709 Your Helpdesk Copilot - Giant Rocketship

[Uncle Marv]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT solution providers, solo techs, managed service providers, anybody supporting business. And my job is to try to help you run your business better, smarter and faster. Today's show is a continuation of the IT Pitch It or IT Nation Pitch It competition.

And I believe this is the final vendor profile that we are doing. So this should bode well for them. Today we are chatting with Giant Rocket Ship, a software platform designed to enhance the efficiency and profitability of your business by automating help desk management.

And they call this a dispatching program that is AI driven. But to help me understand this a little bit more and explain it to you is the CEO, founder Dustin Puryear. Dustin, how are you?

I'm good. Thanks, Marvin, for having me on. All right.

So Giant Rocket Ship, let me first ask why that name?

[Dustin Puryear]
Well, so the first thing is I owned and ran an MSP for 20 years, and I started off as a consultancy. So I had a vanity name, which was my last name. And people really struggled to spell it and type in the domain.

And so if nothing else, I knew I wanted an easy to spell email address. So partially just being lazy. But also, I remember I was walking.

I live right next to a really large lake next to LSU. And I was walking around the lake and I was just thinking, what do I want to call this company? And suddenly I had this picture in my head of this huge rocket.

And then like this little person standing next to it. And I was like, oh, giantrocketship.com. And I looked it up.

Nobody. I don't know why not. Nobody took that domain name.

And I was like, boom, got it. And there you go. It's no deeper than that.

I just had a visual in my head of what, like, just this huge rocket next to me, the little person. And then the domain name was free. I thought it was a great name.

And it's easy to create a logo off of that.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. And surprisingly, Elon Musk did not have it. I'm assuming that would have been one for him.

[Dustin Puryear]
I have not been sued yet. I have not been sued yet. But apparently he's doing some lawsuits.

I might be in the queue.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah.

[Dustin Puryear]
Take a number, right? Yeah.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, Dustin. Your platform essentially was created to solve the SLA problem that we all seem to have, right?

[Dustin Puryear]
That's right. I had this issue at my MSP. You have a lot of what I like to call dead time on tickets, the time between it being triaged and assigned or picked up by a technician, the gap between when a technician hits a problem and another technician is able or manager is able to help them.

So you have the SLA time or ticking away at all during this. And then your customer is getting frustrated. And so when I was at my MSP and I'm a developer by trade, I wrote a really ugly solution for it.

And I started mentioning this at conferences. Everybody thought it was fantastic. But you can fully automate all this.

And it just made a huge impact on the ability to hit your SLAs. And honestly, it helped teams not be frustrated because teams have nightmares when they sleep about pushing tickets around. Like, it's a very frustrating experience.

Right. And so I solved that. And then that's where the company was born.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So let me ask the obvious question, because I know that there are, at least I have heard of platforms that always talk about ticket automation, automatic assignment, the AI generated assistance and stuff. So is there a difference in the way that you guys are handling this versus the other more traditional ticket management systems?

[Dustin Puryear]
That's a great question. So one thing you always want to have is the competitors. And I would say a lot of people don't understand this that haven't started a size or a product company.

It's very scary to enter a market with no competitors. We're very fortunate to have competitors, which means the space has been defined. The difference between us is our thesis is different.

There are products out there that will help you dispatch and escalate tickets. But guess what? They're just like prettier dashboards that let you drag and drop tickets.

Our thesis was, why do you need a dashboard if you don't need a person doing it? Why don't you just let the software figure out where the ticket needs to go? Why not let the software figure out when the technician needs to be scheduled?

Because otherwise, you get this great dashboard that makes it easier for sure for humans to move tickets around. But I feel like the thesis is wrong. Why do we need dashboards that require you to hire a human to manage them when the software can do the whole thing for you?

That's our differentiator is we're not a dashboard company. We're an AI company.

[Uncle Marv]
So in terms of a service manager, because in my mind, that's usually the person that is managing those tickets, dispatching to the proper technician and stuff. So you're saying that this is more like an AI co-pilot to do that for us?

[Dustin Puryear]
Right. And look, even some of our customers have service coordinators, but they'll never hire another one. You know, if you have 50, 60 people, you need a service coordinator to make phone calls, figure out why your customers aren't calling you back, right?

But when you can go to sleep and you wake up and you show up at work and all the tickets have been assigned and scheduled and put on the correct place on the calendar, that's a huge difference than waking up, looking at a nice, pretty dashboard with a million tickets you have to go through. Or when you wake up and your technician's calling sick and it wrecks your day because you spend the whole day moving tickets around. The service manager, we like to talk about the 80-20 rule, which is before Rocketship, 80% of your work was still manual, even in these nice dashboards.

20% you could automate. Rocketship lets you automate the assignment and scheduling of 80% of your tickets, and then you only need a service manager to handle the edge cases that fell.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So here's my question, though, because there still needs to be work done up front to kind of categorize the tickets, assign them by, what, category or level to the proper tech, right? Because if you've got, like you mentioned, say you've got 20, 30 techs and a ticket comes in, the tickets dispatch system needs to know which level of tech or which group of techs it needs to go to.

So how much setup needs to be done by us before we can actually roll that out?

[Dustin Puryear]
That's a great question, and it's one of the questions that comes up when we do a demo is, OK, well, how do we handle triage? Now, triage is critical. One of the most important things you can do on a ticket.

However, it takes 30 seconds, and you never do it a second time. So when we came out of the box, we made the decision to not tackle triage initially. Again, very critical function, but takes 30 seconds.

And we manage all of the lifecycle after that. But if you look at your help desk, and one reason we really didn't try to solve that right off the bat, if you look at your help desk, the majority of the tickets for a help desk are not generated by a person emailing you. There are backup alerts, RMM alerts, tickets coming from portals, right?

And so all those are triaged by their nature. That's why you pay for an RMM. It monitors, and then it triages the ticket and tells you how important it is.

The only tickets where you need a person to triage them are generally going to be tickets coming in as an email from your customers, which is maybe 20% of your tickets in a typical MSP. So the way that our customers solve it is they typically have their first tier. RocketShip gives the first tier that ticket.

The ticket typically has as much information as the Autotask ConnectWise can tag it with. And then that first tier will ensure that the priority is correct, maybe put it on a certain board for a certain issue. And then RocketShip can take it from there, either letting the technician resolve it, or if they need to escalate it.

Now, RocketShip constantly dynamically understands how the ticket is configured and routes it to the most appropriate team based on any changes made to the ticket. Does that make sense?

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, it does. Yeah.

[Dustin Puryear]
I just have to ask the questions, you know. Please, please. I like these questions.

First, it gives us understanding of market fit and where there's pain. So by all means.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, OK, let me shift to this question, which was not on my list. But you mentioned that this initially grew out of your MSP. So my question is going to be a two-part question.

One, are you still associated with the MSP and running this there? And then two, how have you adapted this to work with other MSPs in the space?

[Dustin Puryear]
Yes, I'm not really associated with the MSP anymore. As far as... Help me understand your second question about the other MSPs.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, so you said that this was grown out of your work at the MSP. So when you then launched this, you know, I'm assuming that every other MSP didn't exactly match your business model. So I'm assuming you got some input.

Say, hey, can you do this? Can you do this?

[Dustin Puryear]
Oh, yeah. And so people understand it's very common in our space for MSP to kind of spit out a side company. So Rocket Ship is its own Delaware Sea Company.

It's completely separated from what that MSP was. And absolutely. This was kind of an idea in late 2022.

Worked through the guts of it in 2023. Production release in late 2023. And our initial customers can tell you how involved they were.

There are things in that software that were so kind of business process focused on how I used to do things that I had to rip out and give our customers the option of modifying behavior. So, for example, and one of our differentiators is how we assign tickets. We do something called First Available, which is Rocket Ship looking at how busy people are, who knows what, who's on vacation, who's having lunch with their mom.

But not all MSPs can do that. Some need round robin or who's got the least number of tickets. And so we added features that MSPs say, hey, look, for this tier, for this password reset function, I just need to use round robin.

And so we implemented that. So I would say over half of the features in the engine of Rocket Ship are specifically feature requests from our customers.

[Uncle Marv]
OK, sweet. Now, one of the things I saw on the website is that this can help identify abandoned tickets. Yes.

Can you describe that in more detail for me?

[Dustin Puryear]
Yeah. So this happens in all MSPs. You don't think about it because you're so used to it, even though you're frustrated daily by it, which is a technician's working a ticket.

And for some reason, they can't resolve the ticket. Let's say that you're restoring a backup for a SQL database. And it's in the cloud.

It's going to take four hours. It's 4.50 p.m. I'm going to go home. I'm going to come back tomorrow.

I'm going to finish the restore. Well, how do technicians remember to do that? They come the next day and they got a critical ticket for something else.

And they got another critical ticket. So every MSP lets technicians remember that they have finished previous work. And we know for a fact that doesn't work, right?

It's not uncommon for MSP to get a help desk call from their customer saying, hey, that ticket I created two weeks ago was the status of that, right? And so service managers have to do what? Every day, technically, they should be going through every ticket in the database looking for tickets that are half done.

That's kind of crazy, right? It seems like that would be a solved problem. So Rocketship identifies within 30 minutes that a ticket has been left half completed and sends it to the manager.

[Uncle Marv]
Oh, and then the manager can crack the whip.

[Dustin Puryear]
Crack the whip. But also, well, what's funny is Rocketship has a feature to prevent the need for that. So in Rocketship, you tell Rocketship, hey, I need 30 more minutes from this ticket.

Figure out the best time. I don't want to worry about that. But you can also tell Rocketship, hey, go to sleep for two days, because this restore will take two days.

Wake back up in two days and then put it on my calendar for when it makes the most sense. Nice. So it has the tools for the technician to do it, but you can't trust technicians because they're busy, right?

And so why don't we let the tool manage those tickets and find those edge cases for you? And then we only reach out to the manager and the software when Rocketship can't find a resolution on its own.

[Uncle Marv]
OK. All right. So you've been at this in total a couple of years now.

Rolled it out at the end of last year. So you're coming here year one. What's it been like in general?

And secondly, what's it like being a part of the PitchIT competition?

[Dustin Puryear]
Yeah. So what is it like being an MSP vendor in general? And what is PitchIT like specifically?

I love it, honestly. You know, I was a developer before the MSP, and then actually we were only an MSP for half of the 20 years, for 10 years. And I really enjoyed that community, but I was kind of ready for something new.

And being on the MSP vendor side is very exciting. You learn so much through the firehose because sales is dramatically different on the vendor side than the MSP side. I'm selling a product, right?

And MSP is selling a service. And the relationship building is different. The level of trust is different.

I have access to all this data, right? And people have to trust you implicitly. And I've just really loved that experience.

And also, I'm a people person. I like getting out there and shaking hands, kissing babies. And so I've enjoyed that aspect of it.

So A plus on that. PitchIT, I will give another A plus. I really like what ConnectWise has done with this program.

I am friends with everybody on that group. I had two phone calls just chewing the fat yesterday with two vendors that were on PitchIT with me. And one, I was fussing at because I have the relationship with him where I can kind of goad him a lot.

And the other one was giving me some advice. And again, I'm a people person. I really enjoy that kind of aspect.

And I've reached out to everybody telling them, give me your phone number, because I'm the kind of guy that I like to call you on Friday to see what you're up to. And so I plan on keeping relations with all these people.

[Uncle Marv]
Very nice. Very nice. Looking forward, obviously, we'd like to see you on stage at IT Nation in November.

[Dustin Puryear]
I'd love to be on stage as well. Marvin, make that happen.

[Uncle Marv]
Listen, I can only guarantee that if you win third place, that you get a nice set of steak knives. That's all I can do.

[Dustin Puryear]
And I need steak knives. I'm a meat guy. So I'm down.

Okay.

[Uncle Marv]
Also looking forward, I know that you mentioned you guys are set up with Autotask and ConnectWise Manage as integration. Other platforms?

[Dustin Puryear]
Halo would be our third integration.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay.

[Dustin Puryear]
Because it has a lot of the buzz. And it's where, you know, and it's funny, with Halo kind of a rising store, and with a lot of the not-to-be-named hate that you see on Reddit last year, I thought we were going to see so many people moving from Autotask to Halo. I'm surprised.

It's very rare. I almost never see it in our customer base. But yet, Halo is growing.

They're getting customers from somewhere. And so obviously, we need to get focused on that as an integration because more and more people, they're becoming more popular. And another key aspect is, in terms of integrations, is in this coming year, we're going to be really focused on providing everything we're doing for tickets for projects.

But the year after that, we're going to turn around and create a channel program. Because think about what would happen if an MSP could sell this same type of automation to their customers that are using Microsoft Project, Asana, and Monday. And so we're going to let MSPs offer the same automation to their customers.

[Uncle Marv]
OK. That's interesting.

[Dustin Puryear]
And so all of a sudden, every customer an MSP has that has a project manager on staff or a service coordinator on staff will be able to almost fully automate all of the heavy lifting of that. And they can focus more on the strategy.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Well, we'll be looking forward to that.

[Dustin Puryear]
Yeah. I'm excited about it. It's going to be a great journey.

[Uncle Marv]
You know, being able to resell it will pay for our costs or vice versa.

[Dustin Puryear]
No. Yes, absolutely.

[Uncle Marv]
However it works. All right. Dustin, I want to say thank you for coming on the show and doing this Pitch at Vendor profile.

GiantRocketship.com will be listed in the show notes. And I apologize that you weren't listed in my estimated top 10. But that may change.

[Dustin Puryear]
OK. OK. I'll just take a 10 for now and a one whenever IT Nation happens.

[Uncle Marv]
I'll get that updated shortly before IT Nation. But Dustin, thank you again. Listeners, head over to the website GiantRocketship.com.

You can check the link in the show notes. They just finished up their Battle Royale this week. And you'll have until November to reach out to them, vote, pimp them up, whatever it is.

Get them on the stage in November. Dustin, go ahead.

[Dustin Puryear]
Quick note just for my peers. I do think that they have one more day this coming Tuesday. And so that's the other one third of the cohort.

So I'm done. But I do think they have one more Battle Royale day. So everybody needs to make sure they attend that and support the competitors that I will beat, of course.

But support the competitors I have in Pitch It on that final day three. Well, I want it to be a fair fight, Marvin. I don't want to just beat them because nobody showed up.

I want to beat them because I was better.

[Uncle Marv]
Just like you don't want to beat them because you were the last vendor profile here on the show either.

[Dustin Puryear]
I mean, that might be strategy. I'm not saying it wasn't. I'm not saying it is.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, Dustin. We'll chat with you later. Thank you, folks, for tuning in.

Head over to ITBusinessPodcast.com and check out all the other vendor profiles as well as other podcasts to help you run your business. That's it for now. We'll see you soon.

Holla!