RHS 171 - Tim Hardcastle is Solving for Diversity in Insurance Product Design

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In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. founder of Instanda, and we're going to get all into what Instanda is, and you're going to love Instanda.
Actually, many of you, when you hear what Instanda does, or if you Google it and check it out, you're going to think that it's too good to be true, and it's not. It's actually pretty incredible, but Tim and I go off in this really amazing entrepreneur conversation in the first half that I think you guys hopefully will really connect to.
Hopefully, you'll take some value out of it. And then we get tactical and talk about the tool and what they're doing, why they're doing it and why it's important.
And I got to be honest with you, this is one of my favorite conversations I've had in a very long time. I think you're going to love it too.
And it's exciting to share it with you without a doubt. Before we get there, guys, if you're loving the podcast, if you love the podcast, another great resource is Finding Peak.
Go to findingpeak.com. Subscribe by free.
It's emails. A lot of it's text and video.
Instead of sharing stuff on YouTube, I'm putting the videos that I've done about the business and about insights and strategies and tactics around the insurance industry, marketing, sales, all the things I'm learning at Rogue Risk. I'm putting that at findingpeak.com.
You can go and subscribe. And before we get on to the content, I want to give a shout out to Tivoli.
Tivoli is dominating the game when it comes to warm phone call transfer commercial leads to independent insurance agencies, which I know that's not like the biggest world that exists, but they're dominating it. And they've been a partner of ours for almost two years.
We only continue to buy more from them and partner deeper with them. I think very highly of all the people that are over there, they've been incredible to us.
And partnering them has built a foundational flow of high quality leads that we close easily above 50%. And on really good months, we're north of 60% closing leads from Tivoli.
And we love it. We love them as a partner.
And I couldn't be more happy and blessed to have them as a sponsor of this show and help pay the bills for what makes this happen. So love Tivoli, highly recommend them, tivly.com.
That's tivly-I-V-L-Y.com. All right, now let's get on to this absolutely double tremendous episode with Tim Hardcastle.
So I had a great call with your team actually yesterday. So we're having some conversations with your team about some projects.
And I had my COO and CRO on, and I had a marketing, and we're starting to feel for what you guys can do. So I'm like, I'm super excited to have this call.
It's like the perfect timing because I literally just got like the full demo of everything you guys are doing yesterday. So it's all fresh in my mind.
Oh, wow. So you can tell between the hyperbole and the reality, right? Yes.
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I'd love to start, I'd love to start just, just for, for people who haven't heard of the company before, or, you know, maybe a little bit of the origin story, maybe a little bit of yours, a little bit of the companies just, just kind of catch us up to speed.
We don't have to do the, you know, the every nitty gritty detail, but you know, the high points of the origin story would be great to kind of level set. And then we can get into some of the things you're doing.
Yeah. Okay.
Well, so I was, where did I get the idea from? Let's start there. And I kind of get to the why, shall we, pretty quickly? Because I think if you don't understand the why, then.
So I was the CIO, the global CIO for Hiscox, which is a company that specializes in insurance from the loads of London. It has retail, it has commercial, and it has insurance propositions that go out UK, Europe, and US.
And long story short, the conclusion I reached, having been in a CIO position in other industries, so we have a very eco-friendly office here. So the lights go off if you don't move around, right? So if you see me waiting, it's because I'm trying to activate the lights.
Right, there we go. Are you all right? We're right in the heart of London here, just about 200 yards away from Lloyd's of London.
So you're getting the backdrop of the London city streets and the environmentally friendly office. Anyway, so Hiscox was using technology.
I didn't think it was the best thing that they were doing. They were great at underwriting.
And I left Hiscox and then did more research and dug into that. I think, why was this an issue for one of the best companies in the UK, right? And I got to a place where I was talking to other brokers, other insurers, and it was clear there was massive gaps in and around.
How do you do distribution effectively? How do you get products to market? Right. And, you know, Ryan, because you've been in the industry, how many years, 17 years, I think.
Yeah. Right.
Insurance is very, very diverse. Right.
You can go to a underwriter for BOP in one company, they'll do it very

differently from another company, right? So how do you, from a software technology perspective, solve to that, right? You can't, in my view, with standard models of how does software work. So the hypothesis we took, and the thing that fired me up, because it wasn't something the industry was asking for is you democratize the technology, right?

You put it in the hands of the people that are running the business whether it's a broker or an mga the carrier the experts the marketeers the underwriters the the folk that know how to put insurance propositions together and go get the business and service that business you put it in their hands and that's what we built within standard and no one asked for it it was the world's first it was very difficult to do I can give you the longer story if you like about you know the fact I sold the clothes off my back to get the business going because you know you need a purpose and a why and a belief to motivate you through the really hard times right Right. And our belief was technology was not being said, it was not serving the industry well, and it was not doing it a great value.
And, and we put all that together in a democratized thesis around solving to this diversity problem. Yeah.
Well, I like to hear, um, I like to hear that you did have to sell the clothes off your back because what it shows is grit. I feel like every entrepreneur should have to do that.
Um, you know, I have a different, but similar story in many ways in terms of you make these sacrifices and, um, they're necessary, not, not so much necessary just because they make, you know, I think some people think these things like make a good story and they can put it in their Instagram timeline and it gets them speaking. It's like hardship for the wrong reasons.
The reason that I did this podcast, every once in a while, I just pop the mic on and I just start talking because I get like a thought in my head, right? And there's solo episodes or whatever and kind of interspersed between all the interviews that I do with like this with amazing people. And, you know, I made this comment that I hadn't ever explained it this way, but I was like, you want to surround yourself with people who walk with a limp, right? Like if you haven't been battle tested, if you don't have some scars, if you haven't been knocked down, do I really want you like around me? You know what I mean? Like if you had a nice middle-class upbringing, went to a liberal arts school, work for a big bureaucracy, and then you're going to tell me what to do.
It's very difficult for me to care. And I don't know that that's right.
It doesn't mean that those people aren't intelligent or have good points of view, but it definitely, I, you know, you almost want to hear, like I did this

thing and it absolutely blew up and I effed up all these parts of it. And, you know, and now I'm

doing this and it's like, okay, that shows me that like, you were willing to invest, that you

were committed, that you, you, you, you learn some lessons. Like, you know, you, you don't learn

lessons from winning all the time. You know what I mean? And I get it.
I get it. And I think the,

the kind of perspective you take on risk. I mean, I thinking about the risk right because i had so much passion and belief for what we were doing and i believed it was the right thing yeah that your kind of perception about risk is is reduced because you're so you're so determined to make it happen but you're right it's a it's an it's an endeavor that you your close friends family, everyone around you is on this journey.
Yeah, it's not, it's not to be done lightly. And I therefore think every successful founder has to have their belief, their passion, their drive, to take the steps necessary to do everything it takes to get the business going.
And, and then when I talk to colleagues that are still stayed in corporate world, they have a perspective of risk, which might mean that they take business case presentations to their boards. And it's about a risk analysis.
And when you're in the realms of building a business from scratch, that kind of thesis of logically analyzing a problem doesn't always apply. Certainly in the early years, because you have to have the because, like I said, no one asked us to create a no code platform, right? No one did.
It was like, we invented it. We sold it to the market.
It was slow to get going because there was all the natural skepticism as you, with any new great idea, right? It's time and time again, but I have absolutely no regrets. I mean, do I look 20 years older than I really am? Of course I do.
Yeah. So I know that I, I, well, I feel that unfortunately most people think I'm in my twenties and I'm in my forties.
So yeah, you do look good, Ryan. I wouldn't take it away from you.
I do have that upstate New York pasty white. I haven't seen the sun in like four months look going, but your peak fitness program, right? I've read about it.
It's great.

You know, I, I, I, you know, I, I find I came up, I realized about in 20, you know, my own thing in 2018, 2017. I put on a conference, and halfway through that conference, I literally ran out of energy, like not, oh, hey, I didn't need something.
I wasn't physically fit enough to make it through the conference as the host. And the second half of the conference was an enormous struggle for me.
And I said, this will never happen again, ever. And I made health a competitive advantage of business.
And that's why I write all that stuff is really just like, it's almost like as I learn stuff,

I just write about it because I basically said,

I'm going to turn my fitness

into a competitive advantage in business

where if I'm, you know, I've had business meetings

and this is going to sound terrible

where I've literally dragged the meeting out

just because I knew the other person would run out of steam

because they weren't physically fit.

Right.

And eventually I would just wear them down.

Well, you can apply.

I mean, that's a micro microcosm example of where you're using your advantage in that

situation.

Right.

But there is a, the undercurrent of the kind of the piece that you're talking about is

resilience, right?

It's about the ability to go longer, further and harder than, than anybody else.

And when you're building business, as you know, from personal experience, again, you boy, do you need that, right? Yes, you've got to have that. And that's our story, too.
I mean, you know, you asked about the kind of where we came from, we launched the business in 2016, as a kind of soft launch. And here we are six years on.
And, you know, we went from nothing to where we are right now. We're in 13 countries.
We have 80 clients.

We have a big team in the US.

And so, you know, you need all of that energy,

that horsepower, wherever it comes from.

I mean, you're obviously almost getting

to professional realms if you would fine tuning yourself

than where you are, which is credit to you.

But I think it's still, you need that mental resilience.

Yeah, it's, have you ever read the book Grit

by Angie Duckworth?

I think it's Angela Duckworth, I think is her name.

No, I haven't read that one.

Oh, yeah. still you need that mental yeah resilience yeah it's uh have you ever read the book uh grit by angie duckworth i think it's angie angela duckworth i think is her name i've read that one uh it's a it's if you're it's like an airplane i would put it as like an airplane read right well i'm coming over soon so yeah i'll add that yeah grit is the name very very good so you know i think uh there's a there's a quote um or there's a there's this it's an instagram clip and i don't mean to diminish it in that but it it was an interview that David Goggins did with Joe Rogan.
And this is one of those pullout clips. And he's talking about, obviously, every other word is a curse.
I'm not going to go through that, if you know David Goggins. But the idea that he put in there is, if you're going to do something, like building a technology that has never been built before, building an agency the way we're trying to build an agency, creating carriers out of scratch, like some of the things that that pie and coterie and some of these U.S.
based insure tech carriers are doing. If you're going to do things that that that haven't been done before or that people have said aren't possible or that are too hard to invest in, you're going to be misunderstood.
Like you just,

you have to, and when he said that and like saying that to you now, it's like, well, duh. But when he said it in that show for me, and it was a few years ago, maybe 2019, 2020, I was like, this, all the feedback that I'm getting now makes a lot of sense.
Why are you expecting people to just understand that a no code policy, uh, uh, policy management system that can be, you know, that you can pop your own paper in and compare that against, you know, API. And I'm now I'm talking details to the standard platform that I just saw, but like, you know, all these different things and you can drag and drop.
And the question set, and like, it's easy. Like everyone's immediately going to go, no, no no we're trying a thousand times doesn't work you know als download you know you know you're gonna barf all this crap on you and and you're gonna be misunderstood and you're going no no i believe this so i feel it every day it's on my fingertips i'm bleeding into my computer as i create this thing and um it was almost like he gave you know in, in this case, me personally, you know, not me personally, but you know, when I'm listening, permission to be misunderstood with my idea and that that was okay.
You know, if that makes sense. And that was like a huge weight.
It was like, I slumped something off my shoulders when I heard that. Cause I was like, Oh yeah, I'm not supposed to be understood, you know? And it almost allows you some freedom as an entrepreneur, which is really nice.
It is. And I think to your point, I mean, we've both been

helped by some tailwinds, right? I mean, we came out of, I guess you might even say before the insured tech kind of wave was being talked about in any meaningful terms, we were one of the early, early arrivals, if you like. And you're right, we hit a wall, right? There was like reluctance, disbelief, you know, I love the light look of it, but can you come back when everything is done from season? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, that kind of normal story. So but we have been held by the tailwinds, right? So we we've been blessed with this wave of challenging the industry in a good way I think because the majority of insurtechs as you look at the statistics 60-70 percent of insurtechs are there to collaborate and to enable existing incumbents right and they're not threatening it so I think I think broadly most of them are kind of like positive and it's a force for change and then I think you've also got the arrival like you say of you know newbie carriers which are asking questions of the existing um incumbents in the industry so I think we've both been helped with this wave of positivity around you've got to change and most of that change is going to help you get better right so I think we've got those tailwinds but the other thing I would say um is is that you still hit headroom ceilings which you have to break through right we're at a stage now where you know we are the core platform for a number of smaller mgas they use that we are their most valuable asset and that's what they use to write their business but yeah i can see that in the platform when i went yeah right you still go to the bigger companies they're going to be skeptical because you need a whole bunch of different attributes when you go up the up the food chain right and so you're still chomping away and you still need the the momentum and the energy you brought with you from day one to keep going so back to your point about personal fitness and mental acuity and resilience yeah you'll need that right it's not this is a marathon run a, you know, not quite a sprint, but, you know, you're having to run fast to hit through some of those new walls that we're encountering.
Yeah, I think every therapist looks as an entrepreneur as like an annuity, you know what I mean? Like the amount of like mental crap that you got to go through. They're like, wait, you're an entrepreneur?

Cha-ching.

They're like, hey, you know, you can buy that house, honey.

We're good to go.

I got an entrepreneur on the books.

Maybe I've got a secret asset or a thing that's firing me up.

My wife actually is, she's amazing.

My soulmate, but she's a child psychotherapist.

There you go. She has from cambridge university yeah maybe that's one of my secret weapons all right i've got this you know so what am i supposed to honey today i looked at the wall and thought about running headfirst right into it at full speed what does that mean stuff like Stuff like that.
So no, it's a, it's interesting, you know, this, this game is, is so interesting. And, uh, the things that I have found the most intriguing about are, are, are obviously incredibly passionate about building my particular business.
And I love talking to people that are doing it in all these different places. And I do some investing and stuff.
Cause I just, I just love, I think I love building and growing. And I, and I think the piece of it, and it's why I started writing my little thing.
And then I want to get to your business. I don't want to talk about me, but the defining peak stuff that I do.

And the reason that I got so into that is this conversation is actually the most intriguing part to me, the psychology of the people that create the thing. Now, I want to talk about the thing and I want to talk about how you create it because that's also very interesting to me it's important but I think when you're in this yeah learning you know I have my way of getting through it and you know and and good good uh uh Japanese whiskey and American Scott American bourbon is a big big part of that.
But you know, you're going to have your own way of getting through it. And I'm, I'm interested in, you know, I get so interested in that because even if you're not growing a company, maybe just you're an independent agent working inside an agency today, like so many of the people that listen to this podcast, they're going to have these little moments where they're like, man, you know, I can't get through this hurdle or I, I can't, I can't break this sales goal for some reason.
And sometimes hearing the mentality or the mindset, or that just, here's this guy who's incredibly successful in this really cool company. It's doing all these interesting things and shit.
He's, he's experiencing the same struggles that I am, you know, this three, three year in the business producer in Western Tennessee, you know, I mean, that, that to me is how we all connect at a deeper level. And I think it's really important.
Well, I think, I mean, you're getting to the essence, really, I think of something quite deep, I wasn't expecting to talk about it on the podcast, but here goes, let's get it, let's get into it. I mean, you're talking about, I think that the very essence of human endeavor, right? You know, what is it that fires people up to go climb mountains, to cross oceans? And some people have different perspectives about the amount of risk or the chasm that they're leaping across, right? But everybody, I believe, that is, you know, is passionate and committed to what they're doing, unless they're just taking a joyride and they're just kind of saving the you know the easy life and most people I meet in business executive middle management whatever then they are really enthusiastic about insurance right they want to do an amazing job they feel the honor of the service I mean I get a lot of the sense of this I don't know about how you feel about it Ryan but know, this sense of you're providing a element to society that gives them peace of mind, right? It's a sense of safety.
It's oftentimes very invisible. People don't necessarily think about it every day.
And that's one of the challenges of customer engagement. We'll get back onto that maybe later, but it's a service that is enabling global commerce, global peace of mind for many, many people across PNC and life and health.
Right. And therefore, I think that we find that there's a lot of people which are believing that they're in this service.
Then you say, well, there's another level to that about how do you make all of that just amazing? How do you create the great experience? And like you say, some people are jumping like the grand canyon in terms of chasms yeah like building something from scratch they're building amazing companies like yourself and other people are just saying how do I get through the wall of just getting these agents to come on board and just deal with my my offering in a digital environment because they're used to doing something in the old way 20 years ago and and and I think everyone's just trying to cross their little bit of chasm and, and all of us, I think need to be fueled and to be successful, you have to be fueled by a purpose. Why are you doing it? That belief, and that comes from different places.
I have it, you have it. And, you know, we can maybe get a bit more into that.
But it's about the essence of human endeavor. And I love being in the industry because you meet so many people that are motivated and excited by jumping that chasm, whether it's small or large or whatever.
To one, I literally couldn't agree with everything that you said more. The term I use is we build a foundation of sustainability upon which everyone gets to build whatever the hell they want to build, right? That's the way the language that I use.
So literally, you're talking like this is we're in the same exact vein of thought and the way we think about this. You know, the part that I just want to pile on a little tiny bit is no, no little boy or little girl grows up wanting to work in the insurance industry.
Nobody, zero, zero out of 7 billion said, I want to work in the insurance industry, but we find it in whatever way we come to it. And we develop this arcane set of skills and knowledge that are completely useless in any other industry yet.
And that's kind of what is the initial hook, but it's really not enough to keep us right. So what happens is what you realize, uh, uh, uh, over time.
And it's why I think time in this industry is as important as skill and ability is because what you, what you, what you bump into is to stay here. You have to love it.
You have to love it. It's one, it's not easy.
There's nothing easy about what we do. Two, there's incredible risk, both regulatory and straight.
If you mess up, someone's life is ruined. You don't insure their business properly, their personal assets property, their life property, their health property.
You do something. So there's real ramifications, which means there's a sense of responsibility.
So if you're willing to take on the fact that it is difficult, just at its face, that there's an incredible level of responsibility and that it is. And then, and then the beauty that comes out the other side is this choose your adventure nature of the industry.
Like it literally is a, Hey, if, if you want to climb the mountain, go to page 78. If you want to jump in the swimming pool, go to page 15.
You know, like you can build whatever you want. You can be, you know, I've been a boots on the ground agent.
I've been a CMO for a, you know, a national insure tech. I've worked for an association.
I've, you know, I've done all these different things, but I'll never leave. I love it.
And the people you run into have this similar passion and these crazy journeys. And it's absolutely amazing.
I feel like we've found this little secret that none of our friends who are in the industry know. Like, you know, I get my chops busted all the time for being in insurance.
Ah, you're in the insurance industry. And I just smile and laugh.
You know, I take the ribbing or whatever. But it's like in my head, I'm like, I know this secret that you guys don't know.
Like, this is a pretty special place to be. And as much as it is like boring at face value, also amazing.
So, um, I, I, I appreciate your passion and love it. And obviously I'm in a mood this morning.
Um, so all that being said, you've built something pretty cool. Uh, I got a chance to get the, the, the full demo yesterday.
I've been, yeah, I've been talking to, um, a couple of your people for a while and now, um, oh my gosh, only because we're on the show right now. Uh, Nache, uh, starts with an N.
Yeah. Okay.
Perfect. Great.
Great. And if you're listening to this man, I'm sorry.
It's only because we're on the show that I forgot your name, but he's been great. And, and, and, you know, we're starting to work on some of our own internal pieces to figure out how we fit it in.
But I, you know, obviously there's more conversations to have, but just in full transparency to everyone listening we are, you know, moving down the path of potentially of potentially engaging within standard, but we set this interview up way before that even happened, which is cool. So I love what you guys are doing.
Getting into the actual, so one of the first things that hit me was it's a true, and it's not the only thing it does, so we're going to break this into parts and you can take us where we want to go. But one of the first things that hit me was it's a true policy management system versus the very archaic kind of agency management system that a lot of people are currently using.
Maybe if you feel that that's true, a true depiction, and certainly I'm talking about the US market. What do we, one, do you think that that's an accurate description? And two, what do you think the core differences there would be? What's up guys? Sorry to take you away from the episode, but as you know, we do not run ads on this show in an exchange for that.
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I love you for listening to this show, and I hope you enjoy it listening as much as i do creating the show for you all right i'm out of here let's get back to the episode so i think just let's take one small step back and then i maybe come back yeah please yeah i'm a talker so you do whatever you want it's great i'm enjoying listening to you actually actually. I forgot for a minute.
I was actually on the podcast. Sorry.
Sorry. Sorry.
Sorry. So let me just pick up a thread from the beginning, right, which was when we designed and thought about the platform, what problem were we trying to solve, right? We were trying to solve this, as you're digging in, we were trying to solve this challenge of so much diversity in product design, rates, questions, forms, the way that you want to distribute, whether it's via agent, whether it's direct to consumer.
You put all of those things together and the permutations and combinations around that are endless. And the only way that that had been solved to, in historical terms, with systems, right, was that the systems were designed for, I would call it predominantly the back office, right? Because you go back 10, 20 years, not a lot of stuff was done online because it didn't exist, right? So the kind of conceptual thinking, the design thinking around those systems was very back office orientated.
It was how do I process a transaction and flow through something step by step automation engagement with the customer self-service all of these things whether it's an agent or a customer weren't really conceived when a lot of these systems were designed and then here we are 20 years later and many of those systems are still being crowbarred or or sledgeed into organizations. And everyone does a great job of not talking about the fact that there is very little, if any, ROI on those implementations.
Because everyone spends a heap of years getting them in, tens of millions of dollars putting them in. And no one wants to admit that that was not a great return on shareholder funds, right? So we looked at it and said, you know what, you can't solve this diversity by code, because every time you make a change, you have to write more code, and you have to make a change in the database.
And that's expensive. And then you see all the crowbarring that happens.
And the SIs kind of like it, because they make a bit of money out of it, right? It's more PS fees to get it in. We just said, let's come at this with a different angle and take a view and say, the experts in the industry, these amazing people, the ones that are really progressive, they want to do things different themselves.
We can never get a software engineer to conceive of and imagine how they would want to do certain things.

We can do it at a principle level. We know what distribution about.
We know what rates are. We know what we can never cater for every single use case.
That's a ridiculous idea. That's how software was designed 20 years ago that they were trying to do.
And so we came at it and said, let's give the freedom. let's make it possible for any change to be made within any environment, geographically, product line, and put that into the hands of the professionals, the professional insurers, and give them, with the appropriate governance and audit trails and all the things that systems give you, right, give them the power to write any kind of distribution model, any kind of product, of rates etc etc so that's the problem we solve to and we only solve to it by as i said at the beginning democratizing the technology and you've just seen it right up close yeah yeah right so then you take from that and you say okay uh then how do you how do you cater for all of the different scenarios and different companies and that that's what we've been doing for the last, you know, six years, we've been proving it out.
So that's why we're in the U S market. You know, we have 25 soon to be 30 clients.
We're in the UK, we're in Europe. We're actually in Japan, tough market, very, very different, But that just is just proving that the platform can

be easily changed and adapted for countries, product lines, different kinds of rates. And so

we back to your question, when analysts look at us and say, what are you? We designed our platform with flexibility in mind. And this whole concept of we didn't know how things were going to go exactly which distribution channel, but let's cater at a principal level for any distribution engagement model.
And we don't know exactly how the ratings will go, but let's at principal level cater for any scenario we can imagine. But we designed it from a kind of front to back we thought about the customer and then

we came back into the back office so progressively we've added functionality in the back office because people have said to us we still got to do some of that stuff right yeah um so so in answering your question specifically we are called by the analysts like selen and nevarica for example a digital paths or a digital core so we do quote bind service payment renewal and simple claims right that's the end to end um i just think it's insurance technology it's like yeah it's like the things that you need to do as an mga as a carrier whatever to to to write your product service your customer but we would be described as a digital PAS or a core tech, I think is the latest phrase that I hope is being moved to. Yeah, I hate the term core tech.
I've heard it. I know what it means.
And unfortunately, there's a ubiquitous nature to it. People seemingly understand what it means.
It's like one of those terms that you like hate, but also kind of like describes the thing too. That being said, I think it underwhelms in terms of, uh, it, it underwhelms the wrong word.
It lowers the expectations or lowers, it seemingly doesn't give credence to actually what you're doing. If, if that's probably a better way to say it is, you know, so when I, when I, let me jump on that too.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Please, please, please, if I may, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.
I really feel strongly about this. So I was immensely proud when I went to ITC in Vegas last year, right.
I was immensely proud of something. Let me tell you this.
I was immensely proud of the level of narrative and the words that were being used by people in the industry that I believe we are one of the very few companies that started that narrative. And the narrative was around agility and flexibility and speed to market and no code.
and the narrative that was adopted at ITC by many of the existing incumbents that have been there for many years is those words. And then they would tag on.
And what we've seen of late is a merging of low code and no code. Right.
And low code, to use your phrase, is ubiquitous cover for old technology that you still have to program. And it allows the older tech firms to jump on this liberty bandwagon to say, you know, we're really easy to change as well.
And we'll give you a little bit of a flashy front end. And then the reality of changing anything really significant still has to go back to our engineering shop, which could be in India or it could be in, you know, wherever.
And so I right we've got to be careful with the language we used and it's not I would love to describe ourselves as something new and different but you know Brian every company would like to call themselves something special so I have to kind of navigate my way through some of the labeling that we get given I don't like it either because even if I I go back to PaaS, just think about that middle word, admin. I mean, what strategy analysts in the world will tell you that there is any value add in admin? I know.
So here's one thing I want to put to you and get your feedback on. So I have been selling things to agents for more than a decade.
And if you count speaking engagements, it's probably close to 15 years selling things to agents. And in most industries with most consumer bases, I found that new, fun, exciting sells.
In our industry, that doesn't always happen, right? And I think some of the mistakes of some of the insurtech revolutionaries of 2016, which I was a very proud, I stood on the ramparts of the independent agency and said, all you sons of bitches, you shall not pass. You know, the, you know, the, the, the, you know, what they were doing new and better and different bam and empower and excited in our space.
Seemingly, again, I can only speak to the U S market, the carriers, the MGAs, the wholesalers, the retail agencies and agents, they want, give me the best version of the thing I already know works, right? So that is often how these legacy technologies, which will present themselves as low code or flashy, but really what we know is they just have 400 people behind the scenes, like running paper from desk to desk. Right.
That's how they get away with it. Yeah.
And it's like, how do you, so, you know, when I think of a company like yours, that is absolutely doing something that is different a hundred percent and it works and it's special and I can see it. And, you know, hopefully there's a there, there for us, but even if there's not, I'm impressed and want I'm going down the path.
Right. So that all being said, how do you position that in a way that agents don't get scared away because they've been kind of burned so many times by new different, but attract enough attention that they understand you are not the same thing that they've always seen.
It's a it's a I don't know that I have the answer, but it is definitely always this fine line between we are, we are the best, the best next step from where we were. Right.
Cause then, cause you like want to reach, but not too far. Cause if you go too far, they're like, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nope.
Not for me. You know, Hey, I just bought my spouse a seven series BMW.
Like I'm not doing anything wrong. You know, that's like kind of the feedback you get.
You know, I learned this lesson really early in my career. Um, I was speaking at an event and this, I was talking about writing blog posts of all, of all things.
And this kid in the audience said like, Hey, my agency principal won't let me do that. What do I do? And I said, well, then you got to find an agency that will, maybe you got to leave or start your own and how naive I was.
Right. So, um, so, so things over.
But it's a really good point. I think, I think there's, there's a couple of observations.
If I can just add on to what you're saying, because I'm going to build on your, build on your theme here. Right.
Let's just zoom out a second insurance as an industry, as we've discussed and talked about, we both we feel very privileged to be in it we may we recognize the challenges of being a challenger to the status quo right but at the same time the rewards for busting through that are emotionally and everything else tremendous yes but the insurance industry as a whole is almost it's it's a it's a problem in and of itself because it's so darn resilient itself.

Right. You look at the crises that have gone on.
Insurance has sailed on through, man.

I mean, you know, you apart from AIG that kind of had some odd things going on with financial and corporate engineering.

Every other company has done pretty OK. Right.
That's a very nice way of describing what AIG did.

You are very kind. That's one lens to apply, right? The second lens to apply, however, is even within that, those companies that have taken action in difficult times, and this is every other industry, but it does apply to insurance.
Generally, they've been the most progressive in difficult times, either through M&A shedding costs, right? In difficult times, as we're seeing now, will be the winners over a five to 10 year period. Yes.
Okay. So if we take those two things, one, there is a general level of resilience, but even within that, the ones that are more aggressive will be successful in the five to 10 years.
That's again, what fires me up because those that are going to be progressive and that's our vision our vision is to work with in the core markets of uk and us for us every single progressive insurer right because we've recognized those ones that are really progressive and going to want to move forward will be the ones that will embrace technology and like we're offering and And so you're then saying you're then looking at companies that are culturally today likely to want to engage with something new in the way that we offer it, that you're excited about our technology, right? We're a very progressive guy as your company is. And you can only do so much at any one time, right? So you have to look for good matches right of what people are thinking

about being innovative and moving forward and then what we do is we wait for some and this is

a long-term game man boy oh boy it's a long-term game you then work for the referrals and the

references and the examples of where people are speaking about the fact yep they've done stuff

and it works right because no matter how hard we try and we've seen this over many years

Thank you. the fact yep they've done stuff and it works right because no matter how hard we try and we've seen this over many years if i go into a sales pitch or my team does and they're ranked alongside older tech firms or whatever and you've got a guy or a gal on the other side of the table that's had a bad experience we speak our truth because that's the culture that we built the next sales rep will not because i've bought in my time over decades many many tens of millions of dollars from sales reps from software companies and in the main they're not honest people they will miss sell so we rank alongside all of these folk and who's going to tell that we're any different from the next guy or gal right so the way that we look at it just a long way around to your to your question is we say progress are those is the culture is the environment that we're of that company that we're dealing with progressive is a leader a progressive person that's a good tick and then secondly we wait for this longer term game of referrals and references and use cases and case studies to demonstrate that the value is available from our technology and is not available from others.
And then the third thing, which is a bit tactical, we allow people to engage with us for a period of, let's say, three months and test it out. Yeah.
And we even say to people during the RFI RFP process, give us a week, set us in a question, ask us to build a product. We will turn it around in a week and show you the actual platform working.
Yeah. That scenario on.
So so we kind of give them layers of protection. One is I've heard it from somebody else because it works.
Two is I might have tested it through the RFP. And three, I'm going to give you a three month period to really kind of like get into the weeds with it.
So with all of that, what we found is our success is building, the momentum's building because we can only knock down so much at any one time. I mean, like you, I am a real believer that the insurance industry needs so much more from technology than it has had to date.
Yep. And that's part of my mission is to take that out, but I can only reach so many people and only so many people are going to believe and only so many people are going to engage because they may have bought their seven series BMW last week and they don't want to upset anybody else.
You know, you have to be at the end of the day, I have a big vision, but I have to be pragmatic with how many people I can convince, right? Yes. And so there's, so a concept that I talk about a lot is talking retail agencies in particular, large and small, there's two types.
There's growth agencies and lifestyle agencies. Right.
Lifestyle agencies are interested in optimizing current profit.

Right. types.
There's growth agencies and lifestyle agencies, right? Lifestyle agencies are interested in optimizing current profit. So they're gonna, they're gonna go to every growth summit, they're gonna, they're gonna demo every tool, they're never gonna buy one, all they really care about, and not wrongly, that's not, this is not a judgment, all they really care about is optimizing profit, because it's usually an owner-centric model.
Then you have growth agencies

and those are the agencies, though a much smaller number, true growth agencies that are investing in

technology like Instanda. And what the unfortunate part about when I see companies like yours where

I dig into, I get a couple of demos in, a couple of calls in, you're starting to dig into actual

paperwork and all that. And you're like, okay, these guys are, are, are, are, are real is that so there've been so many, um, posers that have come before.
And there's so much PTSD in the marketplace from tools that, that, Hey, I thought this was going to change my business and it blew up on day three. And, and it took, and, and what I really like, and again, coming back to your particular product, one of the things that turned me onto it was I could see that while it's an engagement, right? There's effort that has to be applied and that, and like anything worth doing, you know, to, you know, it wasn't such an investment that if it, if it doesn't work for some reason, that your business is now heading right for the mountain.
And I don't mean that to diminish what is possible because what I think what I'm seeing and what I think the message should be is that you don't have to invest $200 million into this core tech that's built from scratch with ones and zeros anymore to implement highly effective, highly profitable, growth-focused solutions that change the nature of your business. We have come to a day in technology, and particularly in our industry, where you can make, you can implement, we'll use the term no code.
I don't want, I don't know the right term. You're not taking on as much risk.
Doing business with you guys has this incredible upside. And versus the tools that have come before you or the legacy tools, it doesn't have nearly the downside risk to your business or that kind of sunk cost aspect to your business in implementing this tool, which I think should open people's eyes and should give them hope that they don't have to invest their entire annual budget into one project and put all their eggs in that one basket, that this is something that you can use as a project and experiment and grow, but then all the upside is there.
And that's possible now. And they need to change the way they're thinking.
I mean, that's kind of what comes to my mind. I think that's a great...
Yeah, it's absolutely an astute observation, given you've only just known us from a short period, but obviously you've been a great observer the industry and i think that you're you're bringing to the surface a bit of a dirty secret right the insurance industry is held to hostage it's held to ransom by the legacy players that have you know the balance sheet is awash with tens of millions of dollars of sunk costs that they can't write off right and then and then it's compounded by some of those players making it impossible to get data out yep right so as a former CIO one of my technology strategies was to dumb down the um the applicate the power of the application and increase and empower up the value of data so that you can generate insights and analytics right so that you could then it's the old style description of service-oriented architecture you'd be able to plug and play different components for different parts of your business yeah some of the legacy players make that impossible because you can't get data out and so they they hold to hostage these big companies yeah with a technology that is old and difficult to change and then charge them inordinate amounts of money and then to your point we come along as a new entrant relatively new and can offer this new wave of benefit and value release in a much short period of time and the sunk cost the investment is so much smaller and so there is this battle going on I believe because we get a lot of the bigger carriers saying hey we've got billion, 2 billion book. We're never going to put that on you guys today or tomorrow or next week because you're not big enough.
But we want to be able to take a look over the next three to five years to say, maybe in that timeframe, you will be big enough. So we can start working with you now because we just absolutely fundamentally object to the fact that we are held to ransom by this other tech firm.
Yeah. And so this freedom, this path to freedom.
And again, that's another motivation for us and our entire team. Yeah.
We know we're not the solution for everything and everybody today, but we believe we can bring value for, you know, every individual use cases was every single company that is progressive. And I excite says it motivates us.
We love really difficult challenges because as you've seen, the technology is flexible, right? You can genuinely mold it, meld it to your needs. And, you know, let's let's hope that our conversation continues beyond this podcast.
It was a bit of, it's not a setup listeners. It's the, yeah, no, not at all.
I'll be honest with you. I had this on the, I knew, I knew we were talking, but I had no, I actually didn't know that we were talking that until this morning, that this was the call that with you.
And then I was like, Oh my gosh, this is perfect. We literally just had a demo yesterday.
So, um, it's awesome. I, uh, I want to be respectful of your time.
I want to be respectful of the audience's time. And I think, you know, let's, I would love to run this back in six months.
And particularly if we get down the path and we start doing business together, I'd love to have you back in and talk about that experience and what we're going through. I appreciate what you're doing.
And like I said, whether we actually end up working together or not, I'm incredibly impressed. I think that what you guys are building, the type of technology you're building and implementing is the future.

This high upside, low sunk cost technology that allows people to really get in and play in their business a little bit, to take risks, to try things, to experiment, to launch their own products, to do all these different things that, um, used to be only for the top of the top. Um, now we can, we can push that down and, and really experiment and do some fun things.
And, uh, dude, I'm so appreciative of you and, and, uh, and this conversation has been amazing and, uh, look forward to next place we can chat. Um, before we go can people connect with you if you want? If you don't want them contacting you, I completely understand that too.
Or, and where can they find out more about in standup? Well, best place to connect with me is probably on LinkedIn. Yeah, right.
There's not many. My surname is actually a name that goes back in the UK by about 500 years.
So there's a dynasty of hard castles. There's not many of us around.
So you can find me pretty easily on LinkedIn. I would love to connect and hear about people.
We have a team in the US, which I can signpost people to as well, which is on our website, too. So they can.
And you've already met Nation. There's many others in the team there in the us that we were happy to engage and have discussions and my final kind of parting shot is ryan i i'm a i'm a great supporter and and um very empathetic for people like you that have built businesses but at the end of the day your listeners are going to be comprising a real mixture of other entrepreneurs and founders and more established players and i guess maybe if we all want to sort of get an extra bit of reassurance, I give you this McKinsey report.
McKinsey, no one's going to argue with McKinsey, right? They did the survey of insurtech and financial services and found that for every $1, for every dollar of new revenue that comes from new products, that's worth twice the enterprise value for every dollar of an existing core product so when you think about technology that's going to enable you to drive new revenues and be innovative like rogue risk is you need modern technology you can't use the older platforms completely agree hey this has been my absolute pleasure thank you so much for your time i know you're a busy guy and i i look forward to the next time we have to chat. It was great to talk to you, Ryan.
I look forward to it. Thank you.
Take care now. Cheers.
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