DON'T SELL OUT!!!

a message to the underdogs

I realized last week in my conversation with Matt Morris of EncorEstate who the villains were in my first book.

The market share leaders on the Kitces and T3/Inside Information reports with low satisfaction scores.

For a while this was Redtail and Wealthbox was the underdog:

But now the “underdog” has market share and a very solid satisfaction score… and has picked a new villain:

But now there are new underdogs:

And you can jump right over the former underdog to go to the “new and better underdog”.

It’s like when I talk to advisors going from Wirehouse to Hybrid… They know they’ll be moving to independent in a few years, why not just make the leap now? :)

I highly recommend checking out XYPN’s VIP Community on Facebook:

There’s a specific post about Wealthbox’s new AI announcements that’s particularly telling. I won’t show any names, but here are the comments:

But here’s the thing - when XYPN launched over 10 years ago - Wealthbox and RightCapital were the new-and-cool underdogs.

But now they’re old and not-so-cool… and may or may not be the top dogs depending on which year of the Veres/T3 survey you look at 😉😉

I feel like with AI this cycle between top dogs and underdogs will only quicken which leads me to wonder… will advisors have to start switching solutions more and more often to keep up with the latest and greatest tech?

Or if you’re on Redtail or Salesforce, you switch to Wealthbox which is newer, but not cool anymore… and then wait a few years until Slant is really solid and then switch again?

Maybe The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen plays into all this.

And the best way to stay innovative is to build your own best competitor “in-house” and then slowly start moving your clients over to it.

Or buy your own best competitor…

As literally everybody rushes to build the “AI Operating System”, I can see many market share leaders or money-raising leaders want to keep up by “buying innovative underdogs.”

And I’m calling this “selling out.”

Here’s why - from my conversation with Mark Gilbert of Zocks, the leading AI notetakers are not very much concerned about competition from legacy CRM’s AI notetakers… because as noted in the comments I screenshotted above - they’re usually not very good.

The drive that comes from a vision, and bold idea for the future, and fighting your way up against “the top dogs” is what creates the best products.

• The legacy players have trouble innovating because of all the legacy bloat that builds up over 10-20 years

• The top VC-raising players have trouble building awesome products because there is so much pressure to sell, sell, sell and integrate, integrate, integrate!

More often than not, the leading company in market share DOES NOT have the best product and does not typically serve “advisors first.”

Their #1 client is private equity or venture capital and they don’t have the vision-driven, scrappy ingenious that comes from being the scrappy, ingenious, under-dog.

Hmm, I just used scrappy and ingenious twice… there must be something there! 😅

To the latest-and-coolest builders of advisortech that are currently under-dogs…don’t sell out…yet.

Because it will break my heart. 💙

And to the former (or maybe still current) under-dogs who are looking to buy innovative under-under-dogs…don’t be evil.

Well, who knows, some day I may sell out. Money is powerful-convincing stuff.

But I think heart and soul and passion beats money anyday.

To Epic Human Stories,

Joe