Roofr CRM: The What & Why

Pete (00:02.678)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Rufr report. I am your host, Pete McKendrick, uh, excited for this one. Uh, obviously we have a lot going on here at Rufr over the last year or so. And, uh, you know, a lot of new folks coming over to the Rufr platform. So we thought it would be, uh, a good, a good time and a good opportunity to have our CEO, uh, or Richie Nelson join us today and just talk a little bit about Rufr, the history of it and where we're going.

And, uh, you know, just intro himself for anybody that doesn't really know Richie or hasn't had the opportunity to possibly meet him along the way at an event. Uh, so Richie, happy to have you excited to have you on the show.

Richy Nelson (00:42.259)
Yeah, excited to join. Surprises take me so long to get on the show. It's been, when was our first episode?

Pete (00:47.338)
I know, it's been years. I think that this is year two of us filming. So I want to say October of 22, I think, was our first episode, somewhere around there. I'm guessing.

Richy Nelson (01:01.149)
Yeah, no, I'm super excited. Excited for some questions from Pete. Happy to give a quick intro on myself and the business to start if that makes sense.

Pete (01:12.49)
Yeah, absolutely. I think for anyone that doesn't know Richie or doesn't really know the history of Rufr, I think it's a good time to just kind of dive into that a little bit. And so that people have a better understanding of, uh, how we kind of got to where we are today.

Richy Nelson (01:25.557)
Yeah, so I don't know if anyone knows this, but I'm actually a roofing contractor by trade. So first time on a roof, I was 12 years old with my uncle. He woke me up and literally was, Richie, wake up, you're working for the family business. By the afternoon, I was on a roof. Actually wasn't allowed on the roof. I was only allowed on the ground. My mom and my aunt were like, hey, you and your cousin, you're allowed to be on the job site, but you're not allowed to climb on the ladder. I mean, we were like 12 years old. So.

Every summer from when I was 12 till 24, I was on a roof banging on shingles as they call it. That was back a couple decades ago. And then I left the family business, took a job with a big roofing company and it was then when I realized really how broken and archaic some of the workflows were. I got a call into the office and we had a new lead. I'd have to drive out in person, sit in traffic for an hour.

spend a bunch of money on gas just to go and measure the roof. I go back to my boss and like, man, we can measure through satellite imagery. Why can't I just do this remotely? I'd come back to the office to create the proposal off of the measurements and I'm horrible at math and my math was wrong. Then my boss would yell at me like, hey, the profit was horrible on this job. I thought, why don't we just do this all digitally? They were somewhat stuck in their ways.

I saw that there really wasn't any platforms that did everything. There was a lot of point solutions. So I had this vision of building out this end-to-end roofing platform that kind of did everything and owned the entire supply chain. So I quit my job, sold my house, and dumped everything I had into Roofer. I thought I had about one year of runway to build the business after selling my house in Toronto and quickly realized I had about six months.

Then I ran out of money and maxed out my line of credit of about $20,000. So back up against the wall, I eventually ran out of money and I still remember to this day, I walked into my parents backyard and said, well, I'm officially broke. They looked at me, they're like, are you asking us for money? Like, no, I think I'm gonna go the venture capital route. They're like, what is that? And I tried to raise some investor money for Rufr.

Richy Nelson (03:49.293)
So that kind of led us down the path of, you know, raising venture capital. And we got into a program called Y Combinator, which is basically it's a venture capital fund. They invest in your business and they put you through a basically a bootcamp. And so we went through Y Combinator in 2017. And after the bootcamp, they connect you, you present on something called demo day and there's about, sorry, 900 or so investors that you're presenting in front of.

to potentially get them to invest in your business. So that's kind of the long-winded way of how Rufr started.

Pete (04:27.022)
I think it's an interesting start to Rufr because I think so many businesses that we see in this industry bootstrap it and because of that are limited in their capabilities and limited in their ability to grow. I worked for one in the past, there's a number of them out there right now that I know are battling every day to stay alive in the industry and have a decent amount of customers, but haven't gone that route or haven't had the ability to go that route.

It's really interesting that you chose to go that route upfront and the difference that it's made in the business long term. You know what? I mean, was it just the lack of funding or was there other things that led to, you know, saying like, hey, we should take on some investment because, you know, for the long term vision of the business, it makes more sense.

Richy Nelson (05:15.797)
Well, I had a chip on my shoulder at first. Like I'm not raising venture capital. I'm gonna bootstrap this business myself. And look, I think it's definitely possible to do that. It makes it a lot harder, especially when trying to grow a SaaS technology company. So I was kind of forced into raising venture capital. That wasn't the plan in the beginning. And I'm thankful, I wouldn't change anything. I'm thankful it happened because I really, we wouldn't be here today.

if that didn't happen. I mean, we've raised close to around $34 million in venture capital at this point. And it's allowed us to grow and build the platform that we have today. So I wouldn't change anything.

Pete (06:04.938)
Yeah, I mean, definitely the noticeable difference is the rate of growth for us. You know, the, the speed at which we've been able to grow and, uh, you know, add folks to the team and has been impressive to say the least. And I'm, I know that the industry as a whole has taken notice of how quickly we've risen, you know, because of that. And I think a lot of it goes back to the fact of us having that capital that a lot of these other companies don't have kind of maybe for the same reason, right? It's a pride thing. Hey, I'm going to just.

do this on my own and I think it hinders them a bit. So talking about the history of it, what did you see early on I guess, when you were working in the industry, what did you see as some of the most broken pieces? I agree with you even when I started on the SaaS side of the business, talking with roofers, they were very stuck in their ways, right? And I don't think that they had seen success, maybe not the success that some of our roofers are seeing now, but.

They saw success, they were making money. Like they didn't see a reason to use tech at the time. And, uh, you know, I think, you know, you looking at that and saying like, Hey, there's an opportunity here. It was a very, it was kind of a visionary approach, right? Because at the time, No one really wanted to adopt tech. Like it was a very, they were, they were very stubborn. You know, they didn't see a need for it. They saw more, more as a, you know, a bell and whistle or something, an enterprise customer would use.

Uh, you know, so building a product for a smaller customer or smaller contractor, uh, was kind of a, in my mind, a very visionary approach at that point in time, um, you know, what, what kind of guided you to say like, Hey, let's go for this. Like, I really think people will, will go for it. Like I think people will use it.

Richy Nelson (07:49.473)
So I mean, I was experiencing the problems every single day. As I mentioned, driving out in person, sitting in traffic just to go get measurements. Like I would spend 30% of my day literally just driving to these places to be able to give a quote. And I'm thinking, if I just did this remotely, I could bang out 10 of these a day. And I get, if I keep the same conversion rate, yeah, I'm gonna sell, I'll call it three roofs a day versus selling one. You know, the pen and paper proposals

didn't look professional and I found that if I was up against someone else who maybe had a better looking digital proposal and mine looked like chicken scratch in the back of a napkin, I was at a disadvantage. Keeping track of my jobs, like file cabinets, sticky notes, a whiteboard in the office, it was so hard for me to do my job efficiently when everything was scattered workflows offline.

So I really did, I lived it. So I think those are the top three things that I saw in my experience.

Pete (09:01.986)
So, I think the question that we get quite often was obviously measurements came first, right? You know, Rufr built measurements and kind of staked our claim as a measurement platform there for a while. You know, was that the goal or was the goal always, what was the end goal? Like what was the opportunity? Was the opportunity from the beginning was the goal to build this end-to-end software that the industry hadn't seen?

Cause I think a lot of people look at Rufr and say, oh, they're a measurement software that's all an opportunity to grow a little bit and now they're, now they're evolving into this CRM. Uh, as opposed to the fact that, you know, maybe that was the, uh, you know, that was the goal from the very beginning, kind of like the North star for us.

Richy Nelson (09:48.293)
It definitely, the end-to-end operating system, you know, an all-in-one platform for roofers was definitely always the goal. But me starting, not a ton of resources, also zero background in building a technology company. Like I'm a roofing contractor. My goal was always basically build a software that you get from lead to final payment review and everything in between. And so I thought, well, why don't I start at the bottom, take the bottom up approach.

Pete (10:03.671)
Yeah.

Richy Nelson (10:17.469)
and start with leads. So, Rufr actually started as a marketplace. Think like an Uber for roofing, connecting homeowners to roofing contractors. And we did that through satellite aerial imagery and giving homeowners ballpark roofing estimates in seconds based off of Rufr's pricing per square in that market, and we would connect them with Rufr's. And so, we started with that. It was going well, but as we started to scale, we realized we didn't have enough supply. So,

you think like supply econ 101 supply and demand. We didn't have enough roofers on the supply side to meet the demand of the homeowner. And so we thought, well, what can we offer to roofing contractors to add a ton of value to their business, you know, for as low cost as possible. And immediately it's like, well, why don't we offer measurement tool, a DIY measurement tool. And so we essentially gave this DIY tool away for near free.

and roofers were coming to us saying, kind of confused, to the point where we're like, hold on a second, why are you giving this away for so cheap? Like this tool is saving me, like I spend thousands of dollars on your competitors with this tool. Like what's the catch? And really it was, let's give away this tool, give the ton of value to the roofers and then see if they're interested in joining in the marketplace to get leads. What happened was we instantly found product market fit with that measurement tool.

and it just, it skyrocketed. And the, I think COVID kind of happened and we thought to ourselves like, look, where do we want to invest all of our time and resources to? And it really was starting to build out that, you know, end to end platform for the roofing contractors. And so what we decided to do is actually sunset the marketplace, at least for now, and double down all of our eggs into the building the platform for roofers to help them manage their entire business.

That's how it kind of started. And we started, I guess one would could say that, oh, you should have started with the CRM. But measurements was the easy product to build. I shouldn't say easy, but it seemed like the right thing to do to get roofers onto the marketplace. And it became very clear very quickly that we needed to build out the foundational piece of the software, which is the CRM and then continue to build out the tools that are attached to that. So...

Richy Nelson (12:45.037)
the measurements, proposals, material ordering, payments and financing, invoicing, QuickBooks integration, scheduling, so on and so on. So now that we've built out the CRM and you've seen how fast we've built this, the additional tools this year, we've now launched the CRM invoicing, payments. We've got a financing integration, material ordering, and a ton of features within those.

Pete (13:12.222)
Yeah, you know, I think that the interesting thing about it is the approach, right? So many of the other CRMs started as a CRM and then have built these tools inside of the CRM and kind of evolved over time and the tools have gotten stronger. You know, and I think the fact that we've kind of backed into this CRM a bit, right? We built these very strong standalone tools that could easily survive in the industry on their own.

Richy Nelson (13:12.884)
Oh, are you frozen?

Richy Nelson (13:22.121)
Oh, Pete, I don't know if it's my internet or yours. I can't hear you.

Pete (13:40.238)
Uh, you know, and now that we're pulling it together is, is a very interesting approach and as I think has ultimately allowed the CRM offering to be very strong out of the gate because it has these features built into it now that, you know, are, are considerably stronger. Uh, proposals comes to mind for me, you know, like every CRM on the market has a proposal tool, but it's essentially an MVP or a, or a very like baseline version of a proposal tool where we had this very strong, essentially standalone.

Pete (14:12.792)
And now is just a feature inside of a larger product set. And, uh, you know, I think that that's made this CRM very attractive from day one.

Richy Nelson (14:22.613)
Yeah, you broke up a little there, so maybe I missed some of what you said. Did you ask me a question? Okay.

Pete (14:28.646)
No, no, I was just kind of like commenting on the fact of how it was built. Yeah.

Richy Nelson (14:34.093)
Yeah, I mean, the opportunity that I saw, and we all see now is, the market is made up of a lot of point solutions. And these point solutions integrate with each other to create an operating system for a roofer. So if I'm a roofing contractor, current solutions, I still, I gotta sign up for a proposal software, I gotta sign up for a measurement software, I gotta sign up for a CRM, I gotta hope either they have an integration.

and they're consistently updating that integration, or it's an integration through Zapier, which obviously can get, this can get very clunky, and you're still dealing with five different support teams, five different credit card bills, and the feedback that we got from the market was, I just want one system that just manages my entire business. And ultimately that is RufrSchool. We wanna be the end-to-end operating system for Rufr, where we offer every single

a feature for every single part of their workflow. Ultimately, one platform to manage their entire business.

Pete (15:40.938)
Yeah, I think the question, one of the questions that comes to mind is, you know, building this does, is there a specific roofer, let's say, not roofer with an R with no E, but a roofer in mind, right? When we're building this system, you know, are we targeting, you know, cause I think, you know, what happens over time, at least what I've seen in historically here with the CRMs is they build and then they build and then they build and then they build. And then, you know, their target audience essentially changes, you know, and I think,

You know, there's an opportunity here and it looks as the roofers building to potentially be a software that everyone can use, you know, because of its ease of use, the ease of the easily, so easily adaptable to your business is very flexible. And so is that essentially, roofer's goal because I think traditionally, the smaller guy gets a bit left behind, right? Like they get

They're obviously the easy way to get into the market. I've seen so many softwares come into this market and cater to those guys and then essentially build away from them. And I feel like Rufr is kind of taking a different approach and really more or less building or catering to those, to that audience right out of their box.

Richy Nelson (16:52.389)
Yeah, so I hop on investor calls all the time. And one of their questions in the first call is always, what's your ICP, your ideal customer profile? And usually it's, oh, we're SMBs, or we're mid-market, or we're enterprise focused. And really for Rufr, it's all of the above. That being said, the majority of the roofing market is made up of the SMBs. I think the data

Richy Nelson (17:24.438)
70% of the 100,000 or so roofing businesses have like six or seven employees or less. So we're heavily fragmented with these small to medium sized roofing businesses. And so, you know, Rufr has just naturally started, you know, servicing the SMBs, you know, the smaller to medium sized businesses. But that's not to say that we're also not focused on building out enterprise level functionality that...

One, fit the current needs of those enterprise type of roofing companies, which there aren't many, but two, also those SMBs could take advantage of and help that and grow into. So the way we design the software is really for everybody, regardless of the size of your business. And in fact, we have some of, you know, the largest roofing companies in the world using Rufr and you know, we've got a bunch of, you know,

Bob from Bob's Roofing, Bob's the Roofer, wife might be the accountant, small family size businesses, and we have a ton of those as well. So it's really not one or the other. Personally, I grew up in a small family business, so maybe I'm a little biased, and I'm often thinking about the smaller businesses, and I wanna help them grow. I don't wanna leave them behind and build just custom features and software for the, features and software for.

Pete (18:22.295)
Right.

Richy Nelson (18:50.309)
only the enterprise users and leave the rest behind. I think we can do both, but I got a soft spot for the SMBs.

Pete (18:59.378)
Yeah, I think, you know, what is the stat 95% of roofing businesses to go out of business in the first two years, I think, right. And I think a lot, something crazy like that, right. And it's, you know, and I think so much of that is, you know, lack of support a bit, right. I think that, you know, they just don't, there's a, there's not a lot of understanding there of what it takes to run a business sometimes. And, you know, just not having a support.

Richy Nelson (19:07.414)
I've heard it, yeah, it's something like, right.

Pete (19:27.318)
I think that's a really good thing to do. And I think that's a really good thing to do.

Richy Nelson (19:53.015)
Yeah.

Pete (19:54.166)
That's one of the things that I think, uh, and I'll let you speak a little bit to how you guys have set the organization up, you know, and I think that one of the things I consistently see about roofer that makes us stand out from the crowd is the customer support piece, right? Is, uh, the people of roofer, like you'll often see like, yes, roofer has a great product, but ultimately it's the people as the reason why I'm, I'm switching to roofer. So, you know, um,

You know, what have you guys done to kind of keep that as like top of mind and keep that as like the priority as roofer has grown considerably over the last year or two.

Richy Nelson (20:33.151)
Just to make sure I understand your question, keep customers top of mind.

Pete (20:37.33)
And keep the customer support, the actual like support that we have and kind of this community of the staff helping, you know, feel that roofer I think has, has really kind of leaned heavy on and has really staked its claim on in the industry.

Richy Nelson (20:44.857)
Got it.

Richy Nelson (20:51.201)
Right, got it. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of companies see customer support as a cost center. That is the absolute opposite about how I feel about customer service and customer support. Our customer support team is at the forefront of our customer experience. And, you know, I say to everyone, you hear this all the time, sorry, I'm preaching the choir right now, and maybe it's not like a broken record, but, you know, we want an end to end, a world-class customer experience for our users.

apps end to end, from the second that they interact with the website to using our software. If something goes wrong, we always give a world-class experience. So we've invested heavily in customer support, customer success, community. We want to make sure that we are there truly to help our users. I think in part it stems from the topic, I truly, truly care.

about our customers. And you'll see me in the Facebook groups commenting, offering support. My wife gets mad at me sometimes, it will be like nine o'clock at night and I'm like answering a support request over Facebook. She's like, you need to stop. But I just, I care so much. So we've invested heavily into it. And honestly, it's driven a lot of our growth.

I don't have to spend a ton of money on Google ads or Facebook ads to try to get new customers when our current customers are raving about our customer support and how good of an experience they've had. They're yelling off the rooftops, no pun intended, or they're at the supply shop in the morning talking to other roofers and it's just driven a lot of this organic word of mouth momentum for a roofer.

Richy Nelson (22:44.161)
the best business decisions that we've made and just really continuing to double down on customer service and customer experience. But it's also just kind of, it's one of my core principles, like, this is our customer, they're paying our bills, we should give them the best experience possible.

Pete (23:01.782)
Yeah. And I think it kind of equates in my mind, you know, I think that ultimately the product that we're building is to help the contractor give a world-class experience to their customer, right? So it kind of just trickles down, right? Like essentially if we're giving the world-class experience from both a product and a service standpoint, it's allowing them to then trickle that down to their customer base, uh, and to the ultimately the end user. Correct. Right.

Richy Nelson (23:14.955)
Yep.

Richy Nelson (23:23.369)
which grows their business. Exactly, which grows their business. And then their business grows, their Rufr account grows. So it's, yeah, exactly, yeah.

Pete (23:35.062)
Right. It's kind of a win-win for us.

So with the addition of the CRM, what does it change at Rufr? Does it change anything in the focus of Rufr or the long-term goal of Rufr? Or is it still the same vision and the same goals? The CRM obviously, we have said here that it was the idea from the very beginning. So what changes at Rufr now that we're shifting gears a bit from this measurement and proposal solution to this full-blown platform?

Richy Nelson (24:08.241)
Well, I think it's actually made us even more focused now. Even in the last three months, have you seen, I think we've been signing up an average of three to four roofers a day on the CRM and it's made us just even more focused on building out the CRM functionality. And so we've actually separated our team. We used to have a measurements engineering team and a proposals engineering team. And we've now separated our teams into roughly six different

pods called business units, where we have hyper-focus on every single one of our products. So for example, we have two CRM teams now that are focused on the CRM. And they've got a product manager, a designer, and a group of engineers that are hyper-focused on that. Same with proposals and measurements and our new FinTech team. So it's allowed us to really just hyper-focus and have no distractions from what should I prioritize first?

And that's part of why we've been able to build out all of these features and products so quickly. And we hear from roofing contractors all the time, like, man, like, how are you guys building this so fast? Like I asked you to build something and then next month it's there. Um, and I think that might've been part of the worry when, when roofer saw, oh, we're launching a CRM. It's like, well, what's going to happen with the instant estimator and the measurement software and the proposals. But, um,

back to raising venture capital, this has put us in a position where we can invest heavily in these products. And so we grew our engineering and product team to, I think, gosh, we were like 15 or so about a year and a half ago, and I think now we're close to 60. So we're grateful to be in that position, but we've just invested really heavily in all of these products and are going to continue to. So there's really, you said, how does it change things? It doesn't really change things other than making us hyper-focused on building out this end-to-end operating system for a roofer.

Pete (26:03.982)
Yeah, it's interesting. And I like the hyper-focused thing because I think one of the things that roofer has done that the other CRMs necessarily didn't do was focus specifically on roofing, right? I think that so many times the other CRMs become, you know, home improvement CRMs or they become this more general CRM and, you know, like we, I know Matt Radford.

Richy Nelson (26:16.304)
Mmm... Oh...

Richy Nelson (26:25.493)
If I had a dollar for every time I hopped on an investor call and they say, oh, so when are you going to open up pools or fences or deck software software? And it's, sorry, I cut you off.

Pete (26:32.938)
Yeah, reach back.

Pete (26:40.454)
No, no, I think it's funny that you say that because I think with every software that comes into this industry, that's the first thing they look at is like, and I think it happens to the roofing contractor, right? Like you're a roofer, hey, I'm going to install roofs. And then I go out there and they're like, Hey, can you look at my siding? I think so I need some windows. The next thing you know, you're practically a GC. And it's kind of the same idea here is like, okay, we're in roofing, but how does it equate to these other home improvement spaces? And could it work there?

And I think what roofer has really done to kind of stand out from the crowd is just stay like kind of, you know, with blinders on focused on the roofing industry.

Richy Nelson (27:18.965)
Yeah, I want to build the best roofing platform. A world-class roofing platform. I don't want to build an OK platform that services home improvement in general, 10 different verticals. That hyper-focus on the roofing vertical will allow us to build the best roofing platform. Sometimes there's other platforms that need to unlock TAM.

Pete (27:32.11)
home improvements phase

Richy Nelson (27:47.201)
like the total available market and grow the business, but the roofing industry is massive. So we can build a massive category defining platform in the roofing space. And there's just a ton of opportunities still to build a great platform and we'll get there faster and provide more value to our users, to our roofers if we stay hyper-focused on roofing. That being said, like you can use our,

a lot of roofers that will do roofing and also eaves, gutters, and these other trades. But we don't do siding. We say that upfront. Our software that starts with the measurements, we don't do siding measurements. I see some roofers in there getting clever and trying to do siding measurements with the picture uploads. But yeah, we've remained hyper-focused. That's the goal for the foreseeable future.

Pete (28:46.198)
Yeah. And I think it speaks to the way the product is being developed, right? Because it's by being hyper-focused, we're able to build very specifically and not have to build these wide ranging general tools. Uh, you know, we can, we can build very specific roofing tools. And I think that that's been beneficial for the roofer. Um, you know, I want to speak a little bit to the fact of like how roofer utilizes feedback, you know, cause we were talking about how, like, I just saw a comment the other day by a roofer that said,

Richy Nelson (29:05.827)
Mm-hmm.

Pete (29:15.606)
It seems like every other week, roofer is putting out a new feature, right? And so roofer is definitely producing features at a very high rate of speed. Um, but these features are coming out and they're very usable features, right? They're not just something we randomly picked out of a hat. And, uh, just speak a little bit to how much feedback or how much we utilize feedback, uh, here at roofer to drive the product.

Richy Nelson (29:42.105)
I mean, it's at the core of our product development roadmap. Our roadmap is literally driven by customer feedback. Yes, I'm a roofing contractor. I think we have a total of there's like five or six of us or so at Roofer. And we'll give our insights. But ultimately, it's what do our users want? What are our users saying? How often is a feature coming up? What is the impact of this feature? And so we use Slack for an internal communication tool for everyone listening.

we literally have a suggestions channel. And the entire company will go in there and anytime they get a feature request, we add this in and we give commentary on it. So you say, you know, Bob's Roofing requested that they be able to send a payment and split the cost of the credit card fees, for example. And then we start, we log this in something called product board, which organizes all of our feature requests. So it is literally at the forefront of what we do.

I'm not building the platform features because of what Richie wants. It's definitely not the case. It is literally, what do our users want? What are they saying? It's been great. It's hard to debate a feature coming out if 100 roofers requested it in the last month and said, this is crucial to my business. At that point, it doesn't really matter what I think. Or it's...

I'm not saying that it doesn't matter, but it's obvious to us what we need to build and what's going to bring most impact to our customers.

Pete (31:21.67)
Yeah, I personally, I don't know that I've ever been around an organization that relies or, or communicate so heavily with the users to figure out where we go next, right? And I think that that's been a huge piece of our success and also, you know, in the fact of like, Hey, when we release a feature, that feature is usually pretty solid. It's usable out of the gate. It's not broken. It doesn't need to be really tested much by the roofers. I think, you know, it hits the ground running. And a lot of that speaks to the fact that.

Richy Nelson (31:30.403)
Mm-hmm.

Pete (31:51.05)
You know, we spend a lot of time on the front end, you know, talking to roofers and researching and figuring out exactly how to build this and what it should look like and how it should function. So, uh, yeah, I think that's, you know, it's, it's been huge. I think it's driven, really driven the success of the product. And I think, you know, one of the biggest knocks that I used to always hear on the CRMs is like, Oh, I've been on the CRM for five years and I've been making the same suggestion for the last three.

Richy Nelson (32:00.749)
Mm-hmm.

Pete (32:17.982)
And it's still not on there, right? So it gets frustrating as a user, you know, because there are specific things that you want to see in your software. And, you know, if you're constantly asking for the same thing and not seeing results, you know, obviously you probably are going to start to look someplace else. So, you know, I think that that's a huge, a huge piece of our success and a, and a huge attribute for contractors to look at when they are looking at software is how receptive is your software company to.

Richy Nelson (32:34.285)
Mm-hmm.

Pete (32:46.166)
suggestions that you're making and you know, the things that you want to see, uh, in the future from that. So, and I guess that speaks to like the long-term goal, what, you know, obviously the foundational CRM now is in place. We've got this good proposal tool. We've got the instant estimator and the measurements flowing, you know, like you said, we're divided up into these teams so that the product isn't lacking in any place, you know, so many times you get these like mediocre versions of features because

Richy Nelson (32:49.845)
Right? Yeah.

Pete (33:13.418)
You don't have the resources to continue to improve those features, but long-term, what stuff there is Rufr looking to do to really tie this whole platform together.

Richy Nelson (33:24.961)
I think if I had to sum it up in one line, one roofing platform to replace them all. It's, except Company Cam. We're not building Company Cam. Love Company Cam. They've like absolutely nailed it. We have an integration with them. We love them so much. What up, Mike Knot? So I think the end-to-end platform for a roofer, the pitch is, hey, you can manage your entire business through here. It's, you know.

Pete (33:35.165)
Yeah.

Pete (33:39.793)
Easy, right?

Pete (33:43.734)
Hahaha

Richy Nelson (33:52.397)
from lead generation, marketing hub, measurements, estimating proposals, your CRM, obviously, payments, invoicing, scheduling, you name it, we've got a solution for you to manage your entire business and your workflows don't need to be across multiple different platforms, some of it offline, some of it online. Ultimately, we're the system of record and the operating system for your business.

And we want to take it a step further. And we're already starting to do this now. And I've been working very closely with, you know, myself and yourself with the CRM team of, we want Rufr to be able to uncover things that maybe you're not seeing. Like uncover blockers, be the information hub and insights that power decision-making. Hey, just a heads up, this customer is, you know, has owed this bill for, you know,

60 plus days or your AR aging is getting a little out of control. Hey, you should follow up with this customer. And so one of the new features we're actually building, as you know, is the CRM home and it's really, it's all the things that are happening in, in your business. And we power that with some smart notifications to give you insights that are going to power, you know, the decisions you need to make in that day, that week and so on.

Pete (35:18.686)
Yeah, I mean, that's something that we talked about early on is essentially building the first smart CRM, right? The first CRM that's going to help guide your decisions, give you the insights that maybe you're not seeing, or maybe if I'm a new roofer, like we talked, you know, there's a lot of SMBs using our product, you know, maybe they don't even know specifically some of the things that they should be looking at. You know, some of the traps are.

that they could fall into. And, you know, so us having the knowledge that we have and the roofers that we have helping us build this product, you know, through their feedback and suggestions, I think gives us the ability to, to build in those insights. It's funny that you mentioned it, you know, I've met with the designer this morning on staff that, and we talked about CRM home and we were literally talking about some notifications around, you know, jobs that were, let's say, you know, stalled out, you know, aging out or

or becoming a concern, right? And being able to notify you ahead of time and say, hey, take a look at this job, it hasn't moved or it hasn't been touched. So just little things like that, I think will go a long way to help, especially with a newer, smaller business, or someone looking to grow, definitely giving them some insight. So what's on the horizon for this year for Rufr? I think you guys have, obviously Rufr has built a ton of stuff here in the last.

Richy Nelson (36:25.529)
Exactly.

Pete (36:43.274)
what would you say, eight months, I guess, we've been building a CRM, right? Not even a year yet, right? Ten months, I guess.

Richy Nelson (36:46.233)
Yeah, well, I mean, I think the process, yeah, the process started probably over a year ago. We started doing the product research and customer research. But then we actually started building, yeah, I think about a year ago now. Yeah. And time flies. Literally seems like just yesterday we were, we saw the first designs of the CRM and yeah, crazy.

Pete (36:51.607)
Yeah.

Pete (36:59.146)
Yeah. And so, uh, you know, obviously we're, I know it doesn't seem like that long ago. Yeah. And, uh, so, so here we're entering, I guess, year two now of building the CRM, our first real, I guess, second full year of building it. And so what's on the horizon for this year? Like, what are we adding to the CRM functionality that contractors should look forward to?

Richy Nelson (37:24.081)
We're adding a lot. And so if we think, if we're speaking specifically to the CRM, I mean, here's the thing that some, the word CRM, like some roofers might just see their entire platform as the CRM, where we divide up our teams a little more specifically, but all of the proposal features, for example, that are coming out this year, one would say, look, oh, that's part of the CRM. So some of the exciting things on the proposal side.

We're building our own basically document management system, almost like a docuSign, hello sign, where you can create any type of document, request signatures, whether that's a contingency agreement or a notice of completion, whatever that document is, the proposal team is building that, very excited about it. The features that have been requested the most and that are on the roadmap right now for the CRM team is scheduling.

That's been a massive one. Job costing is another and a QuickBooks integration. So all three of those things are coming out in 2024, but by no means is that an exhaustive list. I think we could probably spend another hour or two talking about all the features that are coming out. And we've got about almost 60 people working on this.

Pete (38:40.842)
Yeah. And I think it's what you've kind of glossed over there, but it's really important to note is that the CRM, like as we talk about the CRM, you know, it is just one piece of this offering, right? Like it's just part of a much larger platform. The CRM functionality obviously is at the heart of it now, isn't going to be the foundational piece of Rufr, but it's just part of our platform. And, and going back to what you said about the point solutions, you know, so many of these other CRMs are just that they're a CRM.

Right. And they're not offering all of these other tools that we have in it. Right. Or an instant estimator, right? Or, or these types of things that are outside the realm. Correct. Yeah. And I think that, you know, I think that's a really important thing to note is that, you know, we talk about, Hey, roofer's becoming a CRM, right? And I think, you know, from, you see it on Facebook and you hear contractors say like, Oh, roofer's building a CRM. Yes, we are, but it's just one of the features and a larger set of features that are coming this.

Richy Nelson (39:13.973)
Yeah, they don't have a measurement software. They're, right, they're integrating with others. Exactly, yeah.

Pete (39:39.234)
Like you said, an operating system, uh, you know, for the, the roofer. Yeah. And I think that's a big difference from what traditionally, you know, the industry has seen. So I think it's going to be a, a big change for, for roofers to kind of understand that, Hey, there's a lot more to this than just a CRM, uh, you know, moving forward. So what do you think is the biggest benefit to the actual roofer? Like if I'm a roofing contractor and I'm looking at roofer in comparison to some of the other things.

Richy Nelson (39:40.505)
Exactly. We're becoming an operating system.

Richy Nelson (39:57.121)
Yeah, exactly.

Pete (40:08.822)
You know, for me to jump on Rufr and potentially start to use Rufr with the idea that I'm going to stay long-term, like what is your hope for the Rufr out there if he gets on Rufr and uses the product.

Richy Nelson (40:23.261)
Well, I think there's a lot of answers to this. One of my favorite quotes that we got from a contractor was, man, your software is great, but I think the best part is it's actually saved me so much time, it's allowed me to spend more time with my family. I kind of sat back, I was like, damn, that's everything. In my opinion, at least. So I could give the stereotypical responses.

you know, save time and money and so on. But like, what is the result of that? And hearing like, I can more time with my family. You know, I can actually, I could shut off at five o'clock because, you know, it didn't take me 10 hours to drive around and do three quotes. Like I was able to bang out five or six today because it's all digital and answer all my customer questions. So ultimately, you know, we want to save them time. Not only do we want to save them money, we want to help them make more money.

I think sometimes in software, it's a convenience thing, right? It's like, oh, this is worth it because it's going to potentially save me time or it's convenient, but from what we've heard from our roofers, as you know, is this software is making me more money. It's allowing me to grow. And I think that's continually my favorite thing to hear from our users and what we want to continue to do. Let us build software that is going to help you.

not only streamline your business, but grow your business.

Pete (41:53.066)
Yeah. And I think that's huge, you know, because I think, like we said, we're catering to this SMBs and that's such a huge piece of the market. And so many of these guys fall off from lack of support. And now here's a product that is literally going to help them not only be more organized, but essentially grow that business and potentially five years from now being a much better place than they would have without it. Uh, you know, and like, it goes back to the very beginning where you said, would you rather close one job a day or three jobs a day?

Richy Nelson (42:14.937)
Mm-hmm.

Richy Nelson (42:20.343)
Hmm.

Pete (42:20.682)
Right. And, and really do it in the same amount or even potentially less time that it would have taken you to close the one job. Right. And I think that that's, you know, where you see, you know, these guys are saving so much time. Like, you know, I remember talking, I've talked to contractors that said, I'm not saving hours here. I'm saving days. You know, I, we know we have a contractor that we're both friends with Corey who said, you know, technology has allowed him now to take Fridays off.

Richy Nelson (42:38.631)
Right.

Richy Nelson (42:47.577)
Yeah, that's the best, right?

Pete (42:47.594)
Like he doesn't work on, he pretty much doesn't work on Friday, right? Because of that. So yeah, I mean, how can you beat that? How can you argue with that? So, you know, and.

Richy Nelson (42:55.153)
Yeah, I mean, look, I love my work, but like our lives should not be all about work. And I got two kids. Like I wish that I had something like the roofer software back when I was selling. I never ran my own roofing business. Just to be clear, I was selling for a large roofing company and installing for a family roofing business, but it's funny, my uncle who I started with is now.

Pete (43:00.29)
There has to be a balance there.

Richy Nelson (43:23.421)
one of our users. Owns a small company, well, I shouldn't say small necessarily. They built a very successful company, but yeah, he was, he was one of our first users on the marketplace. I still remember when I pitched him, sat him at the kitchen table. He's like, this seems interesting. I think you can make this work. And now it's just, it's awesome to see them, us helping their business with the Rufr software.

Pete (43:43.47)
Give it a shout. Ha ha.

Pete (43:49.295)
Yeah. I love seeing their proposal. Their proposal that they're using inside the system is really cool. Yeah. You know that that's probably a far removed from what they used to do. Right. So.

Richy Nelson (43:51.801)
Yeah, they definitely, they look, yeah, they look amazing for sure.

Richy Nelson (44:01.521)
Oh yeah, I remember I used to see the proposals. They were, well, at least theirs were digital. Not, you know, like mine, they were chicken scratch in the back of a napkin sometimes. But yeah, it's definitely a big, big improvement. We often hear from roofers that their customers signed on with them over another roofer, just surely of how professional and beautiful the proposal was. So it just showed.

Pete (44:13.794)
Yeah.

Richy Nelson (44:29.885)
it made them feel like they took a lot more time. When you're choosing a roof, and it's not like you're choosing, what's a good example, someone to repaint your driveway. We do that up in Canada. I don't know if they do that in the US, but there's just, or repaint your fence, right? A roof is protecting most people's biggest investment, their home. And so they wanna feel that trust. And what I love about our software is that it's

Pete (44:48.951)
Yeah.

Richy Nelson (44:59.817)
it's empowering that trust. It's giving the customer a way better customer experience. And that's, you know, as a result, allowing the roofer to grow their business and, you know, just make more money, save time and so on.

Pete (45:12.898)
Yeah. I love the added professionalism that you get from using the product. Right. And cause that speaks to your credibility. And like you said, from a customer standpoint, you know, that professionalism could be, cause ultimately at the end of the day, I mean, you could install a roof, I can install a roof, we could do it exactly the same. You're going to buy the person, right? You're going to buy the trust and you're going to buy the credibility. And so, you know, if you can have that advantage by using that tech, why not? Right? Like, why not take advantage of it?

Richy Nelson (45:33.838)
Mm-hmm.

Richy Nelson (45:40.524)
Yeah

Pete (45:42.206)
and give yourself a leg up on the competition, especially in some of these tougher markets. So if you had to tell a contractor one thing about tech, I think obviously we see a lot of contractors, we talk to a lot of contractors that are very tech savvy, we talk to a lot of contractors that are just starting with tech. And what would be like some words of advice that you would give to contractors, maybe that are just kind of coming in or just growing into a position where they need to start using some more tech in their business?

Richy Nelson (46:12.045)
So as the CEO of a technology company, maybe I might come across as a little biased, but also as someone who has roofed since he was 12 and experienced the expectations from homeowners over the years have completely changed. They want a seamless digital experience, especially post COVID. COVID kind of forced digitization in our industry. We started to see some adoption of technology.

but now post COVID, during COVID, people didn't want you at their kitchen table. It's like, dude, send me a proposal via email and so I can like e-sign it and you build my roof outside. We're in a pandemic, but the consumers are really expecting this. So I think my one piece of advice would be to adopt technology. You don't have to adopt the entire system at once, but I think...

For me, it was the sales process. Sales are king. They're gonna drive the revenue, it's gonna pay the bills, a CRM to help you keep track of those customers. You don't need to digitize absolutely everything. If the whiteboard or an Excel sheet is working for your scheduling, that's totally fine. But my main piece of advice is start to adopt technology because that's what the consumers are expecting. If you can give them a world-class experience and digitally,

and at the same time, save yourself some time and money and just overall headache. It's by far my biggest piece of advice.

Pete (47:49.502)
Yeah, we used to joke that there will come a day when you won't be able to be a dog walker without some type of tech in your business, right? And it's really the truth. I mean, because it is the expectation now, right? Like we don't expect to work with any type of service provider anymore. That's not at least using some type of tech in their business to, whether that's the present proposal or, you know, how they're communicating with me or whatever the case may be, uh, you know, we have this expectation now that

Richy Nelson (47:56.109)
Hahaha!

Richy Nelson (48:09.293)
Yeah.

Pete (48:18.422)
tech is going to be involved in the process.

Richy Nelson (48:21.033)
That's the key, involved in the process. I'm not saying that you can't go and sell in person. I mean, kitchen table selling works and there are a lot of, you'll have still a lot of customers that say, I want you to sit down with me, let's talk through this. And you can build a digital proposal and still walk them through it in person. You can show how we get the measurements and really wow the customer. I think it's Eric.

Richardson, how he brings up the drone photo and measures the roof in front of the customer. He's a genius. So it's not to say that you can't still be in person and everything has to be remote. That's not what I'm saying at all. It's adopt the technology to improve your workflows, improve the customer experience, but it's not binary. It's not one or the other necessarily.

Pete (48:46.542)
Yeah, it is.

Pete (49:12.254)
Yeah. And I think that's an important piece is that, you know, you got to look at technology as a way to enhance the process, not replay the process. Right. So, um, well, great. I mean, uh, this has been fantastic. I think a lot of great information and we've talked a lot about the CRM and what roofer has going on. You know, what final thoughts do you have, if any, uh, you know, to just for contractors out there that may be looking at roofer or, you know, uh, considering, you know, uh,

Richy Nelson (49:18.003)
Mm-hmm, exactly.

Pete (49:39.942)
seeing what Rufus got going on, you know, obviously we have a lot going on and things are constantly changing. And so I'm sure that, you know, there's a lot of interest in Rufus right now. We see it. I see it changing on Facebook almost daily of, you know, we went from being the person in the comments to now being the part of the post, right? So there's obviously a lot of interest generated and what kind of final thoughts do you have for contractors out there that are potentially looking at us?

Richy Nelson (49:52.313)
Mm-hmm.

Richy Nelson (49:57.001)
the post yeah

Richy Nelson (50:06.709)
Yeah, I mean, look, take a look. We will give you a free demo. Some contractors might not realize that the CRM is included in all of our plans right now. So if you're already using Rufr, these features are already included in your plan at no extra cost, almost all of them. Now, if you're a free user, you have less features compared to a premium user. But you can also use it.

you're essentially already paying for it. And we have an entire implementation team that will literally set you up for free. They'll help you set up your catalog, show you the software, allow you to utilize it hopefully right after that call. So I would suggest take a look and spend 30 minutes with us and hopefully it will make a difference in your business in 2024. We're also very transparent with what we don't have yet.

We don't have a QuickBooks integration. We don't have job costing or scheduling, but these are all things that we're working on. There's still a ton of value that we feel that we can give roofers with what is out today.

Pete (51:16.234)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think anyone that has seen the comments on Facebook knows, you know, at this, the speed at which we're building features, you know, I mean, I always talked back to roof con, you know, we talked about features in September that we debuted at, you know, in the beginning of the first week of November in roof con, I mean, literally less than a two month span, we, you know, busted out some major features at that show. And, uh,

Richy Nelson (51:37.144)
Yeah.

Pete (51:44.642)
You know, I think we're going to have some more to talk about. Yeah. I re coming up. So, you know, definitely come by CS and, uh, like Richie said, you know, uh, let us, let us give you a demo and see what you think and, you know, go through what we've got and what we've got going on. Cause I think, uh, you know, there's a lot going on this year and, uh, it's going to be a very, very different product in a few months. So even from what it is today. So, um, well, Richie, I really think I really appreciate it. Or thanks for coming on. I think this has been.

Richy Nelson (52:05.941)
Yeah. Definitely.

Pete (52:14.206)
a great conversation and kind of just, you know, enlighten everybody to, you know, the background of Rufr and how we got to where we are and what ultimately the vision is for Rufr I think is big for contractors to have a good understanding of that. So really appreciate you jumping on and kind of running through that with everybody.

Richy Nelson (52:31.561)
Yeah, of course, man, this is fun. Maybe you'll let me be your co-host one time. And kick off Nick. All right, nice chat.

Pete (52:35.934)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think we've only get, Hey, I mean, we may have to do this again in a couple of months because it'll be much more to the product than there is today. So that sounds good. All right. Well, thank you for jumping on and thank you everybody for joining us on the Rift report. We will see you next time.

Richy Nelson (52:50.19)
Let's do it, definitely. All right, man.

Richy Nelson (52:58.425)
Take care, bye.

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