Flock's product expansion is outpacing customer adoption

Transcript

From the transcript TBPN publishes with the episode.

1. 2:20:51

   another question. Yeah. I I was just curious about just like how you think about product prioritization because I imagine when you get in working with these cities and police departments and they start using your products and getting value out of them, they just start coming to you with like more problems Yeah. Both like hardware, software. But it feels like the drone opportunity is big enough that at some you know, it's it's probably hard to that you have too many opportunities then you could probably pursue all at once.

2. 2:21:20

   Yeah. I mean, I think we took the company from one SKU to eight SKUs in the last twelve months that all have clear line of sights and nine figures of ARR. Great. Amazing. Yeah. I agree. And, like, pipeline yeah. The pipeline is there. The ARR is growth. Like, it's kinda wild. This will be our first quarter, I think, where, like, our our core business, like, won't be the biggest product line, which is kinda weird. Again, that's a good thing Yeah. For us because we're not decelerating on that side. It's just other products are really attractive. Mhmm.

3. 2:21:52

   But I think it is you're right. Like, our bigger concern is the market adoption, not our ability to build. Mhmm. I mean, this is a kind of enterprise y type buyer where they're just only gonna adopt things so quickly. So even, like, on the AI front, we have a lot of ideas. We've built a lot of interesting products. They're just they're really nervous to adopt Mhmm. Too quickly. And I think the example I always give is maybe you're trying to book a hotel and you you call the hotel and you realize you're talking to an AI agent, but you're kinda like, I don't know. This is better than the alternative because I'm just trying to book a hotel.

4. 2:22:23

   I don't know, man. I think when you, like, call 911 and and you're in the middle of a violent situation, I think there's something warming about knowing there's another human on their side trying to help you. Yeah. Enough to say they can't be augmented with AI, but I think that's, like, a much more challenging societal question Yeah. Of what do we want humans to do and what do we want AI to do. Yeah. And we are being conscious to not make that decision for the hundreds of millions of Americans we help keep safe.

5. 2:22:48

   Yeah. Just as a taxpayer, I would imagine that I would want the person to pick up, but I'd love for the calls to be transcribed and then AI to find patterns between what's happening and insights and analytics and all that.

6. 2:22:59

   Yeah. There's also something strange Yeah. Like, if if you if somebody's calling 911 to report, like, a drunk somebody that's obviously drunk driving, it's like you're taking up bandwidth from somebody that is a human that could be going elsewhere. It's like for, you know, maybe it's like you should there should be no dial times is a clanker immediately picks up and says, what's the problem? And then routes it either to a human or if it's less like, you know, if it's not like immediate, you know, some violent act is taking place Yeah.

7. 2:23:30

   It can actually be solved by a voice, you know, voice model. And I answered right approach. But, yeah, I think so to answer your question, like, we're we're pretty focused on doing three things for our customers, Solving more crime, whereas right now, it's about a 40% clearance rate for for killing someone. So you got almost 50 chance of getting away with homicide. Wow. That should be zero. You should every single person that kills someone should go to jail. Nonviolent crime is even worse. We wanna solve cases faster. It takes way too long to solve crime. Mhmm.

8. 2:23:56

   And we wanna do more with less. Like Yeah. Most people I don't know if y'all remember, our grandparents, our parents, it was an admirable job to go into policing, to fire. Yeah. This generation does not view it that way, which means 80 plus percent of police departments are understaffed against their budget. It's not getting better, and technology's gonna fill the gap.

9. 2:24:15

   Yeah. People have compared you to, like, the Anderol or Palantir, kind of, like, I don't know, American dynamism companies or whatever. People have compared you to good businesses. Yeah. But but I'm interested about we talked to Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, about some of the some of the difficulties of deploying software into governments. And he gave the example that one time they they built a beautiful piece of software, exquisite system, and they went to deploy it. And the the the the team on the other side of the government that was firing it up was trying to run it on a computer that had, like, you know, a 128 megs of RAM instead of, like, a gig.

10. 2:24:56

    And so that that was kind of the dawn of the forward deployed engineer. And I'm wondering if you, if you have any unique solves on how to deploy systems, how to deploy software. Yeah. If you like the forward deployed model or something else, like, what's working for you and actually Yeah. Getting your solutions into the field?

11. 2:25:13

    So really similar example. I remember distinctly, we were, like, launching this product and the designer has a beautiful, you know, MacBook and this HD retina display. It's beautiful. Right? Super expensive setup. And she's designed this, like, super slick thing. And I was like, great, Mariana. Like, you should go, like, field test this. Like, this looks dope. Like, let's launch it. Yeah. And she gets into a patrol car and it's a Panasonic Toughbook.

12. 2:25:38

    Yep. It's a 13 inch screen. It's twelve eighty by ten twenty four resolution. And he's using it while he's driving 40 miles an hour. And I'm like, this the product's not gonna work. Like like, we gotta go back. But that that is literally our we've got, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of DAUs using this product now, and they're very happy. Yeah. But that's their normal use case. They're driving. Yep.

13. 2:25:58

    They're on a Toughbook. Like, it's a tiny screen. Yep. It's low res. It's old. And so, like, you're pretty much treating it almost more like a mobile app, but, like, with a distracted teenager as your customer. And that's been pretty difficult because we wanna build these, like, super high fidelity. You're just sitting at a desk all day doing your job, and, like, our customers are in the field all day. So that one's been pretty pretty tough. And then I also think the other burden we've done a good job of going around is just IT in general.

14. 2:26:26

    Yeah. Like, I I city IT is really tough to work with. They're really tough to kinda just, like, get get going. So we tend to build everything we can to avoid IT. Mhmm. There's some pros and cons to that, but so far, I think it's mostly pros.

15. 2:26:39

    How how does that actually work? I imagine Yeah. Is it just like you're looking for, like, user licensing or, like, OAuth or something? Like, how how do you at some point, you have to plug into the IT systems a little bit, I imagine. Like