The Marketing Play That Got Millions to Finally Write a Will

Why Humor Is the Secret Weapon in Fintech Marketing...

What if the most effective way to get people to do the thing they have been avoiding is to make them laugh first?

In this episode, Roland sits down with Trust & Will CEO Cody Barbo to unpack how one fintech company took one of life’s most serious and uncomfortable topics, estate planning, and turned it into a high-performing, humor-driven growth engine.

From viral commercials and memorable characters to a brand strategy built on being approachable instead of intimidating, Trust & Will is proving that humor is not just a creative choice. It is a conversion strategy.

We break down:
•Why laughter creates trust faster than logic
•How Trust & Will built a category-defining brand in a space with no clear leader
•The role of partnerships with banks and fintechs in driving massive distribution
•Why giving away wills for free can actually increase AUM and retention
•How AI is reshaping the future of estate planning and what it means for fintech
•The behind-the-scenes startup grind, including printing thousands of wills in a coworking space

If you are building in fintech, marketing to consumers, or trying to stand out in a “boring” category, this is a masterclass in turning tone into traction.

Timestamps
00:00 – Intro and how Trust & Will’s ads first caught attention
00:37 – Making estate planning funny (yes, really)
01:49 – Why humor works in a traditionally serious category
02:34 – The origin of their marketing strategy
04:40 – Super Bowl ambitions and brand positioning
05:26 – Why banks and fintechs are key partners
08:40 – Estate planning as a retention and AUM strategy
10:34 – The power of co-branded distribution
14:14 – The origin story of “Trust & Will”
16:32 – Early startup days and finding product-market fit
20:34 – Scrappy operations (the “unlimited printing” hack)
21:56 – AI’s impact on the business
23:51 – Rebuilding the company AI-first
25:36 – Will creation in the age of AI
28:39 – Navigating compliance with financial institutions
29:47 – The surprisingly tricky question: who gets the kids?

TL;DR: In fintech, the brands that win are not always the most serious. They are the most memorable. And sometimes, the shortest distance between a customer and action is a well-timed joke.

Want to work with Propagate Fintech? Fill out a contact form at www.propagatefintech.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

My next guest is the co-founder of Trust and Will. These guys have completely taken over the industry via great storytelling, hilarious commercials, and bringing this service directly to consumers via a seamless, easy process. And this is the interview. You know, I first discovered uh what you guys were doing via one of your commercials, actually, which are which are absolutely hilarious. Uh, if if anybody hasn't seen it yet, uh, you gotta check it out. And I'll if it's okay with you, I'd love to like throw a clip from one of your commercials uh in this interview when we uh when we post it.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Yeah, please do. Yeah, we like the one. Uh our our most popular one is the one with Matthew Stafford and Coach McFay of the Rams. Okay, cool.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

We just did our will, and I wish that we would have known, like we kind of started the process a while ago, but I but I wish that we would have done it through you guys because it was very complicated. We had to like get a babysitter, we had to go drive downtown, we had to meet with somebody, you know, it was a whole it was a whole thing. And uh the commercial that I saw that made me laugh, which was a big part of like what we were talking about, my wife and I, uh, was like the role of different family members. And the one where the guy comes out of the ball pit and he's like, doesn't count.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

We so we had this character, his name's the guy's the actor's name is Eddie, but Eddie is also like our character. He's kind of our our Jake from State Farm. But we wanted to take this playful approach on all the life triggers of people like, why do people do estate plumbing? When do they do estate plumbing? Kids is the primary driver, but it's like kids purchasing a home, going on a trip without your kids. You throw them off at grandma-grandpa's house, or for different ages, age brackets, maybe it's leaving money to charity or it's a family heirloom that you want to pass down. But we have this character Eddie who kind of interjects at the 15 second mark of all of our 30-second ads of like doesn't count because it's all this like, you know, son, this car is gonna be your one day because this is my dad's car. And he just gave it to me. Yeah, yeah. Well, technically, you need an estate plan to communicate that in so it just like interjects like a fun educational person, like educational first and personality and kind of makes it more approachable. And that's I think that's the hardest part about this business is just how do you get people to think about this? How do you get them to do it? How do you get them to consider trust them all as part of that option?

SPEAKER_01 2:15

Yeah, no, absolutely. And you know, I love that you guys took such a serious, reverent topic and found a way to have fun with it.

SPEAKER_00 2:26

I think is it's like the least fun topic to talk about with loved ones. So, how do you go opposite of that from like a brand and marketing perspective? And that's that's kind of how we anchored in the brand, even eight years ago when we're sitting around a table figuring out if this is even a thing worth spending our time doing.

SPEAKER_01 2:41

When you guys sat down and said, okay, we need to come up with our marketing flavor and style. How did you land on let's make this as funny as possible?

SPEAKER_00 2:52

I think if we went too serious, like we could have gone like the more like tender emotional, but like we're not trying to be like a Hallmark ad or trying to like get people to like remember us. That's like the one thing that was interesting when we started this journey, and and it still feels that way in some ways today, is there wasn't a brand. Like there was Coinbase for crypto, Robinhood for stock trading, credit karma for credit scores, turbo tax for taxes. Like I can go down the list of other companies. There wasn't a category leader for estate planning. And when you look at like the insurance companies, I don't think the everyday consumer, like even if you're like if you're 20 or 30 years of buying insurance, I don't think most people like know much about the industry and like how it works. They're just like, I have car insurance, I have home insurance, I have life insurance, but like the mechanics are very specific and they don't know the nuance there. But all those brands take a fun, playful approach to their advertising. They don't take this very serious tone. And I said, something's working there. Like if they're spending hundreds of millions of marketing per year making their advertising fun and memorable, we should probably take a page out of that playbook. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. And that was for us, I think, the focal point. It's like, we know we're selling to families. We know that parents with young kids, like rolling your target demo here. That's our primary target demo, but you could extend that to like the sandwich generation, which we're still a part of. We have aging parents, but oftentimes we have young kids. We're kind of hitting the peak career earnings, buying our first house or going from the city to the burbs, like just like life, right? Life's happening. And we're like, how do we take an approach to the brand that feels like the term at the time was more relevant, it feels less adulting? Like, or like how do we make adulting easy and taking estate planning and making it turbo tax like?

SPEAKER_01 4:26

Yeah. Okay, that's awesome. So it had been done by tertiary industries, if you will. Well, I think that is great. I mean, I'm probably gonna mess the expression up, but you know, what's the shortest distance between two people? It's laughter, right? And I think the same thing probably applies when you're talking about the narrative of a company, their messaging.

SPEAKER_00 4:47

Yeah. Like if if we if I were to tell you what we were gonna plan to do in a Super Bowl spot, maybe, maybe not this next year, but the year after, um, in case in case my board's listening, we're manifesting. The focal point of the creative would be humor focused, not like super serious tone. Because I'm I don't I don't think for a Super Bowl that would land very well, the audience.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you're going to die and you need a plan. It's like, okay, a little dry.

SPEAKER_00 5:14

Yeah. We do we did want to do a billboard campaign that just had a bunch of signs that said you're gonna die. Just instead, we went a little, our billboard campaign was much more friendly. It was like, this is your sign to make a will, which is kind of pun intended.

SPEAKER_01 5:27

So Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. So why are financial institutions such a natural home for your offering?

SPEAKER_00 5:34

Yeah. So half half our business today comes from partnerships. Most overwhelming majority are banks, fintechs, credit unions. And, you know, you you think of how these institutions make money. It's on AUM, right? And then downstream financial products and services. But when you look at the wealth transfer number, when we started this business, the number that's being marketed was like 60 to 70 trillion. That number is 124 trillion today. And it's keep growing because you have continued wealth accumulation here in the United States through the markets and through investment activities. This AI wave is going to create, it's it's it's such an incredible moment in time. But I mean, it'll create some of the wealthiest families in the world, mostly here in the United States over the next five years. And maybe even by the end of this year, if Anthropic or OpenAI go public or even SpaceX with Brock X mixed into that. So you have this incredible wealth accumulation, but the death rate is becoming a bigger problem, right? You're gonna have the majority of that wealth start transitioning over the next 20 years. And it'll start with a horizontal wealth transfer to surviving spouse, because men typically live less long than women, so women will inherit it, and then to kids, our generation. So that real wealth transfer will take place probably five to 10 years from now. Though the reality for the banks to answer your question is that that AUM is at risk. Like if they are not focusing on how do we retain this wealth multi-generationally, they're just gonna bleed that wealth to their peers. And some of them are investing in this, like Wells Fargo has a display, they call it the estate care center, where they're helping handle hundreds of thousands of customers who pass away every year. Then you have firms like Schwab, who has, I think it's called their inheritance center. Um, you don't quote me on it, but it's called roughly the inheritance care center. And not every institution has this yet. And then there's some institutions that like they have a younger customer base, like Coinbase is a good example. Coinbase has 50 million US-based wallets, but they're mostly younger people with smaller denominations. And even Robinhood's probably a good example. It's a younger audience despite the size of the company. But 10, 20 years from now, those would be monster companies from an AUM perspective, like behemoths in the in this space. So, how are they those assets multi-generationally? A lot of these institutions, they don't have a good answer for it today. So when we come in and partner with them, like the focal point is the today value, like, hey, let's offer it for free or for a discount, let's create education, let's create marketing campaigns that creates the awareness to get people to actually do it, which is the hardest part, no matter how they get advertised, whether it's social campaigns, TV, billboards, et cetera. But once they have that estate plan dialed in, the likelihood it's got a stickiness component too, that you're gonna, if it's a trust, especially, you're gonna retitle the accounts. You're gonna look for consolidation opportunities. Well, if I consolidate all my accounts within fifth, third bank because I got a free estate plan from them, I'm gonna continue to get additional value versus having everything spread out across multiple institutions. Like there's generally a net benefit of consolidating assets within an institution. If they know that you have a mortgage, they know you have wealth, they have retirement accounts. They can sell you a lot more things, but typically at better rates and better pricing once you step up into that like preferred client segment and eventually into the bank. So I think on the short term, we want to just provide immediate value today, education, a call to action. But is that long-term lens that we look at this business partnership through, through the banks and through the broker dealers and RAs that we work with that, like you guys are protecting to some extent your AUM by prioritizing.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

This is part of your moat, basically. Yeah. I think that's I think that is brilliant because you know, remember when Venmo came out? I feel like that was probably one of the biggest disintermediations that happened in the banking industry in the last, I don't know, 10, 15 years. And I think a lot of institutions, you know, they really kind of stumbled their way through trying to claw some of that back. Zell was is one example.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

I still prefer Zell, right? Like I if somebody asked me to Zell them, I'm like, ugh, I'd rather just give somebody cash than a Zell paint.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

Yeah. Yeah, I I know. I and a lot of people agree with you. And so this is like, I think, a great way to drive that sticky factor at institutions and to reduce uh churn and people going to, you know, outside of the traditional uh banking industry for their for their needs.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

Yeah, it it becomes an asset discovery play too. So like fifth third bank, and and most of this data is public because we've done um some talks with them at money 2020, but fifth third bank last year launched the first free will program in the country for a large bank. And they had tens of thousands of customers take advantage of this offer, but they went full court press on marketing. They did social, they did email campaigns, they did billboard campaigns, they did TV commercials around it, ATM advertisements, in-branch retail advertising. They had Tim Spence, the CEO, call that in their it was Q2 or Q3 earnings call. We were in their annual letter that went to shareholders this last quarter. They went all in on marketing. And when we look at the year two of that, we're like, how do we go do more with you? And we look at all their sports activations, we look at this Comerica, this acquisition of Comerica. I think it makes them the ninth largest bank in the country. And we're like, man, how do we go even bigger with fifth third now that they're an even larger bank through this acquisition? So I'll give them credit, like from a leadership position. Like they said, hey, we care about this so much, we're not just gonna discount the estate plans, we're gonna make them free. And it created this amazing data set for fifth third as an institution to see where are customers today, how much of their wealth is within fifth third and at the customer's discretion, the customer's always in control. How much of that wealth or the assets do they want to consider moving to fifth third because of the incentives that fifth third can provide? So it's great for customer acquisition, it's great for customer retention, but that asset discovery piece is kind of the underlying data set that I think a lot of big institutions are leaning into as to why they want to work with us.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

I think that's I think that's fantastic. And what a brilliant play by Fifth Third's management team. You know, the banking industry is such a dollars and cents world, and everything has, you know, we need a plan, and there's, you know, we can't go anything like we can't go through something like you know, braille. Like we need a plan at all times. Yeah. But to give something away in this industry for free is very abstract. And, you know, there's I think huge value in that because as I'm sure you know, as a business owner and a founder, like one of the biggest problems that founders have is that people just don't know who you are. Yeah. You could have a fantastic product, but if people just don't know who you are, well then where can you go from there? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:02

And the awareness in the marketplace is helpful because in we, you know, we spend tens of millions of dollars on advertising through TV, radio, podcast, search. We show up, I think we show up first in Claude and ChatGPT. I mean, like we show up almost everywhere if you search for us or you've seen our ads before. But it's complemented with our partnerships because they're all co-branded. We don't white label trust them all. We thought in the early days we were going to get strong armed into white labeling because big institutions like well, we'll just call it fifth-third estate planning. But these are already fairly regulated institutions, and I don't think they wanted the additional risk with like offering legal services. So we were very fortunate, 100% of our partnerships are co-branded. And it's nice because when we talked anecdotally, when I talked to people in the marketplace, you mentioned you'd seen our ads. As much people as mentioned to me that they've seen our ads, we have data that suggests, well, I saw you in my Amex offers or B of A rewards or in Chase offers. I saw you in AARP catalog. Like it got I I have one under my desk, but like you're gonna laugh. I've got um your listeners won't be able to see it. But like every AARP member gets this in the mail. It's like a little four by six postcard talking about that member benefit, but it's branded. It's got the trustable logo on both sides, and all of our link.

SPEAKER_01 13:18

And you and I'm guessing you probably didn't even have to pay for that. Your partner probably does.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

For AARP? Yeah. For AERP, we have some advertising. It's our choice to make. We we advertise within their properties. They've got the bulletin and and other properties, but for Fifth Third, it was just part of the partnership because they they wanted to ensure the success of the program. So partners, they're they're much larger companies than we are. They handle all the go-to-market. We work collaboratively, collaboratively with them, but it they don't like thankfully, no one's like strong armed us into like paint up.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you guys have done such a great job branding that it's recognizable the play on words, the reversal of your name. And I I think there's a recognition there that's valuable for your partners. And why would they take the wind out of your sails by erasing all of that kind of brand equity and trust and recognition and call it whatever miscellaneous white label thing? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:23

It's we got lucky. I mean, the fact when we were doing the brand like search in the initial phase, it was like we we did want to use willandtrust.com, but it was forwarding, it was auto forwarding to this attorney out of Minnesota's website, and he he refused to sell it. So we're like, all right, what if we switch the words? We're like trust. Yeah, it was a real story. And it was GoDaddy, and I was like, trust them all.com available. It was like$2,500 or something. I was like, purchase. I was like, credit card on this stupid domain, and that was my but then all the digital handles like Instagram and and Twitter at the time, and all the YouTube and Facebook URLs were available. Like I didn't have to go like attain or acquire them. I was like, oh my gosh, this is the greatest thing ever. That's amazing. That's amazing. This logo that's on my hat and my shirt here, this OG logo is the same logo that I had my designer from my last startup do for a couple hundred bucks. Cause like we literally were broke. I had no income, I had no funding to start the business with Daniel and Brian. But like the logo that we've had from day one is still the logo we use today. So just like there's continuity of those early stage stories that I love. I love that. I love that. What what were you guys almost called? Do you remember? Will and so will and trust. And the idea was that TV show will and grace. Very, like, very literal, very kind of we we like the idea of legacy, the word legacy for a company, but there's a website called legacy.com that's the largest obituary website because the definition of that word was interesting to us. The definition of the word legacy is the money and property you leave behind in your will. And I was like, oh my gosh, that's brilliant. Because people don't think of the word legacy like that. But it was a fun play on words. But they legacy was taken, will and trust was taken. So trust and will was available. I mean, it was I mean it was like sitting there in my apartment complex, just like figuring it out. I was like, what if we switch the words? And it was available. Let's go, dude. What if we switched them? That's amazing. Where's my car moment for Dan?

SPEAKER_01 16:18

What is mine say? That is so funny. Yeah so you know, when I first when I first discovered you guys, I was looking into you know who you are, what you do. You guys are a single one web page is your is your website before you go into your wider your wider ecosystem. Yeah. Were you all were you always just you know we build websites, so you know it's naturally something that's interesting to us. Is was that how your website always was, or is that like a lay was that like an evolution of it?

SPEAKER_00 16:52

Yeah, I mean we were we were a single product offering the first year. So we launched in April 2018. We we went through Techstars, raised a little bit of capital, launched in just California and Texas, because that's where Daniel, Brian, and I, Daniel went to school Baylor. All of his friends that were still in Texas were like married and three kids by 30. Brian, who and I he and I went to school at San Diego State, all of our network was California because we both grew up there. So we're like, well, the most people we know is in these two states. So to get the product to like our friends who have kids or starting to get married, like that seems like a natural starting spot. And those we just launched with a last will and testament. We didn't even have to trust, even though the company was called Trust Emile. Um, and the first year we only did like 40 or 50K, like it wasn't a lot, but we knew who we were selling to. Like that was the big takeaway, the big win, because we went to go raise our seed round. We're like, we're selling to young families. Like that was we had put a little bit of budget behind paid marketing on Facebook and Instagram. We'd done a little bit of microinfluencer campaigns, a little bit of affiliate marketing. But we're like, if we go put, you know, we were raising two million bucks for the seed round. And we're like, if we go put, you know, 10 to 20K a month towards digital marketing, we can just continue to scale this revenue stream while chipping away at new products. So that 2019 year two, we'd raised a small seed round. We were five people. We were a really small team. And we went and launched the trust, starting again in California, Texas. And the will at that point was in, I think, 48 states. And then it took us most of 2019 to get the trust product to most states. But we went from 40, 50k of revenue to 800,000. Like it's a pretty material jump. And we also hit that million dollar run rate. Our unit economics were still pretty backwards because we were spending a lot on marketing, but we were growing monthly revenue really nicely. And it was August of 2019 when we hit that million dollar run rate, 83,333. And from them, then through October, we grew to like 120, 130,000 a month. So still great growth while we were fundraising for our Series A. And we're like, this is really interesting. Cause if we keep this rate up, like we'll be a multi-million dollar business by the end of 2020, which we ended up doing. Amazing. But it, you know, the first two years were really hard because they're like, who are we selling to? How do we survive? We had to raise money to survive.

SPEAKER_01 19:01

And how did you guys did you guys have a period where you were like, what are we doing? Let's we need to hang this up and get jet day jobs. Uh we still, we still say that today.

SPEAKER_00 19:13

I'm joking. We it's tight. Like when you're when you're bootstrapped to like little funding, like it's just really tight. Like we shared a single office at a co-working space between five of us. We uh hacked, we we used to do all of our print and ship fulfillment at the co-working space because in the contract it said unlimited printing, which in our minds was like, this is the only cog we have. Our everything else is software. So it's like high gross margin for a purchase. But we have physical documents we have to package and ship to a customer. So like I have like the most insane photo, uh, my my photos app on my iCloud of from like 2018 until the pandemic when we're in the coworking space of just like mountains of documents that we would out every day. Like the UPS, the UPS and the USPS gear would come in, they'd start with like the little handbag and put a couple in them every day. Then they'd bring a bin, then it was multiple bins. Then by the time we moved out of the co-working space, they'd bring up like the trolley with the cart with multiple to take documents out. That's that's awesome. The co-working space, thank God that the guy who owned it was one of our angel investors, but like he was pissed because we were spending a shot of their money on printing, and no one else in the co-working space could get stuff printed because we were just running it like 12 hours ago.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

Oh, okay. Uh so your the like the lease terms gave you unlimited printing, and you were like you were you were like a like an algebra uh problem in high school for him. Basically, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:43

We we hacked the contract. We ended up settling where we got the same printer they had in the co-working space for our little five-person office. So we switched, we called it uh fresh prints because like fresh we print a lot of documents, fresh prints, Bel Air. And we need a printer, and then we started printing in-house. Now we do it all through 3PL. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:05

Amazing. Okay. I bet you guys were so happy to finally ship that whole exercise to a third party.

SPEAKER_00 21:12

We basically ran a sweatshop during COVID because nobody was in the office. We had a we moved from the coworking space to a like a townhouse in downtown San Diego. And we literally had a garage where the we had two printers in there with all the materials to put the documents together. And we had a couple folks on the team. They were getting paid, of course, but like it was like even with air conditioning, it was a hot, sweaty garage that we were printing documents in. And like I laugh because I can vividly remember it because we'd come in and if we had a lot of orders that came through on a weekend, we'd like divide and conquer on a Monday to get them out. But yeah, when we switched to this 3PL out of Chicago, it was like changed our lives.

SPEAKER_01 21:51

Amazing. Amazing. I I wanted to ask you about you know, the 800 pound gorilla in the room here is is AI. How is AI Weaving its way into your business.

SPEAKER_00 22:04

Yeah. I mean, I think in the, you know, we've been talking about AI probably for two and a half years. I think that last year, the first half of the year was like adopting all the new tooling. So we were, we were all in on Chat GPT and building on open AI. And then the second half of the year was moving to more agentic workflows, like unlocking those productivity gains. And there's both customer-facing tools and AI functions and then internal tooling and inflows. So external, internal is kind of the theme of last year. I think that with plot code release and key four of 25, it like kind of reset expectations because I was like, what's our moat? Like anybody can build anything now. What's our moat? And our brand is a moat, our distribution is a moat, our customer experience is a moat. We've helped a million families start their state plans with almost near five-star experiences. Like those three things, those are great moats. We've got best in class tech, our technology is best in class, but not an AI native work, you know, uh platform. And we're like, if we're gonna reset the whole business where SaaS multiples are compressed, we're gonna go raise a Series D late 26 or early 27. We needed AI multiples to replace those SaaS multiples because they've gotten compressed. So what does trust move look and feel like in this world that we're now in? Because 85% of venture capital dollars goes to AI companies, period. So like if we're not an AI company, we're carving out 15% of VC money deployed to fund the business. Like, I wouldn't even guarantee that there's next fundraise if we don't make this transition. So over the next couple of months, I mean, like we're we're taking it as if it's like life or death, which is a little hyperbole, but like over the next couple of months, we'll have a new parent company we're introducing. So a holding co. We'll still have trust them all. Like everybody consumer facing, those listening to this podcast, they'll still know us as trust them all. But we'll have a parent co. We're launching our trust company, which the Hold Co will hold, and then the platform, a complete rebuild of the platform, AI first, AI native will hit the market. Late Q2, early Q3, actively being built right now, uses absolutely nothing from our existing code base. And wow, throwing it all out. It's like bet the company on it. And if we make this transition, we will reap the rewards. Our customers will have a better product experience, our partners will, and hopefully with that, we'll continue to drive revenue growth and we'll continue to have the multiples that we want to see in that Series D fundraise and on to the public markets one day. Wow. That's huge. All in it's it's super uncomfortable, but like I think when you make these hard decisions to transition through these periods, and sometimes it's the economy. Like the economy can, you know, the COVID was scary, the post-zerp fallout was scary, and we continue to grow through those periods. But this AI, this this AI transformation right now is like it's table stakes for us.

SPEAKER_01 24:45

This this is a 20-year cycle.

SPEAKER_00 24:47

Yeah. It feels really um I'll I'll share this like fairly candidly with with you and your listeners, but like you can kind of hack together a will pretty okay today with with ChatGPT and Claude and Proplex. So like if the will becomes commoditized, where do we continue to thrive as a business? That starts with us living within each of these AI apps that just think everyday consumers, not tech people, but like an everyday consumer that's like searchy, they treat AI like a search tool, like it, like a Google, but they can use it with app plugins. The way that we download apps to our phone, it becomes an app or so what are like the mini apps within an ecosystem of a Chat GPT, a cloud that a customer, a prospective customer could interface with to get their estate plan started, maybe even created, but it's powered by trust and well. So we want to control as much of that as we can rather than leave it open just to the native platform itself to generate the doc. We bring the trust factor, the expert guidance through the process. Right. And yeah, we can flow people towards more complex planning over time to a trust or more uh complex trusts. I think that makes a lot of sense.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

And I know, you know, when we were doing our will, like it had to be we had to nail it. Yeah. Like there's no this is like you have to stick the landing perfectly on something like this because for people who are who are going through the exercise, the subject are is the most critical, most important things in their life, their livelihoods, their children. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:18

Yeah. So it's very it's like a very serious thing that it's like your health. Like you don't want to get a misdiagnosis like asking Chat GPT questions about your health. It's pretty good when you ask it health and medical questions. It's pretty good when you ask it just general, broad-based legal questions, like any category of law, finance the same. I think that's naturally where anthropic and open AI will will thrive. Uh, even perplexity. You can file your taxes for free on perplexity. I don't know if they built that in-house or if they built that with a problem. But that was it. Turbo tax loves that, I'm sure. You look at their stock, their market caps down 50% year over year. Oh, wow. It's just like, you know, AI is coming for every business except for like services businesses. Like you can't replace plumber, construction, electrician. I think those are those are good businesses still. But if if you are inevitably going to get disrupted by AI, you might as well adopt the shit out of it everywhere you can. My hope is that in a year from now, we don't have to like use like we don't, I hope we don't get asked like, what's your AI strategy, Cody? And we're like, I don't know, like, I don't even need to explain it to you because our whole business is built on it. It's the way that people don't ask about our tech stack anymore. If we're like, I don't think I've even got asked the question if we're on like AWS or Azure or GCP. If you're a modern venture back company, you're using these tools and tech stacks.

SPEAKER_01 27:36

Right. It's almost like somebody asking you, What's your uh what's your computer strategy? Do you have computers at your uh yeah? It's like, what do you mean? Of course, yeah, we got computers.

SPEAKER_00 27:45

Yeah, I'm my favorite in the like the tech, we're in the tech bubble, but like when we got asked, like, what's our web three strategy? I was like, who fucking cares? I was like, do you think an 80-year-old person who's setting up an estate plan cares if we offer web three functionality? They don't know what the fuck that is. Like, there's certain things that are hype, and there's other things that are like reality. AI is reality. It's a little hype, but I'm very bullish on it. Um, and I think we, there's a lot of companies that are mission-oriented that want to use it for good. They want to create a better customer experience. It can increase margins. You can operate your company with like a lower head count. So it's not human capital intensive to build a large company anymore. So I I look at all the positives, but you know, you also got to think through the compliance. We work with a lot of financial institutions, all the compliance require requirements and approvals that we now have to go through again because of the tooling that we're introducing.

SPEAKER_01 28:36

Sure. Do you find that financial institutions are a little hawkish on you bringing in AI and AI being such a big part of what you do?

SPEAKER_00 28:47

Yes. Um we we had a a really great partner who still is a great partner. Put us, I joked with the guy. I was like, he put us on double secret probation for six months. Because we launched that what we call the state OS last June. We launched all this really slick tech. It has a lot of AI functionality. There's like a, we call it plan strength. It's kind of like a credit score for your state plan. We launched into state assistant, it's customer facing, it's financial advisor facing. It's really slick. But but but it was all built at the time, then on OpenAI, ChatGPT. Now it's all over onto Anthropic Claude. And like when you make these changes, you have to tell your partners about it. And when you make these changes and it's AI, they want to actually know the cogs, you know, behind it all and the how the how the machine works. Um, so it just takes a lot more time. So for those listening that are legal professionals, we're hiring a general counsel to help us navigate this shameless plug. And it's uh it's a smoother process for us in the near future.

SPEAKER_01 29:48

Okay, awesome. All right. Well, I've got one last question for you. And I'll tell you how we handle this scenario. Yeah. When you select the people who are going to receive your children, yeah, do you think it is best to tell them or not tell them? I'll tell you, we went with the route of not telling them because maybe we change it. Maybe this person joins a cult in three years, maybe they move away. You know, it's like you never really know. So, you know, we were like, okay, look, whoever gets the notification that they're taking our four kids, yeah. Uh, we assume kind of they're like of the moral fabric to just like step up and do it. Yeah. Um, but they don't know. What do you think?

SPEAKER_00 30:31

Is your fear that they're gonna reject taking four kids on versus just like one or two kids?

SPEAKER_01 30:36

Well, we just we wanted to preserve the flexibility to change it without having to tell them, like, dude, you're out. We don't agree with uh, you know, who you're voting for, or you know, or what I don't know, whatever.

SPEAKER_00 30:46

Yeah, you know, it's your choice. I th I that's like that's what I love about estate planning. Like having the conversation with loved ones, like you have an estate plan, you've got guardians, like you could tell your family without telling them who. Like we've named guardians for the kids, we've got everything dialed in, but you don't have to share the specifics of it. Like you're you're in control of that. Like on Trust and Most platform, you can do that all digitally. You can notify the trustee, the executor, the healthcare agent, the guardians. You can appoint a legacy contact, kind of like how Apple and Google do it. Um, but yeah, we chose my my mom and dad uh six years ago. We have two kids now. So six years ago, our daughter was born. My dad's 81 now. Like he's not taking care of two kids at 81. He can you know, take barely care of himself. My mom's 70, turning 71, and like she's still fit. My wife's stepmom's mid to late 60s, she's still fit. But like my brother and his wife have a kid now. Like they're absolutely fit today. Six years ago, they were like like late 20s, just like living in Miami, living the good life. Yeah, yeah. Now he's like sober and works his buttons, good father. I'm like, he's probably the first that he should be first to line. But even like my wife's uh brother and sister, her brother's roughly the same age as us, her sister's younger, they would do great. And like the life insurance benefits would kick in, like financially, they would be set for life, both the siblings, our siblings, and our kids. Um, and we've had that conversation with the parents though, not with the siblings. So they're listening to this podcast, maybe they'll find out, but it's not okay. It's it's to your choice to share or not.

SPEAKER_01 32:20

Okay. All right, fair enough. Fair enough. Um, what uh what law firm did you use for your will?

SPEAKER_00 32:26

What law is getting I I couldn't afford them. No, true story. Business. I met with two attorneys. One said my plan is three thousand, the other said five thousand. That was a good question. And the five I was like, ask the guy for five grand. I'm like, well, what's better about your estate plan? I got a quote for three. He's like, Oh, that's just my rate. And I'm like, why would it pay more for the same car dealership? Like for your template. Yeah, that was a good that was like almost a gotcha question there. I was like, well, yeah, no, I use customer. I I'm like I stand behind it. It's really cool to like you be a customer of your own business because like totally it's great. Like just a very personal experience because it's so it's like an emotional thing, estate planning versus like buying clothes or like something else.

SPEAKER_01 33:06

Yeah, yeah. Very personal. Yeah. Well, Cody, thanks so much for coming on the show, man. It's been great to have you.

SPEAKER_00 33:11

Yeah, thanks for having me. And for any any of the listeners that need help, uh, shoot me a note on Twitter, LinkedIn, and uh would love to have you check us out if we're a good fit for you. Awesome.

SPEAKER_01 33:20

And and where can people learn about what you guys are doing?

SPEAKER_00 33:23

Yeah, so trustandwill.com is the best place. If you follow us on social at Trust and Will, we have a lot of great content on our Instagram. And even if you start following us on social, um, you know, when you're ready, reach out. If you reach out to me personally, I'll send you a little discount code in the DM. But uh we'd love to have you check it out. And if if we're a good fit, hell yeah. Awesome. Thanks, man. Thank you. My pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 33:45

Hey, did you know that Propagate FinTech is also an end-to-end marketing and PR firm? If you'd like to explore working with us or coming on a podcast, reach out to us at propagatefintech.com. We can explore whatever you're working on.