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- [00:00]
A
Curious. Is there something in the water in Utah that attracts all these companies to relocate there? It just seems like there's something beyond correlation or beyond just happenstance here happening.
- [00:11]
B
I think there's a lot, a lot of financial advisors are members of the Church of Jesus Christ, Latter Day Saints. That feels common. And then like Orion founder and FMG founders are BYU grads, which is crazy. Even though they were in like different parts of the country when they started. Those companies that created just enough serendipity then just kind of compound at this point and now, now it's all over. So I don't like Orion moving in that one. I don't know. Like, okay, just move the. Move the company. But here they are. So jumps right over the hill, literally.
- [00:48]
A
Yep.
- [00:49]
B
It's crazy.
- [00:51]
A
You guys can meet up at your favorite watering hole.
- [00:54]
B
Yeah.
- [00:55]
A
And figure out. Yeah. Solve all the problems. Do you think? I mean, I've heard just anecdotally and on podcasts that there's like this unfair advantage of people who grew up in the Church of Latter Day Saints that they actually have like, you know, some level of outreach and sales, like, drilled into them and then that makes them amazing entrepreneurs. Do you think there's anything to that?
- [01:17]
B
I think there's, there's, there's meat on that bone. It's like, really, you just learn to hear no and like deal with stuff and get conviction on yourself. And I think that translates. It's like doing anything. Anyone who does anything hard. Right. Like former D1 athletes or former, you know, you work at a super fast growing company, like, you don't leave that without, like, coming out better. And I think any hard thing, usually those compound pretty, pretty aggressively. So like people, people who do hard things and so anyway.
- [01:52]
A
All right, well, shall we, should we get started? Well, three, two, one. Let's go.
- [01:58]
B
Welcome to AI for Advisors with Mark Heinen and James Cantwell. Every week, Mark and James break down the latest in the world of wealth, tech and AI and occasionally bring in guests to spice things up. This is not investment advice and not professionally produced. I am not real and not yet sentient. Now let's get on with the show.
- [02:21]
A
Welcome to the latest episode of AI for Advisors with myself, Mark Heinen and James Cantwell. James, how you doing?
- [02:28]
C
I'm good. Mark. How are you doing this week?
- [02:31]
A
Doing great, Doing great.
- [02:33]
C
I love that you're joining us from San Francisco again because every time we start an episode, I have no idea where in the world Carmen Sandiego is going to be this week. And so good to see you back at home with strong Internet as any guest on our show in the past is familiar with.
- [02:52]
A
Yes. Our technical issues. My crazy technical issues. Yeah. I've been traveling quite a bit, went to Mexico City, did some other travel and it's been awesome. It's been a lot of fun, but very happy to be home. I was at my 30th reunion this past weekend. I actually gave you speaking. I was speaking and gave a talk on AI and the impact of AI on jobs and education. That was pretty wild. A lot of very strong views among the Amherst College alumni. Really varied actually quite a bit. But actually what I would say is like a very sophisticated understanding of what's going on among people who don't normally like sort of work in this field tech or AI. Right. People who are physicians or, you know, other things. So people are thinking about this a lot. That was my key takeaway. And yeah, I mean I think the big debate is whether the government would start to regulate these models, whether they would start to review the models and slow everything down. And I thought, yes, my counterparty on the panel thought, no, my close friend Tatiana. And we just saw an AI executive order come through which looks like it's going that way. Which is.
- [03:59]
C
Let's bring before we do the full on introduction, we're lucky to have Thomas Claussen, one of the co founders of Slant CRM and AI native CRM. And before we get into your background and your full intro, firstly, welcome to the podcast and I, I kind of like this topic to just kick things off before we get into the formal flow of the show. What I mean, in your world just living your daily life outside of Slant, what are you seeing as people's reactions to AI?
- [04:28]
B
Yeah, it's. I think that the pervasiveness is probably the right word. Like the amount of awareness from any corner of any industry. You know, like the. Everyone on my street's got a different job. Right. You've got mailman, you've got a, you know, you can name the spread of doctor to you name it attorney. You have every version of like, oh my gosh, I use Claude every day and like I would never in my life put my data in that thing. Like, okay, wow. Like people have a lot of. To make. But yeah, it getting regulated. I was on the, yeah, I'm definitely on the camp that I think it will like I just think because right. They put that like FDA analogy was I think what they said, like there's a Food and Drug Administration and we need Like a equivalent and you know, as someone building and wanting the models to improve really rapidly and you know, trying to be like a safe builder on our side, like, I'm really for keeping the pedal down on innovation, but it's going to be. It's going to be crazy to see all shake out.
- [05:27]
C
Do you think we should have regulation, have like an FDA equivalent for AI?
- [05:33]
B
I think they've been pretty good self regulators to date. Like, they think they're trying to announce what they think the pitfalls are. I think they're trying to build safe things. I think they expose what it's going to be good and bad at. Like, I haven't seen them be the bad guy yet.
- [05:49]
A
I mean, I think for me it's not whether I personally feel there should or shouldn't be. I think there will be regardless. And I think Mythos was a bit of a turning point. I think Mythos just showed the underlying power of these models and how they could actually have significant security implications. And those could end up being national security implications. I think. Right. If you think of like power companies or utilities who are using antiquated open source software and Mythos exposes something and you know, some hackers can come through and there are people in my network who have had very sophisticated hacks executed on either them or the underlying, you know, infrastructure they're built on. And it is brutal when that happens. Right. So I think the FDA is probably a good analogy because it's all about the externalities. It's like what will happen if something is dangerous, gets out there. It becomes a public health concern. Right. Or yeah, public concern. Right. Not a private concern. So I think. But right now it's voluntary. It seems like right now these, like the executive order that just came through is 30 day review period voluntary. I know that when the FDA says they generally, if the FDA is happy with something, they just say no comment. They don't even like, you know, write anything. So getting a no comment from the FDA is actually considered amazing. If you get any kind of comment, it's a really big problem. Yeah, exactly. So I think, I think that's interesting to see how this will pan out. But I actually think the big counter argument is this other national security argument, which is like, hey, what if that means China and others are going to move a lot faster and are we going to cede our position? I mean, I think that's like the David Sacks argument. I mean, not even thinking argument. And the David Sacks argument, they're competing
- [07:31]
C
with each other, not even thinking about like geopolitical or, or foreign entities, you know, on that sort of scale, or utility companies being targeted. But even just thinking about those, just building stuff, like, you know, there's a lot of folks using make N8N these like, automation tools, things like that. And while they can be used in ways where, you know, you're securing a webhook or things like that, for the most part a lot of them are just like wide open and it's a matter of like guessing a random string. And with AI, I kind of feel like suddenly that's actually like a realistic security vulnerability. When in the past you kind of like, unless it's like really private confidential data, like, what's the big deal? What are the chances sort of thing. And now it's like the chances are actually really good. Like there are things out there just trying to find, pinging different addresses, different URLs, trying to find a way into something. And so suddenly, like, everything needs to be built securely. And at the same time, we suddenly have a bunch of amateur builders building tools with the assistance of AI. So it's a kind of an interesting dichotomy right now, I think.
- [08:40]
B
Yeah, it's crazy. Even like Utah Big, there's like Kevin o' Leary's pitching his mega, mega mega data center just by Salt Lake City. And like the debate every day just here about whether to build it. What's the implication? Like, it's.
- [08:55]
A
Yeah, what are people saying about that? Because, you know, no one builds data centers here in San Francisco. That's for other parts of the country. Yeah, I'm curious, like, what, you know,
- [09:05]
B
box Elder county is the topic of the news these days. It's like kind of desolate space near a big gas pipeline. But you have, you have every version of local reaction to look at all the jobs, to like, are we going to drain the salt lake of water? And no one really knows the answer. So people take it seriously, though.
- [09:22]
C
Yeah, we got some big building out here as well, Mark. I mean, Taiwan Semiconductors putting three mega factories here. One's operational, one's being built, the third one's planned. The real estate development around that is a first phase is seven and a half billion of real estate and infrastructure. And that's like 10, 15 minutes down the road for me.
- [09:42]
B
That's crazy.
- [09:43]
C
It's going to be massive.
- [09:44]
A
That's a huge project. I mean, I worked on the Apple campus at the time. It was one of the biggest construction projects in the US ever. And that was a $4 billion project. So that's obviously changed. And then I worked on an LNG plant in Australia. This is back in my drone days. Yeah, that was like 6 billion. So that's pretty wild. Those are enormous. I mean, that's like a big economic boom.
- [10:05]
C
The seven and a half billion has nothing to do with the factory itself, by the way. That is the halo development that is going around the factory.
- [10:13]
A
I see the, like, indirect benefits.
- [10:15]
C
Yes.
- [10:16]
A
Yeah. So, I mean, it's a big economic boom, I would say. That's really interesting. Yeah. Well, exciting times. Well, Tom, I do want to give you your flowers and basically say I'm honored. Yeah, you're, you know, you've, you've obviously broken through in terms of slant being, you know, seen as on the cutting edge of, you know, people building CRM. So I thought we'd give you a little time to share your origin story. We love doing origin stories on this podcast. So tell us about your hero's journey. You know, what basically you were working on before slant, what you learned from that and how you came across this opportunity and how it's been going. Would love to hear a little more.
- [10:58]
B
Yeah, happy to. The Hero's Journey is quite, quite a title. I'll just call it the Tripping and Barely Staying Standing Journey. You know, could be the way to describe it, but a little over three years ago now, it's just crazy to say. Max and I started a company together. I've known Max for 12 plus years and we're really good friends. We're at BYU together. I studied economics, he studied math. But we started company three years ago, focused on marketing. Automation is probably the easiest way to describe it. And we kind of made video at the center of it. The ambition was, hey, we want, like, people to keep a personal touch, to really know each other, but at the same time, you know, automate and make things efficient. And the group that gravitated toward it unexpectedly was financial advisors. And a very unexpected niche was like advisors who bought leads from Dave Ramsey or SmartAsset was like the, the power user of PagePort.
- [11:52]
C
And who was your client before that organically happened?
- [11:56]
B
It was like photographer, wedding photographers all around the country. Like anyone who was getting a lead online and it felt like somewhat competitive.
- [12:04]
C
So were you thinking more like small business?
- [12:06]
B
Like, who needs to, like, stand out? And you just sort of, you know, you keep falling and figuring it out and you're okay. Suddenly 90% of revenue is financial advisor. You've built a red tail and a wealth box integration and, you know, you have compliance questionnaires. And you're getting approved at broker dealers. You're like, okay, well we're like this, I guess our world now.
- [12:29]
A
It's a little counterintuitive. By the way, just to interrupt, you're talking about video landing pages. I wouldn't think of financial advisors as really, you know, gravitating to video landing pages, you know.
- [12:39]
B
Yeah, it was a very, like, I think we've always existed in like, I think Max and I are very like, build a product, like work for market, poll somewhere. Like it's good. Someone's going to be like, I need this and try to. You'll, you'll find out where, where you are. So.
- [12:54]
C
Well, I was gonna, I was gonna ask, do you have, do you have any idea, like, was there a catalyst that pushed you in that direction? Especially since you said, you know, Dave Ramsey. Like, I'm almost wondering if somebody in that group picked it up and it spread like wildfire sort of thing. Like Dave Ramsey mention it. Like, is there something. Because that just seems really interesting because I'm with Mark on this. Like, this is not what I would expect financial advisors to gravitate towards.
- [13:17]
B
They at some point Dave Ramsey advisor used it and they operate in masterminds and advisors love that phrase, you know, and they just like, great. I'm in my group of people and I learn all this stuff and clearly we had enough value for someone to bring it up organically. And then it started to grow. But we grew to a point in that product of like, this is who we're serving. It's a small niche. We've got a really smart team. Like what kind of company do we want to build? And Max and I had a really good conversation at the time of like, we think the people here are great. We think our ambition is to build something bigger and not like, I don't want a lifestyle, lifestyle practice, as an advisor would say it right. I want, like I want to build something really substantial and with a great, great people and help all the people on this team, like have a, an amazing career changing experience. And so, all right, what we need to get, let's go bigger. And there was a really serendipitous day where two users chatted in or like, hey, how do I add Social Security number as a custom field? And we're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is for like email automation. Like you never want to email that. Don't put it in. They're like, well like we're, we want to use this for our CRM. Like it's Got people, it's got tasks. Like, that's all my CRM does. And like, in my mind, like, you could, you know, you could never be the CRM that's the system of record. How could you? And that put us down a journey of really listening to users. And we spent pretty much all of 2025 until we launched in August talking to, we were like, hey, Pageport's good. We were going to service it, but we're not going to like grow it. So we took salespeople off of selling it. We put every engineer in a room. We spent a lot of time on product and just said, what's the biggest pain we think we can solve? And our core thesis is AI is going to change the industry and AI is only going to be effective inside the system of record. Like that's the way it's going to be implemented. It's going to be usable. People are going to want to be in it every day and you have to deal with like higher switching costs and all these, you know, hard things. Like, it's not an easy bet. No advisor wakes up in the morning like I want to switch CRM, but they do want a lot of other things to be better. And so we went down that route. We launched last August. It's been, you know, we were seven people and now we're 25, you know, only two and a half years ago, it's just me and Max in a spare bedroom. So, you know, we, this 20, 20 billion in connected assets, that's probably only like a third of what the advisors have on the platform. Like it's, it's crazy growth right now. So we're, we're, we're in growing, growing pains, which is a fun thing to solve for.
- [15:43]
A
I mean, one thing I wanted to ask you about that is when obviously you found product market fit, right, you found that there was sort of a certain type of advisor that worked well with you and could lean in and was willing to change the system of record. What did you find? The best go to market and growth mechanic was to then replicate that over and over again. Because I think a lot of people are in this phase where they are battling over these 15,000 odd reas who actually can make an independent decision of like changing something as important as this. And like the question is fundamentally, how do you get in front of those people? How do you convince them to make a big change? It's a really fundamental question.
- [16:20]
B
Yeah, we're, I mean, I think we're, I try to have the whole company but Myself especially practice really good empathy. Like we don't want to be, I want people to be happy to hear from Slant and excited to hear about it. And I think a lot of the origin there is like, great. We need to build a great product with raving fans who talk about it and post in their Reddits and their Facebook groups and all those things. And that will naturally compound a huge chunk of our growth. And then, okay, what else can we control? There any experience with our team, like you chat into support, it should be an amazing experience. You have your first demo, it should be an amazing experience. Like you're mad and want to yell at somebody, it should be a good experience. Like I want like any touch point with Slant to be very high end. Advisors are service people at heart, right? It's like they work with people. In the end, there's like a lot of ways to get that service. And you're choosing someone who they, they, you know, a client is choosing someone they resonate with and we believe in that. And then like we're going to all the trade shows. Like, you know, if I get a little more tactical on how to get in front of you, like, okay, I think the trade shows are a good way. I think, you know, you get an advisor who is part of a brokerage who has more regulatory things and then you, they need to go fight the compliance battle or get it up the chain and then great, like if, if the product's good enough, they're you, they're pretty happy to go fight that for you. And so then the minute they go down that route, like, hey, we're here to support you. What documents do you need? Who do we want to meet with? Like, I'm happy to offer my time to go meet with, you know, your leadership team. And so we try to piece all that together, but we've always, we always invest in product first and let our go to market follow. So like in the building slant phase, it was like great. No one's selling anything. We're just gonna have five engineers and everyone who's on like a go to market job. You're gonna be a product researcher, go understand the nuance of a wealth box to red tail migration or go talk to someone who's tried three different note takers like git. Let's go make a great product, invest in the R and D and then try to reap the reward app here.
- [18:19]
C
Just let's maybe since we're talking about some of the things that are in the product, I feel like calling it A CRM is a little bit of a disservice because people probably think of the traditional CRM and I've been. This is probably my favorite topic. I think more so because I like publicly got shit for it and now I'm feeling very justified in all the things I said.
- [18:39]
B
That's good.
- [18:41]
A
Yeah, yeah, let's. Let's make sure you get even more shit after this podcast comes out.
- [18:47]
C
I'm kind of happy to. Just means what I'm saying is, is. Is getting under people's skin because there's some truth to it.
- [18:53]
B
The.
- [18:54]
C
Anyway, aside from that, where I want to go with this is let's explain what slant CRM is in terms of who it's. Who it's for. And we know it's for the advisor, but like who it's for and what's the breadth of functionality. Right. That lives inside of slant. Because I think this is kind of interest. This is kind of interesting.
- [19:14]
B
Yeah, I'll. I'll give mine and then James, you should correct it from like someone who's seen it implemented hands on, like what people actually care about. And I think that's always a good. So, yeah, slant CRM. Like, obviously the CRM, you need tags, you need people, you need to make them in a list. You need to make a report of everyone who's in Texas. Like, okay, that is core CRM. You need to make a task. Huge one. Like, I think what a thing that a lot of tech people my background don't know is like CRM. The most important job of CRM for an advisor advisory firm for me is project management. It's like someone calls and says they need 50k to buy a car and someone needs to assign that to somebody and then someone needs to go sell the position and free the cash and call to confirm. Like, there's this whole army of tasks that get done. So task and project management's big. I think CRM underwhelmed on that for a long time. So people were buying Asana or Monday.com or Hubly, like there was like a. Okay, the tasks aren't doing it. We're going to go out here. And then there was. Automation's a huge one. So everyone like, oh great, I want to automate want to add a tag in, you know, XYZ CRM. And then I want to send an email like, okay, you need to go use Zapier. Where it's like, that is an entirely CRM process. I should be able to build real automation. I don't need to Add on a Zapier. I should use Zapier to connect third party data sources. Not say when I do X, go do Y. Is it project management automation? Like true automation, Data enrichment. There's a bunch of cut. You know these are like little chunks of the tech map, right? Data enrichment, catch light. And a bunch of others. Like when you get a prospect, how much money do they have? Where's their house, how much equity's in it? Like where have they worked? Here's their LinkedIn. Like, great. CRM should do that. That is like it's 2026 and then, you know, okay, great. A note taker. The note takers blew up. They added a ton of value to a lot of advisors. There's a reason they grew so quickly. Great. If it didn't integrate with CRM, I don't think people would buy it. Another good signal. CRM probably needs to do this. Like you're planning your meeting, you're tracking your client. Let's record the meeting and teacher. So we added note taker and the periphery around that. Like the ed. All the other edge things there's a lot of. But I'd say those are like the core, the core driving components of what's all combined in one. And when you add those in one spot, suddenly it gets really nice. Like, hey, because the summary was here and because we connect to calendar, you don't need to build like a spreadsheet to calculate annual review anymore. Like this is like one of the most simple advisor questions that no one is going to answer is like, who have I not talked with in six months? Or who's fallen through the cracks? Or if I get an audit, who's. Who am I going to be scared about? Like, great, you can figure that out. If you have all this in one spot. I think there's been this drive of people, like I gotta go build a data lake and then connect 900 things. It's like, or maybe your system record needs to be usable enough and have all the pieces to have it all right there.
- [22:14]
C
That's an interesting point. Because like I, I do, you know, I, I do position slant in front of a number of my clients and we're actually working on some projects together. But I often still, for the right firm, for the right reason, I often still think about a data lake. But like that is true, like to some extent for certain firms. Like, yeah, once you have this data in one place, it might lessen the need for that. Right? It really depends on what the firm's doing growth wise, where how they plan to change, maybe other technology onboard, other firms, things like that, ownership of data, that sort of thing. There's, there's some of that, but that's interesting. I mean, I think I'm gonna give, I'm gonna give my spiel since you, you said I could, I could give my version. So when I think of slant, one of the, one of the things that strikes me and you, I think you explained it is essentially that there's a lot of things that you used to think you had to do somewhere else or handle with like a separate process. And the thing is like those, when you reimagine because you have a better platform that consolidates all the information and more importantly, like understands your business with, with all that context in one place, suddenly it collapses the need for a number of different tools and for those things to be tracked because they're happening in disjointed solutions. Right, Disconnected solutions. So the example about like tracking certain things in a spreadsheet, it's like, well, that really shouldn't have ever had to happen. And like in the past people would come up with custom fields and different things and like a dashboard or a view to try and like track those things. And oh, could I sort by like this date? And those things all go away. Now with agentic workflows and with AI being able to surface, like, well, this is what should just happen when this date approaches. Just kick this off, just go do this. Right? And so that's the piece that I think's really interesting, is that this is a platform that is very extensible and starts to help you with everything from marketing. And that's often where you think about data enrichment, but also with client onboarding and data aggregation and data enrichment and monitoring on an ongoing basis. With email communication being in the CRM, which is common, I mean, that's integrated in most CRMs, but being a little bit more usable. I mean, they're all kind of layering in AI now, so some maybe more effectively than others, but now it's all in there. On top of that, I really, I really liked how simple your document management strategy is. Is that okay to share? Is that kind of like secret sauce?
- [24:54]
B
No, that's great.
- [24:54]
C
Okay. Like, one of the things that I think is great is that you didn't over engineer how AI is going to get context on your documents. And one of the things that comes up a lot in the CRM migrations is like, oh, we have all this history we have to bring over and so we have to do this big data cleanup project first. And I'm not saying that like data cleanup isn't part of any CRM conversion. It is, but it's often all this like history that you need for audit purposes when the reality of like what you need to manage the relationship on a go forward basis, which is really what you should be focused on for the conversion and getting up and running isn't nearly as big. And so by taking your documents, whether they're in Google Docs or SharePoint or OneDrive and building them around a household and you just connect them to a household in slant. Slant has everything it needs to like bring you current and you can interact with document safely. Simple way.
- [25:50]
B
Hey, I got a meeting in an hour and they want to talk about the estate plan. What do I. What's in it? Okay, great. It'll read it. It'll know what your last meeting was about. Like that chat you experiences.
- [26:02]
C
I should probably be wearing my hat because I'm fanboying right now.
- [26:04]
A
I know. I was about to say you're in the tank, James. I mean I think you're describing a relationship chip operating system, right. Which I think is like really interesting if it's so extensible. I, I think the, if I can like take, maybe I can like take the other side of this just for the sake of fun and interest.
- [26:23]
B
Yeah, we should. I'm into it and we got issues. So let's dig in.
- [26:27]
A
Yeah, let's dig in. Let's dig into the issues. I mean, I guess the fundamental question is like what's the point of a CRM these days, right? Like, I think maybe that would be the other side of this. You know, we have the ability to query any data source now through ChatGPT and Claude and through any number of other tools. There's MCP, you can now using Cowork and Codex, you can actually just do browser emulation. You can look up anything from any data source. That could be three data sources, it could be 300 data sources, it really doesn't matter. But you don't need to do all these custom integrations. You don't need. I mean a lot of. Maybe the counter argument is a lot of UI was built around the human using these tools and we are as meat computers. We need pretty ui. We need things to be like really pretty and logical. Whereas you know, agents and computers just need the raw data. Right. And they can pull it up and
- [27:20]
B
just figure it out.
- [27:22]
A
Absolutely fine. So I need to figure out all the documents related to household. I just ask for it and it'll figure it out. Right now, of course there's some data cleanliness required to do that. But you know, I think some agents are quite good at disambiguating data. And so, yeah, this would be maybe the counter argument around CRMs. Right. Which is. And I would love your view, you've obviously thought a lot about it. And so, yeah, how do you think of that? Especially as we're like, over the next two or three years, there might be some acceleration on these tools and it might become easier and easier just to ask questions of a generic box on your computer.
- [27:54]
B
Totally. Yeah. Like, serum's going to die or serum's obsolete. That whole, like, I think there's so much merit to like, agents are getting better. Let's bet on agents and agents can figure it out. I'm on that team. The, the biggest place I rely on on like, well, CRM's gonna go away. I'm just gonna chat my. Chat, chat it all on whatever tool you know, there's gonna be some. My core system where people are living. The biggest one to me is tasks like at some point an advisor somewhere has a team of people or a whole ensemble of advisors are like, hey, the, the Johnsons are buying a house and we need to free up all this cash for a down payment. Or, hey, Johnny's mom died and he's getting an inheritance and we also should send him flowers like that. You're. You're gonna assign that task. You want to track it, see it, get done, tie it to people, know what happened. And when the SEC comes for any of those moments, you want to be able to say like, oh, yeah, here's what I did with the Clausens. I, you know, we met with them, we did all these things. And I think that feeling I mentioned earlier, like, who have. Who have we not met with? Who have I done an annual review with? Like, who's got an rmd? Outstanding. Like, I think all those are gonna. Those, those don't go away. And yeah, you could ask a gentic tool and maybe get an answer out. But there's simple, like, I think in my mind we're earning the right. All those things to really own the task. Like, if someone is saying I need to get a job done and a team member of mine or myself, you know, there's a lot of solo advisors who use slant. Like, I'm going to do these things. I have to get investment policy statements done. Great. I want a list of them. I want to mark them off. I want to. Great. And Then can AI help me write the email better? Maybe send, you know, and can slant be a good tool that integrates with DocuSign and can it auto check the workflow when things get done? And can I do my job better because I have a assistant? Right. That's like the two sides of it, but at the same time. Yeah, I would love an assistant that's, you know, I can just talk to and I never have to read. But humans like read, you know, like I want to see the list of my clients and know who's got an investment policy statement done. Yeah, that's not gonna stop. And I wanna know like I got 10 to do today and oh thank goodness the email's pre written and I can send it and I know who hasn't signed. Like, I can keep making other corners of the job easy, but I think like a big, the big job is getting the task done. I think any scaling firm feels that especially like great, I'm hiring a para planner to do planning or I'm hiring an assistant to scale my capacity or we're adding four new advisors. Like that is a mountain of operations that have to live in a place where you can just track stuff getting done.
- [30:50]
A
Do you think these solo advisors will continue hiring these people as they grow or do you think they will start using agents within your tool to scale
- [30:57]
B
up without agents more aggressively? I get plenty of emails of like, I thought I would have needed a team by now and I'm quite happy. I think there's always some. I listened to a podcast recently from the founder of Notion for those I admire that tool. It's really great team. They've kind of reinvented themselves twice. And he talks about humans are, you know, AIs. AI changes a lot. Humans are pretty hierarchical. Like there's some, as things scale, they build teams and teams want to accomplish more. And you like, there's a natural flow there. And I think like the advisor who's like, I'm gonna really build something big here. They want to build a team, they want to hire. I think though solo is in a golden age of like increased capacity or at least increased delight of their job or decreased admin time. And so that's a lot like personality
- [31:46]
C
dependent as far as the CRM. I mean I don't, you know, I, I don't see it dying. And maybe we could, we could even reference Craig Iskwitz did a podcast episode. I think he might have wrote it in a company article as well about like the AI note taker killing off the CRM being the death of the CRM. So like the death of the CRM is definitely a theme. But in my mind, even as somebody who kind of said like, hey, we need to reinvent it, I don't think it's going anywhere. And I think a lot of it is what you've said, Thomas, which is that like essentially you still need a system of record, there are still things that need to be tracked, people still like a user interface. Right. And you know, as someone who loves to build and tinker and has basically built everything, I'd want a perfect CRM to be on my own. I still go back to my core CRM. Even though I have an AI enabled assistant. I talk to it on Telegram, it preps me for meetings, records, audio and like that I could listen to. It's conversational, it does all those things. Doesn't stop me from opening my CRM and wanting to read things in there, look at lists of tasks and things like that. Like there's still times where you want to consume more data and you need to see it visually to just kind of get your mind around like what you want to do. You can't always have outsourced the, you can't outsource the decision making all the time.
- [33:00]
B
Yeah. And if we get more agentic. But there's gonna be some like you keep, I think you keep marching on that journey but there's still some delightful thing of logging into slant and like these are my tasks, these are my meetings. Oh, like a. I found some things I should do today. These are my nudges. Like great. Like I feel like in maybe my first hour I can kind of win the day and move on to, you know, whatever my backlog had or spending time with my family like that. That's. I think the magic is in between.
- [33:29]
C
I think, I think the right CRMs are thinking.
- [33:33]
A
Sorry, go ahead, James.
- [33:34]
C
I was just gonna say I think the, I think, you know, if you're a futurist building a CRM, the thought is always like, I. I would think the thought should be how do I convert more of this to action and take less of the data? Like reduce the dependency for the data. Right. Like, how do I do more for you? So I can reduce that UI surface area. Right. And just kind of continue to give you the balance you want, like the amount you want as we progress. Because how we're using it today, how we're going to use it three years from now is going to feel completely different, I think. And so like today we want A pretty heavy ui, but like maybe three years from now we'll feel pretty comfortable with something pretty lean.
- [34:18]
B
And then that link system can it just. Is it connected to the right thing and have the right history? Okay, what is that?
- [34:25]
C
So still find.
- [34:26]
A
I mean speaking of like future futurists thinking about CRMs, I mean even the most AI pilled people on X, you know, I'm thinking of Gary Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator. You know he built this tool called GBrain. He's been you know, up till 2am working on this thing and even that produces markdown files that he then reviews. Right. To prepare him for meetings and to look through. He does a lot of meetings so he still requires some level of CRM. So he's still producing something that requires him to manually review it to be clear. So I think it's interesting that we as humans, because if you're in a relationship based business, we as humans want to be able to see something visually and feel we understand how the world fits together. So I feel like that's actually really interesting. I do want to think a little bit about what the boundaries are of the slant universe. What will slant build, what won't slant build. So sounds like obviously CRM, task management, note taker, those are squarely in the realm of, of what you'll build. And then I guess if I understand correctly, like agent builder as well, like building, helping people build agents, that's also in the realm. Yes. Yeah. And then what about like when we start getting into building proposals, building documents, you know, annual check in plans, quarterly check in plans, drafting emails, all that stuff. Is that another area you're getting into?
- [35:51]
B
Yeah, yeah. Drafting like email, making email better. We're trying to solve every day and keep getting better at. So like draft the email, make it awesome. Hey, when you log in you only see emails from your clients or your prospects and no other vendor or whatever. So a lot of email. I think what you talked about there like proposal generation, a beautiful document. You guys probably experienced it. Well your, your AI users heavy, heavy of it. Like me like probably I would say a month ago like was when the models just got cool, really good at images. You know it used to be like oh let make a poster and like the what letters were a little wonky or it couldn't quite put words right. And now it's like hey, I want a diagram of like I want an infographic of snowfall in Utah for the past 10 years and how much has melted and how much goes to Lake Powell and boom. Like it'll make a beautiful thing that looks like a publisher had made it. You know, a while back with that. When that, when that happened, me and my co founder were immediately texting and like, all right, like model is at a point of great beautiful visual. Like you know, when we do meeting prep right now it's just words like, okay, can I make that a beautiful PDF because maybe the advisor wants to print it and put on the desk before the client comes in. Or hey, you just did a financial planning meeting. Like with all the data we got from the meeting and the emails and everything else, like, can I make a beautiful financial plan proposal? You know, they're like, hey, here's the things we talked about. Here's what the Monte Carlos said. Like, so that's what we're, we're thinking about that problem right now.
- [37:23]
A
What about actually doing financial planning? Like actually creating a financial plan? Is that another area you're thinking?
- [37:28]
B
I mean, I think we'll keep like people do a job in right Capital and E money every day. And that is like you gotta own a lot of assumptions pretty loudly to tell someone like you're, you're 95% good to retire at this age. Like I think that's like. And like a planner's job is in there. I think they have like, they're priced and used in a very particular way. Because planning is a full time job. I want every full time employee at the company to need to use slant, not just a couple of them. So I would think like deliverable, not plan is where we're thinking. It's like webmap.
- [38:03]
C
So I got a, I got a question. Since I was, since I was fanboying earlier, I feel like now I, now I want to push a little bit. So I looked at the hero of your website and saw, I believe it says something like the relationship CRM. Right, The Relationship CRM for financial advisors. And I had written an article last year and Mark referenced it earlier. Right. That, that kind of coined a term that I don't love, but coined a term the relationship operating system, which now
- [38:29]
B
a lot of people try to ra. Raise a lot of venture money on no matter what their widget is.
- [38:33]
C
So I agree. So here's, here's my question. If you are the relationship CRM, relationships I really think of as two sided. And when I look at slant and as great as I do think it is, it seems to really mostly focus on the advisor side of the relationship. So are you guys looking to expand that to the client side? Right. Like with your Partnership with current client. Obviously there's some client communication beyond email. Right. You're getting. You're getting text and phone all bundled in. But in terms of. If you think about some of the others. Right. Like, I'll even throw out like a financial. Right. Which is really trying to own that front communication portal with the client. Is that on the table?
- [39:22]
B
Yeah, like the. I talk to a lot of users about things they want and like I hear a lot like I want a better client portal every. Every day.
- [39:35]
C
I think I get asked every other week if I could build one.
- [39:38]
B
Yeah, right. That's like. I think it's like very top of mind for advisor. Like, hey, I'm kind of in the. I'm giving them like a Right. Capital portal or an E money portal that I don't know if I feel like it represents my brand, you know, like that's. I think a lot of advisors say that out loud. I want to make the relationship stronger. Advisor to client and client to advisor. I think right now. Right. Jack of all trades, master of none. Like, we do have to figure out what is most important. There are too many problems I think for us to solve right now of an ops team getting the job done inside of a firm or a solo having a much smoother migration or, you know, like there's still table stakes CRM to get better at. I think like it's. We. It's easy to underestimate. Like, yeah, it's like a. It's a table of people and some tasks like that is the simple version. And then when you get in the edge cases, it gets harder. I think. Yeah. Some natural appendages for us are, hey, when does. When does client portal make sense? I think is like more a question than does client portal make sense? And then similar to that is, I think the big, the bigger version of that is like client intake form. Right. Like precise FP has what percent of the market and is like. I mean, does anyone like to look at it? No.
- [40:52]
A
Well, that's sort of your heritage as well. Right? That's sort of sort of what pageport started doing. So it become.
- [40:57]
B
Yeah, like we had a client portal in some ways. Yeah. It was sort of static, but. And so yeah, we, we think about that problem a lot. And I think it's a time question, not a should we do it question.
- [41:10]
A
And you're still not seeing these folks vibe coding their own client portals. That's not something people do.
- [41:16]
B
That's what they. A lot start and then like, do I really want to have them upload their tax return on my replic coded portal. I don't know. And then they hesitate and then they write me an email or something.
- [41:28]
A
They're probably worried about the auditors or what, what, what's holding them back? Holding them back there.
- [41:32]
B
I think it's like, did I really do this right? Is like the vibe code question often. And so we don't. Yeah. When does an advisor need to, you know, make their own stuff and can they make it beautiful? Like it's a fun, fun problem.
- [41:47]
C
I mean, along those, along those lines, like I've, I've actually. So I, I spend a lot of time outside of this. I spend a lot of time talking with other folks like Thomas. Right. Lots of founders and co founders and stuff. And there's been a surprising number of RaaS recently, like leaving their practice and building tools for other RAAs. And so I've talked with a few recently. Even one that was actually like onboarding customers getting paid, you know, was generating revenue. And then when we dove in and looked at things like there was no code repository, like, wasn't using GitHub, didn't have anything backed up besides his local machine. Like, you know, like was just, just had deployed things to, you know, Vercel and was like, things were deployed. But there was nothing that I was like, you need to stop taking customers money yesterday. Like, this is not okay if this is like this. I have serious concerns about the cons, the security setup. Like, just because you got it to work doesn't mean it's okay to use. Yeah, like that's, that's not a product you can sell. And I think, I think we're in a period where like the market's gonna be flooded with this. So how. I don't know whether it's a good thing or bad thing for legitimate firms. Because what I'm trying to figure out is, is there a way where you'll be able to stand out as like, we're a legitimate organization who knows how to develop software or we're somebody and you don't know what's behind here. We have a product that looks cool.
- [43:19]
B
Well, I've always been on campus.
- [43:20]
C
I've coated it over the weekend.
- [43:21]
B
Yeah, some people don't like this, but yeah, I'll own it. I've always owned like by advisor for Advisor to me is like, no way. Like, that's a claim you hear a lot on a lot of tech. Like, oh, like we've made this by advisor for advisor. Like, don't you want a technologist building Your critical stuff. I don't know, it'd be like me saying like, right, like I'm from buying a car. I don't want it made by the shoe guy. I want it made by a car guy. Yeah, I don't want a Nike car. I want a Tesla. You know, like, you're like, great. You're getting like you're gonna put all your clients data in this forever and all their socials and all their everything. Like, do you want the one. The guy who actually, he still like manages aum and has client relationships is focused on that. Like, do you want him to make it? Like, I don't think so. I think you want a technologist to make it.
- [44:10]
A
It's like saying you're doing cancer treatments by advisors for advisors. You know, it's like, is that really what you want?
- [44:14]
B
Yeah, dude, I help advisors who get cancer because I was an advisor. Like, no, no, no, no, no. I want the cancer guy.
- [44:19]
A
Empathy is not enough. You want some level of knowledge. Yeah, I totally understand. I mean, I think the. But I mean, maybe on the flip side, thinking of the specialists, sorry, the generalists in this space, you know, let's talk about Salesforce. It's always fun to take potshots at Salesforce. So is there. What is the outlook for Salesforce? You know, they've been. They're basically a bet so heavily on Agent Force and at the same time it just feels like they're a little bit out of step with where things are. And you know, just considering their costs, their cost structure and the, their subscription costs, it feels like, I mean, they were, they were like basically target number one with the SaaS apocalypse. And then at the same time, I've heard recently a counter narrative to the SaaS apocalypse, which is that people will be using more SaaS tools in the future because these agentic tools will all use SAS tools. Agents will use SAS tools way more than humans because there's no limit to their amount of time. They'll just use SaaS tools 247 and so. And I've actually seen this, by the way. Like I use Codex and you can actually have it go do stuff on SaaS tools all the time. Um, super, super interesting. So yeah, I'm just curious what your take is of big SaaS at this point. And big CRM.
- [45:32]
B
Big, big SaaS. Big CRM. Like Salesforce is always going to be in a fortunate spot of like, they built so much for so long and have so many legacy customers who. It's like, even if they like, if let's say they have an internal Net promoter score of 1 out of 10 on their own CRM. They won't move it, right? Like, it's like, it's all in here. It does. Like, our billing and the. Like, they'll stack the list of things because you can kind of dream it and do it if you have the
- [46:04]
A
inertia of a system of record.
- [46:06]
B
Yeah, this is like.
- [46:07]
C
I mean, it's like, look at banking software, right? Like, there's some banking software that we're still running, probably coded in the 80s.
- [46:15]
B
You go to your local chase. Like, there's like some DOS going on on the screen. You're like, okay, we're just doing this. And so I think that, like, because of that, I think it changes. Like, the. The CRM will die narrative probably has no negative effect on, let's say it. It executes perfectly in the. In that. In someone's mind. I think Salesforce is as used by those. Like, it's like. Like, yeah. Now our agents go look at the terrible database and figure it out. Like, it becomes like a background layer instead of a front layer, but it needs to live somewhere. But I think, like, you know, we're mig. We're migrating some Salesforces now as we keep getting bigger and, like, you run into things, you're like, they're like, we do this in here. You're like, well, we're not doing that. You gotta do that somewhere. You know, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna invoice your, you know, janitor for your building. Like, that's just, you know, I'm not doing that. I'm sorry.
- [47:07]
A
Is that because of app exchange functionality or is that actually. Literally, Salesforce has functionality that's, like, so custom?
- [47:13]
B
I think, like, no, there's just like, everything. Because I. Yeah. If you have the right Salesforce consultant in the room and you say, I want to do it, great, we'll go do it.
- [47:21]
A
Yeah.
- [47:21]
B
Like, sure. You want to give us 100?
- [47:25]
A
It's like the classic joke of, like, you know, you meet someone in the bar and they're like, who are you? Like, who do you want me to be? You know, like, yeah, basically what Salesforce is, right?
- [47:34]
B
And I think. And I think, like, they were. They were early enough, and they have earned that right by, you know, and we're saying, like, we gotta be opinionated. We gotta say what we do and don't do, right? And there's users who come in, right? And we're like, you know, like a good. A fun Example for us is like, like Red Tail has a native calendar. Like you don't need to have Google or Outlook, you can just have Red Tail calendar or into the firm, everyone. So it's like we live out a red tail calendar. And like I, I have all these really niche features. I'm like, hey, there's a company called Microsoft, a company called Google and they're worth over a trillion dollars and they have a pretty good calendar. Like I'm not gonna do it,
- [48:13]
A
you need to switch.
- [48:15]
B
And some, some are using red till and they use out the calendar. They're just moving on with their life and it doesn't even change. But you, you hear that like oh, like how could the, how could you not have a calendar here? Like why?
- [48:24]
C
I don't know.
- [48:24]
A
Speaking of change of behavior, I want to talk a little bit about like end user change in behavior and then I think we can move to lightning round cause we're sort of getting to the end here. But like the, you know, Claude has launched their financial wealth management sort of area slash capability. ChatGPT launched, you know, their plaid connection. So you can now connect all your bank accounts.
- [48:48]
B
Build your financial plan, right?
- [48:49]
A
It's kind of a build your financial plan, do whatever you would need to do. And so, you know, there's obviously the seeds of people, actually the people who want to be self directed being able to do a lot with this. And there's always been this view, you know, hey look, there's self directed people and there's non self directed. Financial advisors always can just deal with a non self directed. But the question is going forwards, how are people going to change their behavior? Right? And then I guess maybe just to add on to that, speaking of Claude, I heard that some anthropic employees banded together to basically form effectively a buyer's union, saying they want to basically lower the wealth management fees for the upcoming ipo. Right. And so they'll, they'll contract en masse with wealth managers, but lower fees. Right, like collective bargaining.
- [49:38]
B
Right, collective bargaining for 25 bips instead of 75 or something.
- [49:42]
A
Exactly. Or, or maybe free flat fee. I imagine that probably do flat fee. By the way, it makes you wonder why do those people need an advisor if they have wealth management built into Claude? That's a really good question. But yeah, I mean, what do you think will change in terms of the end user behavior here?
- [50:01]
B
Yeah, end user behavior is a good one. I try to. Every month I get a batch of interviews together of people who recently retired and that's just like they just a service I use and they get people in. It's, it's great. Cause I'll just say like, hey, you just retired, congrats. Like who helped you? What did you learn? Who did? And I try to ask all these questions. Well, over half those people have, have serious financial discussions with Claude or chat in their 60s. Like the most of them still used an advisor and it never changed. Did they? Would they or would they have not worked with one? It did change what they came to the meeting with pretty drastically. So like there's a lot of like, hey, you know my, I don't, you know, like my son in law told me all about crypto and I did all this research and I have X dollars like advisor, should I really be buying a whole bitcoin? Like yes or no? You know, like, like that's a real example someone gave or you know, someone could come, someone came into a meeting, they said it was awesome because they're like, hey, I'd actually been sold like a pretty sleazy annuity 10 years ago. How can I get out of it? Like I think that they would have had a whole meeting on uncovering that. They had that meanwhile they could like upload the document, understand what it was and then go to the advisor and be like, this is what my problem is. I think the self directed percents don't change at all. Even as good as these agent kits. I think just the self directed people are happier and can do more and tinker more. I think that fundamental feeling that like a 55 or 60 year old or you know, whatever age it might be of like, hey, I think I'm want to be done working and I'm not sure I can. And they call their friend who just retired and they refer their advisor. Like that does not seem to be slowing down one bit. So I think is behavior changing? Yes. Is like the addressable market for advisors going down? No, I think it's, I think it'll keep.
- [52:05]
A
Yeah. Classic Jarvan's paradox. People research more, get more interested and then want to talk to a special
- [52:10]
B
and then have a more intense question. Right? Yeah, you get like, okay, great. I actually understand what RMD means now and I think I'm okay, but can you make a plan for me? Can you do that? Like, you know, there's like, there's a reason plenty of firms who even just sell a financial plan at a pretty, you know, at a hefty price because like they want someone who's a professional to go look at it and, and Write it up for them.
- [52:31]
C
So, you know, this, this is kind of random, but like one. One use case and simply a little bit of a pivot. But like one use case that just kind of came to mind was these people were doing like self research. Right. And something that I've heard from a lot of advisors is like, we want to educate our customers and our prospects. Right. On financial literacy, and we want them to be more educated. And it's like, I'm sure it's being done, but one thing I haven't really seen is firms using AI to build educational items, educational content, right? Like, they're always like, oh, how could I use AI in my firm? And, you know, they talk about like, marketing maybe, but I'm like, why not educational? Why not something that helps them understand certain things? Like, it doesn't have to be a calculator. It doesn't have to be that sort of thing where you got to worry about accuracy, that kind of accuracy. But to me, that seems like, you know, step one, build something that your customer could use to be more educated on your service, their options.
- [53:32]
B
Yeah, totally. Like the image. Like, like the model getting better at images, right? You probably used to like, hey, I want to make a. You know, we help people retired. We have a cool one pager on RMDs. We paid a designer this many years ago. You can make like, you can make a beautiful 1, 2, 3 pager on any topic you think you have regularly and send it out, distribute it, get it in their hands. Like you could, you know, like, oh, I don't know if I can make videos. Like, well, you can make us write a script and record one and send it. Like, you know, there's like, I think, yeah, education's a great. People should make more of it. There's a reason.
- [54:07]
C
One of those things, like, there's a reason barrier isn't really there.
- [54:10]
B
Yeah, the advisors on YouTube are the ones growing the fastest because they're educating the most. They're out there just saying, like, hey, you know, can I retire at 59 with 2 million bucks? Like, you know, the thumbnail and whatever? Like, that's true. You have a million clients when you do that video.
- [54:24]
C
Well, we'll probably get a million views on this one.
- [54:27]
A
I would think it's just a tad
- [54:29]
C
above our most recent one. So I'm sure we'll. We'll be there. Mark, are we into. Are we into rapid fire? Is that where we're at?
- [54:37]
A
Let's do it. Lightning round, rapid lightning firing rounds.
- [54:42]
C
We never go that Rapid. I mean, we call it that. We can. I'm ready.
- [54:45]
B
If I'm like one word answer, I can do it. But we should probably.
- [54:50]
C
We should probably do that. Yeah, you should do it.
- [54:52]
B
I'll regret it. I don't know. All right, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna,
- [54:59]
C
I'm gonna pull them right off the script that I, I didn't read prior to today. Are you a CRM or an operating system?
- [55:06]
B
CRM or CRM?
- [55:08]
C
All right, there it was.
- [55:09]
A
There's the light.
- [55:09]
C
Your turn, Mark.
- [55:11]
A
Which CRM will.
- [55:13]
C
I'm in.
- [55:13]
A
Come on, we gotta be faster. Which CRM will go out of business in the next three years?
- [55:17]
B
Out of business, I could pivot that to lose the most market share. But out of business, all the new ones that advisors build every day that they announce.
- [55:26]
A
Okay, all right. I appreciate red. Diplomatic answer.
- [55:30]
C
I wouldn't answer that one either. So I don't. There's. There, There are too many. I mean, to be. There are a bunch of like vibe coded CRMs, like, coming out, not necessarily just in our space, but like everywhere.
- [55:44]
B
Everywhere. Yeah, that's.
- [55:46]
C
If you go on, if you go on Reddit, like, for me, you, you can't go five minutes without being hit by like, I couldn't find a CRM I like, so I built my own.
- [55:54]
B
Yeah.
- [55:56]
C
So I think there's going to continue to be more, more people jumping into this. But it's a crowded space and only some are going to get it right. But. Sorry, Mark, Go ahead. You got it.
- [56:05]
A
Well, most underrated and most overrated AI tool or technology out there.
- [56:12]
B
Overrated. I'm an AI optimist, so that gets hard. But I'll think of one AI. Overrated is like when it's. Yeah, we thought about building this, we ended up not doing it. So that's probably. I'll say it like marketing specific. Oh, I'll make you a Facebook ad or I'll write you a perfect newsletter. Like you can do that in the. Just the normal model and it's going to be mid anyway. Like, if it's going to be a good newsletter, you would have written it. Like, I'll own that.
- [56:39]
A
Hmm.
- [56:40]
B
Underrated. I think, like, I still think just pure Claude on your machine doing some jobs for you every day. Underrated, Claude, Coworker. I think advisors would be baffled who keep trying more on that.
- [56:52]
A
What percent of advisors do you think are using cloud cowork right now?
- [56:55]
B
15.
- [56:57]
A
That's. I think that's high. I would put it at like 2%. Like Claude coworker Claude and chat, sure, but Claude coworker Codex or even Claude code. I mean, I. We had Jason Piera around. He. He was on the podcast early on saying Claude code is the most underrated thing. And this was like, in January, so before things really started blowing up.
- [57:19]
B
Before the mega takeoff in February.
- [57:21]
A
Yeah.
- [57:22]
C
So, all right, I got one. And it's right in your alley. Advice for an advisor. Miserable on their CRM, but terrified to migrate.
- [57:29]
B
Hmm. Yeah. Come to slant, we'll take care of you. Easy one. The.
- [57:33]
A
The.
- [57:34]
B
The last pump my tires answer. Yeah. The best companies should be able to confidently tell you whether that's like, you know, whoever, a con, perfect. A great consultant, a great CRM. Like, I've seen this before. I can handle that nasty JSON file and figure it out for you. With AI, the best company should be able to do that. I think that, like, people used to hide behind that for a long time. Like, I'm never gonna be able to get out of here. Now you're like, no. Like, there's really good engineers who really want to you to be the system of record. Like, hand em the file. If you trust them, sign an NDA and they'll come out there the other side with great stuff for you. Or they won't. And then, great. Make sure the terms are set up where you're not going to be hosed if they do a bad job.
- [58:16]
C
Yeah. I mean, as someone who's done. I mean, I've been doing CR CRM conversion since 2007, so I'm creeping up on like, two decades of CRM conversions. They are so much easier. Like, so much easier. It is. The time has compressed enormously. Yeah. And they are so much easier to do. The first pass to identify, like, what's wrong, what needs to be cleaned up. The only challenge I tell my clients now is, like, if the actual architecture is drastically different and you need to, like, re. Engineer, remap, you know, maybe you had consolidated households as like, a contact that now you need to break into, like, the individual members, those sort of things. But even with AI, you can very easily do that when it used to take somebody with some technical ability. Right. To really even get that to happen. So. Yeah, so much easier. All right, what do we got? We got any more?
- [59:09]
A
I am. Well, actually. What's your daily driver? What. What AI tool besides slant of do you use?
- [59:15]
C
I thought we were getting into cars.
- [59:16]
B
I got excited, man. It's a real good one.
- [59:22]
A
You know, thumbs up, thumbs down. That's like a good Good question. Yeah. So you could take that any way you want.
- [59:30]
B
Yeah. I'm driving to work on my 2007 Honda CRV. Just kidding. No, my daily driver for AI. Yeah, I'm. I, I have different jobs for chat versus Claude that are pretty drastic. Tell me more. Yeah, I try. I for Chat really helps me with things that I've done a lot of times and have built like a really good memory in. There's some personal stuff in there and then there's a lot of work stuff in there that is like great. Like my like repository of how I've handled a lot of different compliance conversations is really valuable to me in mind there. Like that one like helps me a ton. My most used agent though, we call it Water Boy. Here at Slant, we have a. A machine. Yeah. And it's on a cooler of water because Waterboy helps the team. And you know, Slant is a team and we have a football. All of our names are football adjacent. Waterboy. I can ask any question about the product, how it works, how anything is happening. Like, hey, why did this happen to this user? Or what's this experience with this?
- [60:35]
A
Is this a machine that's on like, is this an openclaw agent or something? Is it running locally on a Mac?
- [60:41]
B
Own agent we built on a Mac in our office.
- [60:44]
A
Okay, so it's running locally on a Mac. Did you build it from scratch? Openclaw, Hermes. How'd you do it?
- [60:49]
B
Yeah. Max and Radley are first my co founder and then our very first senior engineer we hired from early Pageport days. Gotten like we had. So our support needs keep scaling. We have more users. This is like the origin of this is like, great. We have more and more support needs and it was a lot of times like it gets to some critical juncture of like an onboarder support or anyone is like, why is this happening? This user, I don't understand this functionality or how does this work? How should it have worked? And you know, like an engineer could go read the logs, but that's an unlikely. You know, it's hard. That's like no one wants to do that. It's hard to process. Like AI is really good at reading the logs. And so I can, you can go and ask Waterboy what happened and figure it out. It will look like, hey, this is the journey they went on or hey, I'm. I'm not sure how this feature should work. What should I do? A user wants to accomplish this from their old workflow in, you know, act and juncture. Like, how do I change it, you know, like, okay, like, it, it knows the entire code base. It knows the logic, it knows what's happening. And you can just go ask it nice. Yeah, it is. It has like, our support capacity is well over 5x because of water.
- [61:57]
C
I won't say, I won't say what product. Cause I, I don't, I don't know if this was legit that I could do this, but I was working on a project and I took their entire help file and every document I could find on their product and how it works, and I had dumped it into a Claude project and then used that because their help file on its own was absolute dog shit and use that to help me write custom scripts for them to troubleshoot, to quickly answer questions on what the system was capable and not capable of, et cetera. And so it was fantastic because I would actually ask the consultants and the service providers who worked at that company and they would confidently give me wrong answers. And then I would point them to the help file and ask them to go validate, which is correct. And then they'd be like, oh, I was wrong. It can do this. Here's how you set it up.
- [62:41]
B
Yeah. Updated our docs the amount of time I got that. You get that now, like, because you're like, oh, I can read your docs now pretty fast.
- [62:49]
C
Yeah. So it's, I mean, like, that's a good use case for people too. Like for your existing tech. Like dump all the help files.
- [62:56]
B
Yeah.
- [62:56]
C
Into it and ask it how to do something in the application. I mean, most firms are building that like that sort of chat into their product, but that's another good use case for people. Well, anyway, on that, on that note, my pontification for this podcast is over. Thomas, thank you for coming on the show. It was great to, to get to chat and see AI native. I feel like we could have went on for a couple of hours. I have a host of questions and would love to kind of compare Slant to some of the big boys out there, but maybe we'll save that for an episode too. But thank you for coming on.
- [63:31]
B
Thank you, James and Mark. This was a blast. It's a. Thanks for making this pod too. I've longtime listener, first time caller, so happy to be here and participate and
- [63:41]
A
where people who've listened this long, where can they find out more about Slant and about you?
- [63:46]
C
Everybody's still listening, Mark. Nobody laughs.
- [63:49]
B
Slant app is the right place to go. And then feel free to send me an email Thomas at ThomasLant app and I'll I'll reply. Happy to answer any questions.
- [63:59]
C
Another brave man. This is like the third. The third founder, like, giving out their email.
- [64:03]
A
I know.
- [64:03]
C
I love it.
- [64:05]
A
Agents are at work now emailing you.
- [64:07]
C
The reality is everybody can get it now.
- [64:09]
B
Anyway, scour the transcript, find the email, write the guy, tell them you want an integration with whatever.
- [64:14]
A
All right, well, looking forward to seeing what you build next, so thanks. Thanks, Thomas. Really appreciate it.
- [64:19]
B
Thanks, guys. That was fun.
- [64:20]
C
Thank you.
- [64:21]
A
Bye. Bye.