Creating Disruptive Technology with Jason Kintzler and Self-Managing Investments with Randy Tate

Jason Kintzler, founder and CEO of Pitch Engine, has always tried to look for marketing software that’s easy to use. That led him to develop the most transformative innovations in the PR industry. Jason says you can create disruptive technology from the most unlikely places. You just have to be more open and attentive to the world around you. Randy Tate, CEO and co-founder of Flipping Wall Street, believes that people can self-manage their investments. He developed innovative software that any average individual investor can use as a tool to protect, preserve, and grow their wealth using software.

We have Jason Kintzler and Randy Tate. Jason is the Founder and CEO of Pitchengine and Randy is the CEO and Co-Founder of Flipping Wall Street. We’re going to talk to two top CEOs and find out more about their organizations and what they do.

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Creating Disruptive Technology with Jason Kintzler

I am here with Jason Kintzler, who is the Founder and CEO of Pitchengine, which is a new media and marketing software company whose products are used by more than 50,000 brands and small businesses worldwide. Best known for easy to use marketing software, Pitchengine is used by the world’s largest brands including Walmart, PepsiCo, Budweiser and more. Jason’s the author of The New American Startup, which details the story of how Western independence and self-reliance led him to create a disruptive technology from the unlikeliest of places. It’s so nice to have you here, Jason.

Thanks, Diane. I’m happy to be here.

This is going to be fun. I’m interested in the story of Pitchengine and your background. Where do you live? You’re not in Silicon Valley, right?

We’re more like a Silicon prairie. We’re in the middle of Wyoming, which, believe it or not, is in the United States. We’ve in the high plains of the Rocky Mountains.

You don’t hear a lot of disruptive technology outside of Silicon Valley and that’s why I was curious. Did you think of going there first? What led to your interest in doing this company, Pitchengine?

About a decade ago, in technology years it’s like a century, is when I founded Pitchengine. At that time, I had been a former news anchor and reporter, so I had a media background. Then I got into marketing and PR and doing that for a corporate brand. It was one of those things where I needed to solve a problem and there was no technology that existed that could do that. Literally, it was one of those napkin-sketch ideas that I poured over for the better part of a year or so and finally made it happen. It just so happened that I’m from Wyoming and I spent all my time growing up seeing people acquire their wealth elsewhere and try to move here. I thought, “What if I could skip that step? What if I could just stay here?” That kept me out of Silicon Valley and kept me trying to make it happen here.

Did you start out of your home? Did you have an office? What were the humble beginnings of all this?

They were pretty humble. I was in TV, so I was a news anchor, which, as far as your parents were concerned, you’ve found success, but as far as your bank account goes, you haven’t; you’re just starting. Media doesn’t pay very well. I was looking to do the next thing. By then I had left TV and got into working for an outdoor company. We live in the mountains. There are a lot of those types of businesses. I had done that and coming up with this idea was cool. The company I was at was getting acquired and it was going through some weird changes. I started moonlighting. Back in 2007 or 2008, blogs were in their height relevance. I had started a blog on a platform that was called Ning. It was like create your own social network back in the day. I started blogging about PR and marketing and new media and the convergence of social media and all this stuff. Facebook was around. It was a baby though. It was couple of years old and people were using Facebook but businesses weren’t using it yet. They were starting to poke around the edges.

I started blogging about it and having these conversations and throwing out ideas. In doing so, I created this network of people and they were heavyweights. You’d look at it and it’s this person in Silicon Valley, it’s this person that heads up social media at Ford, and this place and that place, and it was international and I thought, “This is pretty cool.” As I started to formulate my idea, building it in my second bedroom, and doing it after hours at work, I would stay up and just blog. Eventually when I finally got the software where it was ready to launch, I already had a built-in audience and threw the lights on. It took the better part of a year before I was able to quit my full-time job.

You had to create software. Did you have engineers? Did you do this? How did you get to that part?

I was a sponge. I’ve always been entrepreneurial. I come from a family of entrepreneurs, albeit not in technology, I immersed myself in it. I’m not a coder, but I knew it could be done. I had done various projects with ad agencies and creative agencies and people that had the chops to build some things. I went and met with a company that I knew of and just laid it all out and say, “Here’s what I want to do” and they gave me a bid for the project and I was like, “This looks like a million dollars to me.” Refining and pouring over it and saving a little and getting a little lucky, I was able to finally make it happen and they built the first iteration, and just a few months in, I was spending that much every month to keep the thing going but that’s another story.

I saw that you won $3,000 pennies on a penny slot.

Isn’t that funny? I was at a trade show in Vegas and I was waiting for some people to arrive and I’m not a gambler, but it’s fun. It’s entertainment. I’m sitting there and I’m messing around. I had to come up with 50% down to get the agency to start to work on the project. I had saved a little bit and there was this little bit of winnings, so I called from the casino floor and said “Let’s start in the morning” and that’s how it started.

They can hear the ding in the background.

It’s about taking risks and rolling the dice, so to speak, and it really is, right?

I was watching your video where you were talking to Utah State University where you were telling this story. I love it when you talk about Myspace and you’d get a laugh, like Myspace was so annoying to everybody, but that influenced you, right? The Myspace, the Facebook?

Everything at the time, it’s funny to think back on that. Ten years isn’t so long. The older I get, it’s pretty small, but in technology time, it’s just so long ago. When we started, I would get on Myspace and I could share 30 photos with my friends instantly, but as a business, we were still sharing attachments to emails and carrying zip drives or big binders with CD-ROMs to trade shows to share our PR assets. The idea behind Pitchengine was “How can I make this more like Myspace?” How can I consolidate everything into a link so I can just share a link with somebody and they have all this information.

Therefore as an organization, when I share stuff with journalists, stuff with influencers, they all get the same treatment instead of only the top five that I can afford to send a binder to. I was trying to solve those problems. Tech is interesting. Myspace was there and I remember how messy it was, how cluttery it was, how noisy it was, which is funny because if you fast forward till now, Facebook doesn’t feel all that less like Myspace all of a sudden. It’s pretty noisy. We’ve come a long way in some respects and in other respects, maybe we’ve come full circle.

Your story is fascinating because you’ve transformed so many things. You talked about your PR that you were interested in and all the things that you’ve done to change. When I look at your website, you say you make brands #StandOut, so I’m curious how you do that? How have you transformed the PR industry with how you’ve done that? If anybody doesn’t know what Pitchengine does, what exactly do you do?

The transformative part happened in infancy. In 2009-ish to 2010-ish timeframe, PR was very linear still. A company has an announcement to make or a press release to produce, typically those were only mid or large-size corporations that were doing press releases. The idea of media was we are going to put out some news and hopefully a journalist would write about us, and the press release goes back 100 years, 120 years probably now, and the cool part of the press release to me was this plug and play aspect. The early press releases came across the actual wire and they could copy and paste. It wasn’t copied and pasted; it was typeset back then, this bit of copy into their news outlet, their newspaper probably.

That didn’t change much until the early 2000s when the internet was kicking in and companies then said, “If I put this on the Internet and send it through RSS feeds, I can spam this out to as many people as possible.” I’m sure for the first year or two, that was pretty cool, but then what happened was everybody was doing it and there was this whole mess of content. Everybody was trying to get into Google Search and rank high and so the advent of wire services came along. The PR wire services were just these big corporations where you would send your press release through them and they would disseminate it to media outlets. That’s how the process worked up until Pitchengine.

Pitchengine was all of a sudden social media was coming around and there was this promise of being able to have your own audience, being able to communicate with your consumers, your customers directly. The press release started to lose a little bit of irrelevance or at least be questioned because now the only way to reach consumers is not to go reach a media outlet that reaches consumers. Now I can skip all that and reach consumers directly, but I still need a way to communicate with them. I still need a way to package up my information and share it with them. Even back in 2009 or 2008, businesses weren’t having conversations on social networks. They were just sharing links to their website. They needed a way to formalize that. Fortunately for us in that first year, 2009, probably, just a flood of corporations, businesses, brands you know, some of the ones you mentioned, Budweiser, Walmart, the Country Music Association, all this cool content started coming to us.

I remember Budweiser created what we call a pitch instead of a press release just to hopefully help take it out of that box for people. Budweiser went on and put snippets of their Super Bowl commercials into one pitch and shared it with their fans on the Friday before the Super Bowl. It was this new way to say, “We can talk to fans and we can have conversations. We give them cool things.” It was things like that that were the catalyst. What Pitchengine also did is democratize the process, so because it was just a subscription service with $20 or $50 a month or something like that, anybody could use it, a donut shop in Missouri could use it and it would cost the same as British Airways, so it was pretty cool.

It’s interesting when you talk about all these things of how it’s changed because I’m thinking how influencer marketing and different things have changed recently. You were talking about reaching consumers directly. What do you think is going to be the next big way that people reach consumers? Is it more influencers?

A couple of interesting things have happened in the last probably two or three years. What people liked the glitz of social media for businesses and brands was it was free, like “I can do all this for free.” there’s billions of people on Facebook, but any of us that manage pages and analytics and the brass tacks of the whole thing though that that’s not the case. You have to develop a fan base and a following and there’s a lot of work involved. Not only that, you don’t reach anybody with your page unless you pay, so we’re back to this paid distribution model that we started with and it was inevitable. Everybody could see that writing on the wall. Now what’s different is back in those days you had celebrities or big brands that have the clout. Now, anybody can have the clout.

Any piece of content can blow up or go viral from anybody. I feel like every business, every brand, every person will have their moment in the spotlight. It’s just how they take advantage of it when it happens. Are they ready? Are they prepared? Do they have all the pieces in place when people go looking for them to be able to monetize it or whatever? With influencers, it’s an interesting thing. It dawned on me a few years ago. I was speaking in New York. I was staying at a hotel, got in the elevator, and this woman was in there. She started asking me questions like “Do you stay here often? How was your experience?” I realized she was a hotel critic writing for a travel magazine and she was asking me these questions and it was interesting.

I was mid 30s, I was probably right in the spot of who this hotel wants to start talking about them. I answered this lady’s questions and when the elevator got to the bottom and the door is open, I walked and I thought, “If I tweet about this hotel, I’m going to have more impact, like literally more impact for this hotel than that travel magazine article.” Because I don’t know who’s going to read that magazine. I don’t know if they’re going to be in New York. I don’t know if they’re going to see that article. All these things came into my mind. At the time I had 10,000 or 11,000 friends or followers on Twitter, but they were like me. They were marketing people, mid 30s. The influencer thing is important. It’s just how that all happens. Automation can be good, but it can also mess things up and water things down. The brands that are doing it right are going to see a lot of success with it, but we’re all learning in this process.

When you’re talking about Twitter, it made me think about how they’ve recently changed. They don’t want you to keep posting the same thing over and over again, but some people talk about Twitter as like a parade. If you miss it, then you’ve missed it. We have sites like MeetEdgar or whatever, where you can reuse tweets so that people could see them if they miss the parade.

They get on and they’d go over the parade. Now that Twitter has changed that, do you think that was a good idea? Because we’re overdoing it, we keep doing and seeing the same things over and over again. Are we missing things? What do you think of the content on Twitter of people with all the quotes? Are we all talking at the same groups over and over again? Is anybody listening?

That is a great observation. I don’t think we talk about Twitter enough. I’ve always been a closet Twitter fan boy. It’s always fascinated me. I love with the medium of it, I love the short content, I love all that. Where I see the opportunity for Twitter is it was Facebook pulling back from news and trying to be the friend-connection thing, which it is good at; Facebook is good at that piece. Twitter is for influencers. The people that should be on Twitter posting are influential in something. Maybe it’s their local soccer club, maybe it’s the marketing world, whatever it is, it feels like the place where these micro celebrities, these micro influencers can talk to people.

I think it should be free-flowing. If you want to follow somebody, you can follow them, you can even have their messages delivered to you via text message and get notifications. That’s an interesting thing because that has a place in this world. We have influencers that we need to follow and because there’s so much content and it’s so fragmented, it provides a way to follow those people or those organizations or whatever. I don’t think it’s the place where you talk about some of the things you talk about on Facebook family stuff, ways you’re feeling. That’s where Twitter has a unique opportunity.

Twitter was one year or two years old when I launched Pitchengine. I remember in the very early days of Twitter, I couldn’t figure out how to monetize it. The early stage, they didn’t have a clear path for how they’re going to monetize it, so I developed this product called Tweet Rocket. I built it like it was a product even though we never built anything. The idea was you’d go on and when you signed up for Twitter you could collect all these interests, like I want to follow CNN and this news outlet and this thing and this thing and it would bundle it up. It was like recommended things and you would bundle it up into this Twitter handle and follow that.

It was like this jumpstart into Twitter. It was so fascinating because I shared it, I blogged about it and I shared this fictitious product and Evan Williams is like, “That’s what we’re thinking about,” ironically, but that was good. That happened, but I’ve always loved that. It has a good potential to be our new media platform. I feel like that’s where news can go. We’ve tried Facebook because they were the 500-pound gorilla, but Twitter is intriguing to me, especially on a world scale.

You’ve been said to have been the most transformative innovations of the PR industry. You’ve been listed in so many books from Engaged, Twitterville, even Social Media Marketing for Dummies, and then the list goes on. We talked about Twitter and I know a lot of people that do what I do, where we spend a lot of time on LinkedIn because you go where your customers are, but what do you think of Instagram? We talked about Facebook. It’s interesting to see the people who embrace Instagram versus Facebook. You say we’re all storytellers, where do we belong in terms of who belongs on Instagram?

Instagram is my other favorite platform. I talk about this a lot whenever I have the opportunity. If I go and read a full-page advertisement in a magazine that we spend a lot of time thinking through and building or if I go watch a 30-second commercial on a brand and it’s got a very specific campaign or message, all that’s fine and we’re used to that and we’re inundated with that, but if I look at an Instagram page, like an Instagram profile, so that I’m seeing like nine or twelve photos, by that literal snapshot I learn more about that brand than with any of the texts I could read, any of the website I could visit, any of the 30-second commercial I could watch.

It’s like a living timeline, but it’s also an advertisement. It feels like the cultural piece of the whole thing. It’s like I could read with their words on Twitter and I can see and feel their brand on Instagram. That’s where it fits for me. That’s taking Instagram stories out of it, but for me, Instagram is that tool. I can look at that and learn more and get a better sense of a business and the culture and all those things than I probably can with any advertisement or About page.

Say you did what I do, how would you use Instagram? It’s an interesting thing for some companies, if you have a product, you could show your products. You don’t go to Instagram to listen to radio shows and different things.

We’ve just met, Diane, and what I want to know is “What is this like?” You talk to all these entrepreneurs, all these businesses, all these marketing people. I would want to see what that looks like. Do you get to get out and meet them? Do you go to shows? Are you shaking hands? Are you the dirty jobs guy that goes in and spends a day with some of these people? It would be interesting to visualize what you do and it’s a little bit of that behind the scenes thing, but also cultural. On my personal Instagram is, it’s about our business and I share those things, but it’s also about my family since the last ten years.

I talk about this with our team a lot is we have varying age demographics and it used to be that we had these very separate lives. There is this guy that is next generation above me. He had this group of friends that were in college and then one time they all came together, it was like “It’s your wedding” or something and then you had to be this one person. Now, we’re that one person. We are what our jobs are, we are what our kids are, we are what our friends and family are. We have to be transparent that way, but Instagram has this cool manifestation. The ones that do it right, it’s a cool manifestation of “Here’s a little bit of what we want,” and it does have to be controlled. We only want to put on there the positive things, so it’s definitely about branding. It’s a branding exercise for personal branding for sure.

You’ve done so many interesting things and I’m fascinated by all that you’ve managed to accomplish and from Wyoming is awesome, which I’ve heard that Jackson Hole is amazing. I saw your TEDx Talk. I’ve always wanted to go there. I’m very fascinated by that area, but I haven’t had a chance to go there. It was fun watching some of your videos and stuff. You said you met your wife, you found her on Myspace, that’s funny that you can reconnect with someone from a college relationship or something.

We’re so connected now and it’s going to be interesting to see where it goes. I am curious from our conversations. I’m writing about curiosity, which fascinates me and you seem like an extremely curious person to figure out how to solve all these problems. How did you get to be that way? Was this something your parents instilled in you? Did you learn it as you got older?

I think about this stuff all the time. We debate these things like “Are you born an entrepreneur?” or “Is it a learned behavior?” or “What is it?” The curiosity piece is interesting. I try to question everything. The way I phrase it is don’t make any assumptions. If you want to solve a problem, you got to get rid of the assumptions. The master of this to me is Elon Musk. People are like, “You’re crazy. You can’t do that. Battery technology is not there.” He’s like “Let’s make battery technology get there.” That’s the same. When I hear that it, it resonates with me because I don’t take for granted these processes that this is the way it’s going to be forever.

Wyoming is an interesting microcosm. We’re a big small state. We have 500,000 people in the entire state. I joined the Wyoming Business Council Advisory Board and so now I get to help, at least be get at the table and discussions of how to move business and the economy forward in our state that relied on energy. It was oil, gas, and coal, and that’s changed, but we live in such a beautiful place. Jackson Hole is just epic. There’s 4 million people come through there in the summer. All of Wyoming is. What’s changing is now we’ve got this gig economy looming and people can literally live anywhere. Like yourself, you could probably live anywhere. There’s a lot more people like that and they say it’s going to be 40% of our economy by 2020.

Those are the things that are exciting to me as we’re reaching this time when all this technology is going to accelerate. Whether it’s virtual reality or 3D printing, it’s going to impact healthcare and energy and all these things. That’s crazy. Automation and autonomous cars and everything, and this is going to happen within the next five to ten years and that’s crazy. It’s going to be profound. You’re either with it or you’re not. I would rather be on the side of moving forward with it. I only see opportunities in it. There is a positive outlook to curiosity. If you’re curious, you have that positive. It’s optimism. That’s probably important. The last piece is I’m also a product of my generation. I’m Gen-X and we wanted to be disruptive and we were very independent and I’m a product of that as well.

You’ve done amazing things. I hope people take some time to look at your new book, The New American Startup, which is a story of how Western independence and self-reliance led you to create disruptive technologies from Wyoming, which is so exciting.

Anybody can do it if I can do it.

Can you tell people how they can learn more and connect with you?

I’m pretty easy. I’m on all the social networks. I’m pretty open and happy to connect with people, whether it be on LinkedIn or Twitter or one of those platforms. Pitchengine.com is my day job. I’ve got other things on the side that we do and we’re constantly building new products and trying new things. The New American Startup is still on Amazon and available there. That was a fun project with another startup that wanted to make books that weren’t huge and so that was their whole goal. That’s what I did and it was fun to support that and that’s just a story of making your way and making it happen even if the challenges are different.

This has been great, Jason. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Thank you, Diane. I am happy to do it.

Self-Managing Investments with Randy Tate

I am here with Randy Tate, who’s the CEO and Co-Founder of Flipping Wall Street. Flipping Wall Street is an innovative Software as a Service company that is fundamentally changing the way people self-manage their investments by empowering the average individual investor to protect, preserve, and grow their wealth. Using software, they enable anybody to use algorithms to automate their trading the way the elite of Wall Street have been able to do and all at a mere fraction of the cost as there is no asset management fee. Welcome, Randy.

Thank you for having me.

We’ve met and we attended an event of the Heroes Club, but it was also a precursor to another event. I got to meet your Co-Founder and it was a fascinating introduction to what you do. I wish I’d had more time to talk to you, so I’m glad that you’re here because I want to talk about this FLIP. What does FLIP stand for?

It is an acronym. It’s Financial Learning Information Platform.

It’s about investing and it’s something that is different for the traditional way of investing. It gives you much more power. I’m curious if you could explain how much do we have to know about investing to be able to use this software?

The way we’ve designed the software, and my background is in education way back in the day I was a high school teacher, and so I’ve developed the skill to simplify things which has served me well as an executive at big software companies and other places I’ve gone. What we’ve done is I’ve taken Kelly’s, my partner who’s a genius, algorithms and I simplified them in a way that I can teach a seventh grader how to build portfolios that will beat the S&P 500. I can teach them that in 30 minutes.

If it’s so simple, why can’t we all just be rich from this?

We can. The reality is we can. We only launched this platform to the public a little over a year ago, so we are twelve or sixteen months is all. Our intention is to fundamentally change the way the financial services industry operates.

You mentioned Kelly Korshak. I’ve met both of you at that event and I was very impressed with both of you. You have so much knowledge in this area. It’s very complex to write this kind of program. He’s a math guy, right? What is his background?

Not only did he go to Stanford, which is impressive enough, he went at the age of sixteen. He got three degrees before he was 21 and that led him to a seat at the Prop Desk of Solomon Brothers, which turned into the President of the Deutsche Bank handing him $6 billion and saying “Manage the risks. Here is a team of guys from MIT with math degrees. Help them implement your algorithms.”

These beautiful mind guys, I don’t know how you get to that level, but thank goodness somebody does that. How does this work? You talked about the myths of Wall Street, what are those? How is FLIP different?

That’s one of my favorite topics, Diane, the myths of Wall Street. They start with things like the best way to protect your money and to beat the market is through proper diversification, and so the traditional person has been led to believe that taking their money to a traditional financial advisor or planner and having them put their money in the proper mutual funds or ETFs which are big bodies of stocks, that by diversifying themselves, they limit their risk and increase their chances because of another sector. That’s a myth. It’s a complete myth and it is designed to drive the sheep. The reality is the best way to manage risk is through algorithms, understanding the mathematics, and that goes into another myth.

You might have heard of this before, Diane. Have you ever heard somebody tell you that it’s impossible to time the market? Complete myth. If you understand the mathematics, you can time the market and thereby allow yourself to lose less. The real trick to making money in the stock market is not picking the right stock, it’s simply losing less. What we do is we talk to people all the time. I have this conversation, “If I can show you how to lose less when the market goes down.” For instance, I was just looking at a portfolio with an individual and we were doing some back simulations on his portfolio. In 2008, he would have lost 14%. The market went down 38%, so what happens when the market turns in and your money goes back in versus riding it all the way down? You go back in with more money. Therefore over time the compounding effect of that is not a little bit. It is significant. That is the foundation of how we are different from everybody else.

It’s interesting because I have interviewed Ken Fisher, who said “If you read the news, it’s too late because it’s already factored into the news and just reading the Wall Street Journal or something else is not going to do you any good,” but then I listened to this and it’s math. It almost is like counting cards once you figure out how to play the game. Is it like counting cards? If you master the math of it, is that all it takes?

Yeah, that’s all you got to do. I laugh about that all the time because it sounds so simple, but it takes somebody like Kelly. There’s probably not ten people in the world that can do what Kelly does. He, with his mathematical algorithms, allowed our mission. Our actual focus is to empower the average individual investor to be able to protect, preserve, and grow their wealth. That doesn’t exist right now. There is no place to do that not only because we’re locked in to the traditional way we’ve always done it, but when you add on the fees that we pay, the fees that go into having that advisor run our money, that alone creates an exponential and I’ve seen it. The numbers are not little. I’d be happy to share some later if you like.

The numbers are not little. One example, if you take fees, nothing else but fee differential. The way we charge our customer, because we’re a SaaS company, we’re not financial services. Everything is exactly the same with your advisor and with us. The only difference is they’re charging you a percentage of assets under management and we’re charging you only a dollar a trade out of your brokerage plus a software fee that does not come out of brokerage. Over twenty years, that’s $35,000 difference.

You said a dollar for trade. Is that what you said?

That’s the only money that comes out of our brokerage.

The software fee, let’s talk about that. How does that compare to something like Schwab’s or Fidelity’s? You’re paying payments on trades there, so you’re not paying for software with them. With you, we’re paying for software. Is it a monthly fee? How does that work?

Yes, so subscription is sign-up fee, you buy a license to own the software and then you subscribe, just like Infusionsoft or QuickBooks, perfect example. That’s the model we’re using because we know that the money not coming out of your brokerage account, and this is the biggest thing that I have to impress on people. When they say, “A couple grand for that software and $79 a month. That’s way more than I spend with my guy at Schwab,” but it’s not because what happens at the advisory firms is they take the money out of your brokerage. For instance, you’re trading $10,000 and they take $10 out in January. It doesn’t just cost you $10, because that $10 now you’ve lost. Every single month you lost $10 forever, number one. Number two, every dime that that $10 would have generated in February, you’ve lost, and every money that that money would have generated, you’ve lost. It becomes exponential over time, such that the fees you will pay on average in ten years will be greater than the amount of money you invested no matter how much you invest.

If you’re paying a monthly amount, isn’t that money you could have invested that you’re losing as well?

You could have, that’s why we set ourselves up in a pure affiliate model, again modeled after Infusionsoft and QuickBooks. Because we set it up this way, when you buy our software, the IRS will look at that as if you bought a business.

Explain that to people who aren’t familiar with Infusionsoft.

Infusionsoft is a sales and marketing automation company for small businesses. They sell their software for an upfront fee and then they charge you a monthly subscription to take care of all the automation for you. It’s a necessary tool for your business and if you refer it to your neighbor, Infusionsoft will pay you a referral fee.

You were a VP at Infusionsoft before that?

Yes and so that’s our model.

What is required? How hard is this for people to learn how to use this? Do you have to know something about stocks? Is there a certain level that you have to have to want to do this on your own?

Not at all. What that pays for is we’re teaching people how to self-direct and control. When you buy our software, the only things I’m asking from you is that you give us a couple hours of your time. In those couple of hours, we’re going to help you construct, set up a portfolio that fits everything from your desired goals to your moral compass. We’re going to set that up for you, we’re going to walk you through the brokerage account setup, so we’re going to set you up with the broker and the broker is who charges you the a dollar trade, not us, and then we turn the machine on, we’re good to go. The software is fully automated. It doesn’t send you a signal to say “buy this,” it’s not an expensive education platform telling you you’ve got to learn all these classes and know how to do this math. We’re not trying to create more Kelly’s.

What we’re trying to do is allow people to continue to do what they do every day and take advantage of the mathematics behind Kelly’s brain inside the market. In two hours, you will be set up fully functioning. There’s some paperwork you got to do and things like that. All that happens and we hold your hand. You’ll also get full-time as much customer support services you need. Once every quarter, we reach out to you and set up a call to review your portfolio with you to say “Here’s what went good. Here’s what did not go good. Here’s what we see other people doing.” Because we’ve created a community so that everybody shares their portfolios with each other and so you can say, “Look what NVIDIA did in that algorithm. That’s awesome. Let’s do that.” You can dedicate twenty minutes a month and then an hour every quarter to manage your finances at a much cheaper rate than you can get anywhere in the world.

Who’s offering this $1 a trade that you’re setting them up with? First of all tell us about that.

Interactive Brokers. They are the largest online brokerage house in the world. They’re much bigger than any trade or any of those guys, and they are designed for institutions. If you’ve never heard of them, that’s because they’re the place that big brokers and advisors use to clear their money to the exchange and they are a volume house. They’re not designed for customer service or support. The reason we get set up that way in a dollar a trade is because they know that our software is doing the trading, not the individual people that are setting up their accounts there.

Can you just have unlimited number of trades?

Yep. In that average, the portfolio will trade somewhere between 60 and 100 times a year.

You do have to keep track of it to know when to trade?

No, it does it all for you. It is fully automated.

How does it know what to trade for?

That’s what the algorithms do.

I put in that I like technology companies or medical companies and then it decides based on that? Do I have to say specific companies I want?

Specific companies, we do it stock by stock. Another thing that is unique is we are a robotic trader and I get the question a lot. There’s a lot of robotic traders like Betterment and Wealthfront, those are big companies that use robotic trading. They do it in a bucket. They have their own algorithm and then they take your stock by stock and everybody else they fill it in one giant bucket. It’s like a washing machine and all trades together. That’s the way they do it. When you set your portfolio up with us, each individual stock, and remember that diversification, we’re not diversifying you. Most of our customers has six to ten stocks, that’s it.

How about bonds? Is it all stocks?

No bonds. Just stocks and ETFs.

Why no bonds?

It’s a different set of algorithms that we are working on that is coming. Today we don’t do bonds.

For the people that think they need bonds to mitigate risk, what do you tell them? A lot of people still believe that. How do you get that thought process changed, do you think?

That’s again another myth. It’s just one person at a time and here’s how we do it. We currently live in a world that says we need stocks and the bonds to mitigate risks. We are in the not too distant future, we’re going to start pounding the message of stocks or bonds. Kelly was a bond trader and ran a couple of those things as well. There are algorithms that he’s built that can tell you when it’s time to get out of the stock and then get into bond, and to get out of the bond and back into the stock, so it’s not ‘stocks and’, it’s ‘stocks or’.

What about in retirement? Is it different? You’re not going to go heavy with stocks as much as you would with bonds or is that a myth too?

Same process. That’s a myth too, because when you’re trading with an algorithm, when you’re algorithms are doing the work, you will avoid the dips. Let me give you an example. This year is a perfect model. If you look at January this year, the market grew 5%. It was on fire. Our average person inside our portfolios that are software trades grew 5.2%, so we did it by just a tiny little bit and when the market’s going up like that, it’s very difficult. In February the market took a ten-point correction, the S&P did, so as we rolled into February, by the time we got to that Monday where the big drop started, over 50%, 57% in fact, of the money that our software traded had been taken out of the market and was sitting in cash. When the market dropped ten, our average person dropped two. Guess what happens in the following week. We have more money to go back in, in a down market.

You’re buying low, selling high, not having the problems with all that. How long is that money kept in cash? How does it know when it’s going to go back? I guess Kelly knows.

It’s the algorithm. The algorithm will say. It was funny in January when the market was going fast, we had a lot of people calling me going, “My money is all getting moved into cash. Why is your software doing that? The market is screaming.” I’m like, “I don’t know. It’s just doing its math,” but then all of a sudden in February those same people were calling going, “I get it now. That makes sense. Look at that. I didn’t lose very much money because my money was sitting in cash and now it’s starting to go back in.” This is a goal. We like to be able to produce, this is the goal. We’re a software company, so I can’t make claims or promises in the stock market and nobody can. Our intention though is to produce double-digit returns with only half your money at risk, so generally 50% to 70% of the money in your portfolio is in an open position with the stocks of the portfolio. The rest are rotating through and sitting in cash.

How much do you have to invest to even get into this? Do you have to have a minimum?

Yes, the minimum investment is $10,000 for Interactive Brokers to open an account for you, unless you’re under the age of 26, then you can do it for $5,000.

How long have you been doing this?

We’ve been available to the public since we officially launched on January 1, 2017. We’ve been running the software ourselves for a full year and a half before that, and between Kelly and I, we have roughly $3 million in two and a half to three years before that of time, energy and money invested.

If people don’t know Kelly, they don’t know you, they’re just hearing this, what are their biggest concerns?

Their biggest concern is they don’t understand the fee structure, “How does that make sense?” We need to walk them through an extended model of what it looks like, show them what that does. We need to show them what it looks like. I tell everybody to do this. I spent a lot of years educating people, businesses on language, leadership, and due diligence, do your homework. Google is there for a reason. Go to our website, FlipWallStreet.com, look at some of the testimonials, contact some of the people. They can get a number to text to and they can register to watch a webinar that I do every week. If they text the word “cowboys” as in the Dallas Cowboys to 480-418-0300 and you will get a reply to that text that will allow you to register for a webinar that I do every Tuesday night, it’s 30 to 40 minutes, it’s a fast overview of our company, of Kelly, of me, of algorithms, how they work, what they are, and that’s not a sales call. It is free. They can just come and check it out. That’s their first step to get more information

You had mentioned a cost before of a couple thousand dollars. If you’re investing $10,000, how much is this costing you per month if you have that low of an initial investment?

$79.

What was the $2,000 number?

It’s $2,495 to buy the software, to buy the license on. It’s a one-time fee. It pays two things. It pays my very expensive staff who are very skilled at what they do to make sure that your experience is first rate. It also pays a little bit back because the affiliate platform, I’m creating a share economy so that everybody gets a little piece of everything we’re doing, and so I paid back about $800 out of that. It goes back out to our affiliates that have made referrals. Then the rest of it goes into budget and operations. That’s what we use it for. Same thing with the $79 a month. You get unlimited access to our team, whatever call or questions you might have, whatever conversations that you might need or any help your might need if you make a referral.

It’s $79 no matter how much you invest? Is that just for the lower level?

No matter how much you invest. That’s the beauty of the platform. Over time we don’t charge you more because we’re not an asset under management; we’re SaaS. I just want you to subscribe and stay subscribed.

How long does it take to recoup your $2,500 or $2,400 for most people? Do you have that?

Yeah. It’s quite simple because the IRS looks at it as a business startup, if you claim it on your tax return, you can collect it right away as soon as you do your taxes if you don’t do anything else.

Anyone? Do you have to own a company or just any individual can?

Anybody. You can claim it as a sole proprietor if you would like. If you’re in a W2 job, you could take it off that W2 tax pay that you paid, or, in many cases, depending on what part of the world you’re in, you can set up a simple LLC and start it up as a business. We should all own a business anyways. I tell people all the time, if you’re in the small business world, this is not a political thing at all, whether you like Trump or don’t like Trump, that’s up to everybody’s own opinion, but those tax breaks are phenomenal for small businesses and they will make you a lot more money. I’m not an accountant, but I could put you in touch with one.

If you have a simple LLC and you buy our software and pay a subscription, not only is that tax deductible, your vacation this year becomes a business trip, tax deductible, dinners you go out to tax deductible. There’re lots of other loopholes. You could call them loopholes or laws, rules legally where you can take advantage of the tax system so that your software does not cost you very much money and every time you make a referral that buys our software, I pay you $600.

That’s an interesting thing. How about the $79. How can you write that up?

You can because it’s a subscription. Just like QuickBooks is a write off for your business, it’s a subscription tool that you need, so it’s interesting.

You obviously learned quite a bit from the Infusionsoft background you had. You’ve got quite an interesting background. I was looking at some of the stuff that we’ve done. This is a very interesting idea and a lot of people will probably be interested in attending your webinars and finding out more, so you want to tell them that code one more time and how they could reach you?

Text the word the “cowboys” to 480-418-0300. That will get you a text with a form for you to register for our webinar. We do the webinar every Tuesday at 5:00 Pacific Time. They’re always live, 90% of them I do. I am the CEO of the company, so you get to hear from me directly. You can go to our website, FlipWallStreet.com and there’s an info at email. You can contact us with a phone number. If you want more information, reach out that way and somebody, most likely me. If you tell them that you came from this radio show, it will be me specifically that you get the talk to.

Randy, it was so nice to have you on the show. I liked our chat that we had at the C-Suite Network event and the Hero event was a fascinating and Kelly was seriously brilliant, like you said. I really appreciated how intelligent you were too. We’ve got the two you and I’m like, “This is fascinating.” I enjoyed having you on the show. Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

You’re welcome.

Thank you so much to Jason and Randy. What a great show, and if you’ve missed any past episodes, you can find them if you go to DrDianeHamilton.com/Blog. You can look at the transcripts there and you could listen to them as well. I hope you enjoyed those and I hope you join us for the next episode of Take The Lead Radio.

About Jason Kintzler

Jason Kintzler is the Founder and CEO of Pitchengine, a new media and marketing software company whose products are used by more than 50,000 brands and small businesses worldwide. Best known for easy-to-use marketing software, Pitchengine is used by the world’s largest brands including Walmart, Pepsico, Budweiser and more. Jason is the author of “The New American Startup” which details the story of how Western independence and self‐reliance led him to create a disruptive technology from the unlikeliest of places.

 

About Randy Tate

CEO and Co-Founder of Flipping Wall Street. Flipping Wall Street is an innovative Software as a Service (SaaS) company that is fundamentally changing the way people self-manage their investments by empowering the average individual investor to protect, preserve and grow their wealth. Using software, they enable anybody to use algorithms to automate their trading the way only the elite of Wall Street have been able to and all at a mere fraction of the costs as there is no asset management fee.

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