0:00:12 - (Marvin Bee): Hello, friends. Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show where we try to help you, the It business owner, the MSP, or even the computer repair shop owner, how to run your business better, smarter, and faster. We do that by having great interviews with other owners and vendors in the channel, and we're doing that today. I am joined by my good friend, the man of summer, Sean Lardo from ConnectWise.

0:00:41 - (Marvin Bee): Seann, how are you doing?

0:00:43 - (Sean Lardo): Great, Marvin. It's hot in Pittsburgh.

0:00:48 - (Marvin Bee): Get out of here. How hot is it?

0:00:51 - (Sean Lardo): It's 85 degrees. It's sunny.

0:00:55 - (Marvin Bee): Yeah. What's your real feel?

0:00:57 - (Sean Lardo): 84 degrees.

0:01:00 - (Marvin Bee): 84 degrees. Okay. So earlier in the week, we had a day where it was like 94 with a real feel of 116. So we are much more normal today, right now, recording late in the afternoon just so that people know, it is an 85 deg day with a real feel of 94. So kind of a mild day for us during summer.

0:01:31 - (Sean Lardo): It's not so hot all of a sudden, but it's hot. Yeah. So no. Anyway, we're not here to talk about my weather and your weather anymore.

0:01:40 - (Marvin Bee): No, we're not. We are here to talk about because.

0:01:42 - (Sean Lardo): You’re a one upper.

0:01:43 - (Marvin Bee): We're here to talk about the ConnectWise pitch. It program. We are in the midst of interviewing 26 of your emerging vendors for this year's contest. But for somebody that may just be joining for the first time specifically because of this vendor today, why don't you quickly explain to the listeners what the Pitch It program is?

0:02:02 - (Sean Lardo): Sure. So Pitch It is a ConnectWise sponsored Shark Tank competition looking for the best innovators that are startup innovators, by the way, vendors to support the mission that we have within our ecosystem, which is to support the MSPs and our growth. Right. So regardless of whether they're QBR, sales and marketing, cybersecurity, whatever, anybody can apply for that, right? And they start that journey in May.

0:02:27 - (Sean Lardo): We selected the people that are in this year's competition. We have 26 vendors this year, all with the same goal in mind. Their first objective is to become one of the three finalists. Those three finalists will be announced at the end of first week of September when they do a preliminary pitch off at the Battle Royale with Matt Solomon's group on a channel program. Again, the three finalists, when they go there, they'll be competing for first place.

0:02:57 - (Sean Lardo): I mean, second place is not too shabby. First place is worth $70,000. 2nd place is worth 30,003rd. Place is Jelly of the Month, steak knives, whatever you pick, you name it, that's what it is. Like a major award, like a leg lamp, something along those lines. But, yeah, that is the goal. They will be pitching live at It Asia Connect in November, day one. So that is what they're all working towards.

0:03:21 - (Marvin Bee): All right, so money for places one and two. And I am waiting to see what you bring for third place, because now that we have said it for so long, you have got to come up with something. And whether you and I are in the Dollar Store in Orlando the morning of, we'll figure something out. All right, well, Sean, I'm going to let you go here, but before we do, why don't you do the honor of introducing today's vendor and speaker?

0:03:51 - (Sean Lardo): Absolutely. I now introduce this guy as the Irish Canadian, which seems like an oxymoron to some degree because he's going to drink whiskey, but he's going to say sorry for anything he does afterwards, which isn't very Irish. So I'm trying to figure that out. I'm trying to figure out the best way to talk about him in any way, shape, or form, but that's the best I have. So with that said, I want to make an introduction to actually what's become a fast friend of mine, Wayne, and I love the last name even Creamer from Sabota. How are you doing, dude?

0:04:26 - (Wayne Creamer): I'm doing good, Sean. Thanks for another amazing introduction. You know what?

0:04:31 - (Sean Lardo): You're welcome. You've earned it.

0:04:33 - (Wayne Creamer): Thank you. Thank you. I don't know what I did to earn it, but I feel like I did.

0:04:38 - (Marvin Bee): That's going to be a conversation at the bar that I want to hear the origin of all that.

0:04:43 - (Sean Lardo): 100%.

0:04:44 - (Wayne Creamer): Marvin, we will have something ready for you anytime.

0:04:47 - (Marvin Bee): Sounds great. All right, Sean. Thank you. And we'll let you exit yourself and we'll see you a little bit later today.

0:04:54 - (Sean Lardo): Yes. Good luck.

0:04:55 - (Marvin Bee): All right, Wayne. Well, welcome to the show. And you are with Symoda.

0:05:01 - (Wayne Creamer): Yes, indeed.

0:05:02 - (Marvin Bee): Quickly, can you explain to the listeners who Symoda is and what it is that you do?

0:05:08 - (Wayne Creamer): Yeah, quickly, kind of high level, what we do. So Samoa is a client facing customer service platform that's here to help improve the customer experience for MSPs and their clients. So by providing better communication, self service solutions, and a focus on the clients overall support experience. And we're doing this by connecting directly to PSAs, and pretty soon we're going to be harnessing AI to make all those experiences even better again.

0:05:33 - (Marvin Bee): Okay. Now, when you say make the experience better, what exactly does that mean? Because that could mean a lot of different things.

0:05:41 - (Wayne Creamer): 100%. I'm glad you asked. So primarily, if you go to communicate right now with an MSP or any sort of it kind of help, you usually send an email, usually send or pick up the phone to call. It's still the two primary ways that people do that. And really what we're trying to do is bring our solution. Start off with an app on people's phones to allow them to be able to have more of that frictionless feeling, see their tickets, see what's going on a little bit more in real time.

0:06:14 - (Wayne Creamer): I do not feel like they're left in the dark. I'm waiting either for a phone call or playing phone tag or email tag with people over and back if they're available or not.

0:06:22 - (Marvin Bee): Okay, so the customer gets a mobile app, and I assume that this means that there's a platform for us as MSPs to integrate with our existing systems. So how does that actually tie together?

0:06:37 - (Wayne Creamer): Indeed. So right now we integrate directly with ConnectWise and we've got integrations into Autotask and other PSAs are going to be coming soon. Really what we're trying to do is allow people to create tickets directly within that PSA. We've got the ability to triage and prioritize those tickets based on a set of guided questions that we ask in the beginning. And then from there, as the MSP updates that ticket through what it's trying to go through with their team, we bring that information back to the end user. So whether that's the status has changed to be assigned or to be completed, to having the end user have the ability to add notes to that ticket and watch it go through this process.

0:07:20 - (Marvin Bee): All right, so this sounds like it's a customizable brandable app for us, the MSP, to provide to our clients. Let me ask the I'm going to say a dumb question because I'm thinking of it because I'm old school and we've got clients where a lot of users are still tied to their desktop. So is there an app that goes on the desktop or is it truly a mobile app?

0:07:45 - (Wayne Creamer): Today we're truly a mobile app because we want to harness all the features that come from the OS layer, whether it's Android or Apple. And one of the big features that we're looking at utilizing there is push notifications. So whether that's a push notification to let people know what's happening, to say that there's a change on their ticket right down to us being able to customize those push notifications, we can't do it today, but we are working on it and we'll be there pretty soon. But we want to have people have the ability to ask questions. So think of a quick question and say, hey, can I restart your machine right now? Yes or no. Push notification to a mobile device that potentially pops up on a smart device or on a smartwatch. That’s just stuff that you can't easily do today via email, chat, or phone calls. And quite often end users get caught in that over and back of someone tried to call me, I missed them, I tried to call them, they're not available.

0:08:42 - (Wayne Creamer): And they're the areas of friction that's really starting to just become apparent and just areas that we want to be able to help improve that experience for end users and help MSP's clients want to stay longer with that MSP.

0:08:55 - (Marvin Bee): All right, so from the end user point of view, this sounds pretty good. Sounds great to have an app that you can have that integration with and it sounds like it's a little bit of self service. Does that sound correct, 100% self-service?

0:09:09 - (Wayne Creamer): Is one of the pieces we were to look at because myself, I come from an MSP background too, so I managed I was a partner in MSP based out of here in Ottawa in Canada. And for a long time, the types of issues that we were constantly hearing, they always would fall into two main buckets. So one being communicating and not knowing what's going on, that darkness. And we kind of touched on there. That's where we decided to start initially as we build our product, but then the other pieces is consistent delivery and being able to see having people there to be able to do the work.

0:09:44 - (Wayne Creamer): And the one thing that we really wanted to do from that is to find ways that we can automate tasks that are out there that are done continuously replicatable tasks like level one pieces, like whether it's password resets. And again, just guiding people to office 365. To do that, not coming up with any crazy new solution that's already out there. But again, how can we replicate those pieces from a level one technician, a dispatcher, a project coordinator to a degree in account manager, and continuing to evolve them and bring that and have our solution deflect away some of the questions and work that currently hit an MSP?

0:10:23 - (Marvin Bee): All right, that all sounds great. Fantastic. Let me ask this just to change the conversation a little bit. Symoda is spelled Symoda and people go to your website. Symoda.com. One of the things I want to kind of get people ready for is if they go to your website now, it's going to say sign up for the beta. Waitlist, so I know that you said you have some integrations already. How much is available to MSPs right now or when will the full program be available?

0:10:57 - (Wayne Creamer): So right now, today, what we have available is a brandable app. So when you go into the app, you get to see the MSPs branding. We got guided ticket creation, which we can then work with the MSP to be able to manipulate and work with that ticket. Triage and prioritization is there today as well. So being able to ensure that the right priority is set and I can't talk the right SLA, that's what I was trying to think of there is available.

0:11:29 - (Wayne Creamer): People are able to create tickets, update their tickets and see timelines associated to what's going on with their ticket. And as well as the MSP is able to provide notifications, it in the app. So when someone opens the app for the first time, say if there is an ISP outage in their area or there's project work that's happening, there's a note on a banner at the top of that to be a little bit more specific to them for what they want to give out.

0:11:52 - (Wayne Creamer): So in that way it can hopefully prevent people from having communication go to the MSP that otherwise they would be able to understand why they can't get into what they can't get into right now.

0:12:03 - (Marvin Bee): Okay. All right. And then in terms of when you think it would be fully rolled out.

0:12:08 - (Wayne Creamer): Fully rolled out. I anticipate that as we build everything, we're going to have new features, whether that's every month or every quarter, we want to be able to expand out as much self-serve as we can. We want to be able to also even bring this to how can we bring in other tools or line of business, whether that's HR tools or finance tools, so people can actually start bringing this to be a central place to be able to ask their questions.

0:12:35 - (Wayne Creamer): For instance, how many days’ vacation have I got left today? Oh, I need a new mouse for my keyboard. And that's where we see AI and all those generative pieces coming into that. So it's a long walk to get there. But obviously, I anticipate that we're a startup. We understand the pain points that the end user is always seeing. We want to increase that stickiness factor with the MSP, and it's going to evolve.

0:13:03 - (Wayne Creamer): So today, for instance, we would like to find partners who want to join in and help us build this product, help them make it better. That's what the beta program really is understand what features work well, what don't. So it's kind of those early adopter MSPs who really want to strive and help make that customer experience better.

0:13:23 - (Marvin Bee): All right, well, you said it was a long walk, and it'll be a long walk to November and looking forward to seeing you in Orlando at It Nation and see if you can make it to be one of the final three and indeed, get a share of the money or steak knives or whatever. Third place comes.

0:13:40 - (Wayne Creamer): The steak knives do sound pretty good, in all fairness. There's some great steak knives in a dollar store.

0:13:46 - (Marvin Bee): Yeah. All right. Well, Wayne, it was nice to meet you. And I would say this. I can tell I can hear the Irish in your voice, and I get a hint of Canadian. So it's all there. Sean did a good job and look forward to meeting you in Orlando later this year.

0:14:06 - (Wayne Creamer): Indeed. It'd be great to meet you. Meet you there and everybody else, anybody who wants to come see us, we'll have a booth there. Indeed.

0:14:11 - (Marvin Bee): All right. There you have it, folks. Wayne Creamer from Symoda, and we will see him in Orlando at It Nation. And we'll be back with another episode of the podcast soon. Until then, Holla.