The $3,000 SaaS Trap Nobody Talks About

0:09You're listening to The Vault Unlocked, where the real secrets of success are revealed. Every episode, one founder, one confession, one strategy that created income scale and unstoppable growth. The code is cracked. The vault is open. Today we have Ken Cox. How are we doing today? I'm wonderful, Kayvon. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for being here. I always appreciate another business owner, solopreneur, in this case, SaaS owner, founder. Is that correct? That is correct. So you're from InLinked. Inlink.com is the company I'm here to promote today. We are a CRM and office suite. Who I really like to serve is, you know, solopreneurs, small or medium sized businesses, but I serve clients of all sizes, all the way up to, you know, some of the biggest companies on the planet, all the way down to your local yoga studio.

1:03Okay, interesting. So a CRM software. Before we get into that, I always love to know a little bit more about the business owner themselves, you know, a little bit of the journey, how you, how you got to this part in your business. All right. Yeah. So we founded our, our hosting company in 2000. Uh, yeah, 99, 2000 is when we founded our hosting company and that's called host steering and that's all fortune, like big companies, data center, um, kind of stuff, co-location, which most people don't even know about. Right. So that's what I do all through the day. And, but the businesses that I love serving our mom and pop main street and the the the gap is pretty big difference right so we founded nlink.com last year to to bring products and services to that medium mid-sized market and solopreneur that were to take all the software packages that we had for the big companies being served by a privately held company not a publicly held company so i have different different needs that i have that i can um i have different needs for your data i don't have to sell it.

2:10I don't sell it. I'm a big privacy buff. It was important to me to create something that was affordable and easy to use for that small and medium-sized business, that solopreneur, Main Street America, and also give you all the privacy and all the bells and whistles of the Fortune 500s. Okay. Let's go into a little bit more of what this is because I'm unclear. I hear CRM, I think, completely different than what it sounds like you're saying. I want to understand, And when we say CRM, what does that mean to you? The product we understand is smaller business owners, the mid SMBs, and it sounded like solopreneurs, so medium, small scale,$1 million a year type of businesses.

2:55Okay. Absolutely. That's who I really love working with. Online? It sounded like, is it retail businesses, traditional businesses, service-based businesses? So a lot of what I've been doing lately, some of the verticals that have been very popular for us lately, auto glass repair technicians, guys that are doing their construction companies, pool installers. We do a lot of gyms, a lot of yoga studios, that kind of stuff, too. So brick and mortar. But we also do some podcast guys. We have CRM for the podcasts and we have CRM for real estate. You name it. We've got about 67 different snapshots for industry-specific needs that we can just drop in there at no additional charge.

3:41Okay. And what does the CRM do? What's it for? What is it? It does your calendar, books your leads. If you do the AI employees, it'll answer your phones. It'll be the AI agent. It'll do call text backs. If you want to build a course for your business. pretty much we took everything that we've ever done and put it under one hood and we're giving it away at$97 a month okay so I'm going to ask the question I think I have the answer but I'd be surprised if I don't we are doing a white label of Go High Level we're doing a white label of Go High Level backed with the hosting of Hosterian backed with the support of our team so that we're answering the end users' questions, not the agency's questions, right?

4:33InLink is here to cut the agency out. I believe that a small business owner should own their marketing strategy and be able to deploy it. But we've also coupled that with an office product. So imagine your Google Drive, your email, all of those products and services. So you really have one throat to choke where all of your data is being stored and who's managing that data. so let's go in deep in that now that we know what this is so this is a full suite crm product like a go high level yes it's a white but we partnered with go high level for that we've also got some other people in there yes but then you've added your own customer support on top of it correct uh i saw i heard some about compliance but i could have been wrong something about security was i picking that up in the beginning yeah i mean our office product is hipaa compliant we're SOC 2, all the bells and whistles, all the compliancy issues that you would go for.

5:27Being a hosting company, our insurance is a little different than your average agency out there. What's the difference between me just going to go and get a$97

5:39subscription with GoHighLevel, for instance, and then going with you? I want to understand that difference. The biggest difference right out of the gate is going to be the support. right high level direct is primarily they're great support absolutely but they're primarily geared to the reseller and to the um agency all right they're not going to help you build your web page or they're not going to they're not going to update your wordpress for you they're not going to um assist you with yaxt or any of those other tools right and we're we're there to help you with all of those things okay so this is very important see this is very important so i'm a solopreneur Let's just say they're a smaller business, right?

6:17And I have my leads are in, say, ActiveCampaign for emailing. I use ClickFunnels for my data. I'm using School for my videos. You said I'm using Typeform for my quiz funnels, application funnel, all of that. Schedule Ones for Calendly picking. I got to integrate the Zapier into all of that. And then I'm using something like, you know, for the, I'm just thinking for the data visual board, right? Something like a BI, I was thinking like a, you know, BI for the data. And I got all that stuff happening. And we know this is all a one and done in Go High Level or here in this case, let's call it in-linked.

7:01Correct. Brings all that down to one place, one centralized place. Now going with you, I might still have other things that I'm using, like for my website. I'm not building my full website on GoHighLevel. I'm building that on like a WordPress or I'm building that on some other platform. But I still need some of that data to connect into InLinks. Is that correct? Correct. So we have a separate back office than HighLevel, right? So we have our own back office that you go into. It gets you to your office suite. It can get you to your WordPress hosting. If you need dedicated servers or dockers or other stuff like that, we're here to help you with that stuff too.

7:40But that's kind of way, way higher level as your business grows and you have more. I think long term, you're going to have more GPU need than anything. But as you mature and you get out of that million dollar and you get to the five and 10, 20 million dollar range, you don't have to jump providers. right and yeah you're with the company that understands how to how to manage a workload for you know um you know my my largest email client is a top five biggest companies on the planet okay so this is interesting are you using the linkedin that's sort of the um and like mail the the go high level platform to deliver email no no that's that's part of the end link that's part of the end link office suite there's end link crm and end link office So your linked office is a better deliverable, deliverably email deliverable system.

8:38It'll say, I mean, it saves a company with, you know, call it 2000 emails. It'll save them about a half million dollars a year over Google or Amazon. Over Google and Amazon or ActiveCampaign or some of these other guys. This is your office product. So this is like your inbox, where all your employees are getting their mail, sending, receiving all their communications. Oh, that's what you're talking about. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Not mass email. We don't do bulk mailing. We're corporate email in that particular case scenario. Oh, okay. So corporations. So we took those tools that we do for Fortune 5s and brought them down to sell them to Main Street America.

9:16I got it. So you're not stuck on Google or Hotmail as a platform to deliver you? Correct. A lot of companies today, most of your mom and pops are using like a C-panel pop, the IMAP connection or something like that. So if they wanted to graduate outside of there, once they get to, you know, 25, 30, 50 employees, they need something a little more robust. They need, they're starting to understand that, oh, as I'm making intellectual property inside of Google's ecosystem, if I've not properly protected it before I shared it with them, I'm not exactly sure what my rights are with my data. Yeah. Right.

9:55Yeah, that's where I heard the data. Yeah. Right. And this is part InLink. This is also part of the white label. This is not part of GoHighLevel at all. This is a completely separate. This is an office product that InLink deploys. So when I buy from you, I get access to all of this. Correct. Okay. I want to just make sure I understand that. Yeah. And the CRM is part of that. So our Soho package comes with five office products and a full deployed, go high level, white labeled solution. Your Soho product. Our small office, home office product. Okay, I love it. Right. Small office. So it gets you five email accounts with Google, not Google Drive, but NLink Drive.

10:37Very similar to Google Drive. So you can share and collaborate and all those things. But you know it's in a spot. It's not going to be using your data against you. We don't use it to pull and make ads. Right. We don't do any of those kinds of things. So it's pure, you know, I'm an old school internet guy, right? I grew up before we could target you with ads. So I like that kind of ecosystem. And that's the kind of ecosystem that I built for my clients. Yeah. Okay. And how are you selling it right now? Like, like how many? Podcasts. Podcasts. I'm on podcasts every day. Are you podcasting? It's working.

11:08Yeah. Love it. Love it. We do a, we do a Tuesday webinar, right? It's a little slow right now. We launched in January. we do every every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Central we do you can come on go to we do Zoom and we like set up a bogus phone number and call it right now I think a big gap for those people are answering the phones right 65 percent of all calls go unanswered so you know we do the podcast and we do some traditional marketing campaigns too obviously right like hey how many calls are you missing and that kind of thing to the procurement managers of the planet and it's a good time. So when you say missing the calls, who's missing the calls?

11:47So there's a big gap when you talk to the Main Street America front desk staff, right? It's transient, it's turnover, it's high turnover and all those things. So one of the things that I really like to do is say, hey, let's have the front desk person stop being the first person to answer the phone. And let's let an AI employee answer that phone, answer 80 % of all the questions that they might have send them text messages right and what we see is that generally sales go up a little bit because they're always getting the right text message they're always getting replied to and then have that transient front desk person you know spend more time with the clients that are there and face to face and do that kind of stuff and that's what program do you do use that off of we're using the end link crm for that yeah that's your and we partner with twilio is the partner on the backside for that.

12:36And it's a, it's a really not 2024. I would not have tried to sell that product at all, but at 25 it's there. It's solid. It works. I've got it set up in my own companies. My, my wife's company uses it. Um, and it, we got to dumb this down. Cause it's, it's not confusing to me, but I can tell you right now, half the audience has no idea what we're talking. So traditionally on phones and, you know, forgive me because I've, I've worked with, you know back offices for uh sprint and aol and all those guys but um the interactive voice recordings are what we're used to right press one for this two for this three for this it's very um binary decision making so you come up with your entire script and go but an ai employee trademark pending um is it can answer the phone with ai you tie it with uh it's actually integrated with chat GPT.

13:31Use your keys there and it will answer the phone as your AI employee. Answer any questions that come up. We can train these now in like 20 or 30 minutes with your website data really, really quickly. And answer the phone. It will send. So are you open this today? Right? Yes, we are. Would you like me to text you a link to our calendar? How do I sign up? This is how you sign up, would you like me to text you an onboarding form? I need to cancel my service. Do you want me to put you on hold and let somebody call you back next week? Kind of thing, right? So let's just put this perspective. I like to make it so clear because I feel if I can have it, if it's clear for me, it's clear for everybody.

14:12If it's not clear for me, how can it be clear for anybody? You said auto glass. You said some glass. What did you say? Auto glass technicians are a big vertical. Okay, so an auto glass technician, Let's just say they have a small shop, right? A couple employees. They're on the road, but they have Susan that sits at home at the head office. Susan only comes in at 9, and she leaves at 5, and she takes her break at 1. And Susan can only answer the phone one time, and people are calling, emailing. And sometimes Susan isn't perfect. She has a bad day and comes in with a bad attitude. We're humans. It's all good.

14:45No offense, Susan. We like Susan. We respect her. But that's just the reality of the business. And the owner of that business is out. He's working. He's installing. and he doesn't, he's just like, the last thing I need to do is worry about all this shit we're talking about. You will come in, you'll implement a system where every lead will come in, and then that system is powered by AI. So every lead that calls, every lead that gets reached out, every lead that emails, texts, will be responded to, so you don't have to worry about Susan and having a bad day, and you don't have to worry about what happens on the weekends.

15:13There's a 24-7, I'm going to use the word, AI employee. Yes. That's working your CR. That alone, if you've done nothing else, that alone, surely, does that get you more business? think you'd have to be living under a rock to say no to that. Right. Yes. Absolutely. Okay. And then on top of that, now you're helping them with, okay, how their email, like they're, the emails are using the data they're using. Yes. And then maybe some marketing advice, maybe in there or some. Absolutely. Yeah. We want to be one throat to choke. Right. So you, for your internet stuff, you come to me, you come to end link, you need websites, you need phones, whatever you need.

15:52We want to be your one throat to choke. If you need... And you'll fix all the solutions for that. Yeah. So a typical stack, if you get our unlimited AI employee package, it's$500. But you come to the Tuesday webinars, you generally get a pretty steep discount. That's$500 a month for unlimited AI employees. You get two onboarding sessions. We set your phone up. We set your Google review AI up. We show you how to do your funnel AI. We show you how to do your conversation AI. We get all that set up. Is this one-to-one or is this group? One-on-one. One-on-one. One-on-one. So I'm going to pay you. I want to be very clear.

16:28So I'm going to pay you$500 a month. Or if I go to the webinar and wait, I'll get a discount, some sort of discount. Love it. But I'm going to spend 500 bucks a month with you and you're going to set up all my AI agents? Not all. We're going to spend two hours with you showing you how to do it. But one of the problems that we ran into really quickly with an AI employee answering the phone, same problem we can have with a real life employee is the guardrails, right? The difference is whenever I got to correct my AI employees, there's no emotion, right? There's no little girl that's just out of high school answering the phone.

17:03I'm like, hey, you kind of did this wrong. You just log in. And it's important for the business owner, whoever's managing that AI employee, to be able to make quick changes. And we want to make that super simple for them. So that two hours, we're going to set up as many agents as you, as we can. And we generally get the phone, um, maybe an email agent, maybe, uh, your Google phone and Google reviews are the absolute necessary, right? Like when you say Google reviews, tell me what you mean by Google reviews. So the, the review AI is going to, uh, watch your Google and watch your Facebook for reviews and then answer those reviews.

17:38Wow. Using AI instead of the can't kind of thank you. So, and we, depending on your tonality and stuff like that, right. We want to just cater that to how your business would talk and it does a really great job. So you know that every review is getting answered by somebody. Now, I like ethical work, especially in AI. So I typically tell people, let's name your AI agent, something AI. So that whenever they're replying, whenever they're talking to somebody, they know that it's AI right out of the gate and they know how to get to a human and close that loop. best. Okay. So what's the, uh, it's to me, I, I, I get it, but it seems like it's still, it seems like it's a lot of work or complicated or overwhelming.

18:24Right. So what, what would you say? Like the elevator pitch here, if we were to say like, you know, you're in the elevator and I'm your ideal client, which is a small business, let's say I'm a small business owner. Uh, I have CR, you know, we talked about this, right. My data is half it's here. It's on five different platforms. My systems costs, right? Just my SaaS cost alone is$3 ,000 a month to run everything, right? Yes. You're coming in and what's the elevator pitch? So, I mean, you're going to have to do it anyway at some point for the new guys, right? Or my elevator pitch for a guy that has a small business right now is you're missing 65 % of your calls.

19:02We need to get those answered. For the solopreneur getting started is you're going to have to do all this stuff anyway and we've dropped the price it's such a commodity price and and software is going to drop ai is going to drop the price of software across the board you don't have to implement every single piece like just start looking at your gaps fill your gaps and and with inlink we have so many tools we fill almost all the gaps i can't think there's not many gaps we're not accounting software right you still got to connect it to quickbooks or whatever thing else you need. But your entire online persona, presence, all that stuff, we've got you covered.

19:38And you don't have to go to a marketing agency over here or a web hosting guy over here and a developer over there and a UI guy over here. We're a one-stop shop. We've been doing it for 25 years. So the elevator pitch is as a result of 70 % of your phones being not answered, We're going to build you a full AI 24 seven answering an email machine. That's, that's all that really matters, right? That's it. Yeah. Well, it's, it's a bread, but, and you know, I don't have to, uh, I'm super fortunate not looking to onboard thousands of customers. I, I've, I know what growing pains are. I don't like them.

20:23Uh, you know, we like a good solid, steady growth business and that's what we have. How many clients are you like, you know, customers, uh, new subscriptions are you bringing on right now on a monthly basis? New subscriptions? Yeah. We're bringing on five a week. Five a week? Okay. And then what's the churn rate? I don't have a churn rate off the top of my head. It's mixed in with all my other numbers. My overall churn's about 2%. Okay. Why would someone churn on something like this? It can't expense-wise. It's not expense. They gave up. They stopped doing it. They just didn't do the work. The other one is they've been sold by a web developer or some marketing firm and the marketing firm needs to take it all under their belt.

21:09Right? For whatever reason. Right? So if that's the case and they're using GoHighLevel, we'll give you your GoHighLevel transfer code and you can move all the GoHighLevel stuff over. But some of the stuff that we do specifically won't go. Right? Like your web hosting, if we're doing your WordPress. The web hosting, the email hosting yeah stuff like that won't transfer over but your go high level crm pipelines workflows all that stuff if you know what you set up like the dmrk and all that with their emails for deliverability and all that do you make sure that that's all set up and working if you're with us yes okay yeah we've got a 24-hour support team that's here um so it's just you know on the onboarding we do all of that right and then um you know if you have a problem just jump in the chat and they'll jump on a few.

21:57Where can people find you just so we have a better understanding? Inlink.com, I-N-L-I-N-K. I like to think of that as the link between Web 2.0 and 3.0 services. Or if you want to know more, just Inlink.com. And more about me is just KenCox.com. Yeah, so Inlink.com is where if you are a small business owner or a solopreneur, your systems are in different, multiple software products, and or you want to replace it because it kind of seems like there's a lot here, and or you want to replace your front staff or empower them to do better with their job by empowering them with AI product that will be able to answer the phone 24-7, answer email 24-7, and Google review 24-7.

22:46This is a place to go. Absolutely. One-stop shop. I like what you said, a choke hold on everything, would you say? One throat to choke. One what? One throat? One throat to choke. That finger pointing game, right? Like, oh, it's not my fault. It's their fault. Why did this campaign work? Or you know, the email's not going through over here. It's exhausting to chase some of those things down. And you guys help set all that up or you teach how to do that? We do it. I mean, if you're a client, then we do it all with you. That's what I'm saying. If you're a client, you keep, but like you'll do it all with me or you'll do it for me?

23:16Um, we're happy to do it all for you. Not for$97 a month, depending on what the scope of work is right yeah so with the 97 you're going to get um the software you get one one hour of onboarding and then technical support so if you're running into an issue and you need to solve that issue then we'll then we do that at no charge um yeah on the onboarding some of those things can get a little uh setting up a campaign would be an additional yeah absolutely yeah you know it's there's a lot to it yeah that's why i didn't think you can be doing that for a hundred dollars a month. Correct. Yeah. Yeah.

23:50Well, that's, that's it. Any last words for the audience here? Get to work. That's about it. Get to work. Get to work. I love it. And that was another episode of The Vault Unlocked, where proven builders, real strategies, and unstoppable growth happens. Subscribe now. The next unlock could be your success. The code is cracked. The vault is open.

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