Why This CEO Is Building His Own SaaS Killer: Amit RG (RichPanel)

27:43So I was just talking to them and we had like a huge debate over like how to charge for this. So my inclination was that we charge based on tokens plus plus. So if the cost per token for one ticket was like 25 cents, we charge like one third on top of it for providing the platform on which it runs. That was my inclination. and they were like, they were rightfully telling me that, hey, there's going to be like objection from the end customers because they want unit of work. They want like cost per ticket. And the reason I want to go per token is because the work profile is going to become very versatile.

28:19So you will be able to tell your customer support agent that at the end of each conversation, assess the sentiment and if the sentiment is good, then upsell this product. It's not a ticket anymore. It's an upsell conversation. You will tell your AI agent like, hey at the end of each conversation i wanted to go to memory.md and tell me what was interesting about it and then you know every week or every day in the morning send me a slack message telling me like what was interesting about it now this is not cost per ticket this is plus plus work right so and the thing is going to become so versatile that you do like ask it to do like surveys you do like ask it to like you know reach out to all the members that haven't purchased in the last three or six months with like a personalized message so the work profile is going to be very you know diversified so just like human beings the intelligent ones are being built like lawyers and are being built per hour ais will be built on token basis like how much work do you want me to do because i can do anything like as a lawyer i can i can help you get out of a ticket but i can also defend you in like a case or uh like a mna representation so i I don't know what that unit of work is going to be.

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30:06Sean Frank:Book a walkthrough with the Sarah's Pulse team today. Click the link in the description and thank you Sarah's for bringing you this show. It's an interesting idea that we all become so used to thinking and talking in tokens that our pricing expectations for software could actually just wind up being like, now I understand what it costs. Whereas in the past, I have no idea what the cost basis of Ridge Panel is to run that company. It was really hard for me to say, I want to negotiate based off of your cost. I have no clue. But everything's in tokens. I'm kind of like, it's pretty transparent now.

30:45Sean Frank:It's going back to the media buying model. It's like, I'm going to charge you 10 % of media buying. or whatever. It's like, look, the more media buying I do, the more your company is successful. It's alliance incentives that I want you to spend more money. Rightfully, there's a lot of problems with that. And we've thought about if you should charge percentage of ad spend or whatever. But the reality is the seat-based model's dead because I'm going to have less employees. And you're going to charge me for my agency? It just doesn't make any sense. And then I totally get where Sequoia is coming from.

31:17Sean Frank:As a customer, I would love for you to be like, yeah, I want a dollar per ticket. I understand that. But that's still, I think, old school thinking. Because like what you just said, what if the thing could do my taxes for me too? That's not a ticket anymore. You know what I mean? In your example, the lawyer, yes, it could be a lawyer. It could also be a customer service person. If you're on the Supreme Court, you're probably pretty good at do what others too, right? So I do just think they're probably thinking in a more limited stroke. I would love the idea of just all work being done on tokens plus, right?

31:51Sean Frank:Just like a commission basically. Yeah. It's like, it's cost plus pricing. It's just a new form of cost plus pricing, which is a very big break for the SaaS industry. Amit, do you, do you, something you said is like, so, you know, you could have your agent do all kinds of tasks when it comes to the customer. They can reach out and do a survey. They could reach out and say, Hey, I saw you bought this? How about this? Like all that stuff. Do you see a convergence then in consumer SaaS? Right now I have lots of SaaS that does all these things. I have post-purchase surveys. I have like, you know, cross-sell, up-sell, post-lake, all this is everywhere in my company.

32:31All of it is kind of, if I could group it all, all of it is talking to the customer in some way. Like there's some kind of conversation happening with the customer. So we have like lots of different software brokering messages to our customers for different workflows. Do you see all of this converging? Is there going to be like one master broker that's working with all these specialized tools? Or do you just sort of see like, no, it's just going to get so easy to do all of these tasks with such intelligence that, you know, Rich Panel will be in competition with other people who do messaging of other forms right now.

33:07Yeah, yeah, it's pretty fluid, Matt. So it's difficult for me to say with a lot of confidence. I do see like a lot of conversions happening. But by that same token, I also see that the capabilities will level up. So if you look at an e-com brand from like 2015 versus an e-com brand of 2026, there's a massive difference in the amount of things you have to do to earn that same dollar. Because yes, you guys got like Shopify, you guys got Kave, you got Richpanel, got you know like 50 other tools but that leveled up your capabilities like you didn't stop there because that's what we will do like in a competitive capitalist market when you have these capabilities available you'll just do more so by one logic all of the things that you're doing now there is room for like consolidation but because of the capabilities that will be available to you and to your competition you'll just be expected to do so much more to compete in this deal market piece.

34:08Okay. So how, I guess, what are you expecting on the brand side to change? So we're talking a lot about like RichPanel and SaaS and everything. So one theory is that we stop hiring like net new people to do customer service, right? CX as we know it today. But then let's talk about like the people that are left, right? So like when you have all all of this work being done by agents, what do you think our teams look like? Like what is the head of, like Sean's head of customer experience that he has stateside, what does that person's job evolve to? Yeah, so let's look at it like a couple of ways.

34:51I don't know if you guys are following like what's happening to Figma's stock. You will see like people are just skipping through, like in my company, people are just skipping through the Figma step. So first it used to take like a few weeks of design reviews like you know you come up you you talk to like 15 customers you come up with a use case you validate it then you do 50 more interviews you you know propose a feature then you do like figma design reviews this entire process is like three or four weeks now people are just skipping past that stage where you ask claude or gpd to be your customer and you talk to it like hey pretend you're this pretend you're that and you do those conversations again and again it gives you the insight and then you skip through the whole design phase of figma reviews and all of that you just have like a skill built in like a front-end skill that builds and mocks the whole thing and then it also builds the thing to take it to production so same thing will happen for the head of cx where they don't have to do all of this mocks and things it's an agent that decides what experiment to run today goes and like builds the landing page then does like 13 types of test like is it compatible on mobile it's compatible with all widgets that's the orchestration that's as people will have to provide because it's very easy to like build a landing page using ai tools even today so where we will stand is giving you the infrastructure and the protection that once you make that change it's being tested against like all ios safari chrome all those devices and we ensure that whatever you wipe coded did not break the thing then the second step you can think from there is it will run the experiment by exposing it to like 10 % of your audience and it will pick the winner and then pick the next experiment so it's going to be like continuously evolving right so that's that's how I see it happening because you know we as humans we're not going to stop just because I was able to do this thing so well because your competitor is going to say like oh Matt you're doing some agentic thing to like do this once a week I'm going to do it like six times a week I'm going to change my landing pages I'm going to run like 60 experiments at the same thing.

36:57So that's, that's what I see happening. And do you see like a head of customer service then becoming more technical or do you think that AI gets so good at just removing the technical needs that they're actually just like a, a, a great finger? Yeah. I think your head of customer, I think your head of customer service

37:18Sean Frank:just becomes your head of customer. And like, it is one person who manages 50 agents or one master agent or however you want to talk about it. And they'll manage customer service. They'll manage cross-sells, up-sells, look up with more better flows, look up with customer events. I think we end up spending more time taking care of our customers in this new world. And let's talk about the job displacement part because AI is going to be very bad for SaaS companies in the same way that cars were very bad for stable boys. There used to be a lot of stable boys. Now there's no stable boys and cars are to blame.

37:54Sean Frank:And that's going to happen to SaaS companies. I will take the argument that U.S. jobs are less at risk because if it hasn't been outsourced already, why would it be outsourced now? I'm not saying in four years, like, you know, U.S. jobs aren't at risk, but the first people who are going to lose their jobs are call center employees, are people answering tickets, are, you know, IT. So it's really going to hit the outsource economy the hardest i think you know if you're if you're somewhere which is like a va placement tool like and you're in you're placing vas who answer people's emails i'm like well no claude can do that right now so um anyway that's just to think about the job displacement i think the u.s won't be hit that hard yeah so so the job will get displaced irrespective like Like Dario himself said it, like half the software engineers, half the lawyer, half the financial analysts will get displaced in the next 12 to 24 months.

38:58Half, 50%. So the economy is different. You know, like if I'm running a law firm and I get to like remove 50 % of my lawyers or just to like 2x my throughput, I benefit. But the lawyers as a whole do not benefit. So jobs are potent. Like in both the cases, it's going to suffer. But when you're outsourcing, that company was probably only relying on outsourcing as a revenue. So there, the jobs will also be gone and the economy will also be disrupted. Both things will happen.

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40:11Sean Frank:So check out AfterSell and tell them that the operator sent you. I guess, but hang on, can I push back on this for both of you guys? Like, is it more true that companies are simply going to go after cost savings? Or do you think that there's going to be companies that go after more land? Like, will they, like if I have a thousand lawyers right now, I could take two approaches. I could say, I want to go get 10 times the business with my thousand lawyers because I can now. or I could say like, I'm happy with my business at the size it is and I can just cut my costs by half. Like what's more likely to be true in the U.S.?

40:47Sean Frank:I think the best firms will 10X their business because, you know, the problem with lawyers is that it's very hard to become an expert. It's very expensive. It takes years and years of training. And if you could just have infinite lawyers overnight, you're going to file more lawsuits. This is what's going to happen. it. You're going to clog the whole system. But so if everyone gets 10x more productive, I just don't know if the world can tolerate 10x more legal output, right? Or 1 ,000x more legal output. I think at some point, it's going to both, the best firms will take over more land, but half the firms will just go bust.

41:25Sean Frank:So it's going to be - What do you think it would have been a consumer, Sean? How do consumer brands react here? like companies that have, like us? What do you think we do? I think this hurts SaaS and this hurts service businesses. That's what we just talked about, right? So SaaS is screwed because now everyone can make a SaaS product and there's market compression and service businesses are screwed because you make an arbitrage on people and the idea of people being workers has just broken because your computer is going to be workers and you're going to charge people on tokens. And so, you know, if you're in services, if it's account needs floors or whatever, you're screwed.

42:01Sean Frank:Dude, I think it's the best time ever to be a consumer brand. It's like, yes, there might be disruption in the labor market, right? But it'd be very difficult to, even in two years, to have the world's best AI agent and be like, make me a gummy brand that does$10 million a year in revenue, right? If you said that as a prompt, it's just, this is your cascading world of events that still intersect with the real world. because they're going to say, make me a gummy brand. They're going to have to find the people who make the gummies. You know what I mean? They're going to have to go through that entire world.

42:35Sean Frank:And then also earlier, Amit said this, distribution is still a moat. Like you have to get customers, right? And it's just going to be very difficult to break into consumer, I think. But I think it's a great time to be a consumer brand. So bearish on SaaS, bearish on services, super stoked to be a consumer. I don't, I, for some reason, I guys, I get really bullish on SaaS and bullish on services because I just think, I mean, this might be the optimist in me, but there, there would, in theory, Sean, there could actually be demand for 10X more legal services if the technology from a diffusion perspective is like evenly spread.

43:18So like if all, like if your landscaper can get more efficient and take on more business or if you're whatever, like all companies in all sectors, like if consumer can get bigger, if everything can expand, then there's demand for more of everything. Right. And that's very much like the other side of this, which is maybe there is actually like a lot more demand for more software because we're just going to need a load more of it. Oh, yeah.

43:43Sean Frank:So I say bearish. There's going to be way more software. There's going to be like everything will have software everywhere, right? But I guess when I say bearish, you won't have a company that does 100 million ARR be worth$10 billion or whatever, right? Yeah, the multiple compression is real. Do you think that the multiple compression is because of quality of revenue then? It's not that there's more software or less software. It's just more competition. I think it's going to be quality of revenue. And also it's going to be very hard to get those big, those big outcomes, right? We talk about Salesforce.

44:19Sean Frank:Salesforce is a multi-billion dollar a year SaaS company. And I think it goes to 200 million. I think that's just like the upper threshold. I think eventually people will replace Salesforce and it's going to take longer than two years. Like everyone's been talking about the death of Salesforce just because you have to get Walmart to get off Salesforce or whatever, and that's going to take five years or whatever, but they will go towards a gentic solution, I think. But yeah, so we've already seen this where there's companies like Lovable who get to 100 million ARR, and I think those cohorts look worse than the cohorts from a supplement brand.

45:00Sean Frank:I think those people are churning like 50 % every single month. I think consumer SaaS is just like a very, very blood blood in the water business. Revenue is no longer durable as it used to be because the barrier to entry is so low that the thing that made you so successful is also the thing that makes you so susceptible to disruption. So whatever you're talking about, like lovable and replete, that is 100 % true. It's not as durable. so amit how do you think about uh defending your business then like rich panel right now are you is the idea like we're just going to always stay at the edge of like building the best tools and the best agents for our customers and that that well that we're going to have to just like somehow triple down on product even though product i guess this is the thing that I'm finding too, like, again, as a power user of cloud code right now, I can build lots of stuff.

46:03But there's a big difference between the crap I'm building and, like, something I could sell to someone else. Like, there's a huge gap between those two things. Like, I can build crap for my team to use. But, like, it's not sellable software. And there's a lot more that's going to go into, like, how to sell it. So I guess until agents are buying software, humans are totally out of the loop, but I don't know when that is. So how are you thinking about this, Amit? How do you build RichPanel going forward? Tell us why we should continue to pay you. I think you answered it, Matt. The directive I've given to my entire team is our right to win is how fast we play in this new economy and how much value we deliver.

46:49So we have to be like always on the edge of whatever is new and, you know, help our customers get that vantage point by getting there quicker. Like 12 months before somebody else does, 6 months before somebody else does and continue to do that so that our customers have that vantage point or that advantage over their peers, which is why they should come to us. Like, hey, there's somebody who's thinking about CX all the time, you know, taking all the agent capabilities and giving me that advantage over what my peers have. But six months and 12 months before everyone gets there, because by the time everyone gets there, it's commoditized.

47:29It's no longer an advantage. So that's the role us playing. Yeah. Go ahead, Sean. I was going to say, one thing I'm very bullish on is just people being AI implementers.

47:44Sean Frank:Like, the reason I'm going to pay Rich Panel is they're closer to the source than I am. One, they're engineers. One, they're coders. Like, two, they're coders. And, you know, they are very incentivized to make sure that they are on the cutting edge of working AI tools for customer service. So it's like, look, the fee is cheap enough. It's like, look, to kind of outsource that thinking to them, I think it makes a ton of sense. And if you're a service business right now and you can make a ton of money just setting up OpenClaw for people to be like, Hey, I know exactly how e-commerce agency or e-commerce businesses should use OpenClaw.

48:16Sean Frank:I'm going to set it up for you. So I think there's, there's still a lot of money to be made right now and just being the expert in the hyper-specialized field of AI for play. So I'm, I'm a big supporter of that. Uh, Amit, this might be a super technical, like weird weird do you do you think that rich panel do you think you're going to build rich panel in such a way that like every single person every single customer using it is ultimately going to have their own version of that piece of software so like will it change itself based on our needs as a business like my needs are there's a lot of common stuff between sean and myself, right?

48:54As businesses. But then there's a lot of weird things that I have that Sean might not. And then vice versa, right? So are we just going to get to a point where I'm like, Rich Panel, instead of going and talking to your customer team, asking for a feature request, am I just going to tell Rich Panel, like, hey, I'd really love it if you could change how we handle this. And it just writes the missing software for us. Yes, that's the vision. That's our vision entirely and I see it being completely possible so the loop is going to be like first there is a support agent which is able to like resolve 99 % of your tickets that happens in the next six months simultaneously we'll give an agent which manages the knowledge base for this support agent which we are calling like CX manager like that's the head of your customer service department or the CX manager that is responsible for building the guidance for these people.

49:49So the reason we build a second agent is because this is the person you talk to and you eliminate that six week setup time because this agent knows how to manage other agents. So that's the CX manager. So this is stage one and stage two is you will be telling the CX manager, hey, why don't you go and like add this SOP why don't you you know build this integration out for me and stage three is where it has like a open claw style heartbeat where it comes to you every day and says that hey Matt these there are like 15 customers that are upset about this particular skew or variant we should consider sunsetting it right because it was able to like track that it will come to you and say like this is how the customers are reacting to something yesterday and we still had 230 escalations last week because you had to do some operations in ship bob or fulfill erp so can i go and build that integration so like yeah go ahead so when it goes it spends like a bunch of tokens spends like couple hundred dollars makes the fulfill erp integration with rich panel you already have a fulfill integration but this is just hypothetical so you just go like build your own stuff and says that I will no longer escalate this, you know, shipment delay or like reshipment queries to you because you were editing some button on fulfill.

51:10Now I have that capability to do it. So it becomes like this proactive person that's coming to you next. That's how I see it happening.

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51:53This means more conversions, higher AOV, less lost demand so you are driving more revenue and doing it more efficiently. Check out Shopper from Postscript. We use it at Pila, which is why I am telling you to check it out. Yeah, I just think it's a great time to be like the challenger SaaS company.

52:12Sean Frank:You know what I mean? We left customer, which was bought by Meta and it totally screwed up. They did not know, they did not have a customer vision or whatever. And they're lost in the sauce. We went to Rich Panel just because it was lightweight, it was new, it was cheaper, and they're delivering better services. I think it's just a great time to be that challenger because there's going to be so much innovation. And if you're already coming from a place of being a challenger, you have to embrace it. It wouldn't surprise me if you said 99 % of my tickets are done by the support agent in six months.

52:47Sean Frank:I mean, that is crazy if that happens, going to Q4 and I I don't have any more customer service reps basically. Like that'd be, that'd be, that'd be nuts. But, um, I do think it could happen. I think we've seen the technology that that's what's going on. I believe it's happening. Like I would be, I would be shocked if it doesn't happen. Yeah. Which is like, yeah. If you're not the ones to do it, I'll also say like, we have a lot of like steps to like get there, but it will be, I will be embarrassed if we don't do it. Uh, but I believe we are competitive enough to, be the ones that get you there.

53:23But yeah, it's happening.

53:25Sean Frank:I think this is, this will be the wake up call to the whole industry. I think it's like, look, if we have a Q4 where there's one human in the loop, that's crazy. It's like, then it's like, you know, there's a lot of just like people concerned about what happens to accountants or what happens to lawyers or what happens to whatever in this world of econ, what does it do to the economy? We're going to see all customer service reps be replaced in the next 12 months. And that is a scary, scary time. So that'll be the big wake-up call to the industry. But what, okay, let's end the pot on this. 10 minutes.

54:00Sean Frank:What do we think e-commerce brands should be doing right now? Like, should they waste their time to set up OpenClaw? Should they, like, how can they actually, like, be on the cutting edge and not just have anxiety for where the future's going? Matt, what are you doing? And how can you advise everybody? I think it's irresponsible for any founder to not be going as deep into all of this as possible. I understand that we can hire people. Dude, I am like, Sean, how many years have you known me? Like I am such a like delegate, build team, like all that, right? I am that guy. And I am right now telling everybody that I talk to, you need to get your hand dirty.

54:40Like you really need to understand how all this works at a pretty intimate level. I'm not saying that you got to go build everything yourself, but this is not a moment to like just assign an ai person and then hope that they do it like i think every operator and consumer right now needs to be going so deep in this uh and then yes hire out delegate like do all that crap but man you need to know how this works

55:07Sean Frank:i think this is like absolutely critical yeah and i i want to be kind of a a realist in this whole thing. It's like, I think your teams will get 5 % smaller every year going forward. I think you'll still hire highly specialized people, but just in general, I think your teams will get smaller. Um, you know, not to the point where there's no, maybe, maybe, maybe in 10 years, nobody works at Ridge, but like, you know, we were talking about this the other night. I'm like, look, I still need a core group of 20 to 25 people to continue to grow my business. Uh, Yes. And I like, here's an example. We have an amazing inventory manager.

55:44Sean Frank:I think she's going to have a job here forever because inventory has to roll to somebody. Even if AI is doing that in all the work, if it's doing all the projections, if it is doing everything, because it's so expensive, I just want somebody to click the button. Yes, we're ordering this. And it's like, if it's not going to be her, it has to be my CRO Andres or has to be me. And I like it rolling up to Emily right now. So it's just, you know, I think it is the people who are still employed are running entire functions in an organization. So anyway, I, you know, it's very easy to, to come on here and be like, every job is going to be replaced and everything's going to go out of business.

56:21Sean Frank:It's all going to blow up. I, I, I completely agree that CX reps are going to be the, the first wave in this, in this AI war, but yeah, Amit, what should people be doing right now? If you're an e-commerce brand, what should you be thinking about? Yeah. I second what both of you guys said. I strongly believe that all operators, e-com brand owners, need to be time boxing two to three hours, if not more, on a weekly basis to be spending time and exploring these tools and understand what is now capable. So, like, in both of your cases, you're probably not logging into Meta every day and, like, creating ad campaigns, but you do know how to do it, right?

57:02Like you do know what the capabilities are. You may not be like going into Shopify and building like a landing page yourself, but you do know what the capabilities are. And this is a new tech that you're working with. So it's very important to understand its edges, its capabilities. So you will have to like time box at like two or three hours. And unlike Meta and Shopify and all of these other tools or technologies, which are not changing that much, this thing is changing and like leveling itself up every three to six months it's a step change it's not even like a minor change so things that you were not able to do six months back you probably would be able to do those things now so you'll have to to stay competitive you'll have to understand what you're working with like one or two levels down and then encourage everyone in the company to be harnessing and using these tools to their advantage but yeah i think I think there's going to be a ton of work in consumer.

57:59I mean, I'm just going to talk consumer, not every other industry, but I think it's consistent in all industries. I think we all have a lot of work right now on the people side in identifying the people that can and want to participate in this new way of work. So who on our team is actually going to dig in and be curious and build with AI? Because every job is going to have to. Like my head of customer service, they're going to have to know how to use all this stuff, right? And if they don't, I'm going to have to get somebody who does. So I think we're just going to see, like, Sean, I'm with you.

58:34I don't think this is like some dramatic, I'm going to, like, there's just, I need a certain number of people. Like there's no dramatic, like, people change coming. But I do see over every year going forward, a pretty serious upgrade and replacement process. Like there's going to be people that just can't keep up. They just can't do this. this is just beyond them particularly the next two years while there's still like a bit of a technical hurdle to some of this like i showed uh my wife open claw and she's just like yeah i'm not doing that yeah it's like not even close is she kind of anywhere near that thing um and i think that that's pretty that's a reasonable response right but yeah i think i think that's going to be the work sean is there's just going to be a ton of people work for all of us and i think

59:20Sean Frank:everybody listening to this is familiar with agents and if you're not use manis so manis is on beta it is it is a baby agent and and whatever my baby agent it's a browser only agent so you don't have to download anything you don't have to set anything up it has security to this to the quality and standards of meta so like i'm comfortable giving manis access to my email to my slack to everything and it will do stuff for you like i've i i've shared this a couple and I'll share this, but like, um, I needed to build an image database of celebrities. I got a list of names of celebrities we're going to put in a, in a commercial.

59:55Sean Frank:I didn't know who they are and I wanted to see their faces. So I just gave the list of names to Manus and it built me a database with their, uh, you know, link to their Instagram and their followers and a bio and their last movie. And like all of this data, they're like, it would have, it would have took my assistant, a human assistant, three hours to do or whatever, right. Maybe longer, five, it could does it so it can do that work for you right so get started there if you don't want to download open claw and do do all of the hobbyist nerd just start using madness today and then and then for your for your teams get everyone access to claude and then if they don't know what to do have them ask claude what to do claude will tell them how to get started how to do their jobs it is the first technology ever that can teach you in layman's terms to exactly where you are it's why education is going to be upended, right?

1:00:47Sean Frank:Like it meets you exactly where you are and coaches you and it never gets bored. So - Do you know what's incredible, Sean, with that last statement in my company, at least? I don't know if it's been the same for you guys, but probably not you because you have so many technical people. But in our company, people are used to asking someone technical how to do something technical. So I have developers, right? And when we need to do something technical, what do people do? They go to the developers. now it's it's such a break mentally for them to just ask claude they're like well i don't know how to use claude well i'm like when i ask claude how to use claude like that's the the weird loop that you have to break is like you don't go to another person to learn how to do this like the number of times i get messages it's like how are you getting claude to do this i'm like bro ask clod like that's what i'm gonna do i don't know so it i find that that right there is a place to start with a lot of organizations it's like just kind of asking dude and i've brought this up we do every month or every two months now we do ai game building and you just yeah you give everyone a couple hours everyone builds a game it's a fun little thing and you can see how far clod has advanced doing that we used to be we used to build like you know pac-man simulators basically and now you can build you know full 3d shooters bro like it's crazy what you're able to do yeah so yeah i think we're we're gonna do more hackathons now like as a consumer company i never thought i would use that word uh but i'm gonna get like everybody to install clod code on a friday and we're just gonna start playing around and building stuff like everybody anybody who wants to participate that's going to be your signal that you tell me that you're curious and i'm going to show you how to do stuff but build your own little tools like little things that you can use but i think that's a great step too yeah look it should be mandatory and if people complain they should get fired it's like that's the reality it's like imagine imagine if you're in the 1990s or whatever and you're like hey this thing with the internet they're like ah it's boring i don't care about the internet like dude you're not going to survive man what's up operators welcome to the rich panel ad read Rich Panel has been a sponsor for over 12 months.

1:02:59Sean Frank:I've been a paying customer for over 12 months. And guess what? I just renewed to pay again for another year. We have cut our SaaS bill in half and automation dropped our cost per ticket by 70%. Our CSAT has also improved from 88%, which is still really good, to 96%, best in class, all powered by Rich Panel. I told them last year, hey, you guys need to do the same thing with returns. And now Rich Panel has a returns portal. It's built to cut down your tickets and convert more refunds into exchanges. They do the heavy lifting, data imports, self-service, retention flows, team training, all of it, and they'll be live in two weeks.

1:03:31Sean Frank:If you want to save 30 % guaranteed on Helpdesk and now returns, book a demo. Okay, so Amit, we're talking a lot about how Rich Panel can be disrupted, right? And you've been pretty honest with us and kind of what you're doing to defend against that and how you're just going to kind of do that to yourself, which I think is brilliant. end. How are you then thinking about, like, that's the defense side. How are you thinking about growing RichPanel, like growing revenue, growing the capabilities of the platform? Like, are you guys adding things or is it more like depth? Just give us a lay of the land.

1:04:10No, absolutely. That's a great question. And in fact, you know, when we initially started the pod, we said that the cost of writing code is going to zero, but there are like a couple of other things that remain relevant and maybe more relevant than before in the AI world. So one of that is like distribution. The second of it is the brand that you've built. In the industry, we've done a fairly decent job of earning the customer's love. And we want to extend that by launching set of new products. So when I was talking to Sean and others, I think this was like June of last year where Sean is like, dude, you guys should be building returns.

1:04:46And he said that in passing but I took that seriously I interviewed like a bunch of other customers and as it turns out that people do really want a new solution that is a has like the capabilities all the high tech capabilities as as some of the leading players out there but it's also easier and more cost effective so with that thesis we built our own returns portal this would have traditionally taken us like a couple of years to build it but we did it like over the last six months you know ironed out all the edges. We launched it in like Jan 1st and we've signed up like 31 brands already. So that is how we are thinking about using our existing customer base and the existing brand that we have to, you know, offer more services and help them like cut costs in like each of these other areas too, right?

1:05:37And by the way, there is no announcement. This is not even on the website. There's no even like a page on the website. It's just like talking to a few customers based on the capacity we have we're onboarding them uh on the returns platform yeah but i do see that

1:05:50Sean Frank:the reason why i wanted to return so bad is i was with loop and i hated it like i mean why yeah yeah like like loop loop i think is considered to have the best in class features and like this isn't a dig i like i like all the guys from chubbies and whatever but the problem with loop is they raised a bunch of venture capital and then the cost got crazy and like they were literally trying to charge me ten thousand dollars plus per month to use a returns portal and i'm like what the hell are you talking about it's yeah you know like and then we we shopped around other returns portals or whatever and like you know we went to a company i think they're called return go and they just didn't work it's just like it just didn't work it was just like it just wasn't built well um you couldn't do exchanges for instance like just just horrible, horrible software.

1:06:44Sean Frank:So that's probably when I approached Richpan, I'm like, guy, I don't know why it's so hard to build a returns portal, but somebody should do it and give me a loop's functionality for half the price and I'll be happy. So that was where it came from. Matt, what are your thoughts on returns as a service? I think it's brilliant, man. I come back to your comment, Sean, on this whole brands are going to have a head of customer and that head of customers going to have like a whole series of agents and things that that person is going to control. And I can just see a world on it where like RichPanel can be the platform that has like a whole whack of those agents.

1:07:19Like I don't know which ones, but anytime like that we want to talk to our customer, I could see a world where like RichPanel has the agents that let us communicate to our customer that we're selling something, supporting them, handling a return. I can just see that, that that, that has to be true. Like someone has to own that, that set of pipes. Right. And I love it.

1:07:39Sean Frank:And I just don't know why reviews has some people building in it. Like, uh, there's Okendo, there's judge.me, there's stamped, there's Yapo. I think Rebo has, has reviews now. It's like, everybody's building in reviews and I'm like, I don't know. I don't like us do that. Returns is a way bigger pain than me. I don't really care about how I get reviews on our website. It's all a cookie cutter to me. Returns should be just as cookie cutter. And for some reason, Loop was really trying to charge me a six-figure contract for the joy of running my returns through them. It was the most egregious thing I've seen.

1:08:13Sean Frank:So that's why I was begging people. There's not a lot of categories of SaaS in consumer that should charge more than Shopify. That's sort of my baseline for pricing. If you're asking me to pay more than shopify bro you better show me oh that's gonna make me more money because that's hard yeah and i brought this up shopify has tremendous restraint like people people love to talk about everything the most you'll ever pay shopify is forty thousand dollars a month that is that is yeah they have a variable fee and it's a percentage of revenue that's the most you can by contract most you can ever pay them you could be doing a billion dollars a month and that's the most they're gonna charge for you.

1:08:52Sean Frank:I'm like, it's a pretty sweet deal, guys. If you send too many emails in a month, you might pay 40 grand. So yeah, anyway, I got pissed off at Loop Returns. So that's why I'm trying to have people build it. And thank you, RichPanel, for building the cool software. Ahmed, I think it's super smart, man. That's my short answer. I think it's smart that you guys are doing that. That's great. I was saying that's the exact brief I gave. Like Sean said, build a better Loop Returns platform about half the price. So that was a brief. Feature brief. Loop is too expensive. Make more mistakes. Make more mistakes.

1:09:24You don't build this.

1:09:25Sean Frank:Yeah, yeah. One shot at Loop, dude, in a clawed prompt. Okay, a$10 ,000 bet to charity. Rich Panel is going to deliver an AI agent that does 50 % of my tickets for this Q4. And if they do, I will give$10 ,000 to the charity of your choice. But if you fail and you only get to 49%,$10 ,000 is a charity of my choice. I will I'll take that back and if you want 50 % of your tickets answered by AI by Q4 you can go to richpanel.com he's got you taken care of I appreciate you guys I'll talk to you later