SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Trust and Will Company Passes 5k Customers, $1m in ARR Digital Way to Do Estate Planning
12 Jun 2020
Chapter 1: How many customers does Trust & Will currently serve?
How many customers have paid you at least a dollar to do something?
Uh, we have at least a dollar. I'd have to run the exact number. I mean, it's North, it's between comfortably sharing North of 5,000 and it just depends which product here they chose. If it came through a channel partnership or it came direct.
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Hello everyone, my guest today is Cody Barbo. He is building a company called Trust and Will. Think about it almost like online estate planning made super simple. We'll jump into it. Cody, ready to take us to the top? Let's rock it. All right, man. So talk to us a little bit about the company. So first off, is this a pure play SAS models or like a marketplace?
It's a hybrid. We have an upfront fee that we charge for our three products. And then there's an ongoing annual subscription because estate planning is a lifetime of updates. It's not, you set it up once you're done with it. You have kids, you buy a home, you build your wealth, you have an inheritance, you have liquidity.
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Chapter 2: What is the pricing model for Trust & Will's services?
When did you launch the company?
We started talking about this August of 17. We entered a pitch competition that we took third place on at Qualcomm's headquarters, which was like a forcing function to incorporate because we had tech stars approach us, angel investors approach us, We incorporated in October of 17. We went through Techstars in 2018. We raised our seed round that we announced in January of last year of 2 million.
We announced our Series A last month of 6 million. We've done some pretty cool stuff. We're live nationwide. We've had about 65,000 people sign up for Trust and Wealth for one of those three products.
All paid or is that free and paid?
Free and paid. Free and paid. We work with partners on financial services, insurance, a couple other categories. So we can discount the products or do revenue shares with those partners. And then we have our kind of history-defining milestone was last year in January, we did the first electronic will in history, U.S.
history, which means digital signature, digital notary, digital storage of documents. It is the future of not only every industry, but it is estate planning. It's just unfortunately the last industry to adopt documents. modern tech.
So just be clear, that was the first digital will or trust? Digital will. Digital will. Interesting. Yep. Okay. So let's get more of the early days here, the first couple of months. So Forcing Function was the Qualcomm event. It sounds like you incorporated October of 2017. How long were you writing code before your first dollar of revenue? Do you remember?
Yeah, we launched our first product, which was the Will, just a basic last will and testament in the states of California and Texas in April of 2018. That's when we finished Techstars. That was like our coming out party. We were like, hey, we finished the Techstars accelerator. We launched our Will in California and Texas, two of the biggest states.
And that's when our first paid customer came through because the first 200 were friends in the network that had kids or owned property that we gave them a lot of freebies for putting up with our bugs. So development process.
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Chapter 3: What demographics does Trust & Will primarily target?
I mean, if you just, the total customer count you're serving now today, ignore the one-time stuff, just the ones that are paying you recurring and manage all this stuff for peace of mind. What does that add? You're talking like 10 or 20,000?
So our recurring subscription will kick in starting this year. So when we launched our trust product in January of last year, it was just California, Texas. We launched the will nationwide in January because we're still a young company, right? Like we've only had two years really of operating history, but we've only had a product in market for about a year and a half.
So our first round of subscriptions will formally kick in starting this month. But what's been interesting is that since we launched the will in April 2018, over the course of that last year or since then, we've had people come back that set it up because they got married. They wanted to update it because they had kids or they wanted to update it because they moved states, bought a new home.
So we're seeing about one in 100 folks come back to make that initial update without any marketing around the fact that, hey, you should come back and update if you've had any of these life events as triggers. So as we move forward into 2020 and beyond,
We're not just manually reaching out to our members to say, hey, if you had one of these things happen, here's why you should update your documents. But we want to also encourage with our development team, leveraging technology to know or predict when these events happen. We know that you got married or you had a kid, you moved states, you bought a new home.
to trigger an email to get our members to come back and make those updates.
So just to be clear, you have 65,000 signups to date of which about between 10 and 20% have converted to paid, but that paid were those one-time fees you told us about earlier. You don't have monthly recurring subscriptions yet. That's going to kick in this year.
Yeah, subscriptions formally kick in this year. I mean, we were charging for updates. The price of the subscription, we would charge for updates throughout 2019, which gave people any life event that happened, the ability to come back, make the necessary updates, and still get their documents printed and shipped to them.
But it was about a 1% conversion, but that was off a small batch of the initial customer base from 2018, since that was really our first year in market. We only had one product. 2019, we launched two more products. So three in market, which means 2020, we have first full year, three products in market, people coming back in.
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Chapter 4: How does Trust & Will differentiate itself from traditional estate planning?
But we want to be really smart in terms of how do we communicate trust with a paid product? Because we felt that a free product within estate planning can actually communicate distrust. Well, what's the catch? If I'm making these sensitive decisions, right? What's the catch of a free estate planning document? So that's why we like the paid product. It's priced competitively.
But we also want to make sure that we have an opportunity to adjust and evolve our business model.
And so Cody, to date, now that we understand how the pricing actually works, how many customers have paid you at least a dollar to do something?
We have at least a dollar. I'd have to run the exact number. I mean, it's North, it's between comfortably sharing North of 5,000 and it just depends which product here they chose. If it came through a channel partnership or it came direct.
Okay. So can we, is it fair to just to put a range between five and 10,000 customers that have paid something?
Yeah, I'm trying to be mindful of what I'm sharing because we are venture backed and I know we have competitors out there. So I'm trying to play that game in my head of like, what do I feel is most appropriate to share? It doesn't give away kind of the core foundational business metrics.
Yeah, I think even even if people know total metrics, right, public companies are like this, right? Some private companies share all this as well. It all comes down to execution. Right. And so you're executing. It sounds like. Really, part of the secret sauce here is you've built great channel partnerships to get 65,000 free signups. Walk me through some of those.
I mean, can you name a channel partner and why do they promote you versus someone else?
Yeah, absolutely. So one of our longest partnerships is with Haven Life Insurance. Haven Life Insurance is a subsidiary of MassMutual. They're targeting young families with term life policies up to a couple million dollars. Life insurance and estate planning go hand in hand. They're so complementary. Most people start to think about life insurance because they got married or started a family.
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Chapter 5: What challenges does Trust & Will face in customer acquisition?
Are you measuring churn right now? And if so, how are you using it as a leading indicator or lagging indicator?
That's an awesome question. It's so interesting. Estate plans, it's such an essential life document. Our hope is that people don't ever turn out, that people will just pay that recurring fee. We give them peace of mind and trust that we're always there to notify them of any law changes, to keep them on track if any life events happen in their life. We want to make sure those are reflected.
They always have an updated estate plan. The goal would be to keep people throughout their entire lifetime, even through death, which is part of our longer term vision to get into the distribution side of trust in the States. That's where a lot of money is made in this industry. But again, it's not accessible to a lot of families. People don't have the education on the importance of a trust.
So we want to be with them throughout their lifetime, but we'll have better numbers.
You still have to convince them though, because you don't have anyone on actual occurring plans yet. That's a project for this year, correct?
Yes.
The recurring plan. So at the checkout screen, you are opting into the recurring payment, the annual payment. What we're doing is taking a very hands-on high touch approach to our member support. We call members instead of like a user or customer just because it humanizes the experience.
Or someone that's going to die soon and make you a lot of money.
Yeah, exactly. We want to have that hands-on, high-touch approach to, as that activation of the subscription kicks in, we're helping educate our members on why they want to pay the subscription, which is peace of mind, ability to update the documents.
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Chapter 6: How has Trust & Will's revenue grown over the years?
Recently, I love Secrets of Sand Hill Road by Scott Cooper of Andreessen Orowitz. Like I'm good at fundraising. It helped unlock my fundraising superpowers. So I'm really bullish on that book right now.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Yeah. Oh, man. Justin Kahn at Atrium is someone who I've really started to admire. I think that he's taken a really thoughtful approach to how he wants to better himself as a person, a human, a husband, a father, but also as a CEO to his company. And I really like engaging with this content.
Cody, number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your company?
Favorite online tool? Slack. I love Slack.
Live and breathe Slack. This number is going to go down on this next question when the baby comes. But currently, how many hours of sleep are you getting each night?
Uh, about seven. I've really prioritized sleep over the last couple of years and seven is comfortable.
And it sounded like married. Do you have any kids currently or this first one's the first one?
Yeah, this first one. So that's seven hours. We'll probably go to three.
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