[Emerging Tech] Reimagining CRM With AI for Advisors With Thomas Clawson
- Quik! News Team
- 5 hours ago
- 28 min read
Thomas Clawson is the Co-founder of Slant, a next-generation AI-powered CRM built to help financial advisors streamline workflows and deepen client relationships. He co-launched the platform to replace traditional CRM systems by integrating AI agents that manage meetings, follow-ups, and client interactions. Under his leadership, Slant has raised $3.3 million in seed funding and scaled to serve over a thousand advisors. Prior to this venture, Thomas held leadership roles in marketing and demand generation at tech unicorns, including Whatnot and Podium.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
[2:06] Thomas Clawson discusses Slant’s mission to help 20 million Americans access better financial advice
[4:54] How Slant enables advisors to work more efficiently and serve more clients
[6:51] Redefining the CRM for modern financial professionals
[10:26] The story behind Slant’s pivot from marketing automation to CRM innovation
[13:33] How customer feedback drove Slant’s transformation
[16:52] Building simplicity and intuitive design into advisor technology
[19:07] Integrating chat-based interfaces and natural language queries into CRM workflows
[22:32] The future of adaptive, AI-driven software experiences
[27:37] How Slant built a secure, SOC 2-compliant CRM in six months
In this episode…
Financial advisors face growing pressure to deliver personalized service while managing an ever-expanding workload. Traditional CRMs, however, often add complexity instead of reducing it — creating more manual tasks and slowing growth. With AI transforming the way professionals work, how can financial advisors adopt technology that actually simplifies their day-to-day operations while improving client outcomes?
Thomas Clawson, an expert in advisor technology and automation, shares how embracing AI-first design principles can completely redefine the CRM experience. He emphasizes simplifying workflows, reducing manual data entry, and allowing advisors to focus on people instead of processes. Thomas discusses how chat-based interfaces and AI-powered insights can make managing client relationships seamless. By building adaptable systems that learn from user behavior, Thomas highlights how advisors can serve more clients efficiently while maintaining a personal touch.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Thomas Clawson, Co-founder of Slant, about reimagining CRM for financial advisors through AI and automation. Thomas also discusses the need for simplicity in advisor technology, the rise of chat-driven user interfaces, and how his team built a secure CRM in just six months.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
Quotable Moments:
“I want their job to be easier. I want them to come to work and not have 80 things to do, but maybe 18.”
“People deserve to use great software. I hate bad software. And so it's really nice.”
“The future of this whole industry and of AI is unstructured. Data is now useful.”
“We need to make common things easy and uncommon things possible. We look at that a lot.”
“I want that Iron Man feeling for a lot more people. It’d be fun.”
Action Steps:
Adopt AI-first principles when designing software: Building with AI from the ground up enables automation, smarter insights, and greater efficiency, helping eliminate redundant manual work and deliver a more intuitive experience.
Simplify complex workflows for clients and teams: Streamlining everyday tasks allows professionals to focus on meaningful client interactions rather than repetitive processes, leading to higher productivity and better client satisfaction.
Leverage chat-based interfaces for data and task management: Natural language tools make it easier to access insights, find information, and complete tasks quickly, creating a more seamless and conversational relationship with technology.
Listen to user feedback and adapt accordingly: Customer input often reveals unmet needs or opportunities to improve existing products, ensuring continued relevance and stronger user loyalty.
Prioritize secure and compliant systems: Building technology with data protection at its core fosters user trust and long-term scalability, benefiting both advisors and their clients.
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Episode Transcript:
Intro: 00:02
Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and, in turn, grow their business.
Richard Walker: 00:16
Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Today is a special episode in my series on new and emerging solution solutions, and today's guest is Thomas Clawson, co-founder of Slant. Past guests in the series have included Max Klein of LEA, Rabih Ramadi of Avantos, and Marla Sofer of Knomee. Today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms.
Instead, get Quik! using Quik!. You'll be able to generate completed forms and get back clean, context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quickforms.com to get started. All right. Thomas Clawson is the co-founder of Slant.
Slant helps advisors automate official workflows while building a more personal connection with leads, referrals, and clients. Since launching in April of 2023, Slant has grown to work with over 1200 financial professionals. Prior to starting Slant, Thomas worked at two tech unicorns. He led collectibles marketing at Wotnot and before that led Demand Generation at Podium. Thomas, welcome to The Customer Wins.
Thomas Clawson: 01:43
Thanks, Rich. Super happy to be here. It's awesome.
Richard Walker: 01:46
Oh, I when I met you, I knew we were going to have a great conversation. So I've been looking forward to this. So for those who haven't heard this podcast before, I talk with business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they build and deliver a great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company. So, Thomas, let's understand your business a little bit better. How does your company help people?
Thomas Clawson: 02:06
Yeah, it's a great question. I think about it in two parts. First, our company mission, it's on the wall. It's on our website. So 20 million Americans get great financial advice from great financial advisors.
So that's our downstream impact we want to have is we think people need advice and they should get it from great people. And then who do we help immediately to get that done? Advisors I want their job to be easier. I want them to come to work and not have 80 things to do, but maybe 18, you know, some order of magnitude less. And ideally, you know, I think people deserve to use great software.
I hate bad software. And so it's really nice. You know, they deserve good software. They haven't had a lot of that in their career.
Richard Walker: 02:44
Okay. So look, I love being inspired by my guests, but you start right off the bat with an inspiration to me because I had not even thought about that downstream impact. Why did you choose you want to affect 20 million people with better financial advice. Where does that come from for you?
Thomas Clawson: 02:59
Yeah, we did a lot of research as we launched and built it. And if you look at the you you dig into the numbers, you try to see how many people are going to retire in the next ten years. We have like a ten year horizon mentally as we look at it. And it's 40. I think it's like 44 million people are going to in the next ten years.
And 22 million of those people are slated to not retire without an advisor. Like they don't have one now and they won't later. And so we think if if advisors get drastically more efficient, they can help a lot of those people. And some might think, oh, that group has no money or no anything like that. It's like they have a really high average assets, like $12 trillion in that group of people.
So I want them to make good decisions with that money, make the make their lives better, make the country a better place, all of that. So that's the group who's set to not have an advisor. And we want to that's the delta we want to have in the world.
Richard Walker: 03:51
Man, I love that. I mean, I have a family member, I suppose many who are at retirement would never having had financial advice and hearing some of the stories of things that are doing. It's like they're just they just don't understand. There's so many good things they can do. One of my family members was advised by my mom, actually, to put some money into just a high interest savings account.
And that interest. And this person was like, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. It's not worth it. It's like three minutes of work to do it.
Thomas Clawson: 04:19
Yeah.
Richard Walker: 04:20
It's paying for 80% of their rent now. The interest they're getting. That's life changing.
Thomas Clawson: 04:24
That is crazy. Yeah. And there's so many opportunities like that. Like there's so many little things that can happen. And then the big stuff, obviously, that I think a lot of advisors know about.
But the little things and like making sure you're not making a bad choice is so much of the impact.
Richard Walker: 04:39
So do you think that if you talk about 44 and there's a half of those people are not going to get advice, do you think your product's going to help all the people not getting advice, or do you think it's a mix of the two? I mean, how I really want to understand the product and how it's going to make that possible?
Thomas Clawson: 04:54
Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, we advisors are our customer and then they help people. So obviously if they use our tool, it's going to impact the people who already have an advisor. But we're part a big chunk of our product and vision is how do we help them help more people, either through being drastically more efficient or them finding new people to work with. So I want if those advisors suddenly if, let's say these are two long enough and they think, wow, I've doubled the capacity and I have some tools that help me grow that's going to get new people in that system.
And similarly, if a brand new person starts with Xypn or whatever it is they register, they break away, they choose to use us and they get their new clients like, that's a that's a win.
Richard Walker: 05:36
Yeah. I have to argue though. I mean, some of the people who are not going to have advisors, advisors don't see the value in serving them. There's no financial incentive to provide that value. Do you think that you're going to help go after those clients who don't bring as much money to the table?
Thomas Clawson: 05:52
Yeah, I, I look at like, I think the biggest wave of growth for advisors can be that they call it mass affluent. You know, something like 200 K to 1 million when a lot of people have $1 million minimum. Like someone with 700 K. Think about retiring. Probably like worked really hard their whole life.
Like, I want to make that person get great advice and be viable for the advisor. Like if suddenly that software makes it so you have one check in call. It's super efficient, your meetings prepared, you know things are ready for you when you go. Suddenly that is okay. You can charge the percents you would and have a profitable relationship, and at the same time that person gets a way better, hopefully quality of life and experience.
So I want to I look at that mass affluent as like the biggest opportunity for advisors and the advisors I know growing the fastest. They're willing to serve that group.
Richard Walker: 06:44
Yeah. No, I love it. I love it, man. So let's go back to your product. Is it fair to call it a CRM?
Thomas Clawson: 06:51
This is a great question. I, I like I love owning CRM, like you could call it different things. The joke we have in the office. CRM, I think for advisors right now stands for compliance, Rolodex and Manual work. It's not client relationship management.
That's like the initial vision of the whole thing. And so I think we're trying to get it back to basics, like how can you help manage your client relationships? Does it do those kind of things and not just be a note, like a file cabinet of some notes and tasks you've done in the past? So we definitely would say it is a CRM. I think what CRM does really changes over the next few years, but at the core, where are you managing client relationships in the CRM?
So we own it.
Richard Walker: 07:36
Yeah. So like I'm going to bring up a topic I told you when I met you. And for 20 plus years I've been running my company and I've seen a few people say, hey, we need another CRM. And I always ask, why does the world need another CRM? And I'm going to admit right now what I learned from you, and I hope my audience can learn today from you, I my mind's changed.
Yes, we do need another CRM and I'm excited for what you're doing, So answer the question why? Why do we need another CRM? Thomas.
Thomas Clawson: 08:01
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I make the joke sometimes. I've seen the memes of there's like the Jedi looking person on the right and the sort of, you know, they're smoking two cigarettes, look like a crazy person on the left. And in the middle it says, add new workflows, add change this, add a new add on, do it. And both sides just say make a better CRM. Sometimes I think we need that.
Overall, why does the world need another CRM? I would say advisors have used really lousy CRMs for too long. There's way more you can and should do, and if your CRM is seen as a place that's like, I have to go in there, it's a burden. I hate going in there. I hate putting in the notes.
People are bugging me to do it like that's everything that's wrong with it. It should. In this era of AI, I don't think I should have made another CRM pre-AI revolution. I don't think it would have been effective post. It changes everything because suddenly every email you've had is interesting context in every meeting and every text message, every phone call.
Suddenly you can make the CRM better without punching in data. The future of this whole industry and of AI is unstructured. Data is now useful. It used to demand, you know, if you wanted to know every client's favorite sports team, you needed to make a column, and you'd probably only fill it in for 20% of people. And now you've got this nasty array and you can't look at it.
Whereas you should be able to. Who are all my clients and what are their favorite sports teams? Like ask that question and get an answer. You know, like that. That's possible in this era.
So why do we need a new CRM? The current ones are lousy. And secondly, you deserve to manage a lot of relationships with a really high quality bar. And I think technology can help you do that.
Richard Walker: 09:44
So I want to talk about it from a different angle. You're bringing it up. I'm going to dive into this a little bit more. I have been saying a phrase, and I don't know if I coined it from somebody or if it's just my own phrase, which is AI first principles. And I would say that the reason we need another CRM, just like we need another everything else, is because AI has enabled us to reimagine what the products could be.
And you, from my understanding, I mean, tell your story about how you came to this conclusion to build this, etc. but you have designed a product that has AI first principles built into it, which has enabled you to do things we've never been able to do before. Just like you're talking about, ask it. Give me this condensed information that it was impossible to get before. So tell us the story.
Thomas Clawson: 10:26
Yeah, yeah. So story on how we got to this point, how we have CRM. Max is my co-founder. We started the company in May of 23, our first product called Page Port. Some of you maybe heard of that is a marketing and automation tool for advisors.
It served a really particular set of advisors. And as we kept growing, we had people every day ask us, hey, can you do you know, can you like a good I don't know, can you sequence some emails? It was like an early thing we asked and we we did that, but for a long time we thought, well, why can't their CRM do this? And they would ask more and more questions, and every day we'd have some version of, hey, your CRM should get that done. Like, that's not the job of your marketing tool.
That's the job of your core system of record. Like you need to go do that. And by the 400th time you've heard that question or a thing asked that way, we looked at ourselves and said, hey, this first product's been great, but we keep saying the CRM should handle this, and it's not. Is it time to, you know, be bold enough to say, let's go be a system of record? Because I think as a as a founder starting out, it's almost like untouchable ground.
You think that's everyone's telling me I got to integrate with their CRM. I have to integrate with Red Tail or Wealthbox and like, you work so hard to just get that job done and you kind of push that off and we want enough people asked. We said, I think we should rethink this. And we spent my co-founder, especially two intense months of really thinking like, what should it look like talking to dozens of users? And we determined like this.
This can fundamentally be rebuilt and we think we can do it. And so from that point on, we thought, well, what what should this do? I'm not trying to make a prettier version of the same thing. Like how should in 2025 a CRM work? And that got us to say, okay, like note taker functionality has really changed the world for a lot of people.
It should be baked into your CRM, chatting with sets of data. If you've ever used like a notebook or anything like that, could I upload a complex estate plan or a tax return? Could I have all my history of emails, everything like that, and start asking questions about this client record like you totally should? And can I have it all live in one place so I can like, safely and compliantly do it? That was the core of what we wanted to do.
And then as you go down that journey, you start finding things that, well, it should be we should make everything tied to a household and we should make records easy to search and all the little details that make, you know, good software really good. We want to do those. But the core was this should fundamentally change. There's a mountain of unstructured data. People are trying to do really basic things that they can't like.
Let's be the reason they can.
Richard Walker: 13:02
I want to point out something because I've been in business a long time, and I've gone through this process where you hear feedback from customers and you're like, that's not us, that's not us, that's not us, that's not who we are. Why should we do that? Right? And you fight it. You fight it because you're not trying to replace something else.
You have your thing you're doing. It is so hard to come to that conclusion of, oh my gosh, we should change and be something different because people are asking for that. How did you and Max I mean, I know you heard it, but like there must have been some conversation where you're like, are you sure we want to change our business direction here?
Thomas Clawson: 13:33
Yeah. There was a there's a particular week and it was crazy. It happened in one week. We had never had someone write in this type of thing before. We had two people in one week and one the week after write in, and I think two of them said, hey, how do I add a custom field of Social Security number here in page port?
And we're like, you don't want to put that in an email. Like you shouldn't add that and said, no, we're we're making this our CRM and we're like, don't do that. Like, let's get on a call. Let's figure out what we're really trying to do. And they said, no, like our CRM.
In the end, it's like a list of names and people and we do our tasks. And you guys have lists of names and people and it's easier to do the tasks in here. We're going to put Social Security in like you can't do that. Don't do that. But that happened two times in one week and one the week after where users had said, my current, my current default is so bad, I'm going to use your thing that's not meant for it and muscle it to be my new CRM.
And when that happened, we had a really long conversation like, okay, what? What is Redtail really doing for someone or Wealthbox or a Salesforce? And as we kept talking to users, the answer was, well, it's a list of people. It's a place to do some tasks. They can maybe link some documents.
You know, you you there are the users out there who have used every power feature, made it like done all the heavy lifting, invested in resources to make it more powerful. But for a lot It was a list of people and a place to do tasks, and we thought if that really is the baseline to be CRM is like holy grail software. You're the system of record, you're super sticky. They use you for years. It's where their business runs, if that's what it takes.
Like, I think we can do a better job of this. And so that put us on that journey. But it was it was users doing things in our tool that we didn't think they should. And then the constant asks of what it would take. But there was definitely for a long time, I mean, it's important as a software company to say no to things.
You can't say yes to every request or you'll never build anything significant. And so we feel that battle every day still of like, okay, someone wants to do this, but we, you know, we have a vision for what we think this will become. What's the balancing act? But for us, it felt like we had an ambitious team. We had great people, and it was only right for us to solve that bigger problem for the customer and take like a really big shot at building something important.
Richard Walker: 15:53
So it dawns on me I should clarify something that the reason I talk about CRMs. Why do we need another CRM, etc. is because in the 2000, my first product connected to 34 different CRMs. Yeah, and look, there's a few that wouldn't you wouldn't call CRMs. Outlook is not a CRM. Your Excel file is not a CRM.
But I have the same kind of view that you've had that many people don't need much more than a list. That's why they're using Excel. Like just a list with some names and addresses and phone numbers and email, and that's not compliant and that's not scalable, blah, blah, blah. So let's get this cloud system and CRM and then you end up getting, I don't know, a bus that can hold 40 people when you need a car that holds four.
Thomas Clawson: 16:36
Yeah.
Richard Walker: 16:37
And it's overkill. And a lot of people are drowning in that overkill. So I don't want to oversimplify your product. I'm sure it's very complex and capable of a lot of things, but is it sounds like you saw that simplicity as the opportunity to dive into this 100%.
Thomas Clawson: 16:52
I think that's the There's that. We really admire Shopify. We think they're great company. And Tobi, they're often says we need to make common things easy and uncommon things possible. We look at that a lot, like we have to look every day at what really matters in here.
And can we make those like, super simple to do? So like I should be able to click clients on the left side of the page and see all my clients. I shouldn't have to use like nine filters. Do crazy stuff like that should be a very simple process. Like that's a good example of that.
But I think you're right. We want to own the simplicity of it. Like this should be a place to store all the data, get your job done, collaborate with your team members, and do it in a really beautiful, easy to use way. And then yes, there's powerful features you can tack on. And we're going to there's all the AI there is like feeding it with tons of information and making it more robust every day.
But I want those complex features to almost feel like they're in the background or they're very easy to use. So at the core you can log in and say, who am I meeting with today? Can you prepare an agenda for me? Can you recap what we talked about last time? And now you're way better set for your meeting or your day.
Or if you get a task like, great, can I get context into what the task is about? Can I maybe see the clip from the video it came from? Like, I think those are a lot of users will ask for things that they've they've needed to make their complicated, tough to use system system a little bit easier. And sometimes we say, hey, I know you want 400 different note templates, but I think you actually want your tasks to be way easier to do. So can we try to make tasks easier to do?
But yeah, we we we want to own the simplicity of it and then make that's our job as technologists. You know this too rich as I need to make all the hard stuff just happen for you. And you can come in here and do the easy thing.
Richard Walker: 18:46
So one of my concepts and really future predictions about an AI first principle in software development is that a lot of software products, the user interface is very much going to be a chat session. You're going to ask it hard questions that a typical search can't produce, but an LLM or an AI can produce. How much is that infused into your product right now?
Thomas Clawson: 19:07
Yeah. Chats are we lean into chat. There's a reason ChatGPT grew so fast. If you would have told someone four years ago, like, what's going to be the fastest growing company of all time? And they'd say, it's just a place you can answer questions and it chats you back.
I think people would have thought, you're crazy, but once you see the power, it's there. Yeah. Chats essential for our tool. We have chat embedded in a lot of places in our product. Like the most popular is the chat.
So if you're if your old world is going to a client record and seeing, okay, let me like filter through a crazy activity feed and try to search for emails and look through tasks like that gets pretty cumbersome if you're trying to figure specific things out. Whereas a chat, you could say, you know, did we ever talk about Nvidia? Here's the two emails and here's the one meeting. Oh got it. Summarize that meeting for me?
Okay. You have answers so, so quickly. So have client chat with meeting chat. Obviously you can chat with any meeting you've had. What do we talk about here?
What were my action items? How long did I talk? What did they what did they reference? And then we have book chat, which is a place to ask general questions. And that's when that keeps getting better.
It's a hard problem because the context window is oh yeah, a lot of emails, a lot of meetings. So that one we're constantly refining. But there you should be able to ask things like, who have I met with in the past week? Or, you know, who are all my clients who live in Tennessee? You know, maybe you're doing some compliance work, and you got to make sure you don't have 11 people in a certain state, like you should be able to ask that question or do things like, you know what?
What's the market doing today? And then suddenly that goes into like, well, who's in those positions? Like a great analyst. But chat, we think chat is the future interface. Obviously there's moments you want to click.
There's moments you want to say next, you want to have, like the workflows were kind of used to building, but it's fun to see a user. They do things in chat. We didn't expect that work. You know, the hey, can you add a tag to the record for this and put up a module? Yeah.
Like confirm that you want this tag added. Boom. Like that's an easy button on the same page. But once they're comfortable in chat they're doing everything there.
Richard Walker: 21:11
So this is one of the advantages that you have in starting now, is that building chat into your product and your interface is second nature. It's just part of the system. It's part of how you're designing it for legacy products to add it in. It's not always successful. I don't want to hate.
On HubSpot, we use HubSpot. We love HubSpot. When they offered their copilot. At first it was amazing. It actually answered questions and gave me data.
Now it doesn't. I don't know what they did. I can't do what you just said and chat with it and say, hey, show me all this, all the conversations around XYZ. I can't do that. I don't know why, but they're bolting it on, not necessarily building it from the ground up like you have done.
And so I think what we're going to see in technology is a lot of opportunity to rebuild from the ground up, and the big legacy companies that choose to make that kind of investment will be successful, too. I'm not saying a bolt on can't work. It can. But you have that advantage of moving, moving through that faster. There's another premise I have about what could happen in user experience.
What if it morphs and changes based on what I'm trying to do instead of like, the static screen? If you always go here to click clients and you always see the assets, and you always see the conversations in these areas. What if my query or question turns it into a different experience dynamically on the fly? Have you thought about that at all?
Thomas Clawson: 22:32
We've thought about that. Yeah. There's some world of hey, when they log in, they always go first to the client page and then they add notes for the most for recent clients. Like, I would love to build software if it's seen them do that 100 times, it says, hey, your login flow is now going to be your four most recent clients and tasks for all of them, because you do that every time. Wear a button that makes that easy.
I think that's the future of software. And we we talk a lot about it internally, like the next era of software will. It's probably good to paint the past of it. You were everyone was given like a rigid almost workflow, a computer binary output of like you're going to click this, this will happen and this, then this will happen. And it was right.
We, you and I forced users into the way we mapped it. We said, this is how it works. Get your things in the right way and it'll happen. And now I think there's an era where software is going to be like a good a financial advisor should be able to come in with natural language and say, maybe, you know, can the workflow do this or change my home screen to do this? Like that's a vision that's totally possible, where instead of programmers making one output and you having to force everyone into it, can they build systems that scale?
So an advisor or tax accountant or whoever can come and say, like my software should do x, Y and Z and it can get it done for you. But yeah, this.
Richard Walker: 23:55
Is where this is where Iron Man I think gets it right with Jarvis. Hey, Jarvis, show me this. Hey, Jarvis, go figure that out. Right. And the whole dynamic interface changes based on what the need was.
I can imagine advisor starting their day saying, okay, what meetings do I have today and what do I have to accomplish today? Okay. You've got four client meetings and these these tasks were due, etc.. Great. Step me into the workflow for preparing for this meeting.
Step me into the workflow for finishing this task. And the whole experience morphs to that versus hey, go click here, here and here to get this thing started. Right. Yeah.
Thomas Clawson: 24:28
And now that I know what to do, I have to do all this work to get to that point. Yeah, we even have ideas. We haven't built this yet. But, you know, it'd be cool if advisor on their way to work could call Slant and say, what do I have to do today? What are like, make that task my highest priority?
Talk through that. Like that's a fun future. You know, I want that Iron Man feeling for a lot more people. It'd be fun.
Richard Walker: 24:50
Yeah, no. for sure. So going back to how you started all this, I remember you said page port, you discovered your clients were advisors. Yeah, right. And then you you paid attention to that and said we should serve this this community.
And now you're building CRM. Do you think your product is going to become more than CRM?
Thomas Clawson: 25:12
That's a great question. I would say our our products, we want it to be the word we use is system of record. It's always going to be I want it to be the hub of where you do your job. And now I think there's a lot more it could do. If you look at, let's say like the right side of the tech map, for those who know what that is, it's a crazy map of all these logos.
There's CRM lets you kind of have a excuse to maybe do any of them, but we're going to be pretty deliberate on which ones we do. We can't just say we'll do any part of it, but anything that feels like, hey, it's I want to get. It. Well, what's a good example? Calendly or something like.
That's its own thing to help meetings get on your calendar. It's really powerful. They've built a billion plus dollar company on making that really, really easy. Yeah. Is that something that, like, we could make a lightweight version of have embedded and like, hey, you get 90% of the value and you have that in here and now you don't have to think about one more login.
That feels like the kind of things you would be constantly adding on. Or, you know, people are going to ChatGPT to draft a good email. Like, I want a great email writing agent inside the tool that you could do that in the chat interface, but could you make it that much easier and things like that. So we want to we're definitely going to go far beyond where traditional CRM is now, but we're going to try to do it very intentionally with is the thing we're offering making client relationships better? Is it going to help 20 million more Americans get advice?
Are our customers going to love it? And I think that's been good. DNA that we try to keep aggressively is we need to talk to our users, know what they need, and sometimes discern. Are they asking for a faster horse when they need a car, or do they really? Are they asking for the thing they really need right now?
That's I think our job as the technologist is okay. We know the problems they're facing. Which ones matter the most. Let's go solve it as fast as we can. And it's fun to be a new, nimble product because we can push up intense, important features really fast.
I think the case.
Richard Walker: 27:23
I think speed is something that we really haven't clarified in today's conversation. Just how fast did you build a CRM from the ground up? Because CRM, it's daunting to think, oh, CRM, oh my gosh, all the things it has to do. Would you guys do it in like six months?
Thomas Clawson: 27:37
Six months? Yeah. November. Those users came and said, we're using this is CRM without whoa, whoa, whoa. And we really ideated and committed to the project in February and we launched in August.
So it was a six month complete sprint, but it was I mean, it was a lot of late nights, a lot of heads down, a lot of building, tearing down and rebuilding. But there's a functional, safe, Soc2 compliant like your data is secure CRM in six months, which is crazy.
Richard Walker: 28:06
It is crazy, but it also has two sides of that sword. One is you talk about Calendly functionality. You can implement an integration with Calendly probably in two hours or overnight. You could also probably replicate the capability of it in 2 or 3 days or a week. And so you have this challenge of should we build it or buy it or integrate it?
And then there's the other side. What if somebody else says, I could build a CRM in six months? How many competitors will come out?
Thomas Clawson: 28:32
I know, yeah, that that's a daunting. We think every every day someone doesn't announce they're doing it. We think we get a leg up in this. We think there's going to be an eventual race. And I think, you know, Redtail and Wealthbox, they're going to innovate in the way they need to, like their customers have different needs.
They're serving different things. They can't tear something down or make it, you know, like they they have a group, a large group of people that rely on their current way of doing things. And so but yeah, I think this is an area where people are gonna be able to build really quickly. And that's the reason. I mean, we were in San Francisco this week for a product offsite with our engineers.
And like the largest commodity at our company right now is focused engineering time, like great engineers with quality time and a really clear direction is a superpower right now because a really dedicated engineer who's really talented can build really cool stuff really quickly. So can we give our engineers a space to like, here's what we know we need to do next. You get the space and the creativity to go make it happen. If we can push a massive feature every week so that compounds really quickly.
Richard Walker: 29:41
Yeah, my gosh, the way I'm seeing it in my own company is that we're going to eliminate the backlog. The backlog is how many requests and things that we haven't been able to get to. Technical debt infrastructure updates but features and and requests customers have. I think within the year, we're going to be at a point where we just don't have a backlog anymore and somebody says, hey, could you build something? We'll be like, sure, we have time, let's go.
That's what that's what I dream of. And I think totally is feasible because of the power of AI if you're using it well, and obviously you guys are. That's remarkable. Thomas. All right.
I am getting to the end here. So I gotta get to my last question. But before I do that, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you?
Thomas Clawson: 30:26
Yeah. The best. I'm on LinkedIn. Thomas Clausen, you can search my name Thomas at is my email. Feel free to email me directly.
I love hearing from users things they want to do, need to do, hope to do. So those were both were great. And then our website is Dot app, so feel free to visit that and click around find what you need.
Richard Walker: 30:47
No that's awesome. All right Here comes my last question, which is honestly one of my favorites. Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?
Thomas Clawson: 30:56
Yeah, I've got two answers there. One is my dad. He ran a small business. Still does, you know, in grown up, seeing him be an entrepreneur. You know, it's not a tech company.
It's nothing flashy, but seeing him hire and lead people and, you know, being able to visit him. When I was little, I always thought, wow, I want to be like my dad someday. The second is my co-founder, Max Metcalf. Him and I are, I'd say, a very yin yang combo. We really we we disagree in a way that's amazing.
We work together in a way that's amazing. And the way he leads people is a lot of passion, a lot of energy, a lot of things. And I'm kind of more in the background of, well, what do we need to what needs to happen right away or what needs to happen that way? So there's like a great symbiotic relationship there. And then I worked at some great companies before For Podium and Whatnot.
Both had exceptional CEOs who I really look up to. Eric. Eric and Dennis both at Podium and then Grant at Whatnot as exceptional leaders.
Richard Walker: 31:59
And you're lucky to have had those experiences. That's really, really awesome. All right. I want to give a big thank you to Thomas Clawson, co-founder of Slant, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Thomas's website at slant.app, and don't forget to check out Quik! at Quickforms.com, where we make processing forms easier.
I hope you enjoyed this discussion. We'll click the like button, share this with someone, and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Thomas, thank you so much for joining me today.
Thomas Clawson: 32:28
Thank you, Rich. This was awesome.
Outro: 32:31
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