Rythmz: More Than Just Wi-Fi (EP 856)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, continuing with day two coverage at PAX 8 Beyond in Denver, Colorado. So this is one of those episodes where I have to do a mea culpa because normally when I'm on site I would say that this podcast is powered by a particular sponsor, but I haven't been saying that because I didn't bring the box with me. No comment.

We're going to let that one go. So Leonard from Rythmz is here and yeah, I had to give a huge explanation as to what happened and travel and forgot and all that sort of stuff. There was some comedy behind it, it was funny.

So Rythmz, yes, normally is my internet provider when I'm on site, even though we really don't live stream, but it's nice to have a little powered by sign up there. And the biggest thing is having the box with open where people will come up and look and be like, what is that? Is that really internet? The internet. I can say, yeah, open up your tablet and look for Uncle Marv and connect, and they do.

But thank you for being a good sport and not yelling at me. We'll see what Steve thinks once he finds out. It was a light scolding for the record.

It was a pleasant- Oh, he's already been notified. Yeah. Maybe. All right.

Let me ask this, what's it like to be at an event without Steve? Next question. Yeah, no, Steve is awesome. He knows a ton of people and he's a big personality, so it's a lot of fun.

Steve's got energy, like ridiculous. He's got energy, he's got costumes. Costumes, yeah.

I didn't see a costume at your booth. And you won't, because Steve's not here. But no, since I've been at Rythmz, so I've been here about nine months, I think this is the first big event I've done without Steve.

So we're at the booth and people are asking for Steve, right? Because he has a big personality, CEO of the company, founder of the company. He's asking for Steve and bourbon, right? Vodka. Vodka.

Vodka. Come on. Vodka.

I don't drink into one of those. Yeah, well, you can stop off at the booth and we'll get you a vodka, we'll get it going. So let's go ahead and talk about the booth.

You guys, of course, had a little technical trouble getting set up. You guys are probably drawing the most power out of... Maybe. Except for CrowdStrike.

Except for Pact 8, CrowdStrike. Exactly. Those panels do draw a lot.

Yeah. LED panels. So those are nice.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Love. Yeah, so we, they're great.

Especially at the smaller events, we pop, right? Because the brighter your booth is, it's just going to visually, it's going to catch eyes. At this event, there's so many booths and so many bigger booths that it's not as eye-catching. But the LEDs are something else.

They're a big setup. It's not... The booths I'm used to is literally a 10-minute setup, 20, 30-minute setup at most. This is a two-hour setup.

Yeah. There's an app with; you've got to download the video you're going to play. There's an app for that? Oh, sorry.

There's an app for that. Literally. Wow.

And, I mean, that's not something you just, you know, carry on the airline or check through baggage. It has the box to hold, so there's two in one and three in the other. And they're probably 24, 26 inches wide each, and you and I would have to lift one.

You cannot, maybe you could, I cannot lift one by myself. They're heavy. Just because you said that, I wouldn't even want to try.

Yeah. They're heavy. So the shipping, the container is 10 foot long by maybe two and a half feet wide.

So definitely freight for that. Yes, yes. Okay.

Yeah. So let's tell people who may not know about Rhythm, so usually I'm carrying the box with me. I've had it, what, the last six, eight months? Ish, yeah.

And it's basically internet in a box. Every time I go through TSA security, they want to open the box because they don't know. What's this? Yeah.

They don't trust me. But yeah, internet in a box. Basically some bonded cell phone carriers that you can take on site, events, conferences, and provide internet for people.

So you're just going to do this off for me and save my whole, my, all my- You know what, I'm so used to not having you here. That's a wrap. Yeah.

Yeah. No, you did some, those are the, some of the higher use cases. Absolutely.

Now tell people about the actual service itself because that's where I usually don't answer questions. I don't tell people about the cost. Yep.

Because I don't know. Yep. And then I know you have, or at least had three sizes of containers, right? Sure.

Yep. And does that like provide any more bandwidth? Like the bigger you go or? Yeah. Yeah.

So we have, so Rythmz is a, like you said, it's an internet in a box. Think of a Pelican case. Inside the Pelican case, there's a router, SD-WAN, and then the SIM cards are truly bonded SIM cards.

So they're, all of them are live and we've got carriers like AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile. Some of the things that we're coming out with is more additional carriers, eSIM cards, plus the other big carrier. So you've got the boxes, literally for an MSP, it's plug and play.

We're not asking you to do much of anything other than calling us and asking us the SIM SSID and password. Do you want it password protected? Do you want it open? What's the SSID you want to use? And that's the gist of it. Small, medium, and large.

The small, medium, and large has to do with, there is a size to it, but it's less SIM cards, less throughput. All of them are unlimited. So our SIM cards are grandfathered in.

Steve, who we talked about, negotiated contracts with all those three carriers to have priority. So our SIM cards are just below EMT first responders. Right under that is unlimited priority SIM cards.

So more, we have a higher priority than the general public, and that's unlimited. So each of the boxes come with unlimited data per month. Boxes start at $295.

That's the one that has two SIM cards. And then we've got a box that's much bigger. Gosh, it's bigger than a check-in luggage-ish.

Yeah, a little larger than a bowling bag. Yeah, it's a decent size. It rolls.

You're not carrying it. The other ones are carry. Mine doesn't roll? Yeah, because yours is the little guy.

Oh, mine's the little one? Yours is the middle guy. Okay, yeah. The big one rolls.

The big guy rolls, exactly right. And so it goes $295, $595, $795, and that's all in. That's MSP cost.

It's interesting when folks, MSPs that are walking the trade show, they're like, are you MSP first? We're MSP only. I grew up in the channel. Steve grew up in the channel.

I started as an MSP, then started a company called Spam Soap, sold to Spam Soap, and I've lived in the channel. That's my pedigree, my DNA, same with Steve. We're channel only, so any leads we get, we are doing lead gen, they go to channel partners who are authorized certified.

Okay. So the big guy is $795, and it's all in. And that's usually, well, part of the questions that I get that I haven't burdened you guys with is, first of all, are you competing against some of those other providers that are providing event internet? There's one we see.

Okay. There's one we see. Like if an MSP wanted to bring Wi-Fi to PAX 8, I mean, PAX 8, of course, is partnered with a hotel or whatever, but they have those big industry internet companies as well.

So if we wanted to compete against something, we're competing against those types of vendors, right? So what we found, and our go-to-market strategy has been MSP first, and then their customer base. And the typical MSP isn't doing events. They're not talking about events because they haven't had a product to sell.

We're the ones that are pushing. We've got partners that are verticalizing the event space. They've got their own website.

They're collateral. They're literally going after it aggressively for the first time because it's net new revenue. What we're seeing, and this is newer to us too, and we're finding stuff out, the bigger the venue, the more difficult it is.

If you do outdoors, extremely easy, and the smaller events, easier to get out of their internet contract and provide your internet. So we've got in Dallas, New York, Los Angeles, MSPs who are bringing internet to the event. And it's interesting because they're charging a setup fee.

They're charging an on-site managed fee. And when I say on-site managed fee, you plug the thing in, right? It's like managed fee. It's setup fee.

So they're doing a setup fee, a managed fee, and then you can charge. We're seeing like $1,000 a day for internet all day. And so let's say that box I said was $595, depending how big the event is.

So we did a, for example, we did an event in LA. No, excuse me. I'm sorry.

Central California concert, 8,000 people. We did 20 boxes, but we overkilled it. We could have done it with six boxes and APs.

We did the registration. We did ticketing, and we did POS, and then we did VIP. We just did an event in Phoenix, the equivalent of Comic-Con in Phoenix, 100,000 people.

And we did similar, and we did about 20 boxes. And we were able to get that contract because we had some relationships. So for the person listening, the MSP listening, my name is Leonard.

More than happy to do some go-to-market strategies with you on what events and what messaging you want to use to your end users. Because you should be asking your customers, what associations are you part of? What events are you doing? Do you need internet? I can be that provider for you. Oh, yeah.

My first thought was chamber events, if you're a part of a chamber and they're doing something. All the time inside. I've got a not-for-profit that does events all the time.

And I actually, I didn't tell you guys this, but I took the box over and I did a secondary internet connection for them. Okay, for the non-profit event. Yeah, we do.

So the event size that we're doing very frequently is 1,000 and under. We'll pull it off. And we did 100,000.

So it's not a we can't do it. It's just we do more boxes, APs, and we're point-to-point. We can totally do it.

For you, having done it the first time, the ones that you're talking about, the Chamber of Commerce, those can be a couple hundred people. And what they're typically doing is social media. Right.

And that's easy for us to do. So this is new revenue. This is not saying, hey, you've got a PSA.

Change your PSA from that one to this one. I'm talking about net new revenue. So outside of the events, it's not if it's when an MSP gets the call of the internet is down.

What happened? I don't know. It's not my internet. Right.

I didn't do the contract with Spectrum. But you're taking the call because you're the trusted advisor. Exactly.

And that was the second part of the question I was going to ask you because the questions always come up. MSPs may want this box as an emergency backup for those calls when, you know, internet's down. You know, somebody cut a fiber line.

It's going to be a while so they can run over a box. Or a company moved and forgot to tell the MSP, you know, oh, we need internet. You know, oh, they can't be in for a week.

Take a box over. So, of course, the question comes up is the monthly cost. Does that happen whether you use the box or not? So I call it incident response and emergency response.

So let's do the emergency response. So Steve says this funny thing, a fiber sniffing backhoe. So how many times do you get that call that says, hey, someone sniffed the fiber and we don't have internet? Or, hey, I'm moving the first of the month.

I just called Spectrum and they said it's going to be six weeks and we're T minus two weeks. Oh, crap. So the emergency response and then the incident response is this could be very likely part of your incident response toolkit where someone gets hacked, they bring the network down, they bring the internet down, and you want to bring everything up new.

And a new internet. Right. Isolated new internet.

And we could be part of that. So, yeah, this is a multiple situations where, one, you can call us and say, hey, can you send the thing overnight? We do that all day every day. Extremely common.

And then the other is what you mentioned was could I have this thing in the office waiting to deploy? And the answer is absolutely. And we've got MSPs that are charging. So let's say their service area is a half hour to an hour radius of their location.

They're monetizing it monthly. They're saying $25, $50 to $125 extra a month to have backup internet, an SLA of two hours and you'll have internet back up and running. So I would charge you, as of right now, I would charge you $5.95, either $5.95, $2.95, or the big one.

Right. More than likely it's going to sit in the middle guy, the $5.95, and you're going to pay me that monthly. We are looking.

So we have three products right now. We are looking at some, and we're right around the corner of coming out with some new, when you asked earlier if there's some announcements, we're looking at a different model where could I have the box sit in cold and it's a different price, and then when it's activated, it goes back to the $5.95. Right. So we're getting close to that.

So you can keep this box for something less than, and then once it's deployed, then it kicks it up to. That's nice. That's what I wanted to hear.

Although, I also, I don't know if this is true. I don't know if it's just somebody blowing smoke, but I heard there's a mini box that might be coming called the Larva. Yeah, the Larva is just fun.

So the Larva, so once again, the box is a pelican looking box, and what one of the employees, TJ, bought on Amazon is one of these smaller looking pelicans. It's blue, and it's literally six inches by 12 inches pelican box, and he put, what TJ did is he put a small bottle of, our sister company is Neft, vodka company, bought a can of Neft and a can of Red Bull in it, and opened it up and said, hey, Steve, this is our new product. Steve didn't think it was as funny as we did, but.

Of course not. Yeah. Sometimes you have to have fun with him too.

Yes, yes. All right, well, Leonard, thank you for stopping by. Thank you for being a proud sponsor of the IT Business Podcast.

I appreciate that, and I have no idea how many people have gone to your website because we didn't do a proper tracking. I can tell you how many people clicked. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But thank you very much for that, and I see activity at the booth. I wish you guys luck. Tell Steve, we don't need Steve at these events.

I didn't say that. So. Yeah.

Thank you for having me. Good to talk to you guys. All right.

That's going to do it, folks, with this episode of the IT Business Podcast. We'll be back with more from Patch 8 Beyond. We'll see you soon.

Holla.