TurboDocx: AI Power for MSP Proposals (EP 881)

Hello friends, welcome to another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT Professionals and Managed Service Providers, where we help you run your business better, smarter, and faster. And we are continuing on with our summer series of Pitch It Vendor Profiles. These are companies that are kind of in startup mode, some of them, but basically they are in this incubator program to help themselves get some money, get themselves dipped into the channel and start working with us as MSPs and the best possible way forward. 

The IT Nation community is doing this and we hope to see three of these contenders on stage this November in Orlando at IT Nation Connect. And I just saw somewhere where they tried to dub this IT Nation Connect Global. So it should be a big, big conference coming up this year. 

Today's vendor that we are seeing is TurboDocx, but you should think of it as TurboDocx because that's how it's spelled. And I've got Nicolas Frye, the founder and CEO joining me, a fellow Florida man. Nick, how are you? Hi, Florida man. 

I love it. How are you, Uncle Marv? I'm good. I am good. 

So TurboDocx, not to be confused with any other turbo things on the internet, but basically this little automating your documentation platform, right? Yeah. And if I had to be more specific, because I know in the MSP world, documentation as a tech is very different than documentation in sales or other things. What we do essentially is we use AI to grab data from different sources. 

Think of like a Zoom call that's recorded and take that and put it into a proposal or a presentation. So for us, I like to view it as kind of a sales tech, but we do so much more than that because we connect to different platforms like ConnectWise PSA and anything you can put on a piece of paper or in a presentation is really what we do. All right. 

So when I first saw this, it talked about being completely AI driven, but AI powered in the sense that you mentioned connecting to all those things, centralizing documentation, reusing content, enabling users to generate polished proposals, statements of works, all that stuff, right? Yep. Spot on. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've seen a deal get lost because they didn't get back fast enough.

You know, the world we see is someone gets off that call with their client, or maybe they just got off some sort of engagement with them and saying, hey, Uncle Marv, I'll get that to you in like 10 minutes. And then sure enough, two days goes by, a bunch of tickets roll in, a bunch of angry customers are calling, and they forgot to do the proposal. And guess what? They went with another vendor or they went with, or not another vendor, but another MSP, or they went somewhere else.

So my background actually right near you, I used to work at Citrix for many years. And one of the things that we used to do besides building data centers and BDI, we're scoping projects. And a lot of times, for example, you'd get on what we would call an assessment and you would understand what your prospect or current client has. 

And then you'd have to turn it into some sort of document. If it's a pre-sales thing, it'd be a SAL. If it was maybe a post-sales thing, it's an assessment that basically outlines what their infrastructure looks like. 

So we're pretty versatile. Oh, and shameless plug, I'm sorry to throw this out there. We give out free e-signature. 

So I know a lot of MSPs spend a lot of money on things like e-signature platforms. So we do that for free because we don't want to beat up the little guy because we were the little guy at some point. Well, I was going to ask you about that because I'll be honest, I was somebody who went with another platform that I found that wasn't the big boy EDF form filler, signer, blah, blah, blah, because they allowed, I think at the time it was three per month for free. 

And I'm somebody who doesn't do a lot of proposals. So one or two a month is perfect for me. Now, of course, they did away with that. 

So I haven't done anything for a while. But I saw that you guys, yeah, you guys have it to where you can do five free a month. Now, part of your platform is not just with the TurboDocx, but you have a, that's part of the TurboSign. 

Are those separate products or is that all together? So it's all together in a sense that it's one login, one platform, one family of solutions. The way how this started was I was having lunch, actually, I don't want to name drop, but I was having lunch with someone in Miami who has a VOIP company. And he says, Nicolas, your product's pretty cool. 

But he's like, you realize you're still going to have to pay for a signature vendor. I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, well, think about it. Most MSPs don't do a ton of volume. 

They are focused on their current clients they have now, and they're going to spend time automating some of this stuff. And then they still have to go pay for an extra thing. Why don't you just build it? I'm like, yeah. 

I didn't really think too much about it. I was like, oh, he's right. So that's how TurboSign was born because every deal and not just deals. 

I mean, it could be things like a sign-off, like a compliance sign-off. I read this. It could be a lot of things. 

All big deals end in a signature. I mean, it's not some MSPs bill of stripe or QuickBooks invoices, things like that. And those are all great industry standard tools. 

But sometimes when you do more complex stuff where you're writing something that's super custom and you don't want to under scope or over scope something, you want to get sign-off on that. And also, the way I like to think about this too, for a lot of the mom and pop MSPs out there, a lot of times, it's a phone call. They send them an invoice. 

There's a bunch of SKUs on there from some quoting tool and life's good. But if you want to be more operationally mature and you want to play with the big boys, those bigger customers, if you want to start going through credit union, banks, bigger law firms, it's not just one or two people. They're used to an experience where there's like a true formalized proposal, a true formalized sales process, because you're spending tens of thousands of dollars a month anyway on tooling. 

And that's kind of how that goes. So part of this is how do we make the SMB play with the big boys and play with the enterprise and small, medium enterprise sort of MSPs as well. Yeah, that is key. 

And I'll be honest with you. I took a paper estimate over to a customer this morning because he is old school and he's like, I don't want to do all that. But I have had him in the past. 

I went through the process of creating a document and doing just a simple one line signature thing and having him be able. I kept telling you, I'll just send it to your email, read it on your phone, click this box. And I mean, that's what I'm looking for. 

I could have. Now, listen, it was a six minute trip. I'm not complaining. 

But the fact that, you know, saving a trip like that or even sending an email, making a print it, sign it, then send it back. It's annoying. Oh, I agree. 

And, you know, like geeking out for like two seconds. If somebody scans an email or scans like a wet signature, I mean, there's ways to prove it's valid. It's been done that way for years or whatever.

But when it comes to e-signature, believe it or not, there's like all this technical stuff behind it, like a certificate, for example. So just like you have TLS certificates for the browser and some people have to manage the life cycle of that. There's actually certificates that back an e-signature. 

And when you open it in products like Adobe Reader, for example, kind of like a Twitter blue check mark, you'll get like a green one. And, you know, a lot of these free solutions out there, they're more or less just superimposing a signature SVG. Like you sign it on your phone, it creates an image and then just puts it on the PDF. 

And that's cool. But if you want to prove like, hey, Uncle Marv actually did sign that. And so did Nicolas Fry. 

There's a whole enchilada of things you have to go through to prove that for it to truly be e-sign and UETA compliant. Now, OK, we're getting off track here, but I like this track that we're on. So how detailed... I'm a geek at heart. 

Let me just start by saying that. Like I used to be a software engineer. I still write a lot of code for our company.

Well, you worked for Citrix and you worked with Okta and some of these other big name companies. We'll get to that in a moment. But I wanted to ask how detailed does your trail get? Because I know that sometimes I like it when I can see, you know, this is when the person viewed it. 

This is when the person signed it. Here's the IP address, all the time stamps and all that stuff. Do you have all of that in your travel sign? All of the above. 

And then the cool part is, and I kind of left it in, is almost like an Easter egg because the average person, they don't care about how it works, just that it works. But every chain in that sequence of the audit trail is based off the hash of the previous entry. So what that means, like without memeing about blockchain and all that, it's more or less kind of what we're doing. 

So each event that we fire off in the audit trail is signed and hashed by the previous one. So the only way to get to the end of the tunnel, the first hash to the last hash, is to go through that whole process. So like we had to do all this cool like cryptography stuff, like in code to make that possible. 

And to be fair, you need to do it anyways. But we kind of, we surfaced it in such a way like where it wouldn't be confusing to an end user, but someone who understands that stuff will like appreciate it. All right. 

So what was the actual aha moment for you to start this after being at all those other places? And don't tell me it was that friend from Miami who I think, let me, let me, I'm going to see if this, is he also known to like the Philadelphia area? Potentially. Why? Who are you thinking of? We'll say it all fair. You didn't want to name drop earlier. 

So I don't want to. That's one of my unwritten rules. I don't like name dropping unless I have consent.

All right. And then, yeah. And I don't want to be wrong. 

So let's do that. But back to the question is what was the aha moment that got you to look at this and do this? So, you know, my background started kind of in the enterprise vendor space. And I know that's not necessarily like when MSP would do, but I used to spend hours in a hotel room the night before a big meeting or conference where I had to put together a presentation or potentially like a customer facing document. 

Like here's what your environment looks like. And that was not fun. Like I spent years of my life doing that in different cities and, you know, Marriott hotel rooms the night before. 

But, you know, imagine like the process was you'd open up your one drive, you'd pull the one from another customer, you find and replace. Of course, I never admit this out loud on a reporting podcast. This is all hypothetical, but, you know, yeah. 

So you do that. It's a case study. Case study. 

Yeah. So you do that, of course, because there's only so many ways you could deploy a Citrix environment. And a lot of, you know, there's a lot of design patterns similar. 

And sure enough, you get it wrong. You go to a customer and you're handing them something to sign. It has another customer's name in it. 

And the amount of time it took to do that and have someone QA it. And, you know, and again, if you're a one man band, you're an MSP, like you don't, you may not have three or four sets of eyes. Your texts are already busy up their eyeballs, you know, knocking out tickets and stuff. 

So it's not like, Hey, can I just have a second set of eyes at this before I send this for signature? Because guess what? Every second is a second that someone else is potentially going to outwork you and earn their business. So, you know, the aha moment was, you know, even when I was in software sales, like it, you know, time is everything. Like I have really weird philosophies on time. 

And, you know, the goal should be, don't waste your time with the keyboard. Don't waste your time writing these kinds of things that, you know, the big guy's doing, but you may not be, it's a handshake and you know, spend time with your clients and not the keyboard, right? In this day of AI, in this age of AI, relationships and empathy are everything. Anything else within reason will and should be automated. 

So, so speaking of in this world of AI, I'm going to ask you how much of AI is built into your tool, because you talked about being able to be in a zoom meeting. And then from there, be able to pull that information into TurboDocx and create a proposal, blah, blah, blah. So how much of that is AI driven? So I'm going to make this, I'm going to split this into like two answers. 

The first answer is, let's say you don't trust AI and there exists MSPs like that. They have a very interesting perspective on like, you know, the bigger tools they might have licensing with. Like there are a lot of them in Microsoft shops and they use Copilot, which is an awesome tool. 

You have the ability in our platform to almost like create Legos of different, you know, sections of a document and you could point and click and use as a starting point. And that's almost like classic templating, right? So that's been around forever. You know, a lot of vendors would do that. 

That's one way of using it, you know, and that's fine. What we've built is saying, okay, I have a template. That's cool. 

But let's go to any source of data we support. We're adding new integrations like weekly, essentially, to our app library. And what if I just pointed a record, almost like a prompt in chat GPT saying, hey, look at this call and list the top five things the prospect was complaining about.

List the top five things, you know, make an executive summary of how we can help, you know, just kind of things like that, that add that extra layer of polish. And even things like pricing. So for example, let's say I got a call. 

I didn't run it through the quoting tool yet because I don't have time. You know, I want to just get him something on paper because I know they're going to negotiate no matter what. Hey, Uncle Marv, I'm going to sell you, you know, seats of some RMM. 

We're going to charge, I don't know, I've seen them all over the place, but whatever, we're going to charge you 10 bucks a head or five bucks a head, who knows. And maybe as I throw that out there, I know I'm overshooting it, right? Like I know I'm adding whatever my margin is on it. And TurboDocx could just take that from the call and just put that pricing table right in. 

And then once you both kind of agree to like what it should look like, I could go run it through the quoting tool and apply discounting and stuff like that. So, you know, it's time to, AI is the fundamentals of how we're sourcing data. And then we're even experimenting with different things of like review. 

So, you know, I talked about that extra set of eyes. So imagine like being able to upload something, have it look through it. You give it like a bunch of rules, like, you know, don't use acronyms before defining them. 

Make sure what I'm writing makes sense. You know, I'm not saying we're going to do two sites or two offices and then I have four listed in the proposal, you know, things like that. So, you know, any, anything that you would do today as part of your like paper process to close a deal is where we want to play. 

And not just for sales tech, because we even have use cases like one of our MSPs is using us for like client onboarding and manuals. So for example, they get their data through like a Google form and from there they generate almost like a handbook, right? Hey, welcome to XYZ MSP. I'm not going to name them. 

And, you know, here's how you set up your agent. Here's how you enroll in MFA, you know, like very tailored stuff like that. You know, and there's even ways for people to, you know, some people even charge for that kind of stuff. 

I mean, you know, and you hit a button and now it just does it like that, right? So you're not, you could charge for it and potentially not really pay much to do it. Right. Well, I was going to ask you, you know, how much of this is geared towards MSPs using it internally and how much of this is an opportunity for resale? Because this looks like something that anybody in the world can go find, sign up and use, not necessarily need us as MSPs.

So, very great question. And I have very strong opinions on this. So we have a partnership program.

If you go to our site, there's like a partnership tab on there. And I actually have a few logos I have to add. We just signed at least one, hopefully two by the end of next week. 

And we're very big into the MSP distribution model because you're our frontline and eyes, right? And ears of what your customers are doing. We have very competitive pricing. So like, you know, essentially my advice to everyone is just like on our site where we have our pricing listed and it's very transparent and clear. 

That's the price your customers should also pay. And then on the backend, we'll give you a percent, you know, so we'll charge you less essentially, or not even that, we'll just give you a piece of the revenue. There's different ways we can organize it, but yeah, reselling something we do. 

And then, you know, obviously like MSPs are using this depending on how they like to run their business. All right. Well, I have tons more questions, but we are coming up to the end of our allotted time. 

So I want to make sure people know that they need to check you out. And I said TurboDocx as the name, but TurboDocx is the way you spell it. TurboDocx.com is where you go find them out. 

Nick, I want to give you a few minutes to practice your first pitch for the Pitch It program. So two to three minutes, I'm going to step back and let you go to it. So go.

Oh boy. Okay. Slicks his hair back for those listening on audio. 

Just kidding. So hi everyone. I'm Nicolas Fry. 

I'm the founder of TurboDocx and our job is to make you compete with the bigger MSPs about the price tag. How often have you lost deals simply because you did not get back to them soon enough? How often did you get off of a call and within minutes send them that first draft of a proposal and were successful? If you're able to say you did it in minutes, I applaud you. I want you to come work for me because I could learn a lot from you, but I never had that experience. 

So for me, we built TurboDocx as a way to use AI to make that process much quicker. Imagine, not even imagine, like let's say you're a Zoom customer and you record your calls. We could plug into that, take that call and turn it into that proposal and optionally give a presentation if you present, but most people don't, in just a matter of seconds.

And by the way, we do free e-signature. So if you're already spending on e-signature, well, ours is free. So that's awesome. 

But then you also get so much more with it too. Yeah. And one other thing too, if, you know, outside of the kind of top of funnel use cases, you know, if you happen to be doing things like QBRs or kind of like nurturing activities or, you know, things that your tech should be doing, like explain to the customer how to do common processes and, you know, sending them a PDF on how to do it. 

Those are probably some good use cases for TurboDocx too. We're pretty versatile. You know, thanks for listening.

I'm Nicolas and a pleasure to meet you. You'll find me on Reddit, LinkedIn, and we're free. All right. 

Well, Nick, you brought up something I knew I meant to ask you but talked about using this in presentations. I was going to say, is there like a presentation mode of documents that you create that you could be on a Zoom call with them and just pop up stuff in presentation mode? So it's not going to create it live because we have to wait for the recording to render. And, you know, I brought up Zoom a bunch of times, but we also plug in a different CRM. 

So I know a lot of businesses are using ConnectWise PSA or HubSpot, you know, Zoho, you know, is geared towards like SMB. We have a few of those built. But yeah, I mean, essentially, you know, depending on how many calls it takes to close a customer, if that first call is a discovery, just like me and you talking right now. 

And, you know, on the call, they're complaining, it's a pain to manage my IT. I have too many past, you know, we don't want to hire an IT, you know, an IT guy. You know, we need help managing our environment, our infrastructure, stuff like that. 

That very next call you have, and that's how I used to sell, I would put the pain right up in front of them. So like I would learn, I would have a slide that really is like three columns. Here's what I heard.

Here's how we can help. Here's some questions I should be asking. And AI, like if I did a demo on this call, AI would actually fill that out for me. 

So now I have that done in seconds. And even if I floated ballpark pricing on that first call, I can again, use AI to generate that pricing slide, throw it right there for my second call. And then maybe after that second call, I say, yeah, I'm glad we spoke about this. 

I'll get you over a proposal in five minutes. And you actually mean that because you can do it. Nice. 

All right. And I did want to reference the fact that there is a free plan that you can do free e-signatures, five a month. You can do five deliverable generations, unlimited standard integrations for a single user, a thousand AI credits. 

I should have asked you, what's considered an AI credit? So like most companies in this space, and this is more of an art than a science, every vendor has like a free tier now that has AI, but obviously as the vendor and as a startup, we don't want to get a huge bill at the end of the month and be like, well, what happened? So what we do is we have buckets of credits and depending on which plan you have, we'll up it and some give unlimited for now at least. And I hope to continue that as the price of AI keeps going down and down. It's awesome. 

I'm for the business. So different activities you do in TurboDocx would consume a different amount of credit. So whether you go into Zoom or you use your knowledge base, knowledge base is like, let's say you upload your last five proposals. 

We could chop it up and have our AI use that as a reference to generate the next one. For example, each of those activities cost a different amount of credits and then our free tier. And again, someone does one, two a month. 

I think they'll be fine on the free tier between me and you. But if not, our next jump point as of right now is $10 a month. Oops, not the end of the year. 

And they'll get plenty more. All right, Nicolas, thank you very much for taking time to hang out with me here. And at some point we're going to get together and hang out as Florida men since you're not too far away. 

So it'd be something we can do here pretty easily. So TurboDocx.com folks, look for them, check them out. And I don't know how the voting is done for IT Nation Pitch It, but chalk them up, talk them up and share this podcast with people so they can be one of the three on stage in November. 

Thank you, Uncle Marvin. It's been a pleasure being on your podcast. And thanks again. 

All right, that's going to do it, folks. Be sure to check us out for more vendor profiles for the IT Nation Pitch It. I don't know, we've got seven or eight left to fill out the summer. 

And then we'll see you in November in Orlando at IT Nation Connect. That's going to do it, folks. We'll see you soon.

And until next time, holla!