Jason Hill
Appearances
Code Story
S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
You go down this path and you're not that type of person that's a developer. You don't have that tech background. I don't. I use a lot of tech, but I've never built the actual tech myself. I had someone on my podcast that I had a good relationship with. I was able to call that individual and really get the truth out of him and say, Hey, if I go down this path, what will it be like?
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
What happened is when they did that, they would limit the information on their bio because they quickly filled it in. They'd write one sentence and literally they just thought somebody would call them at $50 for a 10 minute conversation. And I'm looking at this, I'm like, why would someone call this individual? They have one line on their bio and one social media handle attached to their profile.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
These people that charged high amounts would leave the platform because they never experienced it. They never got a call. So we eventually added things in, like you have to take 10 calls before you can alter your price. And we started to realize that works. And eventually started charging people to have an expert account.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
Because we also know that when people pay for things, they tend to take more time to learn things and respect them a little bit more. So by charging, it really helped the platform create better retention. It's been a bumpy ride because as you have downloads, it stinks as a founder. You're like, Oh, all these people are downloading it, but then you see them not using it. Right?
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
So we have over 7,000 people that have downloaded out. And the main thing is how many active users, right? So we're always in a war against all other apps. out there and other technologies is to keep them into our app and coming back daily. We have to look at the data. The last hundred people is what I continuously check. What did they do? What actions did they take? Did they log in once?
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
Did they log in 10 times? Did they take a call? Did they make a call? And we're really learning from the data and that's our next goal. We have a big update coming out in the next few months, taking the data and making sure that we're supporting the next hundred users to help with the retention. One thing I say we've done a good job is on the brand ambassador site.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
We have over 50 brand ambassadors that are currently active and we've created a robust program to make them really feel part of our brand. So all throughout social media, you'll see posts about OWL and we just hope that we can continuously attract more brand ambassadors. And our next goal is to join forces with large communities.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
One of the features that we added recently was to be able to add a group on our home screen. So as we add groups on the home screen, we could partner with brands like South Florida Tech Hub We have a launch next week with them, and their group will be featured at the Top Protect Tuesdays.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
And we hope that their entire organization comes in every Tuesday and pretty much starts realizing, like, this is a great tool to connect one-on-one every Tuesday.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
The main thing is when you go down this path and you're not that type of person that's a developer, you don't have that tech background. I don't. I came from the financial service space. I use a lot of tech, but I've never built the actual tech myself. I had someone on my podcast that I had a good relationship with.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
I was able to call that individual and really get the truth out of him and say, hey, if I go down this path, what will it be like? And he told me the harsh truth. And as I interviewed other brands that were showing me the cost to build OWL, I started to realize they're just giving me what I want to hear. Oh yeah, it'll cost $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 to build it.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
They didn't really tell you much after that. But the truth is after that, it's the same exact cost. You have six developers while you're building it. The odds are you're going to need that same six after to continuously build all the features from all the feedback you get. So for me, the biggest decision was picking the right person to team up with to build it.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
And once we started building with that team is try to avoid a lot of noise. Every time you go to a networking event, someone's going to tell you they could build it better. And you've got to be extremely careful because often I see a lot of people start with one. They think somewhere else is cheaper and could do it better. And then their expectations fall short.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
We see really good developers out there say it should be this way and then Somehow it works better when you AB test it the other way. And then after that, yeah, I do have staff. I was fortunate that I took the one person that was with my staff from my podcast and my financial service brand. And pretty much they just turned into the head marketing individual at Owl. So they do all our social media.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
So I was able to just convert that individual. They've been with me over seven years. And then I hired one other individual to be head of brand ambassadors. And their job is strictly to just go after people on social media with big influence and make partnership deals. And that's it. It's one and a half people and me running this entire platform.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
We have to run thin because this has all been self-funded. To this day, I have not raised capital. Being in the financial service space, I have a sense of what investors are looking for when it comes to the data.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
and i always felt we were not ready i just knew that they're going to want to see traction they're going to want to see revenue so we've just barely been waiting and taking it slow when it comes to investors i haven't really publicly went out and talked much to investors i just see whatever has come in i've let people knock on our door we do have a pitch deck i do have a number in mind that we've sent to people we're not out there going a lot of pitch competitions trying to get our next check written to stay in business my goal is to continuously focus on
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
our community. And I believe naturally when the time is right, investors will come through the app itself and see the value and see this technology could also be white labeled and just the growth that it potentially has scaling, of course. So that's been the journey of having a team.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
I can't wait to the day where we have 10 staff members and we really could go to more events and really show people the app in person. We have found that in person does an amazing job when people see it. and then they could see your demo call made and then see immediately like this app is amazing.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
The connections people have made from the app. We have some power users that have done over 2,000 calls on the app. And when I look at their stories, it's amazing. We have people that literally didn't know an individual, had a call, and then they've flown to see that individual and then They've collaborated with them. We've had people join force to podcast together.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
We were at Podfest Expo last year and Podfest Expo let us run our interactive owl podcast booth. We do this unique booth in person where people can come by and get a short interview if they download owl app. So it's just awesome to see just the endless amount of connections that could occur as we scale and what it will do to people's lives. We had one individual, he has six adopted children.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
And he was in Orlando and his autistic son swallowed a bottle cap. He did go to a local doctor and get checked out, but he wanted peace of mind. And he had talking to two doctors on the owl app. And he actually was able to call one of those doctors instantly and give him that peace of mind that was needed.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
So what we're seeing on owl is just the amount of knowledge being shared at a rapid pace is just phenomenal. You could just go in there and Talk to people about personal matters. And I think that's where people are missing the boat. I had testicular cancer a year and a half ago. When you get told those words, you have to go get surgery next week. And this is important. Clear your schedule.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
You just look at life a little differently. When you look at OWL, the way it's designed, wouldn't it have been nice to me to just search that type of cancer that I had and be able to actually call somebody else and just speak about what they went through? to give me the peace of mind going into that surgery.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
So that's where I see Al going in the future, not just for business, but for personal use, just to be able to connect with like-minded individuals and just talk. Let's flip the script a little bit.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
I've lost a lot of money building stuff that, you know, we ripped down. Very costly mistakes right off the bat. I would say building too many features that were not really needed for the size of the app at the time. I'll use an example. Owl had about a 40 to 50% missed call ratio. And when we looked at why is because we used a call system that sent a notification and the notification would ring.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
And the problem is when we look at Apple, they went the other direction with notifications where you could silence notification. You go on do not disturb mode easier. We try to educate everyone that when you went available to take calls, make sure your ringer was on and your notifications were on.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
And no matter how hard we try to educate people how to do it and even sending them an email saying, hey, you missed 50% of your calls. Can you make sure the next time you make yourself available to turn these on? It didn't work. They didn't have enough skin in the game to care. So we had people that missed 20 calls and took six calls.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
That doesn't look very good from a data perspective and it creates a very bad environment for new users. New users would come in and call two, three people and they didn't pick up. And that's the core of the app. Calling someone that says they're available, right? They should pick up 90% of the time. I think I didn't address that issue early enough and we let it run for a long time.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
had to overhaul the entire calling mechanism in the app and now it works through a whole different system where your phone could be on sleep mode and it rings like a regular phone call and you swipe if you have an apple device and it picks up and that was the best thing that we updated because now our missed calls are really in the low teens and the missed calls are typically when they pick up another call so they can't take the owl call for example
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
or we have an automated feature that puts them active automatically. We call it office hours. And sometimes they forget that they have it on. So I would say definitely building features in the wrong order was one of the biggest mistakes that we had. And then we had to tear it down and rebuild it. Am I sad about it? No, I think it's natural.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
I think it's impossible practically if you're a first time founder of a platform to get it right the first time. And people can't believe I say this, but I'm happy a lot of the problems occurred because we weren't ready. That's the truth. If our app scaled about a year and a half ago, let's say, I would have been in trouble. We would have had more scams on the platform.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
We would have had more negative reviews on the platform because if people take calls, make calls, and there's disconnects and the quality isn't there, they would have ran right to the app store and left a negative review. And we would have had a struggle to remove those reviews.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
The other big mistake we made was pretty much our terms and conditions for a while and what people tried to get away with. We were giving out bonuses and then people were trying to take the bonuses and just call each other and then remove them off the platform. And it ran rampant for a little bit. And thank God we shut it down.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
So just make sure you hire good lawyers to put good terms and conditions in there. And really just word it. So it's not so confusing, right? I think too often people try to word it and confuse people and then people don't really know what it means. So we really overhauled our terms and conditions to make them clear.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
And we really made a point that people can't scan the platform for taking bonuses when they refer a friend of $10 and trying to withdraw it. So we just learned so much through trial and error, uh, because Last thing you want is a user who hasn't ever put in a dollar to your platform gets a bonus and they're complaining on social media timeout.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
You didn't put your credit card in, didn't make a deposit. You became an expert. You referred a couple people. Those people just called you and you tried to make a withdrawal and you really didn't use the platform the correct way, right? You literally did it to game the system and we fixed all those loopholes.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
We, now have it that at my fingertips, I could create a group for a community instantly in my back office. And then I could on our home screen of the app, put their community or group in any order. So we have over a hundred categories when you search, right? And then we have a little search bar that works like Google that you could search anything.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
Communities are very interesting because I could partner with an organization that might have 100, 200,000 people in their community. Say, what if I put your community on our home screen from 9 to 12 every single Wednesday? And everyone in the OWL community will see their profiles at the top, and they'll have a higher likelihood that they'll receive a call.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
And also, you could tell your community, hey, every Wednesday between 9 and 12, go ahead and log into OWL app and call one another. That's where the future's going. We built that feature because, A, it helps blossom our community. It helps blossom their community. And from a marketing perspective, we don't have to continuously try to get one referral at a time.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
We could go after established communities that have authority and bring in thousands of downloads at one time, right? If someone has a 200-person community and they send one newsletter out, we have the potential of getting thousands of downloads instantly. South Florida Tech Hub. is known as one of the lead tech organizations in South Florida.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
They're a nonprofit, and they have events every single month. Thousands of paid members and non-paid members that just join their organization at different events. What we are doing is partnering with them, and we create Tech Tuesdays. So every Tuesday between 9 and 12, their community will be at the top of the app.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
What's even more unique is when they run their happy hours, they're going to require individuals to show the OWL app upon entry to the event or pay $5. So their next event, literally that is occurring. And what their goal is,
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
is to tell everyone that attends the event, hey, this has been a great networking happy hour, and we want these folks to connect afterwards on the following Tuesday, not just stop at that one event and then have to wait to the next event, to actually connect better through the OWL app.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
I used to go to my father. He was my ultimate mentor. He passed away in 2023. Just growing up, he had a store in New York City called Captain Hooks, and he would have me go into his store at a young age, like four or five years old, I'm talking, and go beyond the counters and communicate with people. I was running the cash register. I think I made a mistake.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
I wasn't charging people tax at one point. I had no idea what I was doing. Somehow, people were giving an eight or nine-year-old at the time money and paying for items, and it was funny looking back, but he really trained me. He dragged me into flea markets and garage sales back then that That's how you got merchandise, right? There was no eBay. There was no Amazon.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
And he had a famous store in New York City and the South Street Seaport was famous. That's where everyone took the boats to go out to the Statue of Liberty, for example. And I just learned so much through him. on how to communicate to individuals and start with a relationship versus always soliciting.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
He would go into places and just talk and actually have a conversation with someone, learn about them. And by the end, they're giving him free stuff for his store or they're inviting him to a Mets or Yankee game. And I just was amazed about how much stuff he got for free all the time just by being a good human and asking people about them. So he was my ultimate mentor, not so much on the tech side.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
And he told me the harsh truth. And as I interviewed other brands showing me the cost to build OWL, I started to realize they're just giving me what I want to hear. Oh yeah, it'll cost a hundred, 200, $300,000 to build it. They didn't really tell you much after that, but the truth is after that, it's the same exact cost. My name is Jason Hill. I'm the founder of the Owl App.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
He was never a tech individual, but he was always a relationship individual. And it was cool to witness him run a mom and pop store and get to a wealthy area. We lived in Sands Point, New York. Sands Point is on the North Shore of Long Island. It's very well known in New York City where a lot of wealthy folks on Wall Street or own businesses would live.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
And I was just always amazed and so proud of him for being able to get there through hustling. A mom and pop store of selling merchandise that was really bought at a garage sale flea market through his store. And it was like a museum. And then after that, I would say the people from my podcast show. So I've had the opportunity to do one-on-one interviews every single week for the last six years.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
So OWL is a platform that allows professionals to instantly connect through one-on-one audio calls. And the beauty about OWL is you could get into your car right now at this given moment, look down at our home screen of the OWL app and see different categories. Think about categories like sales and marketing, finance, film, podcasting.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
So for six years, I've barely missed a week. People think I'm crazy, right? They're like every week, like, how are you pulling this off? You never miss a show. There's always a guess. And we've been very consistent. We get a cancellation. I look at my cancellation list and I bring someone in. And I look at it as such an opportunity if I get to go there every single week to run a show.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
And I have a producer that I pay, of course. So I just make sure that the show continuously goes on. And we work with a lot of folks in PR. The nice thing about working with folks in PR is if you have cancellation, you can reach out to them. They're used to offering their clients last minute opportunities. And a great example is they got their clients on the news, right?
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
So their clients are used to getting a text message. Hey, we got you on the local news tomorrow at three. Do you want to do it? And people clear their schedules. podcasting has gained me so much knowledge. I've learned from so many individuals what they've been through. And it's a common theme, which is that they just keep going. They have the intuition to just not stop.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
And they're so passionate and they avoid a lot of the noise around them. And often they're not the smartest individuals. I've literally seen people grow businesses from 1 million to 100 million. These entrepreneurs are like you and I. Right. They make mistakes. And what I've seen is they lean on others for knowledge. And by leaning on them, they're able to consistently move forward.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
And usually they're good communicators and they're very trustworthy. So I just seen people blossom their businesses day in and day out through the podcast show. And they have been my ultimate mentors and keep fueling me to keep going.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
If I was sitting on a plane with someone, I would just really be asking them questions like, hey, have you done anything in the tech space before? And it doesn't always have to be tech, of course, what we're speaking about. They might want to build an airplane. They might want to build a car. And I just look at it as like I would make sure that they're not naive, right?
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
right that they have enough money in the bank because i think money fuels all these ideas in the early days and i think people see these pitch competitions they see these incubators they see shark tank and they think oh i'll just build it on paper and then i'm just gonna show people and they're gonna love my idea and they're gonna write me a check for a million dollars to build this idea that's far from the truth investors don't invest in ideas they invest in companies and typically those companies they want to see revenue and traction and good data
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
So I would really educate that individual to take the proper steps, make sure they have enough money if they're going to bootstrap that business.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
Because if they are seeking capital really early on, I would just say, hey, keep your nine to five, try to get the capital raised by going to a lot of networking events and finding one or two investors that are friendly with you and would potentially believe in you. Not so much your brand. No one's going to love your brand as much as you are, of course.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
I could text every single one of our past guests and literally have them do something because they believed in me and helped me out. And it's still that darn hard. Maybe it's best to do this on the side while you're taking income in from your nine to five. Then when you're ready to jump from that nine to five, then you can go ahead and do that.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
But the nice thing is if you're young and in your 20s, you can afford to make mistakes. I think too often everyone says tomorrow I'll do it once I get a little money in the bank. Tomorrow never comes. I can't tell you how many people told me, oh, you're moving to Florida. You have a financial service business. You're crazy. Why would you do that? I hit the reset button.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
Before you start driving away, you hit the call button and let's say, Noah, you were available on the OWL app. Let's say your price was set at $10 for 10 minutes. instantly your phone's ringing and you and I are connected. It's a secure in-app phone call. I don't have your cell phone number.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
I go, because you only live once and I'll figure it out when I get down there.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
And here I am connecting with you and really talking to you like we are doing right now on this podcast, just learning about you as an individual, as well as a professional and seeing where the conversation goes.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
Often people say it's LinkedIn on steroids for that reason, because it cuts out all the fluff of DMing people and then trying to get on someone's schedule to really connect and collaborate and learn.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
there's no app of its kind because the beauty of owl is if you are an expert and you set this little timer mechanism that says you're available it actually pings all of your followers immediately at your price level so no if you're driving in the car too the other direction and you have a two three hour drive imagine Just say, Hey, I'll be available.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
You call me about anything for a dollar and just open up to your audience and say, give me a ring. And we all know, you know, business is about building relationships. The more people that call you, the more opportunities will come from these calls. I started this podcast called the shrimp tank. It was done in collaboration with the FAU Adam center for entrepreneurship.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
We started interviewing the best price entrepreneurs. They had to have a million dollars plus a revenue. And before you know it, I got to a hundred, 200, 300 episodes these days. When COVID hit, it just hit me. I'm like, everybody's at home. Everybody is becoming an entrepreneur. And it's so difficult to connect with individuals right now. We're all sitting on our couch.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
We can't go anywhere during COVID. And I'm like, this makes no sense. I'm like, I can't just call people anymore. It's awkward because we all get so many DMs on Instagram, Facebook, Slack, all these different socials. And then we have to read through them and just use our intuition on who we should set up a meeting with. And often there's a lot of opportunities missed, right?
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
We're all not perfect at reading these messages, reading someone's profile and deciding. When I was driving one day, I just called someone that was on my podcast who ran a tech company. I said, hey, I have this great idea. I just want to be able to connect with other professionals through one-on-one audio calls. Is that possible? Can we design an app that allows this?
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
And he said, we might be able to. Let me talk to some of my developers. And he calls me back, says we could do it. We're going to spend about four to six weeks building out wireframes. There is a cost to this. And we'll put some of our developers on calls with you every single day. And do you want to proceed? I was bored to be honest now, and it was COVID and it was only a chunk of money.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
Most of these type of MVPs that are designed with wireframes cost $5,000 to $25,000 typically. And it was just amazing. What came out on paper is what we see today in the app store. And I went with it. This was back in 2020 on paper. And then 2021, we started building it. And of course it's been a roller coaster, which we'll get into.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
We started actually developing it in January 2021. And then the first MVP launched in beta the end of 2021. We had about six developers and Right off the bat, I would say if anyone's considering building an app, be careful. They're expensive.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
And most of these apps, of course, run out of funding because they start building them and don't realize it's just as expensive to maintain them after you build them because the audience that you're serving is going to recommend different features to be built out.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
And everything you put on paper, if you're building a company like Owl where it doesn't really exist, they're going to run into just feedback that you did not see coming. You know, what you put on paper, just you can't see how the audience really going to see it. The first six months, there wasn't much I was doing other than making recommendations because the developers were coding the entire app.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
But after it went into beta, that's where I really stepped in. The hardest thing in the world is get your first hundred downloads, right? You think people will go into a platform like TestFlight, download it, and then you find out, you know, that it's not so easy to download TestFlight. It's really for developers. And it's really hard to test a marketplace with limited capital, right?
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
If you're not trying to pay users to come in and test things, you're utilizing your network, it's really difficult. We built it on React Native, so that way it could go on Android and Apple simultaneously. And there's a lot of backend technology, of course, tied to OWL. We have to use this platform called Agora for the one-on-one audio calls. We had to custom design our entire back office, right?
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
Because if we wanted to scale up to millions of users, we knew that we had to have a really clean back office and everything's attached to Stripe behind the scenes as our payment processor. And when we're dealing with money, we have to be very cautious. When somebody has a dollar missing out of their account, they will go right to Apple and leave you a negative review or the Google Play Store.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
When it was built on paper, we didn't have a refund strategy. What happens if the call drops? You know, the person that needs a refund. So we hold money in suspense and we had to build a whole proprietary system around that. So we just found that the MVP wasn't ready to launch officially.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
So we didn't launch until June of 2022, pretty much a year and a half between starting the project, testing the project before an official launch. And we just hit our two year anniversary this month.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
I really felt I needed to have the back office at my fingertips because our developers are overseas. So if something happens in real time, I want to be able to see the data. So our back office tracks the call lengths, for example, all the revenue to the penny, all the refunds requested.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
When you download OWL, you can only make calls and then you request to become an expert and you pay $10 a month and get a $10 credit. So all the upgrades go in daily and our team has to go and approve all these experts and look at their social accounts to make sure they're legitimate professionals. And we have to avoid scams. Once you have money on a real platform, we have been attacked.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
So security is of the utmost importance. We have real people's account balances sitting on our platform. We just really knew we had to build a robust back office because you're going to scale to at the beginning to thousands of users. And then eventually your goal is to get to hundreds of thousands of millions. You need a back office that just has all these features at your fingertips.
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S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
People report people, so we have to be able to deactivate people. Of course, if someone requests to delete their account, we have to have that feature in the back office. So I didn't really want to rely on an overseas team to have to email them and say, hey, can we do this or that and wait for responses.
Code Story
S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
I knew we had to move quick because in the financial service industry, I was always known to be a good communicator and being very responsive. And I think that's what's missing in our world today is just the etiquette of responding quickly. We have these large corporations that don't respond and people are frustrated with that. And OWL is all about that.
Code Story
S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
It's all about instant connections, instant conversations. And we felt as a brand that it was of the utmost importance to communicate with people quickly when they email feedback at owl.com, for example. And there's a safety concern, right? If somebody goes into OWL and starts talking to someone and telling them to wire them money, we want to be notified and deactivate that account immediately.
Code Story
S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
So the back office just has tons and tons of reports, tons and tons of data. And that will be very important as we scale, of course.
Code Story
S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
When I went down this journey, Everyone around me that had touched an app, touched a technology similar said, be very cautious. Apps are very expensive and very hard to get downloads and user growth. And especially a marketplace style app like ours, where you need one party calling another party.
Code Story
S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
And being that I want to go to an instant environment versus scheduled environment, you're also changing somebody's habits. Everybody's used to scheduling a time. to jump on a networking call. And I'm saying, no, we don't need a schedule. We're sitting around. Let's just call each other instantly. Let's eliminate the fluffiness, the cancellations, the no-shows.
Code Story
S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
If someone's available, you call them right now, their phone will ring. And they're saying, call me. They're allowing it. It's been the longest journey because marketing has been so difficult, right? When you launch your app, it doesn't have all the functionality that people are expecting. Everybody is used to TikTok and Facebook and Instagram.
Code Story
S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
And these apps have poured hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into development and they work so well. And then they download an app and they hit a bump in the road with friction. They close it and go back to Instagram. You could drive some downloads in the early days, but then do they start utilizing the app? Then you run into issues with retention, right?
Code Story
S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
They come into the platform and then they like it, but then they're gone a month later. The reason why it's been such a bumpy road now is when we first launched in beta, there was no real money, right? So people liked it. Then we launched in the real environment for real money.
Code Story
S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
And then we found out the hard truth that everybody wanted to become an expert and take calls, but nobody actually wanted to pay to talk to the experts, right? With a two-sided marketplace, that's where the issue lies. It was easy getting experts. And our conversion rate was very high because it was free.
Code Story
S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
We're getting like 30, 40% of people who wanted to become experts and everyone saw the value in the app. But the problem is they relied on OWL itself to drive the traffic, to get people to call them. And that just doesn't work.
Code Story
S9 Bonus: Jason Hill, Owwlll App
And I think with OWL, a lot of people made a mistake and just hope that everyone would just bump into their profile and spend $50 for a 10 minute call to chat with them because they were an expert. And we made a fundamental mistake. We allowed experts come into the app and charge whatever they'd like.