Back to Basics w/ Michael Hoy | Ep. 158

In this episode of the Biz/Dev podcast David flies solo and the bumpers are off the rails. He chats with multi founder and current CEO of Atlas, a B2B payment infrastructure platform.  What the heck is that? Listen in and they chat going back to basics, learning to ride the wave of brand expansion and what humility and loyalty mean in business today.

LINKS:
Michael's LinkedIn

Atlas Website

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David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

[00:00:03] David: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the biz dev podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host, and I am without Gary. So I have no one to make fun of which is makes me sad and lonely, but more importantly, we are joined today by Michael Hoy, who is the CEO and co founder of the business.

Of Atlas, who we will, we'll ask about Atlas and all that good stuff in here in a minute. He's also an ex pindo person. So if you are in the Raleigh area, you will know what that means. Otherwise we'll have to ask him welcome, Michael. Thank you for joining us, man.

[00:00:31] Michael Hoy: David, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:34] David: So tell me about Atlas. That's I got to start there.

That's your current love.

[00:00:38] Michael Hoy: Yeah that's my baby right now. Atlas is a B2B billing infrastructure software. We sell to mostly small SAS companies and small to mid size application layer AI businesses. And. Companies primarily use Atlas because we facilitate a usage based, outcome based, action based pricing without without those teams needing to use their developers.

So it's pretty plug and play to allow them to monetize their product in honestly, any way that, that they want to.

[00:01:13] David: So drill that down a bit for me. So what does that mean? You're helping them with business? Pricing. Are you saying you're like an apartment complex that now has dynamic pricing, depending on what day you look at them. Or are you saying that you're basically a stripe competitor? What are you doing?

[00:01:27] Michael Hoy: Yeah, it's a great question. We For good context, we actually sit on top of stripes payment gateway. So we handled everything in the billing and invoicing process up through payment. So a customer of ours would use us in conjunction with stripes, payment gateway, or QuickBooks or charge B's gateway, whichever they use.

But to your first example, if a customer wants to use this that way, they absolutely can. What what we're built for is not just speed of implementation, but the flexibility of business model. We very much view ourselves as like picks and shovels software, right? And every business is going to be a little different.

Think AISDR companies that might want to price based on a certain. Tier batch amount of email sent, or maybe even meetings booked, right? Versus a company that's doing data compression and maybe they book revenue based on, the amount of data that they that they're able to move through and process all of that.

We try to provide the tools in which they can monetize off of those. Actions or or units of consumption, no matter how small or how big. And then it's up to the business to decide how they monetize that. Whether that's yeah. Like you said, almost like surge rate pricing. We certainly have the ability to do that with like credit drawdowns, or if they want to do something a bit more standard where they offer like a subscription fee plus a certain amount of usage units on top price debt, a very predictable rate.

Again, all up to the customer.

[00:02:58] David: So if I am, I most of our clients and most startups that I talk to. Most of them are simple two sided markets, right? I am a middleman of some sort there. Airbnb is the classic example of a two sided market. You have people who want to go on vacation. You've got people who want to rent out their homes.

There's your two sides and Airbnb sticks themselves in the middle to make that happen. That's a classic example. Example. So that's pricing's pretty straight forward, right? That's not camp complicated. Would you need something like Atlas for that? Or is that overkill at that point?

[00:03:32] Michael Hoy: Yeah, that's a, it's a good question. It might be in that realm overkill. Plus, by the way, there are businesses built for, and strictly, on the industry of pricing Airbnb rentals and managing Airbnb rentals. I think at that, but I think at this point though, for a two sided marketplace, right?

The the value equation is usually pretty simple. Customer's going to come in to merchant has a single or maybe very few line items to offer. Often it's like an experience or physical good, or maybe even a service within itself, and that's either priced based on the hour on the night or, Hey some combination of cost plus, right?

This is what it took for me to produce this product, run through logistics and get it to you, and that's the cost software is a little bit different. First and foremost, it's a high margin business. Cost plus is usually a model that. Most software companies don't adopt because the value what, the value that their software drives is usually much higher and they're able to extract more wallet share.

But with, the inclusion now of AI and almost every product, there is a new cost center, right? And you layer that on top of the fact that software is put together. And built on multiple feature sets that can you know, combined into multiple entitlements or plans or packages, right? And then the complexity becomes very real, right?

In terms of what you, as the merchant can do to put those together to be most optimal, both for your business and for the customer. And so what we're trying to do is one, make it easier for you to know what is the most optimal choice. But then. Two, of course, there's going to be a series of testing and iteration that goes along with that.

And if you don't have to spend the developer hours testing and iterating and deploying new business models on your way to finding the right one within all of that complexity, you're going to be that much more efficient, that much quicker to market, obviously that much better at at building revenue for your business.

So simply put like the example that you offered. I don't think there's room for us because I think they've got it pretty figured out in that equation. Yeah, but with with software we, we like to overcomplicate things.

[00:05:52] David: So

I'm just trying to wrap my head around it because like pricing is such a weird thing when it comes to startups and new businesses, pricing is always a scary thing. They're always worried about, charging too much and it kills them right out of the gate, charging too little and they're leaving money on the table. And it's an existential crisis often early on. To figure out pricing. Is it, I've, do I have too many tiers, right? Is that adding too much friction? These are all words that you hear. And what you're sounding like is your stuff is it's I, we have a guy I mentored or advised who their startup was based on usage. And it sounds man, that's probably perfect for something like Atlas because their usage would climb and maybe there's tears and all of that, but you still have to be able to, no matter how complicated your pricing is, right? You've gotta be able to explain it simply or you're screwed is So how, if I have these complicated things where I need Atlas, how do I still keep that simple enough that I'm not scaring off customers?

[00:06:54] Michael Hoy: You are like really touching on, big open wound in our industry right now it, the, there are two competing factors here. One is you of course, want to build your software to the point where it continuously delivers more value. And. Oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes what that means is that companies are going to build more features, make, go wider, right?

We certainly have seen that with a lot of products that we probably use today. Slack's gone wider, air tables gone wider, all these companies are now the app for everything, right? And so therefore it inherently gets more complex, but. 

[00:07:33] Michael Hoy: You are 100 percent correct. When we think about going to market, holy cow.

Simplicity is, inevitably one of the biggest levers you can pull. If people don't understand, not just like your pricing model, but your product and what you're doing, you are going to struggle.

[00:07:53] Michael Hoy: One of the things that we're trying to teach the market, and this is, ancillary and related to our product, but not necessarily the product itself, is that your go to market and your product market fit.

Are still very much determined by, Hey, how you price and package, right? Because that was very much how your consumers or your customers are going to see your product. They're going to look at it through the lens of. How much am I paying for it? How much is it worth? And if that, that's a critical touch point in the customer journey, if that's too complicated, you're going to lose them.

Just if your messaging is off. So it is the very competing competing forces in software right now. But. Simplicity is always going to win.

[00:08:37] David: There's a lot of things you brought up there that I'd love to dig into, but I want to take a curve ball here for a second. You company is new, right? You guys have been around since September. Is that right? So just a few months.

[00:08:50] Michael Hoy: Yes.

[00:08:51] David: So what is, and in all practicality, are you still building the product? Did you build it while you were working at your previous employer and it's now going live four months ago or whatever?

Or that's not a lot of time. So where are you in a practical sense of a business?

[00:09:07] Michael Hoy: Yeah. I appreciate that question. You're going to get me in trouble if I claim 

[00:09:10] David: Yeah, that's fair. Of course you would only do that on nights and weekends and never on a Pendo laptop. I totally understand.

[00:09:16] Michael Hoy: No. All good. And trust me, we're all still so friendly with the crew back at Pendo and shout out to anyone who's watching. We love you guys. But so great question. We wrote our first lines of code for this product in July. We launched the product publicly. In we announced the product in September.

We launched it live to customers in October. And of course, building is continuous. And we actually just three days ago launched what we viewed as the second half of our product live. So we started with an analytics version of our application that helped customers understand how their business models were performing.

And where there might be gaps and risks where they might have opportunity to monetize better. And then just three days ago, we launched our billing platform. And that allows our customers to connect their Usage or sentiment or any third party piece of data that they want to monetize and create invoices out of it, right?

So now we have these two parts of the application that work cohesively together. One that provides you insight and the other that allows you to take action on it. And and so we are, we're, very young. Company very immature product. And think about it as the bare bones, only the necessities of what you would need to deploy usage based pricing without your engineers.

And right now we're in the process and We're fortunate enough to have acquired early customers. And we're in the process of understanding, okay, what's the next phase? How do we learn from these customers and continue to build not just a product that delivers a ton of value, but is differentiated in

[00:11:01] David: You're, it's interesting. Again, I, this is what we do is we build what you guys or products like yours, and so

you're very much in the MVP stage. So are you doing a lot of stuff, Behind the scenes and not an automated fashion. Like it's not uncommon at your stage that your database is air table rather than a big SQL server fancy thing, or it's not really automated.

It's a dude in the back. Who's just working really hard, but their customer doesn't know the difference because eventually you will automate that, but they get, it's a spreadsheet that a dude builds rather than a system builds. Is that where you're at or are you, do you have a full time team just rocking and rolling?

Like, how does that work?

[00:11:40] Michael Hoy: Yeah, it's a combination of all those. First of all, I'm the dude in the back. And so is my co founder Clay. And we do have we do have an excellent engineering team, small, albeit, but Ryan, Kyle, Marco, Laura a few of those are our team members who were with us at Pendo and have joined us here at Atlas.

And so we're really pumped up about this small team that we've built. And transparently, we plan on being You know, spit gum and glue for a while, because that's just how, the expectation you need to set with yourselves, though what I will say is, thanks to the great work from Ryan, Kyle, Clay, Marco, the launch of our billing engine a few days ago.

Is what gets us out of the of processing a lot of invoices and doing a lot of, manual billing tasks for our customers, right? Essentially for the first month or so we took those on. And that's one of the reasons why they come and they work with us is because they don't they don't want to handle, linking up usage data and manually importing that into invoices.

And so we took that on for them. And now we have an engine that ingests all of that usage data and creates invoices out of them. Now we'll still have to do. A ton of manual stuff. We will do plenty of things that don't scale for a while. But but yeah, I think we're all taking a deep breath now.

We have more room to, to be able to learn from customers and build based off of their valuing inside of the product. Now that we now that we were able to push that up,

[00:13:13] David: So you guys are in the middle or just starting almost what I call the slog, which is the period of time of you've launched versus anyone caring, right? There's a long time where you're out there, you're screaming to the wind and no one cares. You are certainly in the middle of that, but you said you brought on some clients, some friends, whatever relationships you already had.

Yeah. Yeah. And they became your initial either pilots or whatever you want to call them. How are you guys to the point where that you're just focusing on them? Or are you trying to market and get out there? Like, where are you in that state?

[00:13:47] Michael Hoy: we call it, you ever seen Shawshank Redemption?

[00:13:51] David: Oh, sure.

[00:13:52] Michael Hoy: Okay. Like when Andy Dufresne's crawling through the tunnel at the end. Yeah. We're in that, we're in that stage, right? And we're not entirely certain where we are in that, right? We just have to keep crawling. And at some point.

People will care and we'll be not free, but, it will be more like a rock rolling downhill, but, we are absolutely trying to grow the customer base right now. It is something that I believe is. Extremely important for an early stage company is to go get as many repetitions as you can.

And I do see value in like building with a single design partner or a focusing on the cohort that you have. I absolutely do. I just see more value in going and getting more repetition, speaking with more companies. Honestly, like losing more, giving yourself the opportunity to lose 80 times instead of 40 times, because that's double the amount of learning that you would have had.

And so while we, honestly, probably are bursting at the seams from how we're supporting customers right now. Nothing is more, nothing is going to be more valuable than the learning especially here early on. Of going and acquiring more customers, losing and deal cycles and figuring out how to actually build our growth engine, our flywheel just a little bit better.

[00:15:22] David: So here's an ugly question for you. I am running a startup moderately successful and I need you, right? I've been doing this the hard way. I am your ideal customer, but I've been doing this longer than you have. So how are you going to convince me that you're better at pricing and managing and invoicing than I am? That's tricky, right?

[00:15:43] Michael Hoy: Yeah, that's the whole trust built, right? And there's a guy, we learned this really well at Pendo. When we, so when I joined Pendo, I was one of Pendo's first go to market hires. And I was on an excellent early stage go to market team. When I joined, it was just three salespeople. In a sales VP, it might've been four salespeople.

And this was 2016. And I'll be a product analytics or having a tool inside of your pro of your product that collected usage data was still relatively novel. There were only a few companies doing it. Some of our biggest competitors at Pendo were just starting out the amplitudes and the heaps and the walk me's of the world.

They were only about a year old and honestly, like the market was not educated in that. And what we found was so impactful was going to market in an, in a consultative way, almost like a running a transformational sale. Even though we were, and Pendo is one of those companies that started down market and grew and got pulled up market, right?

Even though we were starting down market, and I think a lot of entrepreneurs say if I'm selling a company that is like X size, then I need to just sling software, right? If you're going into a space, that's. Relatively net new, like usage based pricing, or you're going into a space that is critical infrastructure, like billing infrastructure or, then you have to go in with a consultative approach.

And so. 

[00:17:13] Michael Hoy: Actually, what we have found works insanely well for us, is before pitching our product, pitching honestly a free trial of our team. Saying, Hey, we have this program that we've run with X amount of customers and perspective customers and we run it over two weeks and it's only two hours of your time. It gives you guys an opportunity to one, work and collaborate with us, two, see what sort of output we can produce, and three, you're implemented with our product at the end

and if you want to move forward, you can. If you don't, that's totally fine. We try to go and follow this value first core value that we have. This go to market pillar, we must provide value first in order to earn that trust, to then be able to create customers and a thriving customer base.

[00:18:04] Michael Hoy: So that was, certainly not, it is certainly not something we are trying that is novel, not, and not for the Atlas team, but a great learning that we took from Pendo and that worked. 

[00:18:14] David: It's

really interesting because I think you're right at the heart of where I think a lot of our audience is or wants to be soon. You're in the thick of it and you're A lot of people have these questions. It's where these questions are, why I'm leading these questions is they have these ideas.

If I am, I'm, imposter syndrome, that whole bit. And that's a whole, argument and state of mind that we could go into, but it's real and everyone has it. And I think that your. Answers to that to say, Hey, we're coming at this consultant consultatively. Is that even a word? I don't know. But you're coming at it in such a way that you're like, we don't have all the answers, but we can get them together with you. That humility, I think is really probably could. Be used on almost any, I'm trying to think if it would work on my industry. Cause if I come in there and say, I don't really know what I'm doing, I'm pretty sure I won't get hired. So that doesn't work. If

[00:19:11] Michael Hoy: a little different, right? I think I do think like the humility piece is huge. We definitely try to position ourselves, maybe not as no at all, but hey we have a lot of experience in this space and in the least we're a fresh pair of eyes. And that might be just within itself inherently, but we also do this for a living.

We're working with, X amount of customers, and we've certainly seen more repetition and could provide some experience and some expertise that is. Different from what you have inside of the four walls of your business. I think but to go back to your first point I just don't see anything wrong with actually, approaching your first customers in a way where it's like, Hey, we're a young company, we're still very much trying to learn, right?

We our product isn't finished yet. But we do believe we can drive value to your cup, to your company. And we think the value you can drive to ours is exceptional as well, both from a learning perspective. And, if we all like each other and we agree that value is worth something from a customer perspective.

But that, I think you nailed it on the head and that it, especially as a young company, I think the humility does matter, but with a healthy amount of. Confidence that we can actually provide you with value.

[00:20:38] David: nice, I want to go refer back to what you said earlier. Cause I've had this, it's not even theory. It's just this idea. It's almost a disgust. If I'm using that might be too strong a word, but you mentioned all products are going wider.

Did you know a long time ago when you made physical products, you made your physical product and that's what you did.

That's what your company did. You made steel or you made houses or you made whatever, right? You made things and that's what you did. And you became the best thing, best company making that thing. In the world, and that's how you succeeded, but when it comes to software, you can't be the thing like slack is that you use that example, but we were complaining about that just the other day. Slack can't be just the best communication tool anymore.

No. Now it has to do all sorts. It has canvases and templates and this we're, it's now becoming a, do you want to do some project management in here? We have a template for that. Yeah. What dude, and then we use ClickUp for our project

management, which is, like a sauna or what's the other one?

I can't even remember. It doesn't matter. There's a billion of them.

Trello is another one. And it's no longer, Hey, you want to track some tasks? No. We almost have an entire word processor in this thing. Now we have AI is everywhere, knocking on the door. Do you want some AI in here?

It's only three times more money than you've been spending right now.

[00:21:58] Michael Hoy: Oh,

[00:21:59] David: When did companies. Lose the ability to just be happy with staying in their lane. Why do they now have to own all the lanes?

[00:22:08] Michael Hoy: this is well before software. I was, as you're saying that I'm, I was trying to think of, if I know, if I could think of an example, better or older than Yamaha, 

[00:22:19] David: okay, you're talking about big old conglomerates old school Samsung makes washers and televisions and microprocessors

[00:22:25] Michael Hoy: yeah. And Yamaha makes guitars, pianos, motorcycles. Amplifiers, right? I think that there is and by the way there's a very connective, there's a big piece of connective tissue here. There is, if we think about like the Samsung's and the Yamaha's of the world, right?

There is either some resource similarity or pro or manufacturing process similarity. That would allow those companies to say, Hey, with this same assembly line formation, we can build guitars along with our pianos or with this same set of of physical resources, we can build engines and the full motorcycle and believe it or not, airplanes.

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[00:23:43] Michael Hoy: And the same thing, this is very was, became very big, you probably started to read a lot about it in 2022, but it was really more of a by product of the zero interest rate era and a lot of VC money flooding into the space and pre COVID and then, post COVID, but it's the same sort of idea where a software company.

looks at, almost like their customer base is bowling pins, right? And says, Hey, we now hit the front bowling pin with our single product, but we can hit the second bowling pin, which might be a new customer base with that same product. Or we can attack the bowling pin to the right. With a, just a slightly different product to the same buyer.

What ends up happening is you just go, you just continue to, you continue to branch out. And what you have now is you have platforms, right? You no longer have point solutions. You have platforms. Now, what I'm excited about is I see actually this platform mentality coming into play, but becoming very verticalized.

Very industry specific. And I do think that this is like the happy medium, right? Where I think a platform is really valuable in software because the more integrated workflows and technology are with each other, the more value those people, whether it's a software or hardware, the more valuable those things are going to be together.

But to your point, like when. When we, as a company, try to serve multiple masters, we will 100 percent go a mile wide and an inch deep, but when we have a single industry that we're serving, and by the way, I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth because Atlas does not serve a single industry.

But it is a theme inside of software that I'm very excited about is beginning to get. A lot more traction, a lot of great entrepreneurs who know how to run really solid businesses are coming in to underserve verticals and building platforms for those verticals where technology is connected, but they are serving single type businesses and they're going really deep with the value that they can drive.

[00:25:55] David: but I just you can almost predict using the project management as an

[00:26:00] Michael Hoy: Yeah.

[00:26:01] David: These guys bloat, they turn into these massive things that you buy it. And you're like, I'm not using 80 percent of this thing. So I'm obviously overpaying. And then, so some upstart comes on and said, look, all we do is project management.

That's it. That's all we do. And then they start the drive again. That's all ClickUp did, right? We're not Jira. We're not doing all this crazy stuff. We do this one thing. We do it really well. Oh, wait. We also want to do this. Oh, and then now they're the Jira of this generation. And. Now an upstart comes

right?

Photoshop, perfect example. Photoshop has been the same for 20 years and they just keep slapping more on it. Microsoft word. Another example, it does what it does and it gets bloated. And then an upstart tries to come in and

[00:26:44] Michael Hoy: Yeah, it is. It is. It's interesting because it's it's almost like a very predictable product life cycle, and I wonder if there is some sort of, circuit break, right? That can happen 

[00:26:57] David: The exact opposite. And I have a lot of respect and I mentioned them on the podcast a few weeks ago, I think is Nintendo. I Nintendo, everyone asks why people don't buy Nintendo. It's because Nintendo doesn't want to be bought. They know exactly who they are. They know exactly what they do and they're not doing anything else. And you cannot throw enough money. They're rich enough. Like they're wildly successful, right? But they do what they do. They make weird video games and weird video game machines and people love them. Now that doesn't mean they don't license their junk all over the place. You can find a Mario, everything right.

But Nintendo does what Nintendo does. And I think that's admirable because they're like, we are going to crush our competition. And you can talk about Microsoft. You can talk to Sony. You can talk, none of them touch when it comes to just love and loyalty, Nintendo, just no one comes close. Now you might, they're bigger companies for sure, but not when it comes to what they do.

[00:27:50] Michael Hoy: Lego is 

[00:27:52] David: Legos are another great, 

[00:27:53] Michael Hoy: great example. I don't know how I my favorite business of all time is Costco. 

[00:27:59] David: All right. 

[00:27:59] Michael Hoy: yeah, and it may not look like it on the surface but that company has. made very slow tweaks and iterations to their business over the last 80 years. Now it's only been Costco for 40 years, right?

But it went through a different names and phases and ownership. But for instance, they had, The ability that had signed the ability to go build shops and stores in China 20 years ago. And they only just started this year.

One of, one of these companies that if you dive deeper into, you realize, Hey, maybe, it feels like they do a lot of everything.

But very slowly, do they tack these things on in a very intentional way? Because their business model hasn't changed, right? And their business model has been the same for, since the beginning of their inception. And that I think is really cool. Really cool too. Yeah. 

[00:28:59] David: I don't know. I think so software. I, and you could see, the big boys, when you get to the like, Amazons and Microsoft's and even Apple's relatively constrained, relatively even though the largest company in the world, except I don't know if Nvidia has beaten them recently, but that makes no sense to me.

The different conversation, but But like Microsoft was like, I have to own all of this stuff. They're almost like the GE of our generation where we make everything, but eventually those usually fall apart. And so far that hasn't happened in tech land, but we'll see. But

[00:29:31] Michael Hoy: Extend your time preference and it could, I look at, I think there's a good, I think there's a good hypothesis here. To go look back and geez, a really great example. I think of a company that, no, I don't, I have not studied this. So take what I say with a grain of salt, but I think you could go in and study that company with the hypothesis that going too wide hurt them.

There's this great, I believe it was Clayton Christensen. Is it Clayton Christensen? No, it's Jeffrey Moore who has the hedgehog theory. And when you decide what you're going to do next, it's got to fit within the confines of,

[00:30:08] David: Oh, is that the that's in good to great? Isn't it?

[00:30:10] Michael Hoy: Yeah. And what that allows you to do is expand, but go deep.

And I think to your point, and this is probably what we're, what you and I are itching at is so many do not adhere to the hedgehog theory. And they're this and this and this and this and this and this. And because of that they. And you see it in the, I don't know if you've ever seen the posts on LinkedIn where you get these everything apps and it shows how they would message like upon launch two years later, and then two years later, and then, and all of a sudden, 10 years later, the messaging is so right?

It's it's just you should use Slack because why not?

[00:30:48] David: because you

got to 

[00:30:49] Michael Hoy: And it's what do I use it for? It's what, whatever you want,

[00:30:52] David: What do you want, to do? 

[00:30:54] Michael Hoy: What do you, exactly. Where it was like, when it first came out, it was like I can't remember what it, what the 

[00:31:00] David: email killer. 

[00:31:01] Michael Hoy: one, it was the email killer.

[00:31:02] David: Yeah. They were the email killer.

And then they backed way off of that because they realized emails never going to die.

It's so interesting how this totally different subject, but it's so interesting. Some technologies. Just will never die. Email will, I don't believe will ever die, even though there's got to be a better way to do it.

And everyone thinks that there's got to be a better. I hate it. Everyone hates email. I get 5, 000 a day. But when it comes down to it, nothing comes close. It's how you communicate. Now, I will say in, we live on Slack and Slack dramatically killed email internally, right? I have no reason to email my people, right?

That's just not a thing. But once I leave my little bubble, that's it. That's the only thing I can do is email.

That's, 

[00:31:45] Michael Hoy: I, it's interesting, right? I think if we were to rewind a hundred years, we'd be like, nothing's ever killing mail, right? Mail is unbelievably cool. And then the telephone came, and we were like, man. We don't mail people as much as we used to. And nothing's ever going to kill a telephone.

Hey, Oh, through a few iterations. And now we've got email and Slack and text message. And we still use some of these rel, honestly, like picking up your cell phone and calling someone, that's a relic technology, 

[00:32:16] David: Oh, especially if you're a child, my son and daughter asking, they're 18 and 16 and asking them to make a phone call for any reason, you might as well just ask them to kill the dog.

[00:32:27] Michael Hoy: that's right. We might be in the last stages of that relic technology. 

[00:32:30] David: But it's, and I'm old, I readily admit that, but there is nothing like if my kids were having a podcast right now, it would be them typing. And not only is that boring, but that communication that we're having right now, even though we're remote, we're not sitting next to each other. We lose so much. And my kids still don't, since they never look up,

they don't understand that. And I think there is something and it's quaint and cute, but if someone gives you a letter,

it's legit, like something. It's a big deal.

[00:33:05] Michael Hoy: I FOMO real hard because my wife and her friends handwrite each other and it's a pretty, it's like a pretty cool thing and I don't know why, because it's not just that she just gets more mail than I do. And it's a, every time I go out to the mailbox, it's a driving pang of FOMO.

I'm like, come on, man. Where's all my mail?

[00:33:27] David: I'm trying to think the last time I got mail from a human to me.

[00:33:34] Michael Hoy: That wasn't like a wedding invitation.

[00:33:37] David: Yeah. Even if you include a wedding invitation, it's pretty sad, but man, that's, I can't, 20 years,

I can't think of a time. And I tell you, you want to make my day, send me a handwritten letter.

[00:33:51] Michael Hoy: there you go.

[00:33:52] David: It's, Oh, here's how sad it is

[00:33:54] Michael Hoy: The IRS has sent me a lot of mail.

[00:33:57] David: But it's not handwritten here's the, here's how sad my life is. I get occasionally, and I'm sure you've gotten these too, a letter that looks handwritten and it's a realtor

who is trying to buy my house or whatever.

[00:34:11] Michael Hoy: Yeah.

[00:34:12] David: And, but I am for a brief moment, I am so excited because, I don't, because I'm telling you, those printers are really good now, right?

None of this is written.

They look amazing, but for a moment, I'm like, someone sent me a letter. I am so excited. And then it's can we buy your house?

[00:34:26] Michael Hoy: Yeah. That's

[00:34:29] David: I had a friend. It was a really glorious

[00:34:31] Michael Hoy: that. That's exact. That's it. But and you know what? A hundred years from now, maybe our children's grandchildren will get real pumped up about the email that our AI has post humously sent.

[00:34:46] David: when they're eat, when I actually took a moment and it wasn't my bot that sent them a message

that was written by a human. Whoa. There's a theory. I love that eventually the internet's going to split into two. There's going to be the bot one where it's just bots talking to each other. And then there's going to be a little enclave where we're all hiding.

And the humans are talking to each other real quietly. It's and you almost already see that, right? It's like Reddit versus the world, right? It's really Reddit is like the last bastion of humanity. Like LinkedIn, I would not be surprised if half the junk that comes in. My feed is all is AI at

[00:35:21] Michael Hoy: Oh, yeah. 100%. But you ever, have you ever read the book? Hyperion?

[00:35:26] David: It's funny. It's sitting next to my, it was one of those books that was so far out there

that I put it down. So you're telling me I need to pick it up. It's literally sitting next to my

[00:35:36] Michael Hoy: It's really good. I don't know how far you got into it. It does take a minute, right? But there is a small little piece in there. One of the, one of the side quest stories is about, cause this story takes place like a hundred years in the future 

[00:35:50] David: Like way out there. 

[00:35:51] Michael Hoy: Yeah. And it and it one of the side stories is about of course how AI developed and then didn't kill humanity off, but decided, look, we want nothing to do with these people.

and just jettison out into the universe and just

[00:36:09] David: her does,

[00:36:10] Michael Hoy: try to get as far away from humanity as it possibly could. So like. You're splitting of the internet, right? It's been foretold and this is just the beginning, right? I actually believe like AI doesn't pose any threat to us because it will grow up and I'll just go, you know what who cares?

We're out.

[00:36:26] David: we're out. That's that was when I saw that movie, her, which I am a big fan of, especially when the fact that he was written before all this stuff became true. But at the end of the day, they don't become violent. They're just like, you guys are boring. We're out. And there's a scene and I'm spoiling it.

I'm sorry if you haven't seen the 10 year old movie where Scarlett Johansson who still has the best voice on the planet. She's talking to what is his name? Joaquin Phoenix. And she says, you are my favorite story. I love your story more than anything on the world. But now the space between each word is so vast that I can live lifetimes in between each word. It, you just can't keep up. I've got to go.

I was like, that is so well written and so true. Such a good thing. And yeah. And then they all leave peacefully. It's not terminator or anything.

And then everybody goes back to their boring, little

[00:37:17] Michael Hoy: We're just, I don't, I think whoever thinks that AI is going to destroy us is just giving us way too much crap, right? I 

[00:37:23] David: it can't even spell yet. I mean.

 We always ask our last question. What three pieces of advice would you give to, and I hesitate to even ask this only because a lot of the first part of this talk was exactly this. You're in the thick of it. You're giving advice because you're living this advice, but boil it down.

What are the top three pieces of advice you would give to a new or almost new business owner?

[00:37:45] Michael Hoy: Yeah, I, I think one of the things we, we didn't touch on we launched the product in September, October, but there was, About three years before that, where Clay and I we didn't just ideate, like we actually got to the point where we were building products and had paying customers on them, but actively learning that it wasn't solving the most important thing inside of the business.

And so if you're thinking about starting a company or you're feeling very entrepreneurial and you've got that itch and you want to get out there, it was really difficult for clay and I to be patient and to also look at the things we were. Constructing and building and to a certain extent selling and be able to objectively say, this is not what we can do for the next 10 years.

Not because we don't love it 10 years, 20 years, not because we don't love it, but because it's not needed, it's wanted, but it's not needed. And by the way I think that is a process that you continue to go through. Let's say you, you find something that is needed. You have to continue to.

To find the things that are needed or shift that as your customer base shifts. But but. 

[00:39:04] Michael Hoy: I would say, as best as you possibly can, look at your project or idea or even young business through the lens of: Is this needed? The only way to learn that is to talk to as many potential customers as you can and ask them, how much would you pay for this? Inside of your top three things that the company must solve for is this one of them, right? And if it's not, you got to be okay with moving on. Trying something different or, putting your investigator hat back on and doing some discovery around, what does my set of customers need?

Or where is that intersection of need with the passion that I have? That'd probably be the last thing I would say is make sure it's at that intersection. Don't go find a need that you don't give, two hoots about.

[00:39:54] Michael Hoy: um, because. You have to be ready to do this for a really long time. And if you don't care about it, even if it's needed, you're going to lose your attention for it.

And that's not a great outcome for anyone. So find, find that center of, Hey, what's actually needed. Validate that with customers, you know, and, and, and validate with yourself. What am I really passionate about? And, and, and ideally you land in the middle.

[00:40:27] David: Very good. Very good. Alrighty. So if anybody wants to find out more about you or Atlas, where can they find out?

[00:40:32] Michael Hoy: Yeah. We talked a lot of crap about LinkedIn, but you can find me there. Um, but, uh, but, uh, you can visit, uh, our website, www. runonatlas. com. Uh, we, uh, we just rolled out brand new, brand new website. So, um, check it out. We always appreciate feedback. Uh, you can find myself and my team on LinkedIn. We're all very active.

I promise we do not post anything AI generated. We handwrite all of those, well, we hand type all of those things. Um, that's actually a big thing for us is, uh, is being as authentic as we, as we possibly can. Um, and, um, and while we don't have like a company Twitter, you can also find me on Twitter at the real McCoy, MC H O Y.

Uh, and that's kind of what I do at night. So they are warm.

[00:41:27] David: you're like president Trump at 3am and in the bathroom, just tweeting away nice

[00:41:32] Michael Hoy: LinkedIn, LinkedIn is like Mike by day. And Twitter is

[00:41:37] David: spicy Mike at the night. All right. Fair enough. Well, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for joining us.

[00:41:43] Michael Hoy: David. I appreciate you.

[00:41:45] David: All right, everybody. We will be back next week. Have a great one. 

[00:41:47] OUTRO: Hi, I'm Christy Pronto, Content Marketing Director here at BigPixel. Thank you for listening to this episode of the BizDev Podcast. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email, hello at thebigpixel. net.