Kendall Hines on Paying Your Customers Instead of Google

00:00 Dan Leibrandt

Hey there, my name is Dan Leibrandt and welcome back to Pest Control Legends. Today we're joined by Kendall Hines, a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Clicki, the referral software platform helping small businesses grow faster through the power of word of mouth. Before launching Clicki, Kendall transformed his family struggling lawn care company into a million dollar success and went on to found Lawnbot, which was later acquired. He's passionate about giving small businesses the same marketing firepower as the big guys while keeping growth dollars local. Kendall's track record of building and scaling companies combined with his vision for reshaping how businesses grow makes him the perfect guest for today's conversation. Now without further ado, Kendall, welcome to the show.

00:46 Kendall Hines

Hey, Dan, thanks for having me. Appreciate you having me on. Excited to be here.

00:52 Dan Leibrandt

100 % man, so I know your main thing is Clicki right now, but I want to dive a little bit more into your backstory. What were you doing before Clicki? And you we talked about it a little bit there, but just go more in depth of your background.

01:04 Kendall Hines

Yeah, I have a really interesting path to get here. Know, most people selling software in the home services space, they've never actually run a company before. Typically, there's lot of companies, you know, no shade, but they're like based out of Utah. And they got into it to build software. But I have a kind of an opposite story. I started in home service, grew my family's lawn care business. We owned a Lawn Doctor franchise at the time. And sold it to my brother. And as we were getting lots of growth out of that business, we had a problem. We'd come in Monday morning and there'd be hundreds and hundreds of leads because we were pushing growth so hard. And between all the phone calls and the leads, I was like, why didn't just some of these people sign up online? And at the time, this was six or seven years ago. At the time, there really wasn't a good solution for selling your lawn care services on your website. So we came up with a tool called Lawnbot, which is essentially like Shopify for lawn care companies. You know, can have an online store and do the measuring and the quoting and they can literally put their credit card in and sign up all on your website. So I started building that and then all my buddies started wanting to buy it. So I was like, wow, this is. You know, really interesting. And I've always been more marketing and sales focused. And we started growing that business really quick and became what it's now known as Lawnbot. Businesses started signing up and 19 months in, Real Green came along and said, hey, well, we are actually looking for an investment. But they were like, well, what if instead of investing, we buy you? And this was just before COVID. And I was like, okay, well, let's take a look at what that looks like. And I didn't realize how software companies are valued. Like I'm a lawn care guy. I grew up on the lawn, learning how to sell lawn care, door to door, telemarketing, running a sales team, trade shows, everything. Like I was like, wow, 10X revenue. That's really interesting.

03:08 Kendall Hines

At the time, we were at like $50,000 a month in MRR, so it was like life-changing for me and my co-founder, and we ended up selling to Real Green, which six months later, WorkWave came in and bought Real Green. So now, we were like at this little startup, six people when we were acquired, and six months later, we're working at WorkWave, 1,300 employees, and we worked at WorkWave for... Two and a half, three years through the earnout. So I got to work with some of the biggest brands in pest control and see how these large software companies work from the inside. Like, it's very fascinating. I've like, just the last 10 years have just been super interesting and I never thought I'd be in software and... You know, back in the day, 70 years ago, I thought I'd owned the biggest lawn care company in Michigan. Like that was my goal. That was the target. And then God had different plans and here we are today. So that's kind of my background. I started in the industry and was just always a tinkerer and fell into software somehow. And we've just kept doubling down and compounding all those learnings along the way.

04:26 Dan Leibrandt

Interesting. Okay. Yeah, that's awesome. No, so your dad ran a company. Then you found out that you guys needed a tool, which I always love when the product comes from a problem that you're dealing with your company. And then you start giving it to your friends. Became a, basically sounds like a massive success. I want to ask you then, what did you learn?

04:49 Dan Leibrandt

Being at WorkWave and working with a lot of these massive companies. Like what were they doing different? What did you learn from them?

04:57 Kendall Hines

Yeah, I mean, a lot. So I've been an entrepreneur essentially my whole career. Like I've never answered to anybody and now I'm answering directly to CEO, but still like I get looped into meetings and just seeing how many meetings it takes to accomplish anything was just for me, it was a little painful because when you're when you're a startup. You see a problem and you take action and you solve the problem. You don't need to go check with finance and all this stuff, like just solve the problem. So that's one big learning and takeaway was like just learning how corporate organizations work. And it's not just WorkWave, it's any large, even a pest control business, we'll use the biggest example, like Rentokil. Like they,...

05:07 Dan Leibrandt

Mmm.

05:40 Kendall Hines

Tons of meetings, like processes, there's time, like how they evaluate these softwares, the stakeholders, like if they do do it, like making sure there's buy-in from all the correct departments, I think those were all really interesting learnings. And then also just understanding how they think about product, like what they focus on internally versus what they wanna build versus maybe what they wanna partner with versus maybe what they would just rather buy because... This is a space they would never get into. So I thought that was really interesting. Yeah, it was weird having a boss for a little bit. Was, if you're going have a boss, better be the better. If you're going to have a boss, it needs to be in the C-suite if you're an entrepreneur, because that's, it's tough otherwise when you're used to so much freedom and flexibility. So.

06:30 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, I'm that same way. Really the closest I've had to a job is doing DoorDash when I was in high school. But other than that, I've never really experienced having a boss. I'm sure that had to be kind of, felt kind of weird. So then.

06:43 Kendall Hines

Yeah, but I learned a lot from them. The person that I reported to is running a company that's doing half a billion dollars in revenue. You learn a lot about, like, we would talk through problems that we were experiencing in just our direct function of the business and how they think about it and how a corporate organization would attack that problem. And the biggest thing is the network that I took with me once I left. I still talk to all those people today that I worked with at WorkWave. Like all the people that, and now they're at new companies, they need referrals too, right? So it's like, you just keep compounding the learnings and your relationships. And it's kind of fascinating, cause that was a by-product that I didn't really, even when I was there, I was like, oh, I'm never going to see this person again after I leave. And boom, sure enough, like life is long, relationships are long. And it's interesting to see how these... The chess pieces kind of move on the board. Yeah.

07:43 Dan Leibrandt

Definitely, okay, so it wasn't all bad. But then, now your main thing is Clicki. How did that get started?

07:51 Kendall Hines

Yeah, so Clicki really came about, we were growing my wife's small business. I was helping her launch it, and we were paying Google $5,000 a month every month for advertising for Pay Per Click. Our costs were going up, and the results kept going down. This is something that I hear on almost every Clicki demo a month. I'm trying to diversify my lead flow. I'm spending too much on Google Ads. I'm spending more than I used to in getting less results. So one day I just looked at her, like, you have hundreds of happy customers. Like, why not just pay them instead of paying Google and Facebook? Like if we're going to give money to Big Tech and just ship it off blindly, shouldn't we at least have, at least try, it'd be worth it to try to see if we could just pay our customers instead. So literally the first version of Clicki was back in like 2023 and we gave all my wife's customers, it's a Lash and Brow studio. We gave them links and we'll said, we told them, just straight up. We're going to pay you for every, it was like bit.ly tracking links at the time. We'll give you a dollar for every person that clicks on the link. And like, I was like personally sending demos to people and people actually did it. Like the women actually shared their referral link. It created bookings for Masha Lash is the name of the business. And I was like, wow, this is interesting. So we kept pulling on that thread and pulling on that thread. And eventually we got to this spot of referrals. Well, that's great. They're clicking on the links, but we need like SMBs like Pest Badger needs a full stack solution. They need the referral link creation. It needs to be beautiful. It needs to be branded. The tracking into FieldRoutes and PestPac and GorillaDesk all needs to be there and be automated. And then also the payouts. It all needs to be a full stack solution for us to go to a company like Pest Badger or a Nice Pest Company and say, hey, we're your referral system for your brand.

09:41 Kendall Hines

Your customer referrals, partner referrals, and you can even run employee referrals all through our system. So it took us a while to get to that, but now that we're there, that's essentially what we have. It's like we become the referral system for these brands. Everything's beautiful, fully trackable into their CRM. And really, think at the heart of it is I want to live in a world where small businesses don't have to pay Google and Facebook to grow their businesses. If you look at the end, we could vibe out on this for a long time. This is like what you do. The cost per acquisition for customers continues to rise. Like I used to run all my own Facebook ads at Lawn Doctor and they were great. We were getting like 15 bucks a lead, 20 bucks a lead. But what we've been seeing is like the space, like the attention is basically overpriced now, or it's way more overpriced than it used to be at least. So let's say you're spending $200, 150 bucks a day to acquire a customer. And your average customer values four or $500, that's like a large percentage of the revenue you're bringing in for that deal to pay out for that customer acquisition. That means less money for bonuses for your technicians, less profits for the owner, less money to invest in other growth methods and opportunities. So we see it, like if you can fix your customer acquisition cost at 50 bucks, which is like what the average referral bonus is on Clicki. That's good for a lot of people, including the business owner, and those marketing dollars stay local in the community. They don't get shipped off to Big Tech. So that's the world we're trying to build and unlock is like, okay, how do we help small businesses grow more profitably? And we see referrals as a great way to do that and a great step one. But we have some other things down the pipeline that we think could be really interesting to add to that story around.

11:40 Kendall Hines

Referrals and local marketing for these businesses.

11:46 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, interesting. Okay, so it started with your wife's business and I can't believe that you're sending just like a $1 Venmo for everyone that clicked the link and even that was working.

11:54 Kendall Hines

Well, it would stack up, right? So like every Friday I would look up how many clicks they have and then send them 40 bucks or 50 bucks and like people were doing it, right? And Venmo actually canceled my personal profile because like I was sending so many Venmos to people. And yeah, so I currently don't have a Venmo, only Apple Cash and Cash App. But, you what's crazy about that story is like Clicki process is $50,000 a month right now in payouts to homeowners, affiliates, whoever is doing the promoting for the brands that work with us, which is just mind blowing to me. Like I remember when we were paying out $500 and it was just all me sending this out, sending out the money, right? So now it's, and I don't touch it at all. It's all automated completely, so.

12:49 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, yeah, no, that's awesome. And no, I'd love that concept, like regardless of the delivery mechanism, I love that concept of like, you know what, these big corporations make so much money. Why don't we, I mean, give more money to our customers to get us more customers? I mean, I would do that every day. Even if it was the same cost, I would be like, well, I'd rather give my customers money than Google money, right?

13:13 Kendall Hines

Yeah. Amen. That's like literally our tagline right now. It's like, don't pay Google, pay your customers instead. And it's not like I just magically came up with that. Like literally every demo I'm on, people bring it up to me and they're like, LSAs through the roof. I go on Reddit and I read the PPC threats and people are just constantly bitching nonstop about the cost. Like it used to be good, it used to be decent, but like, and we can riff on this is like,...

13:18 Dan Leibrandt

Haha...

13:42 Kendall Hines

The Yellow Pages used to be good too. Like the Yellow Pages at one point had a monopoly on all the attention. And now it's like Google has the monopoly. But I think with AI search coming in, it's going to get disrupted. And I think that explains our growth too. I mean, we have 300 businesses that use our software. Lots of brands feel that pain and they're looking for new ways to generate leads and opportunities in their business. And if you look at their referral program for these brands, at best, if they do have one, it's like a spreadsheet and like a form on their website and that's it. It's still on somebody's shoulders in the office to issue a credit somehow, keep track of who referred who, but ultimately what that leads to is pissed off customers because they refer somebody, the ball gets dropped inevitably, they call in the office, I never got my referral bonus, like this literally happened at my lawn care company when we were running our referral program. I referred five people to you, I never got shit, like what the hell? It was like sorry, like we dropped the ball, clearly. And do think they're ever gonna refer you again after that? Like probably, probably not. I think you add all of that up and the world is ready for Clicki. And that's why we've been growing the way we have. And today we have pest control, lawn care, home cleaning, beauty med spa, LASIK doctors, light construction like windows and doors. So that's really kind of our go-to-market core customer, but lots of pest control companies.

15:19 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, yeah, definitely. No, kind of like what you were saying, the ads are much more expensive and SEO is very volatile. Mean, with some of the recent updates and with these AI search engines, it might be really helping you or it might be kind of hurting you. And kind of like you're saying, you need to, and I agree with this as just a general approach and I don't recommend like just doing SEO or just doing Google ads. I think you do need to have kind of an omni-channel approach. You should be doing SEO, but you should also be using Clicki. And you should also probably be doing Facebook ads. And you should also maybe be doing paid directories and such. So it's not like, and I think you'd probably agree with us too, like don't just do Clicki either, but like kind of do many things.

16:06 Kendall Hines

No, it's like the best brands that do the best on Clicki is they have a super referable business. And that's a lot of things. It means I've seen your truck before. You have a lot of Google reviews. You actually take care of your customers. Like I... I think what's going back to like me actually running a company, Clicki is a tool in the tool chest, just like everything. Like if you look at a sales report, my brother just sent me his sales report. Clicki is the fifth highest customer generation source in his business. So it's like Google, Facebook, Clicki, and that's today. Now my goal as the founder of Clicki is how do we make that number one? Like that is like what I'm obsessed with. And so it's like, okay, well, how do you do that? You could continue making the product better. But there's this interesting concept that we have that I think is gonna be really, if we get the opportunity to build it, and that's this network concept that we have. Like in Grand Rapids, we have five companies, they're all on Clicki, they don't compete, but they all have deep customer bases. And they're kind of already, they're asking us for this today, it's like we wanna be able to cross promote each other in some really safe, connected, easy way. How could Pest Badger refer Masha Lash and vice versa? You might not think it's the same buyer, but it is because I've owned businesses in both spaces, beauty and lawn care. And literally the people that bought lawn care from me are buying lashes for my wife. So it's like the same buyer. It would be very valuable for Masha Lash to get in front of 3000 lawn care companies or pest control, whoever buys it, right? So that's the big vision for this is like looking for those opportunities where...

17:27 Dan Leibrandt

Really? Huh.

17:43 Kendall Hines

Hey, we're the fifth lead source right now, but how do we make it number one? Well, what else do we have to, like, what other levers are there for us to pull? And that's kind of probably what the next 24 months looks like for us from a roadmap perspective is like. The network only makes sense if you have enough nodes in the network. And today, we're at 300. So I think the network probably makes sense around 1,000 companies. And you can't all be super specific to Pest because then there's no cross-promotional opportunity. So it needs to be diverse as well. So that's something I think about a lot is how do we unlock those cross-promotional opportunities B2B locally. So that can be really interesting.

18:30 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I wanted to get clear, especially for people that haven't used Clicki or haven't even heard of it. Like, let's get a little bit more clear on how it works. What is the flow? So you send your customers a link and then, you know, you'll pay them $50. And also I've seen that, you know, sometimes the person that gets referred also gets $50. Like, what is kind of the standard flow, especially in pest control?

18:57 Kendall Hines

Really simple, know, like I'll just take like Nice Pest Company, for example. So we hook up, they use FieldRoutes. So we hook up Clicki to their FieldRoutes account, automated in emails and text messages go out at key times whenever would be the best time to ask for a referral. Every business and their customer experience is a little different. So we actually tailor those triggers to that company. From there, that text message in the text message example, their customers tap a magic link and they land in their referral portal. They don't need to log into anything. They can begin submitting referrals right that second. They can share their referral link to Facebook to generate referrals, or they can use a QR code if they happen to be face to face with somebody. From there, referrals are generated. We send those referrals back into the FieldRoutes account, generate an alert so that Nice Pest Company can follow up, and then Clicki's handling all the conversion, tracking, and the payouts. So we monitor his FieldRoutes account for if that referral becomes a successful referral. Now for Nice Pest Company, it's when that referral actually gets serviced. That's what releases the referral bonus back to the referrer. So we're doing all that monitoring, and then once a successful referral happens, we actually issue the payout to Sally Smith and let her know she just earned some money and click here to cash out which takes her right back to the referral portal. That's in essence of how it works. We want to completely automate it for the business so that this thing is just kind of working in the background on autopilot. They're growing their business, working with Dan, doing great SEO and everything else that you do for companies, getting them regular leads. They sell that customer, let's turn that one customer into 10. Let's amplify our current marketing that we're already doing. So that's effectively how it works is we hook up to their CRM and...

20:53 Kendall Hines

Referrals start getting generated and you know the business the only thing on the business is just letting people know about it or if they have an idea for like a custom campaign like Nice Pest Company does a really good job with us they started a realtor program they created a realtor referral program and they go out and find real estate agents to be referral partners for them and they add them to this specific Realtor campaign in Clicki. Now obviously that workflow is a little different than if it was a customer referral program. So they can actually manually add Realtors to this program. They can send a Realtor office a link and have them sign themselves up to be, we call them promoters, anybody that's promoting a brand or upload a CSV file if they happen to have one. Yeah, that's a little bit of how it actually works in practice.

21:44 Dan Leibrandt

Interesting. Okay. I actually didn't think much about it on the strategic partner end, which is something we heavily promote. You know, me, me, Jake and Jonas talk about it in our program. That's like a great way to get leads, not just maybe from your customers, but also from other business owners in the area. So cool. And also, and actually you guys, you guys do this. I know you have the company Bravo. I was going to say, I see. Getting referrals kind of adjacent to getting reviews. And I was gonna ask, is it usually an automated text or email or could you also just ask people in person?

22:20 Kendall Hines

You could, so like when the technicians are like face to face with the customer they could have them generate the referral right then and there. So there's a QR code that they could scan and quickly submit a referral for sure. So yeah, Bravo is pretty interesting. We built that based on customer feedback. They were using other vendors for their after service surveys. Basically think of it as employee incentives. You can incentivize your employees for anything. Google reviews, tips, bonuses, whatever. And companies were using Clicki and another vendor, and what happened was is there's multiple text messages now going out after a service has been completed. Well, that's a lot of pain for a customer. So they basically begged us to build this, and it makes a lot of sense to have a vertically integrated experience on both sides. So the way we really think about this is Clicki Referrals is your external incentive platform for anybody outside of your company. Customers, partners, realtors, whatever, affiliates. And then Bravo's that internal incentive platform, effectively. Anything that you want to incentivize your employees for. Upsells, tips, Google review bonuses. So that's been really exciting, actually, because... People that are using Bravo for those after service surveys, we've baked referrals into it as well. When a referral comes in through the after service survey, it dips right into Clicki, all the tracking's maintained, and it makes sense to have a deeply integrated product both ways. Like what you said, it's adjacent. It makes total sense. And we went with a separate brand so that we could, we actually have customers that run just Bravo alone. Uh. We wanted to keep it very separate in our customers' mind because the beneficiary of the money is two different personas of person. Like you would want something totally different for your technicians to use versus your customers. You don't want them using the same app. It's because you incentivize for different things. So it makes a lot of sense to separate it is what we've basically come to realize.

24:24 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, no, definitely. And that makes complete sense. And again, touching on that fact of like, well, let's power up our employees as much as possible, our local business owners in the area as much as possible and our customers as much as possible. Like those three tiers instead of the Googles, the Facebooks, the Yelps, I just love that. I wonder, no, no, go ahead.

24:47 Kendall Hines

Yeah, well, dude, my, go ahead. I was just gonna say my brother just sent me his spend report and he spent like 70,000 this year on Google ads, Facebook ads. And like, wow, that's like a lot of money. Could we, is there a world where we could spend that same money by giving it to our technicians maybe for more upsells or they're getting referrals in the field? Or we give that money to our customers. Is there a better use of this capital than just shipping it off to Silicon Valley and making Google a little bit richer? And to me, feel like that's worth, that's a noble effort to try to figure out if there's ways to do that. Can we spend that 70K better and be more effective with that money? That's our mission is trying to help small businesses grow faster, profitably.

25:45 Dan Leibrandt

Definitely. No, and like you said, as a small business owner, really as every business owner, but especially as a small business owner, it's all about ROI. So if you have only, you know, a few thousand dollars to spend on marketing every month, where does that money go? Like, do you just put all of that towards Google or like you said, can you have that customer acquisition costs? And this is why, you know, for me, it's almost heartbreaking in a way, but you know, I turned down a lot of the people that come to me because I'm like, look, you're not big enough to invest in SEO. Like this stuff isn't gonna work right away. Like honestly, you should do some of the quicker things like, you know, strategic partners and just getting free Google reviews and you know, like you're saying maybe something like Clicki. So related to that, what are you saying? You kind of already mentioned it, but just be clear, what are you seeing as the average customer acquisition cost for Clicki versus kind of the average?

26:41 Kendall Hines

Yeah, so it obviously heavily depends on that. This is a question we get on every demo is like, how much should I pay? Right. And I think it's really, it's a personal question because, you know, my buddy Rick at liquid lawn is paying tons of money to Google. His current CAC on Google Facebook is going to be different than Jonas's. Jonas's is going to be different than Nice. So everybody kind of starts out with a different number in mind. My mind is like, It also kind of ties back to whatever your service costs. So I have some customers that pay 200, I have some customers that pay 100 bucks, I have some customers that pay 50. It really is dependent upon the industry, your current customer acquisition cost. Like, if you don't spend money today on digital ads, you have no concept of how expensive they really are. You might think 25 bucks is a lot of money, but that's not going to move the needle in today's economy. 25 is like 15. And people don't get out of bed for 15 bucks anymore. So the minimum I would say is probably 20, 50 bucks is kind of the entry level to get people's attention, get them interested. And, um, and that's kind of what we see there, but I think what's cool is on our platform, you can turn up and turn down the referral bonus as you see fit. For example, Nice Pest Company around Labor Day, they did a Labor Day push. So they ramped up to a hundred bucks for Labor Day, did a big blast out to their customers, and then turned it back down after Labor Day to the traditional 50. So any referrals that came in during Labor Day were worth a hundred if they ended up signing up. So yeah, I would say that's a good range. 50 to 200 is kind of common. We have some customers doing a percentage payout.

28:27 Kendall Hines

So it's really just up to the business. Our job at Clicki is to find out how they run their business today and then work backwards and make the referral program fit how they want to run their referral program or how they might already do it. And we just build our system around how they already do it as the ideal flow. But that's kind of the standard, I would say, between 50 and 200.

28:55 Dan Leibrandt

Got it, got it. And also I kind of just wanted to ask you a general question, but where do you see things going in the next few years? Know, everyone's kind of feeling overwhelmed with all the AI stuff and you know, are robots gonna take over his techs or you know, is everything gonna change with our workflow online? Just give me kind of your general thoughts so you can take it wherever you want.

29:19 Kendall Hines

Yeah, I obviously think a lot about this just because I'm always trying to think about innovation and how can we do it better and like, how can we delete things from the process? I think a lot about like the best CRM is like one you don't have to use, but all these CRMs are building these. So basically if you think about every CRM that's been built today, it's built around humans using it. It's not built around AI agents doing it. And then you're dealing with things around like deterministic data, like I don't want the AI agent to like guess how much an invoice is going to be. It needs to be $96.54 every time. So that's the deterministic data. Not the creative stuff that some of the AIs is pretty good with and like processing large swaths of it. So I just think about the world that I had. Want to live in. In the world that I want to live in is a world where my data is free, I can take it wherever I want to go, any platform can talk to any platform. I don't have to pay some outrageous API fee to unlock my data, which a lot of these vertical CRMs do. They hold all the power and the leverage over the customer and vendors, by the way, because they charge a rev share for API integrations from a company like Clicki into a large CRM. And I'm like, for what? Like, I know how much API calls cost. Have a software, like, so they're, get the benefit of being early to the space and building a big business and they get to charge for that. And it's like, you look at these big companies and there's lots of inefficiencies, lots of untalented people that work there. There's lots of talented people, but lots of untalented people that don't provide value for customers. And a really specific example of that is if I have a, if I have feedback from a customer about a product.

31:07 Kendall Hines

The current flow is I submit that to my account manager, my account manager takes it back to the product manager, the product manager takes it to a designer, the designer takes it to somebody else before it even hits a software engineer. He actually writes the code, that's the source of truth. So it's like you have all these layers between the customer and the people actually can fix the problem. We've had a glimpse into this with Clicki and Bravo, is we take feedback from our customers like Bravo. They're like, hey, we want to do this. We go in, we use AI tools like Cursor and some other ones. And literally, we'll have a feature ship the next day. That's how quick these dev cycles are with using AI. So we're completing this loop. So I want to live in a world where every home service business can talk to their CRM, and it gets better, and it's built for them. So like, hey, CRM, your route sucked last time. All your stops for it, and it goes to work, it goes off, comes back the next day, like, hey, Johnny, I fixed your problems, here's my changes, like, try doing another route and see if it's better. So literally, that would be like a pretty awesome world to live in, you know, imagine every company having their own version of FieldRoutes that's just got better over time, completely tailored for them, would seem like really ambitious thing to go after, and... Like if it worked, it could be like you could win the whole thing because I just, I feel like I don't know how long SaaS will be around in its current form. To just distill all that down to its true essence is like, how long will vertical SaaS be around?

32:34 Dan Leibrandt

Mmm.

32:48 Dan Leibrandt

Explain that more and what do you mean by vertical SaaS?

32:51 Kendall Hines

So like FieldRoutes or ServiceTitan, PestPac, Housecall Pro, you name it. Like a lot of vertical as in like a vertical being pest control or lawn care or HVAC, yeah,...

33:00 Dan Leibrandt

Like SaaS within a niche, what do you mean by vertical? Yeah, yeah, okay, okay.

33:08 Kendall Hines

Vertical SaaS. So. These AI software coding agents today are really good and I can take pictures of FieldRoutes. I can export their CSV files to get all the database headers and I can give them to an AI coding agent and be in a really good starting place for me to recreate FieldRoutes myself. All the UI is the same. We have the database header, so now that the AI coding agents know database schema, it's just a matter of time until there's a Chrome extension that can watch every movement that you do in your software to record all of the business logic that you and your team do every day. That's all it is, it's business logic, it's keyboard inputs, it's mouse movements that are recorded. Feed that into an AI and have it create your own version of FieldRoutes that you own forever and it gets better over time. Like, that would be insane. And it totally seems possible. I don't know if you just saw the new Sora like release. I just got early access to it. It's wild and like that's where we're at today. So imagine five years from now. Do you think I just think customer like eventually if that if that world existed we're like somebody came to you and said well we have an AI for CRM. It gets better. It's completely tailored for you and we're half the cost of what you currently pay.

34:31 Kendall Hines

Like you're going to take a look at it. So I just, and you see all the bigger companies are cutting headcount because they're getting more efficient with AI. So they're trying to get leaner. They're implementing these AI tools. Ultimately, it's good for all the people actually doing the real work. And that's the people that own these businesses. It's the lawn care companies. It's the pest control brands. They're providing real goods and services of tangible value, making customers happy. So, because they're going to get less expensive products, which is good for everybody. So, that's kind of what I mean. It's just like... These companies that are big today are big because they were insulated because technology used to be hard, but now it's the easy part. And it's not some magic black box anymore. All these CRMs are just business logic and workflows. And if you can record those and recreate them and duplicate them, then you could see a world where potentially that gets disrupted. So I'm like riffing on that idea pretty hard right now. People think I'm crazy when I say that. Because if you look at these CRM companies that all IPO'd, that would be pretty disruptive if what I just said happens.

35:51 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, no dude, I'm totally...

35:51 Kendall Hines

But that's one thing, yeah.

35:53 Dan Leibrandt

There with you. I'll give you my thoughts there and see what you think. So number one, I totally agree. The word I like to use is I feel like everything's become democratized. So, you know, with copywriting, with generating branding, even starting to do things more complex like building websites and like you're saying coding. I think the right word is democratized because now it's available to everyone versus, you know, and I mentioned copywriting because that's kind of how I got my start of my career. When you needed copy done, you know, when you needed a sales letter or you needed to have some posts done or, you know, a website copy, whatever it was. I mean, you hop, you hire a copywriter. Usually you don't do it yourself unless you're super bare bones. You're somewhat of a good marketer. And when I started out chat, ChatGPT wasn't a thing, but eventually it came out. And I thought I was screwed because now all these people can just use ChatGPT. But kind of what I realized is that although everyone can use it just like now making logos and such, and like you're saying, even coding, I still think that experts are better than the AI, at least for now. Like when I have ChatGPT generate me copy, I'm like, I feel like I could do that a little bit better. And, you know, same thing with one of my friends who's a really good designer. I can generate a logo on ChatGPT and it's pretty good. And I can continue to go through iterations, but he can still make me a better one. I think like the first point is that there's definitely a need for experts. And then also in terms of competition, I think the main thing that separates you from people is trust. Think actually stuff like we're doing here of podcasting and building trust with an audience. And I'd say even having companies tied to a face.

37:49 Dan Leibrandt

So that people can establish some kind of relationship. I think that's kind of where things are going. I think it's all gonna be about trust because everyone can create these same products like you saw.

37:59 Kendall Hines

Yeah, 100%. And I'll add to what you said on experts. Think experts have taste. So that world that I painted where like an AI, like you're still gonna need somebody with some taste to know what's good and not good, right? Like with the AI coding agent that we used for Bravo. It's all my taste in the product and knowledge of the business workflows that made it what it is. The tech, technically anything's possible, but like. You have to have somebody with some taste and vision and kind of know today, you need, you need all of those things to bake the perfect cake. You can't just have all this compute power. You have to know what to do with it. And that takes years of compounding and learning. That's 10 years of being in software or like you back in the early days when you were like literally grinding out the copy, chiseling it with your fingers and creativity. And now you have this like Godlike tool to make you like 10X better. Like I think that's where.

39:06 Kendall Hines

The people with some talent and taste like are just gonna win and clean up shops. So good for us and many others.

39:13 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, yeah, no, when you're an expert and have built a brand around yourself, I think for the most part, you're gonna be okay. And also, for some reason that this is coming to mind, but I'm thinking of Mad Men. I don't know if you've ever watched that show, but I really liked it. And I think you almost have to be the Don Draper of your AI bots. Know how Don Draper leveled up in the company and now he's got all of these marketers and copywriters below him. So even though they're working on all the work, just like how, you know, we might have people working below us or they might even be AI assisted in using AI, you know, at some point, they'll probably just be AI agents below us, but we can be the Don Draper of our AI agents. And like what you're saying, they can do all the work, but we make sure that we implement our tastes and we kind of verify what they're doing. So it seems like now really we're not workers, even though we shouldn't be anyways. But we're really stepping into a manager role and not just managers of employees, but managers of AI agents, right?

40:20 Kendall Hines

100 % and that's today. You know, the thing that gets me is like that's today just imagine five years from now when they figure out compute and the electricity problem for all this and the models keep getting better, so It's gonna be a fun fun decade. That's for sure...

40:25 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, I know.

40:40 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, so what, tell me more like what you're maybe worried about. What could go wrong in the future? Is there anything you're pessimistic about?

40:52 Kendall Hines

Pessimistic. Mean, the Sora revelation last night was pretty eye-opening to me. Was like, wow, you could have an avatar of your dad and they're going to die one day, but you could always carry him with you. My wife was like, that's fucked up. Why would you want to do that? And I was just like, in theory, you could turn your loved one into an AI avatar that is always there for you. And they look like a real person. They can talk to you just as they used to. And it's like... Like what is that doing to society? There's lots of levels beyond that where you could take that of having your own, literally it looks like a human, it looks so real. That's today.

41:33 Dan Leibrandt

Robot, yeah.

41:34 Kendall Hines

Imagine five years from now. So I think about that a little bit. Obviously a little bit worried about, you know, like with what we do. A lot of the magic is in the taste, the workflows, and the integration into the software. So I think we have probably, I think about that often too, like could people just build their own referral program using an AI coding agent? They totally could. They're still gonna have to solve payouts, they're still gonna have to solve CRM integration. And then there's some taste things that we do around the Open Graph data. Like the referral link for Pest Badger, they're able to customize the Open Graph data so when that link is shared to Facebook, it's a billboard on the profile. Like not. That takes some taste, takes some technical know-how to do, and then to do it at scale. So I think about that a little bit. Yeah, I'm always like you as a startup founder, you're always thinking about like how what could kill me? Like what's my biggest risk? And right now it's not like, I don't know, things are going pretty well. So it feels like that's far away. Because the buyers that are coming today, they're not technical people. We do it. We in fact, we had to do a white glove setup model now because companies just want it done for them. They want to sign up.

42:44 Dan Leibrandt

Haha, yeah.

43:07 Kendall Hines

Have our team install it, we'll build the landing pages, we'll do everything connected to the website, and they'll pay for it. They pay a thousand bucks for White Glove Setup. We do all the setup connections, the software, everything for them, and deliver it on a golden platter, turn it on, and go live. So, I think until the business ownership changes, and maybe the buyer becomes a little more technical, at least for our unique niche we're going after, which is like home service, I think we're good. For now but that worries me a bit I mean the fact that I built Bravo in two months with AI like It would have costed hundreds of thousands of dollars prior. It would have costed time, attention, focus. So, I think about that a lot. I think about our competitors releasing features that we have, which is why we built Bravo, because they added referrals to theirs. So, naturally, we had to beat them to the punch. And I think you're going to see a lot more of that. I think you're going to see the, like what you said, the only thing that matters is your relationship with the customer. Do they trust you? And then the next question is, many widgets are they buying from you? And I think everybody's looking to do that now, because they realize everybody's going to be building everybody else's stuff. The technical part is not the hard part anymore. It's the relationship with the customer. Do they trust you? Do you have good taste? Can you deliver? So, yeah, that's a really interesting space to be in.

44:49 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, I agree with you on all that stuff. I'm really deep on all the tech stuff as well. You know, with robots potentially coming and they might look like humans and even the source stuff that literally just dropped like you said. And also, I mean, being able to build the tool so quickly, it's all crazy. Just something I'd like to mention there is like you said, we have to focus on doing things that the AI can't do, right? So thinking even just a few years into the future, what are the things that AI can't do? Like you said, it's building those relationships. It's building that trust, doing the sales calls, doing the real content. Ideally building it up right now because as it continues to become more more prominent, now it's something like content. It will be like, well, are you making the content or is the AI making the content? Versus if you've already been like you've been on a lot of podcasts. So people know it's actually you. But if you just started going on podcasts next month, like, well, is this real? Don't... Because we're kind of, starting to approach that.

45:52 Kendall Hines

Yeah. Well, on Sora, you can create your own avatar. We'll use you in the Sora videos for people who haven't heard about it yet. And you can do collapse. So Dan can send me, he can allow his likeness. To be used in other people's meme videos is basically what it is right now. And I could do a collab video. Could put Kendall in it. I could put Dan. I could put Jonas's collab and do like, hey, do a video of us like cheering champagne glasses as like, and it looks fricking real. Like it looks really good compared to even where we were at three years ago. It's, I don't think anybody kind of knows where this is going to end up, but. I'm here for it. And the good thing about being a startup is we can pivot fast. Like wherever this takes us. Definitely don't want to get into the AI phone agent space that's like just heavily crowded at the moment. And we'll let them duke it out for a while. Let's see who the big winners are going to be. But yeah, that's a...

46:53 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah. No, it seems like you guys are really crushing it in this space. I believe in your company. Jonas believes in your company. You guys are doing a really great job. And like we said, like we agreed on, this is actually something that, you know, it's giving back to the community. It's giving back to good people, not big corporations. So awesome. I wanted to end out the podcast kind of on a positive note, because I know we took a little bit of a deep turn there of like, know, where could all the AI stuff go? Typically what I like to ask my guests at the end of each show is, what is your message for the pest control owners out there? What do you wanna tell them? What's on your heart? What's on your mind? What do you wanna say?

47:35 Kendall Hines

Yeah, like everybody that starts a business and I know this because like I ran one myself is like you are the fabric of America. Like the fact that you can go out and create this company for you and your family and build generational wealth. If you get to a million bucks in revenue, you can probably sell for like 1.5, 2 million, depending upon how the multiples are going. Like that matters and we want to help those people win in any way that we can and what that means is more healthier small businesses, they're more profitable. We want to help the heartbeat of America, which we believe is small businesses. Like if they go away, like if Nice Pest and Pest Badger are all their, if they went away and we're just left with these like global conglomerates where, you know, they're owned by Wall Street. Like I don't want to live in that world. I think it's pretty cool that I know Jonas personally and I see his Pest Badger truck in my neighborhood. And they like provide us a service, by the way, that makes homes safer, keeps ticks away from children, keeps them not getting bit by mosquitoes. Like that matters and it's real and it's probably the least disruptible thing by AI that anybody could be doing. Like thank you for what you do.

48:44 Dan Leibrandt

Dang.

49:07 Kendall Hines

Small business owners, like what you do matters. Like if you go away, I don't want to live in that world where small entrepreneurship and small businesses go away. And I think what's really interesting about this community is people are willing to give back, be completely open with information. There's no secrets and... Like wealth isn't a zero sum game. Like just because somebody else builds a $3 million pest business doesn't mean that it takes anything away from you from building one as well. Think there's endless amounts of opportunity for everyone. I mean, we have competitors, they're in the same market. They all use Clicki and they're all growing their businesses. Like let's all win together and, you know, super proud of what all of the owners. And the companies do. It really does matter and people don't realize the pain that it takes to actually run a small business. How much they deal with every day. Technician calls in sick or three people walk out or a technician gets stuck in the lawn and you have to go pull them out but you already have 12 other promises you made that day and now you're dropping promises here and then trying to get out of that messy middle and getting to that phase where... You have enough revenue and enough key people in place where you're not getting hit by those daily problems. Like, it's hard. And the people that make it, they don't quit and they keep going. And I'm glad for the people that keep going because it matters that they're successful. So that's on my heart and mind. I think about that a lot.

50:43 Dan Leibrandt

Ayyye...

50:44 Kendall Hines

And yeah. I just know how hard it is to be successful in this industry and a lot of people make it look easy and it's so easy but it's supposed to be hard. There's a reason why there's not a lot of rich people on this planet. It's the abnormal thing. But the ones that make it are like the best. A big company down in Texas owner met me at a trade show. Paying us a bunch of money for Clicki and Bravo, super thankful that we exist. This guy's worth probably 20, 30 million bucks. Pest Control Company, right? Like that's cool. And he's like thanking me for building a product for him to use. Like that is, I'm like, no, it's reverse. Like thank you for building a successful business to create the value to even pay me any money to build anything in the first place. Like I think that's one thing where. We can get things lost in translation a little bit with tech and then like the, especially if you sell the home services. Like the people providing all the value in this chain are the people actually doing the work on the properties, taking care of homeowners. If those companies go away, ServiceTitan goes away. Those companies go away, FieldRoutes goes away. So we've got to make those people successful. They're the only thing that matter. So.

52:12 Dan Leibrandt

Amen, man. I love that. That was awesome.

52:13 Kendall Hines

That's my TED talk.

52:16 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, no, that was great. No, and I completely agree, Like when you said, like small local businesses are the fabric of America. Dude, my dad owns a flooring company. My mom owns a therapy business, both small. You know, that's why I'm so passionate about this industry. And I know you come from the local business background too. So we're just, you know, it seems like we're both really passionate about this space. Yeah, man, thank you so much for coming on the show. That was awesome. So.

52:45 Kendall Hines

Absolutely. Well, thanks for having me.

52:47 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, yeah, of course, man. So where can people find you on social media and connect with you?

52:52 Kendall Hines

Yeah, Clicki Referrals, all locations. So Facebook, Insta, YouTube, Clicki Referrals, and then websites joinclicki.com. Joinclicki.com.

53:04 Dan Leibrandt

Awesome. And what about you? If people wanna follow you on LinkedIn or whatever.

53:08 Kendall Hines

I believe it's K. Hines or Kendall Hines on LinkedIn and then yeah, Facebook, Instagram, same thing, Kendall Hines.

53:19 Dan Leibrandt

Cool, awesome. All those links will be in the description if you guys want to go check those out and anything else you'd like to plug or promote, Kendall.

53:27 Kendall Hines

No, that's it. That's it. If you're spending too much on advertising, you want to lower your customer acquisition costs, check us out.

53:38 Dan Leibrandt

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Kendall. This has been a blast. It's been really good getting to know you. Also, you seem like a very smart guy and I'm glad we could kind of geek out on the tech stuff. And yeah, hope to have you on the show again sometime.

53:50 Kendall Hines

All right, sounds good.

53:52 Dan Leibrandt

Cool. And will you be at PestWorld?

53:54 Kendall Hines

Yeah, we're gonna be there. We're at the Pest House.

53:56 Dan Leibrandt

Okay, cool. Yeah, okay, awesome. So I'll be there. So I'll see you in a few weeks. Awesome. See you, man. All right, cool.

54:00 Kendall Hines

Nice, all right, sounds good. All right, see ya.