SuiteSync, startups, AI

Chris Kiefer (00:01.061)

Welcome back Pursuit of Purpose listeners. I'm super stoked for today's conversation with Michael Bianco, who is a tech founder who recently sold his company to Stripe, which we'll probably talk about a little bit today. But I will let Michael explain who he is a little further. But first of all, Mike, super excited that we got to connect through some mutual friends and excited for the conversation today. Thanks for coming on.

Michael Bianco (00:25.71)

Yeah, Chris, thanks for having me. This is fun. Yeah, great to connect and meet someone else who's into startups and software and all that.

Chris Kiefer (00:32.417)

and technology and nerdy things that like, no, it's not like nerdy things used to be weird, but now it's like the cool thing. Or at least maybe I'm just, yeah, no, it's just like, as you get older, you're just like, yeah, we're cool, right? We're cool, right? Yeah, I think that's what I thought. That's right. So yeah, give us like a 60 second bio of Michael Bianco and maybe the recent couple of years and what you've been doing and what you're up to now.

Michael Bianco (00:34.847)

Exactly.

Michael Bianco (00:39.49)

Now it's almost cool.

Michael Bianco (00:46.133)

That's what I tell myself to try to make myself feel better, you know?

Michael Bianco (01:01.794)

Yeah, yeah, my quick story. I've been doing software since I was, you know, small. I think I started doing freelance stuff when I was 13. And, you know, did it all through college to pay the bills. I did like, I built little kind of shareware tools back in the day where you kind of sell things for $10 and people would buy them and buy a license key.

Um, data, you know, went to school for economics and math had, didn't think I was going to do software. I thought I'd get a real job. And, uh, then I found out that actually software was like the best job you can get. And, uh, so I just kept doing it. Um, worked at a small kind of random publishing company where I learned really how to do real software engineering, how to manage teams, how to build SAS, you know, uh, SAS products and, and do a lot with accounting and kind of, uh, e-commerce and all of that.

Um, and what that evolved into is doing consulting after reading the four hour work week and wanting to like, Oh man, Tim Ferriss says it's so easy. All you need to do is like find this little views and sell like rubber spatulas online. I can totally sell software. This is going to be fun. Uh, after like, you know, four or five really dumb ideas, I, as I was kind of consulting to pay the bills and trying out these dumb ideas on the side, I stumbled into this, uh, Stripe Tenet suite problem where.

Stripe was smallish at the time and it was growing. It was like 500,000 people, something like that. NetSuite was big, but not as big as it is now. And NetSuite's kind of a QuickBooks for big businesses kind of thing and accounting, boring accounting software that I got good at while I was at that publishing company. And there's no connector between the two. And so I kind of ran into this problem and built a connector for it. It kept growing and I...

was lucky enough to sell the stripe. They kind of came knocking two years after I started and wanted to acquire the company. So sold it to them and then worked for them for a couple of years, kind of leading some teams there, doing still building products, doing some product work, all that kind of thing. Yeah, and then just recently left to kind of hunt for the new idea. I have no idea what I'm gonna do yet, but me and my co-founder are kind of like searching around and trying to uncover interesting problems and maybe more boring.

Michael Bianco (03:22.846)

spaces of the economy that haven't been touched too much.

Chris Kiefer (03:25.541)

That's super, I love that. And I think the one thing that I would love to hear your perspective more on is just how, first of all, it's like, just be, I feel like there's a, well, there's a couple different topics. I've got like paying attention to where you are and wherever you're working, just kind of like being aware of what are people like complaining about, what knowledge do I have, and then how like, how can I apply this knowledge to specific pain points?

I think that maybe, I guess this is just from my own experience. Ever since I was like, I don't know, in high school or college, I remember saying like, I wanna have a software company. Like I just wanna make a software company. And it was just like, I wanna make software, make software. But I didn't know like, what do I make? I don't know. So I tried, I like, I first knew I just wanted to start a business and I knew video production. So I, you know.

started a video production company, which was basically Chris likes technology, drones were kind of new. So I bought a drone and I didn't wanna be an engineer. So I just was like selling drone photographs, aerial images to like real estate people. And that just grew into like a media production company. But then I was like this entrepreneur, like I'm gonna figure this out, gonna figure this out. We were making like nothing. So it was all like mid, you know.

Michael Bianco (04:39.349)

Oh, I love it.

Chris Kiefer (04:52.309)

early to mid 20 year olds at my media company that ended up being like small business marketing. But then it was like we're working 60, 80 hours a week, probably all making like $35,000 a year, having a blast, getting tons of experience. But then it's like, oh, we my wife and I would like to have kids. And this isn't going to work. So then I was like, I have to give up. I was a

Michael Bianco (05:14.187)

Right.

Chris Kiefer (05:22.013)

get a real job and I started working for a painting company just as their marketing director. Like I'm gonna be a marketing director because I had run a marketing company for six years. I learned so much business skills and just like management and hiring and firing people and all that stuff, even though I didn't make any money, but the value of the knowledge and the skill was great. And then it was from being at this painting company that you're just like, whoa, there's some serious like.

Michael Bianco (05:39.086)

Totally.

Chris Kiefer (05:51.037)

talking to other painting companies and networking is like, well, there's things that I'm seeing that are problems for everybody in the painting world. And now I have this consulting company slash software, it's a review software that's targeted towards painting and now kind of home service. And that's a straight software. And then there's another consulting side for like automation that I'm doing. So that's just to give context because we're meeting each other. That's my frame is like, okay,

Michael Bianco (06:14.57)

Mmm, cool.

Chris Kiefer (06:21.145)

like how many other people that were in painting maybe could have seen or been aware of some of these problems that I saw, but they didn't like act on it or say like, hey, let's try and make this bigger or solve more problems or go deeper into the problem and see what else is there. And I feel like, I don't know if that relates to you at all, but I think that's kind of something that.

Michael Bianco (06:35.903)

Right.

Chris Kiefer (06:45.849)

I'll tell people, like, what do you do? I'm like, oh, I do automation for painting companies. And they're like, what, like how in the world did you end up, it's like, I didn't go seeking it. You're just in it and you're very aware and you start speaking the language and realize, wait, how many painting companies are there? Oh, there's like hundreds, okay. And you know, so anyways, that's my story. And I'll just kind of, I don't have a question, but what are your comments or how does that reflect in your journey?

Michael Bianco (06:51.022)

How'd you run into that?

Michael Bianco (07:11.446)

Yeah, no, I think, I mean, when you're like, how do you find an idea? How do you find a good startup idea? Or how do people land kind of where they are when you talk to interesting people? I think a lot of it is you stumble into it. You know, there's not, I think most of the time it's not a kind of strategic process or something. It's like, yeah, I worked in painting and then I bumped into this problem and I knew enough players in the industry and had enough friendlies, kind of like people who can really trust you because of who you are, not like what you have already built.

to give you a shot and kind of be the first couple design partners to bootstrap a product. I think you kind of need that to get something rolling, to get the flywheel going. And I think the best way to make that happen is to just become an expert and with some weird niche. It's kind of similar to what I did where that publishing company I worked for had used NetSuite, used a bunch of other tools, but NetSuite was one of them. I made a lot of blogs and stuff. I wrote a lot of blogs on how to deal with NetSuite.

Because in that weird ecosystem, there's like a, there's a massive professional services kind of a, a network, both like the ones that are like kind of owned and paid for by NetSuite and then just the larger network that's associated with NetSuite that are just independent consultants, but there's not an incentive for them to blog about how to do stuff. Cause that's how they get their business. It's also kind of boring and people don't want to do it. Um, but a lot of people, developers at companies need to integrate with NetSuite.

So they would find my blog and that's how I got consulting gigs from these blog posts. And then I understood the problems of the customers more working as a consultant, helping these guys out. And then the way I ran into the Stripe Tenacity problem was actually doing a project with Stripe. They wanted me as a consultant to explore what it would look like to build a Stripe Tenacity integration. They decided not to move forward with it.

But that's how I really like honed in on the idea. It's essentially a bunch of consulting, working inside an industry, understanding the problem better than anyone else. And I think if people look around, everyone's like a master at something, is a genius at something. And if they look around, they're gonna realize, man, like I really know this better than anyone else in the world. And if I can just get the flywheel going, getting the first chunk of revenue to make it make sense for me to leave my job, they could build something awesome.

Chris Kiefer (09:21.04)

Mmm.

Michael Bianco (09:35.81)

You know, even if it's not a huge venture capital back business, but a nice little lifestyle plus where it does way better than a job. It's way more fun and you get to use your skills.

Chris Kiefer (09:42.825)

Totally.

I think I 100% agree. I think that it's one other thing that I in just talking to people, because I get so excited about this topic, is first of all, it's noticing something, but now, and I wouldn't have said this five years ago, but it's like, you have to also kind of do the math on, I have friends that are interested in entrepreneurship or they've got ideas, but there's a difference in like, hey, I have an idea and I'm gonna go, I almost, the way I,

view it is like, you're gonna like white knuckle your way into like, I have this passion for this thing and I'm going to build it and then people are going to come to me as opposed to what you're saying, which is like, who do you like, who do you know in your space that right now, if you said, Hey, I could solve this, would, would you pay for this would be like, no brainer sign me up right now. Because like that for me was like, again, I, we had like, um,

Michael Bianco (10:35.528)

Yeah.

Michael Bianco (10:38.935)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (10:45.097)

the for my in this review software that I built, I made it originally for a dentist, an oral surgeon who wanted more reviews, because in my opinion, dentists are very, I mean, it's like their names on the sign of the business, you know, and they wanna be like, we all have egos, but for dentists, it's just a little more personal than in regular business. And he wanted to beat all the competition. And this was like eight years ago. And so we made this like very simple

Michael Bianco (11:00.395)

Right, right, right.

Chris Kiefer (11:14.405)

like auto emailer thing that would email their past client, their past patients. And then it was like, we started going to trade shows and trying to get this off the ground. But this is where I would say there's a difference in that I was kind of forcing that, like, cause one dentist said they wanted it. And I did get other dentists to sign up, but it like, it never really like took off. And I've got a bunch of theories on why now, but I had this, it was a,

Michael Bianco (11:39.244)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (11:43.933)

fully functioning working software that was kind of just bringing in a thousand bucks a month or something. And I was like, this isn't gonna, it's nice. Like I have some like, you know, free tech money to buy tech that I don't need, but I'm interested in. And then I took this marketing job and I was like, hey, I could take this review software, plug it into the business that I'm in right now. And then that software, cause I'm the marketing director making the decisions on what we're gonna spend money on.

Michael Bianco (11:55.755)

Right.

Chris Kiefer (12:14.193)

that painting company became the number one painting company in the country based on Google reviews, which was like this amazing case study. And now it's like all their painting company friends are like, hey, what are you guys doing for that? How'd you guys do that? And it's like, then the snowball starts going, you know? So I feel like, anyways, that again, I'm thinking back to this idea of like paying attention, but also like, is this organically? At least my opinion now would be,

Michael Bianco (12:21.794)

Wow.

Michael Bianco (12:27.656)

Right, right.

Chris Kiefer (12:44.069)

You need, you have to find something that's an organic growth at the beginning because you need the cash coming in to be able to make more advancements and things. And I was literally trying to force my way into the dental industry. I did have a client, but it wasn't like a rock star. It was just like it worked and it was fine. But anyways, I just, I feel like finding that niche is critical and then also having the organic nature to get it off the ground.

Michael Bianco (12:48.46)

Yeah.

Michael Bianco (13:14.678)

Yeah, another way I describe the organic piece that you're talking about is, you know, we have all our like product market fit. Some of us probably heard like founder market fit. But for me at least, this was kind of a new concept. It was like go to market fit. Like you might have a good product that people actually like when you talk to them and show them the product they want and they will buy. And like you could convince another dentist to use it for sure. But, and you had one that loved it and it was great.

And maybe you're excited about working with dentists or building or the challenge of building a business. But then there's the go to market fit where like, is it actually easy to convince someone to buy this? Because they might actually want to buy it if you get in front of them in the right way. But is it a scalable, easy ish kind of flow to actually get in front of people, which I think is easy to miss because you can very, it's more fun to focus more fun to focus on the building. It's less fun to focus on like talking to the people and making sure they actually want it.

And then it's even less fun to make sure that the sales motion actually works. And I think you kind of have to have that whole stack for the business to really operate and run. And the, like you're saying the product, the review thing, dentists probably would want it, but it's a lot easier to sell to painters. And I think that that's like the interesting sort of like you had the core of the product, but you had to shift the vertical that you were targeting to get the, to really get the flywheel.

Chris Kiefer (14:15.529)

Hmm

Chris Kiefer (14:36.277)

And so this is interesting. I'm just seeing parallels between, this is my assumptions on what your SweetSync tool was, but the biggest reason or two main reasons that the original launch of this review software failed, in my opinion, one, I priced it at $20 a month, which is just like, I was thinking like, looking back, I'd go to these trade shows where dentists, they're bringing their whole team there.

I didn't know what, like I didn't do the math on like how much a dentist's time is worth, but it's like, it would have been like better for them to pay me a year subscription of like $240 for the year, and just hand me a check and keep walking than what I was charging, if that makes sense. Like it was literally a waste of their time to even find out what I was doing because I undervalued that. The second thing is that it was not automated at all. So it required a behavior change in the staff.

Michael Bianco (15:07.052)

Right.

Michael Bianco (15:20.044)

Right.

Chris Kiefer (15:32.881)

which is something that I, again, now I would say, if you're gonna, if you have a software, does your software make the team that's gonna deploy this, does their job get easier using your software? Because for me, it was, I was selling this tool that was underpriced to begin with. If it was a higher price, maybe I could have had some more traction and taken off. But you had to buy it, and then you had to convince your staff to do another thing in their job.

which they didn't have to do previously, and they were doing this extra thing just for the review software. In the painting world, I was thinking, okay, what did I learn from what didn't work in dentists? And then I was like, why don't we just tap directly into the project management software? The moment the project's done, ping it over to the Boolean software, and then Boolean takes and runs the information from there. And now, all of a sudden, you have this pain point of every business that needs a nose.

Michael Bianco (16:03.148)

Yep.

Chris Kiefer (16:29.253)

knows that they need more Google reviews, and this thing, literally, you never have to talk about it again. Like, forget about talking about it in meetings, nobody's responsible, you turn it on and it's automatic. And it's like, done. And that's, I feel like, again, I'm assuming, you're coming in with this Suite Sync connector, and it's like, so, tell me how you currently get your Stripe transactions into NetSuite. And it's like, oh gosh, you know, all these things have to happen. It's like, well.

Michael Bianco (16:34.999)

Yep.

Chris Kiefer (16:55.993)

If you paid for this tool and it just did that automatically, would that be worth it? And it's like, how much time is that saving you? Done, a no-brainer. I'm assuming that that's kind of the, that's what the tool did, right?

Michael Bianco (17:04.94)

Yep.

Michael Bianco (17:08.81)

Yeah, it did a couple things. It did that. Like it did the strike transaction thing. It like just brought the strike transaction to the net suite. It would kind of plug in and it's a revenue recognition engine. If you did subscriptions, so break up the revenue over time. It like charge your cart, charge your customers cards automatically. Like you could pay send links to customers to pay off invoices. So it was a little bit of reporting and a little bit of collections and handled all automation.

Chris Kiefer (17:29.417)

Mm-hmm, but all automation basically, just streamlining things that people would have been doing manually.

Michael Bianco (17:35.862)

Yeah, all really boring accounting automation type of stuff. But the interesting thing, so there was like the sales friction was there. Like, um, you know, some people would take six months a year to close and implement. It would take a long time to get these people close. And I think it feels like there's two ways to kind of tackle things, right? Like if you're, um, you can build, like the thing that was really nice about the sweet sink product is it had zero churn. And the reason was once you

once you close someone, once they implemented, once that part of their job disappeared, they didn't need to do anything, they weren't gonna change it. Even if it was expensive, even if the price went up, they just weren't gonna change it as long as it reliably worked. But the catch is you had to get them to change the process. They were used to doing it like X and they had to do it like Y. There was a behavior change that resulted in way less work, especially as a company scaled, but you had to go through that process with them, which required.

Chris Kiefer (18:10.042)

No, exactly.

Michael Bianco (18:32.394)

you know, talking to the accounts, talking to the controllers, talking to the tech teams, there's all these things you have to talk to. If I got cut off date, you had to do this switch over, it was all of this work to onboard the user. But once they were on, it was super valuable to them and required very, very little kind of ongoing maintenance or support. And I think there's different models there, right? Sounds like your product is more plug and play, no behavior change, it can get going really quick, really easy for people to get going with it. But you know.

Chris Kiefer (18:41.675)

Ah...

Michael Bianco (19:02.018)

I you could charge thousands of dollars a month for my software. People would pay it because it was one of those sorts of tools and the overhead was high enough that people would pay that amount of money for, you know, that type of automation. So it's like I think there's different angles and ways to attack.

Chris Kiefer (19:14.846)

Totally.

Chris Kiefer (19:18.769)

I'm reading a book right now called The SaaS Playbook. Have you heard of that? Rob Walling, I think is his name, the author. But what you're saying is reminding me of one of his core principles is the moat around your business. And one of the things that he talks about is the downside of my software is it's plug and play, but that also, most likely, and it's true in my case, it's very easy if someone finds a cheaper widget

Michael Bianco (19:22.462)

I've heard it, I haven't read it.

Chris Kiefer (19:47.901)

another thing that comes along that maybe is does something slightly different. They just turn this off, turn the other thing on and there's no friction or friction in that change. No stickiness, right? In your situation, the beauty and the frustrating part about selling it was probably also the thing that made it super special, which is this is I've got to get what you I heard you rattle off at least three maybe four employee employees and like core people that are all busy and doing tons of things.

to all be synced up and on the same page to say, yes, let's make the switch. And it's like another software would have to be like a hundred times more valuable to justify going from a very automated to like, like what else are you getting by leaving SweetSync, right? Yeah.

Michael Bianco (20:29.42)

Yeah.

Michael Bianco (20:34.634)

You wouldn't, I mean, the other unique thing about like, you know, it wasn't a, it was never gonna be a massive hundred million ARR business. It just wasn't that sort of market. So I think the one thing that's kind of interesting in the SaaS market nowadays is like, if you look below the waterline of like, you know, 10 million ARR businesses, there's a ton of stuff to be developed. A ton of little gaps between enterprise systems, like there's a ton of things that just don't exist that should.

mainly because you need some like unreasonable person to go build the initial version, go through the sales process, be interested enough, have the weird combination of skills to do it. And so if you build it, there's basically zero competition in a lot of these kinds of enterprisey tools. So that was the other dynamic is like the competitors were like, are you going to pay an account, an outsourced accountant, like a linear amount of time as your company grows to continue running these processes? That's one option.

Chris Kiefer (21:16.55)

Hmm.

Michael Bianco (21:31.85)

And I was like the competitor. So you kind of had like, you didn't have any software that they were going to switch to unless they went out of business or stopped using Stripe or NetSuite. Um, and I think there's a lot of businesses out there that are shaped like this, um, that one could just go bill. It's not like, and you could even, one of the magic aspects of this, of that business was just building partnerships with the sales orgs on both at both of those companies, I had basically zero marketing.

Chris Kiefer (21:42.557)

Hmm.

Michael Bianco (22:01.398)

zero outbound, I just handled inbound sales. And I just enabled those other sales teams to close their deals faster. And I think there's a lot of businesses out there like that where these sales reps and larger companies have problems that they need to solve to close more deals, get more revenue, get more commission. I mean, that's their whole job. And if you can help them do that, they're gonna help you naturally.

Chris Kiefer (22:24.057)

Oh, so you're saying you were going to the Stripe sales team or the NetSuite sales team and saying, hey, my thing can help solve this problem. So when you're in the pitch and they're like, oh, what are we gonna do about sinking our credit card transactions? Like, oh, there's actually this tool. That's what you're saying?

Michael Bianco (22:41.55)

So I wish I did that, I should have done that. What they actually came to me and they said, hey, we're trying to close a deal that involves sinking these transactions, can you help us? And then after, you know, whacking over the head enough times, I realized, man, I should just make it, my sales process should be just helping these sales orgs with this problem and I should provide sales enablement. I should provide more tools to them to make it easier for them to do this. But it really took like them coming to me.

You know, to realize.

Chris Kiefer (23:12.013)

Ah, but that's ultimately how it ended. You didn't seek it out to start, but that's what they did. Love that.

Michael Bianco (23:16.822)

Yeah, yeah. And it works incredibly well. And I think there's a lot of places, like a lot of little gaps between systems or like glue like software, like little verticalized SaaS plays where there's like, you have this stack of systems that doesn't play well and it wastes a lot of time. And if you can just, you know, weave it together really well and speak to that user's particular pain in a very exact way, you can build a nice business out.

Chris Kiefer (23:40.733)

Hmm.

Totally. Love that. Yeah, that's super interesting. I think that's actually the other like, so the review software, my wife is actually the one that's like running that and she's doing the sales and stuff for that. What I'm doing full time now is automation consulting for painting companies. So the review software, many people that even listen to this podcast are clients of the review software. And then a few, I've only worked with eight companies so far, but it's like, these are

Michael Bianco (23:54.786)

Nice.

Chris Kiefer (24:13.437)

big, big automation packages that like eliminates like 140 hours of manual work for someone in the business every month. And it's like, so it's similar to what you're saying where it's like the you have a typical painting company, this is my experience, has between six and ten software apps that they're using to just run the business. And this is things like QuickBooks, Google or Gmail, Calendar, there's a...

Michael Bianco (24:21.678)

So what kind of stuff are you doing?

Chris Kiefer (24:42.157)

a niche estimating tool called Paint Scout. Company Cam is a photo management for project organization and photos. What else? Their project management tool, their CRM system. So there's all these things that they're using right now and none of them talk to each other. It's like absolutely, this is what I encountered when I was at my previous job. I was just blown away at how I would...

This all started like, I was at lunch at my old job. I'm like two months into my marketing director job trying to focus on marketing stuff. And I'm literally just having a conversation with the receptionist and she was like, oh gosh, it's Friday. I gotta send out the confirmation or the reminder emails to all of our bids next week. And I was like, what? Tell me, what are you talking about? And she's like.

Oh, so every Friday I have to go to all the estimator calendars and then, and the estimators had like 16 estimates a week and her job was to email every estimate, she's like, hey, just a reminder, your bid is next Tuesday with Nathan, four o'clock, like we'll see you then, and she was copying and pasting an email template and putting in like their time and the name of the estimator and stuff. And then she was doing this multiplied by four estimators, every Friday.

And I was like, how long does that take you? And she's like, oh, it's all the whole afternoon. And I was like, and you do this every week? She was like, yeah. And the thing that was crazy to me is that there is a, this is just where you realize not everybody thinks like you do. But I was like, if I got to work and someone was like, we need you to do the same task 35 or 50 times every Friday, and I would just be like, nope, that's not happening, you know?

Michael Bianco (26:04.824)

Wow.

Michael Bianco (26:30.751)

Right, right, right.

Chris Kiefer (26:32.157)

But people aren't doing, and that was one issue. And then you like, every department, I just started digging like, oh my gosh, like, and what do you do about this? And they're like, yeah, that's manual too. You have to copy that over. I'm like, okay. So then you start meeting other companies. And this was like, it's kind of like you. Like had I had my current train of thought, like three, four years ago, this would have been like a rocket ship out of the business to like go build more.

Michael Bianco (26:59.371)

Right.

Chris Kiefer (27:00.669)

But at the same time, there's a trade-off because in the job, there was an opportunity to network with other marketing managers at other painting companies. And so I was building, like you said, the trust and just like the network, which I didn't, and again, this was all like nation, that's fun, but I'm a marketing guy. There was no strategy. It was just kind of like, oh, this is cool. I kind of like auto-

Michael Bianco (27:21.418)

Right, right, right.

Chris Kiefer (27:29.027)

weird. Mic is.

Michael Bianco (27:29.122)

Yeah, you cut out there for a second.

Chris Kiefer (27:35.191)

Hold on. You can still hear me, right?

Michael Bianco (27:37.258)

I can still hear you fine, yeah.

Chris Kiefer (27:39.463)

It's weird my, I wonder if I.

Chris Kiefer (27:44.563)

I have an external camera. Let me reboot this thing real quick.

It's never done that before. I was like, did I unplug it? But it's still plugged in.

Michael Bianco (27:52.47)

Weird.

Chris Kiefer (27:57.568)

One sec, it's turning back on.

Chris Kiefer (28:22.155)

I think I have to stop recording for it to switch camera sources. So hold on one second.

Michael Bianco (00:08.709)

Yeah, you were saying you had to work within the marketing department with other people that were also kind of doing painting marketing to actually understand what they needed, like how they operated, all that kind of stuff.

Chris Kiefer (00:13.961)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (00:18.426)

Yeah, and so yeah, I would say that the, like, you know, I'm meeting, I'm stumbling across all these problems, but I'm still like, I didn't, it wasn't a business, it wasn't a thing, but I loved it, I loved the automation, but I also knew marketing, and so I'm networking with other marketing managers and stuff, and we're all kind of talking. But anyways, that's just, and now I'm, the thing that is interesting about what you're saying though is,

Right now, we're using tools like Zapier and Make. I don't know if you're familiar with either of those. Make is basically same exact concept, but they're kind of like the new guy. I think they're probably, they actually used to be called Integra Mat. So I don't know how long Integra Mat was around, but Make, they rebranded to Make three, two, three years ago. But anyways, the same exact thing. They are the integrator.

Michael Bianco (00:47.594)

Yeah. I know that app here. I don't know makes.

Chris Kiefer (01:13.27)

between all these apps and their no code tools, but they're still like, so you don't need to be a developer to use them, but there's still like a lot of knowledge and just like awareness and structure of how, yeah, how do I wanna connect things and what stuff should I pass back and forth, you know, that is valuable. So I'm coming in and like consulting on these no code tools and giving roadmaps and templates of Zapier and make templates that will work for painting businesses. And then oftentimes actually doing the work.

Michael Bianco (01:23.682)

You need to be technical.

Michael Bianco (01:28.959)

Yeah.

Michael Bianco (01:40.471)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (01:43.518)

And then just like literally in the last two months, I'm turning all of this into a course so that people can do it themselves instead of me having to come in and implement with my team. Cause we got so, it got so routine with every company that we're working with, that now I've got like workflows and charts and worksheets to like take your team through and stuff. So that's exciting, but it's still like to the point that you're making.

Michael Bianco (01:50.807)

Nice.

Chris Kiefer (02:11.37)

what softwares could be built where it's like literally connect the API from this tool to that tool and then the software is doing everything else. And right now we're like, you could say like the mock software that we're building for these companies is Zapier or Make, that's kind of the glue. But in your case, you know, let's say Make had a Stripe NetSweep integration.

Michael Bianco (02:20.427)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (02:38.414)

Certainly there are far more features that could be built that are custom and more specialized or valuable if you're building a custom tool as opposed to being limited by what triggers and actions has Stripe and NetSuite decided to put into their Zapier integration, you know. So...

Michael Bianco (02:50.379)

Yeah.

Michael Bianco (02:56.854)

And I think there's like a correctness like knob that you need to worry about too. Like for I'm sure a lot of the stuff you're doing, there's like two variables that kind of change on each business, like a the correctness variable is in 100% right? If like one detail is missed once a month, you know, if it's like a little email doesn't make it from here to there, if there's some missing dropped message every once in a while, probably okay, you know, and

each business is like slightly different, like the way they want something done. And so there's not like a, the variability isn't zero between each business. There's like, yeah, but we like the quote to come in like this, or we like to say this, and there's this sort of customization where because of the market they're in, because of how they want to run their business, they have a particular way of doing it. And I think those variables matter a lot when you're thinking about building standardized SaaS, where if you need to make sure, like for instance, the thing I was doing.

Chris Kiefer (03:35.859)

Yes.

Michael Bianco (03:52.426)

it was enterprise software. So like it had to work. These the books had to be closed. It supported public companies that need to close their financials. And so I couldn't say Hey, Zapier's thing doesn't have this feature went down like, sorry, guys, you know, you just had to be able to like go in debug the system, fix it, you know, fix NetSuite bugs that would come up all this sort of stuff. So like having entire control and standardization and like super high availability and monitoring and all that stuff mattered a lot. But the trade off with that is like, hey,

This is the way you got to structure your data. This is the way it's going to come in. You can pick, you know, X number of options, but like that's it. And if you want to get outside of that box, good luck. And you can go hire a developer to do that, but here's our box. And so I feel like there's like some continuum where you have to choose and each business structure is different, I would say. And like, you also have to kind of do the calculus, like area under the curve. Like, is there enough people who have a common problem that you can really build a SaaS? Or is it...

we're sort of what you're doing, where it's templates. It's a little it's like, kind of value plus consulting where you're like, yes, you're doing consulting, but it's a lot of like using this like template stuff you've already developed, you're not doing the work from zero each time, and you're kind of selling that. And so you kind of have to you can't just go in and build like, each market is different. And you really have to, to your point, work in the industry, be the marketer know the other, you know, painting company marketers to know how to build the right thing for them.

Chris Kiefer (05:03.211)

Yes.

Michael Bianco (05:18.19)

because it's very different depending on which kind of industry vertical you're in.

Chris Kiefer (05:20.274)

I love, I'm like super stoked about your, the way you're articulating this is 100% lining up with my experience and I like the way you're describing this. Like you say the correctness.

Michael Bianco (05:33.902)

Correct. So in like software engineering, that's like a thing where you like, you know, how, um, like if you think of a pipeline or something and something is going through it. Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (05:35.745)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (05:45.654)

what percentage of things are gonna work, yeah, 98% or 99% correctness, versus in your case, I'm assuming it has to be 100%.

Michael Bianco (05:51.083)

Yeah, you want?

Right, right, but we're something because it was accounting, it had to be right. Sales, you know, like if you send a sales email and it's worded badly, like whatever, you know, it's more about getting more kind of swings at bat as opposed to getting a home run each time. And that kind of changes the type of systems, that correctness level that you develop and the products that like, yeah, the types of products you built.

Chris Kiefer (06:12.77)

Hmm. Yes.

Chris Kiefer (06:18.882)

Cause I was gonna say that that's one of the things that I realized another problem that exists in the painting world is there's tool, this is the, it's like the super interesting place where no code tools come into play. And that is there are no code. So theoretically you just like, if you want to zap this thing and zing that over there and do whatever you want, it's very easy for anybody to do that. And it's just like, whoa, check out what I just did. Now emails are getting sent automatically. Great.

but now do another automation and solve this problem. And now another one and now another one. And now all of a sudden you've got a stack of automations that your business is running on. And the thing that I realized in working with these companies, the eight companies that I've helped with, some companies were further down the automation path than others. So they had more like structure in place, but they were stuck. And the reason that they were stuck goes back to what you're describing, which is they never made a...

Michael Bianco (07:09.474)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (07:16.978)

architect or like a blueprint of the structure of their data. So they never sat down with finance and sales and marketing and said, okay, what do we need to know when we're doing a project? Everything, put it all on the table and let's agree that we're gonna call it project types, not type of project in this software and business unit in this software. It's like simple things where it's like, there was no, it was just like people were trying to solve problems in their silo.

Michael Bianco (07:29.984)

Right, right.

Chris Kiefer (07:45.622)

But if you sit down and you plan the whole workflow, first, then start automating, that changes the game drastically. And then this is again, this is literally like when I'm talking to a company, I don't even like saying that I'm selling because I'm really just trying to figure out like, how do we get you from this terrible painful place you are to where you're going, which is selling. Yes, and so.

Michael Bianco (08:07.882)

Right, right. Which is what great sales is. You're just, if you can help them, you are, you know.

Chris Kiefer (08:12.902)

Exactly. And if I can't, it's like, hey, I mean, here's your here's the trade off. You can do this. You can do this. Like if you want me to involve, here's the price that it's going to cost. But in that process, being able to articulate, it's like you started building a house and you have walls up and you've you know, you're like about to put the second story on. But you actually never made a foundation.

So you now have to literally knock over your whole house, which by the way, people are living in now and using, so you can build a foundation and then you can go back to building the second story. And that's gonna be painful. It's gonna be hard, it's gonna take months and there's retraining involved, but there legitimately isn't any other way forward. So the question that the business has to think about and answer is like, are we okay with a house that has four walls and no foundation? And how long can we last?

Michael Bianco (09:09.036)

Right.

Chris Kiefer (09:09.246)

Or do we just wanna like eat the frog and get it done and just move on? And that's like for the businesses that haven't reached that point yet, it's also compelling because it's like, hey, let me tell you what happened over here where they didn't take time to make a plan and make a blueprint of like, what do we need to know to run our business? And anyways, I just feel I'm 100% in agreement that that's the same thing where there is like things that in my opinion, I kind of have the optimal way to run a painting company.

Michael Bianco (09:27.51)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (09:38.606)

If I were to start a painting company, I'd be like, this is how we're doing it and this is why. But then you're talking to one company and they're like, oh no, we have to do job numbers like this. And it's like, okay, like, is there any particular, well it's how we've all done it. Like, all right, well if you did it this way, you know, it's just, there's things where, it doesn't mean it's like it can't be done the way that they're doing it, but they're just changing it is like something they don't want to take on. And so it'd be like, if they're gonna use the sweet sync connector,

Michael Bianco (09:50.955)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (10:06.698)

You're like, you have to do it this way or don't use our product. And in my situation, it's like, you could do it your way. It might be better to do it this way and here's why, but if you'd rather do it your way, we can just tweak these things and you'll give up this thing and we'll make it work, you know?

Michael Bianco (10:21.195)

Yeah.

Michael Bianco (10:24.45)

Well, it's interesting because there's a bunch of different concepts here that you could dig into. There's an interesting book called Softwar. It's basically the Larry Ellison biography. And Oracle started out as a database. And the idea was you could build these forms and views on top of the database. Each company would do it differently. Best in breed, you'd buy the database and pay all this money to get the...

kind of business operations, business processes, just how you wanted it that exact order number instead of Oh dash, you just want Oh, you want a number instead of the Oh, whatever you have your particular way of doing it best in breed. But now you end up with this maintenance burden where you can't upgrade you someone else coming into the company has no idea how you did it. So there's not standardization across companies. It's harder to find talent. It's harder to ramp up the talent once you find them. It's harder to make changes because you can't use other standardized software.

But you get the benefit of if there's one key thing that you need for your business that actually moves the needle, you can do it because you own the whole stack. And then there's sort of like the 80 20 thing, right where you know, you you're buying not best in breed, but full integration, pre built, turn it on. This is the way it's done. But you can't do everything you want. And that's it's interesting because this was like, you know, I don't even remember the timeline, but it's called the 70s when Oracle database started out.

And then they kind of ping pong back and forth between best and breed, you know, just general sort of like, you know, does everything you want, but not as good as you'd like it to be done, but you get the other benefits. Um, so you have that on the product side, but the interesting kind of mental model that's helpful from software engineering is it's actually not bad to just like do stuff at the beginning and just call it, you know, project name or name a project. And then, but there's a point where you have to stop. And this is the idea of technical debt.

Chris Kiefer (12:20.16)

Mmm.

Michael Bianco (12:20.79)

is you can think of it as a credit card. Like it's fine to use a credit card as long as you pay it off at the end of the month. And with its software or any sort of like architecture based design and technology, you have to know when your payment's coming up on your credit card. When not refactoring, not like renaming everything, kind of slowing down, not adding new features, like better, kind of implementing a better design now that you know more is gonna actually speed you up.

in the future and you got to pay down the debt, you got to stop for a month and fix it all before you can actually go faster otherwise you're going to just slow down to nothing. This is why you look at these big companies that build a lot, they grow, everything is going great and then the product is basically frozen in time for a decade and that's because they run into this technical debt problem among other things but this is one of the reasons.

Chris Kiefer (12:50.04)

Hmm

Chris Kiefer (13:07.916)

you

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that. I haven't heard that term either. This is, there's so many things that I feel like, yeah, we're gonna have to have like a dozen more conversations to go deep into all these topics, but I'm trying to keep track of time. I do have a couple wrap up questions for today's episode anyways, and that is three books. So I ask everyone that comes on, give me three book recommendations. They do not have to be related to our topic that we're talking about, or they can be.

Michael Bianco (13:28.587)

Yeah, let's do it.

Chris Kiefer (13:40.054)

but just what are three book recommendations that you got?

Michael Bianco (13:43.454)

Yeah, I'd say the first one that is really, I really enjoy is called Wanting by Luke Bergus. It's about, it's kind of a popularization of Rene Girard's philosophy about, I would call it like the like physics of human interaction. That's not how he would talk about it, but that's how I kind of parts in my mind. I really liked that one. Luke Bergus. Yeah, Luke Bergus.

Chris Kiefer (14:04.118)

What's the author's name?

Luke Bergus.

Michael Bianco (14:12.33)

Yeah, let me think. I mean, zero to one is kind of a cliche, but I really enjoyed that book. It's another, yeah, I read that a couple of years ago, but it still pops up in my mind. It's one of the good ones out there. Yeah, Peter Thiel. Yeah, let me think. What's the third one? I really like, there's a book called Successful Fathers that is hard to get because it doesn't have an ebook.

Chris Kiefer (14:23.298)

That's by Peter Thiel, right? Yeah, Thiel.

Michael Bianco (14:41.798)

and it's out of publish, they don't publish it anymore. But it's by this guy who ran a school, I think a couple of different schools, he was a headmaster of these boarding schools. And it's basically like his, you know, mostly anecdotal, but he didn't have kids himself and he ran these schools and he worked with hundreds of families and it's sort of successful fathers, I think that's what it's called. And...

Chris Kiefer (15:04.63)

What was the name of the book?

Okay.

Michael Bianco (15:10.054)

Really interesting book. I mean, just his, I have kids and it was really useful for me. Yeah, yeah, this guy. I really enjoyed reading it. So that's another one.

Chris Kiefer (15:14.346)

Is it James Stenson?

Interesting.

Chris Kiefer (15:22.494)

Sweet, and my last question is, favorite movie.

Michael Bianco (15:27.366)

Jaber movie.

Michael Bianco (15:31.242)

Yeah, I mean, cliche, but I'd have to say Braveheart. I love Braveheart.

Chris Kiefer (15:35.282)

Fantastic. It's excellent. That's like, I'll just tell you now, I was gonna say we'll talk about it later, but I'm big on IMDB ratings. So like, if someone makes a recommendation, I go look it up right away. Obviously Braveheart's fantastic, but I'll look up the rating, and if it's below a 7.3, I won't watch it. Because I've just, my friend and I, over the course of the last, we came up with this in college, and now I'm just, I love telling people to try and disprove this.

Michael Bianco (15:45.675)

Okay.

Chris Kiefer (16:04.694)

But the whole concept behind it is there's so much, there's so many movies out there to watch, you just don't have enough time. And there's nothing worse than starting a movie. I mean, a really bad movie, you'll just stop watching, but now you wasted 30 minutes or whatever. But you get to the end, you're kinda like, wasn't, like, not really great. So the 7.3 is just like what I, if there is a movie above a 7.3, an IMDb, whoever you are, you are probably, just statistically,

Michael Bianco (16:22.527)

Right, right.

Chris Kiefer (16:33.994)

you're gonna be like, yeah, it was worth it. It was worth my time. I'm happy with that two hours that I spent. But if it's below a 7.3, I give everybody in the world one Mulligan, and you can say, hey, Chris, I know this is below 7.3, but I'm gonna use my Mulligan, it's worth it. If I like it, you get your Mulligan back and you can do another one. If I don't like it, you don't get your Mulligan back and there's no, I don't take another sub 7.3 recommendation from you again.

Michael Bianco (16:48.45)

You gotta watch it.

Michael Bianco (16:58.124)

Hehehehehehe

Chris Kiefer (17:02.478)

You can recommend all the above 7.3, but those are like confidence. So the best part is trying to find movies that are sub 7.3 that are actually worth watching. And I've talked, depending on like your competitiveness, I'll tell people this and they're like, there's no way that works. And they're like, what about this movie? Like, I bet everyone hates this movie. It's like, nope, 7.3, like it's our 7.4. But like finding those 7.1, 7.0, those ones are like,

Michael Bianco (17:06.678)

Right, right.

Michael Bianco (17:13.451)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (17:31.514)

They're hard. It's really hard to come up with. So anyways.

Michael Bianco (17:34.114)

So what's your below 7.3 movie?

Chris Kiefer (17:37.142)

Um, so there's one and I think I used to say this all the time, but red violin is one that I believe is, I'm just double checking that it's actually a sub 7.3 now. I feel like I used to say this all the time and it's gotten more like. So it's 7.6. Um, so, and then my other one that I like, it's honestly like, it's very hard. I, I very rarely have found one. Um, I should create like the like.

Michael Bianco (17:43.106)

Red Violin.

Michael Bianco (17:51.038)

At 7.6, that doesn't count.

Chris Kiefer (18:05.922)

the like winners list of sub 7.3 that are worth it. But the other one that I'm a big fan of is Law-Biting Citizen. And I can't remember, I think that one's right on either 7.3 or 7, so it's 7.4. But those two are like, like I love finding the movies that are in right around that range because they're ones that you haven't heard of, but they're still good. The ones like Braveheart, not to take anything away from your recommendation, but Braveheart's like,

Michael Bianco (18:08.266)

Yeah, yeah, you totally should. That would be awesome.

Michael Bianco (18:14.382)

Okay, I'm gonna let...

Michael Bianco (18:30.167)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (18:35.614)

If you haven't seen Braveheart, like you're crazy. Like, have you been living under a rock, you know? So that's like an easy recommendation, but it's really fun to try and find the ones that you've, they're like the little gems that no one's heard of, but they're fantastic movies. Cause on Netflix, it's just like a whole bunch of crap. That's just like not worth any, like, so many movies on Netflix are like five or sixes. And a lot of them are probably even lower than that. But anyways, that's my movie thing.

Michael Bianco (18:37.803)

Right, I know, I know.

Michael Bianco (18:56.45)

Terrible, yeah.

Michael Bianco (19:01.114)

You know what I'll say though, I think that my favorite show that has not, that I don't know that many people have actually watched it is called, oh now it's just in my mind. What is it called? Turn, it's about like the, like a spy, yeah, Washington Spy Network, what is that? Does that have a rating? Okay, there it is.

Chris Kiefer (19:16.086)

Washington spies.

That one is an 8.1. So here's my this is the cat. There's the next layer I think and this is I'm open to your refining this theory But I believe that shows are actually adjusted by a whole point to 8.3 and my reason is If you watch one episode of a show and you're like not really in it I'm not I don't feel qualified to give it a bad rating because I only watch one episode

But if you watch an entire season of a show, clearly you liked it, so you're gonna give it a nine or a 10, or you wouldn't have watched the whole thing. At least that's my working theory. So I haven't come up with like the bar, but across the board, if you look like moderate good shows, they're all high sevens, eights, and then the popular ones are all eight and a half, nine, across the board. So there definitely seems to be

Michael Bianco (20:02.775)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (20:16.558)

a discrepancy in movies. And my only theory that I've come up with is that, again, if you've only watched one or two episodes, you're not gonna be like, the first episode sucked and I'm rating the whole season bad. So you gotta get more invested, which just inherently skews the system. So I don't know, that's my best.

Michael Bianco (20:29.195)

Right.

Michael Bianco (20:34.538)

Yeah, I don't know. It would be interesting to understand when does a person review something? Yeah, exactly. At what point in the season would they review it? I only review an Amazon product if it's awesome or if it's like, I hated it. So there's like, what causes someone to go on and be like, that's neat. Especially for a show, it's different than a movie. I'm not gonna think to rate it. I don't know, it's interesting.

Chris Kiefer (20:41.884)

especially a season like that.

Chris Kiefer (20:51.374)

Terrible. Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (21:01.202)

Exactly. Yeah. But yeah, I would say I'm actually curious. There is way less, uh, like that one only has 23,000 ratings on IMDB, but, um, either way, like this is a, and super interesting show that we're going to, um, I'm adding it to my watch list on IMDB.

Michael Bianco (21:17.794)

This is great, it's great, it's really great. My wife and I like burned through it during COVID.

Chris Kiefer (21:22.77)

And the only reason I would say that the, I feel like you can't have the 7.3 and I also haven't made a note of these ones, but there are a lot of shows that I've looked and they're like a 7.5 and I'm like, it wasn't that like, there's some shows that are just like, I love them, they're fantastic. But it just, there's gotta, it definitely is the 7.3 does not work for shows. So you just have to, you have to take into consideration that I believe, and again, it's like,

Michael Bianco (21:46.541)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (21:51.914)

What's the safe cutoff that you could see a shows an 8.5 and be like, you're probably gonna like it. Like if you're, and this is again, if you're like, I would consider myself from like an entertainment perspective. I'm just like looking for a good story, like some action, you know, kind of mind bender. Yeah, I'm not like a film critic that's like, well, the director and the, you know, the director of photography actually used the wrong lens. I don't care about all that. Yeah.

Michael Bianco (22:06.962)

Right. I'm not a connoisseur, you know?

Michael Bianco (22:14.559)

Right.

I respect people who have that kind of like, kind of a mastery over the craft, but for me I'm like, yeah, I got 30 minutes every once in a while, wanna do something fun, relaxing with my wife. I just want an entertaining story. It's that simple.

Chris Kiefer (22:23.982)

100%, yeah.

Chris Kiefer (22:31.822)

Totally. Well, Michael, this was super awesome. Thank you so much. And yeah, we'll probably be chatting again soon. Thanks so much.

Michael Bianco (22:36.398)

This was great, Chris. Thanks for chatting.

Awesome. Love it. Thanks. Bye.