[00:00:00] Charles Rosenblatt: We always say a good client for us is probably not someone who's delivering a cancer drug. And the reason why they're not a good client is you don't let your credit card expire when you need a cancer drug to stay alive.

[00:00:13] Andrew Michael: This is Churn.FM, the podcast for subscription economy pros. Each week we hear how the world's fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth.

[00:00:32] VO: How do you build a habit forming product? We crossed over that magic threshold to negative churn. You need to invest in customer success. It always comes down to retention and engagement. Completely bootstrapped, profitable and growing.

[00:00:44] Andrew Michael: Strategies, tactics and ideas brought together to help your business thrive in the subscription economy. I'm your host, Andrew Michael, and here's today's episode.

[00:00:55] Andrew Michael: Hey Charles, welcome to the show.

[00:00:57 ] Charles Rosenblatt: Hey, Andrew. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:58] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you. For the listeners, Charles is the CEO of Butter Payments, providing ML AI driven payment recovery for subscription merchants and recurring payments. Prior to Butter Payments, Charles was the CSO of Payoneer, CRO at Velo Payments and is an advisor to Cota Capital. So my first question for you today is going to take you way back. Do you think there was anything particular about your time at D.E. Shaw that shaped your career going forward?

[00:01:26] Charles Rosenblatt: Yeah, absolutely. A couple things that are really interesting. So I don't know how many people know D.E. Shaw. D.E. Shaw is an algorithmic hedge fund. It's now one of the three or four largest. But when I got there, and now I'm dating myself in some ways, which is the late 90s, we had an issue that was very similar to the long-term capital management crisis. And we lost hundreds of millions of dollars for Bank of America. And I'll never forget running the treasury team there, sitting in a room with whiteboards on every side of me in Times Square, calculating how we get money in and out so that we can cover our bills and stay afloat and to become what we did today.

[00:02:06] Charles Rosenblatt: And what I learned from that ironically was you could have the best strategies in the world. You could have the best people in the world. And I believe probably the smartest people I've ever worked with in my career were my time at D.E. Shaw. But outside factors can play a role that lead you to a negative result. And so it's kind of led me throughout my time, not only to be numbers based, which I inherently am, but also need to recognize what's going on in the world, what's going on with competition, what's going on with your clients, so to speak, because that will have a greater effect than having the best product in the entire world that you know intellectually is right, but doesn't actually have some of that practical application.

[00:02:51] Andrew Michael: Yeah, such a super interesting and valid point. So I'm like having that like a [inaudible] because I think that time, as you said, the short density of talents. I think the reason I asked is I think you probably just missed Jeff Bezos by a couple of years in your time there. But some great founders came out of D.E. Shaw as well and big companies. So it's always interesting to see that.

[00:03:10] Charles Rosenblatt: Many of my colleagues went to join Jeff at Amazon and I will say many of them have done quite well in working at that at the very beginning.

[00:03:21] Andrew Michael: Can you imagine? So you've obviously then stuck in the finance space in general throughout the career. Previously, CSO, Payoneer. What brought you today to come up to start leading [inaudible] Butter? Obviously, [inaudible], but now you've come on to take over things. What got you into Butter Payments? What excites you about the product and space?

[00:03:42] Charles Rosenblatt: Ironically, I didn't know a lot about the dunning space and churn space per se. I ran loyalty at Capital One in Washington Mutual and worked with multiple loyalty companies and customer retention over the course of my career. So that piece of it was understood. In fact, the former CEO worked for me many years ago and she called me and asked me, hey, could you help me with... we're looking to change the go to market side of the house. Could you help me with figuring some of that stuff out?

[00:04:12] Charles Rosenblatt: And as I learned more and more about product and our customers and what butter actually did and where butter could go and have it being a data centric business. We actually got into a conversation like, don't I join you? And so I joined her and sadly due to some family issues she had to resign. And they asked me to take over CEO. And once I had been in here and seen what our product does for our clients, and more importantly, what core assets we had that we could grow into new products and new entities, it was an easy decision for me to take over the role.

[00:04:44] Andrew Michael: Yeah. It's a sad circumstance that you say, but I think it's always interesting coming in where you've previously worked with somebody so they knew and understood like you were getting it and have a lot of trust because I think it takes a lot of trust as well to allow somebody else to step into your baby. You know, I think, but like just looking, have some amazing clients like MasterClass and FitBot, Diners Club.

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[00:05:06] Andrew Michael: So you mentioned a couple of things as well, like coming in prior to this, we were having this conversation coming in from like a little bit of a fresh perspective, not having spent your entire career in this space, but rather just on the fringes or doing things related, but not directly thinking about the problem continuously. Like what has been maybe one of the biggest surprises that you've learned or something you've learned coming into the dunning space, coming into a company like Butter that you're like, oh, is this really the case? Like I wouldn't have expected this with my experience in my previous career.

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[00:05:37] Charles Rosenblatt: Andrew to be blunt, I wouldn't have even expected for people to think about this as a problem, which is why our company was founded many years ago. And I think the world has evolved. People like Stripe have put a solution in there, into their solution to try to solve the problem. What inherently is interesting to me is how regimented this space still is. Right.

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[00:06:00] Charles Rosenblatt: So for instance, people say, we are going to put someone into dunning for 14 days. And so we're going to have the subscription go for 14 days. And they have that tied on the technical side behind how long they let someone have access to a product and how long you collect on the product. And to me, looking at the outside, I'm always looking to try to take things down to the lowest coefficient, because it's one of the things I've learned. And I feel like in this case, you have an industry that's tied these two things together that don't necessarily need to be tied together. And so a lot of what we're doing is leveraging what we've done in the past and now creating things to decouple those two processes.

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[00:06:43] Charles Rosenblatt: And I think that comes from learning of, I could tell anecdotes and bore some of your audience, but in general, this whole idea of people think things are tied together when actually they can be decoupled. And I think that was an important lesson for my past that we were able to bring into this space and learned about where the space is today.

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[00:07:02] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I think that's definitely something that's very refreshing about like beginner's eyes and beginning... I mean, coming into a new space and a new segment because you can really start to challenge some of the things that have been done in the past and people just took for granted. I think that's like, I was actually literally having a similar conversation today with somebody about one way a form is being filled. And I was like, why is this even done this way? And like, there was arguments and I said, because this is the way it is. People are familiar with this. I was like, But it makes zero sense. Like it's a complete waste of time. Let's double click into this notion that you're talking about now and why we've historically tied the dunning periods to the product periods. And why do you think it should be different? How do you see things changing?

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[00:07:44] Charles Rosenblatt: Sure. Yeah. So I think in some ways, technically it was easier, right? So I keep trying to get this payment from someone. And then the moment I stopped trying, I just switch off their membership. And you know what? For a radio who's getting paid for advertisers, a SiriusXM as an example, right? I could imagine they're okay leaving something on for 30 days because the cost for them of one additional person listening to the radio is negligible. In fact, it helps them on the advertising dollar side, right? They have another subscriber who's there even if the subscriber's not paid. In some cases, a freemium model actually works when you have an ad base.

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[00:08:26] Charles Rosenblatt: On the other side, when you look at an AI company, they have significant costs for every day that you stay on the platform. And so why, if you're going to give them 14 days to put them in dunning to recover the money or get the subscription paid, if you know they're going to pay, if you think they're going to pay you, it makes sense to leave them on. You don't want to ruin the customer experience. You'll get the money in the next 14 days through a mechanism like what Butter has, right? But if we know, if Butter knows 10 seconds after that payment fails that there's no way that payment is collectible, why in the world are you treating these people the same way and leaving them on for those 14 days where they get to free ride you and they get to essentially have costs to your system?

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[00:09:15] Charles Rosenblatt: And so we actually recently created a payment score which actually tells the merchant upfront. This person's likely to pay in the next 14 days. This person's not likely to pay. So you can take an activity, whether it be negative or positive overall. And so the beginning of the coupling those products allows you to actually make the right strategic decisions while still keeping the customer experience as good as possible.

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[00:09:41] Andrew Michael: And how are you coming out with that score then as well? Because I think that can be pretty subjective. I think obviously you're sitting on data and that's where it's coming from. How is this happening then? I think to your point as well, like it makes sense from an AI perspective where there's huge costs incurred by these products that you're consuming. And so if the payment's not coming through, shut it off immediately and call it a day. But how are you like distilling whether or not like payment is likely to come through or not?

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[00:10:08] Charles Rosenblatt: So we have billions of transactions that have gone through Butter since its inception. We look at 128 variables on every card transaction. We know certain cards are going to act in certain ways. Certain error codes are going to act in certain ways. Right? And that's where the ML and AI is really built in. And what we do, what we've done internally now for five years is created a score for each one of those people. And that score then turned into a dunning strategy, which was customized a segment level to be able to act in certain ways.

[00:10:42] Charles Rosenblatt: So really what we're doing now is externalizing that score. We know Andrew gave us a Chase debit card that has had an account that's always worked for X months, et cetera. But it's the 14th of the month -- I'm using a very simple example, but it's the 14th of the month. And we got an NSF as the code, not a fraud or anything like that. Probably means he's getting paid in the morning and he ran out of money, right? So we can give that a score of 95 that most likely we are going to actually get that money over the course of the next 14 days, right? Or data. It's much more complicated than that. I tried to simplify the...

[00:11:22] Charles Rosenblatt: And so I'll give you the other use case on it, which is if we give someone a 95, if I'm... I just actually did a LinkedIn post today about BarkBox and Squawk Box and what's going on in that industry. If I'm BarkBox and I need to send out the box and make the decision. If that person hasn't paid me within 36 hours, I sometimes shut off the subscription. I lose the CAC, I lose the revenue, et cetera. But if we gave them a 95 score and knew that we could collect in the next 14 days, they could actually send the box and it would be relatively risk-free and relatively... it would definitely NPV positive as a whole.

[00:12:00] Charles Rosenblatt: So to fully answer your question, it's based on the history. It's based on... we have seen billions of transactions and types of transactions. And we've had this score to run our recovery business where we've grown, you know, help build over a billion dollars in ARR for our clients. Now we're just sort of externalizing it. And to be honest, we're externalizing in such a way that even if the client wants to use someone else's dunning strategy or their own, they can still use our score as a variable. And that goes back to my Capital One days where I used to run risk innovation and we used to build overlay scores for models. And this is really an overlay score on the model that they can use to be able to make better business decisions.

[00:12:45] Andrew Michael: And then obviously I think this comes in from your experience, like dealing with cross border payments and from that side of things. I think one of the interesting things I also found as well on the show came up previously discussing like credit card failures and all the various reasons why they happen. Just one of the biggest reasons being credit card expiry dates. And on average, I think it's like 45% of your customer base will be expiring on a monthly basis. There's even just something as simple as that, just due to the way like critical card expires. I think if it's every two years. It works out to like 4% a month or something.

[00:13:19] Andrew Michael: So there's these little details that I think make such a big difference. And to your points in the beginning was like, you would not even thought people think about this stuff, but it is one of those things that like tends to be one of those quick wins you can do when it comes to churn and retention. It doesn't solve the problem, underlying issues that you might have from a retention standpoint, but it solves all the little low hanging fruit that you can really sort of increase retention unnecessary involuntary.

[00:13:43] Charles Rosenblatt: If I was running a business subscription business on my side, it could also lead to a lot of false positives or false negatives about the product I'm offering. Right. You could see 30% of the people walk out the door and your conclusion as a product owner could be my product isn't very good. And so 30% of the people are walking out the door. We need to go change the formula or change the market. When the reality is people want to stay with you and the reason it's not working is their credit card changed, right?

[00:14:13] Charles Rosenblatt: And so I keep going back to with all of my clients and all of our clients here at Butter and people we speak to, let's talk about the business side of this. This is a tool for you. This is a tool to help you. But the reality is I want to make the right decision. And if changing from, I'm going to date myself here by changing from old Coke to new Coke was because people falsely subscribed, unsubscribed to your product as involuntary churn, you could do a billion dollars of damage to your brand. Right? So this all gets to be awareness and understanding. And to be blunt, there are organizations we deal with who are highly analytic and probably figure this out themselves. And there are also organizations we deal with who don't spend their money on analytics and have to make these conclusions because they don't have that sort of background.[00:15:06] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think it's a very... good points as well. Something we discussed with Emeric Ernoult from Agorapulse was in the early days, they were just churn. We need to fix churn. And they were like, what is churn? And then they came up with sort of this insight internally that they first needed to figure out what was within their control and what was with outside of their controls. Because they dealt with a lot of small businesses, small businesses going out of business is not something they can really control as a business. So like they put that box of churn on one side.

[00:15:34] Andrew Michael: And then like to your point, things are credit card failures and these sort of things. These are like things that are slightly within your control, but they still like fall out of the back. And then once they could understand, break down the churn by the various aspects of what was within their business's control to fix versus whatnot, then it allowed them to have much more clarity in terms of what was actually possible and achievable when it came to reducing churn retention in the business. So I think it's very important to be able to have a good grasp and understanding of why are people leaving through the door and is it something that's actually on you to be fixing or is it results that are outside of your control as a business?

[00:16:08] Charles Rosenblatt: Absolutely. You know, I go back to my days at Capital One when I was there in 2004, 2005, as an example. We were a trading away the seventh biggest credit card company every year. So literally our customer attrition was equal to the amount of cards issued by the seventh largest card issuer in the year. We realized that within four more years, every American will have [inaudible] from a Capital One card. And then, of course, we get them back and we give them another card.

[00:16:37] Charles Rosenblatt: So we had to move, we moved a lot of our best people from the acquisition side to the customer management side, right? And I think in that was a lesson to me, which is so much focus is on figuring out to acquire the right customer, but then you don't do anything to keep them. And that's where I look at our service. I look at other retention plays and say, why in the world wouldn't you spend $20, I'm making up a number, to save a $500 NPV account rather than go spend $1,000 or $300 to go book a $500 account upfront where they may churn anyway?

[00:17:19] Charles Rosenblatt: And I think, you know, used to be the old joke with folks like DirecTV. If you wanted your price down, you just called and asked for the retention office, right? He said, I'm leaving DirecTV. Okay, I'm going to send you the retention office. Okay, your price is now lowered by $30 a month. Thank you very much. And whether you were going to leave or not, like the NFL package, I was never going to leave. But I was able to negotiate my rate down.

[00:17:42] Charles Rosenblatt: So what's real and what's not and really understanding the insights. So I'll give you an example on the churn side, meaning if we save 20% of your churn or 40% churn and half of them charge back afterwards because they don't want your product... even you'll learn a lesson that way. Now, we haven't seen that with any of our clients, to be fair, but I'm imagining it does happen. I'm imagining there are industries where people give false cards, people don't want their card charged through, and it really is a product problem. But I think, again, you need to figure that out and you need to be very smart about dissecting the information.

[00:18:21] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I actually just recently went through the process of doing a chargeback, like first time ever. I've always heard people talking about chargebacks on LinkedIn and complaining like some random customer trying to get money back. But I think there are certain cases where it is due and was actually with GoDaddy. I've been a customer of GoDaddy 15 years, I spend more than 20,000 on domains. Embarrassed to share. And they wouldn't give me a refund for a product that I purchased and they never delivered. And they said it was against their policy.

[00:18:51] Andrew Michael: But I think from that side as well, like it's important not to have this... brand reputation is important to not damage it. But I think if you're using a product or service like Butter or others, like you're counting on the fact that you're building a good product, you're coming up with the best intents and you're trying to actually deliver a service to your customers that your customers want. Because ultimately you're going to end up damaging your reputation. I think then also if you end up being lodged amounts of chargebacks, that impacts conversion rates on the front end as well for new people signing up.

[00:19:24] Charles Rosenblatt: There are some what I would call more unscrupulous practices in the recoveries space, right? So there are people who will force payments. And what that means is even if you have a negative balance on your bank account as a recovery tool, they will force that payment in to drive you to a higher negative balance. And while that is on the gray borderline of legal, it's not really brand centric. I don't feel it's highly ethical and we don't do that at Butter at all.

[00:19:55] Charles Rosenblatt: We actually work with our clients on their terms and conditions that they have to accept payment and make sure our strategy aligns with what terms and conditions their clients have agreed to from the very beginning. We created a new product that no one else has in the market, which is around people with multi-cards, with people who have put three or four cards down and the ability to try those cards and each card having its own ML strategy.

[00:20:21] Charles Rosenblatt: What we see in the market today is everyone treats the cards the same. So if you have an Amex, a debit card and a prepaid card, they will use the same strategy and bang on those cards and retry all three cards at the same time and just bang on. What we've done is we've created a way to decouple the three cards and realize the Amex should have a different strategy than the debit card, which should have a different strategy than the prepaid card.

[00:20:45] Charles Rosenblatt: And even more so if there are rules in place. So we work with the client to say, do you have permission to try all of these cards or do you only have permission to try the primary card? So we're very careful about that. We're not really in a highly regulated space. Although my general counsel reminds me we are regulated. We're not getting hammered by the regulators as much as my old industries around cross border payments and credit card issuing, but there are still rules and there are still ethics that you should have in doing that. And that's really important to me as we drive our product innovation and what we do as a company.

[00:21:22] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think those brand trust and integrity is going to become like a much valued commodity now going forward as well because just where it's so easy to build software, like more and more people want to be able to put trust in these brands. And so it's like the practices you employ for dunning and the way you charge customers and so forth, I think really reflects on that as well. And so it's like, you want to take the risk of cheating a customer overcharging or do you want...

[00:21:48] Andrew Michael: But on the flip side as well, I was just thinking now what you're talking about. think like software is probably one of the only industries where you allow customers to like consume your product and then never really expect a payment afterwards. Like an analogy would be like going to restaurant like once a month, every month you go and then like one month you go, you eat half your meal and you leave and then not expecting to pay for it because you've only eaten half of it and you haven't put a credit card down sort of things. But then the expectation and the consumer like to expectation would be like, oh no, like I've churned, like I'm not accountable for that 15 days that I've actually been consuming your service for. And it's just become like the norm as well.

[00:22:26] Charles Rosenblatt: Yeah. Especially in digital products. We have clients across from AI to gyms to media, the MasterClasses of the world, et cetera, to people like haircare products and things. And we actually see very different activity with physical products versus digital products. It's why that score I talked to you about earlier is the allowing of physical products to be sent or digital products to be shut off. So actually the same score has two inverse use cases. Right.

[00:22:57] Charles Rosenblatt: And I think the expectation of most people is they'll free ride what they can free ride. And I'm not saying anything. I don't think I'm saying anything shocking that people will free ride on things if they can. The example you gave is not socially acceptable, right? It's not socially acceptable to walk in the restaurant, eat half your meal, walk out and say, I'm done with your restaurant. And so I'm going to eat half your meal. Right. The idea of using an AI platform for five extra days after your subscription hasn't paid because they didn't shut me off is a hidden thing. It's a personal thing. I don't even think you're purposely manipulating that company. Right. You're just like, well, if they were dumb enough not to turn me off, then I'm just going to take advantage. And I think that's what you need to go back to figuring out what's the customer intent on all of them.

[00:23:47] Andrew Michael: But yeah, I think it's that point you made. It's it becomes socially acceptable. And that's why the one is not and the other isn't and people will be willing to get away with it. So they do it. But at end of the day, like you are providing a service. And I think it's also the way we value these services because they're ephemeral and the digital in nature and they're not tangible, but ultimately like it is delivering value just as much as like plates with pastries at a restaurant.

[00:24:13] Charles Rosenblatt: And there's also discretionary versus needed. We always say a good client for us is probably not someone who's delivering a cancer drug. And the reason why they're not a good client is you don't let your credit card expire when you need a cancer drug to stay alive. Right? You may let your MasterClass subscription card go, which we solve the problem for them. Or you may let an AI product go, or you may not be even aware that your card expired as you were just talking about, right?

[00:24:44] Charles Rosenblatt: And so part of it is awareness. And that's why our other new product is actually an agentic AI workflow automation product, which includes email and SMS. And the goal is, while we over the course of time have really recovered payments algorithmically behind the scenes, we're actually adding a notion to work with our clients to actually do things like m email SMS and AI call center, leveraging the same ML we do in the past because historically they'd hire a Butter and Butter would handle the algorithmic side and internally they send emails and there would be no conversation. Well, Butter's trying this on day three. What's the email on day four? That didn't really exist.

[00:25:26] Charles Rosenblatt: And so we're actually launching next week, which will be, you know, probably after this airs. So we will have launched a product where we're actually working with clients to create a holistic ML driven strategy around all of those channels. And I think that helps some of that social acceptance and awareness as a whole.

[00:25:47] Andrew Michael: Yeah, for sure. We'll obviously definitely leave any show notes or anything we discussed today so people want to check that out. As you say, like this will be out by the time this episode is. Talking about airing the episode, it looks like we're coming towards the end of the episode. So want to make sure I ask a couple of questions, ask every guest that joins the show. The first question is, what's one thing that you know about churn and retention today that you wish you knew when you got started with your career?

[00:26:13] Charles Rosenblatt: Yeah, I think what I wish I knew was intent. Right. And I think it's still one of those major things. Right. And that there are some things you do with intent and there are some things you don't do with intent. And what I've learned running loyalty programs, running credit card companies, running the churn side of this and retention is that, you know, you shouldn't assume intent. Don't assume because someone put a card in a certain way or their card expired that that person wants to leave or purposely wants to leave. Don't assume... in the credit card world, don't assume when Joe Smith uses all 35,000 of his points to go buy something, it means he's going to leave the card because he emptied out his rewards balance. And I think understanding that psychology behind intent and then of course the numbers that drive it are absolutely critical.

[00:27:05] Andrew Michael: Very interesting. Yeah. And I think this is also typically something that we see people put too much reliance on data as well when it comes to churn and retention and taking specific actions. There's a lot of debates we've always had around like the churn risk scores and things like this. But like a lot of the times, like the stories happen outside of the product that happen in different spaces and like, what ultimately leads to churn is a series of multiple different events that have happened that on this are always going to show in the data or on this are going to show in the tent that you see on your end.

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[00:27:36] Charles Rosenblatt: I'll hop in for one second. It's exactly what I went to with the first question you asked me about D.E. Shaw, right? Which was outside circumstances play in the case. If you were the only newspaper in the city of Philadelphia and you had all the subscribers and people left, they didn't want newspaper. But if all of a sudden three new newspapers started in this... using example of newspapers, which is probably silly because it's probably not. Three new newspapers--

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[00:28:04] Andrew Michael: By the time this episode is, there probably won't be anymore.

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[00:28:06] Charles Rosenblatt: By the time this episode is, there may not be newspapers, yes. If three new newspapers started in the city of Philadelphia during that time and you're not looking at the outside factors, those outside factors that people now want to subscribe to those new newspapers and not your old newspaper where you had a monopoly is probably a bigger factor than anything. And I think that to what you just said a second ago, that looking at the marketplace as a whole is equally important in understanding churn as a data score. Although we believe a data score is very helpful.

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[00:28:39] Andrew Michael: Yep. And I'm not ruling them out. I'm just saying they're not the only thing as well. And yeah, I think to your point as well, remember like one of the things where that was like extremely visible was during COVID. I think like almost every single SaaS business initially faced some level of like extreme churn. And then others had some extreme growth and I think there was factors outside of their control that were environmental that had such huge impacts on business. And there's all these factors happening all the time, but just not at the same scale. And you don't even end up realizing a lot of them not happening to you, but that's just what business is. I think it's a lot more to your earlier point that there's so many different factors that can influence the final output. And it's not just about having the absolute best product.

[00:29:24] Andrew Michael: Last question then, Charles is like, obviously, I think we can maybe take this in the context of loyalty or you can decide as well in the context of dunning because now it's fresher on your mind. But like when it comes to the concept of loyalty or dunning, what's one question that you wish more people would ask you, but they don't?

[00:29:44] Charles Rosenblatt: It's an interesting question as a whole. When I tell people... now I'll give your listeners... what I used to charge for on the consulting side, right? In loyalty, the best rewards program are from a provider as the highest perceived value at the lowest actual cost. That's what you want to deliver as a whole. And I think inherently driving that sort of value to the end user is ultimately the critical element, no matter what you are doing. Right.

[00:30:24] Charles Rosenblatt: And I think if the question I got asked, we have clients and we have competitors and clients who will go on that will lift this by 50%. Right? No one comes to me and asks, what's the reality? Right? So part of me, I wish like, is this really possible? Could these people actually do this is a question I wish my sales folks were asked in the sales process. And we've had that happen before and we're like, let's look at the bottom line. We're driving your business $5 million extra in ARR. Even if you thought it was going to be 8 million, because that's what someone else said, right? Not on our side or on other sides. Isn't 5 million still good?

[00:31:10] Charles Rosenblatt: And so I wish people would ask me a question of, and I could ask them, what's the real value that's being derived and what's the real value versus the cost that you're looking at? Not the dream value of things as a whole. So I wish they would sort of ask me how realistic is what you're asking? I spent years... sorry, quick tangent, Andrew, I spent years in the VC world looking at doing due diligence for venture capitalists. And you know, every chart is up and to the right and up and to the right and up and to the right. And so you've learned that when you see enough decks, you just discount everything by 50 to 60%.

[00:31:50] Charles Rosenblatt: And the problem is when you get someone... and I ask my sales team, I go to my ML team every single time before we pitch a client and say, what's the actual number we can deliver? And that's what I go to the client with. And I realize I'm going to a lower number than some of the people we may be competing with with the business. And I'm hoping they come and ask me, why is your number potentially lower than their number? And I can explain because I could inflate my number by a hundred percent to try to win the deal.

[00:32:20] Charles Rosenblatt: I think that's really where I would like clients to go because I want to have an upfront, straightforward and honest conversation with all our clients so they know they are getting what they are promised and we deliver on that. And I think they need to ask the right questions to make sure that doesn't happen and they don't just come back to us six months after they may have taken up another thing, say, this one is only hitting this number, what's going on?

[00:32:46] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I think that's a great point. think it goes back to the earlier point, I think it's all around integrity because I think this is a brand trust. I think it starts with these conversations at the beginning and people need to be asking these questions about the products or services they own. If you're buying into a deal and then six months down the line, you're like, hey, wait a second, this is not what you promised. We're not hitting the 50% mark. I think that's a very bad damage on brand credibility. I see why you'd want more people to be asking you that from your side as well.

[00:33:19] Charles Rosenblatt: Look, I've run businesses my whole career. Dunning happens to be the one that I'm running now, but I've run card businesses, I've run loyalty business, I've run... I want to have conversations with my clients when the client is willing to, to talk about what their business goals are. And then we can fit in how our product fits into their business goals, as opposed to a procurement exercise of... what's your price for this service? I'm talking to your two competitors. Cause by the way, there aren't a lot of competitors in this space. It's nice from that perspective. That's the conversation I want to have. And so that's what I want people open doors and having run businesses my whole career. Maybe I can even be helpful on some of that with them outside of some of this dunning.

[00:34:03] Andrew Michael: Very nice. Charles, been absolutely pleased chatting to you today. Is there any final thoughts you want to leave the lessons with, like anything they should be aware of to keep up to speed with your work?

[00:34:12] Charles Rosenblatt: No, I mean, we're really excited to launch these new products that we're launching in Q1. We're excited about our core product and what we've delivered and moving across industries, as I said, from AI to pets to anything in the subscription space. And so, you know, I welcome anyone to reach out. I thought the question you were going ask me is the last question is who is going to win the Super Bowl. And since I am a diehard Seahawk fan, I'm going to say the Seahawks right now. And we'll see when this comes out whether, you know, that was [crosstalk]. I appreciate the time, Andrew. It was pleasure.

[00:34:48] Andrew Michael: Thanks, Charles. And yeah, that wasn't going to be the question I asked, but I'm glad you gave the prediction. So for the listeners, we'll make sure to leave everything we discussed today in the show notes. If you want to pick that up and take a look, check out Butter Payments as well you can. But thanks again for joining Charles, really appreciate the time and wish you best of luck now and hopefully your prediction comes right.

[00:35:06] Charles Rosenblatt: I hope so too. Thank you, Andrew and look forward to listening to your other podcasts and chatting again sometime soon.

[00:35:14] Andrew Michael: Cheers.

[00:35:21] Andrew Michael: And that's a wrap for the show today with me Andrew Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you were able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with Churn.FM and be notified about new episodes, blog posts and more, subscribe to our mailing list by visiting churn.fm.

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