Marketers of Technology
00:07:15 · Andres Figuera, Travis Cameron
[00:07:15] S1: Okay. Understood. Understood. And now when marketing and generating demand for this service or this product per se, do you have an issue? Like, do you need to educate potential customers? Do they know who you guys are and do they seek you out? Like, how is that looking for you guys? [00:07:30] S0: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I think we benefit again from the age of our company and the fact that we were built, by the architect community that a lot of people get trained on us coming through school. Right. And so architects actually will have courses on us. General contractors were part of the GC exam in certain states. For Florida example, they get tested on some of our documents. And so that education piece is almost built into what we do. We do need to foster it and get better. But then there is the expansion, right? We all talk about as marketers, like what's cross sell? Cross sell for us oftentimes is you might know that core agreement, that owner architect agreement or contractor owner agreement or the contractor sub agreement. But it's this library of 300 documents that we really need to educate people on because that's really where a lot of the reduction in risk comes from, is using the entire kind of contract library together and using things like, hey, you want to make sure that the contract you do with an owner is similar to the one that you hold with the sub and that you have no gaps between it. So that's a large education element for us.
00:07:30 · Travis Cameron, Andres Figuera
[00:07:30] S0: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I think we benefit again from the age of our company and the fact that we were built, by the architect community that a lot of people get trained on us coming through school. Right. And so architects actually will have courses on us. General contractors were part of the GC exam in certain states. For Florida example, they get tested on some of our documents. And so that education piece is almost built into what we do. We do need to foster it and get better. But then there is the expansion, right? We all talk about as marketers, like what's cross sell? Cross sell for us oftentimes is you might know that core agreement, that owner architect agreement or contractor owner agreement or the contractor sub agreement. But it's this library of 300 documents that we really need to educate people on because that's really where a lot of the reduction in risk comes from, is using the entire kind of contract library together and using things like, hey, you want to make sure that the contract you do with an owner is similar to the one that you hold with the sub and that you have no gaps between it. So that's a large education element for us. [00:08:38] S1: Okay. And what channels are working best for you when you come to the need of educating your clients?
00:08:38 · Andres Figuera, Travis Cameron
[00:08:38] S1: Okay. And what channels are working best for you when you come to the need of educating your clients? [00:08:43] S0: Yeah, it's going to be largely digital, right? As probably comes as no surprise. So we are fairly traditional in that a lot of Google search engine marketing, a lot of display, but it's really different by ICP. So we might find, hey, there's more architects and more owners and lawyers that exist on LinkedIn. Our subcontractors, you're going to find them a lot more through like Instagram and TikTok. General contractors will be in between. And then lately we've had a lot of success using Connected TV, believe it or not, where we were using Vibe today. And that's actually performing really well for us of getting in front of the right audience and the amount of view through conversion that we're seeing from it. [00:09:25] S1: Okay. And also when I think about AI, how are you using AI internally to help you out with everything you do regarding marketing?
00:09:25 · Andres Figuera, Travis Cameron
[00:09:25] S1: Okay. And also when I think about AI, how are you using AI internally to help you out with everything you do regarding marketing? [00:09:35] S0: Yeah, great question. So there's, there's a few, what I would call like my AI helpers that I personally have. So maybe I'll start there and then kind of go to some of them that the team uses. And so a few things that we've kind said is, Hey, you know, we're a team of about eight with a few external contractors that help us. We do not have like a project manager on the team. And so one of the things that we built to help us in that is what we call kind of our little PM agent. They sit on-site on all of our calls, they track all of our Slack and team conversations. And at the end of the day, they then look through and say, tasks are missing from Asana that somebody might have asked for, somebody might have signed, might have been the output of one of these calls. And it will actually go through and it'll create in our right project boards, all those additional tasks. So nothing gets dropped. Then each morning that same project management bot sends out basically your daily digest of things that you need to do, things that you're behind on. Where do we have gaps that are preventing projects from moving forward? And so that's kind of one unique thing that is different than your like editor bots or persona bots that maybe a lot of people talk about that says we don't necessarily need a headcount for that because we've helped create some of these, these bots to help and support us just from a, from a PMO perspective.
00:10:52 · Andres Figuera, Travis Cameron
[00:10:52] S1: No, I get that. And since you have, for example, this project manager agent and these different types of utilities for AI, how big is your team that you have helping you out with all this endeavor? [00:11:02] S0: Yeah. So we're about a team of eight internally today. You know, it spans product marketing through to content editorial staff, media internally, SEO internally and then marketing operations. [00:11:15] S1: Amazing. And in general, how big is AIA Contract Documents? [00:11:20] S0: We're a little over 100 people as it stands right now. So we're slightly under about 10% of the staff, of AIA. And so and then on a yearly basis, you know, we've got almost 40,000 customers that are buying from us and we process probably over $100,000,000,000 worth of payment contracts on a year by year basis. [00:11:43] S1: Okay. And also Travis, when it comes to the customer journey with you guys, how does that work? If potential customer is interested in what AIA Contracts is offering, like how do they go about using you and understanding how to really work with the company?
00:12:01 · Travis Cameron
[00:12:01] S0: Yeah. So we're a lot like kind of your smaller end or your SMB SaaS type of tool, right? And so, you know, today it's a really interesting business in that the front end is an e commerce engine. So where we list the 300 contracts for sale. And so in a lot of ways, we're similar to an e commerce business there where we are trying to find that right user for the type of contract that they need for the job that needs to be done. And you think of like jobs to be done framework of saying, this person needs to get an agreement signed. They need to kick off a project. They need to do a change order on a project and get a new billing and agreement signed. They need to get paid on that project. And finally they need to close out that project. We align kind of the documents into those things that need to be done and try and find the right point to sell them at. Once we've sold somebody and we get them used to using that document, we refer to that internally as document on demand or DOD. That's effectively like you would think of it as a trial in your normal SaaS sense. Then it's the job of how do you get them from that trial or that first time using to becoming a subscriber. And subscription for us is, hey, you essentially have an all you can eat bucket for $2,400 on a year by year basis per seat to access all the documents that you and your company needs. So back to education element, the first step is how do I get them in, get them comfortable with using that first agreement? How do I then educate them on the other documents that they can use and then turn it into that they're using us for every construction project and with every contractor or agreement that they're doing is on AIA ACD paper.