Ep. #6, Making Accounting SaaS Sexy Again with Brad Rigby

Isaac Nassimi: Welcome to Platform Builders.

My name is Isaac, and I'm here with my co-host Spang, and today we have on the show Brad Rigby.

Brad Rigby is the Director of Product Management over at Canopy, the number one accounting practice management software on the market.

Hey, Brad, good to have you on the show.

Brad Rigby: Thanks for having me.

Christine Spang: Hey, Brad. Good to see you.

Brad: Yeah, good to see you as well. Excited to be here.

Isaac: To kick things off, I would love to know, Brad, what your favorite fun fact is. I know you're an aficionado of fun facts.

Brad: I'd to think I am.

All right. Fun fact for me today. Ketchup used to be medicine.

When it was first introduced, it was actually medicine.

And so, they had medicinal ketchup or tomato pills, and it was used to help cure indigestion.

Isaac: Was this before the word ketchup was created and it was catsup at that time?

Brad: Yeah, tomato pills is what the referred to them as.

Isaac: I would guess that the sup would be short for supplement then in catsup.

Brad: Yeah, I think so.

I haven't looked deep into it to know where the naming came from, but I thought it was interesting that it was first medicine before it became a condiment, which is weird to think about.

Isaac: That's awesome. That's going into one of the fun facts.

It reminds me that Listerine used to be a floor cleaner, all those kinds of things.

Brad: Yeah.

Isaac: So, Brad, tell us a little bit about Canopy, what Canopy does, and your story of how you came to be at Canopy, and maybe some of the founding story of Canopy, if you were involved in any of that.

Brad: Yeah. So I actually joined Canopy about five years ago.

So, Canopy before then was really hot in the tax world.

So essentially, think about tax resolution. So if you're getting audited or something weird that.

We had a lot of tax resolution products, and we were also building out tax preparation at the time.

So it's tax season right now. Someone would be using Canopy for it.

We pivoted actually right when I joined. And so now, we are practice management, like what you had mentioned before.

So the easy way to talk about this is, practice management really is just a CRM for accountants. It's like, this is my system of record, this is where I go to access all the things to help manage my clients as an accounting firm.

And so, we pivoted to that vision right when I joined, and we've been doing it ever since. So we've expanded our product offering outside of just tax res.

So we do a lot of things in non-vertical SaaS you think is just normal, but accounting is a very specific vertical, they have very specific ideas, ideations around how they do things.

So we have things what we call document management. So very similar to a DocuSign. You can upload, sign documents, stuff that.

We have a task workflow area that we use. And then we do a time billing and payment suite, and so, all the nitty gritty details of an accounting firm's bills.

So, accountants are running their own business, they still have to do their own accounting, if you will.

And so, we've expanded to different portions of that, and now we're trying to call ourselves a firm-wide operating system, this is where you go for all the things you need to go.

So that's my story and how I've been. But Canopy's been around for 10 years, and those five years prior, they were focused way more on tax. Actually our name was Canopy Tax forever ago.

We've kind of rebranded that just to be Canopy now, because we're trying to be more agnostic to tax and just be general accounting software.

Isaac: I think that's really interesting, and you see a lot of startups pivot their focus entirely.

I mean, I know Nylas did. When Spang founded Nylas, it was an email client initially, and we ended up going much lower level.

I say we. I wasn't here at the time yet. We ended up going much lower level and really serving the APIs that helped drive the engine behind the email client.

But I feel it's rare to do that five years into a company, especially if you have some sort of traction and whatnot.

So you were there when that change happened?

Brad: Yeah.

Isaac: What was that like? What was the rationale there?

What was the internal vibe amongst the other employees? How was that?

Brad: Yeah, so kind of what happened, we were churning like crazy.

And so, that industry that we were in, the tax resolution industry, not a bad industry, but they skip around from software.

So we weren't having people stuck in the software as much as we wanted to. So that's why we pivoted to be practice management, 'cause we wanted it to be a sticky software.

We didn't want it to be a transactional software that you could just go somewhere else to do.

And so, we switched that around, changed our entire vision, changed our strategy.

Our board obviously was a little confused by it, and we had a change in leadership at the time. So it was a massive change. It wasn't by any means small, but it was necessary.

And so, the biggest reason is just because we wanted to be more sticky, be more system of record, be really truly ingrained into an accounting's workflow and daily life, rather than just a seasonal offering that they just used once or twice a year around and after tax season.

So, that was a huge change for us. As far as the people go, yeah, everyone was stressed about it.

Everyone was, we were going this way and now we're going this way. Why?

And so, us as a product team really had to paint our vision and lay our stakes in the ground, like no, this is what we really want to do and what we should be doing.

And so, I'd to say it's gone well. Obviously we're not there yet, but we've really turned the ship around and are on a much better trajectory.

Isaac: So your product team was the primary driver behind that change?

Brad: Yeah. So there were actually two or three product managers that came from the accounting space.

And so, they were very principal in that. And so, I had come in right as this was all happening.

And so, it was very interesting for me to watch as a product manager at the time.

And so, yeah, it was very much the product team, along with one of our GTM leaders, that were trying to paint this vision and turn the company around.

Isaac: I understand that product drives the roadmap, all that kind of stuff, but at the same time, when you've got something so ingrained into the DNA of a company and what that company does, it's really hard to get internal buy-in, internal alignment.

How'd you guys get that snowball rolling, or that boulder rolling down the hill for yourselves?

Brad: We were smaller at the time, so you didn't have to get everyone bought in as much. We had maybe 70 people.

And so, when we talked about it, it was hey, we're not turning away from our current strategy fully.

We are just pivoting so that we can support this area of our app, which everyone understood, while also going after this other portion of the market we're missing.

It actually wasn't that hard to do, because almost everyone, whether you were in sales, support, CS, marketing, had been already hearing this from our customers.

"When are you guys going to do this, when are to do this?"

So from a product standpoint, the validation was very easy to show, because we already had people asking for us to do all these number of things that we weren't doing at the time 'cause we were focused on tax.

And so, yeah we came up with a strategy, but it was also very validated by a bunch of our users and prospects, and industry influencers.

And so, when we started to paint that picture to everyone of, hey, if we start to expand, we start to go in these other realms, our average deal size is going to go up, our LTV's going to go up, because we're going to have more breadth and depth into the application.

And so, we're not just getting a tiny portion of the firm, 'cause that's what would happen.

So you have a firm of 10 people, you have one person who does tax res, and maybe two or three that do tax prep.

So we'd be getting three employees of the 10, and we weren't expanding at all.

So it made a lot of sense to a lot of people to move this way, and very actually easy to get them on board, just because they had already heard it themselves.

Christine: So it sounds one of the drivers of this being a pivot. Maybe pivot's not really the right word to describe it.

It's more of a reorientation in terms of how you position the software and kind of what it takes care of for the buyer.

It sounds like the people buying the software were part of the same businesses.

Brad: Often, yeah.

Christine: And that that was something that maybe simplified the transition. But were there aspects of this transition other than the feature set?

Did you have to start talking to different people at the companies?

How did you frame Canopy as existing within the tech stack of the people who were using it?

Brad: Yeah, no we had to reframe it for sure, because instead of just being like, hey we're this specialized tool that does tax and tax prep, and kind of is your CRM, we had to reposition ourselves as no, we are your system of record, we are your CRM.

We want to store all of your information for everything that you need to do with your clients.

And so, instead of talking to one or two people in the firm, we started talking to partners and operation managers, more operation-minded people, to understand, hey, what are the needs that you need on this side of the business, what are you lacking over here?

The nice thing about, nice for us, in the tax and accounting and finance industry, most of our incumbents, most of our competitors at the time were incumbents who had desktop software.

So they get an update a year from this company, if that, and everything's on the desktop. So nothing's live or anything that. They have to have all this other stuff.

So we'd really started to pivot ourselves as hey, no, we're cloud, we're the cloud, purely cloud based, everything's very secure, anyone can access it, and then this was right when COVID hit at the time too. So that's actually...

We had made this pivot at the beginning of 2020 and then COVID hits, and because we made this pivot and started saying, hey, we're cloud, we're your system of record, it resonated across the industry because everyone went remote, and now they're trying to figure out, okay, how do I get access to all of my employees who are now working at home when I only had access on site on the server?

And so, we had a lot of people coming to us because of that.

So that framing around cloud and system of record online actually really propelled us even further into a world we thought was going to take a little bit longer, but it actually ended up happening really fast.

So I would say those are probably the main aspects of how we rebranded, and we also actually did rebrand, new logo.

We dropped the "tax" off Canopy Tax, just called ourselves Canopy Inc. And so, it was truly a full rebrand from all aspects of the business.

Christine: That's kind of wild for me to hear that even in 2020, the main competitors in this space were desktop software.

You're in Silicon Slopes area, it's pretty tech forward.

Me and Isaac are in California, and kind of embedded in Silicon Valley culture, and it's like, we just don't think about the fact that there are some industries that are not early adopters of technology, and for us it's like, the cloud, that's crazy old news, we're totally over the cloud.

We're doing AI agents now. Who cares about the cloud?

And yet there's still these industries out there where moving to just a cloud-based system that is made specifically for their business is truly game changing.

And I think you guys are just a really good example of this broader trend in software really right now of, I think people are calling it vertical SaaS.

Where at first the SaaS platforms that came out were the big behemoths that were horizontally made to support everything, things Salesforce and other players that are in that realm of, they're not really specifically designed for any one business.

And then, the tools have gotten way better. People can use APIs in order to really develop things faster.

And the net result is that now people are building hyper-specialized SaaS applications for every business under the sun.

You can buy SaaS software to launch a brick and mortar pizza shop. And those people actually need software and get a lot of benefits out of SaaS too.

And they have specific workflows, like you were talking about, around Canopy, and the way that they structure their businesses, the things that are really important, like what do these people think about and need to do day to day?

And I think it's just a really cool example of how vertical SaaS has come and addressed a need that was really always there and these people just didn't really have good modern tools that they could use to really make their lives much easier day to day.

Brad: Yeah, no, I a hundred percent agree. 'Cause you bring up Salesforce, right?

If you were to go to an accounting firm and say, hey, this is all we have, and Salesforce is not cheap at all, so they're like, cool, I'm going to sign 10 users up and pay 20 grand a month.

That's not going to happen for this industry, or smaller companies, or a tire shop or something that. It just doesn't make sense for them economically.

And so, you come in with this more vertical view that's literally built for them, just for them, and is priced accordingly as well, to a degree.

We're not trying to be cheap or whatever, but it's still cheaper than Salesforce. So yeah, it's a very interesting.

I like verticals personally, because you can really just dig in so deep and understand them. Whereas being in general SaaS and horizontal SaaS, I feel prioritization from our product standpoint would be really hard, because you're like, okay we'll just build this and hopefully all the industries would be cool with it.

Whereas for me it's, rather than trying to decide which industry to go to, I know the industry, it's really focused on which features I prioritize rather than where I'm trying to attack industry-wise.

Christine: Yeah. Did you know the tax vertical or the accounting vertical before you joined Canopy, or is it something that, you got to know the users?

Brad: So my sister lived in the Bay area and she worked for a tax firm, and I worked as an accounting clerk in college, but that was my only two connections to the tax and accounting industry.

So I had zero knowledge. Before I came to Canopy, I was very much in the CRM world of building just a CRM at the time for salespeople.

So I actually came in to Canopy to work on their CRM specifically, and yeah, but I had zero tax and accounting experience really.

'Cause like a job in college, I don't know, you don't know anything in college.

Christine: Yeah.

I think one of the superpowers of a good product person is, you just develop this generalized skillset of how to ask questions and how to go and talk to the actual people and figure out what are their pain points, and that's something that's generalizable no matter what domain you're working with.

You don't have to be an expert in whatever in order to build software for these people.

You just have to show up with a learning mindset and know how to go and talk to people and learn about what can make their lives easier.

I'd love to go back for a second to this comment you made about how Canopy is kind of becoming the system of record for these accounting firms.

Was there something else that they were using before? Are you displacing another solution and consolidating it, or was it notepads and pens and paper or something?

Brad: Yes to both. It's funny, 'cause the amount of times I get on a call, still, to this day, they pass manila folders around, still. It's kind of funny.

But yeah, no, there's a ton of point solutions, we call 'em point solutions in the industry.

So if they weren't on one of the larger incumbents, the desktop software that do have a full suite of products, they were either on a portion of that incumbent tool and using three or four other point solutions.

So because we call ourselves the all in one, we consolidate a lot of that. So sometimes these people would be moving from four or five softwares to one, and maybe another specialized tool that they just don't want to give up, which we get.

So we consolidate quite a bit for these firms, which they're a fan of. They don't want to be jumping into multiple places at the same time.

So that's really resonated in our industry as well, is yeah, no, I don't want to be in five or six different solutions.

No, I don't want to train my team on that. I don't want to have to aggregate data from everywhere and start analyzing it in an Excel sheet. That's just going to cause, more work more time.

And they're used to it, unfortunately, so when they come to us and a lot of the times they're like wow, I have saved hours of time not having to do all of this work just to do one job.

So that's been what's really helped a ton.

The other thing in the accounting industry which I'll mention is that there has actually been a huge decrease in new headcounts for accountants.

People aren't going into accounting as much as they used to, because the lifestyle is harder. Tax season, these people are putting 80 to 120 hours a week in.

It's not easy. And so, one of our core also beliefs is, how do we improve the lives of these people, how do we make the accounting industry?

You'll laugh at this, but its said so much in our industry. How do we make accounting sexy again, like it was in the 70s and 80s?

And so, that's something at our core that we're trying to do. How can we help make this a fun industry again and make people want to go into accounting and not dread it? So, a lot of that goes on. And because we consolidate, we save time, and when we save time, people are happier.

Isaac: What do you think the biggest things you're doing are to make accounting sexy again?

Brad: We're definitely not using new age slang terms, just to be clear.

Isaac: So no skibidi or anything that?

Brad: No skibidi. We're not saying slay constantly, no. But I mean, we are infusing AI heavily into our application.

There's just no way around it today in 2025. If you're not utilizing AI in some way, you're behind as a company, hands down.

And so, we're heavily investing in AI and trying to infuse all of our tools with AI, just to one, speed them up, two, make them smarter, and three, help suggest how an accounting firm can run smoother themselves.

So that is probably the biggest thing that we're doing this year, is heavily investing in that.

Isaac: That's awesome, but my question on that is, these AI focused features look very different to everyone.

I've seen some pretty poor implementations, or things that are a little bit too forward facing, or things that are just so subtle that you can only even realize it's being done by AI if you really think about it and drill down into, wait, how the heck are they doing this?

What's the framework you used to approach this with, and also, how do you make sure to meet your audience and your users at their level of technical acumen?

Because I know anytime you're dealing in a space that's not extremely tech-philic, sometimes it's hard to get people to use new features.

Brad: Yeah, I agree with that. And I introduced a generative, in fact, somewhat using malice to a degree, I introduced a generative AI feature to our tool two years ago.

That was the first thing that we pushed out. I don't think it had amazing adoption, because people were scared.

Candidly, a lot of the feedback that I got during it was, is this safe, are you stealing my data, is the AI stealing my data? So yeah, there's a lot of hesitation. I think that has changed quite a bit in the last two years. I think people are a lot more comfortable with AI.

But going back to what you said, is there utility there? Is it just gimmicky?

Do they know it's AI? So what we focus on first is, what's the job to be done, what's the pain point, what are we trying to solve here, and really look at it from that, from the customer point of view.

And then, when we go to the table of ideation, of solutioning what to do after we put that together, that's where we start to think about does it actually make sense to use AI here or not?

We want to think about AI first and anyway we can use it, because it just makes sense in some use cases, but oftentimes, it doesn't as well.

And so, we have a feature we just launched that is a newer AI feature for us, and you would never know that an AI is doing it too in the user experience, unless we told you, which we do.

And the reason we're doing that is because we have to get people comfortable with it first before of change it to just be part of a regular experience.

So we're calling it Smart AI Document Automation is what we're calling it. So literally, that's how we have to do it in our industry.

Because if we were just to launch a feature and not disclose that it was AI, people would, they'd hound us.

These are accountants. These are people who look line by line at numbers, and debits and credits, and everything. They do the same thing with software. They're worried about data, they're worried about security, all that kind of stuff. So we have to be very careful when we introduce an AI feature to them, and make sure that we're just baby stepping them into the idea of it and then helping them understand.

And then, once we've gotten to that point, like with the email stuff.

We have other email tools and it's just not a big deal to them, 'cause they understand it.

So now we're introducing this AI tool that's within their documents, we're baby stepping them into it, and then we'll go grandiose and drop the whole, this is Canopy AI, this is Canopy's document management solution.

Isaac: Without getting too low level, I'm actually curious to hear about the feature, if it's something that people wouldn't guess would be AI driven unless you tell them. That's actually pretty interesting to me.

Brad: I mean, they might think it, but may not, just because their... So OCR is what has been the document reader solution for ages, and that in and of itself is essentially machine learning, to a degree.

So that's all we're doing, but we're utilizing these AI companies to just categorize documents and then rename them for people, which people in our industry still get a stack of papers and they scan 'em, and they go through every single one, they split out the document, they rename it, and then put it together as part of their work papers.

So what we're doing is exactly that. We're literally doing what they pay someone $20 an hour part-time for tax season to do.

We're scanning their document, we're telling them what's in the document, we're renaming it for them, and helping them understand what the makeup of all the documents are.

So, it's as if a person is doing the job for them. Half of our users think it's OCR, which sure, it is, but it's through AI.

'Cause they're used to OCR, they're used to that, they're used to having human review it too.

So, it's a similar technology, but AI is so much more accurate and so much faster than OCR technologies are.

So, that's why I'd say it's, might be able to tell, might not, unless we tell them, and we have, we do tell 'em.

Isaac: I think it's awesome because OCR, if I recall, predates computers. It's from the 1920s originally, for taking documents and turning 'em into telegraph, which is crazy to even think about.

And we definitely got some big upgrades for that in the internet world and whatnot, but at the same time, it's still just converting the document into text, or it has been, and this is just one of those things that we've just gotten this huge un-blocker and this huge burst of potential.

And you don't see it implemented everywhere, right, the document understanding instead of document reading.

Super cool to see that ball being pushed forward, especially in some place like accounting where, man, there's just so much manual stuff going on every day.

Brad: Yeah. It's funny 'cause we look at other industries, for instance, the law industry.

Very similar as far as jobs to be done. Obviously they do things differently.

But at the end of the day, they have clients, they gather documentation from these clients, they provide services for these clients, they do the job, they get paid.

Heavily around documents, heavy around the services and the accounting of that.

The law industry, I would say, is probably five to 10 years ahead of accounting industry. So they actually have a bunch of solutions.

'Cause we've looked at diversifying and looking at, oh, maybe we should look at the law industry as well, but they have a bunch of tools in there.

And so, they actually introduced this AI documentation tool two years ago, and it's killed it for them. There's a few companies here in Utah and we've talked to them about it.

Hey, how's your automation tool with AI? And they're like, it is the best thing we've done since we've started our company.

And so, we're like, okay cool, we're going to do it.

So it's kind of interesting to see these industries tangent of us but a little bit ahead of us have so much success and need for it, and it's starting to take hold into our industry as well now.

Isaac: Why do you think the law industry would be so far ahead technologically?

Brad: I don't know. Because depending on where where they're at in law...

I think if you're a business lawyer, in business law, it makes total sense. You're dealing with SaaS companies. It's a no brainer.

No, this SaaS company, they're not going to want to meet in person, they're not going to want to drop their documents off to you.

And so, I think probably the problem there, on the document side, they have I think just as much if not more documents they have to deal with on their end than we do.

And so, I think it just was ripe for change at the time, and I think on the accounting industry side, they had tools, and so people were okay with the status quo for a little bit longer.

But then you started getting, there was this trend in the accounting industry where they started hiring operational minded people that had zero accounting experience, just came in to revamp the operations.

And so, you had these people starting to introduce technology more and more into these firms.

And so, I think it just kind of came to fruition after that, where I think the law industry just made sense just from who their clientele was, and so, the recommendation, the pain points were more prevalent then, whereas on the accounting side it wasn't.

Christine: I'm curious about this platformization thing.

For Canopy, do you think that the things that are going to produce the most value and the most growth for Canopy is going to be going wider and bringing in more functionality into Canopy?

Or is it more going deep, like adding more AI, making the stuff that you already have today more in depth and continuing to add depth to the set of tools that you brought together already?

Brad: Yeah, we've had a lot of discussions about that.

I think we've gotten to the point where we've gone wide for a while, we've gone really wide, and taken on some projects that really expanded us into other places that we never thought that we would.

We feel, now, comfortable for the next year or two just providing depth, truly because we need it.

We're starting to also really get into some bigger firms that are a lot more sophisticated and have different needs.

And so, trying to address those without, we don't need to go build X, Y, Z extra because it's like, no, our tool's good enough, but we need A, B, C for this feature now, because it's necessary and they already have a tool that they're using that they would to get rid of because it doesn't have the breadth that we have but it's really good at this one thing.

And so, I think you get to a point in SaaS from a platform stabbing point where it's like, it makes sense to kind of take pause on the platform play of widening that and just go deeper for a few years, and it just makes things so much easier to bring people on because they're looking for one or two features.

They're like, okay cool, you have 90 features, but you don't have these three features in this one area, and they won't move to us if that's the case.

And so, that's what we're trying to do right now is go a lot deeper, and that's where we see AI really helping out, is how can we make this tool ingrained into their life and not just something that's like, I'm going to use this every day to no, I can't live without this tool? And so, that's what we're trying to do right now.

Isaac: You talked about before about how you guys can replace five tools internally at a lot of firms and whatnot.

And I've always found the challenge with that sort of approach, because you're offering bundling, you're offering everything kind of in one place and it's a kind of an integrated thing, and I think the CRM is in the future always going to be the hub of where that happens, and I don't think Canopy is any exception there.

But when you're trying to displace five tools at the same time, I think you run into this problem where you're providing a subset of all of these tools that you're replacing, 'cause those are very specialized, singular tools.

And so yeah, maybe you have the 80/20 of the features, but you don't have all of them.

And I've found what you run into is that each person you talk to has this different slice of the features that they need from those five tools that you're replacing that you're not quite hitting.

Do you have any advice for anyone who's in a similar place and is dealing with that from a product perspective?

Brad: Yeah, and it's not an easy problem to solve, 'cause you want to please everyone, you have empathy for everyone as a product person, and so, you have to pick your battles.

My advice is, dig in with customers as much as you can, prospects and current customers.

Even though they may want something else, they're actually probably looking for something else, they're probably actually meaning X when they're calling it Z.

And so, often you'll find that there's this idea that you keep hearing from sales. That's where we hear a lot of stuff of like, eh, you guys have everything but this, that's where we hear it a lot.

When you start to dig in, I did this the other day, they were asking for a feature and I was like, yeah cool. So what does that feature actually mean to you, what is it doing for you?

And so, truly understanding where the pain point is, what they're looking for, can actually be much different than what it is on the surface.

And so, you start to do enough of that and talk to enough of people, and you start to really understand like, okay, this isn't just a one-off thing with this firm.

For instance, a firm I talked to the other day, they're like, oh, I need this export and I need it now.

And I'm like, okay, why do you need the export? Well, I'm doing an in-depth analysis of our accounts receivable.

I'm like, okay, cool, we actually have a tool for that in our reporting suite. And they're like, oh, well I don't know how to do that.

And I'm like, okay cool. So this is not necessarily a feature issue, it's a training issue, and/or a perception issue.

And so, you'll find that these ideas tend to weed themselves out the more you talk to customers.

I am huge on being obsessed with talking to customers and prospects, because they're actually going to end up pointing you in the right direction or weeding out the ideas that are distractions.

Isaac: That's awesome advice.

Christine: I'd love to go back towards AI for a second.

So, obviously things are changing super fast, there's a lot of hype out there, and everybody who's building applications is trying to figure out what are things that I can build that drive real value for my end users at the end of the day?

What have you found is the sweet spot for where people can use the technology and the techniques that exist out there today and actually create end user value and experiences that is a huge upgrade over what they might have had before?

Brad: Yeah.

I think that's the fun part now too, is that in our industry, and probably everyone's industry, is that you see a new startup pop up every single day that does that job, or is doing a job that you thought of five years ago but wasn't technologically possible or feasible at the time.

And so, that's actually something that's been fairly easy for us, because we're a platform, so we own the data.

And at the end of the day, in my opinion, if you have the data, you're going to win out on every single one of these smaller AI startups, because they don't have access to that level of data or that amount of data. And so, when we're thinking about ways to bring AI that really provide utility, it's all surrounding the customer's data and how we can manipulate that data or make it useful to them without ruining the workflow.

Something that we try to do is really layer it in so that it's just a casual experience, but casually suggesting, not forcing them to do anything.

One of the ideas that we've always had is just like, hey, how do we, and this is everyone right now, it's like, hey, how do we create an agent, how do we have an agent in the app that is doing all this work for them?

Well, I go talk to customers about that, and they're like, no, I don't care about that. Here's what I want it to do and I want it to do it my way, and I'm like, okay.

But then I'll talk to another customer and they're like, yeah, that'd be cool, but I want it to do this job and this job only.

And so, you have to have a good level of testing your proof of concepts. That's something that we do a lot with AI.

Not that necessarily we don't with other features, but I want to get it in someone's face. I don't want to be building a feature if they're not going to see it's useful.

So the document automation tool, when we first introduced it, it was essentially just a thing that classified documents.

So it said, this is a W2 from 2019 from the IRS or whatever, something that, and then we would merge the documents.

And so, we got that in people's face, we started showing them that, and we told 'em it was built by AI and they're like, yeah that's really cool.

Why doesn't it rename? We don't really care about the classification as much. I want the document's name to change. I spend a lot of time doing that.

And so, I found that when you show proof of concepts, when you introduce users to your ideas before they're shipped, they actually are able to take it a step further for you and say, yeah, no, this is useful, but I want this as well, and then I'll buy it.

So getting stuff in front of customers as often as possible, not only just talking but getting it in their face is something that we've done a ton and found a lot of success in making very, very heavily utilized AI tools.

Christine: Makes sense. What about on just the tech management side?

You're trying to add more depth to Canopy. Are you adding engineers to the team, or are you just getting more done?

Brad: No, yeah, I mean, so all of our engineers use, we use AI to help, they use it to help code.

So that's actually sped things up quite a bit, but we're also going out and hiring a bunch of people too.

So we've been fortunate enough to be able to do that right now because we believe in that this can really change our market for the better, and so, we're going to get some very talented people to help improve our AI or start testing new ideas so that we can get it to our customers and get it to their face and see if we've missed the mark or not.

Christine: That's awesome. Looks we're just about out of time.

And before we wrap, we always do a section we call Picks of everybody sharing something, it can be a tool, it can be a piece of media, anything that you found interesting and are excited about right now.

So, Brad, do you have a pick to share with our listeners?

Brad: Yeah.

So, I as a product person, something that is like, and this is being introduced in many tools, unfortunately, but also fortunately, something that is very time consuming, or used to be, and, Isaac, you can confirm if I'm wrong on this, but putting together competitive analysis, very in depth analysis, takes a lot of time, and having multiple slide decks to pull from.

So something I'm actually very, very excited about is all the deep research tools that are coming out in AI. Taking 10 to 15 hours of work that used to be for me to go look at all of our competitors, figure out what their suite of products are and then start putting them into a good comparison matrix can be done in minutes now by an AI, and it's something that I am extremely excited about.

So that's probably the thing I'm most excited about right now from a software standpoint, just because it's going to save me a ton of time and allow me to focus on what I want to focus on, which is talking to customers, and really what the strategy is and having that just at my fingertips is just, oh, it's going to be so exciting.

From anyone who's in a strategy or competitive analysis role, you got to be using deep research tools every day.

Isaac: I really agree, and I think that was one of those things that when I saw it coming out I was like, hey, I don't really need a big bucket of slop of stuff you found, or I can google my own stuff.

And as soon as I tried it I was like whoa, this is 10 hours of work that just got done in the amount of time it took me to get up and make a cup of coffee.

Totally has changed the way. I don't know. It's one of those things you keep realizing throughout your day, you're like, wait, I could actually use it for this also. It's fantastic.

Brad: The thing is, why I say it's unfortunate too, is because--

It just is going to make things 10 times more competitive from a founder standpoint, from a product standpoint. You're going to see a ton of startups pop up because they're doing all this research, all this stuff way quicker than it used to be.

It used to take months to put together a good business case, and now you can relatively get it done within a week if you do it right, and that means including talking to people in the market, not just taking whatever's in ChatGPT and copying and pasting it.

You can't do that, just to be clear. You still need to have some level of knowledge to make good prompts and to curate these responses.

Isaac: I agree. I'm a little less doom and gloom about the negativity of the Cambrian explosion of apps that will just keep happening with these things.

Because at the end of the day, if the bar is that low, then you'll see commoditization and the bar will become higher again, and then what people expect out of a business or an application in order to be successful will just become high again, and everyone wins.

The consumer wins, and the businesses that are nimble and scrappy and scramble well will win too.

Brad: Exactly.

Christine: Totally. Makes sense. Isaac, do you have a pick today?

Isaac: I do. It is a nutrition tracking app called Alma Nutrition, A-L-M-A.

And I'm someone who, I used MyFitnessPal for a long time to log all my food and calories, like true type-A person, and they eventually added some very aggressive monetization to that product.

I switched over to something called Lose It. And at the end of the day, these were all just tracking apps.

And Alma is so cool 'cause it's one of those AI-first kind of apps where you just press the microphone icon and you just rant to it about the meal you just had, and it could be from a restaurant or just a list of ingredients that I pulled out of the fridge, and it does a good job of really giving you solid calorie counts and estimates.

And that's somewhere where if you're 10% off and you're overeating by 230 calories a day, that actually adds up to something very significant over a year or two of habituating that, and Alma really has figured out how to get it right with the AI-first stuff.

It's super cool, and I can speak to it a human being.

Christine: I do really how the latest round of AI tech has made voice interfaces actually good.

These have existed forever. You're like, hey Google, blah blah blah blah blah, and it was like okay.

But now we've gone from, well, I could set a timer with my voice to, I can actually do a bunch of stuff that's actually really useful in a lot broader ways.

Brad: I was literally talking about this the other day. I was looking for a new app because I was so sick of MyFitnessPal.

Their monetization strategy in the app was just so distracting, so annoying.

I feel I'm trying to download a song from Limewire without getting a virus on my computer, clicking all the popups, get away.

That's how I feel with MyFitnessPal. So I'm definitely going to take your advice and try it put.

Isaac: Yeah. And the one last thing I got to say from a product perspective that they do really well is, they have a lot of functionality that again, it's just all accessed through a microphone and you can kind of feel that they have this pipeline of classifying what you're doing.

Are you asking a question about food you ate earlier, are you trying to delete something, are you trying to add something, and then delving more off of that.

And I think that's a level up from what we've seen in the past few years of people just transparently proxying something to ChatGPT's API and then trying to do something.

It's cool to see these pipelines in place. That is the future, I feel like, of this stuff.

Brad: Yeah.

Isaac: Spang, what about you?

Christine: My pick for today is the Zusa Transit Pack.

It's pretty small, it's 20 liters, and the best thing about it is it has this sleeve on the back that you can put it on your carry on, if you have one of those roller boards, and then the best thing about it is that you can then walk through the airport with nothing on your back and you feel awesome.

And you arrive for your business trip, speaking at a conference or whatever, and you're like, oh, I don't feel I've done any work at all.

I used to be really masochistic and I would travel with everything in a duffle bag that I just carried on my back, and switching to a roller suitcase and a little backpack that goes on top has just been life-changing for me.

Brad: Yeah. Any backpack makers out there, if you don't have that strap that allows you to set it on top of your roller bag, it's just, I'm out.

Christine: I used to have a different travel oriented backpack and it didn't have that, and now I'll never go back.

Brad: Me neither. I don't have that company, but I have a similar one, and it has the sleeve, and it's made travel for business way better.

Christine: I'll never buy a another car that doesn't drive for me, and I'll never buy another travel backpack that doesn't go on top of my roller board.

Brad: Love it.

Christine: Cool. Well, that brings us to the end of our episode today.

Thank you so much, Brad, for joining us and sharing so many great stories and insights from your time at Canopy, and great to see everybody.

Until next time.