I heard about a company that made up a term called "Live ARR". Live ARR included all of the current insane ARR ingredients (non-recurring revenue, etc.) but also included verbal indications of commitment to spend with them as Live ARR. This company isn't a small startup either. They have have been around for years and have nine figures of revenue (or do they 🤣?). I love the rebrand of AI to Super Intelligence. Traditional, real annual recurring revenue needs a rebrand too.

We’ve been alpha testing @OpenAI's Decisions API at @PodiumHQ to help our agents choose the right workflow faster and start with the instructions it needs. It turns out that not every automated decision should run through a large language model. The decisions API is faster, cheaper, and better for many things! Excited by the early results and what this unlocks for our customers.

THIS is the kind of customer message that I love to get. Chad and his wife, Stephanie, run TodayAir, a family-owned HVAC shop in Alabama. In his 20 years in HVAC, he’s seen FSM implementations take seven months and four IT people. TodayAir went live on @PodiumHQ AI OS in 10 days. Our team showed up for them. Whenever TodayAir had a question, they received a response within an hour. Devin, their onboarding manager, took every request seriously. If he didn’t know an answer, he went and found it. After Chad and I talked, he sent me this: “I love what you’re building and how you’re building it by listening to your customers and caring vs shoving it down their throats.” Chad has spent 20 years building relationships with HVAC owners. You know your team is doing something right when a customer starts making introductions after two weeks. Read the whole story of TodayAir’s move to Podium FSM here.

We have 18,000+ AI agents working for customers at @PodiumHQ. We built a system called Edge to make them better over time without asking every business owner to constantly coach their agent. Edge looks across millions of real conversations, finds places our agents could perform better, and lets us test changes against actual business outcomes. One of the best tests we've run was around objection handling. Edge changed how our agents respond when a customer pushes back on price, needs to think about it, or isn't ready to book. The new version increased conversion by 26%. More than 60,000 businesses and millions of conversations every week feed that learning loop. The more our agents work, the more we learn about what actually converts for our customers. More on Edge soon.

A top 25 dealer group realized it was "spamming" its own customers. Eric Rea and Dennis Steele, Co-Founders of @PodiumHQ, say fragmented outreach makes it nearly impossible to know which message actually drove the customer to act.

This has been one of the best quality-of-life investments my wife and I have made. We've given them out as gifts to our executive team. We've given them to our family members, and everybody tells us it's the best thing that they've done for their sleep and their recovery. Congrats @m_franceschetti and team!

Earlier this year, my wife and I decided we wanted to buy a Ford F-250. It needed to fit the two of us and our four kids, so a front bench seat was a must. I also wanted as many options as possible, which made it a pretty specific truck to find. I’d been using my OpenClaw agent, Darren, for a couple of months, so I gave him the job. I had him reach out to every Ford dealership in Utah and the surrounding states through his own email account. He found 19 dealerships that had an F-250 with the bench seat and the options we were looking for. Then I gave him his next assignment: go through F-250 forums and Facebook groups and find the biggest discount anyone had shared getting in the last six months. He came back with 12% off MSRP. Then I asked him to research new-car buying tactics, come up with a strategy, and negotiate over email with those 19 dealerships until he had an offer for at least 12% off. I ended up with several sales managers ready to sell me exactly the truck I wanted at their best price, without ever having to call a dealer. Contacting even two or three dealers yourself is painful. Darren reached out to dealerships across multiple states and could have kept going. As a dealer, you get to decide whether or not you use AI, but you don’t get to decide how your customers use it. I think more buyers are going to shop this way, especially as agents like @Muse and Instinct become mainstream. They’ll show up having already done the research, contacting a lot more dealerships at once, and asking specific questions about inventory, price, trade-ins and financing. The dealers that just ask when they can get the customer on the phone are going to have a harder time. I wanted an actual stock number and an out-the-door price. Darren had nothing useful to compare in those replies, so those dealers dropped off the list. I’m posting some of the actual emails below. DM me to see what we’re building for dealerships to handle buyers like Darren.

3 years ago, Courtney Hall of True Medical Spa came to @PodiumHQ and told me we needed to build for medspas. My first reaction was no. We had a couple hundred medspa customers at the time, but honestly, it wasn’t a main focus. We were focused on auto dealerships and home services and medspa felt like a stretch. Then she showed me how she was using Podium at True Medical Spa, and I was blown away. We looked at the rest of our medspa customers and saw the same thing. They were some of the most engaged customers we had, and the industry itself was growing 18% YoY. We decided to go all in on medspa and make it one of the core verticals at Podium. We built a team around the industry: Product builders, customer success, and go-to-market who work on-site with med spas every day, learning how we can best help them grow their businesses. Today, we have ~2,000 medspas using Podium. Last year, we realized our AI employees could only do so much sitting on top of legacy EMRs. To really change how these businesses operate, we needed control of the workflows and the data. We needed to own the full stack. For medspas, that meant building an AI-native EMR layer. So that’s what we did. Avery, our AI front desk employee, has booked over 134,000 appointments for them. The main reason we went all in on the medspa industry was that nobody was building an AI operating system designed to help these businesses grow while taking more work off their plates. The medspa industry is competitive and these owners have high standards. We love that, because it makes us better. Thank you to the medspa owners who have let us in and helped us learn. And thank you to Cortney for changing my mind.

Yesterday, one of our HVAC customers turned on an AI employee we call Membership Coordinator. Its whole job is to reach out to every member in their maintenance program and book the visits they already paid for. Somebody in the office is supposed to make those calls, but we’ve noticed that at most HVAC businesses, scheduling routine maintenance tends to fall to the bottom of the list. In the first 45 minutes, it sent personalized messages to 50 members and booked 13 maintenance visits. Doing that manually would normally take one person most of an afternoon. Five days in, it’s now booked over 80 maintenance visits. The Membership Coordinator agent handles the scheduling, writes notes on the account, and escalates to a person anytime it runs into something it can’t solve on its own. It’s stories like these that make me so excited about what @PodiumHQ is building. DM me if you want to see what an AI employee would do in your vertical.

Best three weeks for my DMs in 12 years of building this company. Most of the owners we're demoing right now want to move. And in almost every conversation, the same question comes up: Is the migration going to destroy us? I get it! The last migration most of these businesses went through took six (or more) months. Some are still running two systems from it today, entering the same data twice, paying for both. But we move fast over here. We use our Operator agent to review every customer record, and Operator finds the duplicates, flags the bad data, and attaches equipment to the right properties. Our team is changing what’s possible here. We're in a world now where a months-long migration sounds as outdated as a paper invoice. It's days and weeks now. One of our customers, Richard at Thumbs Up Home Comfort needed to move off ServiceTitan before busy season. He did, and he's been running on @PodiumHQ all summer. Read the whole write-up here: Keep the DMs coming. Happy to show you what we're building.

Every piece of advice I got as a founder said that once you reach a certain size, you hand product to a professional and get out of the way. At @PodiumHQ, we did the opposite, and it’s the most important org decision we’ve made in twelve years. The standard advice is that once a company gets big enough, the founder hands product, and most other functions, to professionals who have “seen the movie before.” I’ve never thought “hire professionals and get out of the way” was particularly good advice for founders. But having a Chief Product Officer made sense in a market where innovation moved steadily and you could see the roadmap a year out. When we realized how disruptive AI was going to be for us, our customers, and basically every company in the world, we decided to go the other way. I became the Chief Product Officer in addition to being the CEO. Every product leader at Podium reports to me and has for the last two years. We made that call because the rate of change was clearly about to accelerate past anything we’d seen. We were going to be playing a different game, and I wanted to make sure the company could move as fast as possible. Having a founder as the Chief Product Officer has allowed us to make big bets quickly. When I started using OpenClaw, it was immediately clear that this paradigm was a great way for our customers to interact with Podium and run their entire business. We started building what became Operator that same day. A hired product leader usually has a dozen priorities already committed and teams built around,  naturally incentivized to mitigate risk. They’re trying to reduce the chance of screwing something up, rather than taking big swings. As the founder, I can just decide. This comes with tradeoffs. I have around 16 direct reports now. I can’t spend all of my time as CPO, and it’s forced us to become more efficient and focused as a senior leadership team across the rest of the business. It’s busier, but it’s also better. I don’t think this is set in stone. I could see a world where Podium has a Chief Product Officer again that isn’t me. But AI is changing every part of a product organization right now. I believe that requires the founder to be as close to the product and the customer as possible. I can’t imagine handing that over to anyone else right now. If you want to see what we’re building, DM me.

Agree 100%. We started building agents and quickly realized we needed to build the system of record too. Agents need all the context and permissions you’d give an employee to complete work end-to-end. It goes both ways: the system of record makes the agent powerful, and agents force you to rethink the system of record.