Transcription
What's going on? What's going on, everybody? Who's actually listening to this podcast?
First of all, guys, welcome back to another episode of the Nikil Sai Show, which is hosted by me, the Nikil Sai. And guess what's going on today? We're back with another amazing guest. This is going to be a very interesting conversation. I know most people feel like AI is overhyped, but I believe it's underhyped. People really underestimate how powerful the technology we're getting hands-on is; and this is actually a like a general purpose, like everybody, every day, and average guy is actually using AI right now, and that's what's most fascinating.
The guest we're getting on today has a very interesting take on it, and he's using AI not only to grow his own business but helping thousands of other businesses leverage AI and get more bookings, get more appointments, and scale their companies and whatnot. I know you might have seen a million tools claiming AI, and every tool is an AI tool by now. The person who we are getting on today has a very strong background in AI and has built tools completely differently, with a fundamental approach, uh, to AI and creating real use cases that actually transform businesses.
Now you might be wondering who this person is. He's actually the founder of Closebot. This is an AI agent builder platform that revolutionizes how marketing agencies automate lead qualification and appointment booking. Now, many agencies I personally know have benefited using Closebot. So, I'm excited to bring the person who built it. And we're going to talk a lot about how marketing is going to change and what kind of skills you need to get better at prompting techniques and how AI works and what vision we have and what we need to be ready to foresee and get ready for the AI storm that is about to come.
Let's welcome the CEO and co-founder of Closebot.ai, Bryce Dora. Hey, Bryce.
Thank you so much. I need to hire you to do our marketing strategy. That was brilliant. You hit it on the head. I was—I'm going to take the transcript of this, and there are a couple of things that you said about our company that I want to use verbatim in our marketing. Expert-level AI agent builder, keeping it simple, effective. You—you nailed it. Thank you for the intro.
Yeah, I mean, after delivering half a billion to my clients, I kind of believe that I got a little bit better at marketing. So I'm excited, Bryce. I mean, we met briefly at High Level Summit. I don't know if you remember.
Uh, I did come to your blog.
Of course I do. Yeah, I—I—I made a video with you. I spin the wheel. I won—I won—I don't remember, 50 bucks, 100 bucks, 20. I don't remember. It was so funny.
Yeah, you were the big one.
Yeah. And you were—you were offended if I didn't take the dollar bill. So, I had to—I had to. But that was so sweet. Uh, it was really nice, uh, meeting you and obviously I met your spouse. Uh, it was pretty fun hanging out with you guys and, uh—uh, okay, we'll get into the personal stuff later on, but I'm so—so excited to have you on Rise. For people who don't have context of who the founder and CEO of Closebot is, give us a little bit of intro. I mean, you have a very unique background of being an engineer working with Boeing and again doing AI in Boeing and then coming back and building your marketing agencies to building now a software company that is growing at a rocket ship speed. Walk us through your journey. Give us a little bit of context, like take us through the younger self of Bryce's journey.
Yeah. Well, I was always good at math and science. I loved learning, always have, and that's a real skill I think a lot of marketing agencies have to have. They love learning, and luckily that's the case because there are many tools to learn. But I—I knew I loved learning. Senior year, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I just knew I liked math and science, and that's what my advisors were telling me was going to make me the most money. So I went to the cheapest, closest buy school I could, just for math and science. Um, I went for physics, ended up graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering, though. Fun fact, during that time, I had one computer science class. Hated it. Didn't think I would ever be a developer. Graduated mechanical engineering. Now, during that time, I met my beautiful wife, and we ended up having a baby very young. And right after graduation with a newborn baby, I had to find a job. It was a harder time in the job market. So I put out probably a hundred different applications. 90 of them were in the Midwest. Some of them were in Washington State for Boeing. H, and that's where we ended up. That's the only place that offered me a job was Boeing. I graduated with like a 3.9 GPA mechanical engineering degree; hard to find a job. For some reason, the universe was guiding me to Boeing.
Soon after starting there, I realized that mechanical engineering was not for me, which is disappointing. You spend five years at university and then realize it's not for you. Kind of sucks. I was like, "Hey, that's okay. Um, no one knows what I do at Boeing anyway. Like, there are so many people there that you kind of get lost in the mix." So I had enough free time to go and meet other people at Boeing and find mentors doing AI development, prototype software engineering for Boeing. So it was like the new cool, fun stuff at Boeing that Boeing would never use, but they needed an R&D department to write off for taxes or something. So it was like super fun. I ended up hanging out with them enough at like lunchtimes and after hours to learn AI and software from them. And eventually they hired me onto their team, and I spent a few years doing AI development for Boeing.
And this is what time frame? What year are you talking about you learning the AI technology?
This was about eight years ago.
Jeez.
Yeah. I mean—
It was very different.
Yeah. Nobody knows the word AI yet. So yeah, when we were doing AI, like we were training our own models. I had to sit there. For example, we were doing image AI as well. And I had to sit there and label images to train our AI model.
Sure.
So we didn't have like these ChatGPT, Anthropic things you could plug into.
Correct.
Yeah. That's pretty cool. And when did you decide that, okay, like it's enough and I had to do my own thing, and why—why did you even get into entrepreneurship when you're already working at Boeing? That sounds like a fancy job. AI engineer at Boeing. Yeah. What changed?
Yeah. My parents were super proud, by the way. Like I grew up on a farm, town of 150 people. We didn't have a school there. So I went to a town of 1,500 people for school. So like in their eyes, I was as good as it gets. And everyone else, same thing. They looked up to me, but I just wasn't—I wasn't happy. I wasn't fulfilled there. A large part of it was because it was so corporate and hard to get things done. But my wife, who didn't get a chance to graduate, ended up finding work as a real estate agent. And at this time, she started making more money than me consistently. And I was like, "That's BS because I went to school for five years. I have a bachelor's in engineering, and I am an AI engineer at Boeing." So, I was like, "That's not cool. I'm tired of my 4% raises every year at Boeing. I'm going to quit and do real estate with my wife." And I found out how hard sales was. So, at least I had my freedom and like no limit on potential for income, but I was miserable doing sales.
Yeah, I can only imagine.
Yeah, that's—that's quite interesting when you said that. And uh—Okay, so cool. You're trying to help your wife, and basically you got your ego stroked like, "Oh my god, like how can she make more money? I want to be in this." And why did you transition into starting a marketing agency or actually building these automations? How did that transition happen?
Well, during my time at Boeing, I was also super interested in learning languages. So, I speak Italian. I used to speak German and some Russian as well. And so, it was my hobby on the side to work with different languages and AI. And I had some experience with generative AI in doing that. And I was like, "Hey, I don't like sales. I wonder if I could train a model to do sales for me." And so I got to work doing that. And my wife was real disappointed because I was already bad at sales. And then in my time that I should have been spent selling, I was building software tools that were only losing us money. But eventually when the real estate market crashed, neither of us were making money. But now I had this prototype of a software product I was calling SalesBot at the time, and people wanted to buy it. I obviously needed a website then. SalesBot wasn't available. So I searched and searched until I found the name Closebot. People started to buy it, and Closebot was born.
Yeah. And this is what timeline and what year are you talking?
This would have been November 2022. I was using my own LLM right when I started selling it. And then that was right when ChatGPT released their 3.5 model, I believe. And I plugged my stuff into that model instead of my own. And I was like, "Okay, this—this just works now." And so I was like, right place, right time. I already had all the infrastructure built, and it was just ready to take off. People started asking if I plugged into Go HighLevel. I had never heard of that, and so I ended up just making it for HighLevel because enough people asked for it.
Interesting. That's quite fascinating. I mean, one—one thing I could see is a very strong resilience, like you—you didn't know that like OpenAI is going to create this new model and open the API, but you are still building believing the foundation and the—the product vision you had even before the LLMs were available, and now it's paying off. I think—I think that's the great—most entrepreneurs miss, and they wonder why they're not successful. Like you got to be focused on your product that much and build the architect like you did. That's—that's so cool. So cool. You never heard of HighLevel. Now you're like the guy in HighLevel for—for any type of your chatbot AI automations, which is funny enough. Like I just see like—like every 10 recommendations, like six say your company name. It's—it's just so funny. So anyway, what—what was the journey like? So you—you found the LLM, and finally the Closebot is rocking when it comes to performance, and what was the growth like? What was the journey like? Uh, and how did the product evolve over a period of time?
And it was a grind at the beginning, like all into people's DMs and all over the Facebook comments. It is a grind getting a product off the ground. And I think a lot of marketing agencies probably resonate with that too. You have to like cold call, door knock, DM, like we all go through it. It's a season, but it's so important.
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And where do you—where do you—I mean, it's been evolving a lot. I mean, I've recently saw you guys uh, relaunch with a better version, and uh, I'm so excited. So, walk me through what—what changed in Closebot with a newer version and how it is different and what are you most excited about uh, with Closebot being used by more people right now?
So when I originally built Closebot, the reason why it was so powerful is because of these things we call objectives. You set up these objectives, and instead of having a big long text input of what you want the AI to do, the objectives are able to change the instruction that the AI is working with depending on where it is in the conversation. And the result is just better conversations. H but we started to see a need for things other than just objectives, like in workflows, if you want to split and do different objectives if certain things happen, like maybe I determine you are a buyer versus a seller, well now we need different objectives to qualify you on being a real estate buyer instead of a seller, and it's—it's like this for gyms too; they have different branches, they need med spas, chiropractors. They might have different calendars they want to book on in different scenarios. In this V2, in addition to a lot of the other stuff, the main thing is it makes that really easy. We have a drag-and-drop builder built specifically for building AI agents that need to handle more complex um, lead qualification paths.
Interesting. And I mean, it might just sound simple to people who are listening, but I mean the power of the feature you just mentioned is life-changing, especially from a business standpoint, if like an AI workflow can actually determine the lead and create the workflow and qualify them according to the requirement; that's just life-changing overall. Now I'm curious when you are this person who really don't want to sell and you're like this product nerdy, you know, like just building the product and focusing on like, "Hey, if I build like people will come," what was like the—the—the biggest growth moment, like where was—where did you see the exponential growth in Closebot, and what—what do you think actually like catapulted it? What—what resulted in that type of growth in the first place?
Yeah, really good question. We started getting a lot of traffic with our affiliates. I'm not great at selling, but luckily our audience is marketing agencies, literally the best salespeople in the world. Yeah. So, when they believed about our product and they saw they could make money being early selling something, that's where it really started to take off. We paid out close to $100,000 in affiliate revenue last year. We will probably 7 to 10x that this year, and that continues to be our primary focus. Affiliates.
Okay. For anybody who's listening who wants to be a Closebot affiliate, what kind of incentive structures you have and where do they apply?
We have a 20% affiliate structure. So paid out in perpetuity. You get 20% of all subscriptions that sign up under your affiliate code. And it really pays to be early. We—You may feel like you're late to the game, but we are still so early in the AI world. It's crazy.
100%. I—I think yeah, people are listening to AI and they think it—it's already here. Like we barely scratched the surface. Like, you know, especially with the new GPT models coming up, like there's just so much that AI can do. And I mean, you—you've been somebody, right, like playing with AI like almost for a decade now, like almost eight to ten years. I'm kind of curious like how—for somebody who's listening, most people think AI and it's so—I get frustrated when I see this. People think AI is that one app that they can chat with. They're like—they think this is like the new tool to chat with, and I'm like that's not what AI is. If you have to explain AI to somebody who's listening who might not have the best view on it or doesn't understand it completely, how—how would you explain it and how do you define AI if I have to ask you?
Yeah, I like to go down to the foundation level of what AI is. It's just a next best word predictor. So like if I take out my phone and just start—start typing a message, it recommends other words. So I can say hi, and it says—or if I type his, for example, it says next best word is probably first day at school is tomorrow. It just keeps guessing the next likely best word. H and it's gotten good enough at that that it can guess like correct code to put out. If you lead in there with I'm having this issue with my code, here's my code, it knows to pick the next best word over and over again until it represents—get good code or marketing copy or a message to send to a lead you're trying to qualify. That's all AI is. It's just a next best word predictor. That's probably the most simplest explanation of what an AI is. I've heard people explain it as complex as it gets. Like, "Oh, this is fed with seven gazillion amount of data, and now it's structured, and you get an output, and there's an input." Nah, you just made it super simple.
Appreciate that. I mean, this is what—like I think—I think somebody super powerful has mentioned this, like this—the level of skill is determined by—of how simply they can explain a concept, and you explaining AI in—in that simple terms really shows how good you are at what you're doing, and I believe—
Thank you. Yeah, I'm—I'm excited to—kind of—this is the—the tool exists, right, like the technology exists; what's the use of it if you don't know how to use it? Like what's the—the skill to get the best out of AI is all about prompting, and many people underestimate. They think it's just talking to AI just like how we talk to people. But I think it's more than that. I—I believe prompt engineering is a skill which is probably the number one skill everybody needs to learn right now. No matter what industry, what—what they're doing, like they need to get good at prompting. I'm curious if you have to give a playbook for somebody who's listening to this podcast on becoming good at prompting. Where do they learn? What do they do? How do they get better at prompting?
I think the biggest mistake I see people make, even the people that call themselves experts, is they feed bias into their prompt. What that looks like is maybe I have a business idea, and I want to know if it's a good idea, and I want to bounce that idea off of ChatGPT. It's been trained to sway more towards nice. So keep that in mind. If I say, "Hey, ChatGPT, I have this business idea where I'm going to deliver newspapers door-to-door via a hot dog cannon." Um, really excited about it, but let me know what you think because I said I'm really excited about it. It's going to tell me it's amazing. I'm one to two years ahead of the curve. It doesn't see anyone doing anything like this, and it is bound for success. I should do it now before the competition catches up. I see that every day. Instead, it's not even good enough to leave out the "I'm really excited about this." You have to say something like, "Be brutally honest with this idea. Here it is. Don't feed in any bias and sway towards slightly negative, knowing that it's going to be more likely to sway towards the positive aspects. Even if you say, 'Give me five positives and five negatives,' it's going to come up with five positives even if they don't exist and five negatives even if they don't exist. Its job is to please and do exactly as you ask in a nice way, and we're feeding bias into the system that's just stroking our ego."
Makes sense.
Yeah. I mean, it's a small realization, but then it completely changes the output you get from the AI you're talking to. And especially if you're using it a dozen times a day, how much misinformation you could actually get into your own head by asking the wrong questions or getting the wrong instructions from it or information from it. I mean, I can only imagine like things can go south if—if you don't really get your AI right.
Exactly. Life. So that's interesting. And how are you using AI in Closebot AI? I'm kind of curious. I mean, not just for building product, but I'm curious from a day-to-day perspective; where do you see the most applications of AI in your life?
We use it to write some boilerplate code. So we don't use it to write a ton of our code—best code base, but if we want to speed up individual function code writing, we'll use it—use it to troubleshoot code issues. We obviously use it on our homepage to qualify leads and book our demo calls. And since we're focused on lead qualification and sales AI, we use a different platform's AI for our support AI called Intercom. So Closebot for the sales, Intercom for support, and we use it in code. Our marketing, our CMO will use it to write first drafts of blogs, and then I'll come in and make it human. I don't like to put AI-written blogs out there if I can help it. If you look at ChatGPT or OpenAI and Anthropic, their blogs are written by humans. So if that tells you anything.
Sure.
Okay, that makes sense. And where do you see the direction of AI? Like—like if you have to paint a picture 2030 and like the world—
Is AI flourishing? With so much more AI technology, a bunch of people have lost their jobs and whatnot. Like, where—where do you see the AI actually—what kind of world do you envision, uh, you being in AI for so long, where do you see this is moving towards?
We're obviously moving toward a world where we start to lose the application and browser layer. Instead of having to know where all the buttons are, you can just speak within an application, and it'll orchestrate for you. But still doing it in a way where you can monitor what it's doing and edit it. So we still have a human in the loop because we've seen, especially with agents, when it gets off course, either because of the underlying model or because of bias we fed into the system, it starts to spin out of control really fast.
Yeah. And it's important to have a human there to guide it back and nudge it. Um, so we will just be professional nudgers.
Wow. I like that perspective. And yeah, I could—I could be a professional nudger. I—I don't mind being a professional nudger. Yeah. And those nudges are—I mean, that's our—that's our realm of genius as humans. If you didn't have to know where all the buttons are and you just got to do the really like high-level cerebral type things and let AI take care of the nonsense. That's where we're designed to live.
Yeah, I'm excited. Yeah, that—that—that I can't sleep tonight for sure. I'm excited about that. Yeah, that's like—but we'll—we'll keep seeing very specialized AI systems. I know for Closebot, we are specifically designed right now for lead qualification and booking. And that's because when you build these systems, you have to have a—like we try to keep it as simple as possible on the surface, but the back end is insanely complex. All of the different checks and balances we have to do—we're running several different AI requests simultaneously in milliseconds to respond to a single message—just like so much has to happen and specialized for lead qualification.
I don't believe that artificial general intelligence is a thing. I think it'll be highly specialized, and then we may have a layer where it gets better at talking to different specialized AI systems, but no overarching general intelligence.
Interesting. Okay. I mean, I've heard different perspectives from other people. It's kind of contradictory.
Totally. That's what—that's what I am—very contradictory. That's what makes the AI discussions interesting.
You kind of explain that you're using obviously Closebot for your own lead qualification, but you're using Intercom for support, which makes sense, although big SaaS, you know, they use Intercom. I'm kind of curious why—this is just a poking question—why can't you use Closebot and create like a support version of it? Because I believe many companies who are selling also need onboarding bots and support bots, fulfillment bots, and knowledge bots and whatnot. I'm curious why did you just focus to stay on like sales as a primary focus?
We had to find our unique value proposition, an ideal customer profile that made sense for product-market fit. And I believe Intercom has done an amazing job. I like their product. Didn't think a good solution existed for lead qualification and booking. Um, will we eventually branch into that area? Maybe. But for now, for like lighting fire in our growth, we have to stay focused.
H, makes sense.
And a very interesting thing I have personally is there's a lot of AI conversation—like actual like phone call bots that are like Asian calling—and like there's like a gazillion amount of tools being launched claiming this is the next sales AI—can do sales calls for you. You create a Zoom avatar, and it closes for you. You don't have to take sales calls. I've heard somebody saying webinar AI—this AI will do webinars for you. I was like, "No way, this is true." So like everything is hyped up, but it's funny enough. I'm curious why didn't you not get into like AI? I mean, Closebot is super focused on like chat-based lead qualification and booking. And I get it. It's not perfect. You could really hear that latency. The voice bots are not perfect. They don't sound like human at all. Kind of getting better, but it's not there yet. But I'm curious, are you thinking about it to add as a product? Is that in your roadmap anytime soon? What—where do you see this voice AI thing integrating into Closebot?
Yeah, two main reasons why not yet. Primary reason is that laser focus we have. We believe we have a ton of untapped potential still on the raw text side in an entire blue ocean of customers. So if we split our focus and start going into voice in addition with our current headcount, that would hold us back. I guess three reasons. Second, I don't believe that voice is as big of a value proposition as people believe. I know my generation—I have my phone on constant do not disturb. I don't answer a single phone call ever. And I know most people—okay, most people in our age range are the same. It's the older generation that's going to answer the phone, and they could probably be sold by AI. They might not know the difference, but they're not going to live forever. Um, they're going to die sometime, and then you'll only be left with the people that don't answer their phone. But I'll only—I'll always text, and I'll always message back and forth.
Sure. So, there's that. But, we probably will go into voice because people want a combined system. They want text, and they want voice, and they want them combined. So the nice thing about the way we've built Closebot is when we decide to add voice, it won't be entirely complicated to add it because we already have the backend logic in place.
Interesting. That's pretty smart actually that you already create that shelf space to add a new way of communication, and I think yeah, like it's just a matter of convenience—just like how HighLevel has combined all the tools and given one interface. I believe when people are using their lead qualification and somebody just wants to be like, "Yeah, call me," if the Closebot voice can call them and talk to them and it's human enough, I think it would work. That's—that's pretty dope.
And this brings back to the next question I have for you, which is most marketers are really, really struggling, or like they're always chasing and finding the next new diamond, next tool, next new shiny object, right? You, as an entrepreneur yourself, have been super focused—like there's not many software—just for perspectives, I have friends who raise money and build software companies, and these guys also look at it as a short-term business—like they just churn—like, you know, like fast new product launch—doesn't work, scrap it, go do another thing—but you've been like super focused on this product when it didn't work, when it's working, while it's continuing to grow, and maybe later on—how do you stay focused, and what's your recommendation for people who are having that shiny object and that fear of missing out, uh, type of situation for most people with the fear of AI?
Yeah, that's a really good question. I've always been really good at doing the boring thing over and over again for a long time. Learning languages is like that. The only way to learn a language is just to do it every day for a very long time. Yeah. So, I already had that skill, and this is not a success story overnight. I had a clothing brand. I had a website for people to write blogs in a different language, and it would compare them against other language speakers. Like I've done so much other stuff, but this project has been just really fun for me. And I think if you find something that's really fun and your life experiences prior to that has like brought you unique knowledge—like my language learning, my AI—it was unique knowledge that I could put into Closebot, and it's fun, and I'm making money. So why focus on anything else? And as a marketing agency, like if you used to work with roofers, you understand roofs, now you have a marketing agency, and you find AI and it's really fun and that's your thing, don't also build websites. Hire that out if they want a website. Like, say no to everything that's not within your wheelhouse of unique knowledge and fun and making you money.
Makes sense, isn't that?
Yeah. I mean, that's some straight advice. It's easy to say for most people who are listening, they might be like, "Ah, I just wish I had that type of, you know, diligence to just stick to one thing." That's the trickiest part.
I'm curious, walk us through the—the software journey. I believe building a marketing agency and running a software company are like—like these are like two different skill sets and two different pathways. Correct me if I'm wrong. And what was it like in terms of like a journey for you to build a software company? And how would you talk to people who are assuming to build an AI agent or because building software is so easy right now with Bubble and, you know, Replit—all these tools coming up where you could do what's called "no-code" these days—you know, that—that word is buzzing around—I'm kind of curious like, uh, how would you describe the journey of building a software product and as a journey for somebody who might be considering to start one?
Yeah, I think they're actually more similar than people would think—just running a business in general. It starts with you in the trenches doing everything from customer zero to customer 20. It was just me, and I was developing, I was sales, I was CRM, marketing copy, email campaigns, you name it. And it's the same for marketing agencies. When you get started and until you have 10 to 20 people, it's just you. You don't have the money to hire someone. And my product was code. Your product as a marketing agency is process—whatever that process might be. Either way, we both have product, and either way you have to start as the sole person doing everything. And then as you grow, you start to hire, and I know my job now is more leadership and vision. In the bigger marketing agencies, that's where they are too. You eventually get to a position, no matter what the business is, where you're just leadership—company vision.
And I'm sure along the journey of you becoming an entrepreneur and creating all these businesses and stacking up skills, and I believe that's probably the muscle you need to build—the muscle memory of like all the skills stacked up to become the entrepreneur you are—where do you learn from—what's like the—the go-to place for you to get knowledge at this scale you are in, at this situation? And what do you recommend for other people? Because it's a very—quite an interesting time, and you know the guru market is no longer serving people, and especially with AI being available to everybody just on their ChatGPT app. It's getting trickier. I'm kind of curious on what—what's your current process to learn new skills, and how do you recommend other people do it?
Well, very early on in Closebot's journey, I started with SaaS Academy. That's Dan Martell's group. It's an academy specifically for growing software companies, and I literally just do everything they say as fast as I can. So find someone who has achieved what you want, and then if you can get them to mentor you—free or paid or like mutual exchange of work—just do exactly what they say. It's not hard. They say at SaaS Academy, "SaaS tastes like chicken." Meaning it's all the same thing. You want to think you're special, you're not. Just do what we say.
Yeah. I love it. I—I think a lot of people need to hear that. Yeah. When—when you give advice or when you get advice, you kind of feel like, yeah, that's true, but you know, it won't apply for me. But in reality, it's—
Yeah. Yeah. You're not the special snowflake. Like, just—just work. Just get—in the nicest way—you're not special. Just get to work. Yeah. You know, like, "Oh, but my niche doesn't respond to, you know, my messages"—stop—like, you know, like, don't even—yeah, don't even get me started. So interesting—people do underestimate the journey an entrepreneur has to go through to see success. I mean, right now you have a lot of accounts and active users and a fast-growing company, and everybody—like, again, the product is compounding—so, you know, which is a very good thing, and there's a bright future. I'm excited about you. If you have to go back and like be in that spot for a second where you had like the toughest moment while building this company, how—where—where do you see, and how would you describe it? And I want—I want for context other people to know that it's not just peaches and sunshine, and we do as human beings go through that self-doubt—like, invalidation, losing money type of situation—if you're okay with that.
Yeah, 100%. I think that's really important for people to understand. Early on in growth—I mean, we had a product that a couple of people were using. Their livelihoods depended on it. Really cool. But the code would break, and you can't control when it breaks. And I would—I would wake up at night in like cold sweats checking my phone, you know, going and checking notifications. And there were some times where it was like 3:00 in the morning, and it would be down, and I have to get up out of bed, and I have to go fix it. And sometimes the problems are extremely complex, and I don't know if I can fix it. And then in those moments you're thinking like, "I don't belong here. These people are counting on me. I don't know if I can fix this code. I've never encountered this before. It's 3:00 in the morning. I'm tired. Maybe this was a bad idea." And I've never ever met a problem I can't fix eventually. Pre-AI days. Sometimes it would take me 3 weeks to fix a code problem. Now it's much simpler. I have—we have a lot better tools, and I have a lot more knowledge just from all my time doing code work. But those were the difficulties early on. Imposter syndrome is always a thing though. So imposter syndrome set in. And then as we grow, you know, okay, now we're hiring our first full-time employee. Can I support them? Like, if they're paying their mortgage and it's based on the success of the business, can we sustain that? Am I meant for this leadership position? How much do I believe in what we're doing enough to put these other family's lives on the line, too? And then as you're raising money, you know, we just raised money this last year from friends and family nonetheless. So these are the people that I love and care about more than anyone giving their money toward our dream, and okay, how much do I believe in this? Is this in their best interest for me to be taking this money and putting it into the product? Am I capable of this? So it's always just milestones of where's that plateau of imposter syndrome? Going through self-growth to break through that. And there have been times that—I mean, tears have been shed. I've broken down to my wife, broken down to family. It hasn't been easy, and it won't be easy for any of you listening either.
Yeah, that's the awesome part. Yeah. Let that sink in. For people who are listening, you know, I—it's easy to just see the success, the cars, the—the villas, and the fun trips and whatnot. This is what true entrepreneurship is all about—when nobody trusts you, and everything is falling apart. You're waking up middle of the night, 3:00 a.m., fixing code, and you don't know if you can fix it—like your A is against the wall. Like, you got to figure out—there's no other option. I think that's what we are signing up for. But you know, it is fine. I mean, in the end, we're trying to create solutions for problems, you know, which truly impact the world, and I'm glad you are showing up every day to this and building great products, and congrats on closing your recent round. I know what kind of goals you have in the future. I'm excited for you as well.
Now let's lead you to the next session of the podcast—more about like this is more like simple questions and rapid-fire type of situation. If you can give us like a simple tool stack that you're using on a daily basis to manage your projects, your personal productivity, you know, stuff like that. What would that look like? What are all the tools and processes you use, you know, to keep you in line?
We utilize ClickUp. So ClickUp is like the foundation of our business. We have all of our standard operating procedures in there. We have our team chat in there. So we—it's—it's a combination of like Google Drive and a task management software and Slack all in one. That's our hub. I also utilize Riverside—use Riverside as well. So it's really nice to have one video platform that we can push live to different channels and record high-quality video. Yeah. So I think with those two—
Sure. And then we were in GoHighLevel for our CRM. We're in HubSpot now. But that's obviously a hub too, you know, your CRM.
Jeez, that's—that sounds interesting. Why did you move, if I can ask?
Yeah. Nothing against HighLevel because 99% of our clients are in tools that are like HighLevel—like exactly. But it was built really for agencies and brick-and-mortar type users, chiropractors, dentist office, med spas. It's not built for a scaling software company. So they spend a lot of their time on features like service calendars or—gosh, I don't—you know, they have every feature known to me. I don't need that. I need a really stable, scalable, highly metric-driven CRM, and HighLevel just wasn't that for us.
Sure. I think it's more like the product and timing didn't just fit in, which is fine, you know, that's pretty cool.
Uh, walk us through like your average day, Bri—like how does that look like? I know it changed a lot, but right now, like how does that look like if you have to look back and say?
Yeah, it's changed a lot. Before it was 13 hours of code a day.
Jeez.
Now, like—now it's amazing because I get up at like 7:00. I'm with my kids and family. I get them ready for school with my wife. I get to take my son to school. I'm to the office by 9:00. And then I work really hard while I'm at the office. I say no to as much as possible. I refuse unnecessary meetings, and most of my time here is on content—either outward facing or internal to guide either public vision or internal team vision. I meet with the product team to map out what features are important for our V2 product and always be looking to raise money and networking with people that we may be hiring in the future as we grow. That's my full-time thing. I don't write code anymore. We have people that do our marketing. We have people that do our site. Like—and then like—I leave the office by 3:30, but like those of you who know me and you're in the community, like I'm always in the community engaging with people in our Closebot group. Yeah. Getting their feedback, making tasks for the team, and that goes until I go to bed, but it's because I—I love to do it.
Sure. Yeah. It's hard to turn off. So, yeah. Yeah. There's no work-life balance. Like, it's all work-life. Yeah. Work is life. Yeah. And life is work. Like I work with my wife too. So we talk about it at work. We talk about it at home. We talk about it with our kids.
Wow. That's interesting. Yeah. It's a quite an interesting dynamic, uh, to see that. I'm—I'm kind of curious if you have a chance to go back and talk to the younger yourself, like the 20-year-old version, maybe still in college, excited about the mechanical engineering, just kind of getting into it and whatnot. What would be the biggest suggestion you would give yourself?
Do more. So, I didn't start any sort of entrepreneurship until—I know maybe it was like six years ago when I started doing real estate on the side while I was at Boeing. And that was—but like—kids need to realize that you don't—like, study, study, study, study until you're 25 and then get a job and then you're happy. It's not how it works. I wish I would have like made and sold handbags or something as a high schooler or like, you know, started a side project in college to make money. Like entrepreneurship gives you so many life lessons—just figure out some way to make money and some way to get people to pay you for that as early as possible. Even if eventually you want a job, try being an entrepreneur first. You learn so many valuable skills.
Yeah, I agree. I mean, I see—like the hard truth is like 90% of businesses fail, but you need to realize they start again or they go into jobs, and now they're better human beings and—
They've learned so many skills that they're better human beings, and they just progress the world. I think it's good, and I think more people need to be entrepreneurs. I think that's what AI really allows, you know. I'm super optimistic; like everybody's going to be a mini-entrepreneur by themselves with the help of AI and whatnot. Yeah, you can iterate so fast on your minimum viable product, you know, use Bubble, Replit, whatever, to code out your MVP for your product, it prove the testing, and if it doesn't work, throw it away, start again. If it does work, then you can bring in a developer, scale it.
Yeah, it is. So, it is a very exciting time to be alive, and you know, like the opportunity you have to build software products, especially with no-code coding, and imagine just typing a text and getting the software as an output—that's just unheard of a few years ago, and it's happening right now. So there is—I am assuming, like I'm I'm like predicting—that there will be millions of software companies who are run by like one person, and these are like actual niche-specific software products that solve real problems. I'm I'm excited. Companies like yours who have like big use cases and you know, big market share, like it will crush it, but I'm sure like there will be very niche products who solve specific problems. I'm I'm super excited for it.
If you have to look at your life and and like find out like the biggest achievements, uh, what would that be, and what are your next big goals uh, for Closebot?
Ooh, I think having a happy marriage is the first like really big life achievement. Then I would say probably the first full-time hire at Closebot, like US-based full-time hire. That's a cool feeling. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's one thing to have a VA and they're costing like $6 an hour, but for someone to be paid like $30 an hour US-based, that's crazy. Then raising funds was crazy. What? I raised that much money from friends and family who believe in this thing. Reaching 1 million in annual recurring revenue. Huge deal. Sure. Yeah. Those are all the things. What's the next goal for Closebot? A 100-million-dollar valuation is a goal we have our sights set on.
Perfect. Yeah. Nine figures, baby. Let's go. I'm excited for you, brother. And I really think that's just like that's just the beginning. We—it shouldn't take that long for us to be there.
Yeah, sure. I mean, yeah, AI and like software, especially with the use cases you're solving. Yeah, I'm optimistic. If if you continue the growth trajectory and tap into the right pools of people who could be good users, it's going to take off. Like just about putting gas to the fire. I'm excited for you.
What's What's your biggest mistake in life? If you have to look back and be like, "Guys, save yourself from this," what would that be?
Letting work interfere with my relationship with my spouse. I think there were times in getting things running that I put more focus into the work than I did on my spouse. And that relationship, when it's really strong, helps fuel me in my work so much more. So if you guys are if you're married or have a partner, that's really—and I said it's like one of my biggest achievements, having a happy marriage. That is so important. Lean into that and don't ruin that.
Yeah, that's that's very, very important lesson for other people, and I think that's smart uh, for people to learn from.
Um, where do you find inspiration from, Bryce? What excites you when you wake up every day, and who are the key people involved in your journey actually contributed to the success you've achieved?
You know, I look to Steve Jobs, more so the way he carries himself or carried himself and thought about questions and was able to put ego aside in situations to do what's right for the business or self. M, but I don't have many I don't really have many people that I look to right now. It's more of gaining inspiration from our team and watching them rally behind the vision that we've set in place that inspires me to keep going and to work hard and then just trying to become the person that they need me to be.
Sure. Now, if somebody's listening to this, they're like, "I like this. I like what I'm hearing. I think Cool B like Closebot is cool. They want to sign up." Where do they go? How do they find your help? How can they get in touch?
Yeah, you can go to closebot.ai. It'll switch over to closebot.com here in a few weeks. We are still in closed beta for V2, but our annual plan is going to go up in price prior to the V2 launch, end of May. If you want to lock in low pricing, sign up for V1, get the annual plan, and then we're dropping so much content on V2 and how it works, study up, be ready because when we drop that, it's changing the world. I'm excited.
Yeah, that sounds that sounds like a good option for people who might be considering. And Bryce, thank you so much for joining. And any last word before we conclude the whole podcast for people who stayed till the end?
Do more, do early, and do fast. So more, early, the main thing. Yes.
Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much, Bryce, once again joining us today on the podcast. And guys, hopefully you really enjoyed the session today. Was a very calm and very intensive conversation about AI and getting that perspective on where it's going and how it could really impact life and business overall. I'm excited. I'm stoked. I know what Closebot can do, and I see a bright future for Bryce, and I'm rooting for him. I'm excited, guys. If you need help, uh, hit him up. He's mostly available on Facebook. If you're a user, he's definitely going to respond. And, uh, check out closebot.ai, once again .com to be soon. Uh, yeah, I'll be back with another amazing guest on this podcast just like Bryce. Thanks for tuning in once again. Share with your agency friends who might need help with Closebot. Thanks once again, Bryce.
Cheers. Thank you.