AI Notetaker turned Lead Gen
Relationships are everything
Ok, so this pivot has fascinated me and I haven’t seen anyone write about it… so I decided to write about it.
Back when I was cataloging notetakers (all 39+ of them)… I came across Warmer by the founding team at Betterment:
And of course, I thought… “Oh no, not another notetaker! What are they thinking???”
I might have checked the site a couple more times, and then forgot about it. But then sometime in the past month or so, I revisited the site and saw something very different:
Wait, what? A notetaker became an advisor database? How’s that work?
I was confused… but then just yesterday, I was searching for an advisor and saw their Warmer profile come up as the first result:
And that piqued my interest. So I checked out the site again:
getwarmer.com/advisors/
An open search of all 400,000 advisors and their firms:
getwarmer.com/directory/
A cool map search feature:
So then, obviously, I wondered how they were going to get traffic… and how they were charging advisors for claiming their listing…
I still don’t know about the traffic part (but apparently a direct name search for an advisor works on Google), but the monetizing part is interesting:
So it’s free… but they take a cut of revenue if the lead becomes a client… sounds like Zoe Financial and some others (Finny did this at one point).
But what about that notetaker? Is it still in the picture?
Well, hello there notetaker!
Ohhhh, so the notetaker is how they keep tabs on the prospect conversations… I assume any leads coming through need to have the notetaker involved in the meetings.
Ok, so maybe I’m weird, but isn’t this pivot fascinating?
You heard of any other notetakers that pivoted to something interesting?
To Epic Pivot Stories,
Joe
If you're so inclined, set up a monthly reminder to check that same Google query "blake bagshaw advisor" and monitor the results.
What we see time and time again is the launch of these sites that scrape the SEC database, publish profiles, the profiles appear high in search for a short period of time (I give it 2-3 months) and then without meaningful domain authority established, these profiles drop and drop and drop in the Google ranks.
We've seen this happen at Brightscope, Indyfin, AdvisorCheck, among many, many others.
Even financialadvisors.com - I would love that domain, but they've squandered it, proving even a badass domain name doesn't matter if you don't establish the Domain Authority that demonstrates credibility.
With this said, Warmer has good pedigree founders, so maybe they plan to play the long game and can pull it off as an alternative to SmartAsset / WiserAdvisor style model.
Note - This is the same strategy SmartAsset has done successfully (massive Domain Authority) but even there, the profiles they create for advisory firms - just like the Warmer profiles created for advisors, are "stealing" the SEO from advisors to funnel leads into their matching tool.
For example, whether you search for the name of an advisory firm and click on "their" profile on Smart Asset or Blake's profile on Warmer, it's stealing clicks from people googling the names of these advisors or firms and routing those clicks off the firm/advisor profile to help them "find an advisor" in their audience who is paying them to appear in their matching algo.