Val they actually you're not telling them anymore you're you're showing them and they're actually getting to experience it so now the other things that take longer times and and cost more they're they're more willing to to trust you with those Solutions other automations that you can kind of package into this yeah um so just to kind of bring this all home I know I know this is a long tech talk I apologize but just like exceed the expectations um do not be afraid I've seen people like say hey this is going to cost me 500 bucks and there's there's been two things that I've seen happen one the person is going to think you're fullish they're go like okay this is too good to be true okay they're go like all they're going to think is like low Val they're going to think oh this isn't really a good value right like okay I'm pay it's like I'm going on Fiverr I'm getting a thing and look we find a lot of developers on Fiverr but it takes a lot of it takes a lot of work to go through these like I mean probably 40 50 James tell you like you know it's probably a 100 developers I had to go through before I found some good ones um on Fiverr so like nothing's wrong with that but um yeah so yeah yeah yeah definitely leaning into value making sure that you're also showing what you're building up front is huge yeah um I know I know there's also different structures uh so Emil I would love to pass it to you I know you have built on your your own app and also have an agency on the side so do you want to share more about that model and how it's work for you yeah for sure just first of all I want to uh follow up on what Jonathan said real quick um what I think when somebody who's maybe a complete beginner has no business experience here's what you just said it's too much going on at once they like it's an overwhelming inflow of things to do so what I would say is keep it simple um try and give value give it for free and you'll learn these things over time you don't have to do everything perfect like if you note down what you just said try and stick to it but don't be too hard on yourself you're going to mess it up a little bit um that's just something that I wanted to follow up with um in terms of pricing to be honest it ranges uh like it varies a lot like we have five figure deals we have four figure deals anything we usually what we do is a one-time setup fee most of the time it's between 1 to 5K for an Instagram AI appointment setter um and then a monthly retainer between 500 to ,000 so stacking those retainers um I personally love so we don't have any clients without a retainer I know some people here on the panel do um we personally just love these retainer things we also have the software as well which is also monthly subscription based so we just love seeing the that monthly recurring Revenue number is really what we're most focused on compared to like the onetime setup fees but honestly what I would say is at the beginning um it's kind of hard to nail the pricing we found like we have undercharged way too many times I'd say rather undercharge and take the learning experience instead of overcharging uh We've charged 2,000 and then at the end we were like this is like a $5,000 thing once we finished building it out so I'd rather take the learning experience than overcharging um and yeah so I think that's going to happen to pretty much everyone or I don't know if anybody shares that experience with the undercharging no yeah 100% cool and I think also one thing about what the mill said it's also the fact that most of the times you undercharge the first time you build such a solution but the second time you will encounter this it's going to be more productized on your side so then it's not going to be it's going to be way better uh to handle this for sure you have the thing built out that also makes it easier to scale like in the future like once you've got like a niche established like whether whatever it is you you've been there done that so a lot of that initial first learning is you know taken care of when your first one two five 10 builds whatever it is um so that the process you have it down yes love that and to be honest like this is just one last thing sorry to be honest this would also help you on the commercial side as well because when you learn exactly these producty Solutions then you learn exactly what your customer need and how to sell it to them in an actual good way they can settle on a scale yeah I feel like learn by doing is like the key you know you you can hypothesize a lot but you don't really know until you go out there and do the field work so um I love that call up and I think if I can just pck it back just real fast I know we're moving on yeah but like for those of you who don't have any clients this is your first time maybe your first time like looking at one of these things and you want to get into it just freaking Do It Go build some cool stuff just go like I'm giving you all permission go build some cool okay like just go do it and then like and then once you build it like just start showing people the stuff put it on LinkedIn go put it on Twitter go whever the hell go put it on a flyer outside man I don't care show people your cool stuff you built because like you should be proud of it go show show it to us yeah yeah we have a share your work channel in the Discord too calling that out so pop stuff in there we really want to encourage like cool stuff being being posted and and shared around uh cool so maybe moving forward a bit would love to know once you've landed your first client you're starting to get a few more how have you been able to maintain study growth rate growth rate for your agency um so with the outra team I maybe can kick it over to you if you have any thoughts on this one yeah so definitely also to piggy back on what they already said that once you have this more experience and you can more productize your service I think that's where we uh really saw the difference in in scaling and growing the the agency uh because in the beginning it was all also a bit all over the place we we experimented with many different pricing structures first we went with The Upfront monthly retainer plus a usage base and we notice these three pillars were sometimes even confusing for our clients to to to to notice okay what are the three things that I'm actually paying for uh but we noticed that okay once we got better in our services and in our Solutions we were able to productize and to also standardize the whole the whole process for them so they know or we know exactly even if it's a different Niche a different industry the step that we're going through with every client is going to be the same and once we optimize and streamline this process you can see that communication is really key especially in the beginning if you don't have like the the ability to overperform on on the quality of your product because you don't have experience yet overperform on the service that you're offering them overperform on how you're communicating keeping them in touch keeping them updated every single thing I think it's Alex Orosi who said it that like you want to have this this uh these dream outcomes as early as possible that you want to be able to show them okay every small update is like a small win for them right um and by able to do that you can see that okay you will learn so much more because you're more into contact with them and the the communication is also aligned you know that their expectations are exactly matched with what you are working on because I think the last thing that you want to do is build something that in your mind is perfect but then in the other at the other side they they thought that okay this is definitely not what I was paying for yeah uh but I think on that on that side um also by growing the company the thing that we noticed that made a biggest differ actually is that we're switching or we switched recently our pricing structure a bit because in the beginning like I said it was the three pillars of upfront monthly and usage right now we're looking more at like custom projects and subscription based actually you have this product eyes service business model uh and which we are able to do now because we already went through these many projects so we know exactly okay what are capabilities and once we have this discovery call or Discovery meeting we know that okay this is something within our scope and this is something that we can deliver on on a on a very consistent basis and then they sign up for a monthly for monthly price and they can cancel or pause a subscription at any moment so then we can deliver them unlimited chatbots unlimited automations and they can choose okay right now this first chatbot is enough for me this Q&A chatbot and then after maybe a month I want to restart my subscription and maybe add a module add another functionality maybe now the bottleneck isn't customer support anymore but the sales side of the sales aspect so now they want a sales Automation and we notice that this is really something that Fosters long-term relationships because you're really going step by step with them and you can also see firsthand the impact that you're making with your Solutions yes love that so I guess that's uh that's our our story yeah pricing structure templatized in the sense of like community like the the communication between you and your client like as jofu said seeing is believeing with these products if you've got demos going through to them visual Loom videos all of that sort of stuff where they can actually visualize the product being built in production you're actually educating them as well and you'll find that as a byproduct of that education they're now going to work with you to say okay so if we can do that can we do this and it's like they've just sold thems a solution you didn't even have to do anything just by you being their friendly AI consultant staying on side with them continue contining to stay in contact with them even after deployment right this isn't just up to that point where you say look this go live put on the website and we'll hear from you in three months with a maintenance fee like you need to keep that the whole way through just as good as it was prior to deployment post deployment as well that communication's key I love that yeah I I think an important point oh sorry yeah I think an important point that Alex said is we're not just building chat Bots we're also building relationships and I think that's really at the basis of like getting a good agency going yes I think across like all business practice like I think that's that's so key especially for agencies um we love to flip it over to Amil as well as David I know you both have explored the content creation realm um and that's also helped with your agency building so want to share you know your experience doing that and how that's might have helped you scale and grow your agency yeah David you want to go first I'll go first uh I didn't go that much into content to be honest but I think I had a different approach and this was the approach of building partners and just as you guys said before yes building relationship is very important but you should also try to explore building relationships that are not necessarily uh client to service initially but rather look for partners that you can go and do stuff together like for example I think for a lot of us it's very relevant to partner with other businesses that have access to business databases or like agencies other businesses where that that they can sell your service or you can package with them and that's also an interesting route that can keeps on giving over the long term yeah oh yeah that's like it also creates a bit of a competitive mode for your you if you do have access to like some things that others don't so that's awesome yeah yeah yeah that's a great point I feel like um delegation as a whole when it comes to growing as an agency is probably one of the biggest things that we're now coming under and it's something that myself personally I haven't been used to in previous businesses because I've always worked for for someone whereas now when you're working for yourself you make the decisions you set the tasks you delegate the task to the people who you've now affiliated with so that goes exactly with what David was saying like even if you make a smaller profit but you can delegate it to someone you can just keep your agency moving and moving and moving and if that becomes an offering where you're like I'm just going to give you any client I talk to about this you're just going to build those rapports and relationships with you know people within the industry as well as the clients that you're targeting so that's like a very important thing for us when we're now getting to the stage of okay we've got a few clients now we're sitting there blah blah blah we need to delegate this stuff to continue steadily growing this agency give ourselves the time to go and explore new tools new softwares new ideas that we can then bring into our agency make sure that it benefits us internally and then go and externally sell it to other businesses yeah sorry to cut you off or you mate sorry all right um yeah so we we started our YouTube Channel initially just literally sitting here doing a loom and like showing setups like for example The Voice flow many chat integration made videos on that and just gave up free value then it transitioned to Instagram and that sort of stuff and that's been great for us so if you want to do content what I can recommend is um so what we had in the beginning was the thought of if we share too much um are people just going to do it themselves and not become clients and I would say just share everything so we were like it we're just going to give all the value um because people are going to see it and they're either too busy or they want the expert to do it or for whatever reason they're still going to buy it from you and it just shows that you're competent so if you do YouTube which I personally would recommend um then just blow out the value for free however um it's not really so when it comes to steady growth like it says here YouTube is kind of it's random so you never know when a lead is going to come or when a client is going to come so it's not predictable so what we focused on recently is we need a predictable flow of clients um which is when building Outreach systems and systems where you know if we do x amount of this we're going to get x amount of leads and x amount of calls and x amount of uh closes um that's something that's really important once you start scaling and apart from that I think um just not forgetting about your internal automation so we always automate stuff for other people if you forget to automate your agency you're going to be at some point like um especially once you start scal SC in like an employee does something here needs to be tracked there d d and all these things so that's something to keep in mind as well um yeah yeah love that cool all right just to move things forward I know we have about five minutes before we break into Q&A um but would love to chat on this point which I think is the one that everyone in the community voted for is like want to know the answers to this so what's the most common mistake that you've seen early agency owners make and how do you suggest overcoming it I'm gonna toss this one to Bal to start um I think the most common mistake that at least that I made was in the beginning because I was new I was like sort of like all right you know I think I'm a little bit too early to Niche down I'm ready to work with sort of whatever client comes my way uh and that was a mistake uh just because you'll find that there's there's types of people that you do want to work with and then there's types of people that you don't want to work with and a lot of people come in you know and they want like champagne on a on a or sorry what's this saying they want champagne on a beer budget right um they want you to do a a whole bunch of stuff you know crazy amounts of effort work you know energy to build it out and at the end they're like all right cool thanks and sort of away you go um so honestly just saying no um is is you know your your best friend if you think that this is not something that you could do or you can't do it well or you know you don't have the experience I just say no you know this isn't a good fit for me but you know maybe I can refer to somebody that I know you know one of the other agency owners or whatever it is uh just because if you're really looking to scale um you want to do stuff that you've already done right um because then you you have the sort of standard operating procedures you know all right I need this this this this this requirement from a client I know on average it's going to take me two to three days or you know maybe two to three weeks to turn this around I can expect them to get the sort of first win roughly around this timeline and you know you can just go on to servicing others um where if you're doing these oneoff builds all over the place um it's just going to drain drain your time and it's not really a high Roi activity so I try to do I try to get things you know within within the same industry that I've done before not to say that I'll turn down clients you know if I think like the the the use case is interesting um or whatever it is but if you're really looking to streamline and grow and go further faster it's find a niche get good at servicing that Niche and then just scale that Niche that's it and also like business own owners no other business owners you know what I mean so once you've done your first client and you know they're happy chat with them say Hey you know how are you liking this whatever it is do you know anybody else in your network you think you know that that it'd be beneficial to just having a conversation you're to pitch them on a sale you're going to say hey do you know anybody else that it would be nice for me to chat with you know maybe we could help about or you know work together whatever it is and then if you've done a good job for them um when they refer you to somebody else they're looking good right right um so it it's it's just a win-win all around so I guess the most common mistake that I made when I was when I was just starting out was just not saying no enough to poor clients yeah no I love the love the honesty there anyone else uh from the panel want to chime in on this one yeah sure I got one not setting clear enough expectations everyone that knows me knows how much I'm own about this some people they don't go in with a scope of work right and a scope of work is is profound because that scope of work that sets the expectations of the deliverable being given to the client as well as your involvement I've seen lots and I mean lots of agencies set themselves up to start servicing one client and because that's their first client they grip onto it with both hands and they they want to overd deliver and overd deliver and overd deliver give that two months and you just became a very very decent but glorified freelancer working for an external company you have no options you don't have delegation you don't have enough resources to delegate you don't have essentially a scope of work to refer back to and then actually remind the person that you're doing the deliverable for just so we know this days would actually be uh beyond the scope of our agreement therefore we can go to that paid thing because like EML said earlier doing it for free is amazing that is an amazing way to get in there and start working with people but I've seen people go in for free and then end up doing the freelancer thing and it's like no no no you need to set that clear expectation first like Emil said he's got his deliverable he's got his product I'm going to put this in it's going to have this qualitative return IE percentages of Roi Etc and then my job's done anything beyond that is scope creep and we'll renegotiate a deal from there and there on out and then you can look at charging that paid client for an extended service deliverable it's just I've seen so many people go into that and try to recognize it if you are falling into that because I was we've been there I would not be saying it to you if I didn't deal with this myself a year and a half ago like we had a client we working with for four months and every day it felt like I was back at back at doing development again like I was loading up a GitHub and seeing push requests for the day like it was like oh my God so yeah that's what I would say no I love that setting expectations seems to be a theme that both you and bl like laid out it's like you don't want to be landing a a client who you know you're you're just doing a lot more than what you expected so love that set just just a pigb real fast uh just um contracts and setting uh acceptance criteria just toward acceptance criteria when this is met you like this is what's happy you're happy with this is being met yeah to save your own ass like you need to know um somebody mentioned earlier but like in your head it might look beautiful it needs to look beautiful in their heads not your head you're not making this for you you're making this for them so acceptance criteria make sure they like they're okay with this before you even ever start working yes oh yes um yeah from the oo team Alex and philli any anything to add from here yeah oh sorry go ahead man go ahead okay no problem uh I would AG you have limited amount of time resources so it's really important to delegate it to the right stuff and I see like a lot of problems that we had at the start was by just trying to perfect something that we didn't even validate before so would say validation is a really big part of you know creating your initial product and there's nothing better than just to reach out to your own network and find somebody who can do it for free uh that you'll just say like I'll just create something for you I just need feedback because that's just the best way like we created a bot before and we added in some modules and some stuff and it looked really cool us but maybe not customer facing towards the clients and they might go like that's cool but I don't even want that and then they put a lot of like other stuff onto us and tell us we actually want this and I think that's been a really good like learning opportunity for us just to find somebody in our Network that we can get those ideas from and that validation right know your customers interview them and test what you're building for sure true and if I can also add bit on that is that in the beginning I think we hopped also niches and solutions we tried we tried to provide because the grass seems Always Greener at the other side right so before you have like this uninformed optimism you go in with full head you take the leap but then instead you face this wall of informed pessimism and you see okay this is harder than than I thought it would be uh but the thing is this will be for every Niche for every solution it's just because you yourself isn't ready yet so what you need to do is you need to build on build on yourself and this is when we realize that okay this agency's growth is completely dependent on our own growth as a person uh and the thing is we just need to keep working on ourself keep expanding our skill set becoming better with voice flow other tools as well and then you will see you will earn your right to be able to charge the the adequate amount but also to have these more qualitative clients who you will see that okay this relationship is not just on a transaction basis but on a relation relational basis and I think that is this is something that we saw that really made a difference in being able to laser focus and say okay this is the goal and we keep working on it and because we know the goal is is is something valid it's not just something that's 100% yeah um Emil do you want to hop on on this one share share your top learnings as you started when you started Journey yeah I um I just posted something in the chat because I thought we were going to move on I wrote on your Ascent you're going to dislike what you're doing 80% of the time and the winner does it anyways it's not as fun as it seems and it's not always going to be great and you're going to be sitting here at 11:30 p.m. with a client that you need to deliver the next day and something's not working and you're going to pull out your hair and you're going to lose out on some sleep um so that's an important expectation I think to have as well that it's not uh sunshine and rainbow and each days um H so so that's one thing and another mistake I think people make is like the procrastination thing at the beginning like wanting the perfect website and perfect PDF pitch deck and all this fluff what I would say is build out a prototype for whatever Niche you want to go into don't really even need a website necessarily um figure out stuff as you go don't get caught up on PR preparing everything for three months and then after three months you haven't talked to anyone yet you still have no clue what people even want um so that's something else and yeah I just say take action and start talking to people that's really the main thing you're not going to figure it out by sitting in your uh room all day for sure yes I appreciate that um okay great so this is perfect to maybe queue into um the Q&A session so we have actually quite a few questions in our in our Q&A chat right now I'm going to pop some of these folks on stage if you're comfortable with that as well feel free to like unmute and ask your question very first one I'm seeing is from Alan Bender so his question is curious how you Market to generate cold leads before having a team and how long it took to get the first customer answering that I can I can answer because in the beginning I did primarily cold uh Outreach via cold emails um it took me about two months or so to get my first customer from there um and then sort of as soon as I got one I like just 10x the volume um because I was like well I got one maybe if I like so something's got to work right then you know slowly improve my copy um one thing that the biggest tip that I could give you is if you're getting an email from somebody don't sell a meeting don't sell anything in that first email that they're going to ignore it um you know it's just going to get sent to Mark to spam or whatever whatever it is reach out to them build like an ICP like the ideal client profile and then come in with something specific like hey you know I've done it's better if you if you have like you know um maybe like a free or whatever chap out they've already built for you know the industry or some client that's very similar say hey I did this for this person you know I know that they're the same niche as you would you be interested in learning more you're not saying hey I did this this is my price do you want this hey let's hop on a call it's do you want to learn more mind if I send over a testimonial or not not not a testimonial a case study that way they can review it and you know get back to you and then I follow up with them like a week later or something like that um you know and and then we we just sort of go from there but I I noticed something you know my open rates and response rates went up um when I in you know in the first couple messages was sort of like this is what I did and you know it's it's what the other panelists were talking about um in terms of like sort of leading with value it's like hey this is what I did this is an example of my work yeah do you want to learn more yes or no right then it it you want to leave him off with a question that it's easy to say yes to right because they they they can say yes to learning more and they're not committing to anything because in the beginning they're just getting an email so like there's a really high barrier of of trust you got to get get over and just sending an email isn't going to do it right great answer can I can I Pig you back on that yes go for it um our eyes are now trained to filter out okay so when I see my email like think about the emails that you open up and if you would not open that email then don't send it okay um but I'll just just mention something very important your ICP um I would ask the first question of why am I doing code Outreach because code Outreach does work but why am I doing this uh is it because you're just trying to do another form of of marketing or are you afraid to like do the research and not be lazy like stop being lazy go do the research go on LinkedIn go wherever your clients are go find them uh do the actual research like literally find out the name of your client what they do how much they make what their actual pay points are then send a freaking email okay don't send an email first until you do the actual freaking work um I get super emotional about code out code Outreach because people will like use it as a way to be lazy I'm gonna go on Apollo I'm G get like 10,000 leads and then like they spend 200 bucks and and what did they get you like if you're going to do that just like do Google ads go on Facebook or some like spend that money somewhere else uh make a YouTube channel make YouTube channel like just take the like take the friction away like the people need to trust you if if you send me an email like I don't trust you inherently I don't trust you you're in my my email and if I don't know you you're not on my list then like I so you had to build that trust you're starting from here uh if you do a YouTube channel if I see a meal like I instantly trust this guy why because I seen him do the he's right there he's doing it he's right there like it for like unless he like paid somebody to make the thing which that's still fine because if he paid for somebody to do it I still trust him because it's it's there right um there's so far that you have to go from cold Outreach to to them trusting you to buy the thing it's it's it's outrageous uh start a LinkedIn page start whatever start your your whatever your Outreach is YouTube where the F it is whatever it is do that thing and stop being lazy go find your ICP okay everybody here I'm giving you permission go find your ICP stop being freaking lazy um find that person go reach out go figure out their paying points uh find out what star they owns find out what like their struggles are whether it's automation whether it's leads whether it's uh customer service find out and when you have that conversation with them you're going to be equipped to have the freaking conversation versus trying to sell to them yes I love that it's it's honestly just building a brand even um just to move things forward a bit also this is a like the open Forum part so I've uh if you want to hop on and unmute and ask your question live we really would love that um Steve I think I tagged you in the chat um if you want to hop on I see you have a question around uh employee resistance to do you want to unmute and ask your question yeah can you hear me yes we can hear you hello welcome um okay the my question really uh I work in the pharmaceutical sector so and I specialize in medicine's information and we're about to launch a voice flow based Su super product okay where we take uh drug information that's approved uh by The Regulators like the FDA or the EMA and you can literally ask anything of this thing and it will give you the answer I mean it's just voice flow has transformed this but the the point of my question is so many people I talk to and I do demon I I follow Joe's uh ideas about LinkedIn about um um YouTube but so so many people in this industry go silenced you know and I and I talk to other people and they say well it's about this replacing their functions so I'm sure you guys have will come up against that in the past you know and don't use the word use a different word it's simple just if if people are rebelling against that one word and change the word use yeah yeah if that word if you're if you're if you're being met with res like when you go to like your your mechanic your car breaks down you don't need to know what like all the mechanism you don't need to know what a carburetor is you just know that your shit's broke right so like you just need to use the exact words that's going to take that person to accept what you're saying uh this goes across every every uh facet of of of every sector of of of business is using the dictionary using the language that is going to your audience is going to receive so if like you know somebody doesn't like the word AI just say assistant just say like it's technology just use what like I don't know your I don't know your your Market but use a word that is just replaces AI we don't need it there's no reason like I don't like the word AI because there's such a stigma against it so I I I mean I like Kim I don't think yall use chat BX anymore y use assistants right like that's like the vernacular people use because chat BX just a there's a there's a there's a weight to it just do something else my op yeah thank you for that youve you've answered my other question but they they may be actually link you're right but the the chatbot you know I'm trying to talk to a a physician in a drug company and a chat bot just sounds like you know n but you're right the the uh the assistance the best way to go thanks awesome thanks Steve thanks for helping out it's a great question uh next up we have uh pavl I yeah if you want to hop on ask your question you have uh a big one around pricing strategy for big companies yeah guys nice to meet you all uh I'm from Chief Republic uh sorry for my English it's not the best but I will do what I can actually so yeah first I started to build on different platform actually but gradually I transitioned into voice flow and I love it because of the functionality and the complexity what you can build and everything and mostly because of the uh knowledge base and right now we've managed to position ourselves in our like local city quite well I have to say and started to Le quite a couple of big clients but we are struggling with these like security concerns they have in these like institutions you can you can guess so the question I am uh meeting the most is like where are the data hosted what is the like level of security and so most of the time I refer them to your documentation on your website actually like the gdpr stuff and monitoring K but I'm not the best guy yet actually to like respond to this like cyber security things you know so I was curious if you you know met some of these like questions from your clients and also if you've already had some of these big clients or what was your like strategy with uh pricing and rate limits you know when some company can have like hundreds of questions and queries each day it can get quite costly and over here in chck Republic people are not so wealthy as in USA you know so yeah also get these questions as well you know they don't want to pay thousands of bucks each month for like you know these things so yeah I know lots of stuff yeah um the LA maybe I think this we chat about like navigating like the legal and uh scene and security scenes or you want to chat sure so um a lot of that really depends specifically on what Niche you're working with um like if you're within the medical Niche um let's just say you're didn't look some kind of um Pharmacy or like some kind of medical clinic obviously you can't be sharing uh client information um or you know Medical Data because that that violates Hippa and stuff um same within sort of like the legal field um so for that you know we could look at you can still use voice flow but you know the the AI you can you can connect it to your own sort of self-hosted model I know I've done that um for a few legal firms um you know you can you can host it using hugging face or you know if if you more familiar with AWS you can set up your own sort of endpoints that way all the data that comes in and out um is secure and saved there of course you know voice flow will get access to it in the sense that they'll be able to see the data that's being passed back and forth but voice flow has a really good U page on gdpr and other data security related things um so you know you could always refer them back to that um and another thing about that is a lot of the time um there's companies that come in and they think that you know gdpr CCPA a whatever law you know that is currently out there applies to them um but Mo for the majority of the time it doesn't um like for example CCPA only applies if you're you know a business in California doing over $2 million a year in sales and over half of your income is coming from selling data right but then people just think automatically assume that oh I'm in California CCPA applies a lot of people aren't actually doing the research into you know if this actually applies for me or not they they they don't have like these sorts of insights so would sit down and you know walk them through it um and you know if like you know you were saying they are a larger company then you know there there's a there's a good chance that um this will apply but if they're a larger company they have a legal team anyway right so you can sort of talk with them to maybe have their legal representative on board with you guys as well and you can you can just hash out whatever potential um issues that they're facing like you know you can ask them like hey doeses it it would it help if you know your data was stored in an AWS server that was located in whatever country that you're in um you know because I know that's some of the some of the requirements as well um what it help if we ran our own sort of custom models uhuh so that's also option to like uh use voice flow as a how do you say like a connector between this like hostd llm on some yeah yeah yeah exactly exactly that way what you're doing is um you can use a tool like Lang chain or something like that um you know I'm not sure if you're familiar with that um and then you know have look a Q&A back and forth with Lang chain that way you're not using up your sort of voice flow tokens um and everything is sort of separate U per use case so you can track and then you can Bill accordingly um that's that's something that you know that that I would recommend but again like this this would sort of fall into um the bigger clients you know the the multinationals etc etc for your for your average small to medium-sized business this isn't even a concern and just to touch very very briefly is I think what we're actually heading is um most companies in next especially as like Nvidia and these other companies have cheaper and cheaper uh compute power computer's the the currency of the future uh you're going to see more and more companies having local um U language models like locally um so so like how do we fit in that I'm not sure yet um but I do know you can Docker some of that information send it to chat U voice flow sorry and then um had that information like inrupt it or however you you know there's there's something you can do there so um I spend too much time on that because I get super nerdy super super fast but but that that's going to be an option in the future that I think we're all going to have to deal with especially as computer gets cheaper yeah sure I just wanted I just wanted to touch on top of it because I know you did mention something about pricing towards the end of that there I would stay try and it's very hard to try and sell an Enterprise solution uh especially with the security compliancy agreements especially if you're not working out a decent maintenance or Mr because obviously these type of solutions if you're working with a big company they will have like said before a legal a legal team a board of directors that are interested in the um like the cyber security side of things they'll probably have annual SOC or S so agreements being taken place for compliancy and security they also might have routine penetration testing so you need to make sure that this system is up maintained and being utilized in the back end to make make sure that it the service is the same throughout the entire build so I wouldn't shoot yourself in the foot not aiming for a$2 $3,000 a month maintenance because you might it might need quite a lot of uptake in that aspect with like a 50k start set up because you're setting up like I would set up like locally um yeah yeah 100% 100% uh because the cost for running stuff locally is quite expensive like running the 70 billion parameter model from llama last I checked is something around like 13 to 15 grand if you're running at 247 um and just rock that's like going to be your cost alone right so you you got to pass that forward to them um you know um so but for like you know the Enterprise level uh clients that that really isn't a problem um that they're going to pay that money in order to make sure that they're stuff safe so like exactly I say 50k I say 100K they're GNA say like again businesses want to take your money so if I'd say hey this is local this is this is all the benefits here locally they're going to pay that money if if they trust you enough to to actually do the solution of course your solution might be five grand but their penetration test that they have to do four times a year is 12 Grand a pop they've got the money they just need to the value needs to be broken down in their head to say okay this makes sense and we're doing this in a way that makes the most sense for our company and obviously the protection of our IP yeah that's exactly it and that's pretty much what Daniel sort of me messaged in the chat as well using voice flow as a sort of orchestration layer that's that's where you know you you got to you got to do that um for these larger clients because it's it's going to be very unlikely that you'll be able to ser their sort of exact needs and all their requirements um just out of the box um so for those more complex builds you know you are going to need need to do that and you know voice flow is great for that actually like it it comes out of the box you know with functions you can easily call apis you know you can pass all the information over um it is more technical you know you're going to be digging into documentation and into the weeds but you know that's that's sort of what you get when you're signing on an Enterprise level client right yeah totally awesome awesome you guys all right um so Mar Maurice I think I think you had a question in chat I can cue you up as well if you want to unmute your question is around different options of how demos are done for clients yeah uh thanks everyone I actually love this discussion I'm coming from a product design background and you know using figma and mural and all that type of stuff and when we do demos it's kind of you know it's a little bit different so I'm trying to get some ideas on how to demo uh you know uh products to to customers or potential customers uh considering the cost stuff that Jonathan just talked about to as well in terms of Hosting how do you share it like you know like how do you get into putting it on their website you know it's kind of they might have a website designer designer developer somewhere to take that code and stick it in the body or whatever but how do you go about demoing to to to to customers personally I'll I'll take this question personally what I use is a website called framer there's tons of web developers out there webflow framar loads of them but the beauty of framer is it allows you to basically choose a preset domain that's still being hosted for free by framer so what I would do is essentially jump into there rebuild a very very simple brand mockup of their website inside framer utilizing the the textures The Branding the colors and the image just so that the client can visualize how this would look on maybe their landing page or the header Etc the beauty of framer is that that allows you to publish that and put that on a live domain for free right so then what you do is you go to your voice flow bot take your embed code throw it into a code block put it on the framer website and then you essentially just pitch them that website it's still got a so let's say we were to use one of our companies called White Rabbit it would be white rabbit. framer doai simple easy domain you just send over an email and say take a look they click on it they see their branding they see their images they see their styling of website Etc and then they actually get to utilize and test the bot in the bottom corner alternatively obviously voice flow have just come out with the new feature that allows you to embed it on a page so there's that option too you can embed your chatbot directly into a page and allow them to interact with it like that to basically split test and quality assure the system great I I want to piggyback on there real fast because I think it's like you said you're in product design I think you you know exactly how to like uh Market a product like when you send me something a mural like my jaw drops like holy that looks cool think about I want everybody here to think about what Ben just said and and kind of like put put it to like what we've all said so far as far like getting leads and and and charging think about all the effort that just went through uh for that one client for one client like and maybe it's not even somebody even contacted yet let's say I go to uh Kimberly's website and I'm like all right maybe she can use her bot I go to her website and I make a mock I go through I go the entire process of making a mock website of kimber's website and then I make her entire chatbot and then I sent her a LinkedIn message I'm like hey Kimberly listen U I love your content on LinkedIn uh here's a quick loom video of this um chat this chat assistant I think you would love um let me know what you think and like she opens it up and it's her website and it's a chat bot and she's like holy crap like this person one when went through all the weeds all the BS to do this for me I am touched me personally you do it for me I am touched um I instantly went from a a cold like you I've never talked to you before to like I'm gonna go out of my way I'm gon go to war for you because you spent that F that those that extra time to to to uh do this for me uh I think personal connection is like the the the marketing like cheat code right now of of like just going through that process of going through framer like sure it might have take take you an hour to like make a mock website it may may maybe have taken you like another hour to to do that but that's like 100x more than anybody else in my life is gonna do for me right like just yeah it just it just goes It goes so far yeah and just to quickly pick you back off with Jonathan saying um you can even like cut your time down on that even more by saying you know sending out your whatever cold Outreach message you're saying to however many people and saying hey I already built this when is a good time to connect because not everybody even if you've already built it not everybody's going to be willing to see it um and this way this way you know you send out the message and say let's just say Kim respon is oh you know I'm free to take a look at whatever time then you just go ahead and build the thing right that way you're telling them you know I'm building this custom for you and then when they give you the interest go ahead and build it out otherwise you know you're you're you could be wasting your time this lets you have looks ort of that mass scale but also that Personal Touch yeah if I can jump in again on that I really like that because there's a there was part of the conversation earlier around talked about Outreach in terms of you know all these people going to Apollo or whatever it was or all these emails and sending them out right so if there's a bunch of leads that are actually dentists because I'm actually thinking about doing this I'm working on something for a dental office but I want to actually have this demo somewhere where I can show them here's something I've worked on before for another d office would you be interested in something similar is that the way you're talking about there a little bit look you go I'm sorry goad no go right ahead oh so yeah so just just staying with the the the idea of like making this framer thing and making making that chat that chat assistant for that one for k for whoever that client is um guess what that is like even if she never she ghost me I send her this thing I I put all this work in there like and she just does not respond to me okay like am I going to get mad or am I going to do the other thing the other thing is well now I have a case study okay like it's a case I literally just made a case study so if you do this five 10 times you have 10 case studies right like hey this is some stuff I did because you did you literally did the work it's it's all there and so now worst case scenario you have 10 case studies and now like your your uh expertise just expands and people trust you now because you you've done these things even though Kimberly like gave me a Code shoulder shoulder that that's fine that doesn't bother me uh you know because I have this Casey now I have this thing that that I did the thing yeah m put the put the Reps in and then you know you're going to get a you're going to face a lot of nose you're going to get a lot of people who book a meeting that don't show up that's very common um you just got to power through and just keep putting the Reps in keep putting the Reps and you know eventually the shots will fall and then that's pretty much it um but yeah what I did um it's funny that you mentioned the dental Niche I created a website within web flow um spun up my bot there and then use that to sell to you know other dentists and you know medical niches as well um I partnered up with um ironically enough one of my own doctors um I went in for like a sports injury and he asked me oh what you up to these days and then I sort of showed him I went back at a followup with him like sort of the next week and then I went ahead and made a voice FL bought for his Clinic um and then I was like yo check this out this is what we chatted about you know showed it to him he's like yo this is amazing um you know I want this in in all my clinics and you know he owns 30 clinics so that's something that I got from just speaking with the guy and and you know I knew that he'd be receptive to it because I've spoken to him in in person um and then that that was it and now if I ever need to sell to any medical clinic I don't do the sale I have a doctor you know and he's partnered with me for these things so when versus you know doctors trust other doctors right so the sales just come so much easier they're like oh I'm a doctor I use this in my clinic we just did 50k last month like that's my biggest case study like we we implemented it in they're getting a lot of website traffic you know like four or 5,000 website visitors a month um and they sell like a a private sort of um treatment plan for athletes and you know they're they're converting like even if they convert like 10% of the people that they're doing it like one of their private treatments cost over $1,000 so in the first 26 days like you know I I I tracked like all their metrics I tracked the number of booked appointments I tracked you know the no-show rates the show up rates how many people are converting from you know those uh initial meetings to private clients and I made a little case study about it and now like when I'm reaching out to the medical people like it's it's really quite easy I'm like well I added 50k in 26 days to this Clinic you know it you you have to make an offer where they feel stupid saying no that's you know goes back to where horos is saying like it's like pretty much saying do you want free 50k per month to your clinic yes or no right and if they say no then it's like all right cool you know that that isn't that isn't AA difference to me I know I've already been there I'll give you a competitor 50k on exactly that's exactly it right um and then you just sort of go go go on go on like that yeah wow that's a that's a huge W to do that like from the clinic you went to and then pulling up that's that's awesome thanks yeah um I'm gonna squeeze in one last question because I see that he's still still in chat and then maybe we can wrap up after this one because I know we're quite over uh Jonas I know you asked around uh like token pricing as well and how you can uh better project the usage cost for your project if you want to come on and unmute nice yeah so hey can you hear me yes perfect so uh I just started out and I have my first meeting tomorrow with an e-commerce business uh and they have like I think more than 500,000 uh visitors on theb website every month so uh my question is that could run up to a lot of tokens I guess if they all chatted with a chatbot so who should uh pay for the usage should I uh should they pay and also how can I estimate the usage cost before starting the project so that they know before what they can expect um I mean if it if they're getting you know that scale of of website visitors um you can imagine that you know they're going to be sort of bombarded with questions um so you'll hit your token limit very quickly um so what I would do in that situation is I I would propose probably building out a custom model for them and self-hosting it uh because the vast majority of tokens in voice flow do come from the AI responses right um and you can always send an API request to your own backend to get its API U to get you know an AI response and then show that back to the user um and you can really like you know cut down on the token costs very significantly by by taking that that approach or alternatively you could just say hey you know this is what I'll do I'll build it out for you within your own voice flow account and then you guys could are responsible for you know the buildout fee plus um my maintenance and then you know you guys take care of whatever voice flow credits you guys need you know independently and I think the only because I mentioned someone else actually asked that question that you just answered bow earlier about how do we set that up usage wise the one thing that we found is very very useful is that if they are wanting to maintain and manage their own service costs they've probably got a Google workspace just get them to go in and make a automations at their company name.co UK Etc as a domain they give you the login you build the solutions on that on that um login with their API cost Etc and then essentially that's just handed back to them if you want to step out that that emails there to then work on with the next agency or for them to manage themselves so it just allow s you to sort of build on their systems without having to integrate with a pre-existing account there's also a lot of other models I together AI was one that norval shared but um I think there's a few more where you can look to like like essentially use a different model to save tokens so happy to share that out after I've actually got I'm going to drop it in here now it's a um like an llm usage calculator for API pricing so depending on if you want to use Claude um Geminis Etc so they're all on there just looked through and look at the usage Etc and then you can sort of forecast a little bit with the traffic that you're currently seeing one thing that would also help keep the usage down is don't have the voice flow bot open straight away like on page on page load because obviously that's going to waste them higher how you today tokens as well as if you don't need it bring your token usage down if you're not looking to give massive outputs of over 3 400 words just bring the token usage down and it will bring it into that sort of concise window for it to then give it out without using too many tokens yeah and don't use like gb4 or the more advanced models when you don't need to um you know that's an instant 25x multiplier so you know just keep your prompt short and like Ben was saying really cut down on you know the amount of of tokens that you need um and use the simplest uh simplest model that'll get the job done yes I think that definitely leans on get used to using hucking face or at least knowing what other models are out there because there are so many variant you know accounting llm models that like if you're talking to accountants like you don't need GPT for people have already refined the data sets into new llms and stuff so instead of having 100 billion parameter model or whatever you can have a 7even billion parameter model or a 10 billion paramet model and then by the time you test it then you can see whether or not that's actually working and giving you the optimal output or not but that's that's the stuff that we I think as agency owners have to um that's that's our service towards our clients you know it's finding the solutions that best suit them it's not just okay I'm used to using gbt and gbt 4 so I'm always going to use gbt 4 and oh your retainers this much a month and that much a month it's like no it's like we need to use the systems and the models that are provided to us to best leverage that for our clients they're only going to trust us more you know eventually if you stop working with that client but they're constantly paying you $1,000 $1,500 $2,000 a month on a retainer eventually they're going to ask questions and they're going to be like why am I paying for this like I want Host this myself now so if you want to keep the client there you've got to do your diligence to make sure that you're constantly keeping them up to date using the right systems and ultimately making it as cheap for them as possible that's like the keys love that um yeah the other call out was around making sure you have quality prompts uh we started like a prompts channel in the Discord to just get everyone to share like what prompts have been working for them um also Pete on our team works a lot with our Enterprise clients he's creating like a prompt Series so so uh stay tuned for that I think it does make a huge difference that and structuring your knowledge base uh in terms of like making sure you can deliver quality responses and maximize your token consumption cool I feel like this a good place to wrap um want to like maybe stop our screen share here but thank you so much to all the panelists who've come out and shared all your wisdom um if you've been like thanks for setting us up cam this is awesome thanks foring you orated thing you've been with yeah this is it's all you guys look at the chat like it's it's just literally like blowing up from engagement so you guys are so awesome everybody