Behind The Revenue

Chad Kodary (00:01)
Hey, what's going on everybody? We have Ross Christoforlian today on Behind the Revenue. Ross, thank you so much for joining us. How's it going, man?

Ross Christifulli (00:10)
Going pretty good. Happy to be doing an early morning chat with my buddy.

Chad Kodary (00:16)
Awesome, brother. So Ross, I got a lot to talk to you about today because I feel like, you know, for those, for the viewers watching this mean you have this like sideline conversation where we mean you communicate almost daily on Facebook messenger. And we always talk about marketing strategies and frameworks and tactics and all this stuff that really helps us level up our business. Obviously for the viewers.

Um, you know, for those of you guys who don't know Ross owns an amazing company called Consolidata. Um, it's just a lot of things and we'll, we'll probably get a little bit more into that throughout the session here, but we, we both run software companies and we both go after marketing agencies. So like the conversations that we have are always so aligned and it's always sometimes when we have the conversations, whether it's just straight up like, Hey, let's jump on a quick zoom caller.

Hey, let's, let's talk about this one thing in Facebook messenger. And I was telling Ross before we hit the record button on here, I was like, dude, I wish that our recordings are wish. I wish that our conversations would be broadcasted because if people could hear what we're saying, it would immensely help them in their business. And that's actually what inspired me to even get the podcast, uh, going back on. So I'm super excited today. We'll ask a bunch of questions and we'll have some fun with it.

But Ross, tell us just really quickly for the viewers, you know, what is it that you do in Consolidata? So, I'm going to start with a question that I've been asked a lot in the past.

Ross Christifulli (01:43)
Yeah, so what I do or what Consolidated does, both. Yeah, so Consolidated is a data management company. So we think of us as if Zapier had visualization. That's kind of where we're heading towards. So.

Chad Kodary (01:47)
Both.

Ross Christifulli (02:01)
you can create these API connections in a way that's, in my opinion, a little bit more meaningful. So extracting data from your CRMs and from Facebook ads and Google ads and your different ad platforms, putting it into a nice report.

we are actually moving into over this next quarter will actually be a completely white label capable tool that basically as an agency, somebody could sign up for it or a marketing agency could sign up for it, brand it their own and then their customers can come in, connect their accounts and it just creates all these beautiful reports and metrics for them. We also provide some of our own data like the Google My Business keyword tracking where you see like those little grid maps.

and hot jar style screen recordings and heat maps that's been doing well for us. And then most recently we added in a connection with OpenAI Assistant.

And we're pairing that to platforms, to their chat platform. So like right now we're working on another one for Shopify. So that way when someone comes into Shopify, they have that little chat widget in the bottom corner, they'll be able to have their assistant doing the responses in there. We've already got it going in a CRM. So that's currently what we're doing is we're expanding that out where we built this cool feature and function and now we're expanding it out. As far as my role in the company, I really am,

dual hats. So I am on product, you would say I'm product management because I the product starts with me. Like, you know, I it's weird, because I know you're not supposed to be the market CMO and product guy. I am. But

Chad Kodary (03:37)
Same thing here at dash clicks.

You know, I've, I've found, I found that in most software startups, that's really what it is. It's, it's the person's idea ends up becoming the thing that person builds and shares with the world. Right. And eventually, I mean, at least for me, like you get almost addicted and attached to the product, right? So you keep coming out with all these iterations and features and all this stuff, and you keep wanting to put it out to the world and that's, I think what I mean, you end up staying in product. I think it's something that I also, I enjoy a lot of.

Ross Christifulli (04:15)
Yeah, it is, it's fun. And you almost feel like too, like let's just say right now, you probably know in your mind, for the next six months, next year, I typically keep my roadmaps to about six months. I don't go much further than that. But let's say you're like, okay, for the next six months, this is what we're gonna do. If you were to hand that over and say, okay, now you're the product manager, someone else.

they don't have the same vision as you. They're naturally a different person and they could start taking it down a completely different path. So I do feel like maybe I could hold that a little close to the chest and it could also show my immaturity as a company because we're still immature. So you think about that and you say, well, maybe somebody like a HubSpot where they're doing, okay, they're different because they're a massive company.

We're a small company.

You know what I mean?

Chad Kodary (05:12)
So let me, let me ask you a quick question. If you know, going rewinding back to when you started Consolidata, what do you think was the number one push that you had that allowed you to become an established software company? Because there's a lot of software companies or even just companies in general. They'll go out, they'll build, they'll get a handful of customers and then they just stay like that forever. Right. And they just kind of like rinse and repeat. But you're at the point now where you do have a pretty good user base.

And you guys are growing if I'm not mistaken month over month, right? Yeah. So.

Ross Christifulli (05:45)
Oh for sure, yeah. Actually, this week was our largest week that we've had ever.

Chad Kodary (05:51)
You want to share some numbers, something crazy?

Ross Christifulli (05:53)
Well, I mean, it's not like for most companies, it's nothing to, you know, it's like, whatever, but I was looking at it this morning because all night we've had people signing up. And as of right now, just since Monday and today's Thursday, we've had 60 something like 63 users sign up just since Monday and for us that's huge. Like

Chad Kodary (06:15)
What are those users paying? Is it the $97 a month?

Ross Christifulli (06:19)
In the past it was almost all $97 a month, but for some reason this week we've had this massive inflow of people paying $197 a month and just right away upgrading to the higher tiered plan. So

Chad Kodary (06:33)
What do you think's what what's causing that? Because you're seeing growth, right? What's causing that?

Ross Christifulli (06:37)
Yeah. It's the AI chat through that. We threw that thing in there and all of a sudden it's like, it breathed new life into it. So when we first started Consolidate, I literally just took, we had built some backend tools to be able to pull data from ad platforms and put it on Google Sheets, cause I was like, I am not paying for super metrics. Like I'm a cheapskate. I really am. I shouldn't say that I'm a frugal guy. I will pay for quality people. I will pay for quality things.

But if I look at something and I'm like, cause you know, I used to only care. So it's like, I know what software is. And when I'm looking at this and I'm like, I'm not gonna pay $300 a month for you to take data from my Facebook account and put that into a Google sheet. That's ridiculous. I understand that for big companies, like whatever, it's a big thing. And their origin story is very interesting. They started out of a contest, but not to get off of off track here. So we, I made a...

Canva mock-up because I don't I can't even figure out how to use figma like that's how bad I am and I Went on Canva and I made this mock-up and I made it look like buttons and things like that And it actually looked pretty cool for of a graphic for being Canva and I threw it in my Facebook group And I said we're gonna build this tool It's and I said exactly what it does at the time. It just extracted data and put it on a Google Sheet

We're accepting, I think I said like 20 people for a lifetime deal. We just want to see who would like to be a part of this. It's a thousand bucks if you get in now. And we filled it up same day. And actually we ended up opening up to more lifetime users. And I think in total we've sold maybe 50 lifetime plans and most people don't even know we still have a high tier $5,000 lifetime plan that we maybe sell one or two of every month.

just because people will ask, we tell them what it is and some people bite the bullet on it. And it does help with product development when you're a bootstrapped company, because you know, it's like, wow, that was a pretty much two developers, you know, for the month, or a developer and a

half. But anyways,

Chad Kodary (08:45)
Let's, I want to dive deeper into that for one second because you made a really good point. Um, and obviously just for context, I can definitely relate to that. I see you on social, uh, creating tons of different offers. Like it's almost like every couple of weeks, you got something new that you're thrown out into the market. And I know we briefly spoke about that this week, but I want to elaborate on one, why you do it and two, how that's actually helping your business and, and three, how you're actually doing it. Like, how do you come up and iterate with these?

really quick ideas, throw them out into the market and just get some quick validation.

Ross Christifulli (09:19)
Yeah, so what I've been doing lately, and this has been working really well, is I have a course that I'm going to end up launching here around spring. And because of that, you know, when the hardest part about building a course is like getting all your thoughts and training styles and like illustrations and ways that you want to like perfect your teaching of it together. That's difficult.

And so what I like to do is I've always found that if I, and I think you're the same because I've watched you, when you just start talking and sharing, like things just start coming out from like experience and you're like, ooh, I'm gonna use that. And you write that down, you're like, that's gonna become a part of my polished product eventually. So what I've been doing is I've been, I've broken up into four basically modules, this course that I'm gonna be launching.

And I've been doing one hour class workshops for the last three weeks. And what I'm going to end up doing is taking those one hour sessions and turning them, not just like breaking them up and turning it, but re-recording them in like a polished format. I'm listening back to them as the week has gone on. I'm like, okay, I didn't like this, I like this. And so I'm listening to how I taught it. And then I'm listening to the questions people ask because the Q&A is so valuable.

breaking that in and now it helps me build a really good product because I don't want to throw together a product and just put it into the marketplace. I want it to be good. I feel like that, you know, and people love the live trainings that way because I can sit there and answer every one of their questions. It's, um, it's almost like the same reason people like live music. You know, it's like, it's there's even if it's not perfect.

The live music, it's like a...

Chad Kodary (11:10)
Can do me a favor really quick just for context. What was like the last one of these offers that you created where you did like a live training or something like that?

How many people showed up? What'd you sell it for? Like just add some add some quick context. I'm curious as to how the whole thing came about.

Ross Christifulli (11:18)
Yeah, it was.

Yeah, I think we did it last Thursday. Can't remember. It could have been Monday. My brain is toast, man. I also, as you can see, own a brick and mortar store. So my brains. But it was one hundred ninety seven dollars. We sold over 40 of them both times that we've done it two times now over the last two weeks or three times, maybe two or three times. Each time we sell just over 40 of them. A lot of people were repeat buyers. I'm not a big famous like influencer.

So I don't have like, you know, tens of thousands of people. I might have like on my Facebook profile, maybe like 2000 really engaged people. And then from there you have, you know, meaning they post comment on your post here and there. And then maybe my entire reach with email list and all that of a warm audience might be around 15,000. So it's not like.

You know, some of these guys have, have these hundreds of thousands of people on their list. So anyway, we sold the, that's what we did as far as showing up on the lives. It was between about 15 to 25, but that's because I told people that they could get access to the replay and I've been putting it all inside school and allowing people to, you know, ask questions in the community. It's funny in one of my YouTube videos. And I don't, once again, my YouTube channel for consolidate at small. It's like.

maybe 340 subscribers, like it's small. And on one of those videos, looks like someone's pulling up to the front of the store. On one of those videos though, they had a, I might need you to pause the video and then edit this, okay? Someone's walking up to my store. Give me one sec.

Amen.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

like this before two o'clock. Yeah, and then on their way home, they can run in and grab it. Because I paid for it, and you should have that. We have the screen. The screen, okay. Oh, sorry, I was getting the zoom. Oh, that's no problem. You don't need to bother with the free stuff. All right, thanks a lot. Thanks. Sorry, Chad. I just made your editor's job a little harder.

Chad Kodary (13:57)
Thanks for watching.

Ross Christifulli (14:12)
When a customer is staring at you through the glass, so you're like, what are you gonna do? Where was I?

Chad Kodary (14:21)
Um, I had no clue you were talking about, uh, the one 97, the product.

Ross Christifulli (14:27)
Yeah.

I think of where I left off, that's terrible, I'm sorry. I don't remember where I was at with it, but yeah, it's been a sweet way to build out a product for us. Yeah.

Chad Kodary (14:34)
Talk to you.

And the one 97 that you do, are you just posting on Facebook and gathering? Is that what it is? Is Facebook like your main source of signups?

Ross Christifulli (14:53)
It's actually so funny. So I don't believe I don't build funnels like before I know that the product's going to work unless I'm okay. I take this back. I do have a, when I'm doing webinars, I'll build a funnel before I know the product's going to work, but like when I'm just testing out to see like, Hey, is there interest in this? I'll create a payment link on Stripe and then I'll just go make a post on it. And I'll put comment this if you want it.

And then when people comment, I just copy and paste a message that it's like, Hey, thanks for your interest. Here's the, um, link to secure the spot. And I send it, man. It's crazy how that works. If the thing is, oh, and people miss this all the time. And I actually talked about this at carrot con, which you were at as well. That trust is really at the end of the day, the biggest selling point. Like if you have a good trust, if they trust you and you have a good offer, like that's all you really need. And I'm actually reading a book right now called trust.

And it's a really interesting book about just the psychology of trust. And when people come through a funnel, but they don't know you, Oh man, you got to do all these weird things to build trust. Look, I was on, you know, good morning, Tennessee, you know, whatever they do. All these marketers go buy all these PR spots and they have to do all these funky things to try to make someone trust them. And if.

That's what I love about having a warm audience and a community is that when people trust you, you can throw offers out to them without having to build funnels and all that crazy crap. And then you sell it, and then you can go take their testimonials, put that into a funnel, and now you can build trust organically.

Chad Kodary (16:36)
talking about funnels, let's throw out a cool fun trendy topic. What do you think is happening with click funnels? I know there's been a lot of uh...

Ross Christifulli (16:45)
You know, I'm banned from the group. I've been banned from the group for like a year and a half or two years. So I don't know.

Chad Kodary (16:56)
What'd you do to get banned from the ClickFunnels group?

Ross Christifulli (16:59)
I think it's like, what did I not do to get banned from the ClickFunnels group? I'm not sure you know what I got really frustrated when like, the thing is, is people who are just there for the education and maybe play around with the funnels do fine. But like when you start running a lot of you know, dollars I would like my with my last agency offer, I don't really teach agencies anymore. I've run now you know, it's more software, some agencies coming in who are interested in adding software. But

When I had my last agency program, I was spending $1,000 a day at a time on ads because I was running it to a live webinar and then you'd stop the ads and so forth.

Chad Kodary (17:40)
And the final one down.

Ross Christifulli (17:42)
Yeah. Like when funnels, the page load speed was terrible. You know, I just had so many issues that I was always vocalizing that. And, you know, that's one thing that I like in a software company is when they'll take the feedback and they don't delete it, they listen to it and they go fix it, it shows that their product first. They are definitely a marketing first company. And I think what happened was competitors have come out around them and advanced past them.

And they were forced to launch 2.0 knowing it wasn't ready yet. And it's crazy how many users they've lost to complete.

Chad Kodary (18:19)
Well, I remember, I remember going to funnel hacking live. I want to say the two years ago, uh, and they were supposed to be launching 2.0. I think they did like an announcement inside of funnel hacking live that everybody was going to get access to it in like a couple of months or something like that, uh, and then like a whole year went by and then I went to the next funnel hacking live, which was literally one year later and they were like, we're going to launch it today.

And, uh, and I, I still, I don't even know if they launched it or even if they did launch it, it came out with a massive amount of bugs, which is fine. I g I understand software companies. Like I have a software company and we have bugs and that's totally normal. We get it. But I agree with you. The fact that they were too early into the game. And I think what happened was especially with me and maybe you can relate to, but in dash clicks, we had this

Ross Christifulli (18:52)
Yeah.

Chad Kodary (19:11)
We had this moment in dash leaks where we had dash leaks 1.0. Um, and that was basically like highly focused on white label fulfillment. And then there was mainly like two tools in there. We had Insta sites and Insta reports and that was basically dash leaks 1.0. That's what it was. It was like, Hey, you needed fulfillment. You'd come to us, you'd play some orders. We'd fulfill all your stuff. And then you could either use into sites or into reports. And in fact, for instance, sites and into reports, we were actually charging separately.

Right. So you would like, you could just go buy into sites. You can just go buy into reports. Right. Yeah. And then, uh, and it was going good. Like, you know, on day one, when we launched dash, like, so don't ever forget this, um, day one, we launched dash flicks in, uh, Rob Quinn's, uh, Facebook group. Um, and, um, he had, I don't know, like maybe three, 4,000 members in his Facebook group at the time.

Ross Christifulli (19:42)
Remember that.

Chad Kodary (20:02)
And it literally 24 hours we went live. We did like a live webinar. There's a couple hundred people live, um, on the webinar, which was great. We did live and then within like 24 hours we had like a thousand people sign up. Right. And what's funny about that is when I say a thousand people sign up, we didn't even have a sign up page. We literally had like a form that we built that would zap their information onto a Google sheet.

And one of my partners and co-founders had to literally go and create them an account manually, like in the backend of the database, and then we would like email them their temporary username and password, right? So we didn't even have like a signup page. Right. And, uh, I thought that was a fun story, but anyways, not to get too off topics, yeah, dude, it was forever, but it w you know, that's what you do at the beginning, right. And, um, so that was 1.0 and then.

Ross Christifulli (20:34)
It wasn't ready for that.

I bet you guys were all copy pasting all day.

Chad Kodary (20:55)
We wanted to basically redo the platform. So where I'm saying I can relate to click funnels and we kind of almost did it right around the same time that they were doing it too, which was funny. Cause I remember being at the click funnels conference and they did like this whole like 30 minute thing where they're showing like all the new products for 2.0 and we're long, you know, getting like the 2.0 launch, you know, little seminar that they were doing in my mind. I'm sitting, I'm sitting, I'm like, dude, we're doing the exact same thing. And, um, and the, the

The problem that we had, and this is where I can relate and give them some type of sympathy is when we were building dash clicks 2.0, which is now like a full blown CRM funnel builder. Like, I mean, it's got like the core if, if into sites and into reports were like two of the main features and then we have like 15 features, right? So we've, we've definitely 10 X the amount of features that we have in the dashboard, right? We thought it was going to take six months and ended up taking two years. Right. And there's also ended up taking two years. So

That's why I can kind of relate. The differences is we didn't advertise that we were building 2.0 for two years. We kind of did it like behind the scenes. And then as we, we got a little closer to launching, like maybe within like two or three months, you know, we started, you know, running ads and doing all the advertising for it. And I think that's where ClickFunnels made the mistake. I think that they made the mistake by saying that they're launching 2.0 for like two years and not launching 2.0. And then when launching

Nothing was working. Uh, when you go into the DAT, I remember going into their dashboard because I was using ClickFunnels 1.0 at the time. I still have my ClickFunnels 1.0 account because we have a bunch of funnels on there that we've built and I'm just too lazy to move them over into dash clicks as a reality of what, what it is, it said somebody from my team, uh, starting to take in, in build out all the funnels we have in Click Funnels and dash clicks we're almost done.

But I remember logging into clicks when I was 2.0 thinking that it was going to be great. And what it ended up being was a funnel builder with a menu links that all said coming soon, right. Um, and if you, and I'm in the group, there's like 300,000 people in their Facebook group and you just see people like users that have been in their affiliates that have been in there, like selling their products for years, big affiliates, like just everybody's like almost bashing them basically in a way.

Ross Christifulli (23:09)
So.

Chad Kodary (23:09)
And it's hard to see something like that as a software founder, because you kind of feel bad in a way. You sympathize with them.

Ross Christifulli (23:14)
Yeah. So I do about share some lessons that I love to learn by watching them. Cause this is, I think super valuable. Cause I made this mistake and lead Garrett and I have not made this mistake and consolidate it. So, and I've noticed the difference. So I I'm forever grateful for instance, to Russell Brunson, because he,

his content brought me into the marketing world.

Chad Kodary (23:34)
Yeah, same. Yep.

Ross Christifulli (23:37)
listening to his early, you know, marketing my car podcast and all the things. And I remember when I first signed up for ClickFunnels, they did like this 30 day email sequence where they sent you like a video every day. And like when you got the email, there was like a little flames coming up with the video. And I'd get so excited seeing that. And like every night I was like, hey, dear, I'll wash the dishes tonight. I put my phone up and we didn't even have a dishwasher. So I was washing all of our dishes at the time. And.

watching his videos. Like, I just remember that was a great experience. But they, if you think about software, the thing that makes it scalable is when you find product market fit. Then you're like, okay, now I know what product market, you know, I know what market I can sell this product to. And then you find a repeatable way that you can keep selling it to that. They have always gone after offer market fit.

And I did that with lead carrot and I used to even teach people to do that too, because it helps decommoditize your software. And to just explain offer market fit is like, I'm going to sell them, I'm going to sell them a course for a thousand bucks and give them click funnels for six months and hope that by the end of six months, they've stuck around long enough to be able to continue. So it's like fooling your customers into buying your software.

Chad Kodary (24:42)
What is that all from? Yeah, that's some context there.

Ross Christifulli (25:02)
And it, fooling might be a little negative a word, but it's like, you know, you know what a near resistible offer is. It's an offer that's too good to say no to. And so it's like, but they're doing that not based off features. They're doing that with education and then ClickFunnels is just a part of it. Now I'm all for selling education. As you heard earlier, I sell education. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but if that is at the heart of how you build your company.

How many people like you and I today are now saying, I'm forever grateful to Russell. I love what he's taught me, but the software I had to leave. And that's the reason why. It's because we loved the education side. And I actually feel bad for Russell, because I feel like he's pulled his weight on the marketing and the sales end of it. His devs, Todd, his development team has let him down. And I know the feeling of selling a product

Chad Kodary (25:51)
Mmm.

Wow, that's a nice different way to look at it.

Ross Christifulli (26:00)
And you know what? I guarantee you, when he started talking about 2.0, it's because as the marketer, as the salesperson, his job is to keep and sell users. Well, I should say keep. That's really customer success. But it's to try to keep sales up. And if they're feeling from inside sales are starting to wane because of other companies coming out, he's got to start selling on, hey, here's our roadmap, here's what's coming. I did that the last year. Thankfully, we delivered on

95% of what we promised and we still have a piece that's still coming out that we said would come out next year that's not out yet. That's just a part of the game of software. It will be out. But the point is, is that's kind of in the beginning, in your stages, what you're doing. I don't feel bad if you, I don't think you can compare yourself to them because they've got a lot more revenue than either one of us can imagine. So they have no excuse for not having.

Chad Kodary (26:52)
I think they're doing over probably $100 million a year, I would assume.

Ross Christifulli (26:55)
Yes. So like you look at like us where I know you've got probably more developers even than we do, but when you're dealing with a dozen developers, you're not going to compare that to a company that's got, you know, a hundred developers. It's just, you know.

Chad Kodary (27:08)
Do you think that they have a hundred developers for some reason? I don't know why I could be wrong. I feel like ClickFunnels has a small development team. And I remember I was at the funnel hiking live, um, Conference and I met somebody. It was like their customer support manager, somebody that was like managing their live chat team or something like that. And they were basically saying like the big majority of their staff, like almost all of it is customer support. They had like, I think like 200 and something people in customer support.

Ross Christifulli (27:37)
Well, I hope that's not true because that answers the question. Cause you look at like their competitor that's taken their lunch right now. They've got over 60 developers.

Chad Kodary (27:37)
And I just.

Yeah. What do you, what do you, I want to go a little bit deeper into the whole funnels thing because it's a fun topic to talk about one, one question, which is trending right now is what do you think, what do you think is happening with the whole Russell Brunson punching a kid in the back of the head thing?

Ross Christifulli (28:04)
Um, you know what? I haven't seen much in my newsfeed lately about it. Have you? It kind of died down.

Chad Kodary (28:10)
Nope. I think it's one of those things that got like 48 hours of intense virality and it's fading away.

Ross Christifulli (28:15)
So you know, I have refrained from really taking a stance on it because I'll tell you why. When you look at that video from the top angle, it looks like he's punching a kid in the head, even the first blow. When you look at the video Russell put up, the thing I don't like is it cuts short. Like you don't get to see, cause you can see in the video, he goes like this. And in his video, you just see this. So it's like, but you did see it hit his shoulder.

and it looked like a similar hit both times. It didn't look like he moved it to his head, but I wasn't there. I didn't see it. So like, regardless, I'll tell you my real take on it is I think that, I think if you're gonna put your kid in wrestling and you're gonna stand on the mat, that's, you're just, it's a recipe for disaster. Like your kid's going to at some point look like he's in pain or.

I don't know. I would never put my kids in wrestling personally. I'm not a violent person and I'm not against having my kids knowing how to defend themselves, but they're not going to go learn how to fight. Like, that's just not who I who how I am. No judgment to anybody who does their stuff. So I, you know, but, you know, the other side of me is like, if you're a parent on the mat, you see your kid getting choked and it.

Chad Kodary (29:31)
Yeah, everybody's different and I respect that.

Ross Christifulli (29:43)
your amygdala kicks in. It's not, you know, I teach this in sales. You have your amygdala, your limbic system and your neocortex and your amygdala does not think, it just reacts. It's a flight, you know, fight or flight mechanism and your kids are a part of you. And when you see that, I don't even think he had time to like really think. And that's why I think it's such a bad idea for a dad to be right there while his son's on the mat wrestling.

I think that it's kind of sad because in the same way that like, I didn't give a crap about what Tiger Woods does in his personal life. I just liked the way he had a golf ball. I don't really care anything about what Russell Brunson does in his personal life. I mean, he could play Dungeons and Dragons in the basement all day for all I care. I just, you know, I don't even really follow him anymore, but at the time, the stuff that he did, I loved was the marketing content. That's what I followed him for.

I didn't follow him because he was a wrestling coach or because he was a dad. You know what I mean?

Chad Kodary (30:42)
Yep. Where, where do you, where do you think, you know, staying on topic of funnels for a second, where do you think the funnel game is going to there's a lot of fun of builders out on the market, including dash lakes, click funnels, and a bunch of others is

Ross Christifulli (31:00)
I think that funnels are becoming just a normal part of things. You know, people didn't realize that the conversion rate was better on a funnel than a website for ads. It doesn't, that's not the case for Google and stuff like that. I have not found that to be the case. Like someone clicks on a Google link, I've not found funnels to convert better than my WordPress sites.

So I think that it was being sold really heavy as like the end all be all, like you don't need anything else in your business. And that wasn't true. It was told that you can just funnel hack stuff and you'll have a business. That wasn't true either, but I do think funnels have a place and I think that they're a cool tool to have, but I don't think that it's, it's like this is hot of a thing anymore, like AI bots are huge right now.

There's a lot of other things that are popping right now and it's taking and it's good because it means that the market is maturing.

Chad Kodary (32:10)
But I feel like with trends, I know you said AI, and it's funny because I was having a conversation with one of my co-founders yesterday, and we were talking about AI and how it's trending right now heavily. But I feel like in like six to 12 months, all these things that you see of like, you know, AI video creation, AI phone calls, AI booking bots, like all of these different things that are like, highly trending and highly viral right now, like anything you post. Like I posted something on my Facebook page

myself and I posted the video in literally we had hundreds of likes comments, like just the, the engagement was so crazy because it's so new, right? But I feel like in the next six to 12 months, it's just going to be like a normal thing. And there's going to be another thing that kind of comes back into the loop. Right? What do you, what do you think is going to happen with that?

Ross Christifulli (33:00)
I hope so. Yeah, I hope so. I think that would be good for things. Um, problem with trends and even like, I see this right now with consolidated because of the AI chat is it doesn't give you a, it's kind of an inflated metric, like, you know, I know it's a wave. I haven't posted on this two weeks ago. I'm like, Hey, this chat thing that we're doing, probably it's always going to be here, we're going to keep developing it and making it cool.

But the reason we're coming out and not charging $400 is because it's going to be a wave. And we know we add value in other areas of people's lives. And we have a nice roadmap. But you look at some of these AI companies. I'll give you an example. These AI bot companies, there's one called Closebot and Zappichat. They're direct competitors of ours in the AI space, but not by product. We do it completely different. But they charge $400 a month.

for what we're charging $99 a month for. Now think about this real quick. Jasper came out as an AI software, perfect timing. Like they got on that wave, like it couldn't have been better.

Chad Kodary (34:04)
Perfect.

Ross Christifulli (34:07)
And, uh, but when they did that, it was before open AI's API was fully like even available to other people. They had like a early access to it because I remember following Dave Rogan Moser's posts and he would be like, look, I just told it to have a conversation between Russell Brunson and Gary V and liquid and I remember seeing that stuff and being like, Holy smokes. And so it was perfect timing, but they started.

Chad Kodary (34:25)
I remember that video.

Ross Christifulli (34:32)
raising their price to where I think at one point I was like 300 bucks a month for like the boss mode of jazz.

Chad Kodary (34:37)
They want enterprise. We had an enterprise account with them.

Ross Christifulli (34:41)
And it was expensive, but now go on their website. It's $39 a month.

Chad Kodary (34:46)
What do you think is gonna happen with them? Because I heard they laid off a bunch of people.

Ross Christifulli (34:48)
I don't know what's gonna happen with them. But my point is, is think about what that means for a company. How long can you hang on to that? You build a big company based off your current revenue. You hire people based off revenue. They had to let a lot of people go. You know, you build your infrastructure based on here's our pricing. And now all of a sudden you have, you are forced to drop your price to 10% of what you were selling it for. Your company just shrunk like that overnight.

So what I believe is going to happen like with these chat softwares is OpenAI Assistance is excellent. It is better than anything else on the market. And so when you look at these other chat bots, they have to do so much to make it work close to OpenAI Assistant, not even as good because they're not using the assistant environment, they're using the same API that someone uses to write blogs.

Chad Kodary (35:17)
Cheers.

Ross Christifulli (35:43)
So they've had to modify it to do that. So you see, okay, now guys like myself have come out saying, hey, I'm not gonna recreate what OpenAI has done amazing. I'm just gonna give you an easy way to connect this to all of your platforms. I don't need to recreate the chat platform because these guys already have and they're built into their platform. I don't need to recreate the AI because it's already here. I'm just gonna be a connector of dots. And I think that's where the money is right now in AI.

Because it's too expensive to try to go like AI is moving too fast. Like if you come up with an idea right now for AI, and you build it, it'll be built in two to three months because someone's working on it right now. Like last. Yeah, last night, I was trying to find and if you know of one outside of Pictori, I would love it because I don't really like Pictori. I want to be able to upload a script.

Chad Kodary (36:23)
and everybody will copy you. Ahem.

Ross Christifulli (36:34)
as well as an audio recording of myself, and it builds out a webinar for me. Images, graphics, slides, like everything.

Chad Kodary (36:41)
Yeah, haven't had, the thing that I'm seeing with AI right now, especially with the video stuff and I just posted this on my Facebook too.

It's not there yet. The video stuff like it, it's, it's still even the, there's like air.ai there's Hey, Jen, um, there's 11 labs. There's like all of these different companies. Um, and primarily speaking on Hey Jen and air.ai cause I've played around with those a lot in the last couple of weeks because I wanted to implement those into the company and they're not there yet. I'm not going to do it. Um, I haven't.

Ross Christifulli (37:13)
Have you done the boss one?

Can I show you a demo of it on here? Okay. It says I can call it on here. There's only two things I didn't like on it, but continue.

Chad Kodary (37:21)
I've heard of it. I've heard of it and it's pretty crazy.

Yeah. What I was going to say was it's, I still don't think it's there. I think it will be there in the next, you know, six to 12 months, because these companies are going to continue to fine tune and get better at it. And, uh, but for me, like if I'm going to use AI to create videos and ads and, or webinars or like crazy stuff like that.

If somebody knows that it's AI on the other end watching, it almost is like impersonal and it makes like, I feel like there's going to be like a disconnect because they feel like you're like cheating the system in a way or being lazy and, um, I dunno, that's just my thought. I don't think it's there yet. I will use it. I'm dying to use it. I just need to wait until I can get it to work. Good.

Ross Christifulli (38:10)
Yet when the mass market is used to talking to AI, it'll change, it'll make things easier. I have been thinking about how you're gonna see people try to make this shift to all AI, realize it's not quite there yet, and then try to come in somewhere in the middle. And so...

I think that those like I had this idea back when we had lead carrot and I still think that if someone ever builds this, it'll be incredible. But you know, I had that large call center. And one of the biggest issues with overseas callers is they can't empathize with people. So I had this idea of what if you used AI and you put a face on the voice dialer. So that way when my caller is talking.

they see a face that has the expressions of the voice in it. Like they can read the body language because tonality is not a universal thing. Like I can go to the Chinese restaurant and think they're all screaming at each other. But that's just how they talk to each other while they're cooking. And so but facial expressions are universal. You can see when someone's smiling, when someone's angry, like you can tell. So.

Chad Kodary (39:19)
Well, that's the thing I think about like, Hey, Jen is an example that it doesn't have that yet. Like I'm saying, I'm saying something where I'm doing gestures and moving my hands, but the gestures that I'm doing with my hands, they're not matching what I'm actually saying. And that's where there's a disconnect. I just literally went into the studio. They basically tell you to shoot a three to five minute video. Um, every time after every sentence, close your mouth. Um, so it, you know,

Ross Christifulli (39:24)
It doesn't.

How did you record that? What was the setup?

Chad Kodary (39:46)
gets good.

a lip sync movement and don't bring your hands. If you're doing gestures, just do very basic gestures. Don't bring your hands above your chest. Don't wear certain clothing. Don't wear hats, stuff like that. Cause they obviously want to get like a clear video of you and then you submit it and it runs. And then after you run it, you basically fine tune it. You pay like 80 bucks a month and it finds tunes. The avatar. Once again, I did this twice. It got good. And I posted it on my pages. It wasn't there.

Ross Christifulli (40:13)
Yeah, with a bourbon in me, I couldn't tell.

Chad Kodary (40:16)
it, but it's, I don't know how it's for me, it wasn't there yet. I'm going to wait a little bit until I actually start really producing it. I might use it to test like messaging for Facebook ads. I might just create a bunch of ads just to test like messaging and then like whatever, you know, whichever ones are the winners or high performers. I'll create like real videos out of it. So that might be a good way to use it. Um, but yeah, for me, it's not there yet.

Ross Christifulli (40:26)
Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like, cause you have what I call the Rocky Balboa eye in, in just in normal and day to day life. Uh, and it's not, it's, that's not a negative thing. It's just, it's a thing, but they accentuated it in the AI video. I don't know if you noticed that because someone I saw in the comments was like, Chad, this looks like you had a stroke in the comment.

Chad Kodary (40:56)
Yeah. And also the lips, like I'm saying things in for at one point, like I was talking and my lips were like barely moving. It looks like my lips were like squished back. Right. And I think that once again, it will get better. It's just, it's not there yet. And I'm going to wait, you know, six to 12 months and I'll, I'll go re, you know, I'll go back and visit the, I

Ross Christifulli (41:05)
Yeah.

for sure.

Chad Kodary (41:15)
think, but anyways,

Ross Christifulli (41:15)
I know this is your podcast and we're getting on time, but can I ask you a question? So my question for you is this, you guys are, it seems to me, and maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like you're also unintentionally, maybe you're intentionally doing it, but you just didn't realize that you've been making this shift from offer market fit to product market fit.

Chad Kodary (41:20)
Yeah.

Ross Christifulli (41:39)
trying to find that product instead. Because I've watched your journey over this last year and you did a lot of the things of like leading with the education, which is fine. And it's great. You had a lot of success in that challenge, a lot of people on it. But as far, it seems like you guys have, just from conversation, it's like you're so focused on product right now in a good way. Is that?

Chad Kodary (42:03)
Yeah, I think for us, like for the last, I would say for at least the last three months and moving into this, this quarter, um, our main shifts have, we've literally stopped on features because we've, we were just at a point where for two years, we were just like feature, everyday feature, feature. And it was like, it got, it became so crazy to the point where when you're launching so many features, you're also launching a lot of bugs along the way. Right. You're introducing a lot of new code into the development platform.

And it, it can take a toll on the user. So like for us, for the last three months, going back and moving into the rest of this quarter, we've been highly focused on going into the platform and just making it 10 times better. And by that, I mean more reliable, less bugs, faster, um, looking at things in the UI and making it less confusing to use, right? Just moving some stuff around small stuff, nothing crazy, right?

Ross Christifulli (42:47)
Yeah.

Chad Kodary (42:59)
And then, you know, our goal is to finish that by the end of Q1 here in 2024. And then we'll obviously we'll go back to features and stuff like that. But for us, we're planning on going deeper versus wider. Like we want to go deeper into the features that we've already built. Like we have reputation management, we have a funnel builder, we have a CRM. We, you know, we have all of these things, a hundred other features, but.

I feel like we're not the best at it yet. We just have a lot of features and for us, I want to be the best at a couple of things versus having a platform that just has everything, but it's like 50% subpar, right? It's missing a lot of things. So that's kind of going to be our, our trend moving forward in the next couple of quarters, as well as obviously we're focusing heavily on our white label fulfillment, making that 10 times better, because I feel like we are the industry leader in white label fulfillment, especially

Ross Christifulli (43:48)
Yeah.

Chad Kodary (43:54)
how it's, it's done through technology, like through our platform automated onboarding. It's like nobody's doing it to the level that we're doing it. So we're definitely gonna scale that side of the business up.

Ross Christifulli (44:05)
Are you seeing any immediate effects of it or not yet?

Chad Kodary (44:08)
Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah, definitely. Um, you know, as you start crushing bugs and stuff like that, it's obviously like less tickets, less people complaining, better retention. Um, so yeah, we are seeing that. Um, we're also going heavy right now into ads. So we, I've just been iterating and creating a bunch of ads, like thing in the last three days, I've created 24 different, you know, video ads.

Ross Christifulli (44:17)
Yeah.

Chad Kodary (44:33)
So like we're cranking out a lot of content. Obviously we've got the podcast going. We want to get, you know, you know, when I started dash clicks in 2018, I was doing a live webinar every single week. And those live webinars had, you know, anywhere between two to 500 people on them. Usually that was kind of the norm live. And then it would get a couple thousand views after cause we posted on our YouTube. We would send it out an email blast and all that good stuff. It's like those, those pieces of content created a lot of virality for dash clicks and then I stopped.

doing it for like two years. And I stopped doing it because it's, it takes a toll on you. Like you're literally going live every week. And you know, it's, it's very tedious. Um, but

Ross Christifulli (45:15)
Right. As an outsider, looking in as a fellow software company, can I tell you just one thing that I think would be awesome? And I know you've been working on it for a while, but it would be great. It's not a feature, but it's more of an access would be since you are stopping features for a while and just going deep. If you opened up your API to other developers to be able to build on, it would allow us to.

Chad Kodary (45:21)
Yeah.

Ross Christifulli (45:38)
It would allow your software to continually have new things people can do with it. Like AI, my AI chat bot could connect your messenger. All I need is a get and a post. Well, you know.

Chad Kodary (45:48)
Yep. Yeah. It's been on our roadmap for a while. Um, I know the backend team has been working on it on their off time. Like kind of like get some free time. They, they have been working on making it. We do have our whole platform is API. Obviously it's just not public, right? So, um, yeah, I know they're, they're working on creating a public version of it. I know that that's kind of, it's already been worked on. Um, it's just a slow process and it's not something that's on like the top of our list right now, but we are going to get there and hopefully this year we'll be able to launch that public API.

Ross Christifulli (45:59)
NOOO

Yeah, that's what I mean.

Yeah.

That would be awesome because I know like I could have a whole inflow of people that would love dash clicks. Like the UI is very impressive. I think if dash clicks like I know that you can't always use UI as a selling point, but I go back to my dad. He taught me something. He said that there they used to sell these trash pumps for his company and there was his company and then there was another company and the other company's trash pumps just looked so much cooler.

but the specs were exactly, people always bought the one that looked cooler. So I really think. Yeah. It's a beautiful platform. I think that, uh, the more that it connects with stuff, you're going to just see it go,

Chad Kodary (46:50)
Yeah, I mean we dedicate a lot to UI process.

Ross Christifulli (47:01)
it's going to really be awesome. Yeah.

Chad Kodary (47:01)
100%. Well, hey Ross, um, I know we're running out of time here. Um, thank you so much, uh, for jumping on for the people that are listening, uh, if they want to reach out to you, see more of you, where can they, where can they reach out to you on?

Ross Christifulli (47:16)
Um, Consolidated, like my YouTube channel. I I've been just posting a lot of videos there. Um, I have a free school account that called the Nexus. Uh, you can probably search the Nexus and you'll know, cause it's an AI generated graphic that has letters in it. Don't mean anything.

Chad Kodary (47:38)
Awesome. Well, reach out, go to consolidate, uh, reach out to him on nexus on school Ross. Once again, thank you so much brother. And I'm sure we'll see you here very soon. Have a good one.

Ross Christifulli (47:49)
Sounds good. Hey, that was.