With James Donovan and Camden Bean

At Bridging the Gap 2026, James Donovan of the Accounting Leads Now Podcast sat down with Camden Bean, founder of Ping for a live conversation. Camden traced Ping’s evolution from a basic note taker into a platform that detects upsell opportunities and generates proposals before a client meeting even ends, and told the story about the now-legendary ping pong ball jacket stunt that got the team escorted out of Intuit Connect. Suddenly, Randy crashed the conversation, accidentally becoming the first repeat guest on Accounting Leads Now, and forming the basis of Episode 289 of The Unique CPA. Randy shared the mistake of taking on every client when starting out and why leaning into a niche makes work stop feeling like work and more like what you “get to do” every day. Together, they push past “advisory” as a buzzword toward concrete playbooks, sales funnels built on real leads, and the reminder that as crazy as things may feel with AI, the robots aren’t going to kill you.

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Hello and welcome to The Unique CPA with your host, Randy Crabtree. Recorded live at Bridging the Gap 2026, James Donovan of the Accounting Leads Now podcast sits down with Camden Bean, founder of Ping, before Randy unexpectedly joins the conversation. The Unique CPA is brought to you by RandyCrabtree.com. Log on to learn more.

Welcome back to another special episode of the Accounting Leads Now Podcast. I’m with Camden Bean here at the Three Motion booth at Bridging the Gap. Camden, welcome to the show, dude.

Thank you. I actually don’t think I’ve done an in-person, face-to-face podcast like this in a very, very long time.

I’ve never done one, so we’re going to see how this goes.

Going to have a little intimate date right now. I want to look at you in the eyes. You’re going to look me in the eyes.

Yeah, I love it. So, Camden, right off the hop here, you’re with Ping, obviously the ping pong ball. Walk me through the jacket. I met Storm at Scaling, and I was asking him a little bit about the coat, but I want to speak to the founder and hear where the creativity from the jacket came from.

So our goal is to be “obnoxiously there,” right? Just enough, but tastefully. So we were thinking about, we were going to our first conferences, Intuit Connect. We had just launched the company, it was last year. And we were just like, how can we make a splash? And our name’s Ping. And we’re like, okay, like ideating, like what could happen? And we’re like, what if we put a bunch of ping pong balls on a jacket and we walked around and said, if you can guess how many, we’ll pay you $300. And we’re like, I don’t know, that’d be kind of fun. If anything, that’d be good content. And so we decided, my co-founder’s wife is very, very arts and crafty, and she figured out a way to attach all these ping pong balls. The funny part is we went to Connect. We had tickets, we were walking around and within the first hour and a half we were escorted out by security. So we were kicked out very, very quickly. We didn’t have a sponsorship package, which, to be fair to them, I think that’s a lot of people pay a lot of money for those. And so we’ve learned our lesson. We now bring the ping pong jackets when we are a sponsor and they can’t kick us out. So it’s fun.

Oh, well you definitely made a splash then. I love seeing the coat. You guys are very recognizable walking around. So tell me a little bit about Ping. How’d you start it and what it is you guys are bringing to the marketplace?

So we started as a note taker ’cause you have to start somewhere, and we knew accountants actually don’t have a lot of note takers in their business. “Okay, let’s get a note taker.” But for us, note taking is, in my mind, the very bottom after a call. I don’t ever have time to read the notes. Right? You have Zoom transcripts, you have Teams transcripts, you have Google Meet transcripts. It’s like, transcripts are not that interesting. However, the whole thesis for us is what you can do with that context is incredibly valuable. And so for us, we’ve just continued to add different products on the base layer of email and meeting data. So in the last quarter, we launched our revenue detection, which has been a big, big thing for us, is helping find upsell and cross-sell opportunities based off of what your clients are asking for. So that’s been super, super successful. And we have some other things that are coming down the pike, but that’s the big, big focus for us.

Anything you can share as a teaser? Tease what’s coming live. We’re coming live from the Three Motion booth here.

By the way, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Three Motion before. If you’re listening to this podcast right now, this is a legitimate setup. This is pretty sweet.

It is. Appreciate them having us here.

In terms of teasers, okay. One of the things that we’re working on, I’ll give you two teasers. Okay? One of the things that we’re launching is automatic proposal creation before the meeting ends. So we’re having this conversation, Ping’s live streaming this conversation into the Ping database, we know exactly your transcript, you know all your services, if you’re using an Anchor or an Ignition, we’re connected to those platforms. And before the conversation even ends, you can say, create a proposal and send it to Anchor, send it to Ignition, and they can have a proposal ready to sign in their inbox before the meeting ends, ’cause we know speed is the way to win deals, and we want to enable that. So that’s one huge project that we’ve been lifting.

That’s sick.

And that’s been a really, really fun one.

So what would you say to the firm owner who’s not leveraging an AI notetaker… full stop. What would you say to them who’s not leveraging that? I just feel like they’re missing out on so much revenue opportunity, and probably client retention and just all of the things to truly help their business grow?

So there’s different levels. There’s some people that have an Otter or Fireflies, there’s some people that have a Zoom transcript, and there’s some people that don’t have anything. My response to the people who have Otter and Fireflies is, well, you should use a tool that’s built for accounting firms. We exclusively work with accounting firms. We have other industries that want us, that talk to us, and we’re saying no to all other industries, accounting firms only. But when you go into like the Zoom transcripts, we start talking about how this data is just living in some arbitrary place. And we bring this data into a place that generates value, real revenue for your firm. Don’t let this data just be siloed in whatever system that you’re trying to keep it in or in a Zoom transcript. And then for the third person who doesn’t have anything, it’s awesome. I know there’s a lot of different note-taking tools out there. Just having something that’s taking notes for you is like so freeing. It’s like, oh, I can now be engaged. I know that I’m not going to forget anything, or I’m not going to need to take notes. I’m fully focused on this conversation, and that’s usually what I tell firms, like, get on the bandwagon, it’s amazing, it’s an amazing piece of technology, and you should be using tools that are built for you and going deeper into your workflows.

How’d you get into this? What were you doing before you started Ping and you’re rocking ping pong jackets around accounting conferences?

Nothing too exciting, so I am the son of a CPA. He turned into the dark side of wealth management. But I’ve been in the accounting world most of my life, was studying accounting at school and started working at a startup called Divvy. We were spend management and I was working with accounting firms at Divvy. Got acquired by BILL.com. Stayed there for a little bit, realized I hate working at big companies. Left and I started a venture fund with me and two other partners. We went and we raised a hundred million dollars to go invest in early stage technology. Clearly I was the young guy that the sweat equity, willing to do anything. But then after four years at the firm, I realized this is just too exciting of a time to not be building with AI and going deep into this, and I was like, I need to get off the sideline and actually go into the arena as they say. And so started Ping and haven’t looked back. It’s been awesome.

I love it. That’s so cool. So you guys are talking about generating proposals, identifying some revenue opportunities. What are some of the common things that maybe firm owners are missing or when they’re in those calls that they would’ve missed if you guys weren’t being able to identify those revenue opportunities? Like what, I guess, the common things you guys have solved for that are helping firms grow their bottom line?

Great question. So I would say it depends on the size. If you’re a solo firm owner, our biggest value is first, if you’re insecure about your sales process, we can help identify those things for you. So the majority of solo firm owners, they use us for our productivity suite. Like, hey, we’re going to help you with your notes, we’re going to help, we have an email assistant that triages your inbox natively in Outlook and Gmail.

That’s cool.

As you continue to move up the chain, ’cause our thesis was, if we go to these larger firms, the leadership is going to love Ping, ’cause it’s like, oh, we get all this money, this revenue opportunity detection, but then you’re going to have these guys on the bottom that are like, I hate Ping. Like it’s just big brother watching me, this is a terrible arrangement. And so we actually focused on how can we help the individual contributor. But then as you move up the chain of firm size, we start finding the more client-facing folks you have, the more opportunities are slipping through the cracks. And usually when I talk to a founder or an owner or a partner, I mean, one part ego play, but one part in actuality is like you’re not going to miss these opportunities, right? Like that’s your job. That’s when you’ve built your business off of this. But your staff that’s now meeting with clients, they’re not going to know.

Yeah, that’s huge.

And you go then to a larger firm that has a tax team and an outsourced accounting team? Tax team is not going to know what outsourced accounting means, or, well, all these different things. Oh, we have a little success.

Oh, we got a special guest here. We’re live. So what’s going on here, Mr. Crabtree?

I think we’re going to need to censor this. I don’t know, can we, he is going to throw some language in here that I don’t think is appropriate for all viewers out here.

Three Motion’s great at the postproduction. So we’ll have to edit all this out live.

I just saw two of my good friends here talking, wanted to see what’s happening.

There we go.

Welcome! We’re just talking Ping!

Yeah, welcome to the table, Randy.

Randy’s a big part of Ping with becoming one of our advisors and helping us kind of talk, we want to be better together. And what are the three requirements? What do we make? What are the three things that Ping successfully passed?

So you’ve passed the three is one. I have to, the team barely passed that one, I have to really like the team.

Barely passed that one.

I mean, I like hanging out with nice people. So going to like the team. The product or service has to be something that’s interesting to me. And then that specific product or service, I have to believe is going to have a positive impact on the lives of people in the accounting profession. So those three things, and then if they’re willing to talk to me, I’m willing to talk to them. But then there’s a fourth overriding factor with everything we do, we’ve got to “be nice and have fun.” So that’s my criteria, but this isn’t about me now. This is about you guys. I just jumped in.

No, I want to add in here. Randy, you are the first duplicated guest on the Accounting Leads Now podcast. We’ve never had a double feature before, so thank you very much.

That was at Scaling New Heights, right?

Well, we had you on the previous podcast episode. Then we done some interviews.

Ah, right.

So a lot of exposure now.

I didn’t know I was jumping in on your podcast.

No, this is great. Now this is going to go viral. It’s now famous. We got Randy in here. We’re good.

So I was just about to ask Camden, but Randy, I want to hear from you again: What’s your number one piece of advice or actionable insight that you would share with a firm owner?

Depends on what aspect of the firm, but let’s say they’re new or they’re growing: The one mistake I did when I started my firm was—and everybody does this—but I just took on every single client that I can. Actually, the funny thing is my son is presenting in a room a couple doors down right now, and he was just talking about this, when you start out, you take on everybody, whether they’re your ideal client or not, whether they end up wasting your time because it doesn’t fit what you’re doing, it’s not your skillset, you’re spending time. And that’s what I did when I started my first firm, I just took on everybody and helping everybody, and I really never got out of that mode until I sold that practice in ’06 and started Tri-Merit in ’07 when we became a niche. So if there’s any way that you can lean into a niche, something you’re passionate about, something you’re excited, the phone rings and that client makes you smile. The phone rings in and you frown, do the smile one, find the one that you like, and then lean into that. Because for me, when I did that, it doesn’t feel like I work at all. Everything is fun.

So when you are starting out, it’s fun to live indoors and have food on the table. It’s hard to turn away sometimes the not ideal client. How would you recommend someone gets on the other side of that advice where you are more firm, even though you still want to be collecting that revenue.

So the first thing is you do take on everybody. And you just do. You have to, you need money, you need revenue. But then as you get to a point, you’ve got to start leaning into that ideal client and because everything gets smoother when you do that. This isn’t about me, this is about him. So we need to get back.

No, Randy’s got plenty of good. Well, I think it takes a lot of gumption to niche down, but there’s a reason that we only service accounting firms. I mean, the accounting market, if you niche down, and even then we only service client-facing accounting firms. Like if you’re a compliance shop, like if you’re just a turn and burn tax shop, awesome, I hope you’re making so much money, we don’t have a lot of value for you, and it’s not a good fit for us. And so when you go in and you can have the just like, hey, we only do this thing, it makes selling easier. It makes building your products easier. Like I don’t have to go and worry about what a wealth advisor cares about. I don’t have to go worry about what an insurance broker cares about. I don’t have to go worry about what a tax compliance cares about. I have to care about what an accounting firm that is client-facing and meeting with their clients cares about. And that’s usually on outsourced accounting and there’s some tax folks that are in that bucket. But it allows my engineering team to have so much energy and time just be like, this is the thing, right? I can go to Bridging the Gap ’cause I know this is the people that are having those conversations. I don’t have to go spend time at these, waste time and energy other places. It is scary, but it makes accelerating a business so much easier.

I agree. And the one thing you didn’t say, but you implied is it makes that advisory aspect of it better because you just know that client base, that niche, and then Ping can help you along the way.

Hey, see, Randy knows. Randy came, so Randy was the last person that saw me without a child. Literally, Randy visited my office and then my wife went into labor four hours later.

Wow.

I’m like, Randy, you can only come every three years. We can only have so many of these, but we spent an hour and a half, two hours whiteboarding the vision of Ping, which is. Sorry, I’m just like, ramp, we opened a door. I apologize for just letting it get out here too.

No no, this is great.

I don’t care.

But what we found is advisory is such a broad term. It’s like, almost like gag me with a spoon broad. And I was at, not this event. Bridging the Gap has been amazing, but if you look at these, I went to another event and, oh, give me an example, and on the panel, the response to that question was, there’s too many to count. I’m like, so you just have no clue what you’re talking about. Like you just are making things up, you’re just saying we need to do advisory ’cause it’s very buzzy right now. But with Ping, what we can do, because we have this data and we start talking about revenue opportunities, really we’re helping you sell advisory, ’cause we can say, oh, interesting, your client is talking about need for sales tax. Okay, well what if we gave you the playbook to help you run a SALT practice? And with new technology these days, no longer do you need to have somebody who’s, you’re paying them two and a quarter to run the SALT practice. You can leverage a tool, and you can go in and hire a team and like build a SALT practice that’s reasonable and like can do 80% of the work fairly efficiently and we can help you start building those playbooks where it’s no longer just “do advisory, that’s the layer of the future.” It’s like, no, no, no. Do this type of advisory. Here’s the process, and that’s where Ping can actually come in and help firms manage that. And that’s what Randy and I spent an hour and a half talking about, which got me excited. Very excited.

So I just got two final questions here, guys, ’cause Three Motion’s been very generous with their time and their production studio here. With advisory being such a buzzword, us being on the lead generation side of things, every firm wants the advisory client. I always tell everyone, the end user isn’t searching “advisory near me” ’cause they don’t know it exists. Randy, how would you recommend a firm finds those advisory clients? I have my answers, but I want to hear it from you.

Well, you’re the smart one here. How do you find those advisory clients? Obviously it goes back to your niche. But I am a terrible business development person. Honestly, I am a relationship person. And so if you want advisory, you know your niche, and then you’re just hanging out with that niche or you’re on the social media with that niche, it’s, believe me, that’s probably a terrible answer, but I just go and meet the people that you want to hang out with, that you want to be part of, and wherever they’re hanging out, whether it’s online, whether it’s in person, whether it’s here at, what’s this conference called? Bridging the Gap?

BTG or something? I can’t remember.

Here. That kind of thing. But I don’t know. You have an answer?

I think mine’s going to be a little bit more go to market sales like mine, because I think at the end you have to have the relationship where it’s not going to happen. But I look at any proper sales funnel has a top of funnel. The marketing terms, top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel. I look at the bottom of funnel as the advisory client, and you’re going to have to actually have a decent amount of top of funnel, which is not just, like you’re going to have to have new clients, new leads, new conversations. Like not everybody’s going to actually want advisory. Like I know that’s what we were offering and we should be pushing that, but some people don’t have the budget, or don’t want it, and that’s okay. You should say, great, let’s go through this funnel. And now they’re in the middle of funnel, which the middle of funnel is actually tax compliance, or just bookkeeping, or like it’s the compliance work. And then the bottom of funnel, which is not going to be all of your clients, is going to continue to funnel down into those ideal advisory. And all this starts at leads. You can’t have any of this unless you’re generating new business and you can have the flexibility to be like, I no longer need this quarter of my business because I have enough new business coming in that I can focus on the bottom, which is what I really want.

This is why I hang out with really smart people like this. What you just said was pretty much the beginning of my son’s presentation.

Well hey, he’s smart. Actually. Ping’s transcribing everything, so I’m just like, you got a live feed in your ear right now. “And my dad, er, Randy I mean! He’s sitting across here.” So, that’s what I would say.

Just so, when you’re talking about this, unbeknownst to me, my son asked my wife for embarrassing pictures of me.

Oh, that’s hilarious.

And that was about the second slide to show up. But that’s not the business development tool. We had a laugh though.

Awesome. I mean, what you’re saying, you need to bring people in at the top and then ask enough questions to identify what the need is. As the expert, what is going to be best for that firm. The business owner looking, they think they need accounting, they don’t know what that means. So it’s up to the professional to ask the right question to identify, okay, they actually need X, Y, Z, they thought they needed a tax return, and then we’ve identified they’ve been paying way too much in taxes for years. They’re not coming in knowing that ’cause they’re not the expert. So be the doctor that asks the questions and prescribe. Last question, Mr. Ping: What is the best advice you would give to a firm owner to either better their business or better themselves?

I would say we are in a time right now where there’s a lot of people that are advisory AI—I build AI. That’s literally my job, and I still get exhausted by how much people talk about AI. So like we are in a time where there is so much hype going in and there’s so many cool tools getting built, there’s so many cool offerings you can do, there’s so many cool things you can do. Going down to just the fundamentals of building a business, which is find value, offer value, like find things, find problems, and offer value. Like if you solve that equation, you are going to figure things out. And this is my thing for Ping, is like our job is helping you find the problems for you to offer the value. And there’s so many cool features, like even in this room, the amount of products that are solving real needs is insane. But you need to figure out what’s the thing that you need to solve for, and just don’t listen to all the noise. There’s so much noise. Just like, relax, calm down. The world’s not burning. AI’s here, it’s awesome. It’s going to do so much for you, but you’re not going to, like, robots aren’t going to kill you or take over the world. Just breathe and just focus on what’s the value that you’re trying to drive, and selfishly, at Ping, we are trying to help you find that value.

Love it. Fantastic answer. Guys, thank you so much for stopping by. Of course. Three Motion booth, coming on an episode of the Accounting Leads Now podcast. This is the first live one in person. And Randy, second time guest on the show. This is a first.

I forced my way in. Thanks for letting me be here.

I mean, the security was like, trying to hold you back. I saw them out there. They were like, no, wait, wait. Well, thanks for having me. This is awesome. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Important Links

Accounting Leads Now Podcast

Ping

Bridging the Gap Conference

About the Guests

James Donovan is the founder of Accounting Leads Now and Nine Two Media, where he helps accounting, bookkeeping, and tax firms build predictable growth through modern marketing and lead-generation systems. He is the author of Booked Solid: Digital Marketing Strategies That Actually Work for Accounting Firms and host of The Accounting Leads Now Podcast, featuring conversations with firm owners, vendors, and industry leaders focused on growth, sales, and client acquisition.

Camden Bean is the CEO and co-founder of Ping Assistant, an AI platform built specifically for accounting firms. The son of a CPA, he previously led accounting partnerships at Divvy before its acquisition by BILL. He later co-founded a venture fund that raised $100 million for early-stage software investments, before returning to build Ping. In 2026, CPA Practice Advisor recognized him as a 20 Under 40 influencer.