Welcome to Tectastic, where we navigate the Intersection of Technology And Business, uncovering innovations that redefine our world. Brendan Davis. It's lovely to have you on it. It's techtastic. Thank you for being here. I appreciate it. It's Chris Jim. I'm excited to be talking with you today. Do you have a podcast called Getover Yourself? And then you have Getover Yourself LLC, which I assume is, like, consulting, coaching, that type of thing.
Yeah. One of the hardest parts is early, you're too naive to know you're wrong, and that could get into your way. And big way. And for me, that was my big stumbling lock early is, you know, the internet was new. And, I was out, you know, convincing everybody they needed to go that direction. And I was right, but the way that I was right was wrong. I couldn't get over myself enough to Christian.
And it was when I finally started really listening that I was able to get past that and start to actually succeed in a big way. Yeah. And honestly, as I think to some of my biggest mentors right now, obviously, I'm still very young. I'm only twenty two years and I'm trying to make a name for myself and trying to figure things out. And I believe starting young is the answer towards success.
I'm not saying it has to be to end all be all, but I believe starting young is gonna teach me these principles that are just gonna elevate me beyond where a lot of people start when they're in their forties, fifties, getting involved from your shift career. It's a trade off. If you're later in starting your first business. You've probably been in a field for 20, 30, 40 years and into a career, very detailed.
You know exactly all the ins and outs and everything that's a pain inside that industry, but at the same time, you're starting a little bit later. Odds are you have kids, you have a family, you have a mortgage, you have car payment, you know, life just starts stacking up. The older you get, the more payments you have, and there's a lot you gotta stress with. And so it's also scary and more risky. I would argue later in life actually get going.
Whereas right now, me and my wife, we it's just us 2 right now. As far as payments go, our life is very simple. We pay for food, We have our house payment. We have a $100 to our car. And other than that, we live life very frugally, and that's because we're willing to take these risks a little bit earlier on. Wears later in life, and I could be wrong. I haven't lived that part of my life yet, but, it is a little bit more It is a little bit more difficult, I would argue. It it can be.
So I I I have the benefit of, like, I started as an entrepreneur very, very young. And then I shifted from entrepreneurship into running large enterprise technology organizations because they were looking for that entrepreneurial experience to help them innovate, become digital, to inject a digital DNA is what I always said. But, then shipped it back and I could shift back if I can afford it. I can bootstrap my company because I can pay my team out of my own savings account.
Mhmm. And you can't do that when you're young unless you work like a trust fund kit or something. Right? Right? The ones that are impressive to me are the people that really do start from, you know, I've got student loans. I'm going out and I'm gonna make it Hammer, and maybe they got a little bit lucky. Timing's a big part of being a successful entrepreneur. Right? It's like surfing. If you try to get in front of the wave too much, you just get washed over.
If you fall behind the wave, if you get left behind, you gotta catch it just right. Especially with technology, finding that right moment in the way of the paddle fast and get up on your boards, really, the key to success with it And some of that does take experience, but a lot of it's luck. If you come out of school at exactly the right time and you're in the right life stage that you don't have a lot of burden, you don't have a lot of things holding you back, you can take that risk.
You can start pedaling fast without worrying about somebody with a mortgage and, multiple car payments, multiple kids in college, or whatever. They've got all that weight slowing them down. So it's always a trade off. I encourage people that are later in their career that are trying to figure out what they're trying to do to invest in them sales, take the bet on yourself, but, it comes with a huge risk. You are betting on yourself. And I think that's kinda necessary too, though.
If you're not willing to take that risk and bet on yourself, ads are, in my opinion, it's not gonna work out anyways. But, I kinda wanted to jump back at the very beginning of our conversation you were mentioning Cal. A lot of times you need a support group or some kind of Oh, yeah. Cultivation when you're younger, if you wanna kinda jump in a business out at an early age, and I 100% agree.
I remember my earliest days I would get home from school, I'd get home from playing with my friends, you know, maybe some sports and whatnot. And my dad, he's a busy guy, and so he get home as well, and he'd be on his laptop, and he always made it a priority to spend time with his kids and my mom, his wife. That's something you see a lot of businessmen these days.
Kind of ditched aside, and you see a lot of marriages and a lot of families getting broken apart because somebody's building the next big thing. And, I always respected my old man for that because no matter how busy he was, he would make sure he'd be home in a reasonable time tonight. Even if that meant to still having to get some work done home or hang out for a couple hours and get back to work. He still made that time for us.
Yeah. And I would say the cultivation that worked best for me as we get home, we'd sit on the couch and sometimes did be working away at his laptop, but if we weren't watching a dodger game, we were watching that ABC shark tank, And that is the funnest, like, one of my fondest memories I have with my old man growing up because I would see these these so called average citizens, somebody you could walk by at the grocery store, somebody who could go to
your local church congregation, Hammer of you could have been your teacher growing up, the so called average citizen making a product it was changing somebody's life, not just their own, but some product that was hopefully helping somebody. And I I remember just in that early young age, I would look at those people and I'd I want to be like them. And ever since then, that's that's where I first started in business side. Nice. I was kinda like you.
I Hammer, like, these fun little side projects selling water or random things at school. My first ever registered LLC in the state of California was my landscaping company, Davis over lawn care, and it was is I had an old beat up pickup truck I bought during 1 summer. I had a buddy who had some landscaping equipment.
I had had grown up my entire life, cutting my grandparents grass, so I had a little bit of experience, I guess, Milan Bonds, and my other buddy is he was a gritty guy, and so he said, alright, let's go try this out. So he threw all equipment in the back of my truck. We started driving door to door, and we'd knock on people's doors. No idea what our sales pitch was. No idea what our pricing was. And we'd say, Eric, my name's Brandon. This is Dawson, and, we wanna cut your grass.
And maybe maybe we're still young and naive, and people were just helping us out because very bunch of high school kids looking for some extra cash, but, we got a ton of clients, and it started working out great. And that was, like, my first inch reduction to the business world, making my own dollar. I'd always worked for somebody else at that point. And so when I could, like, go home and say, like, mom, I'm taking out my girl tonight because I made my own money.
That was the coolest experience of my life. Yeah. And then I think it just fueled me for everything else that I've been, reading ever since. Yeah. So I said, at the very beginning, we have a lot in common when it comes to, like, upbringing and all that. My dad was a very busy man, as everybody. Dad probably was if it if their dad was around. True. True. And when his mom died, my grandmother died, my dad was kind of telling me, you you it's it's interesting.
As you get older, you can get closer with your father because you start to have a lot of shared experiences. When you're very, very young, you really don't have a lot in common because you haven't lived a life yet, and, you know, they've lived a quite a bit of life. But as you as you get older, the distance in age seems less. Even though you're you're same distance apart, it doesn't seem as fast anymore.
So my father after his mother died was telling me about, like, all these things he'd learned from his parents, And one of them struck me as really telling that I noticed looking at a lot of the other people I grew up with maybe why they didn't have the same self reliance and self Hammer. And it was, signing me up for Little League the first time, like, when I was tee ball age, whatever that is, like, 5 or 6 or something.
And on the is all the kids' information, all the child's information, and all the back is all the stuff that the parents are willing to volunteer for. And dad at the time, he filled out the front and he looked at the back and goes, Hammer time for this, and then we walked out. But I remember him turning around. We got about 20 feet away from the place where the sign up was because it was up in the where the score keeper would sit during the game.
So it was upstairs above the concession stand kinda thing. Right? So we walked down and then he turns around and he goes, and he walks back in, and I didn't know what had happened. But he told me, you know, just a few years ago, he's like, well, filled out the front of the piece of paper. I flipped it over, saw all the stuff, and I thought to myself, I'm too busy. I've got too much to do. But as was walking down the stairs. My mom was on one shoulder, and my father was on the other shoulder.
And my mom says, we had 7 kids, and we did everything with you guys. And my dad said and his dad, my grandfather, was on the other shoulder going, you know, why do you think you're so busy that, you know, you won't spend time with your children? And so he walked back up and literally put my mom and his name on everything, like concession, umpire, scorekeeping, all of it. And my whole life growing up, it didn't matter what did. And they encouraged us to do everything.
I mean, whether it was banned, theater, art, sports, I played every sport. My brother played every sport. They just wanted to be involved in everything and to try life. And they were always there. They were always involved coaching, you know, on hiring, whatever. That that was true when it came to business too. Like, the first time I raised money for a company, they were the first ones to volunteer money. And my parents weren't wealthy growing up at all.
They they would be the exact opposite of that. My dad was in the air force when I was born, and he was not a Christian officer. So we were on that end of the spectrum, And he worked his way up in life, but they were always there, and they were always willing to bet on me. And that was what gave me the confidence and the self, you know, certain amount self reliance, but also, like, just having that constant interaction with your father was always there with you.
There's a lot of similarities there with the, you know, just having an active dad, active parents, that support network. If it was also my grandparents, they were always You know, the second investor in my first company was my grandfather Yeah. Right away. He's like, what do you need? Oh, and and he was blowing the bond here. So having that support network is I love it. Critical. Right? So tell me about interval. We haven't talked too much about it.
The names come up a couple times, but, it's your first tech startup. It sounds like it's a SaaS because you just mentioned that. What does interval do? Yeah. Pretty simple concept. It derived, one day and my wife as as she was going off to work and, I was walking around the park. I try and wake up every morning just by going on a quick little walk. She's running around. You know, she just made her breakfast, and she's running a little bit late.
And she goes, hey, while you're on a walk, can you call Walgreens and check if my prescription is ready? I said, yeah, sure. Like any good husband, of course, I will. So I'm out of my walk and I call Walgreens, and I was amazed about what answered the phone. And I don't think it's across every single Walgreens location yet, but if you you'll have to try this after the episode, call local Walgreens and see who answers. It was a robot, who's a virtual receptionist.
Yeah. And so I was like, hold on, Irvin. So I start talking to it and I'm like, hey, to see if my wife's prescription are ready. It goes through a couple verification details, the birthday, random stuff like that. And I had a response within 2 minutes of me calling again and saying, yep, Christian is ready. You could go pick it up at this location today. And I'm like, wow, that was incredibly simple. And then I I'm walking around the park, I hang up.
Like I said, that was only about a 2 minute interaction, not thinking too much of it just besides, oh, wow, that worked really well. And then I'm like, wait a second. Was just in California visiting my parents, for a holiday. This is, this is a little bit ago, but and I got incredibly sick. Turns out COVID at the time, and I had to go into a pharmacy to pick up my order, but it wasn't your mainstream CVS, Walgreens. It's just kinda local, mom posh shop. And I remember I felt so crappy.
And I kept calling in and calling again and calling in. Nobody was answering the phone. And I'm like, I need to see if my prescription is ready. I feel a wharf now. And I'm just laying on the couch and, you know, who's probably a man cold, but what my wife would call it, but I felt horrible. And so, I remember of thinking back as I'm walking around the park, I'm like, k. That experience was horrible when I was trying to call into a company and they didn't answer.
Walgreens answered within a couple seconds. Why don't all businesses have this option that it's get crazy high call volume but can't always answer the phone? So that's where Interroll was born. It's a virtual AI receptionist for small businesses.
Trying to just target anyone and everyone who has staffing issues who can't always answer the phone, and then down the road eventually businesses are trying to cut back on costs, we'll be able to fill a little bit more of just up to your receptionist role.
But so far, we've had users who are sign manufacturers, auto groups, pottery making studios, we're kinda all over the place because it's anyone who has been struggling with getting their work done because their phones keep ringing, but they also don't Hammer, like, a dedicated person to constantly answer the phone. And so it was just like, whoever on the staff was closest to the phone at the moment would run over and try to answer the question, but then they got another phone call coming in.
Yeah. And so now our software, it just simply answers the phone like a normal receptionist would, an there's any customer questions, schedules, appointments, tracks, and insights that the businesses could, use for better customer experience in the future, or drive sales later down the road. Nice. That is a good use case for AI and, automation. That's fantastic. I'm curious. Your cost to serve has gotta be fairly high per call. Not as high as a human being would be, but Mhmm.
High for technology because of the reliance on an LOM coming back in. Are you profitable per customer yet, or is that that some distance in the future? So we're still, I mean, what we call our beta stage.
Okay. So we're just trying to gather as much data as we possibly can from every single company trying to figure out, okay, what the average across various industries that, they're actually gonna be needing phone calls answered, because our only costs come from our subscription bases of our phone numbers that we're using. So many minutes are we actually using? And so we're just trying to dial that in between different industries right now, and we're just charging operating costs for the moment.
And so pricing it eventually, we wanna be making 3.5 x on every single client per month because that's still under rating what the actual secretary would normally charge Yeah. Picture in any major major business, especially as our software becomes more and more detailed and we train our AI, it's even better and better and better.
And then obviously integration is down the road working individual CRMs of the companies and whatnot, but a normal secretary is saying to make around $4000 a month if we can even cut that in half. I'm a believer that a recession is bound to happen here in the next couple of years. The US has been going too strong for too long to not have it. And so our our initial phase right now and and beta testing for anyone who can't see. I guess this is not the only podcast, but I'm doing the air quotes.
Our beta test right now is clearly trying to figure how much will it actually cost us to run-in the future for various companies? And so let's just try and figure out every single piece of information we can. So I know in a few years down the road, whether that's in 6 months or down in 2 years, or who knows how long the US can survive still.
When that recession hits, we're gonna be able to go into these these businesses who Unfortunately, we'll have to lay off some of their work staff, but I still need people answering the phone. 63% of sales in various businesses that we're working with and targeting right now still happen over the phone. Yep. And they need people to manage it, but they still if they cut their workforce, they're they're gonna be focusing on their business. They still need somebody to answer the phone.
So that's who are gonna merge into in the near future. It's a great opportunity. It's a good space to be in. The the reason I was thinking about it is the value versus cost to serve or, you know, your full and COGS on that service are usually pretty amazing. Like, if you're in anything in the AI space right now, the economics of it are phenomenally good.
Especially when you're talking about this where it's like, in our world, what we're doing, we're focused on the, like, software engineers, the technical staff in a technology organization. And their global average cost per hour is about $52 an hour, India, Southeast Asia, etcetera, as well as North America. When you blend that together, you get $52 an hour So every hour you can save their time, that's $52. And we can save them 7 hours per instance. That's, you know, $350.
In that $350 we just saved cost us 3¢ to operate. Yep. Right? Like, the economics of that are so disproportionate in anything happened before that the the models that are gonna come out of this. I don't mean the large language models. I mean, like, the business models that'll come out of this are amazing. Like, your company, what you guys are doing, could easily be just a two person company because you could automate everything else under the hood.
There's no read and to have a bunch of staff and a bunch of other technology. You need the phone service. You need the automation service, whatever you're using on your technology stack there that includes the AI piece of it, right, and then a billing system. And then what? Like, that's kinda it. It's a great business model. Yeah. It's incredibly simple. Like you said, the reason we've stuck it with just the 2 founders at this point is because we haven't needed anyone else yet.
We're actually looking to hire our software engineer to kinda go along and just so we can blast this out even faster and make sure everything works. Right? And then we do a rolling acceptance into our beta program. And so every week, we accept 1 new company and make sure everything's built out perfectly within that week. Make sure there's no faults in it or whatnot. And so we're just gonna be hiring one more person to be able to get rolling with that.
But, yeah, overall, incredibly simple to monitor, especially once it's all running, it's it's fairly simple. And I think your audience will appreciate this a little bit more than kind of the average average show because your yours is obviously focused on tech. A lot of people at first were worried, like, obviously AIs coming for the jobs, right? Everyone's worried that AI is gonna take over the future and take over every single industry.
And how we view it is we're trying to bridge that gap between human interaction and artificial intelligence. At this point in time, like I mentioned, we're trying to help those businesses who literally cannot support a front office, whether that's due to margins or there's various reasons why that is, or they just get such heavy call volume that they need something else helping them in the background. But right now, we're trying to bridge that gap.
Can our software or our artificial intelligence go in there and actually help these companies still succeed? Bridging that gap is the way of the future, and I think a lot of people are gonna start recognizing that. I I'm excited to ride the wave. I'm excited for it. Yeah. Well, and and your like, your business is a great example. You know, the mom and pop store can't afford the front office person to be answering the phone.
They've gotta be, I don't know what else they're doing, but, like, if it's a restaurant, they're probably the host or the bartender or both. Right? And so, like, I I wanna at your place and you're not on the service tools that are out there that you can use for that. But I I really wanna get in. Well, you're not gonna survive in a world in which nobody can get reservations. You're not on any platforms and you really can't afford for a human being to be sitting there answering the phone.
How do you survive? So having tools that, again, get the technology out of the way solve for you these reoccurring and troubling problems is the way you get ahead. Mhmm. That is spending $1000 a month on this person or 3000 or whatever it is. I'm spending $150 a month or 200 or 500 or whatever the number is. Right? Can afford that. It's well worth that. And the technology is not something I have to interface with anymore. It's just out of the way.
It's solving a problem, and it's in the background. Yeah. I I I love what you're doing. I am thinking about it going, oh, man, there's like a 1000 use cases for exactly what you're solving, which is fantastic. There is. And I'll give you one example as well before we close out. Recently I was just contacting a lot of my it's kinda funny. A lot of my outreach so far Hammer been pure cold calling cooled emailing businesses.
Because if I can explain it in as simple as a way as I did today, for anyone who's even not teching to say, hey, our software answer the phones for you, and you don't get customers. They go, Oh, okay. Great. Yeah. And so when I was doing some of these cold calls, it's kind of funny because a lot of the businesses that would be best that we would work with, obviously, are the ones that don't answer their phones to begin with.
So a lot of going in person and trying to email back and forth, plain phone tag, and I I explained to them, Christian, this is exactly what happens when I call into your office, and I go and I demo this in person, I call, nobody picks up the phone. And one of these times I'm gonna bite me in the butt because somebody's definitely gonna answer the phone so far has an app in them. And so I call it, nobody answers the phone. I go, okay, you just lost a client.
To call one of your competitors down the road, call somebody answers the phone. I go, you just lost a client, and that's exactly why you need our software right now. And I think that's the gap if gonna be recognizing here pretty soon. That's what we're super excited for over interval. A lot of this show and tell, and that's all it really is. You guys need this because you are losing business, and I promise you, $200 to $800 a month depending on how big your business is, it's gonna be worth it.
So, check out interval. What's the website? Interval dash ai.com.interval dash ai.com. This was a fun conversation, and I know we didn't talk a lot about tech. We've talked more about being orders and, our experience with our families and our networks around us. But I think to me, that's the more interesting part. Mention the technology fading into the background. That's gotta be the goal. It's not all that it's about how do we have a bountiful life. I couldn't agree more. That's so accurate.
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. Overwhelmed by tech debt, discover Vala AI. The solution to tech challenges with the simplicity of a cliff No engineering background? No problem. Vala AI enables anyone to effortlessly tackle tech issues, freeing up your time from tech headaches. Make tech debt vanish with Vala AI, where your tech solutions are just a click away.