This One Platform Could Replace Your Entire Business Tech Stack | Robin Alex

You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford. Robin, what's up? Welcome to Right About Now. Thank you for having me. Hey, man, I'm ready to get high on your supply.

There's 10 other people who are looking for the same thing. So let's go find them. We've definitely been able to take that mantra and expand from there over the past eight years. Give me some stats. Let's start there for the audience. Let's do from Robin Alex, co-founder of Go High Level. What are today's stats, users, something impressive, how many versions? Give me some numbers, Robin, and for our audience. And then maybe your take of today, what Go High Level is. High Level is a AI-based all-in-one platform for businesses. Our goal is to operate every single business that's out there, leveraging a partner of some sort. So having a marketing agency or a consultant or strategist, that can really help the business owner succeed. That's how we want to get into every single business that's out there.

In fact, one of the new lines that we're talking about is we want to be the next version of Excel. Somehow, some way, your business is using Excel and you don't know how it got on your computer. Maybe the IT company installed it or maybe when you bought a computer at Best Buy, it came with it there. However, it became ubiquitous. You're using Excel. We believe that that can be us. And that is us for so many different businesses. And we're starting to build so many different tools to help you all the way from capturing new leads to having a website to nurturing your contacts and email blast text messages to closing them. So invoices, proposals, all the way to reputation management to now leveraging AI to helping with conversations.

We've just gone so wide. And then as we're going wide, we're also going deep into making sure those products become world class and that it can help. businesses. From there, some of our stats over the past eight years, started the company out with Sean and Varun, my other two co-founders. We're still in it, still enjoying it, still growing the business. We're at about 2,500 employees worldwide. We're all 100% remote as a company, which is kind of unique. We were doing that before COVID. COVID just kind of It's helped us accelerate kind of the working from home and it made it okay. But at that same lens, no one likes to get a paycheck for my home address. We are setting up two offices. We just opened up an office in Dubai.

We're actually reopening a huge office in Dallas that should open here in the next couple of weeks. About 20,000 square feet. Idea having a studio like yours in there that people can record content, host events. So that's kind of a big milestone for us. But company-wise, we're at about 180,000 customers worldwide, which represents a little over 2 million businesses around the world that use our platform today. About 4 to 5 million users worldwide. We're the second largest platform by user count in the world. Second to Salesforce. We're growing. We're trying to get to billions of dollars in sales. money that we're generating into our customers' pockets. We've always said we want to be a $10 billion company where we can help generate $9 billion into our customers' pockets.

And then because we're doing such a great job, we'll do a billion dollars on our side. And that's how we'll be a $10 billion company. We're getting there. I think in the next two to three years, we'll be there. And now I got to change that saying, that new milestone, we're going to be a $100 billion company. Or we're going to be like, well, maybe we should revise it. So we're like SpaceX, we need to be the next trillion dollar company. And this is how we're going to do it. So I need to work on that. But nonetheless, you know, our goal is how can we help as many small businesses as possible and help them thrive? Because if they can thrive, they're going to help their communities grow, create impact in their own world.

At the end of the day, mostly in the small business arena, the business owner started the business to provide a service to be value add in their community. A dentist wants to be a dentist. Doctor wants to be a doctor. Mechanic wants to be a mechanic. The plumber wants to be a plumber. Like all of that is still the core reason why they got into the business to deliver that service. Whenever they need other services to help empower and accelerate their business, they always call somebody else, just as much as they're being called. The best way from a technology perspective for them to get successful outcomes is by calling somebody. I have always been that go-to person. When I took a step back, I got into other networks, going to conferences or other places and just started to realize, wow, there's so many other people like me.

And to your point, marketing agencies, it's kind of a tribe of our own. And then there's the IT space. You have MSPs. Then they think of other industries like accountants or bookkeepers and things like that. So when we started, we looked at it as, hey, businesses need help with their marketing. They try to do it themselves. They typically fail out. Then they start calling somebody. When they call somebody, the likelihood of success drastically increases. How do we make sure that we're the go-to product for those individuals? And how do we make it a no-boil? How do we make it a no-boil? brainer. So what we decided was not only are we going to give them the tools, we're going to give them the ability to give it to them at a reasonable cost with so much value that they can resell it for whatever they like, because they're the ones doing the hard work.

And then on top of that, putting their brand on it, have the ability to resell it for whatever they want with their own IP and create that lock of their specialty into helping that small business. That was actually the big aha moments and value that we brought out to the world. And we started out with marketing agencies and then we've continued to expand that. Now, IT companies leverage our platform to now business strategists, to bookkeepers, to accountants. At the end of the day, that plumber, they don't have a full Rolodex of like, oh yeah, I got a website person. I got a social media person and all this. They're just like, I don't know. I have one person that I help with or two people that I help.

with, I'm going to call them and maybe they'll, they might have a contact or maybe they'll help me directly. That's how we've just continued to expand. But I definitely believe that every business needs a supporting cast of somebody to help them get to success. And that's where we serve that market. When you stop worrying about whose name is on the Jersey, he starts selling a lot of shit. No one's going to represent their brand, but their own. Exactly. They benefit. You benefit. There's a lot of reasons for brand and all that. I'm a brand guy. I get it. But there's a time and a place where you get out of the way, especially when you're becoming the ingredient of success for these businesses. That's what I think.

100%. And that's where having the software really be the backbone behind it. But you need someone to go in and configure the software to match up to the business. Whether or not you have technology, if you don't have a blueprint to create that system, it's going to be very difficult to scale and the business is going to rely on you. And the age old question, let's say the better version, what happens when you win the Powerball? What's going to happen in that business? And you want to make sure that the business stays on forever. I've went as far as I can go without bringing up AI. Rob and Alex, co-founder of Go High Level, one of the, if not the largest small business ingredient brand, whatever we want to call it.

They are going to take over the world now. Everyone's about to lose their job. You need to now start building your bunker and hide because the world's about to fall apart. To your question on fact versus myth, I do believe that the models are getting smarter and they have a lot of capabilities and give us a lot of opportunity. There's the 1% who need that capability. And then on top of that, we'll figure it out and use it. But I don't believe that we're there yet. no one has come up with the ideas or no one has figured out how to leverage the tools to be able to create those massive outcomes. Think about the 99%, our average use case is so minimal that it's not changing the day-to-day behavior.

Before AI, it was, what do you do? You go straight to Google and you just search, find me a plumber or, hey, I have this weird red dot on my skin. What's going on? The only thing that's different is maybe there's a small percentage of people now going to ChatGBT to ask that question. But it's still just a new version for the average human, just a new version of Google in many ways. And in fact, it's always the interesting Thanksgiving conversation. You go back to visit your family and ask, hey, is anyone using AI? I don't think that a lot of people will say yes in the perspective of are you actually paying for a paid subscription and using AI to change your day to day habits?

If anything, they may have a subscription. But like I said, it's no different than just Google and what they were doing before. What was also interesting this year was, remember how they were talking about everyone's jobs gonna be replaced, so go ahead and fire everybody. And then Q2 rolls around, whoops, we need to rehire more people because we need people to now manage the agents and in creating all these outcomes. And then you look at the stock market and things like that, Nothing is really fundamentally changed. The world is same, same, but different. Just now you have this new cool drill in your toolbox. That's really how most people are looking at it. The world hasn't moved on just yet, but I think opportunities there, just the misread is how fast the world is going to shift.

When a lead comes in, how fast can I talk to them? Instead of me hiring another front desk person to pick up calls after hours, can I leverage AI? We are definitely seeing increased usage, but the outcomes haven't changed. The game of business hasn't changed. I need more customers and I need more money. So make that happen for me. That's the fundamental difference of, yes, AI could probably do it all, but business owners just need this. small little changes to actually change their day to day. I have to remind myself of that a lot of the bubble and vacuum that I live in. Being in the industry and being on the side of digital and software and things like that, I had to come back to earth.

I heard stories back the social media bubble took off. Now AI is around here. I probably need to jump on this bandwagon. Can someone just help my business grow? And maybe you can throw in some AI so I can at that dinner party, I can brag that, oh yeah, I have AI in my business. But at the end of the day, it is just basically the blocking and tackling. People want more money, more customers. Now, how you accomplish it? That's fundamentally changed. And there are some opportunities before you have people that's calling. And if your line is busy or if it's after hours, how do you respond to those individuals? Because human behavior is you go to Google or maybe not try to be teen or like, give me the best plumber that can come fix my problem.

You call the first one. If they don't answer, you're automatically going to the second person because you just need to talk to someone now. You call that first number. And if it's busy, you lose that opportunity. The new thing now is can you put an AI voice agent there who can... answer the call. And it sounds almost like a human that the technology has gotten so good there. And then it can collect that data, even schedule the appointment all without intervention of another human. So there's new technology there. Same with text messaging, being able to have conversation through texting without a human. There's a lot of small changes with AI, but at the end of the day, it's how can I capture more customers and turn those into dollars?

Yeah, never going viral then. Yeah, exactly. There was another point in time I remember where it's like you had to have your hot take opinion from a political stance. You feel like you have to catch a wave and that's the only way you're going to grow your business. From a social media perspective, I think it is just authenticity. Just talking from your heart, why you're bringing value to the world, which is... obviously why you started your business or why you're in business. You're trying to provide value out there. Just talking about that, showing the good work that you do. I think to me, those are kind of the easiest layups in creating content. And maybe there's new channels that you can test out, but at the end of the day, it's still the same outcomes.

And in my opinion, that's actually the stuff that lasts the longest. Versus just playing on the hype train because you can get viral by following the latest trend where people are trying to create the new AI ones like dancing out on a stage. There's a rapper, Lil Yachty, who did that years ago. And now it's like, oh, yeah, you can change your body and morph into that. And you're coming out to thousands of people. What does that have to do with your business? And why are you spending time there? But just authenticity. And it doesn't matter what channel that you're on, whether it's TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, just authenticity is all you have to do. But businesses struggle with that. They feel like they don't know how to be authentic on camera, which I find super interesting.

One of the big things that we think about is you don't have to follow the world in traditional thinking. Just like to that point earlier this year, it's fire your whole team. You don't need customer service anymore. AI can handle it all. I'm so glad we never follow that trend. In fact, we hire even more because there's a lot of good talent that kind of made it out to the streets. And we've always believed in the human relationship in our customer support and service there. The other thing is finding models that have worked, not just your industry, but even outside of it. From a customer service perspective, one of the biggest things was people love going to the Apple store or the experience going to a cell phone store where you can walk in anytime and you're able to talk to a human immediately and they're able to basically like take your information and then get you like, hey, stand over there, a rep talk to you immediately.

So the question is how- A rep, what are you talking about, Robin? It's a genius. Go to the genius bar and talk to the geniuses. They're so non-aggratiating that they just call themselves geniuses. We follow that same model. I love that. We call it advisors on our side. Yes. But it's the same thing. 24 seven, you get access to a human. We just model that same thing of like you walk in, there's someone greeting you, kind of like a front desk receptionist, putting your name on the list, getting you in contact with the same person. Because back to that point on the premise of high level, we know that you are there supporting someone's. business. We want the software to be the core product of what operates your business.

And so when there's an issue, that is a stop down on someone's opportunity to make revenue. So we want to match that importance. And instead of you go like every other company out there, they do tickets and they'll call you back three days later and all of that. It's like, no, we'll get you in front of a human right now. Make sure that they're strong on the empathy side. They need to know and understand your business and get you to the solution as fast as possible. So we created models there. But It's just that nugget of looking outside of your world and it's okay being different and those things that are different, if you're able to copy and paste from another industry and bring it in, that can help make you stand out.

The acronyms help make it fun and keep the teams motivated. Yeah. In the honesty with your client, you're not easy to work with. You cost more. You want more of my time, then I get more of your money. It's a win-win, right? Exactly. Robin, what's got you excited? What's Robin Alex looking forward to in life and business? Right now on the business front, definitely fascinated with how the world is shifting. Back to a point earlier, more than ever, people are raising their hands saying, I need help in growing my business. Maybe it is with AI. Maybe it's not. I really don't care. Just help me grow my business. As we're building new tools, as we are creating more AI functionality and opportunities are starting to exist.

It is... fascinating to watch the people who are supporting the businesses come up with new use cases, leveraging AI or leveraging tools and how they're implementing it. That is super fun. And we're seeing that more than ever now. And then on the lifestyle, I got two little kids. I got a 10 year old son and a five year old daughter trying to figure out how to make sure I'm there for the right moments and giving them the experiences of life, things that I've learned and my wife have learned and make sure that they're ingrained with that. And then trying to figure out how to lace it all together with everything that I'm doing with work. That's always the fine balance because I On one hand, what I do for work is really just to support the family and everything that we have going on.

But at the same time, I want them to kind of learn the hard work that I'm doing. So how do I bring them in? So that balance is kind of fun for me these days of trying to figure out how far and how little should I keep them involved. Yeah, there's no perfect formula. I have four boys, 17 to 10, and they're involved in certain parts of certain businesses. But it's always a balance of letting them naturally happen versus overexposure. Yeah, forced exposure. Forced exposure. Why don't you come help me with this? You have no choice. This is not really a question. It's more of a statement. Yeah, I'm just being nice in the moment. Any new features or things coming out launching here with Go High Level?

This year, so one of the big things that we do every single year is every October, we do our annual customer event. This year is going to be our biggest one. So we'll have about a little over 2,000 people come in from around the world. And it's really... really cool because it's really kind of the bringing of the community all into one place. And so whether you're a business founder or you're starting a business to be in a high level agency or being a consultant, helping many businesses, you get to bring in a lot of cool people with different backgrounds. And the collaboration is really awesome. And we want to basically curate that experience so that you can have those conversations because As you know, Ryan, being an entrepreneur can be lonely.

A lot of times there's not a lot of people that understand what you're going through or how you're thinking about it. And sure, you can ask your team and all that. But sometimes you need just kind of an outside consultant, outside person to help you for free in many cases. So kind of creating that room is super important. But there, one of the big things that we do is what we call our level update, where we announce all the new drops, our roadmap and things like that. that some of the things that we're talking about is, of course, AI all over the place. How do we make sure that that is in your tool stack? How do we get that into your business? And for us, we always look at it in two lenses.

What is the business need? And then how do we arm our customers, which are those agencies, those consultants, the strategists? Here's how to use the tool and here's how you can maximize the tool to get the business the ones that they need. So we're gonna be talking about that. We're releasing some new products and so you'll get into things like project management. We'll get into some financial tools to event management. Just other things that our customers have been asking for. A lot of different things coming in from different angles. And the way that I look at it is there's something for everybody that shows up. Just depends on what part of your business journey are you on. Are you there to scale your business? Well, we'll have some opportunities and things that we'll be talking about there with some features in the product too.

Are you supporting 10 other businesses or are you learning how to support? So we have tools for all of that down to if you're someone new starting up a business and you want to help other businesses, but you don't even know where to start. We're actually creating some prospecting tools. We'll help you start sending out, finding the leads that you need, help you with sending out emails to helping you send out invoices to creating websites on their behalf. Once you sign them as a customer, we'll have other tools to help you deploy and set up their accounts incredibly fast. If you want to scale your business, here's some other opportunities to create revenue and things like that. So lots of different things. Last year, I think we released about 400 new updates.

You're moving so fast that you forget what you've built or what you're trying to build and being able to get pulled up. And then to your point, having that space to have those conversations to start thinking about what's the point of all this or where's the next opportunity? And sometimes it's who's the next person I can work with and create that partnership. Those opportunities help immensely in 10X the core business. And so when you claw machine drops you back in, you're ready to rock and roll. I love the claw machine. My kids and I have played so many. If that claw would only grab as hard every time. We know that thing's rigged. Those are the cool YouTube videos where people teach you how to use those machines and actually how to... Oh, man.

It's ready to take over the world and be independent on its own. Those are cool ideas. I don't believe any of that, but they can provide a lot of utility. Exactly. I don't think it's about having multiple agents that thought like the underpinnings and the technology behind it. You're going to run the whole business. Yay. You know, behind the scenes, that is how the technology works. I just want to go to one place, type whatever's on my mind or use a voice, verbally speak what I want as the outcome. And somehow, some way like the old computer machine, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, here's your answer or here's your outcome or do the thing that I wanted to do. That's really the vision that we're trying to go to.

People are trying to figure out how to get there, but the end outcome is, I want you to go to one place, ask your question, whatever modality that you want, whether it's texting, typing, voice, Morse code, whatever you want. It comes back with whatever you want as the outcome. And you don't care how it works behind the scenes. That's really the world that I want to live in and what I want to help curate and build. The success translator. Yeah. That's what it is. Robin, this has been fun, man. Obviously, a lot of people listening probably heard of Go High Level, but maybe personal and business links, social, any of that stuff that we can leave for the audience. Check us out. We're at gohighlevel.com.

You can sign up for a free trial. And the fun thing about it, we're very human-assisted. As soon as you jump on for a trial, you can jump into our Zoom room. And we have 24-7 staff, hundreds and hundreds of techs on our side, advisors ready to talk to you and help figure out your business. I'm going to get you connected to the right people or help you get it set up within your business. You can find me on all the social platforms. On Instagram, find me at TheRobinAlex. And I think that's the same thing on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, all of them. Or also shoot me an email, robin at gohighlevel.com. Always around to help and be of value anywhere that I can. You're just as accessible as your company has been.

Take the idea. Make the call. Launch the thing. Fix the problem. Build what you keep talking about building. For more, follow Ryan Alford on Instagram, at Ryan Alford. And watch or listen to every episode at ryanisright.com. This is Right About Now. Now quit waiting. Go win.