In this conversation, Jason Niedle speaks with Andy Jedynak, President and CEO of ClientPoint, about the transformative role of AI in enhancing human connections and driving business growth. They discuss the importance of giving in business, the unique approach of ClientPoint in simplifying B2B interactions, and the significance of brand presentation in attracting modern consumers. Andy shares insights on navigating growth in tech companies, the effectiveness of freemium strategies, and the cultural shifts necessary for high-growth organizations. The discussion also delves into the future of AI in business relationships and the essential role of trust in fostering successful partnerships.
Takeaways
- Giving to others enriches your life.
- ClientPoint aims to simplify B2B relationships.
- Brand presentation is crucial for attracting clients.
- Freemium models can drive significant growth.
- AI is reshaping how businesses interact.
- Cultural fit is essential in hiring for growth.
- Trust is the foundation of successful business relationships.
- Understanding your ideal client profile is key.
- AI can enhance human connections in business.
- Simplifying tech stacks can reduce costs and improve efficiency.
Sound Bites
- “What you give is how you make a life.”
- “Freemium strategy is a game changer.”
- “You need to hire culture-first fits.”
Show Notes
BeyondSaaS Transcript
Jason Niedle
Today we’re meeting with Andy Jedynak, President and CEO of ClientPoint, about how AI can actually facilitate more human connection and lead to more growth.
Andy Jedynak
Hey Jason, good to spend some time with you.
Jason Niedle
Welcome to Beyond SaaS Andy. Hey, before jump in, have you got a golden nugget for us today?
Andy Jedynak
Thank you.
I do, absolutely. Will Rogers is someone who a long time ago was so famous. He was like the Jimmy Kimmel of the world. Everyone knew who he was a hundred years ago. He had a quote that he said and shared as he traveled the country and entertained people that has changed how I think about life. And it was very simply this. “What you get when you work, is how you make a living.
But what you give is how you make a life.”
Jason Niedle
Mmm.
Andy Jedynak
It’s just about changing the frame a little bit. and I really impress that upon my sons, when you decide that you are gonna be about giving to others, even though at first it feels like it’s not the way to receive the financial things that we all need in life, when you start giving, giving of yourself, even giving of yourself financially, you suddenly feel rich.
and you suddenly have people who see you as someone that matters and whose life you’re affecting and changing. So what you get is how you make a living. What you give is how you make a life.
Jason Niedle
It makes me think I do my best to build my business around win, win, win, right? Good for me, good for clients and good for people of the planet. I could relate that to that quote, because it’s both sides of it, right? I’m making my living, but what energizes me and what’s interesting is what I can give to other people. So I think that’s perfect.
Andy Jedynak
Well good, and I hope people hear it. It’s so amazing when you flip the script and you do it. I’ve read about you and you do it.
Jason Niedle
Thank you. Let me do a couple quick introductions. I am Jason Niedle. I’m the founder of Tethos for the last 22 years. We have been helping companies grow through strategy, branding, lead gen, conversions. today I’m really excited to be joined by you, Andy. Andy runs ClientPoint, which is scaling the world’s first AI powered ecosystem designed to restore human connection. And I like that kind of that tension that generates there. And I want to hear about that. His drive for success is really clear. He’s not only played pro basketball,
but also produce television for NBC. So I love that you’re out there just making things happen. And Andy is a rare neighbor at times based in Southern California like me, but also traveling to his farm in North Carolina. So all that is really interesting. Welcome, Andy. It’s good to have you.
Andy Jedynak
Thank you. Thank you again. I’m looking forward to our time together.
Jason Niedle
So tell me a little bit about Client Point and how you see your role.
Andy Jedynak
Absolutely, so first off my role is simple half of it is culture getting our culture right and then half of it is strategies how we Take what we want to do and why we want to do it and bring it to the market to change the world to change the world of business and How business people work together and ClientPoint really is just that we like to say that we make it easy for people to do business with you and we’re a SaaS company right and
We offer services like so many others out there. And what an amazing marketplace. But what makes us different than really all other SaaS, as we build our own category, which we call business relationship enablement, instead of solving another problem in business with software and with AI and all these things, we’re not there to solve another business problem and make it really easy and great for companies. We’re there to solve.
for something much more important. We’re there to solve for the relationship between two business professionals, the relationship between two companies. We want to make it easy not to do all the stuff under in the back office, because there’s more than enough solutions for that, which are great. We want to make it easy in the front office. So when someone spends time with you, who is in another company, they don’t have to go to 10 places to do business with you. They don’t have to go to
Calendly and then zoom and then DocuSign and then Proposify and then you know Dropbox and then a link for this or a login for that We just put everything on one place on one link so that between two companies working together is as easy as you and I going to Amazon. It’s one website one link once you log in everything’s a click or two away
We want to make B2B relationships as easy and as simple as using Amazon or Netflix or Spotify or YouTube. And we realize when we look at the SaaS world, everyone is solving a problem. No one’s solving for that relationship. And so that’s why we exist. We’re passionately want to make it easy for people to do business together.
Jason Niedle
that Amazon metaphor is so apt today, Because Bezos’ whole MO in growing it was how do I reduce friction in the sale, right? And I’ve never heard of anyone reducing friction in managing relationships as a whole, right? That’s the 30,000 foot view, is oddly unlooked at until you, so that’s super interesting.
Andy Jedynak
Yeah. And the other thing he said, and what Jeff said is he retired from Amazon. He wrote that incredible letter that I would recommend anybody read to the industry and as his parting letter to everyone in business that helped him reflect everything learned at Amazon. And one thing he said, it’s really important to give value back to the people you serve or the companies you serve.
And that’s what we think about when we do that. we, as people work together in business, they do a lot of different things. They schedule a meeting, they share materials, documents, content, video, proposals, they schedule meetings, they have meetings, they e-sign, they pay. We use all those wonderful tools inside of ClientPoint. But if you don’t love one of those tools, you don’t want to pay for it, then there’s a ClientPoint version of that tool. Scheduling, meeting, signing.
Etc proposing etc, and it’s a lot less expensive So use the tech you love bring it with you put it inside that ClientPoint between you and another company or just use our version and that saves you money gives value back and Obviously very important in this day and age. There’s so much tech they call it Franken- SaaS I don’t know if you’ve heard the term but a lot of companies Yeah, a lot of companies they want to
Jason Niedle
I haven’t, but so appropriate.
Andy Jedynak
simplify what they’re doing and in this day and age they want to also add AI and that’s more cost. So how do we cut back on our FrankenSaaS stack, simplify our tech stack so we spend a little less money on that so that we can add AI which will change the game as we already know.
Jason Niedle
use the term FrankenSite here because I had a client who came to me with a site that was 15 years old it was fine. It wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever seen, but you know, somebody added a color 10 years ago and then another color and now they had 27 colors or something ridiculous like that. And they had eight fonts on a site that should have had one or two and the logo, they had the old version and the medium version and the new version and you know.
Andy Jedynak
Ouch.
Jason Niedle
all the technologies are a mess and so it’s very, very common. to take a moment and stop and clean everything up and have a nice place to find things alone, much less have versions that actually work together, sounds like a very lofty, amazing goal.
Andy Jedynak
Yeah, and you know, what I love about what you do and reading about it is you’re leveling up people. You’re kind of taking the weak links and who they are and how they present themselves and how their brand lives in the market. And you’re just making sure that the weak links get worked and then the brand can move forward on a unified basis much more creatively. I’ve been a CMO twice in my career.
And I think there’s so many companies, especially in the tech space, who don’t pay enough attention to their brand. And first impressions are lasting, right? And in this day and age, 70 % of the people in procurement, the people who make purchasing decisions for their companies, buying products and services from other companies are millennials and Gen Zs.
Digital natives and they are used to having amazing online experiences as consumers and they expect that right so the way you present your site your brand and the way It needs to be presented is so important because people like that They’re gonna see what you have to offer and they’re very quickly they make decisions about you or not. Sometimes the quality of your product is gonna get lost on them because the quality of your presentation.
They’ll lose you. You’ll lose them in five seconds and they’re gone.
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
Every once in a while I’ll talk to a tech founder and they’re the super technical guys and they say, what my site looks like, what my brand looks like doesn’t matter. And I like the analogy of a restaurant, right? If there’s two restaurants and they’re equal distance to me one has awful pictures of their food, same price as the one with beautiful pictures of their food, which one are you going to, % you’re going to the one with the good pictures.
Andy Jedynak
Ha
Yeah, no, 100% and then what’s the wow? When we’re talking about marketing, what’s the wow? So I’ll give you the example. Last night, my son and I and a few other men who live here in North Carolina, little bit north of the Research Triangle Park area, north of Raleigh, we went to dinner at a new sports bar.
We had no idea what it was going to be like, but we said we got to try it because there are not a lot of restaurants around here. And when we walked in, there were monitors everywhere. It looked like the classic sports bar and tables and booths and all those things. But you know what else they had, they had 50 TV screens, but if you go around the corner, you see this big
cavernous deep kind of hole where you kind of walk down and there’s all these all these big beautiful comfortable chairs like in a fancy movie theater and then there’s a big bar on the outside and up there on the wall and I’m not kidding you was a 60-foot TV screen it was huge and so this little town with all these restaurants and now a new sports bar
Jason Niedle
It’s like a movie screen.
Andy Jedynak
Yeah, it was crazy. And of course, what it was a playing, it was playing a basketball game, right? The wow for this sports bar called Bleachers is the fact they decided to invest in this massive, massive screen. It’s like you’re walking into a huge movie theater, but it was very intimate. And so that really the idea is when you are presenting your brand as a technology company, there’s so many tech companies that don’t present their brand very well. And I like to say, what’s the wow?
What’s that video? What’s that animation? What’s that thing that people can just grab a hold of and say, I love what these guys are doing and I love why they’re doing it. So it’s the website, it’s the presence, it’s the consistency like you said, which is everything. And then it’s the wow. They love the tech, they love the product, but they don’t have the wow.
Jason Niedle
So what you consider client point in? you guys a startup, beyond?
Andy Jedynak
We’re originally founded in 2010. So very mature as a company, very mature in our enterprise tech. We serve companies on six continents in a dozen languages. We serve across many different verticals of business from finance to manufacturing to facility services to companies
So lot of famous companies use ClientPoint every day, everything from Goldman Sachs to Live Nation to Life Fitness to Securitas, which is that big global security company, and many, many others. And I would consider ourselves as still a high growth entrepreneurial company, but we’re very, very well established with the enterprise products we have. We’re just planning to change the world, so.
We have to have that kind of small, gritty entrepreneurial frame, or we’re not going be able to do what we hope to be able to do.
Jason Niedle
Awesome. So you mentioned high growth. What do you wish other leaders out there knew about growing a tech company?
Andy Jedynak
I’ll tell you, this is probably an answer you’re not used to hearing. I’ve spent a lot of time on the B2C technology side and the internet, a lot on the B2B side. A lot of the practices, the strategies and tactics that B2C internet media companies, internet properties use are fantastic, very thoughtful, and they really study these concepts of traffic and conversion and
There’s so many different ways to build an audience that is tried and true and repeatable. And it’s using a lot of, lot of tactics that are common with B2C internet media companies, B2B companies on the marketing side, just like having a franken site. There’s a lot of those with franken sites, right? They don’t really study marketing strategies and tactics for high growth for, for audience building.
for audience acquisition and conversion and monetization. They’re really focused on some of the basics, but they’re not focused on the more cutting-edge techniques that the B2C players use much better.
Jason Niedle
So could I fairly summarize that by saying that the B2B companies need to study the B2C companies’ techniques a little bit more?
Andy Jedynak
They do, absolutely. it’s doing it is like cheating because a lot of your competition on the B2B side, whoever you’re competing against, they’re probably not gonna do it. You just gotta get a lot of energy and passion in it or find someone who knows how to do it and bring them on board. It’s a game changer.
Jason Niedle
awesome. So all that talk about high growth, what’s your growth goal for this year?
Andy Jedynak
Well, we have a new free offering that we launched last year. And the users all through last year scaled exponentially. So we’re applying something that many years ago, as I did my first B2B SaaS company, we really, really focused on. And that is the freemium strategy. How do you market? Well, there’s a lot of ways to market.
When you have a tool, when you have a product that people can use, you can talk about it all day long, you can show videos, you can do lots of things, and that can help create leads. And we’ve got names for those leads, right? So MQL, Marketing Qualified Lead, SQL, Sales Qualified Lead. But when you have a version of your offering, the tool itself, not the talk, but the tool that anybody can go out and use, then you have a PQL or Product Qualified Lead. It’s someone who has…
discovered you, is starting to use what you have to offer starting to get a sense for your brand who you are what you stand for and why you exist Those people who begin to use your tools are much more likely to be the ones that say hey, I love this I want more of this for my company. So our growth strategy is really based around this concept and it’s a best practice of freemium getting it out there
in making it possible for it to become viral.
Jason Niedle
And I love that differentiation between MQL, SQL and PQL.
Andy Jedynak
Yeah, no, absolutely. And what we do is, shared earlier, Jason, is that we’re really, exist to make it easy for people to do business with you. We just want to make B2B easy. Our plan is to become the platform where the world’s most profitable, valuable, important relationships actually take place. Our enterprise offering does that.
Between two companies It helps one company work with another company with one link between them, not 25 links, but one link where everything happens in one place. Our free product in our growth engine, as to what you asked me, is at clientpoint.me. Just go there, you sign up, and you can use it. You get a link, you get your own vanity link, and you can share it with anyone. If you meet someone in person, you can have them scan your QR code.
And then when they go to you, instead of going to, your LinkedIn bio and resume and background and posts, they’re going to your link, but they’re going to themselves and you together in a private secure workspace where you can meet and get business done. So everything that a business relationship does, all in one place. You can share content, videos, documents of any kind.
You can chat back and forth, can schedule a meeting, you can have a meeting, you can propose, you can sign, you can do all those things all in one place. A lot of the people who have started to use that free product we offer at clientpoint.me have said, this is what LinkedIn should have done 10 years ago. so it’s kind of LinkedIn meets Linktree where everything can happen all in one place. And that link you get, your vanity link at clientpoint.me, that is what you can share in your email signature, you can share on
You remember business cards. That has started to take off since we launched it. We’ve been growing exponentially because people love how it works. And yeah, you can do other things on it. You can post and anyone can see your posts and some of those other social media. It’s kind of a growing professional network.
for business people where they can meet and get business done. That is our engine for growth.
Jason Niedle
So what’s your biggest obstacle to growing that right now? Or what do you see as your biggest obstacle?
Andy Jedynak
I think we’re a lean and mean organization. We have gotten very good at delighting our customers. That’s one of our cultural value statements, delighted customers. We are Big Iron SaaS for very important large global companies. We are an enterprise based company that serves those needs of those people. And it’s an amazingly important focus.
Adopting a freemium model to really scale the business means making a change in our mindset. Our mindset needs to go back to, okay, we’re also a company that could become the next LinkedIn. We expect to grow greatly through a different model and we need to change our culture the way we think and work internally to be able to really take advantage of the scale and growth opportunity that
is starting to happen. It’s kind of coming at us now because people are joining ClientPoint because others got them to join and all those things. The obstacle is going from a very healed, disciplined, enterprise, B2B SaaS company to that plus thinking like a scrappy, guerrilla marketing growth, high growth company that manages that growth. And I’d say that’s really the biggest obstacle. It’s a good problem to have, right?
Jason Niedle
But I like that, you when I ask about your stage, you said we were high growth and entrepreneurial yet established, right? And then now you’re talking about the tension, like we’re established, but we also need to have the mindset of high growth and entrepreneurial at the same time.
Andy Jedynak
Yeah, that’s, I tell you, that’s, getting that right is a really big deal. You can’t mess up either one or you lose opportunity.
Jason Niedle
Is there a company that’s doing that really well that you look at as inspiration?
Andy Jedynak
I like the companies that have done the freemium models because they found a way to really meet a need. They’ve discovered there’s a need and they’re meeting it. I think we all like to study Dropbox. That was one that really did a great job. When it comes to getting something out there that really makes sense and then adding on more and more of an enterprise capability to that.
Jason Niedle
Mmm.
Andy Jedynak
I think back, I look at the companies that have built new categories of SaaS. And I think of the story 25 years ago when Mark built Salesforce and he had to build a new category called CRM. And he said, we can’t just use these old databases. We need to actually put our customers and our products.
Jason Niedle
Hmm.
Andy Jedynak
and do an amazing database online with a whole bunch of capabilities to be able to support salespeople, support people, and do incredible work. What he did, and what so many other companies in the SaaS world have done, is they’ve built new categories. And that’s what we’re doing. Business relationship enablement, being the front office, not just another solution, solving for relationships. So every company that has built a new category of business is one that I really admire, because that’s what we’re doing here.
Jason Niedle
is slightly off topic, but I keep hearing the word freemium and I had this discussion with my 10 year old the other day and he said, dad, I’m an entrepreneurship fair at school and I want to do lemonade. And we talked about it for a while. And ultimately what we decided is he’s going to give away tiny cups of free for five bucks, which was more than his original $2 price point, can get a really nice cup with a silly straw in it. It’s rimmed with sugar with a strawberry on it with strawberry lemonade. Right? So he’s going to drive the kids.
Andy Jedynak
Wow, sounds like his dad is in marketing.
Jason Niedle
He’s gonna drive the kids for
the free one, but then when they see the super sexy one, they’re gonna pay two and a half times what they would have paid earlier,
Andy Jedynak
I love that. No, that’s great. Boy, you’ve got a smart kid.
Jason Niedle
If you had a magic wand, what would you fix in terms of your growth obstacles? Would you fix that culture? you, and earlier you said that it’s half culture and half strategy. What would you fix?
Andy Jedynak
Our strategy is right, our culture is right.
What would I fix? Every year it’s funny. wake up every, no, no, no, that’s okay. No, it’s funny because I wake up early. I wake up four, four 30 in the morning. And I love early in the morning. It’s, nobody’s around. You feel like you own the world, right? And one of the things I do as a serial tech entrepreneur, especially with the title I have is I’ll wake up in cold sweats.
Jason Niedle
Or change. Maybe fix is the wrong word.
Andy Jedynak
Thinking everything that could go wrong, right? And that’s a, it’s just a habit I have. And then I spend the rest of the day just marveling what we could do and where we could go. I think for us, probably the biggest obstacle right now is that shift, as I shared, that shift from amazing enterprise servicing onto
Jason Niedle
Mm.
Andy Jedynak
you know, a very high growth strategy. I think the natural obstacle in that again is kind of a champagne problem as we grow our client base, how do we add more people to the team? When I think about that, a lot of companies and lot of your viewers are, maybe they’re in growth mode right now and they’re facing a real opportunity because they’re in the right market, they’ve got great product market fit, they’ve identified their ICP really, they’re…
ideal client profile really well. And they’re communicating well and their business is growing. And how to manage growth really, really well can be a major obstacle. And one of the things that I really focus on with my team is that even if you’re growing fast,
don’t get out ahead over your skis by just hiring great talent. You need to hire people who are culture first fits. Fit your culture and if it’s not well defined, define it fast. Because you can get a company with 50 or 100 people and not have a great culture but you’re never going to grow it to a thousand or two thousand people. So find people who are a fit to your culture even if it feels like it’s slowing you down and then see if each of those applicants are people.
that fit what the job demands. In other words, they have the skills to meet what the job offers, what the job needs. My advice on that front is find people who fit your culture and then find the ones who have the skills fit within that cultural template.
Jason Niedle
Perfect. And that answers a question I was going to ask later about like, what are you looking for in great partners?
In terms of LeadGen, you have this amazing freemium product, you have a great product market fit, you have a great history, you have a strong team, you have the but you have a product that is not particularly well known or is potentially category What are you doing to bring people in and to educate those people?
Andy Jedynak
Yeah. And my answer probably sounds so similar. It’s really all about the freemium strategy. Traditionally we’ve done, what, most people know as inbound marketing or content marketing and, Halligan, the one who founded HubSpot came up with this idea of content marketing or inbound marketing and putting out content that’s important to the, to your ideal client profile.
And spreading it far and wide and getting them to get to know you through the content you offer is very handy. And it brings in really qualified people who resonate with your message and resonate with you as a company. And they’re more likely to buy from you. I think that the freemium strategy, having a free product that anybody can use, is just a force multiplier of that. And we are…
expecting that the way our free product works is so strong that people are naturally going to want to find out more about us and want to use us more. And really the end result of that is if we execute that product well, then people will use us more, will share us more, and that’s going to create growth. Now you’re talking about driving leads. We like to do inbound marketing. We like to do leads that are product qualified leads.
the real question is when people use our free product are they the ones who are most likely to use your enterprise product and that right that was that’s big challenge of ours because we’re fine having anybody join Now we got to get the right ones to join who are most likely to be the decision makers So and that’s a refinement process, you know, it’s it’s you know Where do we get more people who use our free product at ClientPoint dot me who are more likely to be our ICP? How do we find those people?
And then it gets down to the numbers game, right? The numbers game is it might cost 10 times as much money to get that free user, but when you look at the conversion rates and what the likelihood of them to become an enterprise user or a larger enterprise users, then you say, I’m willing to spend 10 times as much money to get that person.
Jason Niedle
always so interesting for me to see how this works. And I love that you have kind of built in, I don’t know if viral is the right word, but you have built in lead generation in your product, right? Someone uses it, someone sees that they’re using it, and then that person goes and looks at it. So it seems like your top of funnel is probably pretty amazing already.
Andy Jedynak
Yeah, I we’re excited about it. Absolutely. the other thing is, I love what you do because you’re really out there to get people to learn. And I’m a lifelong learner. And I just really love to hear the latest. But I have to tell you, I’m going to spend a lot of time looking at the other videos you’ve created. It looks like a pretty good mix of people.
Jason Niedle
I appreciate that.
thank you. You know, it’s funny is I added a question today that I haven’t been asking, but every single person I’ve spoken with, and I think we’re on, what are we, 12 here, pretty new, actually, we started this about six weeks ago. But every person brings up AI. So it’s time to just be more intentional about that question. Tell me, what should we know about AI and how is that affecting growth?
Andy Jedynak
Sure, what we’re seeing is an interesting trend in SaaS. we know, SaaS is a very successful category and has been since 2010, 2011, 2012, you could say, or even earlier, probably the best performing sector in the markets. And last year, maybe a little bit the year before, we saw something that we would call the SaaS recession, where sales in SaaS actually went…
down or didn’t grow nearly as much as it had in a long period of time. And we saw evidence of that because we saw, we heard about major SaaS players laying off large percentage of employees and these kinds of things. And I believe that the reason why SaaS expenditure has been less on the upswing over the last year or two is because of AI. are going to AI and they’re happening
because a company’s got a lot of great people who are smart and saying, we gotta do this, look how it works. Or it’s happening because the C-suite is realizing they better do it or get left behind. And if they’re not realizing it, boards of directors are saying, you gotta invest in
There’s not a real clear understanding of what all it can do and as you get into the more senior players and companies, it’s really more of, we gotta do AI. And they’re trying to figure out what that means and how that works. But the bottom line is AI, just like other major trends in the past, is quickly and rapidly changing the world forever and that includes companies, people who are in business. So I see AI as something we have to do.
whether we know how to do it or not. And we have to figure it out. what we’re seeing in the marketplace is every SaaS company that offers AI is definitely finding a way to put it into their product, which is great. The question we’re seeing is, well, for the companies who are looking to fill that AI docket in their company, they’re saying, do I do AI through a CRM?
Jason Niedle
Mm.
Andy Jedynak
Do through signing? I do AI through ERP? Everyone’s got AI, so if I just keep using people as that AI, well, we would submit that that’s not. It’s just a bunch of AI that’s doing a bunch of different things, and maybe there needs to be more of a kind of a cohesive solution to bring AI to bear within a company that really serves the people as opposed to just kind of serves the little buckets of tech you have.
Jason Niedle
I think you’re 100 % right and it’s going to be fascinating because we’re really in the bare infancy of this. What does the world look like in five years? Where are these consolidations happening? Where do these things come together you know, a lot of people are talking about agentic AI and you’re talking about a step beyond that where, sure there’s agents, but who’s actually controlling and monitoring and managing the agents so that they have an overall solution that serves, your case, a high purpose, like relationships.
Andy Jedynak
Yeah, that’s a great point. think about that. The people who are responsible for major, major companies, they’re hardly getting their heads around it for good reason. Because if you get really good at AI this month, two months from now, there’s more, and then four, and then six months. The philosophy we bring to all this, Jason, is actually very, very different. Again, as a business relationship enablement company,
a company that doesn’t have a lot of resources to build, category, we’re hoping and planning for the people who use our product to gravitate to it and then they are the ones that say, wow, no one ever had this capability. Now that capability is here. We don’t want to ever go back to 12 links between two companies. We just want one link between companies, one client point between companies.
We want people to experience ClientPoint and then say, man, here’s a new category. We all ought to use this. we have that focus with AI. We’re saying AI is great, and you hit it on the head. call it agentic AI. It’s doing different tasks, right? We do want to have an AI that finds all the other AI, pulls the right one up at the right time
enable relationships. To make it so that two humans have a vastly better experience in business together. And so that is what our focus is. have an AI agent designed to do what you described. we’ve given her name. Her name is Meg. It’s kind of like Cortana or Siri or Alexa or Rufus or whoever you like to use.
But Meg isn’t there just to help you with tasks. Meg is there for your relationship with another human. What do I mean by that? in ClientPoint, you can have a relationship workspace, as I’ve shared, between you and another person, right? And that’s your link where you meet and get business done together. No other links, it’s just there. But business, most of the day, you’re not available. You’re either in meetings,
or you’re having dinner with family or friends or you’re sleeping. So, or you’re on a podcast, yes exactly. Well what’s happening is the person that you’re doing business with, especially if they’re a digital native, they want to do business with you, they want you to be available to them. Because why? Well because that’s their experience with Amazon and Netflix and Yahoo and YouTube and anything else. If they go there, they get what they want or need. To use an example of that, imagine if
Jason Niedle
or you’re on a podcast.
Andy Jedynak
You went, or anybody watching goes to Amazon tonight at 1046. And it says, oh, Amazon is closed. We closed at 1045. Just leave an email and we’ll email you tomorrow. We’ll let you know which knee brace that you need. We’ll give you list of knee braces that you just searched for. Well, that’s crazy. No one would ever let that happen. That’s how digital natives expect the world to be, even in business.
So they want you to be available not because they’re nasty but because that’s how they expect 24-7. two humans in a relationship in a relationship workspace, that’s client represents you when you’re not there. When you’re at dinner, when you’re sleeping, when you’re in a meeting and she answers on your behalf. She’s trained for you, your values, your
for the proposal, for the documents between you and the companies. She’s trained on the person you’re working with, what their favorite sports teams are, what’s important about them, and who they are in their life. She knows whatever you’ve told her about that person. And so when you’re not there, she can answer on your behalf. if you told her the wanted to call when the other person is showing up finally, she’ll call you and say, come on in. The person’s there. They showed up.
six weeks after you wanted them to show up. So having an AI that sits between two humans so that a human in business can be available 24-7 effectively. Again, there’s a saying, Meg is your AI assistant. She’s not pretending to be you. She’s just your executive assistant answering. That’s like a leapfrog advance. And that’s something we can get our heads around. An AI that makes you available 24-7.
for another business person, just like Amazon is available to them That’s what we’re working on. We have a long way to go, but it’s live, it’s active today. You can get it if you go to clientpoint.me. So that’s how we look at it differently. And we hope that that holistic view, of how an AI can facilitate human-to-human interactions will be something that sticks in people’s minds. Because man, AI is changing a lot.
Jason Niedle
It sounds really,
really compelling. made me think of an I purchased from one company that actually does clothes and on Friday at sundown on the Sabbath, I cannot purchase cameras from a very famous store in New York that sells camera gear. I cannot even check out. Not only is nobody there, but they will not, B &H camera. Yeah, they will not let you check out.
Andy Jedynak
Can I say the name? Can I say the name?
B &H. I
have to tell you what’s funny. buy from them because of that. Because of that. I waited a week to buy this really fancy 6K cinema DSLR camera because they stood for something. I know that’s the antithesis to our point, but I just have to put a plug in for these guys. They’re standing
Jason Niedle
I do too.
But it is and it’s
Andy Jedynak
firm on a belief they have. What’s that?
Jason Niedle
not, it’s about humans, right? It’s about humans.
Andy Jedynak
Yeah. Yeah. And so in that case, that’s almost an antithesis where you believe you love how much, why someone stands so much for someone that you’re willing to wait till they come back from, you know, Passover. but that’s cause you know, the human in them and you know what they stand for in business every single day. people just want an answer. And if you can find a way to
Jason Niedle
Yeah, cool.
Andy Jedynak
digitally super empower So that you’re available to them 24 7 we do it with Meg, We call it relationship AI we think that that that’s the ticket to really making AI work.
Jason Niedle
All right. What advice would you tell an early stage CEO?
Andy Jedynak
Wow, make sure you’re up for it. it’s funny, one my sons, his name is Joel, he’s an amazing man. He’s a natural leader. I’ve watched him grow and now he’s in his mid-20s and I could just see that he has that way about him that he could be actually a great, great
We were raising him and I was, you know, I’m a serial tech CEO, I’m a reformed Silicon Valley tech CEO. I remember my wife said to Joel, said, Joel, don’t you want to be like your dad? Don’t you want to be a CEO someday? And he said, nah, too much So I don’t know, maybe he’ll change his mind someday and he’ll become, because he has the goods to be a CEO like that. But man, you gotta be cut out for it. This is, know.
I don’t like to say it, but I’ll use it because everyone knows what we mean by that. This is a young man’s job, a young woman’s job, and you’ve got to have the fire and the energy and the health and the fitness and the wherewithal and the competitive streak to go do it. So the first thing I would do to answer your question, yourself if you’re cut out for it. a decision. If you’re to make the decision to do it, you got to live by
Jason Niedle
And you said earlier, before we jumped on the call, you said you’d like the fight, you’d like the competition.
Andy Jedynak
Yeah, no, like you said, as we got started here, I was a pro basketball player in Europe. I like to play, I like to have fun and I like to compete. And without that, I don’t feel fulfilled. guess that makes me a little bit more likely to be successful as a CEO.
Jason Niedle
Cool. In this chaotic time, are growth trends that you see in this coming year?
Andy Jedynak
a lot of them, but there’s one or two that I think are the most
an old book by this gentleman by the name of Alvin Toffler. It was called Future Shock. He wrote it 50 years ago. predicted what this world would be like with this exponential growth of technology and all the amazing things that would happen. I think this is an overload.
And where the growth is going to be is where people take center stage. Relationships are the essence of life. Relationships are the essence of business. People who get back to relationship and build what we a concept we use at ClientPoint called trust philosophy. People who can build trust philosophy with other people. That’s where growth is gonna happen. The tech.
Push it aside, remember about the people, and wherever companies have relationships at the fore, those are the ones that are to be most likely to grow.
Jason Niedle
feel like we could talk for an hour about trust velocity.
Andy Jedynak
It’s a good term, isn’t it?
Jason Niedle
Just that, it’s a great term and it makes me want to know more. All right, well, this has been really informative and really interesting. Where can our audience find you?
Andy Jedynak
Go to clientpoint.me. If you go there, you sign up, you can just search for and you can find me and connect with It’s just like LinkedIn. Except for we can also meet and get business done together all in one place. So go to clientpoint.me, connect with me there.
Jason Niedle
For the listeners out there, that’s exactly like it sounds, the word client and the word point and the .me, C-L-I-E-N-T, P-O-I-N-T, .me. Andy, thank you so much for being on Beyond SaaS. For listeners who are leaders in mid-stage tech looking to grow, I do offer a limited number of consultations at no cost.
drop any questions, comments, or feedback below, or look me up at tethos.com. next time, this is Beyond SaaS.
Andy Jedynak
Thank you, Jason.
