Welcome to Tectastic, where we navigate the intersection of technology and business, uncovering innovations that redefine our world. Ryan Matonis, welcome to it's fantastic. It is lovely to have you here. Thank you. It's great be here. So you've been a repeat founder. Well, actually, your previous company has been acquired, and now you're taking on an expanded role within the new organization sounds like. I'm also, I guess, I would say serial founder. Yeah. Is, Oh, so you got both going for you.
You're you're now living in a life of post acquisition. But your first one, the, I mean, the first couple didn't get there. And then the last one did, and then now we're, like, rolling up. But, yeah. I mean, a actual pretty typical story is very few people are successful in their first try. That would be, incredibly lucky fortuitous thing. Right? And later on, you figured out a couple the the misses you made along the way that got you to the opportunity that you eventually were acquired for.
And now you find yourself at a larger organization post acquisition, and it's it's a fundamentally different world you live in, generally speaking. Right? Same industry, maybe even a lot of the same people, but at a much larger scale than the previous. Yeah. Even the things that do feel the same, like they're just part of they're just completely more broken apart, and they're just like little bits and pieces part of the bigger thing.
I'm always curious about the post acquisition the technical integration side of it. Now that might be because of what my company does. But I, I often found that, you have 2 different cultures hitting And then going back way, way, way back, we were, you know, emax versus them or, tabs versus spaces. Like, there was holy wars about some very basic things in the tech space.
Like, if you were an engineer, you were e max or you were VI VIN world, or your tabs or your spaces, there was no meshing of those 2. And whenever 2 tech organizations would come together, that battle will get thought all over again. And it's worse when you're also talking now about, like, cloud vendors, if if you're AWS focused or you're, Google cloud focused or all the language choices you have. There's so many different ways for that clash to happen.
So the the first question I really have for you in that is Did you run into that? Is this something you're still fighting through? If so, and, like, what has that been like as a founder and your but your baby being acquired by a bigger company. So maybe not in that exact way, because there was no technology department at lead force before the lead engines. Acquisition.
And there was really just a lack of, like, sales and marketing and everything else, and it was just like, they almost were kind of just made for each other. And that even goes back to the way that, like, lead engines was created and lead force was created.
But there was still just, like, different ways of thinking about, like, whether or not you need systems for things, or, like, oh my gosh, you're using all these tools that aren't integrated or, like, you don't even have a, like, Google analytics tracking pixel yet. It just seemed crazy to me, like, as the tech person. Right?
But then I, of course, I knew that I was missing so many other things that I just I hadn't built out sentence because I had done it, like, through contractors, and I had relied on partners in, like, channel marketing and things like that. And it was still, like, mostly a solo operation when this happened. Lead Edge is what? It's not lead force. Yeah. That's an interesting point. So you you were a solo entrepreneur building out room, and and then you were acquired, and now you're part of a team.
Yeah. Do you have, like, do you have founders and early entrepreneurs in your market? Who is your market? Or in your in your in your audience? Oh, yeah. I know. People hear that wanna hear story. Oh, yeah. Very much so. Like, that that tends to be the the the principal people are their founders, or they're very early in startup. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, so the way I started lead managers, I'll tell this story.
I think this is probably more interesting one for them, is I was just doing freelance development services. Because I just knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and I wanted to meet people and, like, founders that were doing these things. And my buddy came to me with an idea where he was like, Hey, I need to automate this process inside of my business. Basically following this blog article going through these different tools. And it sounded really easy, and I was like, okay.
Like, I could build that. Like, what's your budget for And you only had, like, $1500 for me to come build this in this dashboard. And then I, you know, so I was like, well, we can do this for you. You don't really have enough budget. And then also, like, if you wanna upgrade it? What if you need to maintain it? What if it breaks? Right? He's like, so, hey, so how about this? How about I build it?
And I own it, and I give you a lifetime license, and I charge you exactly what you're can spend, but then I'll maintain it. If it breaks, I'll upgrade it. I'll go sell it to other people. They'll pay me for upgrades. You'll have usage of it. It's the exact same thing that you were expecting without all these other light. Hidden things. So we did that, and it worked. Right? And so it was like, I had my first customer who paid 1500 bucks for it.
So that was like market validation because he had to go do his research to if there was like a competing tool, something like that. Then I started selling at other companies that did more or less the same thing. And then I found really big reseller who ended up becoming an acquirer. So I think like there's And the conversation there was kind of just like, why are you guys even reselling my products? And they were just running cold emails of service for their clients.
And they didn't really have a lot of IP. Right? They were just buying a bunch of different tools and charging a fee and running it. And when you kinda do the numbers on, like, here's how it's worth when you sell an agency based on its earnings, and here's how much a SaaS company is worth.
Like, here's how much equity you're creating inside your business, and then here's inside your vendors, right, and it was like, well, Mine's kind of like a old one that does your thing, you're selling way more of it than I am. It's like if we kind of just put these things together, like, you know, It's a very different story. It's a better story, right? Yeah. It's like we're building this really valuable business together now, right? And so we did that. And it was a little slow going at first.
It just wasn't quite the perfect fit, and it took probably like a year to get it, like, locked in. That's actually still pretty fast. Yeah. I guess it is. Yes. And it's still getting better, right? It's still constantly getting better, and it's more niche, it's more dialed in. It looks completely different now. It is completely different it's even more of, like, an internal location now. Like, I think the lesson here for, like, tech founders, like, we think so much about, like, the products.
Like, my story actually was more of just, like, the moves that I made. And it was, like, getting big channel partners. It was, like, reaching out to companies that, like so I made a tool that built lead lists so I reached out to companies that did called Outreach automation. And I was like, Hey, what happens if somebody has a great experience with your product and they run out of leads? Like, they cancel, right? Like, so why not feature us in your marketing. Right?
So you got leads from that, or they put us on their website, got leads from that. And that was actually how we met Leadforce, was they found us through one of those channel partners It's smart on some of my fronts. One piece of advice that I've repeatedly given to people is the closer you can be to the transaction, the better. And in the case of what you were doing and what Leapforce is doing as a whole is you're helping your customer go towards the money. And get closer to it.
And that's always a win. Like, if you can help them sell even if they're only making a penny every time they do it, they'll just do it more often. Yeah. And as a startup to be at the earliest portion of the discovery outreach of a, like, SAS vendor, it's a great space to be in. But I also find, though, I was in AppTek for quite a while. I was at AppNexus AppNexus acquired by AT and T that whole mess. And it's gotten a lot more competitive, and there's a lot.
You have spent a lot of money now in ways that you didn't use to. Like, if you could build the technology 20 years ago to manage it for self. It was far more cost effective to do that than it was to go find a vendor or buy somebody else's tool. But now you couldn't possibly build a tool yourself that was competitive because there's so much already in market, and it's already buying up the cheap advertising. It's already buying the, you know, where the data's cheap.
So your only option is to pay for it. Yeah. Honestly, what's the best example of that chat, GPT 4 is $20, and there's a freemium version that's Right. Yeah. Why would I pay $20? Oh, wait. It's terrifying. That's gonna be 25 $20.20. All the all the SAS people out there. Yeah. Exactly that. Like, you you are now paying $25 for a bunch of experts effectively. How do you compete with that? Yeah. No. I I've been I've been preaching this for years.
I call it technical equity, and it's just like the idea that, like, you can either acquire a ton of technical debt, and it's probably the wrong word. Equity probably just perfectly the wrong word. You could get a bunch of technical debt by building a bunch of custom stuff, right, or you could just, like, build things on top of other things. So I'll give you an example. Maybe 6 years ago, I built a phone number. You could call it. You could start talking to it in any language.
It would come out on my side in English, and then I could talk back to you in English. It would come back out on your side in whatever language you were speaking. And it was really simple. It's like Twilio has, like, language recognition, and it has voice to text. And then Google can translate it, and then Twilio can turn it back to speech, and it wasn't particularly fast. And I didn't commercialize this.
I didn't make a product out of I'm sure if I went back and I revived this and I tried it again, I'm sure it'd be faster, it'd be more accurate. It would sound more human like, right, because Twilio Google have been pouring a $1,000,000,000, whatever a week or something into this. Perfect. The last, you know, 5 or 6 years. Right? And I'm not even paying it except for the usage, and I'm not using it. Right? So it's like there's a lot of just these little things that you can do.
It's like you leverage this, you leverage this, you leverage this, you leverage this, you leverage this, especially, like, with what I was doing, I was a data aggregator it was like, I was gonna go build on top of all these other data products and I just trusted they would get better and they did, because that's your core business, right? They're gonna get better.
Well, it's interesting because one of the big problems that a large enterprise runs into is they've got a bunch of integrations that they've done in their whole world. It's just integrations. Right? But then they glued it together with custom systems. Yeah. And they're spending a massive amount of money just maintaining the status quo. Yeah. It's weird because, like, the earlier phase you're at, the the better the SaaS products tend to be for your use case. And then staying up to date.
There there are a lot more frequent releases. They're, I don't know, less breaking changes, I guess. But when you get into the enterprise space, you're talking like, I have to integrate with SAP. Well, great. So now you've got a $200,000,000 change anytime anything happens. Yep. Right? I've never figured out how to bridge those 2 worlds.
How do you get more of the startup size, SME type tool set up to the enterprise to work with those systems that that that they have no choice but to continue to rely on. And if you can solve that, you know, you're talking about $2,000,000,000,000 company. Yeah. I don't know. I, think the GPT stuff is gonna be kind of like the solution here because it's gonna become more and more able to understand what the heck people cobbled together.
Like, I've noticed whenever I've put stuff into GPT 4, like, it's able to even pick out enough from the way that I've named my variables and what I've written to, like, kinda understand what I'm doing. Like, you can copy a code snippet in, and then you can be, like, make a website for this service, and it, like, kind of is good enough, and it, like, knows you're doing lead gen, and it's kind of scary. It's like, oh, I would've had to explain that to a person.
So I think there's, like, an element of that. I think there's also just, like, rip and replace. Like, once there's enough technical debt, you just kinda, like, you know, wipe your hands of it. I think a lot of these, companies are creeping. They're feature creeping into each other at this point.
I think the thing that I was talking about earlier where you go out to your people who are, like, adjacent to you in the product ecosystem, like, the person who creates your customer, they're trying to sell your core feature now is, like, one of their features because either GPT made it easier to crank out new features during your development sprints or just, you can just add some feature now.
It's like, oh, this just look at this thing and decide if it's a good lead, like, okay, it's a GPT prompt. Like, it's just things that are trivially easy that weren't before. So there's a there's it's all oh, sorry. I was just saying there's a huge amount of that, but the the the bleed into each other. And as they bleed into each other, it gets easier to rip and replace them. Right?
So if you have legacy systems that are cobbled together and that now, like, the new guys on the block or, you know, new version of HubSpot or something handles that, like, in a cohesive way, because they're just able to load more features in there, it's gonna be much more easy to just do that rip in their place. Yeah. I talk about tech in a very similar way. I the sunk cost fallacy code is absurd to me. Yeah. Right? It's ephemeral. It's it's temporary magnetic positions on a disk to start with.
Yeah. Why do I think that my code has any intrinsic value? It doesn't. And so, my own way of approaching that has always been like, I don't enhance. I just replace I just rewrite it. Usually, because it'll take me longer to reread what I wrote a year ago and figure out the hell I was thinking that it will just write the new thing anyway. And this guy's a lunatic problem. Yeah. That's exactly how my team thinks of me.
He just goes in and erases everything and starts over and like, it's just easier. That should be taken right at the comments now. Honestly, I love that. That's my favorite. Yeah. God. The the code assisting tools like, Copilot and all those. I don't personally use them. I have tried a couple times, but it's just easier for me to just write than it is for me to, like, have some thing, making suggestions, because the suggestion just pulls me out of my flow. So I look over and I'm like, wait, what?
Crap. What was I doing? Yeah. I mean, I, I think the best way to use it is, like, just little utility functions, like, I'm gonna say is in US business hours and, like, put it in this little file, and it's gonna crap this thing out or, like, a reformatter that's just some regex I personally don't have the time where it's the cheetah right. Yeah. No. You're right, though. Like, at a certain point, like, in a 1000, 2000 lines, it just, like, starts making things up.
I mean, like, I don't know if you've gone down the rabbit hole of, like, telling it to define everything inside of files and then import those files and then reference back to the that you defined earlier and now define each file. You know, like, you're copy pasting it all in. You're like, does this really work? But No, it doesn't. Doesn't. It gets close. It gets like really scary close, and then you don't have like that knowledge of the code to go debug it, you know.
You're just like, I don't know why it's broken. It all looks really I just wrote it and it's all tech ed already. Yeah. I don't know. It scares me. It's like, because it's, is it gonna get exponentially better? Is it gonna cap out? Is it we'll see. I think it's perfect for MVPs. Like, if you want to spin up a thousand lines of code, and then you just you get killed on the feature creep because just making it blue is, you know, oh, that's 2 hundred miles. Not not really, but, right?
Just anything kind of like that, you know, oh, can you, can you have it send me this notification and, you know, run this alert and save this thing here. And it's like, okay, well, that's, that's 10% of GPT's coding budget. Yeah. Yeah. The the feature creep piece is what stops it for being useful right now, but it's definitely a solvable problem. It's just that everybody was so focused on the It writes code and, like, I don't care about that. That's the easy part.
Like, the hard part really is understanding what to write and how it connects to other things. That's it. So, what you've been doing though with gluing together other tools is largely that. Not like you wrote the core functionality for this tool or that tool. You just made them communicate to each other, which arguably is all modern software development is. Yeah. It's just libraries on libraries, and it's all maintained.
There's this what is that x KCD comic where there's that little sliver that's maintained by one guy in Ohio that makes less than minimum wage and does this full time. And the entirety of the internet runs on this library that solely he maintains, yeah, or JS guy.
I think he's in Russia, there's It's a fascinating moment in time because we're transitioning from a one way, one paradigm of technology and, like, the wizards technology world being, like, you know, the people that could code, but more so, it was that about they were able to understand how things would talk to each other into, like, well, $25 a month. I have a tool that can do it for me, and it can replace a 100 of you on the coating part. We're still missing the context part.
So you have something more like a prompt engineer that's going to be the the modern equivalent of a software engineer, but that's also just a moment The transition to the next thing, which is in all kind of self, what's the business for criteria, and what's the business need old that thing upgraded. I got upgraded. I, you know, and patched and it broke something else. I've gotta fix that, like, that self healing version of it. That can't be that far away.
Oh, I think it just at the end game here is that your buddy that has an app idea just goes to a website and just tells it his app idea and the website just makes his app. And, What would even be a point of the app, though? Because at that point Wait. It's it's software because then AI can just do anything at that point. Like, it's backed, what its capabilities are, and you don't need websites. Well, I've actually kind of thought about that a lot too.
And like that, even going back to your previous question about SAS, Like, I guess Microsoft, you can just have its AI query, all of your data. If you give it API access, us to everything, and it can go, you know, hey, did somebody from our com company talk to these people? And, like, it just goes and finds, like, oh, here's this transcription from this Google Meet or not Google Meet teams meet is what it would be. And, it's it's scary. Yeah. And it's, like, you could have just on demand Okay.
Make me a widget so that I can do that, but why would you even what would you do with the widget? Right? Like Right. What would be the point? Well, what would be the point if you doing it? Either. Hey. Yeah. Jacob solved this thing. Like, go. Like, at some point, it's like the market sets the requirements for the business. You need to grow at 10%.
The the discovery of what you need to do to grow at 10% over the 18 months that that market demand is going to put pressure on your stock is something that's quantifiable. Right? So you you could sit down and say, okay. Well, I can actually build a tool that figures out what the roadmap for our company is. And then I could build another tool that takes that and breaks it down into discrete requirements for the business.
If I get the requirements for the different parts of the business, then I can write discrete little systems that could do the same thing with that and break that down further. And so it got to the point where it's, like, The market wants your company to grow at 10%. This is what you do, and it's a self fulfilling machine that just sits and runs itself. Like, there's no need for humans.
The the reason I say it that way or at the way I think about it is when we're writing software, all we're doing is automating something that used to be done by humans in some form. You know, in some places, we're automating the automation of another automation.
But down that rabbit hole, there was a person at one point, The end state of AI where we're going with it is that AI is just a much better interface to the technology for needs And if you can take the human out of it, which a business doesn't really have a need for humans, the humans are just there, then what's the point? Like, what what do we do? What's What is the future of human work if that is even possible?
Because that's gonna be the most efficient business to run, which gives it absolute ability to drive down cost. Yep. There's a there's an end game there that doesn't look good for people unless we figure something out. No. I mean, I think it's pretty obvious what's gonna happen. You've got a bunch of people. Their job is basically using Google Sheets, PowerPoints, you know, there's things like that, right, that are all owned by the companies that make the super AI. Right?
You see what I'm you see what I'm bringing in here? Yeah. Are we just batteries? Like We're just batteries. Yeah. No. There'll be a time where it's like our dexterity, and it's like there's some calculation where it's like, we couldn't make a specialized robot to do this thing, you know, but, you know, then they, you know, that's there's gonna be some curve there. What is it called? The transistors keep getting smaller and smaller. More as law.
More as law for just like what robots are gonna be able to do for labor. Like, that'll probably be a thing. I think I think that's another one's coming very rapidly too. Some of the demonstration bots I've seen in the last week are, like, I don't understand the need for the human. In a whole bunch of manual jobs today. Yeah. And it's not that I don't value the people. I'm not suggesting that at all.
I'm saying that, like, in the in the case of a business need, it is cheaper to pay for new robots than it is to continue to pay salaries for a human already. In a lot of places. McDonald's doesn't have people filling drinks and hasn't for a long time because it's much cheaper to automate that. Well, what happens when also true of flipping the burger and putting it on the bun and doing all those. There won't be people doing that. Self driving vehicles.
It's been true for a little while that there are, you know, for certain routes with trucks, you can have the vehicle drive it. You don't need a person there. Yeah. How many jobs is that? Like, as you go down it and look at a lot of the stuff that people do construction, a lot of the role in construction, I can actually there are robots already that'll do a better job than the human would.
Yep. So the the dexterity part is true for now in some cases, but it's it's I mean, I the the one that I just saw yesterday, the bot was able to do the the cup stacking thing. Yeah. Than any human can. Yeah. That's pretty scary, actually. Or no. Maybe it'll be something we just completely aren't expecting. Like, maybe somebody will give GPT 5 a Bitcoin wallet and, and, like, act as to, like, the financial exchange or something. And it's just like, it won't be like a labor thing.
It'll be like, AI just sucked all the money out of the economy and just is gone. There's like the South park bankers. It's all it's gone. It's like AI has, you know, 10,000,000 Bitcoins, and there's like a 1,000,000 left that are shared by people. Nobody even knows who owns the AI. Like, just if we're throwing crazy predictions out here. Well, but that's I I think it's interesting to play out the in your head rata hold because then you you can say, okay. What am I doing to prepare for it?
I don't mean building a bunker. Right? So one of the questions I've asked repeatedly is if chat GPT was to replace Google as the font of all knowledge, the oracle of wisdom, and where I get information, which arguably, it's already rapidly accelerating on that path. Yeah. What happens to advertising? Most advertising today is Google based. I mean, there's, yeah. We, we mostly do outbound, but this advertising, just running ads. Yeah. That's true. But the purpose of advertising doesn't go away.
As a business, I need customers to find out about my brand. If I'm trying to increase the, you know, like, with Nike, I always said that, like, Nike doesn't make better shoes, they just make you feel better about buying their brand. Yeah. Right? That's true of most brands. What happens when I can just ask who makes the best shoe and I get the response of the the actual quality or the thing I'm asking for. You get, you get idiocracies of what.
You have people just neuralink in it, just straight into there, just thinking, you know, they think what is the best shoe. Great Nikes. Yeah. Hey. It's already on your feet. You already bought them. You bought them a month ago because we knew you needed them or want them. We knew you needed them. You got Nike's and Amazon. It's like cash on demand. And you're like, I guess, I, I guess.
There was a joke at a while back on don't remember what the heck it was, but it was, instead of next day delivery, it was prior day delivery. Your day delivery. Middleby cold COD, Just unsolicited. They'll show up at your door with cash on demand sales. And they're just like, okay, I guess I really do need this. That's not a bad idea. You know, that's a terrible idea, but somebody's gonna do it. Don't worry. Yeah. So, Ryan, I I sorry.
I've I've gone down a weird rabbit hole with you and asked you a bunch of questions that have nothing to do with your business and what your, what you're out there doing. Maybe it should, but, yeah, no. Go on. I was gonna say, like, I I I find lead gen and space that you're in to be very like, it's very important to my business to be able to get, like, how do we get the right audience looking and seeing what we're offering and how do we get it them.
And I think that everybody listened to this cares about that too because most of them are startups in SaaS or in technology offerings. So if they wanted to know more about what you do or they wanted to reach out to you, how would they do that? Yeah. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. Just look me up, Brian Matonis. Mentioned that you saw me in a podcast or something because the AI bots are also reaching out. Test for them.
They'll all ask them about, like, some ancient battles if they respond in 20 seconds or less with a paragraph or 2 about it, their bots. If they're really confused, their people. Why are you asking that question? Thank you for responding as a human being. Yeah. Exactly. Or go, you know, leave force360.com. You can reach out there if you want some help with outbound marketing. Get more people smashing the phones, wanna get better smashing the phones yourself, something like that.
Yeah. Ryan, it was a pleasure having you on, man. And chatting with you. Sorry that I I took it down a weird path. No. You're good. I had a good time. Maybe we could, go down the weird path again sometime. And that's a wrap for this episode of Tectastic. Wanna thank you personally for joining us, and we'll see you next time. Until then, keep exploring and stay curious. Thank you for listening. If you are new here and enjoyed the content, please subscribe. It really helps us out.
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