02.17.20 | Ep. 332 – Matt Moody, Bellwethr

Matt Moody Bellwethr Founder has spent his professional career as an entrepreneur. His most recent company, Bellwethr, uses intelligent interventions to create retention and revenue for its clients. Matt discussed his background and Bellwethr's early success with Joel.


Joel Goldberg:
Welcome into Rounding The Bases. Another episode on the way I'm Joel Goldberg and before we get to the guests, just a couple of things I wanted to talk about and first off, I can't believe that we're sitting here as this is released in the middle of February already 2020 and in my world, middle of February means that pitchers and catchers have reported in baseball. For anyone that's listened to this podcast, you'll know that there are plenty of baseball references as a baseball announcer. I use a lot of baseball analogies and lessons from baseball in the podcast and also in my speaking business. I when I present to companies and associations, but really the podcast and the presentations are not about baseball, but in my other world, baseball is 24 seven certainly once the season begins, which this year will be March 26th for the Kansas City Royals, but middle of February means that pitchers and catchers have reported the work has begun.

Joel Goldberg:
I'm bringing that up because as this is released here on the 17th of February, I am right now in Arizona with the Royals. Not a long stay, but here to do a bunch of interviews. And what I love about spring training minus of course the, the weather that's a, uh, given the warm weather to get away from the cold of Kansas city in the Midwest is just the fresh start. And I think there's so many lessons to be learned in terms of spring training, wiping the slate clean, focusing on fundamentals, taking stock of what you have in an organization, developing the younger talent that you have meshing together as one unit. And in the case of the Royals and baseball, they have about six weeks to do that and, and really work on those fundamentals and, and tweaking the little things, those little things like small ball that I so often talk about in this podcast.

Joel Goldberg:
So happy to be in spring training. I'll be back home really soon. Some speaking engagements coming up. As always, if you want to reach me, you can do so at JoelGoldbergmedia.com and then the other quick little announcement that I wanted to make is that the podcast has one more episode that'll be released and then that'll be it for season three. Take a few weeks or so off, and then season four will kick off with a surprise. Well, it doesn't have to be a surprise, but a really big name guest from a major company, a CEO and I already have about the first six episodes of season four already recorded, so a lot coming up soon, including a phenomenal guest for the end of season three which will be next week, February 24th with that said, and so many guests already having visited for an interview with me, I'm always open to suggestions, so again, you could reach out to me at Joelgoldbergmedia.com as for this episode, my guest is the CEO and founder of a company named Bellwethr.

Joel Goldberg:
Matt Moody is his name and it's artificial intelligence is the, I guess the simplest way to explain it on the website. They say you've worked too hard to get your customers, let's keep them use intelligent interventions to create retention and revenue at every touch point in the customer journey. Matt and I had a chance to visit at WeWork, which is where his office is out of and I spend a lot of time over there. We were Corrigan Station in Kansas city. Really cool dude. Very successful. They're building something big. So here's my conversation with Matt Moody.

Joel Goldberg:
Matt, good to catch up with you. And let's talk a little bit about artificial intelligence and your company Bellwethr. What is Bellwethr and how does it pertain to AI?

Matt Moody:
Yeah, so we primarily focus on using artificial intelligence to increase customer retention. Just basically putting that on autopilot. And that's sort of a good way to kind of think about what we do is sort of autopilot for your keeping customers happy and keeping them around and paying, , you know, artificial intelligence in general, the, there's a lot of different ways. And then, you know, there's still ongoing debates as what is, what is AI, what isn't AI. , the way that we kind of look at it as, it's a matter of finding patterns in data that are barely complex, something that's beyond, you know, something that we can see as humans. We can look at some, some things and go, Oh, there's the pattern. When you start adding more data, which obviously we're, we're flooded with that these days. You know, what we're doing with AI is sort of finding a pattern there that's associated with something. And then with that you have the ability to predict when you start seeing things, you know, you have some sort of a way of predicting future outcomes. That's in a general way.

Joel Goldberg:
I've mentioned it to you before. From a layman standpoint, AI to me is getting into my email and as I'm wrapping up an email and I say, have a, and it fills in great weekend. If it knows what's going on and it's Thursday or Friday, so such great weekend. If it's Monday, hopefully it says great week. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's not. I think that everybody understands that at this point you're obviously at a much higher level and we'll get into that. So who are your type of clients?

Matt Moody:
Yeah, so we primarily we have sort of different tiers and we, uh, at the, at the highest level, what we say is it's ongoing relationship. It's not like a one off where you go to the grocery store and you may go to one store one time and you buy one thing. It's always some sort of, either it's a recurring billing. We all are flooded with subscriptions these days. So we have subscription, you know, uh, we're, we sell to other businesses and they have a subscription model. We also serve banks. You know, there's an ongoing relationship there. It's not a one off is basically the only thing that we don't, we don't really handle that.

Joel Goldberg:
So how did you get here, we'll talk about your background and the really interesting and unique stops, I think, unique in the sense of the, they're all steps along the way that that wouldn't necessarily at the time say you're going to end up here creating Bellwethr. What is fascinating to me, just the journey, but what led you to this.

Matt Moody: 
So leading into Bellwethr, so that was my fourth startup. The last one was acquired by a regional telecommunications company. And when I was there, I just had access to data, built a machine learning model that identified sort of a risk factor for customers. I just saw the value in that and felt like, Hey, this is probably something, at the time when I vested there I instantly kind of wanted to go out and do my own thing again and, and felt like that was a unique point at the time. And so  that was really the origin. Now it's, it's transformed a lot since then. A lot of pivots, a lot of learning. Uh, but that's, that's the origin, right? You're a younger guy, I'm guessing thirties, about 38. Yeah.

Joel Goldberg:
Okay. So, yeah, you're still at an age where it's okay to say what it is. Bu, so later thirties, where were you a kid that was messing around with computers and that type of stuff or no?

Matt Moody:
Yeah, yeah. I think, I mean, I, you know, I kind of think back and I'm, I'm pretty sure I had to, you know, it's that first wave of kids that had a computer their entire life. I don't even remember. I don't, my dad wasn't like a coder or anything, but we just always had a computer and he was always, you know, looking at the new one and bring in a new one into the house. And I, and I think I was probably, you know, not most of my friends did not. So, but yeah, I've kind of always been around them and always played around. And so you kind of stble into writing code here and there. And , I, I was definitely of like the first generation where you had like a web class. Right?

Joel Goldberg:
Right. Because my generation, we were the first to have computers, but at least at that age, we just use them to play games, maybe to, you know, write a paper or something. I mean, I can remember in college, so I'm about 10 years older than you. We, we just, you didn't have laptops for sure. And you weren't going to bring a computer with the heart, the big hard drive and the big monitor and all that stuff to a dorm room. So you had a word processor just to do papers w which was the next level from a typewriter. But certainly we didn't even know what the term coding was. My mom was a computer programmer in the later eighties into the 90s. But, but the word toting wasn't really even out there. So you grew up where that was, you know what, we didn't have really internet quite yet and it was more of a word processor type of thing. So you are in a generation where that was starting to evolve.

Matt Moody:
Yeah, yeah. We were, you know, we had the, the beat bop, you know, the old dial up. I mean I guess my parents were, I didn't know I was writing code or messing around, but I was just sort of curious about how it all worked and started playing around and I don't think I broke anything. At least it wasn't bad enough. Yeah. That was one. And that was also the time, you know, where you had a computer and it was like, it, it didn't work very well after, you know, it was so I guess there were viruses and you know, all kinds of other stuff that went wrong and nobody, you had antivirus software that was miserable to deal with.

Joel Goldberg:
and you waited for 10 minutes, 20 minutes and hoped it worked. Yes. Right. But you are at least starting to get your feet wet with that. Were you, are you a tinker or are you someone that likes to mess around with things and, and, and see what you can find, explore?

Matt Moody:
Yeah, cause I don't learn in a very conventional, it's not the normal, like I'm not like a classroom guy. I didn't do, wasn't a good student but if I can jump in and just play around with stuff, then that's just sort of how I've learned that, that I learned best.

Joel Goldberg:
But I think there's an interesting message there and you and I've talked about this, but you weren't a classroom guy and so, you know, 18, 19, 20 years ago not being a classroom guy could really label you in a certain way. And nowadays, not being a classroom guy, what we're starting to get rid of the stigma. There are paths and avenues that are becoming much more acceptable and normalized versus the traditional way. Certainly the way I grew up and even the way you did, I think. And you know, I remember you telling me that you did not graduate from Fort Hays, but look at this here now you own a very successful company that is growing and growing. And so what is the message there in terms of, of paths and journeys for young kids?

Matt Moody:
Well, I think, you nailed it. I mean as a society we've learned that there's different ways to learn. And that's one of the nice things about the internet and sort of the, I think one of the most valuable things is just the fact that you can find out anything. And so for somebody that's very curious and that wants to know something maybe isn't going to wait until, you know, second semester to tackle something that maybe they're curious about and you can just jump on and figure that out. , it opens so many more avenues and, and you know, there's different speeds of learning. And I think that's, that's probably one of the things that has been, that's really changing now is that if you want to learn something, you can, you can, you can do it today.

Joel Goldberg:
And different ways of learning. It's not all about books, it's not all about and that is for some people, there's nothing wrong with that either, but, but the fact that there are different ways to do that. So how curious of a person are you in general?

Matt Moody:
Probably annoyingly curious as my, I think my wife would probably attest that. , and, and some of the, some, the members of Bellwethr would probably agree with that too, that it's like, Oh, Hey, we probably didn't need to think about that problem right in right this second or dig in as deep. , so yeah, I think, I'm probably overly curious,

Joel Goldberg:
But in turn, you know, this in terms of building a company around a technology that is evolving by the day, that curiosity and you're not the only one within the company I'm sure really serves you well. How much enjoyment do you take in being in a field that is constantly changing and the element of disruption?

Matt Moody:
Yeah, well, and I think that's probably why I sort of gravitate towards that is that it is, I mean, it's changing constantly. It's not something that you're going to be, you know, if you try to set it in stone, you're going to get surpassed. There's going to be, you know, there's an evolution in all the different aspects. And, , you know, we were talking about today and you know, the , the competitors that we labeled a year ago, , there's more now. There's, I mean, within that was literally, you know, six months ago. We have a completely different list today. So it's, you know, that, but it, but it makes it really challenging, but also really exciting because it also means that, there's gigantic opportunity and it's just a matter of continuing to solve problems.

Joel Goldberg:
How much do you enjoy that too? I mean, competition, I think you can go, and we'll talk about this later because you are a former athlete, but, , competition for pushing one of two ways and there are those that thrive on that competition. So being in an industry where not only is it constantly evolving but more people are understanding the value and the importance of being in that spot, how important is it for you and Bellwethr to stay ahead of the curve and how much do you enjoy that?

Matt Moody Bellwethr:
Yeah, I think most of the time I enjoy it. Sometimes I'd like to be able to take a little bit of a break, but it just doesn't, it doesn't work that way in this space. , I think, I mean, that's one of the beauties of, of competition and that, you know, ultimately we're, we're serving and solving problems and, and, , improving things that we'd like to think that we're improving things for not just our customers, but also consumer level, and, and pushing forward. And ultimately that competition is going to end up generating better experiences for virtually everybody.

Joel Goldberg:
What element of this, in terms of, you know, your role of running Bellwethr water excites you the most? Is that the technology piece? Is it the business side of it? Entrepreneurship, I mean, you, you now have your one, you have your hands in everything, but also you're a leader and you're having to delegate and let other people do those types of things. What do you enjoy the most?

Matt Moody:
Definitely the problem solving, seeing it actually work for our customers and seeing, like we look at it as we call experiences. Every time that our software is engaged, we see what that experience looks like. We can see the data, we can see what happened, how somebody engaged. Then when we get testimonials back that like, you know, we got one the other day that somebody who said, Hey, this isn't, this isn't a nice to have. It's a need to have. And we're like, Hey, that is literally, there's no better compliment for what we're doing. So I think that's my favorite part is just seeing the impact that we're having and then also being excited about the opportunity for where that can go and branching out to really meaningful problems. There's some things that, you know, we feel like we're capturing data that could then help us solve some really important problems in the future.

Joel Goldberg:
Well, because that's part of it too, right? I mean, I know this, that the service that you guys are providing should be, and in many cases is a necessity for most of these companies. So what challenges do you have in convincing them that they need it versus this would be something cool to have?

Matt Moody:
Yeah, and that's the challenge in something new. You know, we're offering something that's, there's not a lot of direct, you know, apples to apples, competitors. It's a new application and a lot of senses and , now the problem has been there for a long time. There's different ways to handle it. So it's, it's mostly like, it's mostly communication. It's communicating, Hey, there's a new way to solve that problem. Then it becomes like, you know, here, here are the incentives of the reasons why you should solve it in this manner and you know what the outcome would end up being for the business. So it's, it's mostly just a communication of "Hey, you know, that problem that you may not even necessarily acknowledge on a day to day basis," but the way that, you know, cause you solved it in a sense. So now we're saying, Hey, we can solve that in an exponentially greater manner.

Joel Goldberg:
I thought it was interesting to dig on your website. It says democratizing AI. Now that makes a lot of sense to me. At least in my mind. What it's saying is that AI should be for everyone. I know you go off to a conference, you'll, you'll meet a lot of companies. How do you sell to them Bellwethr.

Matt Moody Bellwethr:
Yeah. So when we have sort of our marketing channels where we're trying to get the message out, you know, on Google where people are searching for, maybe they're searching for that specific problem. , you know, LinkedIn where we're just talking about solving the different problems in general. Then we have our business development team that's out, you know, trying to talk to people and, and communicate the value that we can deliver

Joel Goldberg:
For you as someone that, I mean you've had a lot of different roles. I also know that you have that background with coding. You probably don't have time to spend on coding like you did in previous years. You are running a very successful and still new and growing company. What was the launch date?

Matt Moody:
I mean 2017 was like the first iteration and then we and it was a different. We were solving the problem in a different way and we weren't as heavy on the we hadn't raised any money. It was a very small operation and I wasn't planning on growing it. So 2017and then 2018 was when I felt like I stumbled on something and it needed to be a different sort of entity. So 2018 was really more of the birth of what we were, what we're doing and what it looks like today.

Joel Goldberg:
Here you are in 2020 so do you enjoy the element of, of delegating and the flip side of that, how much of a challenge was that to let go of some things that you were very good at are very good at but maybe didn't have the time for?

Matt Moody:
Oh, it's the still my biggest challenge because it's when you can jump in and do some like certain things. I have experienced in a lot of the different friends and so it's sort of like I have to kind of hold myself back because we have people that we want them to have ownership of these things and if they constantly feel like I'm jumping into jumping into the middle, then it can sort of mess with the flow and the process that we have in place. So I still fight that. I imagine, you know, some of the team would be like, yeah you could, you could do that even less, but it's an ongoing challenge.

Joel Goldberg:
You guys have obviously grown a lot. You started it with how many people.

Matt Moody:
We started it really like the first, the first eight months it was just me. , and then we grew it to four and we were four for a little while and then , we were four up until May of 2019 and then we went from four to now we're 15.

Joel Goldberg:
And maybe growing more. So a couple of questions here. First and foremost, how have you attracted talent? Because there are a lot of brilliant minds out there and a little bit of what we talked about before , two kids that are coming out of school now or totally different. Not even just from when I came out of school, but even from when you were in school too. They know things. This has just been a part of their DNA. So if you are tinkering, this was something that was laid out for them to explore. You had to kind of find it a little bit on your, on your own. How are you bringing in talent? ,

Matt Moody Bellwethr:
We, we've been incredibly lucky on that front. Part of it is, , I mean I guess I would say the recipe for us has been that we're, we kind of have a quirky culture. It's a little different and I think, you know, for attracting some of that talent, they don't look at it as like a, you know, you sort of have the option of like, Hey, I can go work for this big tech company where everything's sort of status quo or I could go work at a startup, which means it's going to be a lot more chaotic. Maybe, you know, there's a lot more, there can be faster opportunity and that's also attractive. And so we kind of try to leverage sort of our weaknesses and that we're small.  We don't have, you know, we don't have all of the benefits of somebody like a Microsoft or Google. So we try to make sure that we turn those obstacles, we make those obstacles more of a, more of an opportunity. And then the other thing for us is that we're, we are, because we're, we're using an even, you know, AI sort of all advancing and there's so much going on there. We're using a specific form that is, that's sort of the next wave and it's pretty, pretty sexy in the, uh, in the tech side, the tech ecosystem. So that part attracts a lot of the, the really up and coming talent that they're like, Hey, this is some, this is the new wave inside of this giant wave. So that we using that, those two sort of elements that are sort of the culture we're trying to establish and, and, and, you know, sort of the forefront of, of AI.

Joel Goldberg:
Tell me about the process of raising money too, and how much of that pitch was exactly that in terms of something that was up and coming. And I don't know if that's, I think you probably had at least a little bit of that background from, from your early years in business and entrepreneurship, but, , how has the funding gone and, and what is your strategy been?

Matt Moody:
Yeah, so we, we raised two and a half million seed round back in. We closed it in May of 2019. And you know, it's, I mean, it's challenging when you're, the seed seed round is, is, I mean, you're in the Wild West because there's not, you don't have all the, you know, most of the investors that are in that side, they understand that it's super high risk, super high reward if you get in at that stage and it's, it's a challenge. It's especially challenging at that point because there's just not, you know, it's tougher for them to gauge because there's less data, there's less information about what, you know, there's less than, there is no track record. I was able to leverage the, Hey, we're using this new technology, you know, can show them what we're doing. And then also, you know, it was obvious, it was clearly beneficial that I had, I'd been sort of I'd done it a couple times.

Joel Goldberg:
I want to talk a little bit about your background in terms of entrepreneurship because you know, you look at, look at your LinkedIn and look at your, your resume and you've done a lot of different things. Maybe at first glance you'd say, wait, how, how do these all lead to Bellwethr? So what, let's begin with the Relaxing Company, which is totally different than a background in digital media, which is totally different than AI. But maybe there's a common theme to all of that. How did you come to, to found the Relaxing Company and what was that?

Matt Moody Bellwethr:
Yeah, so, , that was a, was it started with a single product called Mary Jane's relaxing soda. It doesn't have what you'd assume it had. That one originated out of I, I was, I was a product developer at a supplement company before that. And , I got laid off. That was like 2008. So when things started tanking in the economy, then you don't need new product, you need to shore up what you have. So somebody's working on sort of R and D isn't all that necessary. So I kind of was like, Hey, I've been working on different ideas here. At that point felt like I didn't really have and there weren't, it wasn't that easy to find a job at that point either. So it felt like there wasn't a whole lot of avenues sort of just kind of got thrusted into, now that supplement company I had worked for was a startup. SoI had kinda gotten to see a little bit of the ropes. So started Mary Jane this really, and the idea was, Hey, there's an opportunity on the opposite spectr from the energy drink boom at the time that was happening. and I'm like, Hey, there's probably something here. I knew some of the, the different herbs that were out there and not the herbs that now the legal stuff. Yeah. Yeah. No, I clearly leveraged the name, which, which ended up being the, the sort of, the spark for that one because it attracted a bunch of media attention. You know, we got that one going and got it into Whole Foods and some 7Eleven stores and different distribution, like beer distributors across the country. Ultimately it ended up being a flash in the pan. But.

Joel Goldberg:
how long did that last?

Matt Moody:
Uh, two years. Yeah, two years. I worked on that one. So what worked and what didn't. I mean we had, you know, sort of like the e-commerce element. We naturally, that part came pretty natural. We'll put up a webpage and we'll sell it a horrible business idea to sell soft drinks online where the shipping costs three times as much as the product. Horrible, horrible business model. Not that well thought out. But ultimately we did it just as like a, you know, Hey, we'll throw up this web page and let people order. And then we attracted a bunch of media attention because of the name and we had like a, you know, it was a unique feeling that you'd get from drinking it. And, so we started selling out online, which again, we weren't making any money cause the, the economics didn't work.

Joel Goldberg:
Had the idea.

Matt Moody:
Yeah. Yeah. And then we got some stores and we got everything going now. It was 2008. Ultimately that one failed. We were selling at the volume we needed in all the stores. But we never raised that much money. We didn't raise nearly enough to keep it going and it's a low margin business. And, so ultimately we didn't, you know, we never even took on any debt and we just, basically ran out and we couldn't afford to, to sort of keep increasing the vole of production and sort of grow too fast in a sense.

Joel Goldberg:
You move on from there and now you're in the digital media world and Salina Post, Hays Post. What was your experience in digital media?

Matt Moody:
Yeah, I mean, I didn't, I didn't have anytime at the time when I started it. So when I was at like doing the soft drink company, I, we, I started in when I was living in Denver and then I moved out to California. , and ultimately at the end I didn't have any money. And so I'm like, well, I guess I'm going to go back to Kansas and came back and tried to take some of the lessons that I'd learned. You know, I was trying to raise money for the soft drink company out in California and noticed, you know, Hey, we have this great e-commerce element, but the economics don't work. , I saw some of the other companies that were pitching their products and then, you know, they're purely digital software of things. So I felt like, Hey, I can go back and, I'll go back to Kansas and I'll, I'll try to bring some of these ideas and bring them back and do them here and that one ended up taken off and worked out really well and was acquired, , within the first year of doing it. And that was, that was it. Like I, I just kinda tried to pay attention at the end of, the nice thing about digital products is that you can iterate really fast. You can, you can measure what's working, what isn't working. You can change, you can try new things really easily. , which ultimately served sort of like, my way of doing things like move fast, figure things out, dump what doesn't work and iterate on what does,

Joel Goldberg:
let's get to the baseball themed questions as we're sitting here at WeWork, just heard about them. The biggest home run that you have hit with Bellwethr or in your career.

Matt Moody:
Mmm. Okay. So with my career then I think I'd have to go, I always try to like keep the theme of taking a challenge and turning it into something positive. So when I had my soft drink company, we were behind, we were sold out. We were, but we had no product and we kept selling. And it was just, you know, we had to try to figure out how to, how to shut it off almost and we had a production run coming in. People, their orders had been delayed, got the, got the delivery and when checked and, they'd put the wrong colored caps on our bottles and it, it looked horrible. I mean it was like we were silver and blue and they put gold caps. I think I can kind of use this one as like part of the experience of dealing with the stress of like, Oh, this is horrible, but yet stopping, not freaking out. and we ended up turning it into a, we labeled it a contest or like, Oh, Hey, who gets the gold cap? It's like the Willy Wonka thing. I just kind of had that idea. Wevsend them all out and now naturally everybody at the time it was like, Oh, there's going to be specialty ones that you get the golden cap. Now everybody got the gold cap. Uh, but it ended up blowing up on Twitter and, , it, it ended up creating more sales because everybody thought it was cool. Uh, we, we, you know, the idea was that if you got to go cap, you got a tee shirt. And so yeah, we didn't, we didn't actually think anybody would turn the gold caps in, but every single person turned it in and it ended up, ended up being one of the cooler things, you know, it got picked up on the media that we were doing a Willy Wonka thing. And so we turned that, you know, turning that one from a huge negative and, something that just felt really bad into something awesome.

Joel Goldberg:
So really turning a potential miss into a home run with the buzz that you got. So that leads me to the second baseball themed question and maybe this was it, or maybe it was something else, or maybe that was, it was that business in general. What's the biggest swing and miss that you've taken?

Matt Moody:
Mmm, well I think that was, that company ended up being, you know, the biggest it was, it ended up being sort of a flash in the pan. That was a big strike. Went all in on it, put every dollar ahead and do it. And, and I mean there were awesome lessons and learned a ton from it and, and ultimately an awesome experience, but it ended up in a pretty strong miss.

Joel Goldberg:
So, so those lessons learned how they helped you today with Bellwethr?

Matt Moody: I think the, you know, just trying to make sure that, you know, really focusing on strengths and, you know, cause you have the ability to kind of bounce around and , for somebody like me that can bounce around really easily, , it, it, you know, I think focus is probably the one thing I learned is not spreading ourselves too thin and also just making sure that there's, you know, there's a lot more behind, you know, the decision process

Joel Goldberg:
And the final baseball theme question, what I call the small ball question, my favorite. What are the little things in the world of Bellwethr that lead to the big things? What are you talking about a quirky culture. What are the little things that make up that great, quirky culture for you guys?

Matt Moody:
I think, you know, we want to make sure that it's fun. Ultimately we try to make sure that it's fun and I think there's, you know, some other little things that, , we try to stress. , one of them being that we, we've told everybody that nobody, you know, we don't use the phrase that they work for the company. They don't work for me. They don't work for my co founder. They work at the company. They ultimately work for experiences for compensation of course, nobody's going to keep working if they don't get paid. , and, and they, they open the, they've worked for learning. , and so we try to make sure that that's the culture. It's not a culture of, Hey, you're my employee. Nobody, we don't use those sorts of phrases. , that one. And we have some quirky, we, you have these, you know, we have these weird trophies. We have a gigantic taco that that gets passed around every month, for the person that's helped. It's, we have a sort of a shout out calculator that, you know, how many times you've helped other people. , we, we send our customers goat trophies in the mail for the performance in their, like when they use our application. Yeah. It's a long thing, but just some of those little quirky things that we kind of find our funnel. We just want the experience to be different and to be, to stand out and be sort of one of a kind.

Joel Goldberg:
That's, that's a little bit of the sports background to me cause there's so many teams at every level that handout the, the whatever of the game, you know, to the, to the top performer or the, the, you know, the guy that's grinding the most, the grittiest, the, you know, you see it in hockey a lot. The hard helmet or the, the whatever it is, it might not be the top person, but someone that's contributing to that definitely resonates with me. All right, four final questions as we round the bases and I know that you did play some college baseball, right handed pitcher back a number of years ago. What was the scouting report on Matt Moody, which is a great sounding sports name athlete's name too, by the way. It's just got a little bit of that ring to it. What was the scouting report on the arm of Matt Moody in the late two thousands Oh, is that right? Late 2000.

Matt Moody:
Late nineties, early 2000. Oh yeah, I'm going to guess mostly just a fast ball. And then when I, uh, I blew out my elbow, , and my very first college game, as a freshman and, and so then after that, then it, I was trying to remember, Oh, then I, then it became mostly like I had to, you know, spot and.

Joel Goldberg:
you meet more than just the fast ball anyway. Certainly on the college level and beyond. Right. So, so you added the changeup to the mix?

Matt Moody:
Yeah, I had to change it up. My arm angle had to change a little bit and so I added the change up and that ended up being my best pitch.

Joel Goldberg:
Is there anything you learned from that? I mean, I know you didn't end up playing and competing probably as long as you expected to or wanted to yet. Most people at that level, no, they're never going to make it to the big leagues. Some have those dreams, some make it, most don't. That's just the odds. What, what did you learn from that that maybe translates to today?

Matt Moody:
Hmm. Oh, I mean, so, uh, I would say that virtually all, every success I've had is probably derived from, because it wasn't in the classroom for me. , I would say mostly came from baseball and primarily pitching. , just because I think, you know, you learn pretty quickly that, you know, you can't, you can't freak out, you freak out and everything gets worse. So I think handling the pressure, handling the stress and just sort of like the thinking that goes on the problem solving that is real, literally every pitch. I feel like it was probably the best thing that I did as far as shaping, now wasn't the plan to go this route? Yeah. I mean, I definitely, for the longest time thought that I was just going to keep playing but ultimately, probably the most beneficial thing I did as far as like how it ended up impacting what I do now.

Joel Goldberg:
Second question as we round the bases, the name Bellwethr, which is not spelled the way people would expect it to. Tell me about the origin and the spelling of that.

Matt Moody:
Yeah. So the origin, I mean, I kind of, we were, it's all it's predictive sort of technology. And so, you know, kind of went to the old, thesaurus and was like, ah, Bellwethr meaning, you know, just the definition as to a predictor of the future. Now since then I did a lot more research into it. I guess the, the misspell was because that was the domain. I couldn't get the actual domain. So we went full techie and we're like, we'll drop the vowel and Hey, that domain's available. So we'll go with that. Now since then found out that a Bellwethr is a back in the day of the shepherds and sheep and the flock. Then they put a ram at the front and put a bell around its neck. And so the shepherd could figure out where the flock was by the sound and so that's what, uh, that's what a whether is actually a Ram I guess. So. I didn't know that when I named it, but

Joel Goldberg:
B. E L L W. E. T. H. R.

Matt Moody:
yeah. Right. Yeah. No, ER at the

Joel Goldberg:
end, no, ER, at the end you can find it. If you, if you start Googling it, you'll, you'll find a third question as we round the bases, is there something in the world of artificial intelligence, anything that you've learned or seen, constant developments that just blows your mind that, I think as I was telling me that, you know, anytime we buy a new toy in the house, the Roomba will just clean the room and figure out where it wants to go. Could, I never envisioned that 10 years ago. Look at cable. At this point, people are cutting the cord for cable. There's another one that I don't think 10 years now anyone will have traditional cable. And, and we'll be digesting all of this in different ways and streaming services and on and on. Nothing looks today like it did very little. Looks to me like it did 10, 15 years ago. What blows your mind?

Matt Moody: 
Actually I was using one the other day. I was using a new tool for my email and , I was typing in like a date and , you know, this, this new email client and all of a sudden popped over from the side, my calendar for that date and I'm like, okay, this is great. Now I don't have to go open my calendar and go look instantly. Just kind of showed it. I'm like that, that's pretty slick. So I think some of the new technology where we can interpret some of the language and we can figure out what is going on in our heads and what would be helpful. I think using it for that, those sorts of things that, those, those are literally really tiny things. But I feel like they're just super powerful.

Joel Goldberg: 
There's so many of them out there too.

Matt Moody:
Yeah, there's tons

Joel Goldberg:
And even a month or two months from now, you'll see something new or see something new. It's like, wow, this is really cool. Why didn't I think of this? And you guys are thinking of those things. Final question, the walk off as we round the bases, what's the longterm prognosis for Bellwethr? 10 years from now, five, 10, 20 years from now? What, what do you want to see happen?

Matt Moody:
Yeah, I think we want to be involved in virtually every element of the customer journey. You know, we look at it from, we try to engage in different, when different things happen, we call them events and that can be anything from when you go to cancel to when you've sign up to, you know, there's all these little micro events and we want to basically make every single customer journey and customer experience better and contextual, you know, based on what's most likely to, I mean, at the end of the day, make the customer happy, which keeps the customer a customer.

Joel Goldberg:
And if anyone listening wants to get ahold of Bellwethr, how can they do so?

Matt Moody:
Yeah. Bellwethr.com just B. E. L L. W. E. T. H.R.com and we're on Twitter and the usual stuff,

Joel Goldberg:
at Bellwethr?

Matt Moody:
Get Bellwethr.

Joel Goldberg: 
That's okay. B. E. L. L. who's gonna steal? B. E. L. L. W. E. T. H. R.

Matt Moody: 
that's what I thought.

Joel Goldberg:
Matt, congratulations on all the success and all of what you have coming ahead. Can't wait to see what it is. I know there'll be big developments and small ones for that matter that are important along the way. Thanks for doing the podcast.

Matt Moody:
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Joel Goldberg:
And you can get ahold of me at JoelGoldbergmedia.com hope to catch you next time on Rounding The Bases.


Rounding the Bases with Joel Goldberg Podcast was created to share the stories of men and women in business and entrepreneurship that are both well knowing and or hidden gems. Joel believes that everyone has a story and their story matters which is why Joel is eager to connect with individuals that are bringing value to their community through innovation, leadership, entrepreneurial journeys, and developing company culture. If you would like to be a guest on Joel's podcast please email us at joel@joelgoldbergmedia.com.