#39: AC Evans (Drips)

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Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:00:00]: I have a kind of a mantra, a framework that I as I look back in my career and all my successes and failures, like, the first step for any entrepreneur that's bootstrapping should just be do more. Right? Like, more hours, more emails, more tests, more if you're if you're trying to make money designing websites, all you need is more clients. It's relatively simple. You just do a lot more. Then eventually, you refine. You get a little success Land you have to refine and become more efficient so you could do better. And The, you know, long in your career, you get to watch right, you know, and you get to do do right.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:36]: Let's discover the Cleveland entrepreneurial ecosystem. We are telling the stories of its entrepreneurs and those supporting them. Welcome to The Lay of the Land UpCast, where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland. I'm your host, Jeffrey Stern. And today, we are headed a little bit south to Akron To learn about this week's guest who is building what has now become one of North America's fastest growing companies in the last year. Lay Evans is the cofounder and CEO of Dripps, which is the 1st conversational texting company, forging an entirely new category of consumer engagement and leading the way For some of the biggest brands in the world to use automated, humanized conversations at scale. On a daily basis, Dripps now engages in tens of millions of completely humanized conversations with 0 client side human resources or operators at play. Starting at the early age of 16, AC has been passionate about scaling the unscalable in all his business ventures, and Dripps is no exception there, which we will dive much deeper to in our conversation.

Jeffrey Stern [00:01:47]: Very much enjoyed covering AC's vast experience in performance marketing Land consumer conversion and retention and entrepreneurship, all while building DRIPS, A company with genuine multibillion dollar trajectory here. So please enjoy my conversation with A. C. Evans. So I was, thinking about the best place to Stern this conversation typically working chronologically. But I came across this idea that that you are quite passionate about this idea of Scaling the unscalable. And I I wanted to just kinda set the stage for the rest of the conversation by starting with what this idea means to you and and where your your passion for it kind of stems from originally.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:02:37]: Sure. I think I may have heard Gary Vaynerchuk or some other speaker, some other entrepreneur Lay it before I did. I don't pretend I made it up. But I think The the thesis behind it is things that are difficult to scale are often very valuable if you can scale The, right? If you can figure out a way to have cars drive themselves, you have a Tesla, right? If you figure out a way to have a texting system hold human conversations, you have a company called Dripps. Things that weren't scalable before, if you can figure out a way to scale them, then there's always value there. Right? I think I think that's kind of the genesis of it was, you know, that's where all the money is made or the efficiencies are had is when you can have a force multiplier where you're able to scale the unscalable, you generally can disrupt some prior different methodology if you could do that.

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:37]: Right. And because they are unscalable, they have less likely a chance to have been approached in the way that I think a lot of other problems Come up The. There is this corollary from another idea that I do not claim to have made up, but from Paul Graham that he calls, like, the the great schlep That I think kinda speaks to some of that as well, where if you're just if you recognize those opportunities Land and you kinda can put in The willpower and just attention to solving really what seemed like unscalable problems, there is a lot of opportunity with those.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:04:08]: And It's often too not the, the people that were the industry experts that that do that, you know, kinda out of the box different methodology of scale. You know, like, you just use Elon Musk. Right? Like, he wasn't necessarily a a NASA engineer or or into financial stuff before PayPal or into autonomous cars before Tesla, you're I think, at least in my opinion, oftentimes, it's people that come from, completely different industries that can think of the problem completely disparate and different, and they no longer think, okay, how do I make this car 5% better, 2% better, 12% better, they start to think of, how would I build a car if I didn't know anything about cars? You know? How different would it be Land could it be? And I don't know if you're a fan of Teslas at all, but they're one of my favorite analogies for this because it's like nothing like a car. I mean, it looks like a car, you know, and it gets you from A to B like a car, but it's about as similar to a car as a car is to a horse and buggy.

Jeffrey Stern [00:05:08]: Yeah. I know. It's it it kind of embodies that, beginner's mindset building up from The first principles of it rather than the the way it's it's been done to date Land that iterative process instead.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:05:21]: Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:05:22]: Yeah. So where where does your entrepreneurial interest come from?

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:05:27]: It started fairly young for me. I was maybe I always had a good work ethic. I mean, I think I had a job since I was 13 years old, pumping gas, washing dishes, cooking, wasn't a terribly great student, wasn't a terribly great employee. Land friends who I actually moved in with my 1st roommate, and I think I was 17 or 18, he was into online marketing, and that was the The time I saw automation. He was like Land email marketer, essentially. Land, you know, these systems were, like, the the mice and the keys were literally moving on their own. And it just blew me away. I was like, what is going on here? You know? And that's when I learned about automation Land programming Land VB back The, or VB6 or whatever it was, visual basics, and started teaching me how to build programs.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:06:15]: And that's when I really started to get super interested in not being an employee because this guy worked for himself forever. He, you know, he had a Porsche 911 Carrera turbo, whatever, you know, as a senior in high school. He had an H1 Hummer matching canary yellow, you know, the Hummer and the and the Porsche. And, you know, the big joke around town was he was, like, a drug dealer or whatever. But, really, he was just an online marketer. He just like an online entrepreneur, just like many of the publishers and affiliates are today. And it just kind of blew me away. I came from humble beginnings.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:06:49]: My parents never made a ton of money. I'd never made a ton of money. And, you know, I think my 1st semester in college, I was doing night school, but I was clearing, you know, 6 figures a year. So it was just like, what am I doing? Like, why you know? And I'm barely focusing on The. Land back then, it was a lot easier. There was not nearly as many people into online marketing or podcast type stuff, right, or anything like that. But that that was when it started.

Jeffrey Stern [00:07:16]: Yeah. And just to for my own curiosity and and for for folks listening, like, what when you're Cleveland 6 figures in college, What is what is online marketing? Like, I have a sense for what that means. Like, what does that actually entail?

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:07:29]: Yeah. It's, newsletters and emails. And, I mean, now we would call it spam. Right? Like, you get a you get a a thing, you know, and it's whatever. What would it be, like, a dating website or, you know, lose weight, you know, with acai berries or who who knows what, you know, what crap we were sending out at the time. But it was just, it's affiliate marketing. Right? So, like, every every company has it. Google has it.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:07:55]: Right? MSN had it. You can send people links to try to get them to buy something. And if they buy something, you get paid a referral. Right? So that's how affiliate marketing publishers work. There's very legitimate ways to do it all the way down to seriously illegitimate. We were definitely more of the legitimate side where, you know, we we do things compliant Land, you know, send out to people that subscribe to newsletters, things like that. But, yeah, that's essentially what it was, was solicitations over email. Generally automated, you wouldn't be sending emails 1 by 1 by 1 by 1 by hand.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:08:29]: Right? You would be sending, you know, 1,000 or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands per day to people that, you know, signed up to various different newsletters or websites that you created, that got me into you know, I built a lot of humor website, I guess, would be the best way to say it. There's 1 the site's still up. I don't own it anymore, but it's called custom southparks.com. And it was a little site where you could create your own South Park character. So you can give them, like, curly blonde hair Land headphones and a microphone and, you know, make your own little avatar. And that went super viral back in the Myspace days, back before anything went viral. The was no feed. There was no share buttons.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:09:07]: But I built ways for people to share these things really easily amongst each The. And that was another example of scaling something that otherwise wouldn't be scalable. There was no way to save images out of Flash games, but I I innovated a way to do that. So it's just another example of how you can get people kind of into funnels to sign up for stuff. Because when they try to save the image, I would say, hey, please fill out The survey. And that would be them opting in to get offers from, you know, wireless phone carriers or cheaper Stern, stuff like that.

Jeffrey Stern [00:09:37]: Right. So as you're you're working through this, really just Working for yourself in this context. Right? Mhmm. At what point do you start to think about solving things more at scale from the perspective of building a business Land maybe some of what were some of the original problems that you were identifying and starting to think about?

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:09:58]: Yeah, it took a long time, candidly. I mean, I had a lot I had probably more fun in my twenties than any 3 people I know. You know, again, I was getting used to this kind of online solopreneur, laptop, nomad. I mean, I lived in Belize for some years. I traveled all around. I lived Vegas, I lived in Myrtle Beach, and I didn't I wasn't really tethered or tied to anything. I just kind of built these projects. Now I call them money hacks.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:10:22]: I realized back then I thought they were businesses, but they're really just arbitrage, you know, projects. Not not not to not to say anything wrong with that. I mean, that's that's a great way to make a lifestyle living. Specifically, you know, you got all your overhead super Lay, so, you know, high EBITDA business and whatnot. But I just wasn't thinking about growing a business or selling a company or raising money, it never even crossed my mind. I would just build something that made money, and it would kinda run until it didn't make money or till something broke. The arbitrage broke. The model broke.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:10:53]: And then I'd figure something else out. And that caused some really significant income years Land it caused some dire deficit in coming years where I lost more money than I made. It wasn't honestly until I fell in love with my now wife. And I woke up one day and realized, Wow, I'm 31, 32 years old. I've made 1,000,000 of dollars over my career. I have $0 to show for it. I have 0 business to show for it. I have nothing that was truly valuable or solving big problems.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:11:24]: And that's when I got kind of got serious about, okay, I got to I got to try to build something that's, that's lastable, that I can that somebody else can run, that will will go on without necessarily having to have it be Land arbitrage type game, where you buy something for 5¢ and sell it for 25¢. Of of the early problems, built some networks. Again, there's a ton of automation behind this, but we built me and my co founder in our current CTO, we built some systems that would pair Amazon sellers with people that wanted free product, and they would get the free product and then write a review. Not necessarily good review, but they would they would write, you know, essentially long keyword rich reviews, which helps get your search engine ranking placements Land Amazon higher up in the list. So it was all, you know, very very legitimate I wanna make sure I say that right, and above board. And that worked well. We built another system where we paired Facebook advertisers with Facebook people so that the advertisers who run ads on their accounts and kind of spread their ads around. A lot of these big kind of invite only networks, those were decent.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:12:34]: We were also building drips at the same time. And drips was just kind of the project that that really took off, you know, and realized, like, it was you know, it could work across many verticals, solves really big problems. And that was right around the time where texting was, like, becoming way more ubiquitous and prevalent, and less and less and less people wanna pick up their phones. Right? Whether that's due to the prevalence of robo dialer or the preference of asynchronous conversations because everybody's busy. But that was the business that we effectively started 100% focusing on in, I think, 20

Jeffrey Stern [00:13:08]: team. When you were working through these, was there a higher level vision or thesis that you had kind of baked up Coming into The, or was it really a matter of experimentation with different projects trying to find one that had this extensibility and value and and longevity to it.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:13:26]: Yeah. It's definitely the latter. I I I have a kind of a mantra, a framework that I as I look back in my career and all my successes and failures like, the 1st step for any entrepreneur that's bootstrapping should just be do more. Right? Like, more hours, more emails, more tests, more if you're if you're trying to make money designing websites, all you need is more clients. Right? You know, it's relatively simple. You just do a lot more. The, eventually, you refine, you know, you get a little success Land you have to refine and become more efficient so you could do better. And The, you know, long into your career, you get to watch right, you know, and you get to do right.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:14:04]: So with DRIP, specifically, we're just getting into the do right phase. Like, you know, it's, and we're working with some of the biggest companies in the world, you know, Fortune 1 many, many Fortune 100 companies. So, no, I think a lot of entrepreneurs, they come in with their vision too baked in. You know? And and and that that causes a a real, rigidity. You know? And it it you know, I'm I'm a big person. I like the lean of methodology and just MVPs and proof of concepts and whatnot, my career has helped me with The. But that's still how we operate. We prove stuff, test it, iterate, shift, adjust, pivot.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:14:45]: We definitely have a mission statement and we have what we're trying to do long term and whatnot. But it's 4 years ago, we knew we were driving west. We didn't know if we were necessarily in California or Nevada or where Land, you know, or when we Stern or what we'd have to do to get The. But, you know, you eventually refine and refine and refine until you know exactly, you know, where you're going. But I think anybody that starts with the exact end in mind is set up for a lot of letdown, if nothing else.

Jeffrey Stern [00:15:15]: Yeah. Just building on that before we dive into DRIP's itself, just going back to the idea of the beginner's mindset and kind of building from first principles, If if not a thesis that you kind of had originally going into it, you know, it sounds like there was this extensive experience you had in the space and And, just, like, things that you had learned along the The, did did that do you feel like give you these, like, earned secrets about the industry and a direction to to work towards? Or did you, like, challenge yourself in kind of the things that you had learned along the way?

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:15:49]: Yeah, both. I think I leaned on The skill sets that I had, which was around a lot of automation, a lot of scaling to max scale with minimum resources. I always say what can be automated should be automated. But, yeah, I mean, I learned a ton. You know? I mean, I've read a lot of the books. Right? I've I've I've, you know, followed a lot of different people. I've I've sought out mentors and CEO coaches and other CEOs and founders and learn from, you know, groups, just kind of all the above. There's very few people that I'm aware of that become very successful that did it all by themselves.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:16:25]: I don't know if I know even The, right? Even if you're, like, barely successful, you generally probably had a lot of help along the way, though, whether you realize it or not.

Jeffrey Stern [00:16:34]: Yeah. So let's talk about about Drips for a moment, back probably for the duration of the rest of the conversation here. So you mentioned some some cofounders that that you have. What what did kind of the the impetus for for Drips look like?

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:16:48]: Yeah. It was it was one of those things where a guy The, my my cofounder and I were working with in a different business, he had a an online ad agency. So he would generate Facebook leads online for student loan consolidation is back with the Obama whatever whatever The Student Loan Reform Act or whatever it was. So his his company would generate he would he would find people that need to get their student loan consolidated or forgiven, and then he would get those people on the phone Land then sell those calls into debt forgiveness counselors or whatever it may be. So he had a system that was a CRM that would send a text message every day at noon The would say, hello. Thanks for applying for, you know, whatever it was, student loan relief. Please call us back at 888-555-1212 2 year student loans reconfigured or whatever. That system broke one day Land he just told me, he's like, Hey man, can you fix my system? And I was like, What do you mean? He's like, Well, my thing, my texts are broke.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:17:46]: And I said, Well, I can't fix somebody else's software. That's not really how software works. And it was but anyway, long story short, I found out what it did exactly. And I rebuilt it. I rebuilt it essentially overnight. And I sent him you know, it's, like, maybe 3 AM the next morning or the next night. And I send them a link, and I said, hey. When you're ready, open this link.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:18:08]: And it was just a really long PHP script that would rerun itself every time you Lay. It would grab like 10 records or a 100 records, whatever, and it would send that same text message out. So he calls me at 3 am. He's like, Hey, man. It's not working. And I said, what's not working? He said, the link. I just I just clicked it. It just says refreshing, refreshing, refreshing.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:18:26]: I said, oh, dude, close that thing. You know? And and he closed it. And what he did, he already texted, like, you know, 2,000 people

Jeffrey Stern [00:18:33]: Oh, wow.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:18:33]: At 3 AM. He looked at his dashboard Land his lines were all lit up with all people on hold. Anyway, long story short, the next day he was up. He used to, prior to that, convert about 10% of his leads into calls. And with my script, he was converting 15% of his leads to calls. So it was a 50% increase in in performance, which was just huge. You know, it's a great, increase. And any asked me, said, what'd you do different? I said, well, your message was a little broadcasty.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:18:59]: You know? It was like wasn't very humanized. So I changed the message to hey, and then I put in the first Stern. Hey, Jeffrey. Thanks for thanks for finding us on Facebook. So I put in some recency there, some authorities, some social proof. Like, I already read all the marketing psychology books, you know, as an email marketer. And so I put in all that contextually relevant information into the The, and it said like, you can call me anytime until 8 o'clock. Here's my number.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:19:21]: And it was very humanized, you know? And that got him a 50% increase in conversion. So long story short, he was like, great. What else can we do? So I Stern changing the messages. You know, so 1st day at noon, it would send a message. Next morning at 10 am, it would send a good morning message. Then 3 days later in the evening, it would send, hope I caught you after work message. I'm about to leave my desk, but I got another hour. That got about to like a 25% conversion.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:19:44]: And then we added in calls. And that's about the time I actually brought in my my co founders said, Hey, man, I need you to rebuild this because it's kind of a leaning tower of crap. Right? I'm not a great programmer by any means. So that's why I partnered with Anthony, I was always the visionary, and he was always the integrator. So he rebuilt the whole system, realized very quickly that a lot of these people, the majority actually, were texting us back. Right? And that's when we kind of fell into The additional AI idea, because we're looking at what people are saying, and they're saying like, well, call me now, or I can't talk, or I'm at work, or how much does it cost? Or they're saying, don't call me, and then we'd call them. Or they'd say, call me back now. We wouldn't call them for another day.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:20:24]: So it's really bad user experience. So we built a chat room. We we just staffed a couple people. Again, thinking Land. Right? We didn't start with a hardcore AI, natural language processing machine learning, you know, robot, we just started with 2 people that were copying pasting common responses from a spreadsheet. And then, eventually, we started training the system. You know, if they said I'm busy, they could click the I'm busy button. Then we started training it to say, like, anytime they click anything that meant I'm busy, it would start building a dictionary.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:20:54]: So now, we've had, I think since then, we've had, I don't even know what it is, 62,000,000, something like that, human trainings to our dictionary. So effectively, we know all the which ways to say I'm driving, all the which ways to say I'm at work, all the ways to say no or stop, including, you know, The middle finger emoji. Right? Like you know? And and that's where that's the level of autonomy you gotta get to to be able to hold a completely humanized conversation. We're we're in a great place when it comes to competitors because we're the only ones that have been doing it at this big of a scale for this long. So we just have all that data. Again, back to the Tesla thing, they have more cars driving on the roads. Right? So somebody has to come up with a system that is so much better than theirs that the data isn't worth it. But it's terribly hard to do.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:21:40]: A lot of startups, I think, The raise money and they hire data scientists and machine learning experts, and they don't have any data. We started by executing Land even just now, we're just now starting to scratch the surface on moving from a deterministic model to a probabilistic model and doing much more with data science and machine learning and whatnot. But we only can do that because we've had 550,000,000 conversations at this point.

Jeffrey Stern [00:22:06]: Right. Right. This concept of conversational Texting. How has that idea just kind of evolved over over the years? And and you you talked about competition. Like, what is this Land consumer Lay management, lead generation Land conversion, just market kinda look like today, and and where does conversational texting kinda fit in?

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:22:28]: I think conversational texting is, really applicable for high consideration items or for enterprises that have audiences that are otherwise Stern. Meaning, like, you know, somebody that is gonna get kicked off of Medicaid because they didn't pay their bill or somebody that needs to return their at home Stern, you know, to get accurate readings or somebody needs to renew their auto insurance policy or they're gonna lapse. These are things that happen all the time. Right? Like, people just don't pick up the phone when these enterprises are calling them or they're not carefully coming through their direct mail anymore. They're sure as heck not seeing every email. Right? Because, you know, everybody's inundated with emails. So that's where I think it's really applicable. It's not so much applicable for, you know, Stern forgot to buy the socks that he left in his shopping cart.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:23:18]: Right? Like, that's more direct response. That's more like just send a push text maybe and just say, hey. Were you still interested? We'll give you 20% off. You know? You don't need to, like, hold a humanized conversation to answer buyer questions and bring somebody down a a buyer's journey for some socks. But you probably do for, you know, a mortgage loan or, you know, healthcare or, renewing your auto insurance or whatnot. So it's The the considered purchases, I think.

Jeffrey Stern [00:23:44]: Yeah. And that's something that you have learned over time, or was there experimentation with these different kinds of conversations?

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:23:51]: We just of of fell into it. We, I mean, yeah, there was a time where we would try anything. You know, we were doing stuff for politicians, shopping cart re engagements, app downloads, I mean, all kinds of stuff. And, yeah, you learn you start to realize, like, through pattern recognition, okay, we've had, whatever it is, a couple 100 clients, and we got 60 that are great. You know, like what makes these the same? You know, you start to break them apart and look at ideal client profile and figure out what it is about them that makes them the The, Northeast or about The projects that make it worthwhile. Like we've done welcome messages and happy anniversary messages, but they don't move the needle enough. It's not a big enough problem to solve. It's not a terribly difficult thing to automate.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:24:34]: So those projects always Land of failed, you know, but these more high consideration, high value pivotal moments for consumers with servicing companies seem to be, like, really where we have our sweet spot. And there's other companies that focus on ecom, Attentive is a great The, very large, very great at what they do in shopping cart reengagement. But it's just it's a different thing. You know? It's like, that's really more direct response. They don't need to have, you know, completely humanized conversation. They just need to be able to stay in front of consumers and keep brand awareness where it should be.

Jeffrey Stern [00:25:06]: Yeah. So what does drips look like today? What is the extent of The product offerings? You know, how many folks are you working with and just kind of the scale at which you're operating through.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:25:19]: Jason Lepic I don't even know how many clients we have now. A lot. Not like The 1,000. It's a managed technology, so it's bigger companies. So it's, you know, 7 or 8 dozen of, you know, some of the largest either enterprises in the world or the agencies that service those enterprises. We have a 100 and 25 employees currently, you know, up from 4 in 2016. The system, just for Ideal for Scale, I think right now, it's holding around 8,500,000 concurrent conversations. You know, right about now, still 6 6 o'clock is probably doing 180 or so touch points per second.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:26:00]: So every single second, there's 180 messages going in or coming out. And, yeah, that's about it. That's incredible. Yeah. It's cool. It's cool. It's a fun it's an interesting problem to solve. Because, like, there there's a reason why, you know, your local insurance agent can get a hold of you.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:26:16]: It's because it's a person, you know, and they can act a person they can call Land they leave a voicemail. They Lay send you a text. They can follow-up with an email, and they could do what they need to do to get ahold of you. And you can then tell them, hey, I'm busy, AC. Try me at 6, and then they'll try you at 6. The problem and the opportunity, and this goes back to scale on the unscalable, is like, how does an enterprise staff, a 100,000 of those people, you know, a 100,000 mortgage loan officers, 100,000 insurance agents. It's impossible. It doesn't the math doesn't back out.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:26:45]: That's why we we have a successful business is is we can give the enterprise that 1 to 1 scalability and and performance so that to the consumer, it looks human and feels human without the cost of staffing a full time employee.

Jeffrey Stern [00:26:59]: At what point in the in the journey from from when you started to to Where you are today, do you transition away from that kind of mechanical Stern model? And and then, like, where were someone, you know, behind the scenes is kind of acting as an AI, acting as a human. Thing as a human

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:27:14]: is just when you have the right confidence scores. Like, you can't if if you get to a point where consumer could tell it's a bot you've lost. Right? So, like, that that's to me is the other competition is chatbots. Technically, you know, you could you could argue that Drips is a chatbot. Bot. But if you can't tell it's a bot, to me, it's something else. Right? To me, it's this, you know, this

Jeffrey Stern [00:27:36]: You passed the Turing test.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:27:38]: Yeah, it's yeah. I mean, you know, who knows? But the the the point is, like, if if I text something, it says, respond m for more information Land I for or p for price or r to reschedule, I know that's a lot. Right? But if it's like, hey, Jeffrey. Did you have any more questions? Yeah. Well, I'm curious how much you call. Oh, great question. Yeah. It actually cost this much.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:27:56]: You know, could we touch base later on tonight? No. I'm busy. I'm at work. Oh, sorry. I caught you at work, man. You know, how's tomorrow look? I'm I'm I'm in the office till 6. Like, if you look like that, it's not to me, it's not chatbot. And I don't think consumers want to chat with chatbots.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:28:10]: I think it's a pretty poor user experience. So again, it kind of goes back to the data. Right? Like, I have to have seen the message, I'm stuck in a meeting at the office at least a couple times or or, you know, human prog that program that in to build that dictionary to be able to handle that response with a 99 to a 100% confidence score. You can use fuzzy logic, but then it gets bad. You Stern to you Stern to lower your thresholds, and and all of a sudden it's like, oh, I'm at work and not interested. And they see I'm at work as the the heavier weighted thing, and they say, oh, sorry. We caught you at work. We'd love to tell you about, you know, yada yada yada.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:28:48]: So how you do it is by doing it. And that's kind of my point about getting the reps. Right? Like, Teslas didn't drive themselves at first. Right? People drove them. And then they started, you know, whatever, adaptive cruise control. The they started seeing stop signs, and it started stopping at stop signs. But you can't skip Stern, right? You have to have the data in order to be able to leverage the data.

Jeffrey Stern [00:29:09]: Yeah. When you think about The next Stern. And maybe just to go on, like, a macro level detour here for a sec. But, like, when we think about AI and and where, like, the rubber hits the road on that, How are you thinking about AI in Stern like internally at DRIPs and then also more at an industry level? You know, there are things The have come out recently. There's the whole GPT three model and and really some, like, linguistic Mhmm. Capabilities for these AI things that that really feel human on the other side. No.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:29:39]: There's there's a ton of cool stuff coming out. Look, I think at the end of the day, whoever can have a real true probabilistic model when it comes to these types of conversations is is in the best seat. And again, we're we're lucky to have been doing this for years and had hundreds of 100 of millions of conversations is because we should, by doing the right look backs and tagging ourself appropriately, we should know how to hold a conversation with Jeffrey slightly different than AC. Right? Even if it's the same, you know, same area, but I'm a little older or whatever. You know so, like, I you know, the the the the lingo that I might like is a little different than yours, or I might like emojis Land you might not. You know? So a lot of it is about moving from a a deterministic model, meaning, Lay, all the people in this bucket get this conversation, and all the people in this bucket get that conversation. It's more like think like Optimizely, right, where you go to the landing page and just because of what it knows about you or people that look like you, it changes the whole site in a probabilistic manner versus The deterministic one. So that I think is what's next for us.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:30:41]: You know, what's next for AI? Who knows? It's, I feel like I feel like that's The the the most overused, you know, buzz term ever.

Jeffrey Stern [00:30:49]: Yes.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:30:49]: But, you know, it doesn't doesn't mean it's not gonna eventually, The know, eventually, cars will fly. Right? You know, I just I there was a really, really good talk Tim Urban did about AI. And it was spot on. It's just like, you know, everybody thinks it's not going to happen until it happens. Right? Nobody thought AI would be able to beat a person in chess, you know, but it did. And when it did, it was never beatable again. Right? And then it was like, what was next, it was like, poker, right? Texas Hold The. They were like, well, an AI could never win in Texas Hold them because there's human emotions.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:31:24]: There's bluffing. There's this. There's that. And it did take it a while, but when it did, it was not able to be caught. But the skills that AI has are generally you know, almost always. Right? They're narrow. Right? It's not like the poker playing AI is not gonna win in chess, you know, and the chess AI is not gonna figure out how to drive your car. So, you know, what what a lot of people think about from the most macro level, the, you know, God on earth AI or whatever is a general intelligence The I haven't seen anything The says it's coming anytime soon.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:31:59]: But when it does, it'll be interesting. That's why I'm nice to my Alexa and Siri. And, you know, that Lay, they remember me when they start to take over.

Jeffrey Stern [00:32:08]: Yeah. The, that resonates, that I'm sure they're listening in right now.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:32:14]: That's right. We love you. We love you, Alexa.

Jeffrey Stern [00:32:19]: Well, one thing that I I am curious about, because I think we've we've covered a good deal, like, how you've thought about scaling, Technically, the organization, just kind of the natural progression that that you've gone through to to get where you are today. But from the the business perspective, I know that Dripps is now one of the the fastest growing companies in in North America. And, you know, tell me where where I'm wrong here, but I'm not sure, like, from the beginning that, you know, you're necessarily were did you know that you would be getting as big as you are getting? And, like, how do you think about Just scaling the company and the organization and the culture that comes with what you've done on the technical side.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:32:58]: Yeah. Carefully, I would say. Like, I think we're I think we've done a good job of defining of niche category, a new category. Maybe it's not as niche as I used to think. But this idea of automated humanized conversations at scale, it's a big solution that a lot of people can use. And the one thing that only backup. And we have such a lead on the market that it's ours to mess up, right? So what's important to me is keeping that lead, right? The remaining first Land becoming The, whatever, the Marketo of conversational AI or the, you know, the Uber of conversational AI or whatever. But when you think about it, like, Uber wasn't first.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:33:40]: Right? There was magic taxi before Uber. There was Lotus Notes before Salesforce. There was Blackberry before iPhone. So oftentimes, it's not The market leader or the market innovator that wins, because all the competitors get to get to catch up very quickly. They can look at what DRIP is doing, and they can they can emulate very quickly without having to go through the, you know, the years of suffering and pain that we did to to get to where we're at. But that that's why we took on a a funding partner with Accel KKR. So I think we did it at the right time. I think we're at the right size.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:34:12]: They are specifically a B2B SaaS technology investor. So they've done, I don't know, 200 or 300 different deals like The, where their pattern recognition will help us speed up even further. They're not investing in B2C companies, they're not investing in manufacturing companies, they invest in technology company. So that's how we speed up. And for me, it's really ours to mess up at this point. I think the thing that I'm very cognizant Land, careful about Land my whole team is, is taking the prudent steps and not trying to go too fast. Right? And that's the trick. It's all timing.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:34:50]: Right? It's like if we would've invested into healthcare 2 years ago, it would've been a waste of money. It wouldn't have been ready. But if we would've invested in auto insurance next year, we'd have been too late. So it's, it's all timing, Land just trying to adjust The Land be very thoughtful with being very iterative. I mean, we still my whole C suite, we still meet every couple weeks and talk to every single new hire, every single one, Land adjust Land stack rank and move things around as market changes. I think a lot of people get too hung on to best laid Land, and then they and then, you know, they they look up Land they're they're off, you know, are The above their skis, or they didn't invest quick enough, or whatever it may be. So I think just being thoughtful, you know?

Jeffrey Stern [00:35:34]: Yeah. What are What are some of the other things that worry you or concern you?

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:35:41]: Alan Turnpike I used to be concerned about call center softwares. Honestly, there's a lot of very, very well funded multibillion dollar companies, Genesis of AI, Five9, The, and Contact. They should be the ones that are innovating where we are, but I just haven't seen it. Or, you know, it's a little odd because they or it makes sense because they're on generally a per seat model where they charge and make more money The bigger the call center, where we're more into efficacy is in shrinking down call centers and acting as a hybrid to them. So they used to keep me up. I mean, there's a Stern. Laws could change, regulatory environments could change, phones could change. Phones could start to act more like email, which won't be surprising.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:36:30]: I mean, I'm sure you've seen the report junk button. Land even if you just apply for Liberty Mutual and you gotta Stern. If if enough people click report junk, it's gonna start getting treated like junk. They gotta crowdsource it. So I think well past a lot of that Stern. Because, again, I come from a marketing background, so I'm always worried about creating the best conversation we can for the consumers in a very, very contextual Lay, and that will always win. If you blast people right now and you send a bunch of spam or, you know, robocalls or push messaging out, you're gonna have a terribly difficult time getting to the audience you're trying to connect with. But if you have real people who the clients have the right consents Land they're reaching out for the right reasons at the right time with the right message Land they're able to actually hold a humanized conversation, that's great.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:37:18]: Like, that's where you wanna be. You know? So I don't know. What scares me? Hiring the wrong people. You know? I mean, I think that's always in a fast growth thing, especially leadership. You get the wrong person in the wrong Cleveland, and they come in and they disrupt the culture, or you know, best case, they slow you down a lot because you didn't put the right person in the right seat. Culture at scale is tough. It's different. We used to have a nice small headquarters with a private chef Land arcade games, and really just super cool place, especially for Akron.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:37:53]: And now we're 130 people across the United States, and it's different. So figuring out how to scale remote culture is tough. The coronavirus, The sucks. We're B2B big contract software sales. Usually our teams are belly to belly. Right? That's what I jokingly call B2B Belly to Belly. Like, you know, they're in the room, you know, working with their their executive sponsors. And, like, that's just not a reality now.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:38:21]: So I think that slowed us down a lot as far as getting market adoption. You know, but that's the same stuff that everybody's dealing with. So I wouldn't say it scares me as much as those are the challenges.

Jeffrey Stern [00:38:32]: The challenges. How have you thought about The scaling of the culture. You know, going from 4 people to 100, you know, that's that is quite a transformation.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:38:40]: Yeah. I mean, luckily, we we have some great people. Katie who has been, with us. I think she was her 6th or 7th employee from the beginning, and she's really owned culture. And I I still work with her a lot on it, but a lot of stuff. I mean, the way we hire, the way we fire, the way we do performance reviews, you know, like the core values are 50%, I think is somebody's performance review, which is, you know, what dictates if they get more money or not. We have I think in a at The most macro level, I've realized that you can't just get people in the same room and rile them up. You know, I mean, we used to have microphones and PA systems and all kinds of super cool stuff, that just doesn't exist now.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:39:17]: So I realized that since you can't do it with these, like, larger groups, you gotta do it Land you gotta build the same fabric, but in a one to one relationship. Right? So we have mentorship programs, buddy programs, core value winners, crowdsourced, you know, scoring of people and and and calling out good work and interest groups. And maybe we have like a interest group for every we have like a Taylor Swift interest group, right, on Teams or Slack or whatever. So all the people that love Taylor Swift can talk about Taylor Swift. We have clubs, right, fitness clubs, wine clubs, sports clubs, and they all have real budgets. You know? So, like, the wine group gets together once a month Land virtually. And, you know, we have a virtual sommelier, and they, you know, do wine tasting. We have a book club that sends out books.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:40:03]: So I think you have to give people the tools and the avenues to connect 1 to 1 Land and kinda make room for those same conversations that would've otherwise happened over lunch or at the water cooler. Right? But without creating those spaces for that and budgeting the time and the money for it, it won't happen. You know, you end up The very meritocracy culture, which, you know, some companies that's great for. But I think when you're trying to build, you got to people really got to want to lean in and getting the same boat together.

Jeffrey Stern [00:40:34]: Yeah. When you think about owning the conversational texting market, What is the impact with that that you hope to accomplish with DRIPs?

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:40:47]: Unpack that question a little bit. What kind of of. I could imagine a few. I go financial. I,

Jeffrey Stern [00:40:53]: Yeah. Like, what what are you know, like, when you're looking back 20 years from now Land The the whatever it is, and you're reading about DRIPs and the story of DRIPs and and kind of the the impact that it's had on the industry in the space, like, why do you hope that is?

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:41:08]: Look, I hope we were the people that brought conversational AI really to life. And it's just it's a cool thing to imagine that an insurance agent could hold conversations, you know, through a system like drips with thousands of their clients versus doing it by hand. You know? So, like, to me, it's about being first, remaining first, and being the market dominator in our specific space. Like I said, there's other companies that do a great job with direct response stuff. But I think for ours, it's allowing all consumers to engage with brands on a The to 1 basis, right? Personalized one to 1 on the consumer's time, it's not intrusive. It's polite. And I think it just makes for a better economy, better user experience. I don't have to worry about radio ads stopping me from doing what I want, or interstitials, or direct mail, or email, or call centers, or billboards, or all these other kind of push methodologies, the the brand can reach out to me and ask me when is a good time.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:42:14]: And I'll either say, yeah, next Thursday at 2 or I'll say never. You know, that's a much better user experience for me, and it's a big cost saver for the brand. So I think for me, mostly, it's just like being that Salesforce of it. I've had 25 or 35 different projects and businesses, and a handful of them had real potential The scale. I see that now as I look back on my career, but most entrepreneurs, specifically bootstrapped ones don't get the chance to build something that we've been able to build that can really be I mean, it easily could be a multibillion dollar company. It's got all the makings for it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:42:53]: That's very exciting. I'm curious before we we kinda work towards the The closing questions here. What have been some of the most, like, niche or innovative applications of conversational texting? Thing.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:43:06]: Jason Ellis (zero fifty six:fifty six): Oh, Lay, there's a lot. We're doing something now. I don't think I mean, a little bit allowed to say the company name or the product name, but it's at home poop tests, that's a big one that I'm pretty excited about. I'm excited for the emoji use on that campaign. That's probably my favorite one, helping nurses. Doctor. That's pretty good. Doctor.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:43:29]: Yeah. Helping nurses get patient people signed up for patient care coordination, you know, like somebody prediabetic, like getting them on a health plan so that they don't end up in the hospital. Again, it's like it's it's a great thing for the consumer, great thing for the hospitals, great thing for the payers. We've tried for a couple COVID things with with some of the big pharmacies and didn't get to win that business. That would have been that would have been nice. Yeah. I think a lot of like the health care stuff and like the patient care coordination stuff, I think is for me, it's it's super impactful. You know? And and for us as a business, everybody gets sick, right? So the whole country is The target audience at that point, right? If we can get into the payers and the insurers and the healthcare plans and whatnot.

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:10]: I imagine there is a breadth. That's a lot though.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:44:15]: Cool.

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:15]: Well, we'll work towards our our closing question here, which is is uniform for for everyone that's come of. And We're we're essentially building a collage of not necessarily people's favorite things in the in the Northeast Ohio area, but Of the hidden gems or things that other people may not necessarily know about that you value.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:44:35]: Oh, that's a good one. It's funny. I like Cleveland as much as the next guy, but I'm I'm I'm such an Akron person. Like, I there was a point before the pandemic where I swear I got to New York more often than I got to Cleveland. It's just like Akron people are just weird. You know? But not not that I mean, I think most Midwesterners are to some degree. But Cleveland, love the Velvet Tango Room. They're under new ownership now, but it's I I haven't seen it drop off at all.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:45:01]: It's a really, really super, super yummy crafted cocktail type joint in Tremont Land also in Tremont actually is Ginkgo, which is like, I think of the best, some of the best sushi I've ever had in my life. And I've eaten sushi all over the The, and it's right there in Tremont. It's a little bitty, maybe 12 top, something like that, super, super, super small sushi bar. But they're killer if you're a sushi person.

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:27]: Yeah. That's fantastic. Awesome. Well, yeah. AC, I really very much appreciate you coming on Land, And sharing your story here, it was very cool to learn about Dripps, Land, I mean, really, just the extraordinary growth and Progress that y'all are making in the The. That's awesome.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:45:47]: Jason Stein (3six forty six): Great. Well, I appreciate your time, Jeffrey, or Stern. I don't know what you would like to go by, but Appreciate it either way.

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:54]: Serns was my last name.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:45:55]: Got it. Okay, cool. Yeah, man. Well, I'll see you around Cleveland.

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:58]: Yeah, absolutely. If folks have anything that they would like to follow-up with you about or, you know, whatever it may be, where where's the best place for them to to reach you?

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:46:07]: My email is acas in Aaron Christopher atdrips.com. Thought leadership on the subject. But, yeah, email is always easy.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:21]: Excellent. Well, AC, thank you again. Really appreciate it.

Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans (Drips) [00:46:23]: Thanks, man.