AI Made Human Connection More Valuable, Not Less

00:15 Warren Kucker: Hey there and welcome to another episode of Selling AI. Today I'm speaking with Zach Jones, co-founder and CEO of Waffle. Waffle builds what they call an agentic operating system for non-technical businesses. The idea is that most AI tools actually just make you faster at doing the same work we always did. Zach thinks there's a different approach. This is the wrong frame. He wants to make AI the operator, not the assistant. What makes this conversation interesting is that Zach's running an automation company, but he's running a founder-led sales motion. He cold calls people's themselves, he manages the process from end to end. And so a really good juxtaposition there that we're gonna dive into. He thinks that the AI era has actually made human connection more valuable, not less. And so today we're gonna dig into all of that. How he built a sales approach from the ground up, what it actually takes to sell AI to buyers who have heard a bunch of AI pitches recently, and what he's figured out about the line between automating your business and staying close to your customer. So let's get into it. Zachary, thanks so much for being on the show today. Looking forward to talking about waffle.

01:16 Zach Jones: Yeah, Warren, thanks for having me. Great to be here.

01:18 Warren Kucker: Great, great. Well, listen, just give me a little bit of your background. Obviously, army cyber command officer for a decade and to building an AI company. We'd love to hear about that arc and what got you to building Waffle.

01:29 Zach Jones: Yeah, so I always wanted to be in the army. I was like 10 years old and I came across my grandpa's like Vietnam stuff and that was immediately when I was like, yeah, this is definitely something that I want. do with my life. Somewhere along the way, I went from being interested in being like special forces to caring more about engaging with people and building things. Well, the perfect confluence of those things is the cyber world in the army. It wasn't always available. So I spent a lot of time in other special operations capacities before the cyber core actually was built, which is good. But finally got to do and be around the things I cared about in the army. when cyber became available. As far as deciding to build a company, one of the things I noticed being in the cyber world, even during the AI age, is how many people and the service members on the cyber quarters, they're not savvy on AI. So I think like many experts in different fields, you get so dialed into this one way of doing things that it's almost too scary, especially a big institution. to move on. And so I found myself once AI became available for the military, building agentic workflows, stuff like that, and then showing these other cyber officers how to do this. And it was when I was doing that that it occurred to me, like I'm really still just using AI to be faster at a manual. task, right? Even with these agentic workflows, I'm still in a loop doing uncreative things that are wasting my time. Around the time I started percolating on that, I went to grad school. And when I went to to grad school, I got, as we were talking before, we started this conversation of kind of a side gig at sales for an education business. While I was doing that, started leveraging AI to help with my outbound, but I mostly was just doing exactly what I just lamented my peers were doing, where I would hop on to, or like in our case, we were using ZoomInfo, and then I rolled over to Instantly later on when that became available, it still was just telling it what to do. So yeah, it was running my outbound, but I was still needing to lay out my sequencing to to like the sub-sequence categories and that, I'm still thinking through all that. And it made me realize that most people are doing that. And so what got me into what I'm doing now is I'm from a redneck town where people are suspicious about AI. It's all boomer businesses, mom, paw businesses. So I'm close to that world. And I realized there's gotta be a way to do AI. in a way that actually helps them in a way that they see and notice, right? Because they don't want to have AI just type me an email, copy, paste, send it, which is what a lot of people do, right? That level one AI savviness. They would be a lot more approachable and amenable to it if this was like, hey, this is your operator for your legacy tools. You don't even have to switch tools, right? So that you can spend more time doing the thing that actually matters to you. So start toying with that idea. The long and short where Waffle came from is wanting to help

04:53 Warren Kucker: Thank

04:54 Zach Jones: non-tech businesses and wanting to help nonprofits even as well use AI

04:59 Warren Kucker: you

04:59 Zach Jones: in way that actually makes sense instead of adding just another tool to their repository as an assistant. Give them

05:06 Warren Kucker: Nice.

05:07 Zach Jones: their time back so they can focus on what matters. Most of these guys are purpose driven. I can't actually do any government projects right now. So I haven't been able to offer my services there beyond just day to day because I still have government military affiliation. But I'm looking forward to when that opportunity comes up because there's a job to be done there as well.

05:26 Warren Kucker: Yeah, no, that's awesome. Yeah, so on the non-technical business aspect, I've had this conversation a lot. Obviously, AI is some technology that's moving quickly. It seems like it's inundated our lives really quick. But then when you really take a step back, most of the real world doesn't operate this way, in a good way, right? So I talk about, great, it's going to eat jobs and move really fast. Most businesses are still trying to figure out SEO, which is a 15-,

05:53 Zach Jones: Correct.

05:53 Warren Kucker: 20-year-old problem. Most businesses are, say like half the businesses that could be on like a cloud-based application to run their business are still using a server in their office, right? So like we're still dealing with the cloud transition. To think that we're gonna switch over to this immediate AI world in a way that's insanely disruptive, which is least mildly disruptive, is a little bit foolish because that's not how most people operate, right? These things move slow and they move slow for a reason and in a good way. So I'd to hear in particular, how do you think people make that transition from just using AI to just like automate something that they normally would do, complete a manual task, save themselves five minutes a day, to actually being, let's say, more AI forward.

06:42 Zach Jones: Yeah, I think that that's a good question. First of all, the point you made, right? Because I think that's part of it is that the reality in the tech space, it feels like AI is just everything, right? And that's where we reside. But for these non-tech businesses, they might not even know how to pronounce a chat GPT, right? They're like, what even is this, right?

07:00 Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah.

07:02 Zach Jones: So I think there's a few things there. Number one is, at least with the people I deal with primarily, they are very resistant to things that feel like new tools, right? Or some of them have been using the same pair of scissors for the last 30 years, right? They're not going forward at all. And so part of it is making it not feel like another tool you now have to add to your arsenal, which is an important philosophy for waffle, I think. Number two, which is something that you kind of put to in your intro, spoke to in your intro is that, you know, I believe that AI is going to make human connection more valuable. not less and nobody will tell you more than a small business owner how important human relationships are right because every customer is an important human relationship to them they're very engaged to that and so they the other aspect of it but not always look good off to the board, right, early on right now, but in a few years, what is especially gonna be important as people become increasingly resistant to job disruption is having a philosophy where human connection is really important. And so I think for my audience, right, which is again, non-technical businesses, non-profits, that small of cap space, number one, I'm saying this isn't a tool. Think of this as your AI employee that integrates to your existing. tools instead, right, communicates across them in a way that is low-touch and frictionless, right, but we don't want them to feel like they have to go and sit down at their computer and open up another tab and that's how they manage this. But number two, also saying we're not replacing you, we're making you more valuable because now what you offer, right, as a core business is not administrative tasks. What you offer as a core business is not lead gen, right, what you offer as a core business is that you're like the best local mechanic in town or whatever right or like you have the best slice of pizza in the city or whatever it is. It's like give we're giving you time to be you and make the meaningful connection with what is most important to you. And I think that it's a philosophy shift because there's a right now AIC is not just a tool but a disruptor and if we can change that view to being an amplifier instead I think that's a big deal. I was just listening to an interview with a that talked about changing from having your like back-end lady who would connect your call to long-distance calls and all of sudden now you have a toll-free number, right?

09:40 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

09:40 Zach Jones: And they were up-skilled and had other opportunities, right? There's a fear at the point of transition that this is going to replace the human. And I think if we lean into it, which a lot of big companies do, we're more likely to lose out in the long term. Whereas in my space, if I lean into this other worldview that says you're valuable and this AI tool is going to make you and your humanity more valuable, is how you win that mid to long term, especially as more more boomers are retiring and teaching kind of an old school way to their business acquirers who small business owners tend to be in that space. So that's my space. It may be different. for another category, but where I inhabit,

10:22 Warren Kucker: No.

10:22 Zach Jones: that's what makes sense to me.

10:24 Warren Kucker: No, so obviously, mean, the history of, let's say, technological advancement has been worry about replacing jobs and then turns out it creates jobs and there's winners and losers in that you have to be careful to find the way to help people that have those jobs replaced find something new that's valuable and fulfilling, right? There's a scenario where that's and you hear this a lot, this is the back and forth that's happening now is that, well, AI is going to replace a lot of jobs and there's fear, right? Well, we've been here before, but in the same token, one of these times it might be true, right? So like we should be cautious and we should be mindful. And if it's fast enough and replacing, there's a chance the majority of the computer-based work we've been doing over the past 30 years goes away. Well, we've reoriented our entire economy around that. So like, how do you manage that appropriately, right? But on the flip,

11:13 Zach Jones: Right.

11:15 Warren Kucker: right, in a positive kind of light, I have a similar conversation all the time is that It's funny what's happening with AI is like what's old is new again, right? So like you can absolutely elevate the human relationship. So I'll be a little bit extreme here, but you can imagine that let's say your local dry cleaner, you have 700 customers in the area. You can have a more personalized relationship with those customers, right? What you shouldn't have to spend your time on is how do I get my... my business ranking on SEO and gaming, Google

11:47 Zach Jones: Right.

11:48 Warren Kucker: search engine optimization problems so that you're the number three dry cleaner in your area. That's

11:54 Zach Jones: Okay.

11:54 Warren Kucker: not a valuable human problem to solve, right? So like it's important for a business for awareness and to get someone to walk into your shop. But if something else solves that for you and really it's just like, great, here are the seven dry cleaners in the area and like you can elevate the experience so anytime someone walks in there, you have a personalized relationship with them that's. different than what we've had in the past, that drives value, right? And then people come into your dry cleaning

12:17 Zach Jones: Agreed.

12:18 Warren Kucker: shop, right? What could that look like? It could be like, listen, you have a mini recording of every conversation you're having, which is kind of creepy, we'll put that away. But you're trying to remember 700 people's kids names, right? So well, that's not gonna happen. Can you elevate that conversation? Hey, it sounds like Susie had a ball game like last week. How did that go? I'm going to that dry cleaner as well as an outlet, torching my clothes more so than I would any other dry cleaner, right? There's an aspect in every area where actually the human relationship should be elevated in this space.

12:46 Zach Jones: Yeah, 100%. Um, and we, there's so many directions to take with these small businesses that have physical products and services. Um, but I think like that also points to the reality that they will, think ultimately be, uh, winners, uh, in this category, this, um, transition because

13:00 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

13:00 Zach Jones: the economy will transition more towards, um, those who offer physical goods and services, um, as opposed to those with, um, software based skills is hardware and physical products, always moving a slower pace than the software. And we just see that. an exponential reality right now. But yeah, 100 % I'm with you there on those connections.

13:19 Warren Kucker: more, couldn't agree more. I'd say like we were looking at like dental, right? So like, why should you replace a dentist with a robot? Really the financial intensive is not there, right? So like, it just like the dentist is not that expensive compared to what a robot who might make a mistake is, right? So like,

13:34 Zach Jones: Alright.

13:35 Warren Kucker: so like that physical space is going to get back to swinging into the right direction. So then how you elevate that, it's an interesting approach for waffle. So you've mentioned you've using agentic AI for like 90 % of everything you're doing. waffle here. Let's start with the reverse. What's the 10 % that you haven't been able to leverage it for?

13:53 Zach Jones: Right, well I don't even know if it's quite the 10%. Maybe it is. I would say high ticket clients still want to talk to a human being. Most so the good thing is it's not a huge time suck But like we have multiple clients who are spending, fifty thousand dollars or more on a solution who like you know what they don't want to do is like talk to a A voice agent over the phone. They want to see me like the way we're doing right now and they want to talk You know, they want to be to ask those questions freely because they have the same kind of people who they get a voice agent and they just keep saying speak to a Representative until they finally get pushed over right?

14:31 Warren Kucker: Right, right.

14:32 Zach Jones: so that's a 10 that's part of the 10 percent I'd say the high ticket clients, they're spending a lot of money, they tend to be a little bit older to be able to afford bigger projects. They want that. And I also do outbound calls. I will do that for a portion of my day. And that's something that's not automated in our experience. So that's a decision. There are ways to make that more automated out there. But for us, that's part of the 10 % is a set amount of time where I make outbound calls.

15:06 Warren Kucker: No, I totally agree. human-human relationship, there may be a time where people are talking to an AI, but I actually think when I up happening as AI, we'll talk to AI to eliminate the transactional part of the conversation. So you think about, let's say, discovery as part of a sales process. I'm trying to figure out whether you have problems I can solve for, you're trying to figure out if I can solve your problems. Well, we can cut the crap. unlike some of that, right? But like beyond that though, after it is determined that it's worthy of continuing the conversation, which is really what that discovery call is, great. Like how do you, now I need the human, right? Like, and maybe that's a little foolish right now, but I think most people are gonna want that relationship, right? Because it's, you're not gonna

15:48 Zach Jones: Right.

15:48 Warren Kucker: have a relationship with an AI your entire journey with someone, nor would you want to. So I think that's good elevation there. Are you finding something similar there in your sales process? Are you finding what areas are automatable and what aren't?

16:01 Zach Jones: Yeah, so I definitely think... because of my space with there being lot of non-technical businesses, that I do see a world where a lot of that pre-discovery is done like agent to agent. I see that being a huge opportunity. But I also know that at least for now, a lot of the people that I'm working with, I may do an intro call. That's not, like so I might actually, though we think that this is a warm and qualified lead, I may take the 15 minute phone call and just say, hey, this looks like it could be a good thing, before they're even at Discovery. But yeah, I would love to see it go more that way. I think that for, again, my audience, which is different than I guess if you're doing more of a tech to tech company kind of situation there, they're still gonna wanna have those conversations, at least for foreseeable future, at least the people that I work with. So what I'd like to see though, way, and our clients will have this because of one of the services we offer of those agents that are out there hunting for opportunities to make you more effective. Yeah, so. I think that's a good good look to it, but I still I still think that call call is good for me as an early stage founder, too. And I recommend this for when I do coaching calls with founders, I kind of do like a peer mentorship thing with other founders. And I would say, hey, right now it is tempting to automate all of this. But part of your own ownership of the process is to know your customer really well, especially early on and confirm that you're actually addressing the right pain points and that you can actually be the best in the world. Or is it unique, right? Because you might think you're offering something unique. They said, yeah, I've been, I got like 30 emails this week from other companies offering the same exact thing. It's like, well, you don't know unless you're out there. And sometimes it requires that human thinking on your feet with those customers who are already cautious to get those insights early on and make sure that you're building something special that can actually address an issue.

18:08 Warren Kucker: Cool. Let's talk about the 90%. What are some of the coolest things you're doing with Agents at AI? You talk about, again, not just automating all of the old tasks. What are some of the newer things that you're able to do that you couldn't even conceive of prior to some Agents of Workforce you built?

18:22 Zach Jones: Yeah, so one of the things I'm obsessed with right now because we actually started as a dev agency, right? So we still do some custom dev projects for clients is create having a symphony of AI agents that can self-validate, debug and do extended tasks on projects. So that way we can sell leverage and not labor. I love that so much because we still do a human in the loop final look before we deliver to a client, but that gives us the ability to have an agency that still has a dev component but have lives. In this space, it's very easy to be stuck on the labor-intensive side of it, which is crazy because we should be on the cutting edge and that's what we're doing. Another thing that I really love that is agenting, and we do this for some of our clients if this is a need that we assess they have, is an adaptive, AEO-optimized website that you have agents that are scraping what's working and terms and hits and like all those issues that you would want to know about in your SEO optimization but then adapting in real time for you so that way you don't have to like now call me and say we need I need a new website and they know you don't well just it'll your agents are like making sure without making meaningful content changes prior to your approval making sure that you're maximizing your reach those are great things They make it a lot easier for us to do our job because then the human side of those kinds of projects is spent more on complex tasks that we still can't quite mentally peel ourselves away from. It's not complex, but you might enjoy this to other people as I love that I don't have to send. Invoices that take various events of the workflow trigger

20:19 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

20:20 Zach Jones: The AI agents to activate that next part of the workflow so I don't have to think that I said the invoice is it was paid right like I get my updates from my Financial agent tells me if voices have been paid or they're late And this is what like your you know MRR looks like this is what you're spending This is where spending has changed so I don't have to think about it because money is super important But man, do I hate logging in and I don't want to look at it, you know I don't want to see

20:46 Warren Kucker: Yes.

20:46 Zach Jones: my business account. just want the AI to tell me what we're up to. So from

20:51 Warren Kucker: Gotcha.

20:51 Zach Jones: complex to maybe more simplistic, but still important aspects of the business.

20:56 Warren Kucker: That's awesome. What are some examples of things you've done for like a physical business, smaller scale that have been helpful, well received as part of these ethos of like, let's not give them another tool, let's just give them a better outcome.

21:10 Zach Jones: Yeah, so one of the projects that we've that I've seen, I love bragging about this one, is for this company that they're like, they're like a door brokerage firm. I don't know if you've ever heard of a door broker before. But I love his motto. says that you can make millions of dollars in the margins, and he's doing that. But basically he does doors for AI data centers and stuff like that. And he's this

21:35 Warren Kucker: Okay.

21:35 Zach Jones: old dude, right? He's in his 70s, just out there killing it, making a lot of money. And we did really two basic things for him. One more complex and more expensive, and it's been a long, fun project. He's kinda kept us on, but the first thing was just Helping to automate the simple like lead generation process for him is hard for an older person in a three-person I guess agency model thing where it's a lot of labor To find the right leads and he doesn't want to do outbound so setting up the same system I use I'm just great for qualified leads and and work on the sequencing and adapt the sequencing for him as he goes according to whatever updates are made to his website so the language is unified the story was unified, it was satisfying for him and it saved a lot of time for his little team. But the big win for him was he wanted to make better use of his data across the various kinds of clients and the types of doors that they need and stuff like that. And it requires a lot of research. It sometimes requires coordinations with other larger like door companies and things like that. So we built

22:48 Warren Kucker: Right.

22:49 Zach Jones: up his own software that would help to manage all the things he was outsourcing there. in-house and have his AI agents handle the whole process and his first year on that product will save him an estimated $800,000 on

23:03 Warren Kucker: Bye.

23:04 Zach Jones: his little company and absurd amounts of hours of work too. I think to me, when you can say, and you know the great thing for him is that he doesn't now have more work, he actually has less because the AI agents that we've been into the infrastructure for small business handle that personalized software solution just like they handle this. legacy tools, make sure that

23:25 Warren Kucker: Bye.

23:26 Zach Jones: everything is unified, that he gets the ability to make fast decisions, but most of the time he's not even worrying about it. It's a self-licking ice cream cone, as my co-founder likes to say.

23:37 Warren Kucker: That's awesome, yeah. That's really cool. And again, there's just like a limitless problem set in this space, right?

23:45 Zach Jones: Yeah, there is.

23:46 Warren Kucker: You're trying to, so it's funny, traditional tech has been about finding a problem and finding as many people as possible to have that same problem and offering a solution that closes the value gap, right? Like there's what's happening now in terms of like what profit can I make? And then like, if I fix this process, what will my profit be then, right? Like that's all.

24:05 Zach Jones: Yep.

24:06 Warren Kucker: It's all tech is. Did I find a fine big value gap? And then I find a solution that solves that problem as similarly as possible across that, right? But when you're in this space that you're in, you have to solve many different problems, right? So like I talked to a banker for ranchers, How he qualifies his leads is how many head of cattle they have. So it's like, great, have white, he goes up to a farm, says,

24:27 Zach Jones: Awesome.

24:28 Warren Kucker: I think you have about 300 head and you probably need a financial instrument that looks like this, based on this. This is not. It's almost like AI might de-scale the process in a way that makes sense, right? Like you're gonna have, there's a one-to-one process that becomes much more valuable, but saves 800 grand for a three-person company, right? So like that's a big impact.

24:48 Zach Jones: Yeah, I think you made a really important point there and that's that as the opportunity to have something more personalized to your specific use case and needs becomes more doable and manageable and fast, right? More companies want to take advantage of that. Like a lot of when you think about like these Fortune 500 companies, my wife, she's a corporate attorney for a Fortune 500 company and like when they... build when they have solutions and software brought to them. It might have the name of something that would be familiar to somebody else at the consumer level But it is not the same thing right? There's a lot that is adapted to that scale No more to make it compliant for all the regulations They had to follow but number two to do the unique things that need done in that business So you're had your straight up when you say like what happens now is that these small businesses can benefit from the same type of care? at a de-scaled level and I think that If there are when we think we were still thinking in terms of the I want that one thing that solves the same problem for everybody in this vertical Which there's still space for that I think but there's also the space for like hey I'm a small business and it used to be that I couldn't have my own personalized software that would like Differentiate me for my competition right the way that like bigger companies can but now that's possible at a price that I can touch right? And so that is that's been very So it's been a fun conversation with investors, like what's like your niche? was like, it's really more about the position of the businesses and less about the vertical there. And like, are you ready to be like aggressive and take advantage of similar personalized software solutions like a big company would get for

26:37 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

26:37 Zach Jones: a better price, you know, and for you or not, it's less about this person. We don't just do door brokers, for example, even though that's been a fun one. Yeah.

26:45 Warren Kucker: Right, right, right, yeah, yeah.

26:48 Zach Jones: So I think you're right on there. you

26:49 Warren Kucker: Cool. Let's talk about your sales process. tell you guys about sales motion. What do you feel has worked well for you? What do you feel hasn't worked well? Anything that maybe used to work well that don't anymore?

26:58 Zach Jones: Yeah. Okay. I think that's tricky because I think it's changing so fast right now. That's something that I think we're in a transition point, not just for our company, for just what outbound looks like. Because I'll tell you, think the most effective, if we're talking about conversion rate, is a referral network. The problem is that it's not scalable. Like, so we, our first my four or five high ticket clients branched off from each other and they were just like you gotta go do waffle. So when it comes to our referral network we're batting a thousand right? So that to me is awesome and it feels good right? They're normally higher paying clients because there's a trust established but it's not scalable. I will say though that I've always told people that you should look around your network and be like who do I know that would pay a hundred dollars for the thing that I'm trying dissolve right now or whatever it is right is

27:58 Warren Kucker: Never.

27:58 Zach Jones: you go talk to them right so I think you should start there and really build a referral network it's not a sexy and it's a lot of hard work it's not very automated but I think you should do it Another thing that I found is working better, pump than it was, is app on emails. It's still a low conversion rate for app on emails, right? But I'll just compare it to things like referral networks and organic social. But I mean, you got a peach bang for your buck. So that's working for us. It probably get a two or three mid ticket closes a week. So like a four figure close on something with those things. And then organic social media, I would tell people that as much as I wish it was all like things that I don't automate my personal social media. I just, I again, this is you can write if you use threads as a couple ways you can do it. Like there's a cool app called Black Twist, one called Bobbins, one called Threadify. So I would tell people who are trying to really expand their reach to get savvy on threads and use their organic social there. You can use those apps to automate the whole process. You don't actually have to

29:11 Warren Kucker: Yeah

29:11 Zach Jones: I still do because I just kind of say I'm gonna set 30 minutes of my day And I'm just gonna do at like 430 in the morning. I'm just gonna like schedule things, you know

29:19 Warren Kucker: right right.

29:20 Zach Jones: But we get a lot of we've had a lot of pull from organic social media people want to see you and Not like your business account and they like it when they hop on a call like this you look exactly like you did in your profile picture. You're you are a real human being. That's really cool

29:33 Warren Kucker: Right, right.

29:35 Zach Jones: And we closed. Yeah, they probably about six figures of deals this year from threads. not like, nothing crazy, but enough that I'm like, that's definitely worth my time versus

29:48 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

29:50 Zach Jones: like TikTok, which I get nothing out of that.

29:53 Warren Kucker: Right, right, right, right.

29:54 Zach Jones: But that's me. Those are some vehicles. think some of the things that will get you started aren't scalable, but you should still do them and then

30:02 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

30:03 Zach Jones: turn your attention more towards. the 90 % that can be automated as you grow because the time suck isn't worth it anymore at that point.

30:13 Warren Kucker: Yeah, the way we've kind of worked at this is most people just do cold email. Most

30:21 Zach Jones: Yeah.

30:21 Warren Kucker: people are afraid of other channels. For like five, six,

30:25 Zach Jones: Right.

30:25 Warren Kucker: seven years, we've known that multi-channel, meaning email, phone, LinkedIn works pretty well. That's working less well than it used to. One, LinkedIn's kind of really honed down their algorithms in a way that makes it harder to get out to new people just by consistently posting on LinkedIn. Not impossible, but harder. But like so then really what it is is like how do you create awareness across every channel? So like how do you, you can get to a point where you can do the foundational work on almost everything and then do the human level, the 20 % on top of it. So instead doing the 100 % of three tasks, you can do the 20 % of 15, if I did the math really fast, right?

31:05 Zach Jones: Right, yeah, that's a good point.

31:06 Warren Kucker: Yeah. like, and then, it's just all, unless you have something extremely viral problem, no one's ever solved for you solved for that problem really well. You have early stage investors, and then you're in part of the YC ecosystem that just takes off on its own. It's going to be handy, a hand combat for awhile. And so referrals is a great example,

31:22 Zach Jones: It is.

31:23 Warren Kucker: right? Even just your network referrals. I found this personally in order to hear your feedback. So I have a pretty robust network just for being in, let's say the work environment for 25 years and staying in touch more than. with folks. You ask people for referral, everyone will love to do it. Yeah, absolutely. Let me think about who my network might be. Someone's going to speak to. No one does it. It's hard to hardly to think about. Warren has this sales software. Who is do I know in sales that might be interested? And then let me reach out to them. But if you go into their sales navigator and say like, here's their second level connections, pull out the titles that make sense is here's the list of 50 people that would be good of an introduction. Here's the messaging for those folks. Who can you put me in touch with? That 10x is your referrals, but that's hard work and you can't automate it. So that's the hard part of this stuff. And how you get through, while the cold email engine's running and people are getting awareness, they see your name, they see your face, you call them up, you kind of get a couple of nos and eventually get to a yes, you have to almost just overwhelm the market with different content. You're finding the same kind

32:24 Zach Jones: Yeah.

32:25 Warren Kucker: of approach.

32:26 Zach Jones: Yeah, I love that. Yeah, and I agree. think that's why I still do the cold outbound emails, you know, hundreds and hundreds like a day. It's because I mean, I'm not like that is something that is automated in my life.

32:36 Warren Kucker: Yeah, right.

32:37 Zach Jones: But the reason is I kind of the way I tell my team is I'm like, you know, it's kind of like you're out in like a freaking like desert digging for dinosaur bones. Like at the end of the day, they have a bunch of people digging in a bunch of different areas. But there's a T-Rex out there somewhere, man. He just like, but you have to keep digging. Otherwise, you don't hit it. It's a lot of averages thing. Especially for me, that's why I still do the cold calls man is I'm like I don't do a lot but a few a day and I make sure that they're highly qualified because I'm like if I make ten calls I might get seven no's before I get a yes, right? I might get nine no's before I get a yes, but the key is not to quit at seven or nine, right? Because that you over on the market. There's a yes out there There's a yes out there for anybody. There's a yes out there for like the Snuggies, you know, like there's a yes out there for your software solution you just gotta

33:25 Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah, alright.

33:27 Zach Jones: be willing to persist and do that work as you're saying.

33:32 Warren Kucker: That's awesome and it's moving fast. sales is the perfect capitalist market where something that works, works for a little bit and then people recopy it and then it doesn't work anymore because what you're trying to do is get people's attention and if everyone's doing the same thing, you can't get their attention anymore. So

33:49 Zach Jones: Exactly.

33:50 Warren Kucker: it's the ultimate space in here. like every edge, billboards is the new funny, stupid San Francisco tech thing, right? Like people put up billboards, what's old is new again, right? Well, now there's billboards

33:59 Zach Jones: Yeah.

34:00 Warren Kucker: everywhere. So like who eventually you're going to get to a point where billboards don't work, right? It worked for the first three,

34:05 Zach Jones: Yeah.

34:06 Warren Kucker: went viral. It was awesome. 50 people do it, billboards don't work anymore. So it's pretty fun. Yeah. Cool.

34:10 Zach Jones: Yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah.

34:13 Warren Kucker: All right. Let's say future looking. How are you? Again, this is predictive and impossible because it's moving fast. What are some things you think might be different about the way we work one, two, four years from now? And maybe like in particular in this kind of like physical local space that you're in.

34:30 Zach Jones: Yeah, I think that's a great question. One thing that I think is gonna be different, and I'm seeing this already, is that. the midterm I think we're going to see like small and mid-market kind of businesses really thrive in this space because that was opportunity at a lower cost for them to be competitive. what I do think, one way I think it might be different in the market is that you'll see less of various professional services because you can possess more of the market now, right? I don't think it necessarily means that now like the accountant down the street is out of business because of the account the next time over, but I do think they could be more likely to be absorbed. I you see, I think that you can see more of a transition to an acquisition strategy and a buyout and like say like we can, I think it's better to join them than lose them kind of a situation at the lower level. That's something that I don't have, I don't think it's a popular opinion, but I think that it's coming. As far as how we will work differently, I think that over the next year or two, I think that the desire for what all kind of reach and agentic AI is going to have in businesses will probably peak. I think that there's a point because of the economic disruption that like we know just like every other tech wave that normally when there's jobs that are taken even more jobs are offered, right? Because something else needs to be done, right? The former president of Tesla said like, hey, you know, when the Excel sheet came like the actual Excel sheet, people were like, my gosh, all these people that are just manually computing this data, they're all gonna be fired. And then it's like, well, you know what? Those skyscrapers are still full of people working in this, but now they're able to value puts and calls instead of just the stagnant trending markets, right, for stock prices and analysis. So I think in the same thing here, like we can, if we did a better job in the tech world communicating that, we wanna see what's gonna happen next, but because we're not, because Fear moves markets and normally it unfortunately moves for like frontier Models like it moves it in their favor in the stock market We'll see the peak and when that peak happens what you'll see is a lot of the transactional space a lot of Most of the administrative work stuff like that. I think we'll be agentic and agent to agent That's why we're moving with such an urgency on my cross organizational cross-communication agents

37:03 Warren Kucker: Uh-huh.

37:04 Zach Jones: But then I think what ends up happening is that people in their roles, you're not gonna see as many generalists, you'll see very, like everybody I think will end up being very specialized because now the value is not like I'm just your, I'm not the accountant, like I'm a tax strategist for agriculture in particular. I've refined my, I've trained my agents like on my native data, right, to be

37:32 Warren Kucker: there.

37:33 Zach Jones: really good at this one thing. you'll see a lot of specialized people doing only one or two things with their time and at work and agents run the show and that will also I think truncate to smaller sized businesses and that's why they'll have to specialize because there's not gonna be room for 10 general service like I'm just using the accounting analogy because my is just finished tax season and I just got my return but I wish I got a return actually owed this year unfortunately but

37:57 Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah.

37:59 Zach Jones: I but I see is like the of requirement to specialize because there won't be space for that many generalists anymore because of the access to data. I think that'll be unique and interesting and I think about that primarily in the physical product space because in that services space because that's where I mostly engage my customers. So I'll be interested to see how that actually taps up. That's a thought and a theory that I have.

38:26 Warren Kucker: Yeah, no, it's interesting. It's like how that could play out. It's like at that peak, there could be a scenario where there's gonna be some work that we don't do anymore, which is fine, right? There's work. I couldn't imagine a world where, I'd say you're younger than me, but I wasn't in this world. I couldn't imagine a world where the computer wasn't on the desk. I don't know what you were doing on your day to day when there was not a computer

38:45 Zach Jones: Alright.

38:46 Warren Kucker: on your desk, right? So like there was barely starting, I worked at UPS starting in 2006, there was barely starting to be computers on the desk. We still got green bars. They mailed us reports every week. 2006, this is how close we are to this, right? So there's work that's gonna go away. And honestly, the amount of time we spend at work is probably gonna reduce. And before that gets too scary, we used to work seven days, weeks, 100 years ago, right? So like we didn't have weekends, weekends are modern

39:08 Zach Jones: All right, yeah, we don't want that.

39:10 Warren Kucker: concepts, right? So it'll be okay if we're working at three day work week, six hours a day, right? But then what's funny is there'll be a threshold there. I'm already hitting it now with what's actually like business development reps, people that are making cold calls. Honestly, like someone who's cold calling, can really only cold call effectively for about 15 to 20 hours a week. It's hard to do and you can't cold call for 40 hours. But I'm not going to not pay them for 40 hours. They're working, probably working about 30, right? Getting paid for 40. But I actually have them doing work that I can do with AI. But they would be, they're marginally better at it than the AI. So we have the space and the time and there's value to be gained here. You're 20 % better at AI. at validating this research. I could have AI validate this research, but sometimes it gets it wrong and it's still off. So you validate, I do this with myself. I still review every piece of POV I create for my outbounding, because once in a while something gets past the goal and you send out a bad email. I have the time to do this and get this marginal stuff. I think you hit a level of like, if you incentivize employment, you have the ethos that you want to have people working for you, which was what we're doing this for, right? There'll be some work that AI can do reasonably well that you can do 20 % better than you just do because you have the time. Which is a pretty funny way to look at it.

40:26 Zach Jones: It is funny. that's a good, that's a interesting insight. And I think that another, you know, value add there is that you have these, you know, these sales guys, sales reps, they're like, well, now they've got, you know, 10 hours in a week back and they might have a unique or like, like interests or skills that could contribute to your company that there's time back. So maybe that could be better served, you know, like you make them better too. So,

40:51 Warren Kucker: Yeah, agreed.

40:52 Zach Jones: which makes your beer taste better at the end of the day, because they're doing something great for you.

40:54 Warren Kucker: Totally agree. Maybe have a dry cleaner that's serviced by a robot, and you a dry cleaner where it's like, listen, I can put a robot in here, but I like the human aspect of it. You're staffing your dry cleaner, and people come to you that want to hand their clothes to a human, not a robot. So you can have that aspect to it. Other scenarios, I wouldn't mind, instead of Uber, no offense to Ubers, I wouldn't mind if I didn't have a driver in the car. One, probably don't know who they are. Just do a Waymo. And so that aspect to it, yeah, I probably wouldn't mind a robot driving me around. That has been pretty consistent. aspect to how they drive. So there's gonna be that juxtaposition. And what I think it'll be funny, as long as we don't destroy the economic fabric that we've established over the past 300 years, and we do okay on the other side, that this way of doing it, the pre-AI way will seem weird. It'll be like, wow, dad, you used to type everything into your computer and you had to tell,

41:42 Zach Jones: Right.

41:43 Warren Kucker: instruct your computer to do everything that it did. I'm like, yeah, it didn't know how to do anything and it had no knowledge other than what I told it, right? Like, he's gonna blow his mind at some point, right? some. Great. Well, listen, Zach, this has been a great conversation. If people wanted to find you, where can they find you? I think you have a newsletter. Like, where do they get good content from you guys?

42:02 Zach Jones: Yeah, no for sure. So if they want to find me the best way to get in touch with me directly is to look for a rookie founder on threads. That's probably where I'm most active these days as far as social media. And then yeah, I've got a rookie founder.com is my newsletter. So those would be two great ways to connect to me. I'm fairly responsive on threads, but my insta is my private life for the most part. So I try to keep that one locked

42:29 Warren Kucker: Gotcha.

42:30 Zach Jones: down.

42:31 Warren Kucker: Gotcha.

42:31 Zach Jones: But yeah, that'll be how you find me.

42:33 Warren Kucker: Awesome, Zach. Well, I'm looking forward to following the journey of Waffle. I like the ethos modern tech, real business, a combination there. And I appreciate you being on guest on the call. I appreciate you taking the time.

42:42 Zach Jones: Yeah, thanks for having me, Warren. It was great talking with you. Bye.