Will Bodewes, Phonely: Phonely (YC S24)

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom Pod YC edition. We have Will Bodeis. Am I pronouncing that right?

Will Bodeis? Yeah. Bod Davis.

But yeah, it's fine. Bo Davis. He's CEO at Fly, which is a Weiss company from uh summer 2024.

Uh Will's a is a cool guy obviously building an AI companies. Uh PhD student or was at least in Melbourne, Australia. ran a stealth startup for some time and uh I see here founder and co at spoke sound as well.

So will I'm glad to have you on for an express version of that one. Can you tell us a bit more about yourself and what you're up to nowadays? Yeah, for sure.

So back background on myself um covered it mostly you know done a v variety of things from ultra endurance cycling to uh founded two companies at this point um PhD AI research in Australia. Now I'm working at building a company called Phonley. So essentially what we are is the easiest way for you to build a voice agent that answers your phones.

So you don't want to have a human answer your phone. You want it to be answered by artificial intelligence. We give you the platform.

We give you the tools that connect the plumbing of your call to your calendar to your CRM to whatever you need it to do um to be able to operate and talk like a person. Right. And that PhD of yours, was it trendy at that time?

Did you get an ROI out of that one in 2020? Um, I think so. I mean, we obviously I think it helps getting into Y Combinator just to having the technical experience to be able to say that you're, you know, have the experience, have spent the time, have worked on it, um, to go through the YC, right?

And who are you as a kid? Because you're an athlete. I think you're pretty ambitious.

Like, how were you raised? Who who are your parents? What's your education like?

Yeah. So, my my coming up story is is rather interesting. So, um, at the age of 13, my dad got us into these very extreme ultra endurance things.

So, when I was when I was 13 years old, my brothers and I spent 72 days kayaking around Lake Superior, which is 1,200 miles. It's the largest freshwater lake, and we're the youngest people to ever do that. So, from the time of like 13, I had it in my mind that, you know, like, wow, I could do something that many grown men couldn't do.

And I think that that that for me that driving factor of telling myself that story over and over again led me to do things like you know go be a division one athlete in college go to the NCAA's um from there start a company from there go to get a PhD and start another company and get into YC. So I think a lot of a lot of what has like if you say what has made will will it's been you know the continual story of like telling myself um that I can be exceptional and then proving to myself through hard work that I can actually get there. So, I would do the same with my kids, but someone would probably call child custody on me.

So, how do you do that as a parent? Uh, yeah, good question. I mean, I I I never really thought about that too much.

It was more of just it was, you know, I was 13 years old and that's what we did, right? Um, and it was all something that like we wanted to do and he he made it sound like an exciting idea and I think it was was probably one of the best experiences that that I had. So honestly, yeah, 112 miles at in how many days?

Like a week? 1200 miles. 1,200 miles in 72 days and we we camped the entire time.

So we spent sleeping on the shore of Lake Superior camping, carrying all of our food and water and everything in our kayaks. And who was your your dad? Was he an entrepreneur as well?

So he started a veterary practice in northern Wisconsin, which is where we grew up. Um, so entrepreneur own ways, you know, very much like grew up on the farm, very much, you know, build it yourself, do it all kind of from the ground up. And so I think I learned a lot of inspiration of like, wow, you can just start something and people will use it from him.

But I knew that I always had this site for to build something really big and be truly like aspirational. And I think that that's what YC has given me the opportunity to do. Yeah, I think you have a humongous unfair advantage there.

like it starting a a company working 16 hour days must be pretty easy for you comparing to kayaking for weeks and weeks. I wouldn't say it's easy honestly. So I've done I've done a lot of like these ultra endurance events like I've I've biked for 37 hours without sleeping.

Like I've done a lot of this stuff right um and still one of the hardest things I've ever done is start this start my first company and my second company. And so you know to founders out there to people that are building in whatever space that you're building in it's really hard. Um, and it's hard because when I when I get on my bike and I go for a ride, I know that I can if I just keep riding, I'll get to the destination.

But when I start my company, I don't know that if I keep working hard, then I will get to the success that I want to get to. Um, because there's so many other factors and there's so many things that can change. I think that that dealing with that uncertainty and dealing with the other people's your view of what other people are saying um is a tough part, right?

way less physical pain but way more emotional pain as well. How do you deal with that with all the setbacks? Yeah.

Uh it's hard, man. I think I think it's like everything looks um it's just hard. I I there's no there's no other way around it.

It's just like it is hard and just reminding yourself that like you're going through it and like this is what hard feels like. Um this is what growth feels like. you're not going to know.

Like I think that entrepreneurship is just this general discovering of all the things that you didn't know and instead of it being like somebody teaching you, it's just like thrown at your face. Um and so I think it's just you have to embrace that like it's going to be hard. This is what hard feels like and the only options are to to quit or keep going.

And for me like quitting just isn't an option. So Right. Never is.

Uh tell me about the setbacks you had with Fon. Did you have to pivot a couple of times? Um so we haven't had to pivot a couple times.

I think the the hard part is like we've been going at a very hard space in a very horizontal way, right? So, we've been going after a big market. Um, and there's just a lot of people that are in this space that have been working on it.

I mean, we obviously have our, you know, you always have your fair share of uh in the early days of technology issues, of customer issues, of, you know, employee whatever, all that stuff. But I think that um you know getting to where we are today is like when I started this it was just like this idea that I didn't know it was going to work but I just decided I was going to commit to it 100%. And then see where it would go.

Um so yeah just like a lot of discovering things along the way. Tell me about your co-founder co-founders and how are they complimentary to you? Yeah.

So, uh, basically more technical. So, we were both getting our PhDs and, uh, he he was, you know, had more experience, much more technical, um, and just better at like LLMs and all the important things about building voice AI. Right.

And are you on the non-technical side? Are you coding as well, fundraising side on you? And he's more like behind the the screen all the time.

Yeah. So I I I'm I'm slightly technical, but I don't spend most of my time like I wouldn't say that I'm technical at this point. It's like most of my time is sales and uh investor managing the team um and all that stuff.

And why were you built to uh manage and drive only to uh its billion dollar destination as a founder? Why was I built? I don't know that I was built for that.

I think it's something that you're you're made, right? It's like a decision that you decide to make. Um but where's the founder product market fit sort of is my question for you precisely.

Yeah for sure for sure. Um you know I think like artificial intelligence research was definitely helpful in getting us there but in terms of like you know founder market fit. Um I don't know that there's any like other thing other than I've been working on this for two years have background in doing artificial intelligence research and really understand the problem.

Um but other than that it's not like I have spent like I I'm just not old enough to have spent 20 years in a field. Right. So Right.

And what's the exact problem you're solving and do you feel you have product market fit yet? Yeah. So the exact exact problem that we're solving is basically um businesses want to have AI answer their phone and especially like we do a lot of lead qualifications.

It's like our biggest use case. And so businesses want to have AI answer their phone and they want to like qualify a customer for example like ask a few questions and schedule appointment. Um to make that happen you kind of need a platform to sit into place where you can build these like flows.

You can test these uh test these agents and then you can connect it to your CRM. So we're essentially solving solving the problem of you want AI to answer your phone because it's about 70% cheaper than a human. But how do you actually do that and how do you get all the analytics, all the connections, all the plumbings to make that happen?

Well, you have to use a platform like phone link to do that. And what is the best use case inbound and not outbound? Right now, outbound has TCPA regulations.

So, uh there's certain regulations around cold calling um and around just like mass outbound calling that have blocked that. So, that's why we're seeing that inbound is a good use case. Outbound can be a really good use case if and only if a few conditions are met, right?

And I guess just putting my phone number out there so that people can see it and call it and then once the AI answered um how u how's the flow? So obviously I do think you're using Open AI's API on the the reasoning side of things, right? Uh not on the reasoning side of things.

So we have essentially built our own models. So we can run off OpenAI or we can run off our own fine tune models um that we've distilled. So yeah, that that's primarily what what our customers are using is we'll get a customer on, they might want to start with OpenAI, they might want to move to one of our own custom models that's specifically built for them.

Tell me about uh building your own custom model because I don't think there's that many YC companies that did that, right? It's pretty sort of a mode. How did that happen for you?

Yeah. So we when we got into YC, we applied and we pitched the idea of like, hey, we're going to go build, you know, this voice agent, but we're also thinking about building a model for voice because right now it's like LLM models don't talk like people. And so we were thinking about building that and we kind of built it internally and rather than like releasing it or launching it, we've just used it for oursel and for our customers.

Um because these these LLM models are trained on lots of text data. not trained on um how to respond like a person. So, we've just like tweaked them to be better at talking like a person than what like the standard GBT4 or whatever would do, right?

And how's it better than Sesame for example? So, Sesame is a combination of a a voice model, an LLM, and a you know u speech model, right? So, it's it's and a transcription model.

So, it's like these things put together. Um, and so it's Sesame is basically just using a llama I think it's a llama 8B as a back backbone of it. So in terms of like how is it better?

Um, it's not necessarily like we could use Sesame and build it into FOY and it would and our customers would get a lot of value from that, right? Uh, so they're just different layers of the stack. And on your website is there like a way I can try it because Sesame has that demo that's so good, you know?

I think on your website it's only like a sign up. Yeah. So, if you go to our website, you see there's a big button that says talk to Phonely, and you can try it out there.

Um, you can just test out what it what it sounds like. Uh, yeah, I'll try it out for sure. It's pretty uh scroll up here.

Yeah. So, just that right. See that button that says talk to me there?

That might Oh, man. That's so small. Yeah.

My ADHD brand didn't see it. Um, interesting. I might want to fix that UX bug though.

Like, I didn't uh catch uh or put more attention to it. Um, I click and nothing happens. Anyway, um, I'm gonna test it out for sure.

Okay, finally. Uh, on my very, very interesting stuff. And how are you getting your, uh, clients nowadays?

Like, what's your GM strat? Um, sorry, you said a go to market strategy. Yeah, correct.

Yeah. So, I mean, right now, sorry. Um, yeah.

Yeah. So, so right now we're really focusing on, you know, we're focusing on the lead generation, the qualification space. That's like we're seeing a lot of uptick there.

Our customers are really scaling in that space. Um, there's a lot of these people that do pay-per call uh type of, you know, automation and optimization and we spend a lot of time working with them. All right.

And your ICP precisely, are these large enterprises with a lot of customer support? Is it banks at fintech? Where are you targeting?

Yeah. So right now we we work with a variety of different ones, but again it's people in the lead qualification space. So this might be a company that is running paper call ads for healthcare or ACA or auto or something like that and they need to qualify a customer before passing over to a salesperson.

We fit in the middle really well for that. Okay. And what's the pricing?

Uh pricing depends per minute. So we scale from 20 cents down to 5 cents a minute based upon volume. Okay.

Is that competitive? Because that do you know like uh was it Sinflow? I think that's in the a similar niche.

Do they charge something similar? Sorry. Uh can you say that again?

Yeah, the I believe it's called Sinflow, right? Sinflow the AI calling platform. Do they uh charge something similar per uh per minute?

Yeah, they're they're a little cheaper on the low end and a little bit more expensive on the high end like when you're at high volume. Um, essentially we take a bit more of an involved role when our customers come on. So like you go sign up for Synflow, it's like you have this complicated platform.

It's like figured out. Usually it's like we do onboarding with the customers. We build all the flows for them.

Um, make it super easy for them to use. Yeah, yours sound uh smarter as well. Just the voice was a bit annoying.

How do you uh select the voice uh that that suits the the customer? Yeah, so you you can we've got a variety of different voices that you can choose from. You just go to the platform, you pick a button and then you can change it there.

But my question is more like how should I choose the right voice for my customers? So I just asked Chad GPT what kind of tone of voice they like? Uh basic sorry keep getting calls.

Um yeah so getting spammed. Yeah I know. So yeah so basically you can just AB test it.

That's the best way to do it. Pick one that you like. AB test it.

We've got it built into the platform. So, you just select two options and go from there. What does a dayto-day in your life look like?

Day-to-day? Um, spend a lot of time on like sales. Uh, I spend a bit of time on product.

Um, just like honestly a little bit of everything, but I think most of my time is spent on sales and and uh just building a team, building a company. And what time do you wake up? What does your supplement stacks look like?

What what does your physical activity look like? What do you read? Yeah.

So, wake up at usually around 6:00 or 7. Um, start work right away, go for a run at about like 9 or 10 in the morning or do a workout. Um, after that, just we'll work till 9 or 10 o'clock at night and then go to bed, do it over again.

Supplement stack, nothing special, honestly. Um, I don't really do much of that stuff. Pure grind.

Grind. Yeah. Who do you learn from nowadays?

Do you still have calls with YC peers, YC mentors? Like who who is your guiding light in terms of knowledge and AI and everything that you're doing nowadays? Yeah, so just a lot I learned a lot from the YC community.

Um, a lot from you know their their content they push out. I met with the crew partners yesterday to just catch up with them and chat. So yeah, I mean very much them and then also our peers that are building big companies, right?

And uh how do you determine the next features that you would deploying? How do you listen to customer feedback and determine what's uh what's next for the platform? A lot of calls.

Just get on a lot of calls with customers. Talk to them. Ask them how they're using it.

Watch recordings. See how people are using the platform for the first time. If it's confusing, we need to change something.

Just do that. Cool. Well, where can we find out more about you?

Yeah, if you want to head to www.fonley.ai, you can check out our website. You can sign up. We've got a free plan where you can answer your phone, do everything on the platform completely for free.

Um, so that's a cool thing we just launched. definitely recommend checking that out. Um, secondly, if you want to follow me personally, my LinkedIn is most where I'm most active.

So, you just go Will Bo Davis, then you will find me. It's B O D E Wes. So that was Bill and