# Al's concerns: where's the money coming from?

- **Episode:** [106](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/106.md) (2024-06-13)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** funding, concerns, business
- **Time:** 34:45–38:59 (start 2085s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/106?t=2085](https://truthliesandwork.com/106?t=2085)

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[34:45] Geoff Roberts: It can
[34:53] Leanne Elliott: But come back
[34:54] Al Elliott: Yeah, come back
[34:55] Geoff Roberts: Definitely come back because Nudge isn't as good as this
[34:57] Al Elliott: So come back. I'll cut that out. Keep that in
[35:00] Leanne Elliott: Welcome back. Let's get back to giving Geoff a hard time, shall we? Al, you had some concerns at this point, didn't you?
[35:11] Al Elliott: Yeah, you can't help but like Geoff because he's so enthusiastic and he's so selfless as well. But my tiny little brain couldn't quite get around this obvious problem. Why does everyone get paid the same? But some tasks require much more expertise than others. For example, customer service compared to being a senior developer. So I wanted Geoff to explain how they get around this. Let me just be your CFO for a second and go, one second, Geoff, we've got— let's just use argument's sake, 10 people, because nice easy numbers. So I've now got a wage bill of $2.1 million. Um, and my revenue is, let's say, $5 million. And we're like, yeah, but we need this. We need someone just to do tech support. Sorry, not email support. It's just literally email support. We need them to do it. But Geoff, you've got to spend all our budget. So what do you tell me? Where's the money coming from to pay for that?
[36:01] Geoff Roberts: Yeah. So this, this is a circumstance we have very directly in, in our business. We have these lower-level tasks that still need to get done. And we've looked at all of these things through one of two lenses. One is, is this something that we can outsource to an external contractor that is not part of our full-time team? The other is, is this something where we can divvy up the responsibilities amongst the full-time team? And we've done certainly a bit of both. So when it comes to support specifically, we are a support-intensive business, to be honest with you. It is a big project or a big product. There's lots of different integration points. We integrate with all sorts of different technologies. We have a lot of support, particularly early on in the customer lifecycle. And we knew we couldn't just go out and hire sort of junior-level customer support reps, and we saw inefficiency in doing that anyways. You've You've interacted with such people. They don't have the ability to solve your problems in most instances. They're sort of just saying, hey, we've received, you know, your incoming customer service request, and they route it to somebody else who can actually solve the problem. So we said, let's just cut that layer out altogether. And the primary thing that we do in this regard, we actually do both of the things that I mentioned, but everybody on our team does support. Every single person, all of the engineers, myself, everybody else. It's non-negotiable. We tell everybody this upfront. If this is a problem for you, then you're not going to work at Outsetta. This is just part of the gig. And you can argue that there's downsides to this. We have extremely senior software engineers that are hugely valuable employees spending some of their time doing customer service. You can tell me that is not the smartest thing to be doing financially. I think there is certainly some truth to that. But the flip side of that is every single person on our team is confronted with our customers' issues every single day. And I think there's so many positives that come out of that. It's actually been pretty beneficial to the business. From a customer service perspective, really believe that good customer service comes from interacting with people. This is a little bit of my personal opinion/baggage, I guess. Like, I've never had a good support interaction with a chatbot, frankly. So I think customer service and delivering competent customer service from a person is only going to become more of a differentiator going forward. I do think there's a time and place for AI tools where, you know, you can talk to them and interact with them and Um, have some dialogue with them back and forth, but ultimately when you need serious help, it should come from a person