Jeff Dolan walks in, sits down, and takes his chances by pitching FlashRecruit to The Chad and Cheese Podcast with the possibility of facing disgrace and the Firing Squad.
What is FIRING SQUAD?
Firing Squad is a raw podcast featuring two grizzled industry veterans who want to showcase recruitment industry startup companies. Their technology, products, and solutions either save them and win massive applause or just #fail and face the FIRING SQUAD.
On this episode:
We know that email engagement sucks and the response rate is horrible, which is why companies like FlashRecruit exist. FlashRecruit's mission is to "Break down the communication barriers to start the conversation between recruiters and the job seekers looking for their dream job." Can FlashRecruit pull it off or are they in store for a visit from the FIRING SQUAD?
You'll have to listen to find out.
Then visit sponsors Sovren, Ratedly and America's Job Exchange.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Intro: Like Shark Tank? Then you'll love Firing Squad. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to put to the recruiting industry's bravest, ballsiest and baddest startups through the gauntlet to see if they've got what it takes to make it out alive. Dig a foxhole and duck for cover, kids. The Chad and Cheese podcast is taking it to a whole other level.
Joel: Hey, what's up guys? Joel Cheeseman here, aka Cheese, aka Turkey Killer. On this episode of Firing Squad we have Jeff Dolan of FlashRecruit. Jeff, how you doing?
Jeff: Doing well. Appreciate the time.
Joel: Are you ready for the pain?
Jeff: I'm ready to rock.
Chad: Pain Train's coming.
Joel: All right.
Jeff: I'd try a turkey joke in there, but...
Joel: Well before we get to you, let's hear a quick word from our sponsor.
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Joel: All right, all right, all right.
Chad: Here we go.
Joel: Everybody feeling good?
Chad: Feeling good, man. Turkey Day's on its way. Joel's going to be tons of turkey-taking naps, which he's used to in the first place. I think the naps part more than anything.
Joel: Well the good news for me is because I'm divorced and we had the kids last weekend, I had Thanksgiving dinner last weekend, so I'll get double the dose of turkey which means double the naps, which for me is really, really extreme as you know.
Chad: Tryptophan, you'll be in tryptophan heaven.
Jeff: Fantastic.
Joel: Yes, sir.
Chad: Excellent. Let's get to the show. Jeff? Are you ready man? Let me tell you a little bit about what's going to happen. You have two minutes to pitch FlashRecruit, okay? After the pitch, Joel and I are going to hit you with rapid fire Q&A. If you drone on or if you bore us, you're either going to get the bell, or Joel's going to hit his favorite crickets because you bored us.
Chad: At the end of Q&A, you're going to receive one of three. You're either going to get the big applause, which means you've exceeded expectations. The golf clap, means you're on your way, but you've got a lot of work to do, or you're going to get hit with the firing squad, which means it's probably time to take your ass back to the drawing board and start over with this whole concept.
Chad: So that's Firing Squad. Let's buckle up and let's get this pitch started, Joel.
Joel: Sounds good, man. Do we want to meet Jeff a little bit before we go into it or not?
Chad: Yeah, why not I guess.
Joel: Jeff, you've got a 30 second intro. Go.
Jeff: All right perfect. I run all the revenue operations for FlashRecruit. I actually started my career at Careerbuilder.com, and I was there for over ten and a half years primarily in sales roles. Ran a couple different markets and that was actually where the idea where FlashRecruit was born, right. There was a massive opportunity to capture some of the candidates that would be dropping off from the site.
Jeff: We'll get to that later. I then joined a early stage company based out of Detroit. Grew that from two to four million in revenue before formally starting FlashRecruit. We've been fully running here for two and a half/three years. Based out of Detroit. That's me.
Joel: Awesome so we have some prior experience in the recruitment space, which I think you're the first guest ever.
Chad: And a sales guy.
Joel: And you built a company, so we expect great things from you, Jeff.
Jeff: I'm glad I was able to raise the expectation, therefore the applause will mean more to me than otherwise.
Joel: Don't mess it up. At the bell, you've got two minutes to pitch us your company, and after that Chad and I will have our way with you.
Jeff: Sounds like a plan.
Joel: Here we go.
Jeff: All right, cool. FlashRecruit is a recruitment-focused live chat. What we're solving for is the fact that the apply now button is broken. Candidates know how to find employers. They know how to find career sites. They know how to find job postings, but we're losing 90 percent of those folks. The reason for that is that they're not just willing to jump into that formal apply process, right? They have questions.
Jeff: On the flip side, recruiters know how to reach out to candidates, right? You go on LinkedIn, you do a search for a title and a location. You've got a big old list of people. The problem is not finding those folks. The problem is connecting with them. Historically, you've got phone calls, emails, in-mails, whatever it may be, all of them are less effective than they once were.
Jeff: What we've done is built a live chat to them. Specifically and only for recruitment with the intention of connecting the right candidate to the right recruiter live. Let them interact, answer a couple questions and do one of two things: Get the candidate into the cycle or out of the cycle. Both are good.
Jeff: What we've seen is that our customers are telling us it's driving people into the cycle must faster, more efficiently. It also tells us that they're able to get in touch with folks who would have otherwise not applied to the job, and that's a big part of what we do.
Jeff: That is FlashRecruit at a very high quick level.
Joel: Very good. It sounds like you're adding a layer to complexity to the recruitment process. I know we'll get to automation and things like that later, but you pitch your product as saving time and just on its face it sounds like it's adding a layer of complexity. Convince me that it's not, that it is actually saving time and making things easier.
Jeff: It's interesting. A typical industry-accepted ration, you've got ten people who view a job and one of them apply. What we know is that there are qualified people out there who are doing their research. So even if there was a bit of complexity, and it enables you to chat live with a candidate who's highly qualified for your role as a recruiter, what we have seen is that people are very excited about that.
Jeff: When it comes to saving time, though, here's a typical candidate experience. They go to a job. They find this apply, they click apply or fill out whatever form that's asked of them. That gets recycled into an ATS, and then somehow it gets onto the recruiter's dashboard.
Jeff: The recruiter then has to get in touch with the candidate, so you're going to call them, email them. THey're probably going to miss that. Eight hours goes by. 16 hours go by. Somebody responds. Then they're trying to schedule a phone conversation which takes another day and a half until that actual conversation occurs where they ask a couple of questions and find out that they're not a potential fit. Or they are a potential fit, and then you're scheduling the next step.
Jeff: That took days, and so what we're doing is we're enabling our customers to put a live chat on jobs, career sites, wherever it may be that allows an instant interaction. If the recruiter's standing there, I'm notified that Chad the candidate wants to talk to me. I need to know that Chad has seven plus years developing whatever it may be. I'm able to figure that out on the spot as opposed to going through the days of scheduling previous to that answer being found out.
Chad: So quick question. I understand there's prescreening questions for any candidate coming through FlashRecruit, and it depends on how the company sets it up. If a candidate answers the correctly, they are automatically funneled to the specific recruiter, and the chat's opened up, right?
Jeff: Yes.
Chad: Okay cool. What happens if the candidate answers the question incorrectly. What happens then?
Jeff: Good question. It's up to the recruiter, or it's up to the company I should say. Most companies if that candidate doesn't answer all the questions correctly, they can still get notified of that chat. There's a ton of use cases we have out there where a candidate chats with a recruiter about a job. They're not a perfect fit there, but there is another opportunity so they can kick that candidate over to another recruiter.
Jeff: In other scenarios where it's a more rigorous screening process, we can automate using some of our technology, a customizer-configured message that would go to the candidate saying, "Hey you're not a fit for this specific role. Follow us on LinkedIn," or "Here's a link to our other opportunities." In the second case, that would not notify a recruiter. Again an effort to save time.
Chad: Where are all these conversations logged?
Jeff: On FlashRecruit, but the key there, and one of our biggest differentiators, is making sure that that is logged wherever the customer wants it logged. We're a Bullhorn Marketplace partners, and in that scenario a candidate chats with a recruiter. Conversation is had. I click complete, and I move on with my day as a recruiter. We create the candidate record in Bullhorn. Obviously the conversation that was had is loaded as a note. It's referenced to the right recruiter. Referenced to the right candidate, and also any answers to screening questions would flow in there as well.
Chad: What if I didn't apply for the job?
Jeff: You'd be referenced to the job because that's the job that you chatted on. It's not an applicant, right? You'd be a candidate in that case.
Joel: Jeff, so you sort of dissed email and voicemail, which is fine. Is this a text-based solution? Is it a web-based solution? I know you have native apps. How do both job seekers and customers typically interface with your solution?
Jeff: So the majority of job seekers interface with our solution on a mobile browser. There's a variety of devices, but they're looking from a mobile device and they do that via browser. The majority of our recruiters, actually it's about half and half with the recruiters. Half of our recruiters are using it on a desktop. A day in the life of a typical recruiter would have them at a desktop, so they get a notification on their screen, have the chat from there.
Jeff: Another half and half probably are using one of the native apps either on IOS or Android. Typically, the recruiter is working a full desk. They know they're around, or in the scenario that an after-hours chat comes in, they're sitting on their couch, they would typically have that phone from a native app on IOS or Android.
Joel: Do you find that they will use it at all hours of the day?
Jeff: It varies, but for the most part, yeah. Also the customers are different, right? Take a staffing customer, that is their world. We focused on staffing intentionally for a couple reasons, but one of them is that that placement is their world. They are very dedicated to finding that tough-to-fill role. Finding that candidate [inaudible 00:10:12] and they are more apt to have a conversation early or late.
Jeff: In other cases, you can either go so far as to set notifications to snooze out from 5:00 p.m. until 8:00 a.m. and so you wouldn't even get a notification that a candidate wants to chat with you fare hours.
Joel: So if someone chatted you up on snooze mode, what message would they get?
Jeff: It's a configurable message, pretty simple. You can provide another call to action, but the key there is that we do care very deeply about the candidate experience. We have always built with that in mind as well as the recruiter experience. So if you're on snooze you get an away message much quicker. If you tried to chat with me at 1:00 a.m. and I did not hit snooze, then we actually go up into a period of two minutes which is when the data tells us to do this, but we still display a message that says, "Hey I'm not at my desk right now. I'll follow up with you at the email you provided."
Jeff: That actually is a segwuay into an important component, because I know this question is coming. What happens if I'm not at my desk.
Chad: Right.
Jeff: Right? Number one, we basically turn it into that lead for them. We got you that candidate you would have otherwise not received.
Jeff: Number two, the recruiter, next time they look at their phone when they wake up probably laying in bed or when they're at their desk, you see that candidate. This X, Y, Z Chad tried to talk to you about this role last night. I was on a call last week actually and a recruiter told me that as long as she got back in touch with those folks within 24 hours of them trying to chat, she's got a 80 percent plus response rate from those candidates. That's impressive. It's less about those scenarios. It's really more about that new channel of candidates that you're opening yourself up to via using a more modern and appropriate communication vehicle which is live chat.
Chad: So generally getting an interview on the calendar is pretty basic. You already have the prescreen questions. After you pass those pretty much is, do we want to interview you. At that point you coordinate calendars.
Chad: Why does a real person have to be the one chatting to set up an interview?
Jeff: Good question. There's a couple parts to that question. One of them is that a lot of our customers use technology to schedule those interviews, right? Very simply, when a chat is happening, if this person makes sense, they'll throw in a calendar link and let it run from there.
Jeff: That's a pretty brief, the scheduling piece, is a pretty brief part of that
whole interaction there.
Jeff: The second piece of it that I think is interesting is the difference between just screening and actually vetting out that candidate. You can have all the AI and all the bots in the world that can basically confirm what's in the job description. Where we see our customers seeing value is that, again, it's enabling these two humans to connect, and the candidate has questions that aren't in the description. AI is not at a place where they can answer some of those questions that cannot be programmatically put in there. That's where the human interaction comes in. When it comes to the scheduling, there are certainly technologies out there as well.
Chad: With all the questions that are actually being thrown at human beings today, are you guys logging all those questions and answers to be able to build a Q&A database?
Jeff: Yes, that's a little future state from a product standpoint to be totally transparent, but we are absolutely paying attention to what's happening in those conversations. There are tons of implications about what that data can do. I will tell you that the one learning that we have pulled from there that has been very powerful for our customers and for us is that these interactions are not long. One of the initial pushback years ago was, "I don't want my recruiters chatting with candidates for a real long time." What we found is that it's just not the case. You've got these high-quality people. It's a candidate short market. They're not going to jump through your hoops, aka the apply process, but they've got a question. Those questions get answered fairly quickly, and both parties know I'm either in this cycle or I'm out of the cycle. Move on with my day.
Joel: Jeff, I want to kind of go back to the messaging component and ask a little bit about the competition in light of that.
Joel: If job seekers are engaging with employers via more or less a mobile web application. So their browser, Safari, whatever it might be. If they don't hear quickly from their question, how ... so with text messaging when someone messages you, you get an alert that says, "Hey you've got a text message." How does someone know if it's hours later that they've got a message waiting for them.
Jeff: You mean somebody meaning the candidate, correct?
Joel: Yes, the candidate.
Jeff: Gotcha. So when a candidate chats we've got first name, last name, email. That's the information that we collect. So if a chat did not get picked up again, we tell that candidate after a period of two minutes, "Looks the recruiter is away from their desk. They'll follow up with you." When that recruiter finds that, you can click a button in our system which would then either email or send a text message via SMS if the candidate prefers that, to let them know that Jeff the recruiter is back online.
Joel: My competitive question, it sounds like you have some components of SMS, but you're not using like a Twilio or something.
Jeff: No.
Joel: Is that in the offing, and if not, why not when you see competitors like Text Recruit, who Chad and I know pretty well. You've got Canvas, and of course all the automation tools. Most of them are text-message based. Was there a reason why you didn't, and if maybe you are, just tell us a little bit about that.
Jeff: There is a reason that we didn't. There's certainly room for both. If I'm a large employer, and I have a database of 100,000 people that I want to communicate with and I have their cellphone numbers, then by all means, text those candidates. They've opted into that twice actually. That is a very good thing.
Jeff: We are further up in the candidate file. I am the guy who is on, I'm doing a little bit of research because I had a bad week at work or whatever that may be, and I am looking at your Facebook page. I'm looking at your career site, I'm looking at jobs, and I end up on X, Y, Z job that could be a potential fit, but I'm curious. You're asking for ten years of experience, I've not seven, but I've got X, Y and Z in addition to that. That is the candidate we're grabbing. You cannot text that candidate because you do not have that candidate's cellphone.
Jeff: We are gathering more at the top to bring them into the middle part of the funnel.
Jeff: The second part of that answer that I'd love to bring up is that it's a very different thing. One of the reasons why our tool has so much momentum behind it right now is that we're providing a more informal and quick place to start this conversation. If it is via text message, it's a much more personal thing. It's more of we have some semblance of a relationship, whether I can be a candidate in your system. There is a relationship there. We found that candidates are less apt to jump into the texting conversation with no prior context. So we have built and focused very specifically on the top of that funnel enabling more candidates to get into the top, so that relationship is created. Once that relationship is created, then by all means use whatever vehicles make sense for that specific relationship. We have found that live chat works at the top.
Chad: So from a website UX standpoint, like from your client's standpoint, I go to websites all the time and they have the little chat box down at the bottom or the bubble that's just kind of bouncing there to let you know that it's available or it starts to engage with you. I went to the FlashRecruit site, and I wasn't prompted to chat at all. I saw it down there, just kind of sitting there nice and quiet. Why? Why wouldn't you want to promote anybody coming in to start the engagement right out of the gate instead of just hope that they want to click on that bubble.
Jeff: I think that there's a fine line from UX standpoint that goes from subtlety to annoying. We've got a variety of different versions. Customers can tel us they would like to be more prominent, I'll use that word as opposed to the other word I used. We can make it bounce. We've got tool tips. We've got hovers. It can be larger, it can be colors and it can flash, right? There's some stuff there, and so we can certainly do that.
Jeff: On our website it's a little bit different. We are not recruiting for jobs. It's a slightly different scenario. At this point, we remained a little bit more subtle.
Jeff: What I will also tel you though, is that from a candidate-experience standpoint, our customers who are fully integrated, it is not a "just a popup". It is not a link in a job. Literally you've got an apply option on a job, and so I'm looking at a developer in Detroit. You've got apply. You've probably got apply with Indeed, whatever it may be. Under there you have a button that says chat now. That is what we do and that is where our customers are seeing massive value. Candidates will click that, and then since we've got the recruiter data from the ATS or the career site provider, that chat notifies very specifically the recruiter or group who is attached to that specific rack. That is our differentiator. That is what we do.
Chad: Back to the chat bubble. When I engaged the chat bubble it automatically, and this might obviously work differently on your site versus your client's sites, but it asked me for first name, last name, email address. Out of the gate, from a user standpoint, I'm just not going to give you that stuff, but I have engaged with other chats where they say, "I'm Jeff," or "Hi, I'm Joel, and what's your name?" One of those things, that's really cool engagement, and they get my name, and, "Hey, just in case our chat fails, can I get your email address to make sure that we can stay connected and answer your questions." Do you have the same functionality within your system, and if so, why aren't you using it on your own damn website?
Jeff: Good question. Some of that is being built. Some of that exists today. There's a reason we've done it the way we've done it. There are a lot of live chat companies out there in the consumer space. It is a big industry and they all do very clever things like that, but there's a big difference here. If I'm going to look for a car, that dealership does not need to know who I am before they answer those questions. Applying for a job, talking about this job opportunity is a different scenario. We've provided this to all of our customers. We have this conversation a lot. What it comes down to is that the staffing firm or the employer, they want first name, last name, email when somebody wants to engage.
Jeff: It's been customer-driven for us to make that decision. What we've also seen though is that the drop off is not that crazy. Although you mentioned you might not fill that out, what we found is that first name, last name, email has become very commonplace within the employment world. It hasn't proved to be much of a problem today.
Jeff: That bit is by design, but we do continue to explore what that initial engagement could look like and should look like in the future. It is certainly in the roadmap.
Chad: I think one of the worst things that we do, and all of us I think being in sales at one time, we have to listen to the customer. There's no question. When they really don't what the hell they're doing, especially from a UX standpoint. Look at these God damn websites, right? They suck. Then they want to tell us about how we can actually pull the UX together for chat when you guys are the experts in chat.
Chad: What you're saying is, what we were just talking about is either in development or is already available, you're just not rolling it out because clients don't like it because they want that intel. Is that what I'm hearing?
Jeff: So we pay a lot of attention to what our customers are telling us. What to build, what not to build, and that one is starting to bubble up more closely to the top, but we've got other priorities at this point. It's not on the two-week sprint, but it's certainly within the six month roadmap for sure. [crosstalk 00:21:28]
Joel: Let me ask about that horizon a little bit. What does your solution look like 12 months/18 months from now, both as a solution as well as your company. I don't think you mentioned when you launched. Are you going to be looking for venture capital? What's sort of the vision both product wise and company wise for the business.
Jeff: The recent version of the product today launched in June of last year. That's how far we've got there. Previous to that we had an 18-month BETA period, and we were very lucky to have that. We got a significant seed round. So previous to June of last year, we spent 18 months. We had a BETA product in hand. We put that in 32 different customers hands. They used it, they broke it, they did all of these different things. We spent a year and a half doing that before a June launch.
Jeff: Since then, we've been growing very rapidly. We don't love to focus on fundraising, although it's an important part of growing a business, and we will be raising sometime in Q1, just for total transparency there. The more important part of that question is what it will look like from company standpoint, and so the number one thing, far and away the number one thing we hear from customers when they sign on with FlashRecruit is that they want more chats. The conversations are good. Recruiters enjoy the experience. They know they're getting people they would've otherwise. Then we've got some [inaudible 00:22:52] some pretty significant reporting to be able to return an ROI very specifically on the candidates that are coming through. That's not rocket science.
Jeff: The question is, how do we get more chats. Where we are focused is continuing to build out our partnerships. When I told you that scenario in which a chat button lives next to the apply now button, as you would imagine that has a much higher click rate. It's much more powerful. That's great. We've got the career site covered.
Jeff: The problem is how many of those candidates are actually hitting the career site. So in some of the big staffing companies, big employers you've got a relatively big number, but what about for the rest of the world. What we're working on today is creating partnerships with the career site providers and partnerships with the job boards to create that same experience because there are more eyeballs there that will convert a higher volume of chat, and that is what our customers are asking for.
Jeff: We're very focused on the partnership front and finding ways to drive more appropriate candidates to our customers' chats. So I guess partnership is the short answer but that partnership could mean all sorts of things.
Chad: Excellent, so tell us a little bit about pricing. How is it priced out?
Jeff: So pricing is really simple. There's a lot of complication when it comes to pricing. We are a pure sass model. There's a very simple $99 a month platform fee. On top of that it's a per user price between $20 and $40.
Chad: Per user per month, right?
Jeff: Per user, per month. That actually caps off at 50 users. So from there we'd consider that enterprise, and we've got some more creative options at that point, but very, very standard [inaudible 00:24:24].
Chad: The pricing is all transparent on your website though, right?
Jeff: Yes.
Chad: Other than getting into enterprise level. We've seen from a lot of startups that they like to hold their pricing very close to the vest because in most cases they just don't know how to price it. I like the pricing. I think it's actually fairly cheap. Here's the big question. You know as well as I do the gorilla in this game is Facebook, and they're building out employment and they're going to be focusing on it more. How do you compete with a product that is going to be, because it's all glitz and glamour at this point, but companies want to get into it, and they want to figure out how to use it. How are you going to compete with those guys when everybody uses Facebook messenger?
Jeff: That's a good question. Facebook actually has messenger accounts than they do Facebook accounts, which I think is super interesting. I know it sounds cheesy, but I think it's one of the coolest times from an HR tech standpoint. There's a lot of very cool things happening. The answer to your question though is in order to make recruitment chat work, there has to be three things that occur. There is the right candidate, there is the rec, so that job in the middle, and then there is the right recruiter who is attached to that job. That is why we are different. That is why live chat and all the consumer live chats can't do what we do. That's why messaging platforms can't do what we do. We've taken the time and worked through the details on how to say, "Okay, this is X, Y, Z rec. This candidate is looking at X, Y, Z rec. Here is the specific person that is attached to that. That's the person that we should be talking to, and once that conversation completes, get it into the system of record.
Chad: I mean don't you see Facebook doing those types of things? They're already starting to take jobs from applicant tracking systems.
Jeff: Yeah, which is super interesting. By all means, it could be possible. We spent the last two and half, three years very, very focused on it. Not to say we've got a headstart on a company like Facebook but what we have today is proving to be powerful for our customers, and so we are focused on maintaining that momentum and growth right now.
Jeff: Plus there's a nother component there too. If I'm a candidate and I'm going to chat Facebook messenger, that means that I have to be okay with using my Facebook messenger account, right?
Chad: Exactly. Right, gotcha.
Jeff: That's not cool. I'm not going to do that. There's no way. It's not like there's a whole world of unemployed people out there who are just like, "Oh yeah," hopping around and looking for jobs. I think one of the other pieces of value that we have verse like, why don't I use G chat or what about the LinkedIn messaging capability that keeps growing. All those things, like part of our value.
Chad: All right Jeff.
<Bell Rings>
Jeff: Ouch.
Joel: We're at 28 minutes. You weren't droning on, but we're close in the time and we want to cut it off at 30 minutes, so with two minutes left, Chad and I will go through our commentary on the product, as well as giving you a final rating.
Joel: I'm going to go ahead and go first. You're a great salesman. It's pretty clear that you've been doing this for a while, and your answers are really concise and well-formulated and I think that's great. I love mobile. I love messaging and that component of it. To me anything that moves us past email, traditional things like that is a good thing.
Joel: I think that the challenges with the business are just like any really job board or solution out there, and it's being squeezed by the big boys. Chad mentioned Facebook. I could easily mention LinkedIn who has a messenger product, with Google I think Google for jobs and how people apply to openings is changing. I feel like there's a real competitive element here that's going to be really tough to overcome.
Joel: For me not a dis on the product. I think the environment is going to be incredibly challenging for you and this next step of raising money is going to be really important. For now. We're giving you a cap, but it's kind of -
Jeff: It's a golf clap.
Joel: - a held back clap.
Jeff: Yup, that's fair. Thank you. It's good to talk to you guys.
Chad: Okay, so a couple of things. First and foremost, I want to give you kind of sales to sales guy's business advice. I was on the system this morning. Had a great conversation with Henry. Number one, he did great work. He deserves a raise, but one of the things you guys have to do, and you have to do this today, is you've got to devise a way to sell your chat through your chat, and stop this bullshit process of having to schedule a demo. You have somebody interested, and they're there. In some cases they might want to buy, but you're pushing them to next week for a demo. You've got to stop that today. You've got to figure a way to actually use chat to push them to sales people so that you can start a demo through the chat platform. That's number one.
Chad: I'm going to go back with what Joel has to say is that competition is the key. It is crazy muddle out there with everybody talking about texting and messaging and Facebook and Google. Facebook is definitely the 800-pound gorilla, and the glitz and the glamour is what always companies find themselves gravitating toward.
Chad: I believe you guys, as much as Joel has said, you guys have a big dog in this hunt from a short-term standpoint to be able to make this thing work. Long term is going to be the strategic focus that you guys are going to have to go fare. I think companies should look at you guys very, very diligently today, but long-term, I'm going to have to go with the golf clap as well.
Chad: Good show.
Jeff: I appreciate it.
Joel: It's so anti-climactic. Sorry Jeff.
Jeff: That's good.
Joel: So you survived, Jeff. Any words?
Jeff: No, other than appreciate the opportunity and I appreciate the feedback. It's something that we obviously think about quite often. When it comes to the sales experience when you hit the website. We have gone back and forth with that. There's a couple integration questions we want to make sure that it fits our ideal customer profile before we have that, so that's one of the reasons there, but it's good feedback. We're watching what's happening with the big guys, and that's a part of what our strategic planning looks like very, very often. It's good feedback. It validates what we know to be true.
Joel: Right on.
Chad: Excellent.
Joel: Well Chad, that's another episode of Firing Squad. Everyone thanks for listening. Until next month.
Chad: Thanks, Jeff.
Joel: This is it. We out.
Chad: Later.
Jeff: Thanks, guys. Have a great holiday.
Outro: This has been the Firing Squad. Be sure to subscribe to the Chad and Cheese podcast so you don't miss an episode, and if you're a startup who wants to face the Firing Squad, contact the boys at chadcheese.com today. That's www.chadcheese.com.