Daryna Kulya: At the very core, open phone gives you your business phone system calling, texting, contacts all in one. Very simple. It can start just for one person. If it's just you starting out, great. Get your open phone number. Use it to call text clients. It's all there. I think it becomes really magical as you start growing your business and you hire admin, help, ops, estimators, whoever you can easily bring your team into the solution so you stop being the bottom line.

Austin Gray: Alright? Welcome back to the Owner Ops podcast. I'm your host, Austin Gray. I have a special guest, Daryna Kulya joining me, one of the founders. Are you the original founder or one of the co-founders of Open Phone? 

Daryna Kulya: It's two of us. Two founders. I'm a co-founder. Yeah. 

Austin Gray: Thank you so much for helping me get the phone number for the Austin, Texas area code for Texas Land Clearing Solutions.

Daryna Kulya: Absolutely. 

Austin Gray: That was a huge help. 

Daryna Kulya: Oh ha. I'm glad I was able to help. And thank you for having me. I'm so excited to get to know you to chat, so very happy to be here. 

Austin Gray: So can you tell us about what it was like starting open phone and when did you start it and then what's the story been and take us away from the start to now.

Daryna Kulya: Oh man. Yeah, we're going back in time here. We've been building open phone. So we started the company in 2018 officially, but we were exploring the idea and like building our alpha version, beta version in 2017. And so both me and my co-founder, we came, we are now in the US but we started the company in Toronto and Canada.

And there are several things that led to the journey of starting open phone. I think probably one which is interesting given your experience actually, is that, so my co-founder, prior to this, he was a product manager at a company that was building invoicing software for contractors. And one thing that he learned is that, because again, he was building this invoicing product that was used by a lot of contractors, and he noticed that they were all super paranoid about putting their phone number on the invoices.

And he was like asking like, why don't you put your phone number here? And they were like saying, listen, I'm busy with clients. I'm busy on a job. I don't have time to answer my phone. I get all these calls from people who wanna do business with me, but like I'm busy with a customer. They were just saying that their phone is ringing off the hook.

It's like crazy. But the existing solutions at the time, and again, this is me taking you back to 2017, right? 20 even earlier, the existing solutions were like so expensive, so clunky, built for like big enterprises. So they basically had a choice of you, you either use your personal phone number or you buy this like super expensive, complicated solution.

And a lot of them were just like, Hey, I give up. And I think that was like such an interesting insight. We didn't start open phone immediately after that, but that was like one of those aha moments that many more things happened. But that was probably like a very unique insight that led us to think, listen, why is that the case?

Why for something so important like phone. The solutions are so clunky, expensive, outdated, and both of us are product people. So we took that as a challenge.

Austin Gray:  I recently got back from launching a land clearing business down in Austin, and this last winter I launched a snow shoveling business alongside Bearclaw. And in both businesses I've implemented Jobber as a way for us to efficiently manage quoting job schedules and invoicing and even collecting online payment. Why? Because it's worked so well for us in Bearclaw and it's saved us a ton of time and headache. So if you are looking for a software that can help you manage the backend of your business, look no further than Jobber, you can visit gogetjobber.com/ownrops O-W-N-R-O-P-S.

Austin Gray: So like how did you dive deeper to understand that pain? 

Daryna Kulya: Yes. So to, that's a great question. So first of all, so now my dad is now retired, but he has been an entrepreneur all his life. And frankly I also really grew up with it because the pain is very, is pretty, pretty clear in my mind at least. It was that you can't afford missing a call.

Like growing up, I remember my dad would always like, whatever happens, we are having dinner. Like we're just all hanging out as a family. If his phone rings, he like leaves immediately and goes and takes the call because it could be like a very important client, it could be potential business. So to be honest, for me, yes, we did some things to validate the pain, so to speak.

And I'll, I can share more about like different experiments we've done, but quite frankly for me, like I felt this on a personal level, like going back to my childhood in a sense. That I was like, oh man. Yeah, if his phone rings, I always thought we have like bus, there's a chance that we will have some money as a family versus if his phone is quiet.

I basically thought, okay, bad things are happening. This is like me being very little. So I think in some way I don't think we really needed to go like crazy into this validation phase. We have so many of our friends and family owned businesses, so many of them use their personal phone numbers. We were just surrounded by people who had this problem.

So we didn't necessarily have to do crazy amounts of user research. And the thing is that when we launched the initial version of open phone, the alpha version, we I, to get our first customers, obviously it was like friends and family, but then I posted on some Facebook groups on Reddit. Quite frankly, I was surprised, like how big the problem was and how much traction we got when our product was super, super basic.

So I think that we definitely, maybe for some other startups they have to do a lot more kind of like validation. But I think we almost stumbled into this problem very like naturally and we were like shocked to see how, just how big an opportunity it could be. 

Austin Gray: So I want to go back to that first piece you said whenever your partner was building invoicing software.

Daryna Kulya: Yeah. He said he heard contractors stating what? That they were afraid to, they were afraid to put their phone number on the invoice. And the reason being why, and the reason being is that. Their phone would just ring off the hook and they don't have a way to, they don't know how to handle that. Now, mind you, again, things have changed.

I'm taking you back to 20 16, 20, maybe even earlier. So I still think, and to some degree it's true and we are very fortunate to be building a solution in the space. But yeah, I think that going back to that time, the problem was that they just don't know how to handle it. And again, I think a lot of the software, maybe a lot of our competitors like really focused on building a solution for much larger companies.

And that solution was inaccessible and just not really appropriate for a two, three person business. So I think that, I think for us, that was like a big learning. 

Austin Gray: Yes. So I just wanted to make sure I understood that correctly. But yes, I can totally resonate with this. And I grew up very similar way. My dad's cell phone just rang, he owns a concrete business back in Texas and he did decorative concrete, and it was just like.

He was that guy who would show up to our baseball practice or our soccer practice or football and his phone would be ringing and he'd be coaching and he'd take calls and then he'd go visit the customer after our practice, after we went to bed. And it was like, it just never stopped. But it was because everybody had his personal cell phone number.

And so when I started my business, a big thing that I wanted to do is like, I just want to have a solution to where like people can call our business line, but that's not coming to my cell phone after hours 'cause I want to hang out with my family and I just don't even want to think about it when I come home, even though we still think about it.

Daryna Kulya: Um, yeah, 

Austin Gray: You're able to, if you're, if there's a way to like direct customers to a specific line. In my head that was a solution. And so I actually started with, I don't even know if they're one of your competitors at this point because it's so clunky and I have a rule where I don't bash any. Other contractor. So I'm gonna use the same rule with other software, but sure thing, it is very enterprise level. Looks like it was built in the 1990s and I am a sucker for good design. You guys have incredible design and the one I'm using has terrible clunky design. Um, and I've had two instances where I realized that we were missing calls.

So that led me to doing more research and that's how I came across open phone initially. And so whenever you started building it out, what was the initial solution that you were building for the one main pain that you were solving? 

Daryna Kulya: Yeah, that's a great question. So the first, it's interesting, right?

Because the first, I'm almost trying to remember now, it feels like a long time ago trying to remember like our initial Alpha product and let me actually. Tell you exactly what it was because it was just me and my co-founder, my partner. We, we couldn't necessarily just immediately build everything under the sun.

We had to start with something. And we started by just creating a simple but beautiful iOS app. And there is a reason for it because again, I, I actually love competition. I love the fact that we have competitors. I'm not gonna bash anyone, but the thing is that there is, we saw that a lot of people really cared about, like, going back to this idea that we, my, my partner was building a solution prior to this for contractors that they didn't need this beautiful, incredible web app.

They actually needed an app on their smartphone that was their business phone solution. They needed that a lot more. 'cause they were always on the go, right? They were like going from job site to job site. They were like on the go. And we, we saw existing products on the market and they were all like Web first.

They all basically built everything possible on the web, but their mobile app was like really clunky. We like, we're both product people and we were like, oh my god, this space needs like a beautiful iOS app, mobile app. So we started out with an iOS app and to be honest, the functionality was so basic. It was like you can call, you can text, maybe it's not basic.

You can call, you can text, you can have your contact all in one place. But maybe this, the one important decision we made early on that I think really in helped us grow is that unlike all of the other solutions, we didn't just take your phone app, the your default iPhone app or something. We didn't just take that and build, rebuilt it, right?

We thought like it would make sense for a business in today's day and age. And we did something I think pretty simple, which is like we put your conversations all in one thread. You know how on your phone you have a voicemail, like when you get a voicemail that goes into one tab. If you get a text message, it is an iMessage or Messages app.

If you got a missed call, it's in your phone app. And then you also have, by the way, you have contacts, right? So it's four different apps or different places where your information lives. And just imagine running a business and doing that. You go crazy, you miss stuff. Oh, I left you a voicemail. Oh, who left me a voicemail?

It's crazy. So we did something so simple is we just brought this all into one experience and made it simple and nice and beautiful on, on iOS. And I think that's like super basic right? And that pretty simple product got us a lot of customers and got traction. And of course we built on top of it. Right now we do so much more, but I just thought it was, was pretty, pretty awesome how it, our initial version was not that complicated.

But it was done I think really well, and that got us our first customers. 

Austin Gray: That's fantastic.

 Austin Gray: Stryker Digital specializes in SEO services specifically for local service businesses. Bodie and Andy, the two co-founders, have helped me get Bearclaw Land Services to the number one search result on Google inside my state for my specific search term. If you wanna learn more, visit stryker digital.com. That's S-T-R-Y-K-E-R digital.com.

Austin Gray:  You built the, the mobile app for a business line for an all-in-one business solution. And listeners, if you're listening to this sort of, the way I thought about this whenever I was starting the business was like, if we could just keep everything all in one spot for the business, it does two things. One, it keeps organization better. Two, I. It allows me to live my own personal life on my own cell phone and have texts on my cell phone primarily with friends and family, which is the life I want to live.

I don't wanna always just be like texting work clients or customers. And don't get me wrong, I love working hard, but there is a spot to have a clean break. And so yeah. Why don't you tell me about where you took it from there. You got the all in one mobile solution and for listeners, I think it would be interesting to just tell them about like where you're at today, like what does open Phone do and how can it benefit a contractor today?

Daryna Kulya: Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you. Look, going back in time, right? From that mobile app, solo from mobile app, like where we took it. I think there was, before I tell you w where we are today, I wanna tell you about one super important part of our journey, which I think changed everything. Up until 2020, we were sure we were a mobile app.

We created a, our desktop app, added a lot of features, became a lot more kind of capable of handling bigger businesses. But there is like a really key point of that journey, which is we created a solution for teams in 2020. And what I mean by that is we launched shared numbers and this was a game changer.

And this is what I am, I think at this point I can say that like we can really help teams. And in your situation, for example, if you wanna delegate your calls and messages to someone else, you're busy with your family, you want someone else to respond to customers. What you need is you need a shared phone number where you can see your team handling calls, handling messages, people, there's visibility.

Everyone knows who said what. It's like having like a shared inbox similar to support at similar to that. You have that for phone number. And I'll tell you once we launched it. It was like a day at night type of situation because I think that, you know, a lot of people talk about having product market fit.

Daryna Kulya: I think I really felt it at this moment because people were just so hungry for a service. And by the way, this was also like early Covid days. A lot of teams went remote and a lot of businesses were saying, Hey, I want my assistant. This was like a crazy time. Hey, I want my assistant to not have to come to the office to call people from a desk, from a landline.

And I'm like, yeah, you don't wanna be doing that. So we had people who are, who ported over their landlines to us, and they would now have this solution where their whole team being remote, being distributed again, early covid, people went, this was like a bit crazy, right? People could just handle the phone collaboratively.

This was like such a exciting moment for us, and I'm calling it out because I think that for contractors. For service-based businesses. I think this is the true reason why you don't wanna be using your personal phone number. Sure. Privacy work-life balance. I get that. But the big reason why having a personal phone number as your company number is not a good idea, is that at some point you're gonna hire a va, you're gonna hire an ops person, you're gonna hire, I dunno, back you.

Daryna Kulya: You're gonna start building your team. And if you do that at any given point of time, but you as the owner, you still get calls on your personal cell phone number, you are still a bottleneck. It's like you hired people to remove your yourself from being a bottleneck, but you are still a bottleneck. So I think that this, I'm just calling it out because it was such an important point for us to be able to deliver a solution that solves this problem.

Now we've added a lot more. We have integrations. There's some really cool things we're doing on the automation side, but I still think back to that moment, like that was the p the time that I could say, listen, if you run a business, do not make yourself a bottleneck. Get a solution that allows you to have your team do the work.

And you have, you are still there, you are still involved, but you are not a bottleneck to customers hearing back from your company. 

Austin Gray: Absolutely. And after you helped me get set up with, uh, the Austin area code for Texas Clearing, we hired our first sales rep down there. We got our marketing campaigns launched, and I can say as a first time user, it was super easy and super seamless just to add him onto that and have him start answering that.

And so we have just broken into starting to use this. What I'm really excited about. Two things. One that you mentioned, being able to share this number with the team because as we grow here, and I think a lot of our listeners like, like I was mentioning before, are in that like zero to 1 million phase.

And so it's like transitioning from, Hey, I'm doing absolutely everything in the business. I'm taking the calls, I'm doing the estimates, I'm doing the field work, I'm sending the invoices. The biggest unlock that I experienced first off was like, Hey, let's just get that like first admin role hired to where we can take some of the admin off part-time, four hours a day, 20 hours a week.

You can hire overseas, you can hire in-house, you can hire in person. It doesn't matter. The most important thing is like understanding what the lowest leverage tasks are and then putting a document together to go hire that person. And I believe putting a phone system in place early on will help save you time in the long run. 'cause at some point you're gonna have to come back and do it either way, to your point. 

Daryna Kulya: Absolutely. Listen, I, there's so many times I've mentioned this, I'm, I am I like to think, I'm not like, I don't wanna push everyone to do something. Like people have to make their own decisions what makes sense for their business.

But I think of it this way, same way as you wouldn't, you're starting your company, you're not going to be using your personal Gmail to send invoices and quotes to customers. You're probably gonna get like a work email address so it looks a little bit more professional and you are already setting that kind of like separation to a degree.

Like you're, that's a system, right? Because when you have an assistant, you can have them get access to your work email, but you are not, again, likely going to be giving them access to your personal Gmail for everything else, right? So you immediately have that like separation and then ability to scale.

So I think of it in a similar way, get a business phone number. You'll already know that as you grow. That's a number your customers have. And you can always scale it up, scale it down, add people, remove people. But it's going back to your point, you're not gonna be a bottleneck. I also wanna mention that as we've seen kind of companies come to us and going back to your point of like when you hire your, an admin or first employee to help you out, it's almost like you wanna set them up for success because you want them to be in a position to help you.

And if you don't get, give them the tools and the right, there's, if there's no system in place, they're just not going to be helpful. And you are paying them and they're not taking things off your plate. So I think it's just as simple as that.

Austin Gray: It really is. And one thing I'm very interested in is this new partnership that you guys have launched with Jobber.

Can you tell us more about that? 

Daryna Kulya: Yes, absolutely. Yeah, of course. I love your hat by the way. It's like we have to talk about it. We have to. So we have to. So I mentioned that for us, like also another really big point was. Open phone, and it's in the name OpenPhone We're not closed phone. We wanna be connected to other tools and make that super easy.

And we've already got a lot of integrations going with CRMs like HubSpot, Salesforce, Zapier, a ton of integrations. And now, as of yesterday, we are connected, we are integrated with Jobber. And what this means now is that if you're using Jobber to run your business and you're using OpenPhone and you get calls with customers on open phone, your call summary, your call transcription can be pushed automatically to jobber.

So you, if you are, if your team is in jobber tracking everything, all the details of a job. Now the calls that happen in OpenPhone are a part of it, so you have that fee full, full picture of what's going on. I'm very excited, by the way, this is just the beginning. We wanna do more with jobber. I think there's more things we can do, but I, but we've, we already have a lot of customers who connected both tools, and they're now, again, enjoying the fact that when they're in jobber and they see the jobs that they have and the requests, they get that full view without having to switch tabs, tools, et cetera.

Austin Gray: My head is going in so many directions for ideas because one, like I told you in the beginning, maybe I didn't mention it, but I just love software. I love beautifully designed software, and I love figuring out how we can make things more efficient within our business. One of the most important things, when I was down in Austin.

I got to spend time with the guy I'm doing this business with owns another internet business. They do about 90 million bucks a year, and he said the most important thing you can do right now is track what your customers are doing. Meaning if they're paying you for a tree service, make sure that they're tagged in your CRM. That way if they're paying you for a gravel driveway repair service, make sure that they're tagged properly in your CRM because if any of y'all listen to any of for MO'S stuff, if you haven't, go check out the LTV to CAC ratio.

Lifetime value of customer to customer acquisition cost ratio. That video is gold right there. So the most important things that this guy challenged me to do in my business was like, go understand where your customers are coming from and then make sure that they're tagged properly. As I heard about the open phone and jobber integration, I'm like, oh, this is gold.

'cause right now. Our estimator is wearing two hats. He wears sales and estimating, and then he also does project manager. So he's very busy and I think you, that's all businesses is like turning generalists into specialists over time. But right now at this phase, he's handling both. If he could answer a phone call from a customer from one of our ads.

And that summary was transcribed into the request with Jobber. And then we had an automation with Zapier, or excuse me, if we had that plugged in with chat GBT to summarize and tag accordingly. And then we plugged our Zaps in to automate everything. Like we're saving so much time there and I can't stop.But think about all the ideas here. 

Daryna Kulya: Oh man. Since you're talking about it, let me tell you about something. So I think this is where you asked me about what are the things we do at Open Found. Sometimes as a founder, I get excited about every feature. Every, everything we do is my favorite thing. You brought something up that I wanna mention.

Obviously, we're like getting into this world of ai, right? Where we wanna make sure that as humans, we spend time on the highest leverage tasks and we start automating and getting rid of anything that's manual, that's, that's not really creating that much value, right? So I think as it's happening, we're starting to see this, right?

Automate reminders, right? Why do you need to remind any follow ups? Any reminders could be automated. Now talking about tagging, one of the things we recently launched at open phone is AI call tags. And this is super powerful. We should make sure, I think it's probably V two. We wanna make sure it also comes through nicely on the jobber side.

I have to follow up on that. But what you can do is that any call you have an open phone, just imagine every call is automatically recorded, automatically transcribed, automatically summarized. We now have ability to automatically label it and you can prompt it the way that you want. So for example, as the owner, do you wanna know any time there was an estimate call where the customer was very concerned about the price or they wanted a discount, you can literally, and I actually did this the other day, you can literally say tag any call where discount was mentioned or where the customer had maybe negative feedback on the price.

As the owner, you probably wanna know this, but there is no way you will, if you have a lot of calls going on. You are just not gonna, people are not gonna tell you, right? It is just gonna happen and it's your business and you are losing visibility. So now you can have these automatic tags and you can quickly go and be like, show me the calls where the price was too high or the price was too low.

I dunno. Or the customer was unhappy. Show me negative sentiment calls and you can listen to them, give feedback to your team, but then also you can. Personally follow up. I think that's the kind of stuff that every owner wants to do. They wanna be able to see what's happening and take action and not be bogged down by the noise of everything happening in their business.

Austin Gray: More and more ideas just keep coming through. 'cause I'll tell you guys, and I know like I'm on this kick right now of like this last week, I've just been head down on like making sure our CRM is updated with tags. And like I have spent all week going back through every single one of our 2024 invoices, talking, calling project managers, Hey, what did this person say?

Like, why did they not buy, why was this estimate sent? And like, why did they not accept trying to understand as much as I possibly can about, uh, the ones who didn't accept and then try and understand the ones who did pay. Like we, we literally just got off the phone earlier or yesterday about who is our ideal customer.

What is our 100% ideal customer? And then let's segment that out and then take a step back into who is our second most ideal and where are we getting the most demand right now? And then it, the conversation shifts to do we have the right equipment to service where we're actually getting the most demand?

And I think like those sorts of insights that AI is going to be able to provide with something like call summaries from open phone is going to be gold, especially for the lifetime value conversation. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna push y'all listeners back to go watch this video. Go watch the hormones, the lifetime value to cat video. It's like the best free online gold that you can get right now. If you understand those metrics, then all of these things that we're talking about start to become really important to you because you know that if you're building a customer database. 

Austin Gray: Stryker Digital specializes in SEO services specifically for local service businesses. Bodie and Andy, the two co-founders, have helped me get bearclaw land services to the number one search result on Google inside my state for my specific search term. If you wanna learn more, visit stryker digital.com. That's S-T-R-Y-K-E-R digital.com, 

Austin Gray: And they're tagged properly. You can upsell the customers for other services throughout the lifetime, that customers in your database, and you also know where to invest, right?

Daryna Kulya: If you're talking about obviously CAC to LTV ratio, you will know what marketing channels to invest in or what channels to not invest in, because it just doesn't, maybe there is a channel that brings you a lot of customers and you're like thrilled about it, but then those customers don't spend enough with you, and there's another channel that's actually better because you're getting higher quality customers. And to your point, without that data, you are making decisions. It's like you're, yeah, you have no idea where to actually put your money. 

Austin Gray: So I was doing some competitor ad analysis. You know how you can go on Facebook ad library or library and see what your, like other similar companies are running. One of our guys in a different market, but really good marketer is running just like a, Hey, click to call this number ad. And in my head I'm like, dang, but we're gonna miss out on all the data from a customer filling out this, the submission form. And this was literally just last week. So like you saying that there's AI call summaries 

Daryna Kulya: Oh a hundred percent. 

Austin Gray: Let's just drive it all to that number. 

Daryna Kulya: Try it. Yeah. I think there's also, by the way, so since we were talking about it, I also wanna talk about texting, which is something that there, there were some conversations on Twitter XI, I still say Twitter by the way, but there were some conversations, I'm trying to remember who, who exactly said this, but.

One of the things that we are seeing at open phone, again, we serve over 50,000 businesses. We serve a lot of ho home services, service-based businesses. One thing we are seeing on our side is that texting is huge, and I just think that if you are a service-based business and you are not texting clients and, and like, I wanna be clear, I'm not, I don't mean spam spamming them or cold texting, which is not actually, is not legal consensual, hey, they, they are opting in to, they want to text you and you text them.

I think it's just so huge because at the end of the day, I think what we're seeing is that, sure, you wanna be, of course you want to answer every call. You wanna record calls and have that visibility. But I think the fact that you can, your business can be accessible through text. Is is a superpower. It's faster, it's more, I think if you can text someone, you have a better relationship, I find, and I think that it can lead to better close rate of deals and ultimately stronger customer relationships.

So I am, as much as I love calls, of course, I am also like a big texting person, and I feel like that's the channel that businesses are, it's very underrated. It's still underrated. Why do you think it's underrated? I think it's underrated because maybe, okay, maybe it is underrated because people know, and generally I think most people know they don't wanna just cold text.

Like you can technically, you can cold call, you can cold email. Thankfully we don't get a lot of cold text messages going on, and there's a whole reg regulatory side to that. Maybe it's because of that, or maybe it's because of the tooling. Maybe it's because there are certain scenarios where texting makes more sense.

I am a huge proponent for texting. So again, based on your business, based on the nature of your client relationships, again, we do this at open phone, we allow you to have a shared number that people can call and text. I think sometimes it's just letting the consumer, your client know, listen, this is our number.

You can call us. We're available, but you could also text us and maybe, maybe because people are still not used to the fact that, hey, you could actually text a company. Maybe that's why it's still underrated. I don't know. Maybe I am a little biased, obviously, right? I'm on the side of tooling. I see things all the time.

I would be curious to know others' point of view, but to me, what I see is that when you let your customer know, Hey, listen, you can text us, they will, of course, they're more likely to do it, and I also feel like you then need to have the tooling to make sure that those texts don't go to one person, they go to a team. So again, as the owner, you're not getting text at midnight and you're like, I don't know what to do. So we make that easy.

Austin Gray: So what sort of data do you have to show that texting is where the movement is going?

Daryna Kulya:  Yeah, look, I think we, so we are a platform that offers calling and messaging and we are just seeing the volume. I don't know what numbers I can share. Let me just say that when I look at the volume of text messages on our platform is just growing so fast and it's like we, again, we offer both, but I think it's the growth of that we've experienced despite the fact that there have been actually some, and I don't know how much your listeners wanna know about the regulatory side, but there have been actually some interesting regulatory changes around texting because carriers don't want spam as a consumer, you don't want spam. 

So there have been actually some regulatory changes to make it a lot safer so you don't get spammed every day. But I think despite that, we are seeing great growth in texting. I am also seeing, because I work with a lot of our customers, I'm also seeing something that I think is a no brainer. If you get a missed call and you can't, let's say your team is is responsible for answering calls and they're busy, if you get a missed call, send them a missed call, send the customer like a missed call auto reply, which is like a, just a text message, Hey, sorry we're currently unavailable, but like we can help you, you know, what can we help you with? Something like that. 

We are seeing like really nice adoption of that feature and I don't have the full data, but I'm imagining that saving one missed call from saving one person from potentially going to a competitor by using something like that could just pay off big time. Because again, when you're busy, you're not able to answer. Offering SMS as a channel can just be super helpful.

Austin Gray:  I can agree a hundred percent that. You never know who's on the other line. 

Daryna Kulya: Yep. 

Austin Gray: And I posted about this on X, I think that's the first time I've ever said Post it on X. Instead of, I've tweeted about this on Twitter, still trying to like 

Daryna Kulya: Look at that.

Austin Gray:  transition.

Daryna Kulya: I know I still say Twitter. I feel like for me it's so nostalgic. 

Austin Gray: It really is. I mean, I can specifically think of two phone calls, two and three actually, that were just like, there were six figure contracts on the other side and it was because the call was answered and we delivered a fast site visit and met them in person.

But had we not done that, we know, and I'm sure you have data that supports this, but the way people search for things online today, if you don't answer your phone or if you don't like make an initial contact, they're just going right to the ne number two and number three and number four. Yep. But if you're number one on Google, that's like your first kind of like hurdle to get there.

And those are, that's a conversation for a different episode. Yeah. But if you're there and you're getting that call and you're missing it and you're missing the lead, it's like you've already, you've paid, I don't know, 

Daryna Kulya: You paid for that call. 

Austin Gray: Yeah. You pay your SEO agency a lot of money. Right. And it's, if you miss that call, that's a lot of money down the drain. And it could be a six figure contract on the other side of the phone call.

Daryna Kulya:  A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And I think this is going back to, and by the way, I will just tease it and say, I don't know when this episode is going out, but I'm just gonna tell you that there is something really cool. We're launching very soon to even further help with this. I can't talk about it again, it just depends on when this episode is going out. 

Austin Gray: So let me pull up the production calendar here, and maybe this could, so I've got, we've got episodes all the way into the second week of June that are edited right now.

And I believe, oh wow. We have. Like, so I believe this episode will be sometime in July. 

Daryna Kulya: Oh, wow. Okay. Hey, let me just put it this way. When you are listening to this, hopefully you see at that point we would've already launched some more capabilities that really help businesses not have missed calls. My kind of message now and like something that I just recommend people regardless, also, even regardless if they use open phone. I, I hope more people use open phone, of course. But I think regardless of what you use, thinking of ways to turn those missed calls into opportunities, whether it is a sending an automated text message or obviously making sure you have the team to, to respond to calls. I think that's still such a big opportunity.

There was a tweet the other day and I'm, I feel like you probably have seen it. There was something about like the, sometimes the biggest advantage you could have as a service-based business is just answering the phone. And it's crazy how many people don't do it and don't do it well, and hopefully we can help but listen. 

Austin Gray: It's so true. Who, let me ask you this. This is gonna be an interesting question. If you don't have an answer to this, it's totally fine, and if you can't share information, it's totally fine. Who in your open phone network is posting publicly about the best automation that they have built with open phone or the best process? Does anything come to mind on your end? 

Daryna Kulya: Yeah, definitely. There's one specific, there's one person that definitely comes to mind and one thing I'll just say is that we, we serve a lot of different kinds of businesses. The first person who came to mind, and he is an amazing customer. He does so many cool things with open phone. His name is Chris Sands, who runs a law firm. And, and maybe we tag him. I'll give you his details. Perhaps we ta we tag him here somehow. But he runs a law firm and you would imagine like law firms like, okay, cool, boring, they sound boring, no offense. But what he does is just amazing. Obviously they have various acquisition channels, ads and various ways they get leads to call and request consultation, but the kind of setup he has on open phone is incredible.

There are several places where he's written about it or showed like his setup. He does use Zapier. I actually think he might be using make.com, which is similar to Zapier, but there's many automations and I think some are actually going back to speaking of Facebook ads, when you receive a Facebook lead, there is an automation that pipes that in that person into open phone and I believe they send a text message.

There's like multiple things they do, but he comes to mind and I think. In his field and in for law firms, I haven't necessarily seen that much innovation, but I think what these guys do is super cool and they use open phone in ways that I sometimes have to be like, wait a minute, we do that. Oh yeah, we do that. Yeah. 

Austin Gray: That's really cool. And I'll have to, uh, yeah, if you don't mind after this, connect us 'cause I'll have to look into Yeah. Or just share his, wherever he's sharing this. Definitely. Yeah, because I wanna look into it. And listeners, part of the reason why we do this podcast and part of the reason why we keep it broad in service-based business is it's, I don't want you to discredit the fact that this dude is just an attorney building this for a law firm.

I believe that we can apply different principles taken from all different types of businesses and just apply those to these sweaty type, blue collar local service based businesses. And you guys have heard me talk about this before on the podcast, but. I believe like this is where the most opportunity is for entrepreneurs right now because there are a lot of systems that are outdated.

There are people like Daryna who are making cool technology that a lot of people in tech are using, but we have access to that same tech at a reasonable rate as well, just to go apply those principles and tools into our business. And so if you keep listening to this podcast, like I promise y'all that, like if you can't hear my excitement, I love software and I'm super excited about the automation and the opportunities here.

So like we will keep diving deeper on this and I will continue to share as I integrate open phone. So I've got a specific question for you. I told you I've already put open phone into the Austin land clearing business as I integrate this into my Colorado Forestry and Excavation business. Mm-hmm. Excuse me.

We have. Two things going on right now, and I'm just curious to get your direction here. So our sales guy, I just pay for a direct phone line for him on Verizon. So he's got his own cell phone, he is got his own number. And that was specifically just to keep his work line separate than his personal line, just as he's communicating with our customers at barlo.

But I also have a general phone line that I direct all of our ads to. I direct all of our marketing, our Google business profile, our website. So it's a general phone line, and that is currently on hosted through. Okay. Um, and that has a call tree in which when the customer calls, like if they need, I still answer the office line.

If they need an estimate, it goes to our sales guys line. You know the deal. My question for you is, where do I go from here to integrate open phone? Do we just do a quick port over from eVoice? And keep his cell number the same and then just do the call tree or how you coach the same. 

Daryna Kulya: Yeah, that's a great question by the way. I love that. It's very specific. So yes, we can definitely, so step one, right? Take your number from eVoice, move it over to open phone. I'm sure whatever you do there, we can easily just replicate, we can give you a lot more functionality and everything on top of it. But I think that's step one. So that business phone number you have now lives on open phone.

You have more control, more visibility. You have all these like cool AI things, summaries, everything, right? So that's step one. Now step two, and I think it's optional, it's really like your decision, right? But we certainly can, instead of you giving your, to basically, instead of you having your sales rep carry two phones, have you pay, I'm sure whatever you pay for Verizon is a lot more than what you would be paying if you had that on open phone.

But you can basically. Move that Verizon number to open phone. So your sales rep has his, his regular cell phone with his whatever personal number and sim card, but now you are paying for his open phone line that sits through an app on top of it. And the benefits here, first of all, the benefits for him are that he doesn't have to carry two phones.

Daryna Kulya: I dunno how annoying it is to him. To me it was very annoying. That's just like a personal thing. That's one thing. The benefits to you are the fact that, hey, first of all you don't, you likely pay a lot less. You have a lot more visibility and into data stays with use as an example. Like that person, I don't know, at some point maybe they leave and go somewhere else, but you have very easy control and retain all the data to do with the number.

So for example, any calls that he makes can be synced to your CRM. Like I, if it is jobber, I'm pretty sure. You can't do that with a regular phone. Right? So when he has a, an open phone number, those calls are all recorded, they're all transcribed, they're all summarized, they're all pushed to jobber. So you have that, you have all that data, that visibility, and again, on top of it, it's probably a lot cheaper.

I don't know how much I am assuming it's like 50, 40. I dunno, maybe even, I don't know how much it costs. I'm assuming that's the range of Verizon, but, but yeah, it's like cheaper plus, more convenient. Plus you have the data and if he were to leave or whatever happens, that number can be easily, like in a second reassigned to a new person.

So that change management, like this person left, this person came on. It's super nice. And also when that happens, whoever comes in, this is like the, even the most interesting part, whoever comes back in to take that person's seat or to help out or whatever, that person. Has all the historical data and doesn't really have to be trained 'cause they can be like, oh, this is a customer, we promised this. Okay, cool. They just hit the ground running. So those are the benefits. 

 Austin Gray: This episode is brought to you by Dialed in bookkeeping. Ben and his team provide bookkeeping services, job costing reports, and accurate financial information for the home services industry. If you're looking to keep your books up to date, visit dialedinbookkeeping.com/owr ops. When you use this specific landing page, you'll get your first three months, 50% off.

Austin Gray:  So you just hit on something that I'm about to do a personal like solo episode on. But I believe the biggest opportunity right now on top of service base are the service businesses who invest really fast into building the knowledge base.

'cause the knowledge base, I believe, is what's gonna be what sets you apart from your competitors and the speed in which you're gonna be able to, if for whatever reason your sales person leaves or your admin person leaves and you rehire when you have access to that data. Like how, with how fast it's moving.

Right now with chat GPT and other AI tools, it's like. You can summarize that, create SOPs out of that to create checklists. It's like create call scripts and it's boom, get somebody going on day one. Here's the call script. Here's what you do on the inbound lead. Here's what you do on outbound. Here's what you do on the second call. And oh, by the way, if this customer calls back in based on what you just told me, that customer balked at the price last time and asked for a discount. So be prepared with this like 

Daryna Kulya: Absolutely. 

Austin Gray: You've given me so many ideas. 

Daryna Kulya: Absolutely. 

Austin Gray: I have so much energy to go implement. 

Daryna Kulya: Yeah. And I think I love the point you're making about the knowledge, right? 'cause now that I think about it outside of open Funnel, outside of everything like you are, right? At the end of the day when you are a business, I think this is why there's so much content out there about create your SOPs, really make sure you have an SOP. Because if you don't, at the end of the day, you as the owner, you are still plugged in, people are still pinging you like, how do I do this?

How do we handle that? And you having that base of knowledge can be super helpful. Plus, like you said, with chat GPT, you can, I think it's so cool, you can maybe upload that, that so p. Upload all of your SBS to chat GPT and be like, Hey, I'm looking to make some improvements. Give me ideas for ways we can make the process easier. I just think that once you have it all documented and have that data, you are, you have the leverage to do a lot more on top of it. 

Austin Gray: I don't want to take this away too much from open phone, but I had to share this. One of my neighbors, he's a second homeowner in our mountain town, led AI at Zoom and I had dinner with him, I don't know, it's been sometime over the winter, two, three months ago.

And he implanted this idea of startups and early stage businesses can move faster than ever right now with a small team in ai. And so he's working on some sort of accounting startup revolutionizing with ai. So they have four people and they have notion, they build SOPs with chat GPT, they upload it in a notion and then they leverage notions, ai.

To create the assistant to ask it questions. So if they bring on a new hire, it's like that new hire is just asking the assistant the questions instead of bothering the other person of, Hey, how do we do this? You just ask the AI the questions. And so that's where this plays all into that, right? So if you can start recording those calls, you can start building that knowledge base to where you can grow faster as you hire faster.

Daryna Kulya: Absolutely. 

Austin Gray: So I'm excited about this. 

Daryna Kulya: Listen, and I think it's such a, all these tools, like, it's such a, so there's ai, which is obviously creates a whole new world for us, but I also think that there's more to be said about automation and tools talking to each other because like you, you brought up the fact that, okay, everything is in notion cool, like with open phone.

We, this is why I am really bullish on making sure that the tools you use are. Connected, integrated with each other because like we have our open API, which we released just recently. Someone could create their own may. Maybe whatever tool you use, I dunno, maybe you have a homegrown CRM, right? You can pipe all of your data from open phone into your CRM.

You can analyze it, you can label it like we as a product, we will always give you what we think most businesses need, but maybe your business has their, like a very custom workflow that is very important, right? So this is why we have our open API and we connect to Zapier or make, we wanna make it easy for you to like take what we have and make it fit into your workflow instead of being very rigid and telling you how to do your job.

So I think that's very interesting. And what gets me excited is, listen, you can, I don't know, maybe you can take all your text messages that you've ever texted with clients and you can. Analyze sentiment and see, hey, when we talk like this, clients are a lot happier. Or maybe there, there's just so much analysis you can do.

I feel like someone out there is going to, I always as a founder, feel like there's always something one of our customers is gonna do. That will blow my mind and I'll be like, I had no idea. It's even possible. I always wanna encourage folks to take their tools that they're using and make them work in the way that makes sense for them versus, yeah, because I don't know, maybe, yeah, there is a workflow that I, we haven't even thought of.

Austin Gray: Are we to a point right now, and sorry if this is a rudimentary question, are we to a point with chat GPT now where chat GPT can access the open AI from the chat? Excuse me, open phone, sorry. Yes. Where chat GPT can access your open phone, API through chat. 

Daryna Kulya: Yeah.You can do that. I guess like the piece that the workflow that I've seen people do, at least like something that I've seen people do is that like common workflow is they want to have chat, GPT respond to text automatically based on the context and based on certain things and that is possible.

We actually have a little prototype of that and also I've seen people who do that. So I think the short answer is yes. I think the longer answer is obviously Chad GPT is as good as the data you provided with, so maybe for certain things it's great. For certain things, there's still like more training needed.

But I also wanna tell you obviously, hopefully by the time this episode airs, there's a lot more exciting things we've launched. But this is definitely something we're working on. There's basically, customers should stay tuned because we wanna bring a lot more AI into the product. But not just AI, but like useful AI. So yeah, this is a big problem and you'll see us tackle it over time.

Austin Gray: I love what you said there, useful AI because I think people who have not, it's such a general term, right? And there's, depending on who you're talking about, there's the negative connotation with it. Yes. I do wanna be mindful of the time. It's seven after the hour. What, when is your hard stop? 

Daryna Kulya: I probably have something coming up soon, but we can maybe another 10 minutes or so. Yeah. 

Austin Gray: Cool. We can start wrapping it up. 

Daryna Kulya: Cool. 

Austin Gray: I would love to do a, I would love to do a second episode with you, especially after this new feature because 

Daryna Kulya: Sure. Yes.

Austin Gray: I'm like on the edge of the cliff right now. I want Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, we could go on a rabbit hole here, especially down the AI piece. But, uh, listeners, why don't we start wrapping this up and as a high level for somebody who is wearing an owner operator hat. And for me it was like I was doing excavation and tree work.

I was in the equipment, I was solo, and then I. I just decided that, hey, if I ever want to, if I ever wanna grow this business, I have to figure out how to hire correctly and create the SOPs and delegate correctly. Can you just tell listeners how open phone, especially plugged in with Jobber, can help us a small service based business? Just like a quick recap here before we wrap it up. 

Daryna Kulya: Sure. Look, so I think that at the very core, open phone gives you your business phone system calling, texting, contacts all in one. Very simple. It can start very simple just for one person. If it's just you starting out, great. Get your open phone number, use it to call text clients.

It's all there. I think it becomes really magical as you start growing your business and you hire admin, help, ops, estimators, whoever you can easily bring your team into the solution, so you stop being the bottleneck now. On top of you working with your team together, calling texting clients all in one place, all very visible.

We give you integrations and automations. You can automate a bunch of stuff, which I think we talked a bit about. A lot of follow ups and reminders and sending a text message when you miss a call. All of that good stuff can be nicely automated, so you don't even have your team to do that. It's just there for you.

Now it becomes even more magical if you use something like Jobber. I love jobber. I think it's an amazing product, and if you use Jobber you, that is your kind of like system that you run your business on, and you probably want to make sure calls are there and call recordings, call summaries, transcripts, they're there.

So you always have full visibility into what's happening with a job, with a request. Open phone automatically, as of yesterday, automatically pushes that data into jobber, which just means, again, you have that data in one place. Super useful, helps you scale. Now, on top of this, of course, we're bringing a lot of very useful AI in the product to save even more time and make sure you never miss a customer.

But yeah, I think that when you are a service-based business, first and foremost, don't be the bottleneck. Don't have your personal phone number. Become the company number and ruin everything for you. Just start off clean, start off fresh with a business phone number that can actually scale and give you a lot of leverage.

Austin Gray: This episode is brought to you by Dialed in bookkeeping. Ben and his team provide bookkeeping services, job costing reports, and accurate financial information for the home services industry. If you're looking to keep your books up to date, visit dialed in bookkeeping.com/owr ops. When you use this specific landing page, you'll get your first three months 50% off.

Austin Gray: That's incredible. Thanks so much for being on listeners. I'm gonna do something crazy right now. Um, and I didn't even, I didn't even warn you about this. You guys know if y'all have been listening to the podcast. I love meeting other owners and operators of businesses. It gives me so much energy. The reason that Daryna won my business as a customer when I was looking for a phone solution is because I made a post about phone solutions.

A lot of people were commenting on it. She jumped in and then she just commented like, Hey, I can get you this right now. She got us an Austin area code for Texas Clearing. Which like some of the other providers just were just like, this area code isn't even available. And she just got it for us like that. And so the willingness, what'd you say? You're at 50,000 customers?

Daryna Kulya:  Yeah, we have, we're, yeah. Listen, every customer I care about every, I, I don't look at that. That's nice and I appreciate it, but for me, like I, it just means a lot to have every customer and I'm so happy we were able to set you up. I also like phone numbers, to be honest.

Maybe that's the thing. I like finding nice phone numbers, so I have too many numbers myself. 

Austin Gray: That's awesome. Sounds like me with domains. Um, so where I was going was like, I have the utmost respect for the fact that she is still just hustling, like making sure that a customer who's posing on Twitter and like I'm just a small business guy, right?

And the fact that she is still in the business and operating, I have respect for that. So here's what we're gonna do. I'm going to sign up for an open phone account for owner ops. We don't have a phone number yet. Oh, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna create a specific landing page. 'cause normally if y'all have been listening to the episode, you hear this spiel at the end like, Hey, we publish an episode at every Friday.

Go sign up for our newsletter owner ops.com, o wops.com/newsletter. Scrap that for this episode. We're gonna put a phone number in the link here. Why don't you text the phone number that we have in the description? And what we're going to do with that is I'm gonna ask you one thing. What questions do you have for us that you have answered?

I want to implement a q and a session here. Chris Kerner with his podcast, does a really good q and a, and I want to implement the same thing here. So use that phone number below. Text us what questions you want answered. If you do that here, I promise you I will answer as many as there are or as little as there are. I will answer every single question that's typed in here. So what else? Love it. Would you add there? As far as making it simple, do we just need to put a phone number here and then 

Daryna Kulya: Yeah, 

Austin Gray: They text their questions and then we send capture.

Daryna Kulya: Absolutely. A hundred percent. You can do that. You can also, this is like your preference, right? Be you could also do something that could be actually cool. I'm just excited that you're gonna have a phone number for your podcast so people totally, people can text you. Another thing, what you can do is you can have, I'm sure you're busy and you don't wanna be handling every single call. What you can do is you can put your number, you can mute your number.

So calls go to voicemail right away. You can have a nice voicemail, but this way people be, maybe people wanna text you a question or they wanna call in and leave a voicemail, and that voicemail is nicely transcribed and you have a nice audio. So if you wanted to for one of your episodes, you could just play the audio. It's a person asking you a question so people can, again, it's your decision, but people can text you a question or they can leave you a question in formal voicemail and you can text them back. 

Austin Gray: Let's do it. So listeners, a lot of you have been reaching out either on Twitter or just like grabbing the email and just being like, Hey, how do I run Facebook ads? Or how do I think about hiring my first admin assistant? Or what website are you using? All of those questions I want to answer for you, and I hate this that I had to reply back to one of the last responses and I've been trying to think about how do we do this in a better way to where we can answer people's questions.

And I think this is the answer, but I had to answer back one of the last ones with, here's a bunch of video resources. 'cause I used to just jump on calls with everybody, but it's to the point to where there's like too many requests now and I still have a business to run, but I want to make sure that we're answering all your questions. So let's do that. So I told you I was gonna put you on the spot. Can you help point me in the right direction for like, how to set that voicemail up? Get the phone here.

Daryna Kulya:  Absolutely. Oh my God. I'll, I'll help you out a hundred percent. We can also get you a really nice number, and I think it sounds great.

This could be like your community phone number, right? Anyone who's in it can be wonderful. I have so many ideas. I feel like you are, you're talking to the right person. 

Austin Gray: Fantastic. All right, cool. I'm not gonna put you on the spot for any sort of like discount code or anything like that for listeners, but in the future, if you do come up with something that you want to give, okay, next listeners, some sort of special promo, 

Daryna Kulya: Okay.

Austin Gray: Let us know and we'll make sure to include that on that landing page there. 

Daryna Kulya: Love it. Okay. Note it. Absolutely. 

Austin Gray: All right, listeners, we're gonna wrap this one up and thanks again for listening to another episode of The OWNR OPS Podcast. Scrap the newsletter, scrap. We're not scrapping the newsletter, but that's not the plug here.

Text the number down below, or leave us a voicemail and we will answer q and a questions in a solo episode. Thanks again for listening. Don't forget, work hard, do your best. Never settle for less.

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