Building Smarter Businesses with Connected Systems

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studio in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by My Global Presence. The award winning Atlanta public relations agency that elevates brands and non-profits through authentic storytelling and national media campaigns. Find them at myglobalpresence.com. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is gonna be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, my Global Presence. If you want global visibility and meaningful impact, go to myglobalpresence.com. Today on Atlanta Business Radio, we have the CEO and co-founder of Flowgear, Daniel Chilcott. Welcome.

Daniel Chilcott: Thanks for having me, Leigh. Good to be here.

Lee Kantor: Well, I am excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Flowgear. How are you serving folks?

Daniel Chilcott: Yeah. So we’re we’re an app integration platform. So we’re kind of the glue that sits between all of the apps and services that you use in your business and help you get rid of manual work and kind of delay in processing operationally. The go to example that I always have is if you’re running an e-commerce store and you have orders maybe getting placed in Shopify, and you need to integrate those as invoices into your accounting system, flow gives a platform that will help you do that. But beyond that, it’ll also help you integrate into your warehouse management system, send messages to your logistics vendor, keep your customer updated. So any time information needs to move across different apps, that’s the that’s what the platform will handle.

Lee Kantor: So if someone doesn’t have Flowgear, how are they managing it right now?

Daniel Chilcott: Combination of things can often be kind of swivel chair. So there are people who are, you know, effectively double capturing. Um, our platform is kind of the latest generation of the way this is done. Uh, in, in previous years, the way you would have done this is with an installed integration product or for specific, integrating specific apps together, you might have bought a product that, uh, you know, kind of some one off purchase or some very sort of low dollar value per month, but it’s just going to do a sync from A to B. So it’s very purpose specific where you want a platform like Flowgear is where there are 10 or 20 different things that you need to integrate. And as soon as you have a lot of data moving to a lot of different places, the problem you have is how do you track it? How do you retry when errors occur and that sort of thing. And that’s where the strength of the platform is. It helps you keep control of that when it’s operating at scale.

Lee Kantor: So what was the genesis of the idea? How did this come about?

Daniel Chilcott: Yeah, I’ve been through a few iterations here, but my early my first real job was, uh, you know, work in tech support. And then I, you know, I was one of those kids who grew up coding and really wanted to get into, into building software. And so I jumped at the chance to do that in this tech support business when they started a software division. And at first we were just taking anything that came to us. So, you know, building custom software, whatever, whatever was asked for. And over time, we started to evolve that into kind of a reusable CRM. This is back in the kind of mid 2000. And what I was finding is our customers like the product, but every time we sold it, they needed it to integrate into something else, an ERP or, you know, a mess or the HR system. And that’s kind of what planted the seed of there’s got to be a way to do this better, a way to make pieces of the integration reusable. I didn’t know anything about the industry back then, but I went solo to build the predecessor to Flowjo, which was an on premise tool that would allow you to do this. And the idea was to not have to write code. So how how big are the building blocks that you can create and provide to a customer so that it’s easy for them to kind of stitch those processes together? And long story short, that’s how we got to flow here.

Lee Kantor: So how does kind of the age of AI change anything in your process? Or how does, how did you adapt to that?

Daniel Chilcott: Yeah, absolutely profound change. And, um, yeah, I actually hesitate every time I’m about to say the word AI because it feels like that’s all I ever say. Um, but I think for the first time, the promise of our platform, we are more able to deliver on it than ever before. And the promise is we can make this easy for you. And the way that we used to express that is we said, well, you don’t have to write code. You can do it visually. So you can kind of drag and drop the different steps. So if I’m, if I’m syncing Shopify to, um, uh, sage, for example, I can create a workflow and visually create those, steps. But often the devil is in the detail and getting the exact way that that data needs to be reshaped. Right? That’s, that’s a technical thing. And it’s hard for folks to do that. I think what’s really interesting about AI is that for the first time, you can truly build beyond your expertise. And so we’ve completely rebuilt our platform over the past year and a half. And the intent is that you actually use AI to engage with it. So you can still build the workflow manually if you want to. But most of our customers aren’t really doing that. They’re starting with a prompt and saying, make a workflow that does this, and they don’t have to understand any of the details. It can discover everything about the platform, all the connectors, how they need to be used, it can test sections of it, and it can just iterate on that. So it can go through five, ten iterations on that before it comes back to you, asks you for some decision points that are framed in a way that you’re able to respond on. And so, you know, in short, AI has profoundly Changed the it’s kind of raised the baseline in terms of what we’re able to give to customers. Even if you’re not in a technical domain, you’re able to build things far beyond your expertise.

Lee Kantor: Now, does it require the customer to do that, or do you have team members that help them kind of think it through to make sure it’s running as efficiently and effectively as it can?

Daniel Chilcott: Yeah, I think there’s always a place for an expert and we have a mixture of customers. We have some customers who, you know, have software teams who use the platform. So they see it as part of the infrastructure that they build on. And those are what we would call self-serve customers. They build what they need. But we do have what we call professional services customers. Um, many of them are starting to build some of the scenarios that I just described, but they may also choose to come to us and they say, hey, you know, we just need to build this. We don’t have the time. Um, and so we can do that on a time and materials basis. Um, or alternatively, you can work through a partner and they can get it built for the customer as well. So there’s always a place for the expert, but I think there’s kind of a tearing where even a customer who, uh, you know, individuals who are not in technical roles at all, they’re able to build a tremendous amount. Um, and the point is that the option is there for them.

Lee Kantor: Now, how does, uh, your, your program kind of deal with all the cybersecurity challenges and compliance issues that a lot of organizations have to kind of muddle through?

Daniel Chilcott: Mhm. Yeah. I think that’s actually kind of gets to the core of the, the value that the platform offers. And, um, you know, we’re seeing a lot of this type of problem with a genetic coding. If you just, you know, go into a codex or a ChatGPT or a cloud code and say, hey, build an app that does this, it’ll probably build the app for you. But if you’re not in a software role, it’s very hard for you to figure out whether it’s actually done it safely. You know, where did it store, uh, username and password to, you know, as a, as a simple example. So part of what the platform is going to do. Fogo platform is make sure that the guardrails are in place, that it’s actually quite difficult to do things that are unsafe. So you’ve got connectors that are built in a way that is secure. Um, there’s a safe way to store sensitive information. There’s an audit trail around how changes have been made in the platform and when things get into production. And then specifically from the point of view of the lens of AI. So if someone’s working through a prompt and they’re saying build a workflow that does this, we’re constraining what that agent is able to do. So it’s only interacting with a test environment, not the production environment. So there’s a lot of layers to this, but I think we’ve, we’ve figured out some of the kind of broad strategy around making it safe. And it’s, it’s this careful balance of you want every business wants the acceleration that comes with AI, but you’ve got to balance the risk on that. And so it’s that care that is something that we’ve been really thoughtful around, around how, how do we make that happen in the platform? How do we make it the default that you’re going to be doing things in a way that’s safe.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there a story you can share that maybe illustrates how you work with your clients? Is there, um, you know, maybe one of the clients that had a bigger impact than you imagined or, um, it was most rewarding for you to be working with this type of client. What is there something you could share? You don’t have to name the name of the client, but maybe share a little bit about the before and the after after partnering with you.

Daniel Chilcott: Yeah, I think for us, success looks like more and more stuff being built on Flowjo because, um, the customers seeing the value of it and there’s a number of customers that my mind jumps to their, um, one is a very significant, um, uh, Apple distributor actually, um, in, in South Africa. And, um, you know, they started with us, they’ve been a customer seven, eight years now. And it started with, um, some integrations between their ERP and some kind of adjacent products. And then almost every year, they just added more and more on to the point that we’re we’re now integrating easily 20 different systems at scale. Um, and I think that kind of speaks to the, the trust that we’ve been able to engender in with this customer around our platform. It’s dealing with kind of mission critical workloads. And that’s the best, uh, signal that we’re getting it right. When a customer chooses to come back to us for a new integration. And then, you know, the other thing is that no business is in a, in kind of a static state, your software is changing all the time. And so, you know, if you’re making a change, like you’re switching out one CRM to another, the other measure for success for us is when those decisions are happening, are we included in that? And that’s exactly what happened in this particular customer. So, you know, if we’re carried into that new app that’s important to them. I think that’s a that’s a strong signal that they’re getting value from the platform. And that that certainly is what delights me personally.

Lee Kantor: And when you’re working with clients that have that many disparate, um, systems touching Flowgear, how do you, how do you handle like when there’s an update in one and how the, you know, the kind of all the dominoes that fall when that occurs, does that all happen automatically?

Daniel Chilcott: Yeah, kind of our first rule is don’t break anything. Um, and that means things are different kind of scopes. But one example is that if you’ve built a workflow to do something, it never gets auto upgraded. Um, and neither do the connectors. So if we’re working on a connector at a certain version, you built the workflow. That way we make sure that that never changes. But as the vendor releases new updates to their product, maybe they update their API. We build a new version of our connector to correspond to that, and we surface to our customers that there are new versions available so that they can go through and update their inventory, update their connectors that they’re using in the workflows. So it’s our job to stay up to date with what’s happening with all of the products that we support, ship those new versions, make them available, and then give our customers a way to opt into those updates when they’re ready for it. And I think in the context of a lot of the work that we’ve done around giving them, giving customers different environments to work in, so you can kind of test all of this against a test environment before you promote those changes into production. That’s the way that you build confidence that you haven’t broken anything. And another aspect is the ability to test workflows. And we borrow quite heavily from software practice where if you if you write some software, you also write tests that run a piece of software and validate that result. You can do that in flow as well. So that’s, that’s a good way to get a high level of confidence that you haven’t disturbed or regressed anything. And then observability is also super important. So any data that’s flowing through gets tracked, it gets tagged that shows up in dashboards and exception reports. And you’ve got an ability to get an understanding of something is not performing as it was previously. So yeah, the, um, remaining stable, even though the platform needs to be updated around those integrations is a very important capability for us.

Lee Kantor: So some of the time, you know, if there’s been an update before your clients know.

Daniel Chilcott: Generally, I mean, so we’re on partner programs for most vendors that we support. So they’ll give us an early heads up. Um, and we use some automation as well to test whether a new version is shipped. Um, so for a CRM, for example, we’ll have access to a sandbox and we kind of pull on that and check its version. Um, and it varies widely across vendors. I mean, there are, there are legacy apps that we support, but you know, maybe the product gets an update once a year. Um, I’d say an average SaaS product probably gets updated once a month, once every quarter perhaps. And then in extreme examples more frequent than that. But I think that’s part of our role is to make sure that those updates are managed independent of, of a customer’s involvement.

Lee Kantor: And if the customer chooses not to update or is slow to update, it’ll still be functional.

Daniel Chilcott: Yeah, there’s no kind of one, um, one answer to this, but, you know, generally vendors are going to be quite careful about not introducing breaking changes as well. So there’s versioning is basically the answer to how this happens. Um and certainly a customer might opt not to update. Um it’s our responsibility to show them that there’s an update available and they can um take advantage of that. And of course it depends on the customer. Like I mentioned, you know, some, a subset of our customers are self-serve and a subset are professional services. So if it’s a professional services customer that our own PS team is, um, supporting or that a partner is supporting, then that’s kind of usually part of the service that’s provided. So kind of a retainer to make sure that their integrations are being updated.

Lee Kantor: Now, who is kind of the ideal customer for Flowgear? You mentioned kind of self-serve and done with you for you. Um, what’s that profile look like?

Daniel Chilcott: I think for the, the kind of customer that I love to, to close is one who is, is going to self-serve. These aren’t always customers who have, um, software expertise internally, but, you know, to me, just the measure of success of have we deliver on the mission of making integration easier. The measure of success of that is have they been able to build stuff independent of us? So I love that type of customer, but sometimes it’s not a capability issue. Sometimes it’s just a bandwidth issue. And so they need, they need help, um, getting things built. So it’s not really so much the consumption mode. Um, but you know, in terms of industry, um, I think we’ve had good success in, um, manufacturing, logistics, supply chain broadly, um, financial services insurance. Um, and um, within kind of software and software adjacent MSPs, software houses, system integrators, um, that’s worked really well for us.

Lee Kantor: So what’s the pain they’re having right before they call you?

Daniel Chilcott: It depends on the customer. Uh, often a business will express it as I need to automate a sync between these two products. And so that’s, that’s how we want to, um, capture their interest is showing that we’ve got connectors for those products. Um, other customers, they already understand this problem. They already know they have a large number of integrations in play. And, uh, they, they understand the value of a platform and we’re starting to see a big uptick now where customers are on platforms that are competitive with us, but they want to kind of get ahead of the curve and they’re not seeing those vendors. Um, um, provides support for AI in a very fundamental way. And so they’re looking at whether there are other other options available. And and that’s something that we’re seeing a lot of interest in the market around is, um, can I build using AI instead of the techniques that we were using a few years back where I’m creating stuff visually in a canvas. Um, but, you know, generally, uh, a customer who is operating in any level of scale with many apps, they understand the observability problem and they understand the cadence problem. They need to be able to get stuff done quickly. Otherwise their, their software and their business rules are changing faster than the integration process can support, which is, um, you know, a very, um, a bad position to be in.

Lee Kantor: So is there a number of integrations where it makes sense to, um, look at Flowgear, like if you, is it 510, like what is the number where it makes sense to, to partner with flow gear?

Daniel Chilcott: Well, the good news is we, I think we have something for everyone. We actually recently did a big commercial change and we have a price point as low as $200 a month. And in that, we bundle what we call concurrent workflows. And that’s to say that you can build any number of workflows. A workflow is an integration between two points usually. And you can control which subset of those workflows are running. And you get four concurrent workflows for 200 a month. So even if you have a tiny requirement and you just want to start experimenting, or you have an inkling that there is some value to be gained, maybe you’re trying to compress, compress some operational delay. You can start super small. But then on the other end of the spectrum, we have customers who are running 100 or hundreds of of concurrent workflows. So there’s, there’s kind of a full suite available to, to you there. There’s no specific size, but I would say, um, an average customer for us is probably mid-market.

Lee Kantor: So recently you announced a launch of a new runtime with AI copilot. Can you talk a little bit about how that came about and how it works?

Daniel Chilcott: Yeah. So that was really just the realization that, um, where I was going specifically with genetic coding was going to have a profound impact on our industry. And as it happens, we were starting to build a brand new platform. That’s what that’s what we mean by the runtime. It’s, uh, it’s basically the engine that runs the workflow. Um, and so we were doing a lot of reengineering around a new version of that to support much larger volumes of data and lots of flexibility. And basically all the things our customers are interested in seeing. And fortunately, we hadn’t got too far along with that when ChatGPT hit. And so we were able to kind of take account of, uh, what, what was happening there and saw very quickly that the way that we were starting to build software was going to be the way that you would want to build integrations. So we almost think of integrations as code. They’re a formal description of something technical that needs to happen. And so, um, that really lends itself to using an agent like a copilot to be able to help you get it built. We shipped the preview of that in February. Um, and we’re expecting to be in general availability by the end of August. And, uh, so far it’s an absolute pleasure. I mean, you know, in terms of our core R&D platform, there was a very significant change. A lot of industry folks agree on this kind of timing. There were some, uh, updates to models from OpenAI and anthropic around October, November last year. That really changed the way that we started to build our product. Um, and so we were able to kind of leverage that and look at how we could apply those capabilities to our platform. And that’s really what’s driving this, this growth now. So yeah, building, building from a prompt and not even necessarily being in the platform. So you can be sitting in your agent desktop app and you can ask for an integration and it will just know to use a flow gear workflow to get you that result.

Lee Kantor: So do you have any advice for the small to midsize business owner or the enterprise leader when it comes to when they come to the realization that, hey, maybe my systems aren’t running as effectively as they could be and there might be a better solution out there.

Daniel Chilcott: Yeah. I mean, we’d love to have a conversation. Um, I think the key thing is to start experimenting. For us, the, the measure is whenever data needs to move to different places, that’s usually going to be an operational issue. So how quickly am I able to turn orders around? Um, and if the answer is not pretty much immediately, then there’s definitely scope for improvement. Um, and you need to look for a right size solution that is going to be appropriate based on the volume of data that you’re trying to automate. And I think we’ve positioned pretty well, um, around that with a, you know, a very low entry point, and we can complement that out. If you’re not comfortable creating those integrations, we can do that for you. And the number needs to make sense in terms of the time that our team needs to build it. But again, just everything that we’re able to do identically is really compress the time that we need to deliver value. So it’s, uh, it’s probably much more compelling than it would have been a couple of years back.

Lee Kantor: So how long does it take about for when someone raises their hand and say, okay, I’m in? And then where they’ll start seeing kind of a noticeable change.

Daniel Chilcott: In terms of getting an integration built.

Lee Kantor: Right? So like, okay, I’m in, I’m in. Daniel set me up. Let’s make it happen.

Daniel Chilcott: Yeah. Well, you know, a week depends what you’re building, but, uh, you can see results pretty quickly. Um, depends on the complexity of what needs to be built. If you’re, if you’re literally just starting out, then probably on the order of a few hours to get something, uh, built out so that you can start testing. It takes a little harder to. It takes a little longer to harden it. Um, but yeah, I’ve in, in the course of a week, if you’re a much larger business and you have other folks who have to get involved to, you know, you don’t know what the business rules are, that kind of discovery process can take a long time. But I would say, um, even for that size business, as long as the customer is able to commit the time from their side, you know, maybe a month now.

Lee Kantor: Um, I think you mentioned that the company’s international, was that always your intent to be kind of a global organization or did that just happen by, you know, your clients just showing up all over the place?

Daniel Chilcott: Yeah. Um, more or less organically. Um, we started picking up customers in, in the US and Canada. Uh, and, um, in the recent year or two, we’ve been more purposeful around that. Um, we’ve just found that the US, well, I guess North America has just been super receptive to our product. Um, I think it’s, it’s just such a big market, there’s always room for for one more. Um, and I think we’ve got some unique characteristics that make us appealing as well. Um, and today, uh, our, our business by revenue is split almost equally between our home country of South Africa and North America.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team or just check out, uh, the offerings, is there a website? What’s the best way to connect?

Daniel Chilcott: Yeah, flow.net. We just updated it. So super, super current in terms of how we’re conveying everything that we’re doing. And, uh, absolutely feel free to reach out to us from the, from one of the contact options there.

Lee Kantor: Well, Daniel, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Daniel Chilcott: Thank you Lee. Appreciate it.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.