832 - Justin Clegg (Allset) On Building The New Standard in Home Service Payments

Allset
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Mat Sherman: All right, how's it going, everyone. Welcome to another episode of forward thinking founders, where we talk to founders about their companies, their visions for the future and how the two collide today. I'm very excited to be talking to Justin Clegg. Who's the founder of Allset set. Welcome to the show ,how's it going?

Justin Clegg: Hey, Matt. Good to see you. And nice to be here.

Mat Sherman: Excited to have you on. Last time we saw each other. We were in San Francisco bay area for [00:02:00] startup grind. And here we are on the innerweb. So I'm excited to share what you're doing with the with the forward thinking founders, community, people that haven't heard of what you're doing, what are you working on? What is, what is Allset?

Justin Clegg: By by the way, you're just as cool in person as as you are online. So it was great.

Mat Sherman: Thank you. I I'm definitely an authentic, I mean, I I'm exactly who I am, both, both both sides and I don't hide anything.

Justin Clegg: Good thing. So yeah I'm the founder of allset . We are a Utah based startup.

We're a vertical SaaS with embedded FinTech and it's a conversational texting platform for home service businesses. So we define home service as everything from contractors, like plumbers, HVAC to. Outdoor companies like lawn care landscaping and then even cleaning companies like residential cleaning made service carpet window washing.

So it's a, a really massive market. We've got a, a really exciting go-to market sales team. Some folks hanging out and hit hitting the phones hard and we're growing very quickly. So that's our, our focus.

Mat Sherman: So walk me [00:03:00] through maybe a a customer experience from like one of your persona, like walk me through who's one person that would, that would engage with your, with your company, engage with your product and like, how would they U use all set?

Justin Clegg: Sure. So think of a company that runs a painting business. So the painting business has 10 to 20 contractors that work for them. Those individuals have a scheduling system or a CRM in place. They're gonna go to your home. And they're going to paint your walls. And when the appointment is marked completed in their CRM, Allset's going to take over from the rest from that point moving forward.

So we handle things like payments. We handle things like reviews, referrals and we also introduced automated tipping. Which has become a very exciting use case it's proving to solve for labor shortage. So in home services and really any industry today, especially SMBs, they are severely impacted by hiring and retention.

And so by introducing automated tipping we can [00:04:00] increase wages by and tips by 300% which translates to about 120 to $130 per month per technician which is valuable income. That goes towards paying for gas groceries and keeping people happy and motivated and staying with the company longer.

So our average tip amount is about 25 bucks. That Americans will leave. We have a 1.2 million annualized run rate in tips that are all handled and processed through texting. And that's just in a few short months. So building an exciting SaaS platform and then opening up customers wallet. And giving a way for them to provide feedback and insights

Mat Sherman: and walk me through like, you know, that's where you are now, but how, how did you get here, I guess, in other words, like why did you decide to start Allset or like, what's the what's the origin story here?

Justin Clegg: Yeah, so I moved to Utah in 2017 and I bought a home something that's a little bit easier to do than in Palo Alto. And the focus was, you know, understanding and putting on a product hat. [00:05:00] Of, you know, why home services was such a bad experience. And so everything from the scheduling to the communication, to the payments I had folks coming into our home you know, with checks with clipboards they smell like beef and cheese really a dearth of trust.

Right in terms of how the experience should be running. And you contrast that to, you know, your bay area you know, door dash Instacart, Uber experiences, where you can tap a button and you get XYZ delivered in 30 minutes. And so that was kind of a out of personal frustration and pain during the pandemic.

Everybody stayed at home. And so that problem was exacerbated. We saw more people you know, increasing the wear and tear on their home. We saw more people, really just struggling to you know, find and, you know, trust, great service professionals. And then on the labor side, you know, we spent time in the field doing the work.

So I cold called a few different companies asked if I could go into the field with them and [00:06:00] do the work. So I cleaned carpets here in Utah. I detailed cars, you know, wash windows, just learned how the space works. And then throughout that customer journey observed where the opportunities and the pain points were to introduce new technology that could be automated.

So that's a little bit about our story. But literally during pandemic invited folks to run home service businesses into my kitchen and sat down and talked about. You know how they would like the world to be moving forward, I think.

Mat Sherman: And let's actually pick up there. So how, how do you want the world to be moving, moving forward with you for, for Allset?

I mean, in five years, in 10 years, and in, you know, in 20, however far you wanna look like, what do you see as the big vision here for all set or in other words, like what you're actually rowing in every day as you look out into the, the, the near to distant future.

Justin Clegg: Yeah. We're excited about a world. Where customer communication in the home services space is seamless and it's frictionless. It [00:07:00] is an exciting data layer that we're starting to see form where, you know, if. Sort of the relationship between a phone number and a customer is now cross-selling itself into all of these different verticals. So with Matt Sherman's phone number, I can see that, you know, you have cleaned your carpets.

I can see that you've washed your windows. I can see that, you know, you've ordered a plumbing, you know, service. Yeah, exactly. So these experiences and the data layer that's being formed is allowing us to. Insight in sort of the customer behavior, transactional behavior and data and you know, frequency of services and overall quality.

When a customer leaves a tip for a job well done you know, those funds. Are improving retention for the business. But that customer is also saying you guys did a great job. Thank you. And so now we can go click deeper and understand why that quality was, was even better. The second part of our vision is really thinking deeply about embedded payments as it scales vertical SaaS.

So in our model and in our world today, [00:08:00] All set, you know, can target about a 1% margin on all payment processing volume. So if it costs, you know, you $2,000 you know, to, to get, you know, your home cleaned, all set would be taking 1% of that. And you think about that at scale. And $2,000 would be more of a painting.

A home cleaning would be closer to 300. But our objective is to capture 1%, you know, after interchange fees and we're able to unlock significant savings and discount on that pricing of, of those transaction volume.

Mat Sherman: And then in order to like, make that happen you want some help, right? I mean, it takes a village to make a startup work and scale.

So my question for you is how can the forward thinking founders and seed scout community help you? Are you raising money? Are you hiring, are you looking for customers? Partnerships? Like how can we assist here?

Justin Clegg: Yeah. Number one. We're always looking for great people and great introductions. So. From the introductions and people's perspective you know, we love [00:09:00] meeting and talking to home service, business owners.

Most of us know a few even in our own families. So send them to all set. Let's get them up and running and automating communication. The second is. From the talent perspective, we love to meet great products and, you know, engineering leaders who are excited about you know, handling tens of thousands of concurrent messages per month and scaling a messaging product and a payments product.

And then the final thing is, yeah, we're preparing for our pre a, so we are in the process of fundraising. If there's folks who are interested in you know, participating the deal, we're happy to extend some allocation there.

Mat Sherman: Then for my last question is if someone wanted to learn more, wanted to get involved in any of those ways, how can they find you online? Like, do you have a website, social media presence, an email address? Like how can someone learn more?

Justin Clegg: Yeah. So just head over to Tryallset.com. And got a simple website. My email is Justin all set, hq.com. So reach out hit us up and happy [00:10:00] to get to know great people. So.

Mat Sherman: All right, well, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast. I really appreciate it.

Justin Clegg: Thanks Matt.