Firing Squad: Propulsion AI's Scott Morris

In this fiery episode of The Chad & Cheese Podcast, Scott Morris, the brains behind Propulsion AI, steps into the Firing Squad. Will his vision of AI-powered hiring revolutionize the game or go down in a blaze of buzzwords?

Chad and Cheese pull no punches, grilling him on everything from job descriptions that practically write themselves to the wild claims about AI making recruiting headaches disappear. Can Propulsion AI handle the heat, or is it just another HR tech flash in the pan?

Tune in for sharp shots, brutal truths, and maybe—just maybe—a survivor.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

Chad (00:22.402)

no.

Joel (00:23.702)

All right, let's do this. We are the Chad and cheese podcast. I'm your co host Joel Cheeseman joined as always. Chad. So wash is in the house. This is firing squad as we welcome Scott Morris, founder and CEO at propulsion AI Scott. Welcome to HR is most dangerous podcast.

Chad (00:31.384)

Cheers.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (00:44.063)

Guys, you know what? I'm like such a fan. I can't even believe it's like meeting your heroes. I thank you so much for having me on. What? Never meet your- Don't meet your heroes. my-

Chad (00:49.11)

Never do that. Never do that. Go ahead. Stop the recording now, Cheeseman. the recording now, Cheeseman. Never.

Joel (00:51.272)

What a suck up. What a suck up man he is. He wants that applause man you guys are the greatest bug. We appreciate we appreciate it. Hopefully, hopefully you're as big a fan at the end of this as you are so because we know that you want listen to fire squad. But before we get into the firing squad stuff. I know that you're going to be on the hot seat here to give us a little Twitter bio. So tell us about Scott what makes Scott tick.

Chad (01:02.475)

Never meet your heroes.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (01:02.596)

Wait a sec.

Chad (01:09.229)

No promises.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (01:21.065)

Yeah, so I'll give you the standard stuff and then I'll tell you the stuff that you can't read and you can't find. 25 years in the profession of HR, about 20 of those in a C level role. And I've worked in organizations as small as 250, which means nobody cares in a company that size what your title is. Everybody's sleeves are rolled up and you're dug in, which means I've been a frontline recruiter, been a frontline comp person, ER, et cetera.

but I've also worked in large organizations, 15,000 plus. And so you get the, I've gotten the whole spectrum of experience. What you can't read about me, what you guys probably don't know is I started my career as a police officer in the city of Los Angeles. I was a working actor in Hollywood. been, on my second entrepreneurial venture. So it's a weird sort of patchwork of career history, but I think it's led me to the right place, at least for what we're doing right now.

Joel (02:10.644)

And he's done the running with the bulls. He kind of left that...

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (02:12.798)

Yeah.

Chad (02:13.742)

little pamplona action.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (02:16.253)

and made it out alive.

Joel (02:18.554)

LA cop, man, that's, that's good for you. This will be easy. This will be nothing. This will be nothing. Unless, unless you're like the, the Beverly Hills cops with the, this, this place, this car is nicer than my, than my apartment. All right. Well, good enough. Good enough. Chad, tell him, tell him what he's won today on firing squad.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (02:20.34)

Yeah.

Chad (02:20.588)

Yeah, I mean, that's more dangerous than running with the bulls. I mean, yeah, come on.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (02:25.067)

Yeah, I don't know.

Chad (02:29.784)

Banana and a tailpipe.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (02:30.899)

You're... I'm not going to fall for a banana in my tailpipe, excuse me.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (02:38.955)

It's more natural for us, brother.

Chad (02:44.536)

Well, Scott, welcome to the firing squad. This is how it's going to go at the end of the bell.

or when you hear the sound, there you go, hear the sound of the bell. That's what I was gonna say. You're have two minutes to pitch Propulsion AI. At the end of two minutes, we're gonna hit you with about 20 minutes of Q and A. If you're not concise, you're gonna hear them crickets, means to tighten it up. At the end of Q and A, you're either gonna receive a big applause.

Dial up Elton John on Spotify, play some Rocketman and pop the champagne baby because this bad boy is going to the moon. Golf clap. Okay, everything looks okay, but you're, you'd better have some hidden figures helping this one out. Okay. And last but not least the firing squad. Not even one of SpaceX's chopsticks can pick this booger out of the sky. Pack it up and try something different. My friend that's firing squad. Are you ready?

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (03:41.908)

I'm set.

Chad (03:43.49)

we go.

Joel (03:44.18)

How long do you work on these intros, Chad? This is your best work. So pick a booger out of the sky from space. Good Lord. Good luck, Scott, following that. Are you ready to pitch propulsion to the firing squad? In three, two.

Chad (03:48.333)

Hahaha

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (03:55.723)

Thanks, shoes. I am ready. I am set.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (04:02.623)

Guys, here's what I want you to do. Get a mental image. You get approval to put new roles onto your team. Maybe you're hiring from the outside. Maybe you're doing it from the inside. You run over to HR and you say, need to hire. And they say, well, what do you want in the role? And you start to rattle off a bunch of tasks. And it does this. And I've got this fire burning. And right there is problem number one we solve.

Salary is an investment, but most of us are conditioned to think about tasks, not outcomes. Outcomes are the return on that investment. So HR says, well, give us a little bit more. And you say, well, hire somebody like Bob. And they say, that's not what we meant. And so they give you a template, and they send you on your way because they don't have the bandwidth. That is problem number two. Managers need a guide. HR doesn't necessarily have the bandwidth to do what they want, which is to guide you through the process. You take the template back, you sit down, you stare blankly at it, and that's problem number three.

Even when we know what we want in the design of a role, most of us are really bad at getting those ideas out and into something that's usable. And so we start to cut corners. We go to the web and we cut and paste and we write out a bunch of tasks. And we ultimately wind up with something that looks like and feels like and reads like an obituary. And task-focused job descriptions don't lead to higher engagement. They don't lead to higher productivity and they don't reduce turnover. And that's problem number four.

And then finally you take what you've got, the best that you can make it, and you go back to HR and you give it to them. And they say, well, we can't use this. We're going to have to rewrite it. And you smack your head and you say, well, why didn't we do that from the very beginning? And there's this ping pong back and forth. Our customers are telling us to do the process right takes four to six hours if they were doing it with human effort. And that's problem number five. And that's why Propulsion AI was born. We utilize AI to interview the user because they are the expert. We think the user is the manager who has that role.

And in the process of that interview, we are actually delivering the critical value that we deliver, which is clarity in the head of that individual about that particular role and its design.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (06:00.171)

and then the platform does most of the writing. And I say most of the writing because it's an iterative process, it's not a handoff. The platform's gonna generate a performance-based job description, an SEO-optimized job posting, social media content, interviewer guides. It'll do base compensation salary analysis to make sure you're competitive with the market, and not in four to six hours, but in as little as 15 minutes.

Joel (06:25.11)

All right, Scott, well done. You got a few seconds added being a super fan, just so you know, just so you know, in case anyone's keeping, in case anyone's keeping time on the podcast here. All right, so you know the first question, the name, Propulsion, why, what's the meaning, and particularly the URL. Your URL is getpropulsion.ai.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (06:32.213)

Thank you, brother.

Then, mo at the end.

Chad (06:36.526)

Not like there's any bias from Cheeseman,

Joel (06:51.475)

Propulsion.ai is for sale. Did you try to buy it? If so, how did that turn out? So talk about the name and the genesis of that.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (06:51.54)

Yeah.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (06:55.609)

Yeah, we looked at it.

Okay, I mean, let me start with the PQ and stuff that matters less. think at this point, yeah, we looked at buying propulsion.ai and at the time that we founded the company, we had a better use for 5k. So we decided we would create some kind of alternative and then we would get down to really the focus on engineering and the focus on product market fit. The name came about weirdly because we were thinking, how do we...

How do we launch companies to success? In 20 years as a chief people officer, I've been a buyer of a lot of HR tech and it never seemed like the products, I mean, it's not like they don't work, but it's always felt like they were developed by smart software people who had never really walked a day in the shoes of a practitioner who had to solve problems by hand. And so what we wanted to do is propel companies to new levels of success.

and build great foundations for them to build upon and that's really where the name came from.

Joel (07:55.542)

I'm so inspired. Thank you for that. You're bootstrapped up to this point. You were founded in 2023, so you're still in diapers. Is money coming? Did you take friends and family? Is there a seed round in your near future? Talk about the funding.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (08:12.169)

Yeah, well, we're always open to conversations about the injection of capital if it helps us move the mission forward. We haven't needed it to this point, you're right. We're a bootstrap company, but we're in conversations. I think as I looked toward the future, I feel us kind of bending toward the venture arm of the larger suite providers, Workday, ADP.

Google just because of the synergies that exist there. But we'll see. Right now we are laser focused on product market fit and on customer value and on wrapping great service around what we've created.

Joel (08:35.734)

Mm-hmm.

Joel (08:48.308)

You say we, talk about the team.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (08:50.507)

So intentionally lean, you know, we're about 90 % to the bottom line right now and in part that's because as we started we used, you know, resources that were both volunteering and contract.

The vision that I have for the company is one that you I used to want to run a thousand person company But you guys know just as well as I do a thousand people can't agree on anything and it's hard to get a lot of stuff done the bigger the company gets so we've built systems that automate almost everything that we do so we can intentionally keep the headcount low

Chad (09:25.496)

There's another propulsion AI out there. Are you aware of that?

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (09:28.031)

Yeah, yeah, they're in India, as a matter of fact, if it's the one that I think you might be thinking of. yeah, we're not pursuing infringement on them for going after our name, by the way, but they were, they're a much earlier founded company than we are, but.

Chad (09:42.534)

Yeah, you might want to spend a little money and get that URL, cement that name and then go after that. Okay, so Scott, I mean, have years and years, I don't want to date you, but decades of being in this space and being, I mean, literally head of people, CHRO, of people, that type of thing. Why, why?

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (09:48.043)

Yeah.

Joel (09:48.084)

That 5K might be worth it now.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (09:50.675)

Now, yeah, yeah.

Chad (10:08.342)

get into a startup situation. mean, you know, you know, it's hard enough being an HR, working your ass off and obviously not getting a hell of a lot of respect for it. You know that more than anybody does, right? Now you're in a position where there's even less of that. So what in the hell were you thinking?

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (10:10.313)

Yeah.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (10:20.319)

Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (10:27.893)

Dude, such a...

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (10:32.939)

Such a great question, dude, because the, you know, I mean, people took my calls and, I had.

Chad (10:38.573)

Yes.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (10:40.389)

people that did things and it was a 45 plus hour manageable week and I had holidays and I got pay and stuff like that. But there were two factors I think that drove me. The first, I mean I made reference to just a second ago. I really thought I could do a better job. I thought I could bring together peers of mine, top talent leaders, top HR leaders and with them really think about how to actually solve root cause problems rather than symptoms. And I got possessed of this crazy idea that I could somehow build better

Chad (11:06.829)

Mm-hmm.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (11:10.285)

software and I would talk to people at conferences and know peer groups and and they would you know slap me on the back yeah yeah yeah you know go do it you're right you're right you know I'll stand behind you till your nose bleeds but that was factor number one. Factor number two is and you know you you you age me with the decades but you know the fact is after 25 years of dispensing advice of trying to help people find fit I found myself in a situation where I didn't and

You know, it took a toll on me. I went to a company that, you know, in the beginning was really, really good. But then I started to recognize that the way I communicated and the, you know, the strategies that I wanted to put in place and the way I approached problems and what I was willing to accept and not accept in terms of excellence and mediocrity, they were just like diametrically opposite from this company. And I thought to myself as, I, you left in the end, I thought, how did I get into that situation?

And we spend a lot of time in the industry thinking about the impact of financial impact to companies of a lack of fit. And nobody thinks about the impact to the individual. And the reality is both of those things are important. So I had this idea that I could do it better. And I found myself in a situation that was like personally traumatic. And then apparently I had like this psychotic break and I thought like, I'm just going to go do it.

and left and later in life I think is easier because you have the resources to do it and I did and nobody's interested.

Chad (12:35.597)

Mm.

Well, all of all of, yeah, all of that pain. I'm really surprised, Joel. He didn't he didn't he didn't start a podcast. So job descriptions, nothing more boring, nothing more shit that's out there today. Job descriptions, job postings, those types of things. Yes, they're definitely the base of what's what's needed to start the process. But it seems like it's being commoditized incredibly quickly. Right.

Joel (12:42.634)

The actor's coming out.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (13:07.401)

Yeah, that's why we don't do it. That's why that's not our focus. mean, and I know it seems like that is the focus. No, it's not. Here's what you build off of. What we deliver is a process that creates clarity.

Chad (13:07.926)

So, go ahead.

Chad (13:14.688)

That's the foundation though, right? You build off of that.

Mm-hmm.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (13:24.767)

That clarity is really the value that we create. And by the way, asterisk, we also write all the content for you. But you could get away, like you could not have a job description if you're hyper clear about how a role fits your strategy and the outcomes, not the task, but the outcomes that you are going to.

ask that person to be accountable for their connected to business results, how you're going to measure success, the competencies and skills that you need in the beginning and ones that you can develop along the way that are going to make somebody a better producer. If you're really clear about those things, you open the door to so much, not only in recruitment, but in talent management, performance management as well.

Chad (14:04.974)

So what actual model are you using to be able to support this? What large language model? it cloud? Is it open AI? Who are you using? You've got to be using somebody.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (14:11.805)

when we say a little bit more check.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (14:17.289)

Yeah, well, 100%, but we are using a mix because we found that the different language models produce

content differently. And so we use Claude, we use 3.5 from OpenAI, and we use 4.0. And we're looking at some uses of Llama as well. And we have a failover model that we've built in the background, not only for the sake of being able to consistently produce, but also because the content comes out differently. But there's a point that I think is important to make. We are not a GPT wrapper. We have built a scaffolded system that takes in very specific inputs

Chad (14:28.194)

Mm-hmm.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (14:56.509)

solicits those from the user, uses them in very specific and combined ways, and is layered with some highly engineered prompts. So what you get from us, you cannot get from ChatGBT just using the commercially available LLM.

Chad (15:14.305)

Why not?

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (15:16.245)

Well, one, because every LLM, I mean, it doesn't matter what you're really using, their training set is the internet. And that's a lot to overcome. Because if I say job description, it's like saying box, right? There are so many varieties of ideas that come to your head when you hear that term. Same thing with job description. So we're not, if you use the commercially available product, it's going to go scrape the web for stuff, pull back what it thinks, and write something.

Chad (15:25.454)

Mm.

Chad (15:41.742)

Yeah, but I can actually give it something to take a look at so I can give it a variety of job descriptions that I want to actually at least found a a base off of, right? So which is sounds like somewhat of what you guys are doing. I can do that easily in the commercial in the commercial available system and keep a line so that it's continuing to train on that. So the biggest, the hardest part for me, Scott, and I think for any founder that's out there is trying to outrun.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (15:50.761)

Yeah.

Chad (16:10.028)

the tech and the ability for anybody crazy Joe like me, just to be able to jump on and create a platform that competes with yours overnight.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (16:19.914)

Well.

Let me tell you another aspect of it that goes to that, Chad, and that is issue of scalability. Because one thing that, as a Chief People Officer, one thing that I was always supremely concerned with is the employment brand. And there are ways, there's a tone of voice that is specific and unique to the company. There's a tone and lexicon that is specific to the industry as well. And if you're just sending a bunch of people, first of all, you're have to be really good prompt engineer. Second of all, you're gonna have to know how to ask the questions. Third of all, if you're using it

Chad (16:22.498)

Mm.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (16:50.235)

as an individual, you can have to the right questions to ask. Managers needs guides because they don't know the right questions to ask, right? So even if you can get past all three of those, now you still have the issue of scale and how do you keep a single tone? How do you keep a consistency across the entire enterprise? You can't do that by using ChetGPT, but you can using our product.

Chad (16:56.846)

Hmm?

Chad (17:12.182)

Okay, so when you take a look at some of the things that you guys offer, one of them is posting directly to job boards. Why? Why does a company need that? Are you focusing on SMBs who don't have systems to be able to do that? Or is this enterprise and you're literally just providing features to make it easier because you're not integrated with those big systems yet?

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (17:33.035)

So the direct answer to question is, our focus is trying to reduce friction. And so if you already, like let's say you have a recruitment management system in place, all of your workflow is in the recruitment management system. And so we will integrate with that RMS and flow the job posting into the RMS. I'm gonna come back to the posting here in a second if you let me. But if you don't have that, if you're a more nascent company,

then you need an alternative. so that friction point is one that we're looking to reduce.

Chad (18:09.39)

So what about SMB or enterprise? Enterprise focused, SMB focused, where's your TAM?

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (18:15.935)

Well, right now, so we are laser focused on a much smaller, we're very focused on SMB. the reason is just, mean, like, well, I'll tangent here. We're having a conversation with a very large energy company. They are...

I can't remember what their exact employee count is. It's well over a thousand. But when you think about an enterprise that large, there are a lot of things that are going to get in the way for a nascent company. You've got a procurement department that's trying to do their job. You've got info security people that are trying to do their job. And even though they're a very, very low...

know, levels of concern about anything information security related with us. Those impediments are still there for a nascent business like Propulsion AI. So the focus on the SMB is just an attempt to be laser focused on delivering to the market and building traction. But the problems...

that we are addressing are universal problems. A manager in a 5,000 person organization still needs to have clarity about the role in order to build engagement, facilitate productivity, and ultimately keep people in place, keep the right people in the right seats. That's no different than a 5,000 person organization than it is in a 500 person organization or a 100 person.

Joel (19:27.343)

So you've been around a while, Scott, and 20 years ago, a lot of companies recruiters, when they had to post a job would go to Google and they would search sales representative job posting, and then they would copy and paste it. They would kind of tweak it to their company in different language, but essentially the bullet points and what they needed were, were pretty close. That system worked for a long time.

People don't want to like come up with the wheel when it's already been been created. And then chat GPT comes along and it's like, holy shit. I've been copying and pasting and tweaking. Now there's this machine that I can put multiple or I could do all kinds of stuff with and it will do it. Create me a job posting for free. So I guess my point is the, the bar was pretty low for job postings 20 years ago. It was really, it still low until chat GPT. And now people, think feel like there's

manna from heaven, that there's this tool that will write this job for me for free, essentially. I think, know, Chad and I've talked on the show and if you're, if you're a fan, you've, you've heard this. We've talked about the death of text EO for a long time. mean, text EO survived on, we'll make an unbiased job posting. It'll appeal to everybody. It won't be too masculine or too feminine. Like that's how they've spun this.

You know, Grammarly and other solutions, I think are trying to figure out what is our role with a chat in a world with chat GPT. You guys were founded in 2023 chat GPT came out in 2022. There had to be like an Oh shit moment when you guys were building this to think like, how are going to spend this or do it differently? Hire easy has a free generator, a paradox. Like you post a job, it'll plug in chat GPT.

Help me understand the value proposition when all these free options are out there.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (21:19.595)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think it goes to company culture. The three of us I know, I I feel confident saying that all three of us have seen a variety of company cultures. And in some, the focus is like, how do I just get out of pain of the moment? How do I just put bullets on a page? How do I put something out there that I can just post? And if that's your focus, if that's the culture of the company, then you know what? We're probably not your product. Go get the free one, right? I would say that to people. But our focus is not writing the job description. The job description is an

asterisk, our focus is on building clarity and I'll give you a concrete example. Let's say that you were

creating a job design for an accountant. A fair thing for us to put in that, a reasonable thing would be follow up on delinquent accounts. It's task focused, it needs to get done. But you've got to ask yourself, why do you even care about that? Why do I write that in there? Do I want people to come in and it's like how I'm getting excitement by watching them make calls to people that don't want to talk to them or write emails? And the answer is it's a means to an end.

The end is a number called days outstanding. That's a number that's important to the business. It's a measure of efficiency. for people who aren't aware, it's about how fast the organization can collect on services that are delivered. And so there's a difference, though, when I tell somebody, your job is to come in and make these bullshit calls, that's different than if I say, look, this is a really important aspect of how we make money as a business, and you're accountable for it. Your job is to reduce days outstanding from X to Y. That's a complete

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (22:53.117)

different mindset. That's what we deliver. And by the way, we'll also formalize that in a job description for you. So if your company culture is one that wants to focus on how you're going to maximize your human assets, that's a different proposition than if your company culture is, just went out of the pain of some compliance thing and I just need bullets that I can put on the web. I'll give you a second example if you'll let me do it, which is there's a lot of attention that gets paid to organizations that have very long and arduous

Joel (23:10.112)

Mm-hmm.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (23:22.699)

interview processes and there is no shortage of kits that to company brands that you can find online about you know repetitive questioning and they didn't know what they were looking for and blah blah blah. You know where all that comes from? It comes from the fact that they weren't clear going in what they needed.

Because if you're clear going in, you're laser focused. If you've cut and pasted from the web and your focus is just get bullets on the web, then you're not clear and you're working it out in the interview process. And that doesn't lead to good selection. It doesn't lead to good talent management. It doesn't lead to good performance management.

Joel (23:58.166)

Let's go to, talked about the past and sort of up to the present. Let's talk about the future for a little bit. there's a popular sentiment in our industry. Like we're not going to search for jobs in the future. The jobs are going to find us. in other words, matching is going to happen. Companies and people are going to get together. Like descriptions and resumes will have less value in the future. Talk to me about your concerns about that future.

Do you agree, disagree? If you agree, you're certainly not in a growth industry and does that concern you?

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (24:32.735)

Well, so I partially agree. And I agree in this sense that I think we're going to see a huge shift, upgrade in the way that we select people for jobs. Overall, and for the last 10 years, I think we over index on resumes. And 84 % of which have some kind of embellishment on them anyway.

I think we over index on experience. think we under value skills and that's not PhD level science for me, right? But I've thought that for a very long time. So think we're gonna see big shifts in how people are selected. But the job description still matters. The document might not matter, but the clarity that exists between a boss and a direct report matters hugely. And it matters in this sense. The more clear I am as a direct report about what you as my boss need me to do, the less I feel like I have to come and check everything with you.

unless you feel like you have to micromanage me. And the more focused you are on outcomes rather than tactics, the more you create the opportunity for me to act with autonomy and for me to come back to you. And this is the head slap moment that you want as a boss. You want to say, look, here's what's not negotiable. You need to get to this outcome. And you want me to come back to you and say, well, Joel, if that's what you want, shouldn't I be doing these things? And you're like, my God, duh. Like, I didn't even think about that because I'm not on the front line. But yes, as long as those things

go to get to get the outcome. So I think the description and the way we're thinking about the role that is going to absolutely endure, whether the document endures or not, I don't know, and it doesn't really matter. The clarity is what matters.

Joel (26:01.941)

Mm-hmm.

Joel (26:05.482)

Yeah. Quickly talk about marketing. I know you have a lot of integrations. How are you getting to market sales and your sales team? If I go to Google and search job description generator, you're not buying ads on Google unless it's different keywords. Talk about the marketing side.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (26:24.843)

Yeah, I mean, we're, are focused on, I mean, we are buying some ads. They're all, they're all linked in, but let's talk about our primary target market, right? It's mid-sized companies, 50 to 500 employees, but with a focus on organizations where they've got smaller HR teams who understand the need to embrace technology to get ahead of, you know, the...

what seems like a never-ending, at least it was for us, never-ending set of requests from the organization. have, know, 15,000 person, I had 90 HR people working for me. We never felt like we could...

know, satisfy the demand from the organization. that's our target market is that 50 to 500 person company. And then in terms of our positioning, we're positioned as a specialty solution, not a template, as I said before, not a GPT wrapper.

In part because we're built on a foundation of expertise. We're using frameworks from top HR leaders, top talent leaders, and we're not just automating the process. We're actually helping people to think differently. Plus, we have a set of features that are proprietary. I'll give you an example. We have a feature called value added scales. It's a way of defining or pulling out of the user's head how value needs to get delivered in a role. I don't know about you. I have certainly been in two organizations where

in each, I had the exact same title and an almost identical job description. Yet in organization one, the demand in terms of how I needed to show up to deliver value was very strategy focused. And in organization two is very execution focused. Now, fortunately, I think I do both of those well. But if I didn't, I was going to be a mismatch for one of those. How I deliver value. Do I need to be more long term or near term? Do I need to be more strategy or execution? Do I need to be more hands on or delicate with my management? Sorry.

Joel (28:15.958)

Are you talking about your sales and marketing strategy? If so, I'm not following.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (28:20.563)

I'm sorry, brother. I was talking about things that position us differently. And yes, so that is a part of our sales and, yeah, of our branding. You know, we've created...

Joel (28:26.9)

Okay, you're branding. Okay. Give me some more tactic, give me more tactical than strategic then.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (28:34.091)

So we have created sort of two ways in our principal buyer is likely the chief HR officer or the head of talent for the organization. But the reality is they're not the people that are in pain per se. The people that are in pain are the VP of engineering who experienced bottlenecks with their HR teams. And not because the HR team doesn't want to help them. It's just they're pulled in 50 directions. So we've got a model where you can go to the web and

And you can, first of all, you can try the platform for free. Zero credit card, not a lot of rhythm or roll, easy to get into. Try it for free, do as many as you want. When you sign up, what we're seeing with our current customers is that that sign up from, the VP of engineering leads them to take the documents. In fact, I'll give you real example. had a senior VP at Albertsons who was on the platform, created, start to finish 20 minutes, all of the documentation for a role on their team.

And I know exactly what happened to it. They took those, went to their HR business partner, said, here, this is what I want. When can you have it on the web? The next sound was the jaw hitting the table. And then that posting was on the web in the afternoon. So it's that kind of entree that gets the individual out of the pain and then leads to a conversation with the head of HR or the head of talent for us.

Chad (29:55.608)

So who are you selling to? Because you just talked about the VP of engineering, right? And they're the ones with the actual pain. So you being in sales, as long as I've been in sales, you have to sell to the pain. HR doesn't know what the pain is, VP of engineering does. How in the hell do you try to get into the heads of all the VPs, all the different departments that are having all these troubles instead of being laser focused? Because that's a scatter gun approach.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (29:58.943)

Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (30:19.029)

Well, we don't think it's a scattered project. Take your question. I think it's a legit question. what we're trying to do is facilitate an ease of people discovering things and taking care of their own pain. Our focus is the head of HR. And I differ with you a little bit, Chad. I think a smart chief people officer does feel the pain. They do think about these things.

And they're looking for ways to get their organization out of it. Give you another concrete example. My last corporate gig, we were merging together four disparate SaaS companies into one. And when you do that, there are some companies that have job descriptions and they're out of date, some that don't have job descriptions at all, some that just have bad job descriptions, right? My team had to rewrite them. It took 13 weeks.

With Propulsion AI, would have been done in an afternoon. The writing would have been done in an afternoon. And the HR team, because they weren't doing the writing, would have had the ability to add service at a consultative and strategic level, thinking about job families, thinking about integration of jobs, thinking about KPIs, rather than doing the writing. So I think our focus is enterprise. Our focus is chief HR officers and heads of talent.

But we certainly don't want to not have a channel for people to figure out, like, hey, look, I can take care of this myself, because we see that as a way to start the conversation with our target audience.

Chad (31:38.51)

Okay, two things real quick. So comp compliance and record keeping, that's all dirty as hell. And that is a pain in the ass. Are you just literally doing surface based information, pulling that back and giving them kind of like a folder of information, just kind of like information seeking standpoint, or is this actual making recommendations?

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (31:58.795)

Well, so when it so there were three different things that are there and I totally agree with you on this one. The on the compliance front, right? You've got if you're a federal contractor, you have OFC CPE that you have to worry about and they're they're not hard things, but we've built that in. And that's where I say this is built on frameworks used by top recruiters, top HR professionals. So, you know, Athena, our digital human, she understands EEO. She understands OFC CPE. She understands reasonable accommodation. She understands all of those things, because by the way, she'll generate ADA compliant

language around your physical requirements, et cetera. When it comes to compensation, we are able to deliver information that comes really from two sources. One is BLS data, which is about six months aged once you get it, but you know that it's actual employer-reported data. The other is scraping from...

workday and greenhouse and the publicly posted salary ranges for job titles that companies are actually putting out there. And we offer a variety of different sort of capabilities. The most basic is just, knows, Athena knows the pay transparency statutes state by state, a little bit more complicated. She can look at a geography and skills and responsibilities and give you a mean salary based on those factors. And then more

complicated she can do benchmarking and she can do a five-year historical and a two-year projection on the salary or the wage.

Chad (33:26.488)

Good God, Joel. This sounds expensive. mean, Athena sounds like she's doing a lot of work back there. How much is this for these companies who want to use propulsion, AI?

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (33:33.003)

Cheers.

Joel (33:40.138)

Give us a price tag Scott.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (33:40.843)

Yeah, well, I mean, you can go to the web and you can pick up a single seat that has full capability for $64.95 a month and with the ability to add other, you know, other aspects to it.

When we price for enterprise, we're pricing on the number of managers that we're going to put into the system. And that means we're deep discounting. We're going to make it up on our end by volume. And the organization is going to get a deep discount on the price. And we're going to size it so that they can get the value that they want. But our average deal size is between $40,000 and $65,000 right now. And keep in mind, we've had commercially available product out since, like, November.

Joel (34:24.022)

All right, I'm not the best in math. just said $69 a month.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (34:28.299)

64.95 per user for a single seat

Joel (34:30.27)

okay, for a single seat per user. And then you just said your typical deal is over $50,000 a year. So you're dealing with huge companies, right?

Chad (34:32.366)

65.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (34:38.73)

Yeah.

Chad (34:41.538)

What?

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (34:43.683)

We're dealing with organizations. There's a difference between how many managers we put in and how many employees that we put in. But yeah, we've got a couple of large organizations.

Joel (34:52.247)

is it by employees or users? Users, seats.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (34:55.721)

It depends, well, it depends on, yes, it's ultimately users of the system. It's people that can create it.

Joel (35:02.006)

Okay, so there's a ton of users if you're if you're only at $65 a month with that many folks because if my math is right, your product is $700 800 $1000 a year. And you're on average 50 to 60 people are using it. But your seats are smaller than that $65 price tag, right? Because the price goes up or goes down the more users you have. Help me understand.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (35:30.251)

Yeah, but if I put 300 managers, and even, mean, just for the sake of the math, like at $1,000, and it isn't this, but at $1,000 a year for 300, I mean, that's a decent size price tag.

Joel (35:46.1)

Okay. All right. All right. All right. Yeah, my math, my math's math's not so good. But that that seems like a lot of people. Okay. You know what that Bell means, Scott, it's it's time to face the firing squad. Are you are you ready?

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (35:48.657)

Anytime somebody says, I think I'm really bad at math.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (36:01.845)

Set.

Joel (36:03.126)

Awesome. I'll go first. so I want to preface this by saying you're a super nice guy and we appreciate your listenership and your loyalty. Um, no matter what happens from here on out, uh, remember, just remember that Scott, I have, I have a hard time with companies like this. I have a hard time. Anytime said, anybody says, I just lost a job board. I just launched an ATS. I just launched an S like something that S optimizes job postings. I just launched something that writes job descriptions.

because it feels like such an antiquated thing. However, I do understand that we aren't in the most forward thinking business in the world. We do have a lot of people that are still like buying their first ATS and still using spreadsheets. And so I always struggle with innovation and reality and somewhere your business is in that realm. So, so I have to, I have to sort of give this a curve, great, great you on a curve.

because of that sort of mentality in our, in our industry. Historically, job descriptions have been a pain in the ass. It's a copy and paste. Let me figure it out. And I do think that chat GPT is a game changer in being able to write job descriptions. Now you have, you have spun your business is not just job postings. however, your website literally says better job descriptions, better candidates. So if I'm shopping your company, your product, I think you write job descriptions.

Every company that does this is challenged right now from Textio to Grammarly to everybody. Everybody does this is challenged. So I don't think you're in a growth industry. The product is very cheap. think that we're going to like video chat. The way that we, promote ourselves as companies, the way that we advertise job opportunities is changing. I see this ultimately as a

nice to have, but not a must have. If you had sold us on, this is a must have product, even though you have free options, even though you have Google, even though you have these things, I might've bought it. But I just, don't think it's a must have. And in our business, budgets are cut, budgets are tight, head count is down. Everyone is buying must have products that are saving money, making money, whatever. it's just, based on our 30 minute discussion, I can't get to a place.

Joel (38:31.52)

where I think that this product is a must have. If we had another 30 minutes, maybe you could have convinced me of that. But for me at this point, just too much competition, too much free options. It's just, it's a feature. I don't see it as a product. super nice guy, Scott, but for me, I gotta be honest with myself and you and the audience. can't buy this. Chad.

Chad (38:55.736)

my turn. Okay. Sitting back and just eating popcorn during that. What? It's close to close to lunch or time. It's got great idea. Wonderful fan fucking tabulus. The problem is everybody has the same idea. It's the features and you have a bulk of features where I think is awesome. And you're trying to, you know, obviously create a platform around this, which is

Joel (39:00.52)

Again with the food, damn it.

Chad (39:21.374)

Awesome. then also another issue with regard to the standpoint of tech is changing so fast that we've got to be taking a look at what we can do as Joel had said that is vital to the organization right now and sell that. And I asked CHROs and CPOs what their most vital roles are on a daily basis. And they have no problem saying, it's this role.

I'm always getting people are always bitching about this role. The biggest problem with most of those chief people officers is they have no fucking clue how their team actually impacts bottom line EBITDA or anything that the C-suite actually cares about. Now, if you can actually formulate something to help them create a much better narrative when they're going to talk to their friends in the C-suite, then they'd be an entirely different discussion, right?

Again, great idea. We dropped an interview earlier this week with Chris Foreman, pretty famous startup owner of AppCast. That happened this week. And we asked him why AppCast was so successful. He had one reason, one, timing. Timing. You ask many founders, what's their number one? It has nothing to do with here, here, my people. It has to do the time was right, right?

Now, I believe if we were having this conversation three years ago and you were going after a big series A, and that was three years ago, you'd have a serious chance. The problem is that all of these features, as I said before, something that I believe are really starting to become a commodity and or something that's just not vital to the organizations running on a daily basis. If it is, then that narrative needs to be said. You have tons of experience. I think

What you have, and again, you're a founder, you should know this, pivots are going to be normal. They're going to be necessary. I feel, the focus on a pivot to a vital stance. Get some fucking funding and then you got a chance. But until then, my friend, I hope you do. I pray that you do, but I got to give you the guns.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (41:41.589)

Guys, I'm sorry I didn't bring the value out differently to you because I really do think we are focused on that C-suite conversation, Joel, that you mentioned or Chad that you mentioned. So I appreciate it. Thank you. still a fan and I'm glad to open on with you.

Joel (41:42.55)

Mmm.

Joel (41:53.462)

We still love you, Scott. Give people that URL so they can find out more and maybe be convinced that we were wrong and they should try your product.

Scott Morris (PropulsionAI) (42:03.945)

think the number one way that we overcome objections is letting people try the product and they turn around really quick. www.getpropulsion.ai.

Joel (42:13.942)

Another one in the books. Hopefully you come back in a few years and tell us to suck it because you've become rich and famous. Yes, and we love it when that happens. Chad, that is another one in the can. We out.

Chad (42:14.977)

Beautiful. That's all I'm saying. You wouldn't be the only one. You wouldn't be the only one. We out.