How Trust & Will CEO Cody Barbo grew Trust & Will to $32M revenue and 5K customers in 2024.

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is cody barbo he is building a company called trust and will think about it almost like online estate planning made super simple we'll jump into it cody ready to take us to the top let's rock it all right man so talk to us a little bit about the company so first off is this a pure place sas models or like a marketplace it's it's a hybrid we have an upfront fee that we charge for our three products and then there's an ongoing annual subscription because estate planning is a lifetime of updates it's not you set it up once you're done with it you have kids you buy a home you build your wealth you have an inheritance you have liquidity we want to encourage people and use technology to update their estate plans throughout their lifetime so that's where the subscription comes in is this just for rich people no no i would say that the misconception of estate planning is that people assume that it's for the wealthy in fact the most important reasons to set up an estate plan is if you own property you have assets worth protecting or if you're a parent you can appoint guardians for your children you can protect your home and your assets with a trust avoiding probate court which can cost a lot of time and money an emotional toll especially if you've lost a family member so really it's built for the everyday family in this country out of curiosity can i give an example of my dad here in a second what's the average age of a parent or person that is paying you guys using you yeah so majority about 70 of our members are going to fall within the kind of 25 to 50 range and have minor children it doesn't discount the fact that 30 percent of our members are 55 plus but our core focus is really people that are starting families buying their home building their wealth and going on this journey okay yeah i was going to i was going to ask i just went through some of my dad who's 83 and i mean he like can't he can barely type his thumbs are too big he doesn't even understand like a keyboard text and i'm trying to say dad call a freaking lawyer and get this stuff done and he's like handwriting stuff out it would be a nightmare for me to try and get him to use this even though he desperately needs it yeah 40 of boomers have no form of estate plan which is honestly a crisis you think of people our age that are now entering the kind of caregiver role taking care of our aging parents or grandparents and it's incredibly important to have these documents set up to make it easier for a transition when and if the time eventually comes so for hopefully our parents not for a long time but it is a reality that we have to face at some point yep so okay paint the picture here let's let's go to your core cohere 70 between 25 and 50. someone listening around 30 years old they want to use you on average what are they going to pay on the upfront fee and what are they going to pay on the annual subscription yeah so we try to price our products as affordable as we can we have three products in the market we have guardian for the first time parent which is 39 for an individual 49 for a couple 10 bucks a year we have our will package which is 69 for an individual 129 for a couple it's an ongoing fee of 20 to 30 a year depending on which product sorry that was 69 69 for an individual will and 129 for a couple and then we have our trust package which is 399 and 4.99 with a 50 a year ongoing subscription so really it's for that mate 399 set up correct got it so someone's going to use all guardian will and trust products it's going to be kind of 40 per month plus 70 per month plus four sorry uh uh 40 to set up 70 to set up 400 to set up and then something like you know 30 to 60 dollars per year yeah yeah it's like 10 years yeah because it's kind of crazy like an estate plan if you go to an attorney you're gonna spend anywhere from two to five thousand dollars to set this up just to make a simple update like you had another kid you bought a new property you moved states it might cost you a thousand two thousand dollars so just having that nominal annual subscription allows us to kind of keep that maintenance and relationship with our members so that as they go through life these life events happen i'm living proof of it i got married having a kid this year and then we'll be buying home it's like it's logical to go set up and update these documents but not have to cost you an arm and a leg to do so you're the perfect founder for this company so um before before i get more the backstory or the journey to this point give me a sweet spot here so it sounds like people ignore the setup fees for a second is it fair to say maybe the average is a person paying you something like 40 50 bucks a year yeah about so yeah if you average it across the products okay fair enough and and is there are there any power laws across the products in other words one one of these products makes it more than 80 of the revenue yeah the trust makes up a considerable amount of our revenue considering that our base products the guardian is at 50 and our trust product is at 500 it is a 10x jump to the trust i think with estate planning most attorneys want you to set up a trust it is the best option if you want to protect your assets avoid probate and avoid those fees that are associated with it but for the first time parent who maybe doesn't own any homes i think of like the younger millennial parent like mid to late 20s who just had their first kid doesn't own any home or any property or assets the peace of mind of knowing that your kids are protected is the single most important thing that we're trying to hit on which is why 45 million parents with minor kids in this country don't have any estate plan let's start them with the guardian product and then work them up towards a will package or trust package when the time is right never forcing them into something that they're not quite ready for yeah put this stuff on a timeline for me when did you launch the company we started talking about this august of 17 we entered a pitch competition that we took third place on at qualcom's headquarters which was like a forcing function to incorporate because we had tech stars approaches angel investors approach us we incorporated in october of 17. we went through tech stars in 2018 we raised our seed round uh that we announced in january of last year of 2 million we announced our series a last month of 6 million we've done some pretty cool stuff we're live nationwide we've had about 65 000 people sign up for trust and well for one of those three products we did the first one or is that free and paid free and paid free and paid we work with partners on financial services insurance couple other categories so we can discount the products or do revenue shares with those partners and then we have our kind of history defining milestone was last year in january we did the first electronic will in history us history which means digital signature digital notary digital storage of documents it is the future of not only every industry but it is estate planning it's just unfortunately the last industry to adopt modern tech so just be clear that was the first digital will or trust digital well digital digital will interesting yep okay so uh let's get more the early days here the first couple of months so um forcing function was the qualcomm event it sounds like you incorporated october of 20 of 2017. um how how long were you writing code before your first dollar of revenue do you remember yeah we launched our first product which was the will just a basic last will and testament in the states of california texas in april of 2018 that's when we finished techstars that was like our coming out party we were like hey we finished the text stars accelerator we launched our will in california texas to the biggest states and that's when our first paid customer came through because the first 200 were friends in the network that had kids their own property that we gave them a lot of freebies for putting up with our bugs okay and i always like to give this question if you remember can you quantify what you spent all in on your mvp before that first dollar revenue how creative were you yeah probably a couple hundred thousand i mean we had for context i have been a serial entrepreneur it's my third startup second venture backed my two co-founders daniel and brian they come from a custom software development background daniel was running biz dev brian was running product at the agency and then we had a fourth developer fourth person on the team who's developing the full system for our mvp so between the four of us upon incorporation we raised about i think like a quarter million going into the start of...