Episode Description
Nick Armstrong, an entrepreneur since university, launched his latest venture, Chirp, which uses AI to enhance sales pipeline conversion. Nick discussed his journey, starting with GreenTriCity in 2005, which was acquired by AGL. He then founded Co Zero, Australia’s fastest-growing company in 2011, before pivoting to Identity, a neobank addressing anti-money laundering challenges. Identity listed on the ASX in 2018, but Nick moved on to Chirp, targeting B2B SaaS companies with 5-20 sales reps. Chirp uses AI to qualify deals, automate research, and suggest next steps, aiming to improve win rates and productivity.
About Nick Armstrong
You can find Nick at https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholas-w-armstrong/ and learn more about Chirp here https://www.trychirp.com/
Nick Armstrong highlights his entrepreneurial background and the launch of his latest venture, Chirp. Nick shares his early entrepreneurial journey, starting a business at university and taking advantage of free office space at Sydney University.
Nick discusses the early stages of sustainability in Australia and how he got involved in the carbon credit schemes through his father’s connections. Nick’s first business, Greentricity, was acquired by AGL, and he reinvested the money into similar ventures.
Nick introduces Chirp, his latest venture, and explains its role as an AI co-pilot for sales teams. Nick explains how Chirp uses AI to analyse conversations and fill out CRM entries, freeing up sales reps’ time. He highlights the benefits of Chirp, including closing deals faster, improving win rates, and automating research on meeting participants.
Transcript
Note: This has been automatically transcribed so is likely to have errors! It may however help you navigate the points of interest.
Michael McGrath
Welcome to the troubleshooters podcast with me your host, Mike McGrath, now today’s guest, Nick Armstrong is a genuine entrepreneur. He started his first business at uni before selling it just a year later. He’s gone on to start multiple ventures, and he’s currently just launched his latest venture, chirp, which is a new technology that helps organizations enhance and improve their revenues by harnessing AI to improve their pipeline conversion. Quick shout out to our sponsors, Oasis partners, corporate advice for the practical bias. Now, the guys at Oasis know a thing or two about getting a deal done. So if you’re considering an exit, talk to the team at Oasis. Over 500 deals done and still counting. Nick Armstrong, welcome to the troubleshooters podcast. Thanks for coming in today. We’re very grateful to have you join us now. You are the entrepreneurs, entrepreneur, for sure, and you, you’ve been on a hell of an entrepreneurial journey, haven’t you since? Well, since you left school, pretty much since you left uni. In fact, you started a business at uni than you I did.
Nick Armstrong
Thanks, Mike I didn’t know any better. I was actually taking taking advantage of the free office space at Sydney Uni upstairs.
Michael McGrath
Is that right? Look, we’ll come back to that. I know that you’ve just launched a venture called Chirp, which is very exciting. We’ve just been chatting about it. It’s a sort of AI. I mean, you can sort this out later, but I’m going to butcher this, but it’s effectively a cool AI tool that really helps quantify and qualify the quality of your pipeline.
Nick Armstrong
It’s a co pilot for sales teams. It does, it does that. It doesn’t be more than that.
Michael McGrath
Okay, let’s not get into that. Now come back. So I want to go back to the beginning and just get a bit of a handle on your story, right? So, you started a business in the sustainability area. Was it greentricity in Uni. Is that, right? That is spot on. Okay, so tell us about that, because this is back in, I mean, you’re not that old, but this is back in 2005 right? So that was fairly that whole sustainability thing was really at the early stages then, wasn’t it?
Nick Armstrong
Yeah, it was actually the New South Wales Government had just come out with a scheme to create so these are the carbon credit schemes, estate based. Yeah, that’s right. My dad goes back. My dad was a stockbroker, and he introduced me to some of his stockbroking mates just down the road, actually, in Australia square, and I had never drunk cappuccino before, and took me down, and they got me so buzzed up on caffeine. And I thought this was great. I was so excited by that. That’s great. And and they told me about that they’d seen some of these companies doing, doing, you know, this, this stuff in sustainability. And I went home and read up all about and wrote this, this proposal to the government to get a license ended up getting granted one. And by Joe Tripodi, who, who later got, I think, done by ICAC for for doing some naughty things. But, yeah, got a license. That business got acquired very soon after, luckily, and I took that money and reinvested into pretty much the same sort of business straight after. So that’s interesting. So you started a business at uni, you developed it and then you sold it. It’s still going, isn’t it? I think I looked up on the website, well, that, yeah, that business got bought by what is now AGL. So it’s still going. It’s well done. It’s been consumed by AGL. I wish I’d held on to my stock, but okay, classic thing that we all do is sell it and reinvest it. Classic thing, Mike, as I’m sure you know from your businesses, is, if all I’d done was sit on my stock back then, yeah, you know, it would have paid itself.
Michael McGrath
Yeah. Well, it’s a sort of Warren Buffett buy, hold, you know, never sell. But so what did you do then you you got out of that. You’re in sustainability. I mean, just, going back before that. What? What? What do you think? What? When did you first start thinking you might be an entrepreneur, or that you wanted to do stuff by yourself, for yourself? Well, when did that first germinate that idea?
Nick Armstrong
Yeah, I think, I mean, I was at school. I was school captain at Sydney Boys High and 2001 and I ended up doing a bunch of things at school that I suppose school captains hadn’t done for a while, okay, turning muck up day into a revenue positive day for the school, okay, but it involves shutting down traffic on Moore Park Road and not letting traffic go until they would actually donate money to a charity.
Michael McGrath
That’s amazing. So you obviously had a bit of a, you’re a bit of a leader around that idea. And you, you like to monetize things, right
Nick Armstrong
Yeah, well, I think monetization is, is key. Like I’ve done 25 funding rounds now I think you know all of those still to this day, I’m back raising money. And if each funding round is as hard as the last one, and it’s all you know, investors are looking for the same thing. They’re looking for customers, they’re looking for revenue. They’re looking for it’s all the stuff you you see in businesses on a daily basis that cash is king and even in startups, people are looking for, you know, we, I go back to that company, Groupon, a while like, do you remember Groupon? They were, they were handing out coupons for a while back, okay? And Groupon, they used to, used to pay $100 to get $50 in revenue, right? Needless to say, they went bust pretty quick so, you know, and that I just go back to those, those sort of things that still applies to startups
Michael McGrath
So you left. So you started your first business. You left it. Then what did you do? So you stayed in the energy game.
Nick Armstrong
I did. I mean, I had some businesses on the side that aren’t on my LinkedIn profile. I was laughing because, you know, I saw you had Gino’s, Gino’s pizza. I actually set up a business called food by web, which was online food ordering. Same time.
Michael McGrath
I was a bit before you, so I was in pizza and delivery. So that was, that was before the web, really, but we were taking it from, you know, before, before deliveries. I mean, people, everything gets delivered. Now, literally everything. But back in the mid 80s, it was a complete novelty that you could take some food to somebody’s address like that was outside of London. That was just not a thing. So, yeah, fantastic.
Nick Armstrong
I mean, that’s we did a similar thing, but it was just before the iPhone. But the mistake we made was that our orders were going over fax machine, and the fax machine was still in the office, and so the office closed on Fridays at 3pm generally, yeah, so the kitchen wouldn’t get the order, and so that business didn’t last too long
Michael McGrath
Yeah, look, my kids have never heard of facts for share, but that because they they came very quickly, and they went just as quickly, didn’t they? Yeah, okay, so, so you then started that business as the energy link, and you were eight years there, so that was a good body of work. That wasn’t it, yeah. So well that that was called co zero.
Nick Armstrong
So as opposed to CO two, we were trying to co zero, have co zero, which was no carbon dioxide. Again, it was based on the trading schemes that existed at the time. And in 2011 that business was the fastest growing company in Australia. I was, I think at that time, was on the young rich list with my co founder, which was one of those claim to fames that I that I’m ashamed to have because it didn’t do anything.
Michael McGrath
It’s only the kiss of death. Actually, it was, but no but, but still impressive, though. So you were really trying to get into that whole helping people calculate their carbon footprint and offsetting it.
Nick Armstrong
We initially were, but then it turned into a trading desk, basically. So we built a an app that let you create your roof top solar credits, your rebate, and then you could then trade that with a corporate that had to buy those rebates to offset their, their their government mandated requirement. So not a not a voluntary requirement, but it but a government mandated requirement. And at that stage, that was something like, I’m pulling a number out here, but it was something like 8% of their of the electricity they purchased had to be accompanied by their certificates. So that was underpinned by, you know, some regulatory drivers. Needless to say, those regulatory drivers changed as the government’s changed, yeah, and that’s what ultimately led to me needing to pivot that business in 2012 right? So I had investors at the time. The investors were, one of my investors was a Japanese corporate. The Japanese corporate couldn’t, couldn’t understand how a government would change the policy that it was unheard of in Japan, under, you know, I think a pretty stable sort of long term, yeah, stable, stable regime. So these were state based legislated schemes that were effectively changed all the time. Well, state and federal, yes. I mean, they both were, and I know you’ve got some experience In this through other board directorships with so, so you would be familiar with it. But yes, they do change all the time. It’s one of the the unfortunate things about making long term investment decisions in this space. I hear it from institutional investors all the time, which is one of the reasons why I left the renewable energy space right, is it is just virtually impossible to, you know, I can’t imagine being a super fund in Australia and having to make a long term investment decision in energy, right? Like it’s just, you know, yeah, it’s impossible.
Michael McGrath
Yeah. I mean, I suppose that the advantage of legislation, I’m on the board of health, safety and hygiene business, the advantage of legislation for us is that, you know, companies are compelled to do certain things and to keep certain standards, which drives, helps drive our business. The flip side of that is that, you know, when they change. You know, everything can, everything can fall apart.
Nick Armstrong
Yeah, you can make a lot of money or lose a lot of money overnight, yeah. And in our case, we lost a lot of money overnight. And I think it’s, you know, it’s once been twice shy for me in that space, and it’s probably why I moved into, well, I moved into one of the most highly regulated spaces, which is financial services.
Michael McGrath
Okay, yeah. So tell us about that. This is a business that you eventually listed, right? Yeah. So this is called identity.
Nick Armstrong
Double down on the regulation, yeah. So identity, which, which didn’t start again. I tend to like changing company names, but it didn’t where you actually started life as a neobank, believe it, on 2014
Michael McGrath
so for the uninitiated, what’s a neo bank.
Nick Armstrong
A challenger bank. No, so you might be familiar. So not one of the big four, yeah, not one of the big four, and not even one of the big five or six. But like the UK, your, your mother mother tongue, or our mother tongue, I should say, is the leader here with Revolute, Monzo, Starling. These type, you know, these, these names that some Australians would be familiar with and are probably customers of. They they’re digital first banks, yeah, you can sign up and get better exchange rates, and they don’t have the legacy of it’s all online. They haven’t got the costs. But, yeah, they don’t have the legacy. And they start doing well, but they normally then get bought by one of the bigger banks. They they do, but in the case of revolute, it’s an amazing story. I mean, they’re now worth more than NatWest, RBS. There. I mean, it’s just, is that, right? It’s quite phenomenal. I think their last valuation was over 40 billion pounds sterling. Okay, interesting. No, that’s good. I mean, look, we need, we need the banks, you know, we need competition. Well, you know, yeah, you need, and that’s the thing that’s sort of lacking, I think, in Australia, but which is why I wanted to start a challenger bank, but I couldn’t get it funded in Australia. Everyone thought. They said, Nick, what’s wrong with the with the current banking system? So I had to pivot that business and and the big problem that identified at the time, and this was actually identified to me by by HSBC, who I was working with at the time, was that anti money laundering fines that just hit 200 billion US dollars globally, and that was a big cause of payments being held up. When was the last time you sent money overseas? Can’t remember. Well, I can tell you that I did it about six months ago through a normal bank, and it took three days for that money to arrive. I guess that’s interesting.
Michael McGrath
Actually, I do remember now I had to send some money to Hong Kong, and I had to put one of my guys on it for a week to get it done because I needed a banker’s draft, and that everyone has stopped doing them in covid. Yeah. So we had to join the get this. Had to join the police bank. I couldn’t join it because I wasn’t Australian citizen at the time. I am now. But my wife had to join the police bank because they’re the only guys who did it, and she joined it, just to get the draft so we could send it to Hong Kong. What a bloody so they took a week.
Nick Armstrong
They call it. They still call it a telegraphic transfer. And you’re probably old enough to remember, yeah, remember the telegraph
Michael McGrath
Dear mom, run out of money, please send some.
Nick Armstrong
That’s right. So they, yeah, that’s and it’s a hangover from the time when banks would still, and I’m making a tapping signal, for those who can’t actually see me, telegraph would be sent. A wire would be sent between two banks, and they would tap below Morse code. It was a Morse code instruction, that’s right. And so they would have, and Mike, believe it or not, they’d have a wire room in a bank.
Michael McGrath
So, what was our identity, and what was the genesis of that then? And how did that evolve? Because it very few people are able to start a business then they list on the stock exchange. That’s pretty impressive story. So tell us a bit about that.
Nick Armstrong
Yeah. I mean, I can’t claim to have come up with the with the idea it was HSBC that turned around and said, Nick, if you can help us solve this money laundering challenge, then we’ll become a customer. And I can’t necessarily say that we solved it, but what I what I can say, is that, you know, we patented the idea, and the company is currently suing JP Morgan for patent infringement at the moment. Okay, right, okay, and there’s a live case in Delaware at the moment, so it was worth summing that pattern. Then I presume, well, it’s being cases live so and what’s the date? Today’s September 20. So, yeah, so it’s currently live. So, so that could be a large settlement. Who knows? But, yeah, so, so HSBC turned around and said, If you can help us solve this challenge. So we were using Blockchain technology at the time. Blockchain is a new technology that is the technology that underpins Bitcoin. It is a shared Well, I mean, we’re just having a conversation both before the podcast about, you know, technology and, I mean, it’s a shared database, effectively, like a big Excel spreadsheet that can be viewed by multiple parties. So it’s a great technology for sharing data between parties that don’t necessarily trust each other, like banks. So we thought, well, great, let’s use this technology to help banks share personal, personally identifiable information, right? Things like your passport, yeah, your date of birth, your other identifiable information, the sort of stuff that you had to give police bank, okay, yeah, because I guarantee that police bank are probably keeping that on a database somewhere within their bank. Yeah. And the reason it took seven days for that money to clear is because they’ve had to manually pick up a phone and call HSBC in Hong Kong and tell them that you’re, you know the Michael McGrath that that you say they are, yeah, or they say you are, that’s just now I own them as well. That’s right. And they know, they probably know where you live now as well.
Michael McGrath
Yeah, so, so you use blockchain, and that was pretty I mean, Blockchain is a real thing isn’t, I mean, Blockchain is extremely widespread now
Nick Armstrong
As a technology definitely is. I mean, the thing that I think the general public have sort of, I suppose, forgotten now, is because AI has really taken the media’s attention. Is that the blockchain wave has sort of been forgotten about, and it was the technology that was going to change the world. And now I AI has now sort of is now changing the world. But is AI drawing on the on the data that the blockchain allows access to or what, oh, listen, I call them all frontier technologies. So I don’t necessarily think they’re, they’re, they’re, I mean, they’re interdependent of each other. I don’t necessarily think that they are dependent on each other, but, yeah, they they’re all frontier technologies. So, you know, most of the big companies, the fangs, or the the mangs, as I think you call them, now, they are all, they all have large research and development budgets going into all of these frontier technologies. So blockchain is definitely not gone by the wayside. It’s just that it’s not talked about as much now because AI has taken the lead
Michael McGrath
And so, so you solve that problem. So tell us about that business then. So how did you, how did you get to list it?
Nick Armstrong
Yeah, so we, I mean, we did the typical sort of seed. Well, you started pre seed generally. So, I mean, for those who aren’t familiar, you know, the typical sort of fundraising path of a startup is sort of a pre seed round before you have revenue, a seed round once you’ve posted some revenue from customers, and then then a series, a round once you are ready. Sort of like the coin the slot machine. Once you’re ready to scale up the business, you found product market fit, you know what your customer acquisition cost is, and you’re ready to scale the business. So we did, I would say, up to a series a funding round. And. Yeah, we kind of got to a point where we we had some early investors who were looking for liquidity. So they were looking for the ability to sell their shares, and we wanted to, but we still the company was hungry for more money. So we had this sort of, we had this difficult situation whereby the board had to kind of manage, you know, how do we, how do we deal with with the need for more money, but the need to provide liquidity to existing shareholders? And, you know, at the time, there weren’t many secondary options available in Australia that there are now. So there are, there are now funds in Australia that will provide that a secondary funds that will come in and buy out existing shareholders. So there weren’t, this was 2018 so so there weren’t a huge amount of those. And in any event, we were in quite a niche part of the market. If you were in the UK, yeah, there are reg tech specific, yeah. Investors, yeah. In Australia, there are generalists, okay, tech investors, so, so you decided to list, right, which is normally a kind of three year journey. What did you expedite that we did, but we didn’t do it through a backdoor, okay? So a lot of people say, Oh, Nick, you just Yeah. Did you do that? No, we did a front door list. Is that? Right? So we did a clean, fully regulated listing
Michael McGrath
Because that’s not cheap. I mean, that, you know So, I mean it, I mean, typically it’s three quarters of a million, maybe a million dollars to list. Oh, it was, at least, that was it. And then normally it’s the compliance costs are normally, three quarters a million dollars every year.
Nick Armstrong
It’s not cheap, and it’s not easy. So, so, you know, ASX has very stringent requirements. They have profit test, asset tests, yeah, you know, you have to provide three years fully ordered accounts. You have to provide, you have to have a board of directors that has qualified, full qualifications. You have to have directors that have previous experience running listed companies. You have to pass all the probity checks. Yeah. I mean, it’s not something that I would recommend any small company does. And having been there and done that, you know, the costs, it’s not even a cost is it’s, it’s the time and energy that it takes for management to jump through all the hoops, basically, and not just initially, but ongoing as well. I mean, completely. And you know, I had three and a half thousand shareholders, so okay, you know, prior to listing, I had 100. Yeah, you gotta take an account broker fees so you know, the lawyers, you’d be lucky to get away with a half a million dollars in what, in legal fees.
Michael McGrath
So you listed it and and then you ran it as a listed business for a while.
Nick Armstrong
Still listed. Ideate
Michael McGrath
Ideate, okay, and it’s a payment data, business, basically payment.
Nick Armstrong
That is correct, exactly right. So they, you know, customers are, there’s an announcement today on the market that customers, Bendigo Bank, Robo bank, Master.
Michael McGrath
And are you still involved there?
Nick Armstrong
No I’m not full disclosure. I’m not, okay, yeah, no, it’s good.
Michael McGrath
Okay, so you, you kind of moved on from that. I mean, you’re piling up a lot of learning here, a lot of lessons, right?
Nick Armstrong
A lot of sleepless nights.
Michael McGrath
Yeah, I bet, I bet. So, so, so bring us to Chirp then. So this is your current venture, which How long have you been working on this?
Nick Armstrong
Well, I took some time off between identity and I did some time in Singapore, okay, with a venture builder run by Temasek, which is a large sovereign wealth fund. So did you spend some time in Singapore? It’s been about a year, because I earn it’s really happening there. And there’s a lot of Hong Kong money move there, and there’s a lot of private equity and family office. Yeah, they, they, they relax the laws. Well, they, they incentivize the laws for family offices to set up in Singapore. So Right? I mean it, it isn’t. It isn’t. I think Singapore does a good job of of sort of marketing themselves as being open for business, and it definitely is open for business, don’t get me wrong, yeah, but you know, in terms of early stage venture capital, Australia has a lot of incentives for early stage businesses. We have the research and development tax incentive which which is unmatched in most markets. It’s pretty good, three and a half cents back in the dollar. Yeah, no. Helps a lot. I mean,
Michael McGrath
I’m on the board of some manufacturing businesses that have really, you know, really been helped by that.
Nick Armstrong
Yeah, usually. So, you know, there’s not, I mean, Singapore has some tax grants, but, but there’s nothing like that in Singapore, No, there’s nothing like that in Hong Kong. Hong Kong has some science and development parks that. But you know, for me as a entrepreneur in the early stages, Australia is a pretty damn good place to set up a business. Having said that, you know, developers. I have a lot of software developers in there. When I say a lot, nothing like I used to have so but the costs that we pay our engineers in Australia is, is hasn’t really changed much in the last five years. Maybe it’s dropped slightly, but on maybe, maybe kept up with inflation. So, but, but to come back to your question, so I came back the end of last year, so I’ve been working on this now for about seven or eight months. Okay, but, but, Mike, this has been 20 years of hard knocks. Like in 20 years, I have struggled with founder led sales, and I’ve struggled with sales broadly. And I can put it down to two things really. One is that I haven’t qualified deals properly, right? And what I mean by that? Well, you’re probably familiar with these simple, you know, frameworks that we use, qualification frameworks. Band is the simplest one, budget, authority, need and timeline, yeah. And am I talking to somebody, you know, that’s got authority? Yeah. Is there a burning need for my product, yeah, is there a timeline to buy? So this is as an entrepreneur, you, you know, you’ve continually, you know, seen the challenges of trying to secure consistent sales revenue. Because, you know, 90% of business problems are solved by more sales, normally, right? Well, nine, yeah, 90% save solves all problems. Sales solves all problems, and, but, but, but somewhere between 90% Yeah, that’s right. But also 90% of the solution is to hire more sales reps, right? And that doesn’t work.
Michael McGrath
So, so, so what you’re saying is, with all that pain and all that sort of angst over the last 20 years, you put that into this solution you’re now calling Chirp, which is the AI sidekick. Sidekick to AI which? So tell us, you know, I’m a I’m running a midsize business. I’ve got 10 reps. Yeah, we’re trying to get more sales. Give me the tell me what you’re going to be able to do for us. Yeah, so, well, I can tell you what the benefits are. We’re going to help you close deals quicker. Oh, I like the sound of that already, and we’re going to help you improve your win rate. Okay, so if you’re closing 50% of deals that come into your pipeline from marketing, will help you close 75. So we do it in a few different ways. The first one is we help you qualify deals better using a framework like band, okay, and but the way that we qualify better, yeah, using band, because we analyze the conversation and we so we pick out words and phrases in the conversation that express budget authority, need and timeframe. So if you say something like, you know, I I don’t have any budget, or the converse of that, which is, yeah, I’ve got $20,000 to spend this year. We will pick that out using AI, and we’ll fill out a little it’s basically a spreadsheet, but it’s, it’s, it looks a lot prettier than that, but we’ll fill that out for you, and that’ll get updated in your CRM. But shouldn’t the a sales guy, listen for that. So what you’re saying is that we do it for you. You’ll monitor those conversations, synthesize all that and then represent it with the insights
Nick Armstrong
And fill out the CRM for you, okay, and, and, because, all right, salespeople spend according to Salesforce, or just down the road, yeah, salespeople spend sales and build them, right? You did. You’ve contributed towards their retirement plans, but salespeople spend 72% of their time not selling. So what’s that time being spent on? So that that time is spent on researching who they’re going to meet with, like finding out that you set up Gino’s pizza, yeah, Matt, filling out a CRM, yeah? And taking notes during meetings and and basically typing up those notes, right? And then, basically, you know, booking follow up meetings, sending case studies, writing emails, okay, that sort of stuff.
Michael McGrath
So, so effectively, if I want to engage, if we want to engage with, with, with your business, your new business, Chirp, we’re buying a platform. Is it a platform?
Nick Armstrong
It’s software as a plugin. It’s software as a service.
Michael McGrath
Okay, yeah, so if you’ve got a CRM, this is a plugin.
Nick Armstrong
It sits on top of your CRM. And again, it’s a sidekick or a co pilot. And our view at the moment is that the CRM is only one part of the sales, what we call the sales stack, or the the tools that you have in the sales suite these days, there’s often, there’s a there’s there’s marketing software, there there’s email, there’s calendar booking tools, there’s a call recording tool, And there’s prospecting tools, etc. So, so we orchestrate all of that together and and then, as I mentioned, we overlay this qualification framework. And then the other, the other thing that we’ll do is is automate the research on who you’re meeting with for you. So we use chat GPT to call out to all of the different public data sources to find out exactly who you’re meeting with, and so we can find out things like, you know, what school they went to, what they started at university, what sports they played, what, what, what they like doing in their spare time, whether they ran a marathon last weekend.
Michael McGrath
So you synthesize all that public information effectively. Cutting down the time that a rep or a sales person has to spend pulling that together. That’s right. If he pulls it together at all,
Nick Armstrong
That’s right. So typically, you know, most people go to LinkedIn before they go to a meeting, and you might do that 10 minutes before you go to a meeting. We can find you a lot more than you would in LinkedIn. I can tell you if a company has just raised a round of funding, if they’re about to go bust, if they’re,
Michael McGrath
Yeah, okay, interesting. So, so, so, effectively, this is a, this is a bolt on, as you said. It goes over the top of your CRM and then pulls together the various tools, including the CRM, but not just the CRM to to help synthesize and cut down qualified deals. Yeah. Okay, yeah, exactly.
Nick Armstrong
And then there’s a third part, which happens after the meeting, and that’s what we call next best action. And that really is just telling you what we think you should do next, or what what the AI thinks you should do next to help close the deal. Yeah. Now Mike, as someone that’s been doing this for a long time, a very long time,you will know what to do next, naturally, but your juniors might not, no, so I’m not sure I do either. But yeah, okay, I’ve got the point. Yeah, I’ve got the point. So sobly. This is a, this is bringing AI to life, really. This is saying this is a good use case for AI. This is a real, tangible use case for AI. And I’m going to throw another buzzword in there, just for good measure. This is what we call agentic AI. So agentic AI is the next evolution of chatgpt. So chatgpt is a large language model, it gives you context, so you can use it to find context and to ask it a question. It can’t book you a flight, but what Chirp can do is take an action for you, right? So it can write you an email, right, or it can book you a meeting with someone, right? Or it can actually take an action, okay, so the next evolution of what we call these AI agents is, is this agentic AI? And that’s and that’s the space we play in.
Michael McGrath
Have you got productivity cases for that? Yeah. I mean, does that? Does that save? I mean, obviously saves time, but does that start saving money?
Nick Armstrong
Well, our play is a revenue gain. So we, we say, we make you more money less staff. It’s, it’s effectively more revenue. It’s more revenue per member. That’s right. So keep Your 10 sales reps, yeah, you’re gonna, you’re gonna uplift your revenue by, I mean, I can’t give you the exact numbers now, because we’re only seven months in, but if you know, as I said before, if you, if you’re doing a 50% win rate, if you can take that to 75% win rate, you know, do the numbers on that.
Michael McGrath
So for anyone listening to this, right, what’s the, you know, what in your view, what’s, what’s the best sort of company that can you know, which, where’s your sweet spot, and where do you think this technology and these tools are most effective?
Nick Armstrong
Yeah. I mean, I can tell you that we chirp are targeting B2B, SAS companies, software companies, and, and we just have to be quite specific on who we target, because we’re very small and we’ve only just started out, but the and, and it’s five to 20 sales reps, so that That’s where we think we can help the most, but I think more broadly, the AI agentscan can help, can really help anyone that’s that, that’s, you just got a CRM in place, and that is looking at automation in their sales stack. So if you are using a call recording tool and you’re using some sort of marketing automation software, so you’re doing outbound emails, you’re doing any type of outbound cold calling, that type of thing, then I think AI agents can help now. Chirp might not be, you know the software for you today, but you know, my hope is that, is that we’ll grow over very quickly. I hope there will be an Aussie success story, because I’m not here to fuck around.
Michael McGrath
So it’s a SaaS model, right? So effectively, yeah, it’s a simple SaaS Yeah. So, you know, the the technology gets loaded. Someone pays monthly,
Nick Armstrong
Yeah, it’s a monthly net now, just, is it for a user. It’s a per user per month, but there’s a consumption charge as well. That kicks in over a number of meetings. Now there’s a The reason there’s a consumption charge is because AI is one of these, as as, as your listeners would know, is one of these things where there’s a large computing cost to this. So we have to pass on some of that. We can’t consume all that because the more people use our software, the more we get charged. Software, typically has had a very high gross profit margin up upwards of 90% typically software as a service. That is now that’s not the case with AI compute. Ai compute is very expensive. It will come down over time, but it’s not there yet.
Michael McGrath
No, okay, okay, so effectively, it’s, it’s a it’s a monthly cost per user, cost per user, and the more you use it, the it kicks in over a certain level. That’s right, interesting. And so where do you think all this is going? I mean, do you think that? I mean, there’s a lot spoken about now, at the moment, a lot of people worried about it. A lot of people think it’s getting it’s going to get out of control. Well, what’s your own view?
Nick Armstrong
Well, I’ve just come back from San Francisco, literally, last week, where I was I had the fortune, or misfortune, to jump in a self driving car that was run by Waymo, which is a subsidiary of Google. And I was just saying to Simon, one of your colleagues, that’s, you know, it’s quite disconcerting, because they still have, they’ve left a steering wheel on, which baffles me why that would lead to steering wheel on a self driving car. And the only reason I could think of is that if a car happens to go haywire and starts veering off the road, you can so where did you see in the front of the back I sat as far away from the controls as possible, because I’m a very bad backseat driver, and I Yeah, yeah, yeah. I presume the brake on the in the passenger seat doesn’t work the same as in my do say in the instructions when you sit in there, that if it does happen to start mowing people down on the road, that you can override the controls.
Michael McGrath
So, wow. So no, I mean, that’s pretty scary. You know that idea that the roads could be full of cars. Well, it’s happening. It’s not scary. Well, it is scary, but it’s, I know it’s happening on the mine sites because I’m involved in a company that’s providing the aftermarket harnesses and technology, and that’s been going for quite a while.
Nick Armstrong
Yes, it’s been going for more over 10, well, 10.Is,
Michael McGrath
I think, because technology isn’t new, it’s more around what people will accept
Nick Armstrong
That’s right. And trucking, I think, is the sixth largest employer in the US or transport. I you’ll have to fact check that on me. Do you fact check? I don’t know. No, we do. I mean, we do, if there’s money involved, there’s no money. I mean, we try selling a trucking company.
Michael McGrath
We try and get our actually, we don’t. We’re not keen on transport. The margins of quite tight. There’s some nice niches, but generally we we stay away from from haulage. Really understand
Nick Armstrong
It’s a pretty, yeah, pretty heavily dominated
Michael McGrath
Very important, and expanding, actually, yes. So we like some of the supply. We call it mobs and buckets. So we like the supply side to that the manufacturers, manufacturers, trailers, tippers, tankers, that, that world’s, you know, growing, because there’s more and more moving by road, especially in Australia. It’s a big country. There’s populations growing, so that’s more movement. And we don’t have much of a train infrastructure to speak of, really, so the roads are still the king here.
Nick Armstrong
Well, that’s, I think that’s where we may start to see some of this happening, because I know that, I know that Google is definitely looking into self driving truck infrastructure and but I also tried on the Apple vision pro while I was in San Francisco, and I can tell you, as an early adopter of the Oculus Rift, well, what’s that? Just the vegan goggles? Yeah, so Apple’s vision Pro is their new 3d goggles. But I’m not doing it justice by saying that, but it’s just incredible. I mean, the implications that this will have for retail and FMCG is huge. Is that right? I mean, like you can do, and training businesses, for example, like you could do. You could run a full training course through these goggles. If I was, you know, I think back to doing a course at McDonald’s that, you know, I don’t think I ever did, but you could run a full course, you know, through these goggles. And it’s just phenomenal.
Michael McGrath
So it’s a sort of simulation, you know, being able to replicate, you know, real environments, environments, yeah, hazardous environments, confrontational environments,
Nick Armstrong
Yes, it’s just so, so I think, you know, they the sort of doom and gloom scenarios that are painted that, you know, AI is going to sort of the end is nice, yeah. I mean, I think where we may end up is sort of in this, you know, leisure generation, where, where we’re all going to end up as drug addicts and sex addicts. And, you know, I don’t think that’s necessarily a reality. That’s yeah, so maybe we, we just end up with, you know, we don’t have to work four hours a day, yeah. And I’d be quite happy to go sailing on the harbor. Yeah. Well, most of my stuff had it will work four hours a day. Anyway,
Michael McGrath
My dad used to, sort of, you say, how many people work here? About half of them.
Nick Armstrong
Well, you’re the chairman now, so, yeah, you probably play golf.
Michael McGrath
You’re joking. I’m the executive chairman. That’s preserved for the non executive chairman, so I’m still hard at it. Okay, well, that’s been fascinating. Well, we wish you all the best with Chirp, and it’s been interesting to hear a little bit about your 20 year journey. I’m sure there’s lots of other stories that we could have gone into, but we’re out of time. But again, Nick, thanks for coming in and all the best to you and to Chirp. And for anyone who’s listening, if you’ve got some sales reps and you want to start improving your productivity, why don’t you give Nick Armstrong
Nick Armstrong
The website is trychirp.com
Michael McGrath
There you go. That’s easy enough, even I can do that www.trychirp.com
Nick Armstrong
Thanks for having me. Mike.
Michael McGrath
Okay, thank you. Bye. Well, there you have it. There’s no stopping. Nick Armstrong, if you want to know more about Chirp, the details will be in the show notes. Now, if you’re enjoying this content, be sure to tell your friends and those who may also enjoy the content, thanks for listening. Until next time.
Link to previous episodes: https://www.oasispartners.com.au/podcast/sheree-sullivan-turning-grit-into-gold/