SPEAKER_04 0:00

You started your career before the agency for almost a decade helping your parents grow their online jewellery business, but somehow ended up starting a huge WordPress agency with over a hundred developers on board. If you were starting the agency today, how would you do things differently?

SPEAKER_00 0:16

I think it would be a headless agency. To be very honest, if I were to start a new agency, will I even be an agency? Now I'll be a one-manager. I'm talking to you, and there are autonomous agents. I have everything. I have a top-of-the-line subscription for ChatGPT, Kirchsturch, Lloyd. Why? If somebody comes to me and says $200 worth of subscription, why should I spend $200? I said, are you out of your mind? Because of those $200, you're getting $100,000 software engineering.

SPEAKER_04 0:36

Many, several of them. A lot of web agencies like speak to talk about the struggle to get MRR inside of the business. How have you tackled that piece? Maintenance.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Some sort of licking revenue is important. Now we have plans taking for $49 to $600 a month. Every agency in the should have that. No excuses. There's just no excuses. The only excuse thinking is how do we find the leads? Well.

SPEAKER_04 0:57

Door to door. That's what I've been doing.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

I'm sure if you knock on 100 doors, you know you'll find two.

SPEAKER_04 1:01

It's impossible to fail, actually.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

You can just sell it for a thousand dollars with a sixty dollar cursor subscription or a hundred dollar uh codec subscription. How do you find and define those people?

SPEAKER_04 1:14

Got them. Welcome to agency giant. So you started your career before the agency for almost a decade helping your parents grow their online jewelry business, but somehow ended up starting a huge WordPress agency with over a hundred developers on board. And I'm interested in what that transition looked like.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Well, it's pretty interesting, actually. I never thought I'm going to be in the website development space ever in my life. It's just that when I was trying to take their business online, my parents' business online, I discovered something called as SEO search engine optimization. I kind of like enjoyed it, you know, because see, I'm not a coder per se, you know, but uh nowadays that everybody's a coder, thanks to Claude and Anthropic and whatnot. But I somehow really enjoyed SEO, getting websites ranked on page one. So they had like a couple of portals, websites. They were selling on eBay, Etsy, and all that. And I thought, okay, let me like kind of unify it. Long story short, I kind of like enjoyed that game. And I said, hmm, I did really well for them, you know, like our family business. I can do it for others. And I just started having conversations, like dinner table conversations with some friends and family, etc. One person said, okay, cool. I'll I need a website and I need help. Another person said, I need help. His cousin said, I need help. His cousin said I need help. Long story short, in three months, I've got like 10 customers. I'm uh building websites for them. In fact, I started off with CS Card, Open Card, WordPress, because I didn't know what I was doing. This was not my game, right? And uh all I knew was that I have done it successfully for my parents, so that means I can replicate the same story for others. And then I realized that WordPress is the best way to do it. And I started off uh hosting on WP Engine. I think that was my first ever host, you know, which I invested with and started recommending to other people. People were happy. My first ever website build, I charged 50,000 rupees. I was in India at that time, which is roughly four, 550 USD. You know, I was really proud of it. And I was so happy. That business is a million dollar plus business in India right now, selling skincare and cosmetics, by the way. So I'm really happy that she uh she was able to make it a smashing success. One of our first 10 customers. But yeah, the story is that it's because of SEO, search engine optimization, because I realized that I could get them on page one of Google uh by just hard work, just pure hard work. And that's how I got into the website development space, you know.

SPEAKER_04 3:49

Why WordPress specifically? Did Shopify exist back then? And I remember early platforms like Big Cartel as well that existed back then. So why what funnel do you need to WordPress?

SPEAKER_00 3:58

Okay, so I actually, when I was building out my parents' e-commerce website, I experimented with uh volution, big commerce. There was something called as uh cart rocket in India, which was a copycat kind of a ship uh Shopify and Shopify also. But every time, you know, there were either challenges with integrations, multi-currency setups were difficult, etc. And and or it was really expensive, you know, because getting developers for a particular industry, obviously, you know, it depends, you know, they can be of any range, whether you hire them from Asia or India, like or Africa or Western world, wherever, you know, developers for every niche, the more niche you go, the more expensive they become, as you know. So, you know, long story short, is like I realized that if you know the plugin ecosystem really well, you know, and you know, you do your research, you understand the business model of your prospect, your customer, you know, you can you can actually launch a $10,000 website for just $1,000 also. And that's how I got hooked in the WordPress ecosystem. And it led me to uh, you know, uh a DM on Instagram one day from a company called as GoDaddy. You know, as you know, GoDaddy, they found me because I was a part of their GoDaddy Pro ecosystem. And they said, hey, uh, you know, uh, you're doing pretty good, long story, you know, and I think you're connected to a lot of websites, and uh, we would like to give you an award. And they gave me an award, uh, sort of the GoZadi Business Buy Award. And that how that's how I actually got a lot of visibility also.

SPEAKER_04 5:33

Interesting. And so did a lot of the early clients outside of those initial 10 from friends and family and circle come from WordPress WordPress community itself, and then from places like GoDaddy, or did you have like an outbound strategy where you were acquiring?

SPEAKER_00 5:47

We were honestly speaking, never uh uh very good in the outbound uh strategy. However, GoDaddy gave me visibility, okay? And go at that time, GoDaddy's office was in India, in WeWork, where I had an office right next to it, by the way. And then I got even more visibility. But there's another story there. Because of GoDaddy, they posted a picture of me on Instagram. And my co-founder, Ryan, you know, he found me and he messaged me, hey, let's do something together. I said, sure, what do you have in mind? He said, like, I am I'm a five people, uh two, two people, two-person agency. I said, I'm a five person agency. He said, let's do something together. And we kind of like married our companies and Seahawk, you know, and we got even more visibility. So Ryan had his own customers with the GoDaddy Pro Connect directory. I had my own, and uh we were able to like use that ecosystem uh from Godaddy, but GoDaddy then sunseted that, okay? And we it led to some challenges because we were getting very good leads from that ecosystem, and we were top three in that directory. So that was pretty good because inbound leads you can't beat them, right? People who are struggling, people who have got from, let's say, point A to F, but they want to get to Z and launch their website. And um, you know, that was really good. And then SEO, search engine optimization, my true love, my true calling, you know. And I was really happy that I was able to our website guest really well. We get inbound leads now every single day. Proud to say that. And uh I think that's been working well for us.

SPEAKER_04 7:19

Nice. Why Seahawk? What's the origin of that name?

SPEAKER_00 7:21

Oh, that uh so my when I started off my agency, it was called Sitecook. It's there on my LinkedIn as well. The Sitecook, because I wanted to work with restaurants. So right now I'm like 86 kilos, but like six, seven years ago was like big. I was really big. I have a huge foodie, okay, and love food, okay. And uh so that's my site cook. And I wanted to work on digital marketing, websites, etc., with restaurants and cafes. Uh that's another story. We can we can spend two hours separately on that. But uh Rwyan already had Seahawk because it was uni in Wilmington. And that's how we said, okay, cool, we can't use two names, so we just use Seahawk. It's a cool name, you know, and our logo also has the Hawk and everything. So we just chose Sea Hawk.

SPEAKER_04 8:04

What was it like merging with another business and bringing a business partner and were you not protective over being a solo founder and holding on to the equity?

SPEAKER_00 8:10

I love talking about this, okay, because co-founders. What is the co-founder? It's like a marriage, right? And uh we have had our you know ups and downs, you know, with COVID, everybody was under stress, etc. And we have incredibly good times. We go to word camps and events and you know whatnot. I think uh we both push each other to you know become the best and focus on our best. And I think having a good co-founder is a blessing. That's what I would say. Because alone you can only do so much, right? And uh and I think to be very honest with you, I might not have been fully focused on the website and WordPress game if I did not meet my co-founder, because I was doing other stuff also at that time, right? But then this started picking off, uh, you know, it went full steam, so I said, why not? You know? And uh yeah, we'd we've had a good ride. We've had a pretty good ride. We still have, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 9:09

Do you have uh the majority of your team presence in India still, or are you because obviously you're based here in London, so what's that situation like?

SPEAKER_00 9:15

So I'm from New Delhi, India. I moved here five years ago. My team during COVID, we had an office, and about 50 people used to come to that office. Then everybody moved to the remote world, and they are now all over India. But my team is in India, they're in Africa, they're in South America, uh, because we cover a lot of time zones. Uh, and this is the reason that we have very, very good labor at a very good price. That's why we are able to offer great pricing to our customers without compromising on quality. And uh I think uh that's led to um, you know, a lot of uh we getting accounts for other agencies and other hosting companies, and we're able to successfully offer white label services to others. And a lot of other people have tried and failed at this because if you have labor and it's expensive, you know, and uh then the margins don't work out in the services world. If a software is a different story, but with services stuff, you know. So yeah, our team is everywhere. We hire I've tried hiring from uh Philippines and uh Vietnam sector, it didn't work out for me. I didn't, but I didn't try hard enough because I understand the India culture and I'm from India really well. So most of my team is from India.

SPEAKER_04 10:27

Interesting. I I I struggled with the Philippines as well, actually. I think lots of people try and and that's on. Um interesting.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

Talent is another part. You see, everybody, let's let's be honest, on resume's LinkedIn and CVs, 90% 90% people lie. So you have to see through them. So like I think I'm a pretty good judge when I meet somebody for 15 minutes. That's all what I need. Uh I know exactly whether that person is gonna survive with this or not.

SPEAKER_04 10:53

What are your what are some of your uh your kind of lessons in ensuring that with a virtual company that isn't holding it at this true physical presence, you're up holding culture, but also just good work ethic and ensuring things are getting done. Are you quite strict with time tracking, for example? How do things look across the company?

SPEAKER_00 11:12

So we used to use a software called as desk time to you know log the uh laptops, monitors, the sector, whatever. We kind of like sunset it after a year or so. Why we did it? Because after you know, after COVID, everybody kind of got lazy, less accepted, okay? And uh by working from home and under a lot of stress and pressure, whatever. So when we were hiring new people, we realized that we were getting output, we were paying for eight or nine hours of salary, but we're getting like three hours worth of output, what's going on? So we had to do it. But then over time we just realized, like, you know, and like if somebody's active on Slack, you know, we don't have any time zones or stuff like that, except some people in South America, Africa which are dedicatedly working for PST time zone the sector. But we just know, you know, when somebody's active on Slack and they respond to you within one minute to 20 minutes that they're around. Even if they're if somebody's out and about, somebody's let's say picking up their kid from the school, Slack is there, right? You get notifications. So we know that that person is responsive, and you know, and we just know, you know, over time. That's how.

SPEAKER_04 12:13

Yeah, interesting. So the core service of the agency still is Web First, building Webflow websites. What is what are the adjacent WordPress websites? WordPress websites, of course. Webflow, WordPress.

SPEAKER_00 12:24

I know, I know. We get a web we get a lot of web flow leads also, by the way. Uh but uh we have a good partner and we just you know give them out. Now we have not received too many Webflow leads. I think it's because of the headless ecosystem, whatever. But but uh yes, we are focused only on WordPress website development, although I personally am building out uh, you know, and experimenting with headless websites. And I recently launched a portal called as hostless.io. That was my first experiment to learn, besides my own website, gothamkhurana.com, which I've built again and again and again six or seven times, just to ensure, like, because I wanted it to be in a certain way, and again, SEO first approach, you know, and I was learning the anthropic and codex ecosystem. So that was just education, you know. But uh, I'm really proud of what I did with host list and uh uh hostlist.io and it's like 30,000, 40,000 uh agencies offering hosting and hosts, you know, and MSPs also there and indexed really well, getting a lot of ranking. It's got tons and tons of features and stuff right now. While we are speaking, there are a lot of agents working, you know, on my laptop, and I'm very excited to get home and see what happens.

SPEAKER_04 13:36

Well, so talk me through that project. So, what are you looking to achieve with with hostless?

SPEAKER_00 13:41

So I've realized that the hosting uh ecosystem, they are facing a massive problem of acquiring new customers. I've heard, I think I read it somewhere, that some hosts are spending upwards of $500 to acquire one customer who spends $50 a year. So to recover that $500, they have to hope and pray that the customer will survive for 10 years. Think about that deeply. Okay, and then they have to retain them. And customers, if they get angry, they will just bounce off to some other host in the hosting ecosystem. And there are a lot of other directories who only push the ones on the top, those who are paying them, you know, an affiliate fee. And the affiliate fee is anywhere between $50 to even $300 for one referral. And sometimes some hosting companies offer like a lifetime referral, depending on the program, et cetera. So they just push the ones which they want to push. And I said, hmm, this is a huge problem. Let's try to sort this out. And this idea just came to me. And uh, long story short, like uh, you know, and I speak with a lot of hosting company founders also, and I see this problem over and over again. And it's life, check it out. You know, it works really well. It's translated in a couple of languages. I intend to translate it to uh at least 10 or 15 more languages. It's indexed really well. Chat GPT is loving me for some reason. They're uh because I think it's all organic and authentic content. And uh I get a lot of reference to Chat GPT perplexity, you know, and hosting company founders are claiming their profiles. Nobody can game the ranking algorithm, nobody can ever pay to rank on the top. And that's the reason, you know, and most importantly, because it's not like I'm bored with WordPress. I love WordPress. In fact, the WordPress ecosystem has become really good because of the incredible work with the WordPress.org community, the plugin community, and now is really they they maintain it really well. If there's something wrong with the plugin, they'll shut it. So the WordPress ecosystem is really strong now, uh, but headless is exciting. So it was it is also an experiment to see what level to what boundaries I can push myself. And I'm getting a lot of love from uh other you know, hosting company founders and agencies offering hosting. So let's see how it goes.

SPEAKER_04 15:56

Well, talk about an agency offering hosting. What in what instance does an agency offer hosting versus using a hosting platform?

SPEAKER_00 16:02

Agencies offer hosting all the time. The main reason is because their end users, small, medium businesses. You know, let's say Joe's cafe around the block. That Joe, you know, who has a cafe, only cares about making sure his website is running. He doesn't want to pay a uh hosting bill. He doesn't want to look at speed optimization on or look at Google Core web items. Does he even know what Google Core Web Itals is? You see my point. So there's can you imagine the sheer number of businesses like that, small businesses like that all over the world?

SPEAKER_04 16:33

But is the is is the agency not then just using a hosting platform and stuff? They're not, presumably they don't they're not hosting on their own server, they're them white labeling effectively, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:42

Yes, yes, host agencies, they have a relationship with some hosting company. They have an account, a reseller account, or a big mammoth VPS server sector. Mostly they have a reseller account. Uh, and a lot of incredible companies offer these kind of accounts. Google Daddy, Bluehost, Hosting.com. There are new kids on the block like Jethost, Flash Cloud, name it. Like I live and breathe this ecosystem, and I can talk about hosts day and out. But uh they offer very good service at a very good price, the host. And they have a very good reseller ecosystem and they can have separate panels. So for an agency to just get one account, you know, and let's say they pay a reseller account for 25 websites, let's say $300 a month, hypothetically, I'm throwing a number. And that Joe is paying them, let's say, $300 a month to maintain like the basic maintenance and to host their website. Or even $200, you know. And imagine if the host has like two customers, is paid off for the rest of 25 websites, right? It's very profitable.

SPEAKER_04 17:40

So you've probably had a lot of time to think about this. I'm interested with host list. How do these hosting companies differentiate from each other outside of brands? Like how do you rank an algorithm on what host is right for a specific company if they all offer similar things at different prices?

SPEAKER_00 17:56

So reviews is one for sure. But here's the thing: it's not you can't just count Google reviews. You just can't count trust palette reviews. You have to think of all of them: Google, trust palette, and Reddit. Now, if you look at host list, if you just randomly check, you know, 50 hosts or 10 hosts, look at the Google reviews, okay? All of them are crap. Because whenever there is an angry customer, the easiest is to go on Google and write an review. So I realized that hosting companies were also facing challenges and problems because of that. So it's an aggregate which is published over there, or we make sure that it's the trust palette. It's never never the Google one. Because trust palette, they still have control. They can challenge it, they can reply, they can try and sort, et cetera. But in the grand scheme of things, I've realized when I look at hundreds or thousands of hosts, uh, they are very obsessed with their trust palette reviews and G2 reviews. So that's one part of the algorithm, just one tiny part. But there are a lot of things also like speed testing. So there is there is uh public information, the CRUX scores, and you can just check the speed and you just know whether it's good or not. And we're doing manual battle testing with the same deployment, you know, with the lowest tier plan of matchwords. And we're going to be publishing videos out soon as well. So there is a lot of other, there's a lot of things, other things in the hood, but it's all public. If you go to anybody who goes to hostless.io, there's something called as the HRI, the ranking system, which I made. And you can just check and you will see. And every time it's updated, it keeps on updating. That's why we are doing it. We're just trying to make it stronger. Most importantly, disclosures. Nobody has that in the ecosystem. Disclosures like what's your refund window? Think about it. You know, nobody is not there. Look at think about it deeply. Go to GoDaddy, go to Bluehost, go to WP Engine, any host, okay? The refund policy is not very clear, so uh the ones who are doing that, they get a small bump also. And I think that's fair. Nice. Right? And uh and this it and I am getting traffic, a very good amount of traffic. It's only going to increase because I truly care about the ecosystem.

SPEAKER_04 20:00

Is it going to be a dying industry over the long term with AI because of the fact that language models are recommending such core it almost like this like you use Claude and it recommends a baseline infrastructure to everybody? So, like, is that like a major threat to that industry?

SPEAKER_00 20:19

Oh, I love this topic. Okay, so much I can talk about it. Okay, so let's talk about WordPress again for a second, and then I'll connect it to this. Okay. So WordPress is roughly about 40-ish percent of the internet. Okay. It's gonna decline. It's inevitable. Okay, but decline not like it's gonna crash to 20%. It will decline maybe a percent every year for the next five years. After five years, I don't know what's gonna happen. Okay, because it's massive. Okay. And the new kids on the block, they don't want to use WordPress. Okay. But the legacy is there, okay, and it's improving. And there is a cloud connector with WordPress also. Okay, so if somebody has a budget or somebody wants to experiment on their own and they want to launch a 10-pager website, WordPress is undoubtedly the best solution. Okay, with the because they have such a big community and the ecosystem is very easy, okay. But what's happening is that when you want to experiment, the hard truth is that Cloud and Codex, et cetera, they only recommend Vercel and NetLifi. Okay, I didn't even know what Verse L and Netlify were till about three to five months ago. Okay, and I discovered and started like really like learning a lot about them, and I have accounts with both of them because I wanted to make sure, you know, that if there's a problem with one, then I can always switch. And honestly speaking, the their support team takes like a week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks to respond. What does that mean? That means that they're overwhelmed with the sheer amount of tickets and growth. So with the AI, this I would not say it's a threat, at least for the next decade. Yeah, but uh if WordPress uh cannot keep Up pace and make sure that the cloud connector works flawlessly. Then eventually, you know, I don't want to say it, but eventually the percentage loss will be very high. I like to take an example of cordless phones, you know, and a cell phone. When was the last time you use a landline or a cordless phone?

SPEAKER_04 22:20

I don't have one.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

You see where I'm getting to, right? You see where I'm getting to. I don't think WordPress is there because WordPress is evolving very quickly. Uh but it needs to come up with something super exciting for the Gen Zs and the new kids on the block. That's what I I'm alluding to.

SPEAKER_04 22:37

It's interesting. Is is the is the tech itself flawed or from a tech perspective do they set basically operate in a similar way, but just with an easier user interface?

SPEAKER_00 22:49

I would say uh the biggest challenge is getting a website launched, even though hosting companies are sorting that out now. So for example, if you go to Bluehurst or Jethurst or any other, especially the new hosting companies, there's like a one-click install, you can launch, etc. But again, going back to the SMBs, you know, going back to Joe's Cafe, you know, for them, is VIX easier or WordPress easier? For them, is Squarespace easier or WordPress easier? For them, headless is very complicated, by the way. They cannot do Nextchase and Astro builds, even with Claude, is very tough. Although ChatGPT has something called as sites. I just saw that yesterday. I haven't played with it because I'm living in Codex and Claude most of the times. But if ChatGPT is giving an option to just type in English or any language of your choice and pay a $5 a month subscription and your website is live, that's like Wix also, right? So can WordPress do that right now? Answer is no. You know, it's it's difficult. You know, people go to WordPress.com, they see, they get confused. They can go to WordPress.org, they get confused. When I say people, I'm not talking about agencies. Agencies now. I'm talking about, you know, all kinds of businesses, you know, small businesses, small and medium-sized businesses, even enterprises, NGOs, et cetera, because their teams are not technical at all. I sp I this morning I met a massive, massive NGO based out of India with 200 employees, and they have no clue about the technology stack. They just know it's on WordPress. That's it. They've never even gone into it. Then I looked into it, there's an Awada theme in the background, there's that, whatever, nonsense. But the point is that it's the hard truth is that it is tough to navigate it if you don't have any knowledge. You see. But if you don't have any knowledge, the truth is that you can launch something on Wix and Squarespace with the click of a button.

SPEAKER_04 24:38

Interesting. Then as an agency, surely is a there's a huge opportunity for you guys over the next five to ten years. And and if you were to migrate out of I mean, WordPress is is still going to have its place, but if you were to migrate into Headless, then and the customer just wants a great website in the shortest time frame possible. Um, do you think that you would be able to produce great websites in a shorter timeframe with Headless if you could transfer your existing knowledge to every team member that you have at the moment?

SPEAKER_00 25:12

We are kind of like we have already using AI in the ecosystem. Okay, so what we did was at CHOP Media, we've realized that they're gonna there's always gonna be WordPress. When I say always, I mean for the next 10 years it's not gonna go anywhere. In fact, I'm very bullish on our WordPress uh maintenance business, support, care, whatever way you want to call it. Because people go on Google and they say WordPress maintenance, WordPress support, WordPress care. You know? And I have realized that uh, you know, me and the co-founder, I'm both like, WordPress maintenance is not gonna go anywhere. So we came up with something very interesting called WPMentain.com. Before I come back to headless, I'll talk about that because it's kind of like linked to it. So what WP maintain, as the name suggests, is like the simple platform where people can connect their websites, agencies, hosts, they connect their websites on WordPress and it will show you what kind of problems they are gone, and they can click buttons and they can update it. Or this is the industry first. They can pay us a small fee and we can update it for them because hosts do not want to touch the websites of their customers. And we already have some incredible pilots going, okay. And agencies have started loving our product because we also offer a services layer on top of it with resolving tickets, etc. So imagine if you have an agency of 30 WordPress customers, you can sign up on WPmaintain.com and I charge you $2 to $25 a site depending on the model which you choose, and you just keep building your customers and you enjoy the cash. So WordPress maintenance, I'm really bullish. Now coming back to the headless part and the AI part of this, okay? About four or five months ago, we introduced Cloud throughout the company. We gave our team, all of our team access to Cloud, but I also started experimenting with Kimi and Minimax. And they all have their strengths and weaknesses, you know? Like one is for design, okay? But then you have to bring the design into WordPress and give it to a pro. We call it what we call them WordPress pros at Chawk Media. And the pro will use that HTML design, which the client has approved and make it out. This process used to take about two to four weeks, and now it takes less than a week, okay, and it's superior quality. Sometimes it takes about two weeks because it's back and forth with the customer. That's the only challenge sometimes. But you can't, if somebody's on a vacation, you can only do so much, right? So AI is already being used in our uh WordPress workflows. If somebody is not using them and they are a WordPress agency, they must do it. And I know a lot of them have not even touched it right now. It's shocking. Now, to convert or bring about moving some of them to a headless environment, we are actually launching something called as headless WordPress CMS. Basically, you can do that too. So the front end, okay, it could be static HTML, it could be NextJS, it could be anything. But the powerhouse, the CMS can still be WordPress. So we're already offering that now. And it works flawlessly. It's beautiful. Snappy websites, they look like $20,000 websites. So it's happening. And uh it's just a matter of you know, patience and persistence. Uh, because we never marketed that product, you see. We just started, uh we're gonna just start marketing that product now, you know, and uh I think we're onto something over there.

SPEAKER_04 28:25

Aaron Ross Powell Do you Do you think that many developers um and uh not not just web developers, but of course that's your expertise, but are at a danger of being very resistant to change and and the and adopting AI. And uh just a bit of pre-context on that question. My my younger brother owns a web development agency that started on WordPress, then moved to Webflow, and that is now doing headless. And it took a very long time for I went through that transition about six months ago when I started using Visual Studio Code and and Claude plugged in and building applications like wow, I can now take my ideas into reality and so on. My father is a senior software engineer, I can't even get him to entertain the idea of using Claude code, he's incredibly resistant. Do you experience that in team in in like your your local vicinity, but then also just in the wider market, do you think there's a lot of resistance from developers?

SPEAKER_00 29:16

It's true. There is massive resistance. In fact, at our own team, you know, there was like we saw and unfortunately we had no option but to let them go. The problem is like if you cannot adapt to change which is necessary, it's not only that you're not gonna survive at my company, you will not survive anywhere, right? If you cannot adapt. Because why not? It's better, it's changing your life for the good. Like I just mentioned, I'm talking to you, and there are autonomous agents, you know. I've got I have everything. I have the top-of-the-line subscriptions for ChatGPT, cursor, Claude. Why? Why? And somebody comes to me and says, $200 for a subscription, why should I spend $200? I said, Are you out of your mind? Because of those $200, you're getting a hundred thousand dollar software engineer. Many, several of them. Think about it deeply. What are you even saying? So the fact that people are resistant to that, it just blows my mind. And there's so many of them. At my HR portal at Sighawk Pedria, we get job applicants for WordPress developers every day, every hour sometimes. So many. You know, and it's it's just shocking that none of them have any experience using uh uh cloud or any sort of AI. Everybody's and they can't invest $20, $60. Okay, if they can't even invest $200, the simplest, and I have said this on LinkedIn very recently also, just buy a cursor $60 plan. With cursors $60 plan, I don't have you. Have you used a cursor or no?

SPEAKER_04 30:41

Uh no, I've not used cursor. I went straight into VS Code Code code.

SPEAKER_00 30:45

I am like a diehard Claude fan, also. Fable, fable, fable, or open token all the way.

SPEAKER_04 30:50

Take the token.

SPEAKER_00 30:52

Don't care. Charge my key charging my credit card. Don't care.

SPEAKER_04 30:55

There's no token efficiency going on.

SPEAKER_00 30:57

Don't care. Because you're getting like a think about what they're getting, right? But if somebody's genuinely on a budget, and I know a lot of people are, just get a cursor $60 subscription. Okay? It has the best, best mileage. Their composer is shockingly good. It's not very good, but it's good. So it's just it's just stupid, crazy. I just don't understand why developers are so resilient to change. It's just crazy.

SPEAKER_04 31:27

Well, here's a kind of an interesting further thought than that, which is so I I own a software company as well. And so we're hiring developers. There's a part of me, as someone who's somewhat ignorant to the conventions and conformity of conventional development that feels like the way I ship features and and and code uh vibe code my own applications for the business and solve problems, I do it in a way ignorant and quite blissfully ignorant to some of those things that a developer would think about. And I find that just in some instances, great developers can actually be much slower than people who are not so deeply embedded in the development space when adopting things like AI. Do you think it's possible that being a traditional developer could actually be a handicap as far as being able to adopt newer ways of building things?

SPEAKER_00 32:25

Well, what is a developer nowadays? What is the definition of a developer nowadays? Okay. If somebody came to me one year ago and said, like, listen, and uh, you know, I wanted to build out a website like hosteless.io, and uh it was just not possible. You know? And you would need to hire a team of a lot of people pay a obnoxious amount of money, definitely above six figures, to make a website like that. Right? At least, you know, considering the whole shebang of things and the time. So if if a developer what is a developer? I think a project manager is a developer nowadays. As long as they can commit to the time, they want to learn, they they can adapt and they have anthropic and you know codex by their side, like really is just it's a massive, massive handicap. Uh if a developer or any project manager working in an agency, this podcast is focused around agencies. So to all the agency listeners, if in your team somebody is not using AI 24-7 or till the time they're awake, I think you are definitely gonna fall behind. You will have to shut sharp in the next few years. So it's inevitable. Because it's just a matter of time. I do speak with a lot of agency founders for work because we out they outsource work to us all the time. And it's just crazy that uh they are just not adapting to change, you know? It's inevitable, but it's inevitable. It's gonna happen.

SPEAKER_04 33:58

I completely agree with you. Uh last year, start last year, I paid uh just around £100,000 to for a team of developers to build a data tracking system within Airtable. And uh over the course of one weekend in Q1 this year, I've built a more sophisticated, more effective system myself. And if that doesn't speak for it, I actually have goosebumps as I say that. It's it's unfathomable when you actually dump in. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:24

I know, I know. I'm building out another thing also. If you go to my LinkedIn, there's something called as girl.dad. I actually got that domain. I own the domain, girl.dad. I'm very proud of it because I'm never leaving that domain. Ever. It's a very unique name, right? So I have girl.dad because I'm a girl dad, and she inspires me. My daughter Tara, she inspires me. And I wanted to come up with something, you know, in that space. So I'm using some sort of my ideas from hostless, the scoring system mechanism in this ecosystem as well. So the website is live with an email. So anybody who's a girl dad or a boy dad, doesn't matter, just sign up and be revealed soon. And that's also another experiment with AI. I just can't stop shipping products because I'm proud to say I'm an ideas guy, you know, but I could never execute the way I wanted to. And the way I'm able to help my parents with the headless ecosystem, with the world, with the their jewelry business and the astrology space, I I I've learned so much. I call it, I call it the best education. So as an agency founder, whoever is listening and tuned into the show, they must be immersed into you know, anthropic or cursor or codex, no matter what. And you have a short window. When I say you, I mean like agency founders, they have a short window because eventually everybody's gonna start doing it, you know?

SPEAKER_04 35:45

Yeah, absolutely. And uh unfortunately you've come from the position of knowing what great is, and so that's you know, when in a world where everybody can build anything, you've got to know what great actually is in order to, you know, we're expediting the process and we're able to do things in ridiculous time periods now, but we still have to understand what a good application is, what good user experience is, what good user interface is as well. I mean, you look at the sea of applications that are coming out, which is just like this is like there's no user interfacing work being done at all. It's just the basics of of Claude. And I think there is gonna be a, you know, kind of like the, you know, you've you've had all of these different ideas that you've brought into fruition over the past um few months. Like many people are gonna do an awful lot like that. We're in that era of AI slop where people are creating all kinds of different things. And I think we'll really the the applications and the solutions that are going to survive and thrive beyond that are gonna be from people that understood what great was before they got into building things.

SPEAKER_00 36:46

Yeah, yeah. There's another thing I can add to every founder. If you use a CRM, the first thing which I did was I decided to make my own CRM. That's how I initially learned in a quoting system. So we were spending $1,100 a month on HubSpot, and I just changed it. So now we use crm.cihacmedia.com, and it's not similar, it's better and much cheaper because we own the code, we own the GitHub repo, whatever. And if anybody wants to learn, I think just build your own website. And if it's on WordPress, stick to WordPress and they can still use the WordPress CMS. But the front end, you have more power than ever before. You know, so I would just say like experiment on your own website to begin with, you know?

SPEAKER_04 37:30

You built um you built uh a white-level network as well for your agency, and you you've you've you mentioned earlier that you're you're able to do that because of the fact that you're you're taking you have the ability to be able to run at really good profit margins on on the price in which you're selling services. How instrumental has that been to the growth of the agency in general? How much of your client base comes from white label partners, both hosting and other agencies?

SPEAKER_00 37:58

Well, uh it used to be 70-30, 70 percent 70 percent being the B2B, the white table business. Now it's just around a 50-50. You know, it's also because a lot of uh, you know, agencies and hosting companies, they were not internalizing stuff, they were giving it out. But uh the honest answer is a lot of companies have started to internalize things because of AI. Are they successful at doing that? Uh I don't think so. Because uh you can definitely ship out software, but uh you cannot ship out services at certain margins internally. So I think it's gonna come back to that. It will be like it's just like you know, everybody's just you know experimenting with shiny objects right now. And uh but somebody needs to still, you know, uh click buttons and update the themes, update the plugins, make sure you know the page builder behind WordPress, whether it's Elementor, WP Bakery, Gutenberg, are working and humming perfectly, upgrade it. You know, you just can't like let it be. So and yeah, there's another thing I can talk about page builders. Every hosting company in the world is offering their own AI builder. How good is it? Well, I don't know. I've tried a few of them. Some of them are decent, some of them are good. Are they great? I have not seen one of them, you know. So because but even if it is really, really good, you still need hands and hours to set things up. You see my point? You just can't like prompt and launch like perfectly. You still have to spend time to do it. In fact, you have to spend more time sometimes rather than building things from scratch.

SPEAKER_04 39:39

I've always thought it to be quite an interesting model hosting companies having their own builders because to me it's it's somewhat backwards in the sense that if you were looking with no experience to go build a website, you go and look to actually build the visual thing first, and then you only learn you need hosting when you've built the thing and then it comes afterwards. So it's it's somewhat backwards to the journey you would take.

SPEAKER_00 39:59

It's mainly also because uh how will hosting company acquire new customers? Anybody who's starting a new business, okay, they need a website, right? So it's also like kind of like uh you know intake page for SEO, whatever way you want to frame it. But that's another reason they want to do it. They don't want the customer, a prospect to go out of the hosting company's ecosystem. That's why a lot of hosting companies are offering pro services, and we power that for a lot of hosting companies. Pro services is like website development, site optimization, hack site repair, you know, maintenance is massive. Uh you will be shocked at the kind of hack site repair orders we get uh directly and by our hosting partners every single day. It's just incredible because WordPress websites do get hacked even with the best security solutions. Uh we have invested heavily in incredible security company, you know, solutions. So like we have taken licenses with everybody, so we don't compromise. But uh the truth is that you know it is the maintenance layer, it's not gonna go anywhere. And you need hands, you need hours to do that. And we have a team working seven days a week to make sure that you know what this websites are having. Because if something crashes, the client will blame uh the agency, and if they don't have the agency, they will blame the hosting company. If you and that's how they get most of their negative reviews.

SPEAKER_04 41:21

Have you uh used cloud uh security? Uh cloud security. Yeah, cloud security.

SPEAKER_00 41:26

No, I have not. What is it? I have to look into it now more.

SPEAKER_04 41:28

Oh god, yeah, and yeah, have a look. It's a clo it's a it's a security auditing tool given code.

SPEAKER_00 41:33

So that I do anyways with any sort of project, but with the skill, you know. And it says audit the hell out of it do this, and then I tell Codex to do a second security audit. So, but maybe that's much better than native.

SPEAKER_04 41:45

I would define, yeah, I would ask it natively to do cloud security. It's they they they used it to find generation like age-old bugs in like the Firefox web browser that couldn't be found and identified, just like it's very yeah, really promising.

SPEAKER_00 42:00

I'm using Codex as a second reviewer nowadays, and that's a very smart move.

SPEAKER_04 42:05

Yeah, I think I've been thinking about doing that. So you recommend it.

SPEAKER_00 42:09

You can use it in Cloud nowadays.

SPEAKER_04 42:10

Yeah, and yeah, fine.

SPEAKER_00 42:12

That's pretty cool. There's a git there, you just uh install and done. And it by the way, you don't even have to log in again and didn't know that because I started doing it like a few days ago. It just talks to the same email ID and it just kind of like picks it picks up on it.

SPEAKER_04 42:25

Nice.

SPEAKER_00 42:26

So I really enjoy doing the second review because that's like at the eyes of another engineer, you know. And if you're burning tokens for that, worth every penny in the world.

SPEAKER_04 42:36

So you finish shipping if you finish so a feature is ready to ship and then you get it to audit from codex. Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 42:43

Before that, I always plan also now with the superpowers. I I don't know if people are using superpowers. My pro tip for anybody in immersion in the AI world, use superpowers. If you don't know what it is, Google superpowers get and you'll see what yourself. I think it's incredible because it plans it in such a nice way. Even if you're shipping out a WordPress website, like using superpowers just guides you properly, you know?

SPEAKER_04 43:09

Yeah, I do I create plan for for every even just general querying these days. So like I was just just before I came here, was just querying some some some research on large companies who have virtual teams rather than in personal. I want you to find right people that I can learn from in this space and so on. And I go ahead and create a plan based on that, and it'll say, Oh, I I will find people, but then I'll also do this and I'll also do this, and I'll also do this. And so then even just general querying beyond coding, you can use those methodologies to just get so much better output.

SPEAKER_00 43:39

100%. One more thing I would like to add here is that this is a tip for agencies immersed in the WordPress ecosystem. You know what you should do is because a lot I don't know if anybody's using Figma. Figma, I had anybody I speak with, they've stopped using Figma. Everybody and anybody, okay. Uh I don't know. Are you using Figma by any chance?

SPEAKER_04 43:59

Uh no. And a designer sent me something on Figma yesterday, but I don't personally use it myself.

SPEAKER_00 44:04

Because Cloud Design is also pretty incredible, right? But uh I because I'm immersed totally in AI and I use Kimmy, I used Kimi 3.0 the day it was launched, the movement. And I already had a Kimmy subscription also, so I could experiment with it. The kind of designs, for example, what Kimmy can you know ship out, and you use that design, get the approvals from the customer, you know, use help of Claude to ship out a beautiful word-class WordPress website, you can make so much money as an agency founder, especially a startup agency founder. If you're a kid out of college and you need to make three to five thousand dollars to survive, you know, and you know, and just power through pay or you know, college bills, et cetera, no excuses. There's just no excuses. The only excuse they can give is uh how do I find the leads?

SPEAKER_04 44:52

Well Door to door. That's what I'll be doing.

SPEAKER_00 44:55

Or go, or just do one thing, go to uh Google business and look at what's near me and see which websites are janky, old, whatever, and you'll see hundreds or thousands of them. And you have to hustle. I'm sure if you knock on hundred doors, you know, you'll find two.

SPEAKER_04 45:10

It's it's impossible to fail, actually, in in that situation.

SPEAKER_00 45:12

You can just sell it for a thousand dollars with a sixty dollar cursor subscription or a hundred dollar uh codex subscription.

SPEAKER_04 45:18

That's an interesting point that I wanted to raise with you, actually. Uh a lot of web agencies that I speak to talk about the struggle to get MRR inside of the business. Um, how have you tackled that piece? And do you do ongoing maintenance subscriptions and so on? What does that look like in the company?

SPEAKER_00 45:33

Yeah, so whenever we ship out a website, we give them one month post launch service on the house, no questions asked, no matter how many rounds of revisions. That's just our style. We want customers happy. That's why we have incredible Google and Transparent reviews. Okay, in seven and a half, eight years, all of our reviews on clutch Google Transparent are five stars except one negative review. One. Can't keep everybody happy. But the the truth is that uh, you know, maintenance, some sort of recurring revenue is important. We started productizing our services five years ago. So a basic 10-page build is gonna cost you $800 or $1,000. If you want add-ons like WooCommerce, then you have to pay extra for that, whatever. Okay. But after that one month is over, we enroll or we pitch them a monthly maintenance plan. Okay. Now we have plans anything for $49 to $600 a month. And sometimes some people take like a top-up on the $600 also. But very recently, we upgraded our plans from hours because we used to do two hours a month, let's say, on a $299 a month plan. Now we do tasks and we do unlimited tasks. Okay, and it's live there on our website, Seahawk Media, and people love that plan because it's not like we're getting a ticket a day. You know, sometimes we get a lot of tickets from a client in one day, and we we say, okay, that's not a big deal. Sometimes you don't get tickets for two months, also. So the client is happy for $99 or $299 a month. We're happy because we are getting the subscription, but we do proactive work. We update the themes and plugins on a Monday or a Wednesday or a Friday, depending on the cadence. And uh I think that recurring uh stream of revenue really helps us with the cash flows, et cetera. And it's profitable also. It's important to build, and every agency owner should have that, whether it's SEO or maintenance.

SPEAKER_04 47:17

Are you gonna build the genetic layer that takes uh requests, analyzers, whether it's something that's easy to ship out? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:24

It's happening. We're already you know uh moving away from one of our legacy, you know, SaaS subscriptions, just like HubSpot. We I switched to CRME, we're using something else for um uh you know project management, et cetera. So we're switching that out, we're gonna internalize that internally and make sure that the moment a request comes, it talks to you know a software which we built, wpmaintained.com, analyzes what's going on, maybe even responds back on uh WhatsApp and email right away, which is also what we are trying to do because most of our customers have WhatsApp now. And imagine this you you are a client of Seahawk Media, okay? You are an auto dealer, and something happens to your site, you submit a small ticket, okay, and you get an instant response on your email and WhatsApp that we got your ticket, that's fine. But this is the problem we have identified. So now we're gonna give it to a solutions engineer, and that person will resolve in the next two to eight hours. And after that is done, you get a WhatsApp and email again. So whoever whoever is doing this in the at this speed, they will win. Yeah. We have to do it, there's no other option. The competition is only gonna become fierce.

SPEAKER_04 48:33

Are you open to talking about Cloud Linux? Yes, sure. Why not a little bit? Because you got investment in 2025, didn't you?

SPEAKER_00 48:39

Yes, we did. We get we got investment from Cloud Linux, but uh we uh there was some uh misalignment, and uh unfortunately there's a lawsuit going on. And the details are there publicly on the repository and our own website. But it's all public information, so anybody who wants to uh uh read about that, they can just go to see HUC Media or they can just Google and they'll go to the repository article and they'll see it over there.

SPEAKER_04 49:05

Well, details aside about that, uh I'm interested in why you'd look to take money into the business in the first place.

SPEAKER_00 49:11

I think Cloud Linux uh is a great company as it they have they are supplying uh an incredible solution to maybe like uh I don't know, 8,000, 9,000 hosts all over the world. So when it comes to their offering, hosts swear by it. You know, I have never used their software internally because we don't have a server, but hosts swear by it and it works really well. And uh we took the money because hosts, you know, we took their investment because of hosts. They are hosting customers. And uh we thought, like, okay, we're gonna do pretty cool uh work with them, and uh we're gonna be uh you know getting more deals because of that, but uh somehow it just didn't work out.

SPEAKER_04 49:56

Fine. I I'm interested, you you obviously spend a lot of time thinking about hosting in that industry in general. Um how do you feel about uh self-hosting from the perspective of people self-hosting LLMs, building servers at home? Do you think there's a real future there?

SPEAKER_00 50:10

Ooh. Self-hosting. First of all, uh, do you have the time to do it? Is it worth the time doing it? That's another question. That's another one. How big is your team? Is it worthwhile? So let me put it this way. Let's say you have uh let's say an 8 million or a 12 million or a 20 million dollar agency business and you have like 500 customers, three or four enterprise customers, sure, do it. You know, in the grand scheme of things, it's just worth all the time and money and the investment. If you have a six-figure agency, you know, and you have 30 customers struggling with cash flows or not struggling with cash flows, you know, whatever. Usually a six-figure agency is struggling with cash flows based on my personal experience. You know, you also must have, when you were starting out your agency journey, you also must have also. So we all know that. So don't do that then. You know, just piggyback off some host whom you can truly love and trust.

SPEAKER_04 51:07

Yeah, for sure. I imagine that that GPUs and and just general tech will just become more accessible over the next five to ten years.

SPEAKER_00 51:17

100%. 100%. I think uh look at what's happening with AI. Look at what's happening with AI. Are the models becoming more expensive or cheaper?

SPEAKER_04 51:26

They're becoming more, it depends on it depends on what way you look at it.

SPEAKER_00 51:29

Because the because the the intelligence of a couple of months ago is I think it's becoming it's incredibly cheap because even if Claude was to charge us $500 a month tomorrow, would you hesitate?

SPEAKER_04 51:39

No.

SPEAKER_00 51:40

Same. Right? Nobody would hesitate. And then you have competition coming from Kimi and um Minimax, Deep Seek. Have you tried Quen by any chance? No, I haven't. Me too. I just tried one week ago. It was it is mind-blowing how good it is, owned by Alibaba.

SPEAKER_02 51:55

Alibaba is a good one.

SPEAKER_00 51:56

Yes. Alibaba has one of the best models. And Quen 3.7 is incredible at audits. It will pick up things which even the fable doesn't pick up. Kiddy or not. Anyways, back to the point that uh GPU costs, all these costs, hardware costs, etc. People say it's gonna become expensive, they're subsidizing, etc. I think it's it's like an it's like uh arms war, you know, and uh it's gonna become cheaper. And there will be uh there will be some companies in the AI world which are gonna go bankrupt also, because till when can they raise money and they can survive? And uh and the ones who will thrive will thrive. Yeah. Maybe I think it's only gonna be ChatGPT and Anthropic.

SPEAKER_04 52:42

Yeah, I think that's a fair assumption.

SPEAKER_00 52:44

And you did you know that ChatGPT came up with a device also?

SPEAKER_04 52:46

They're working on a device.

SPEAKER_00 52:47

No, they came up with some keyboard thing. A keyboard thingy.

SPEAKER_04 52:50

Uh you can talk to it. Yeah. Oh, they've released that now? Yeah. Because that was is that the the the device that Johnny Ives worked on? That's another one. That's not the one, there's a different one.

SPEAKER_00 52:58

If you I saw an ad on LinkedIn yesterday and shows the device. Really? Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 53:03

And what does it do?

SPEAKER_00 53:04

You talk to it. You don't have to touch the keyboard anymore.

SPEAKER_04 53:07

So it's like a physical super whisky.

SPEAKER_00 53:09

Yeah, yeah. There's like a small keyboard y thing, and you just keep it here and you just click a button, you can talk to it, or I don't know, something like that.

SPEAKER_04 53:15

And then and ChatGPT speaks back to you. Yeah. Oh wow, that's interesting. That's I'll have to read that.

SPEAKER_00 53:21

Whether it's usable or not, we're gonna get it.

SPEAKER_04 53:23

Yeah, I mean, there's gonna be this huge wave of wearable energy.

SPEAKER_00 53:26

Yes, I'm just coming to that. So what's gonna happen is that eventually that uh because it's a racist synapse, like ChatGPT just started out with ads. You can now serve ads. So Anthropic is said they will never do it. Will they? You know, maybe they come up with something called as clawed light for $5 a month, and which includes ads. You never know. You never know, you know, because they have to compete, right? But hardware. Hardware is gonna happen. It's inevitable, you know? And it's just a matter of time. Like Johnny Ives device from ChatGPT, like it will be sold out within minutes, yeah, seconds, maybe. You won't be able to buy it for a year. It'll be sold in the black market. Right? So to coming back to that point, you know, with respect to hardware, GPU costs, the sector, the demand is only going to go up and up and up because uh but the suppl but the supply, that is something time will tell.

SPEAKER_04 54:23

So you you struck me as someone who's got a lot of ideas and and you self-proclaimed proclaim that as well, but then also have managed to to have a lot of discipline and focus in the agency specifically and and stick to, you know, with we' in in a sea of from where you started to where you are now, there have been so many different web solutions and like we mentioned Webflow, for example. Uh how have you managed to stay focused in the business, but then allowed your creativity and personal to go wild?

SPEAKER_00 54:50

So here's the thing Park Anthropic and Claude on the side uh or ChatGPT codecs on the side, before they existed, if you were to offer Shopify solutions or Webflow solutions or Next.js, custom solutions, ERP integrations, you needed software developers or developers who have speciality in that. Our team is all focused on everything around WordPress. The SOPs, the alignment, the page builders, the Gutenberg, the plugins. Now, if I were to offer Shopify development or let's say Drupal or whatever, Webflow, I would not have to have one person. I'd probably need a team of three to six people to begin with. Because what if one person gets sick or leaves the company then? I can't have a client hanging, right? So we decided to just like stay focused. WordPress is 40% of the internet and climbing, climbing, climbing. Like it was 30% like five, six years ago and started growing, growing, growing. So this is not gonna go anywhere. It could be even 60%. Well, then uh anthropic came in and uh everything is changing now. So offering something beyond WordPress is inevitable, of course. You know? Now whether it's uh offering social media services or Google Ad Management Services or AEO GEO optimization services or headless website development is up to the agency, you know. But uh we stayed focused on WordPress for the reason I just explained.

SPEAKER_04 56:22

And and what does your role specifically look like now?

SPEAKER_00 56:25

There's a lot of things. I wear every hat you can imagine. Um Marketeer talking on podcasts, you know. I interview other people on my podcast, by the way. And you would be a perfect guest for that. I need to get you on.

SPEAKER_04 56:38

It'll be a pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 56:39

It feels it feels kind of weird to be on the other side of the seat, by the way, to be very honest with you. So uh so marketer, SEO, I love search engine optimization, always every single day. In fact, SEO has become really tough, and I love it because outranking somebody else on an LLM, you can't pay for that. You have to really work hard for that. And I think I know how to do that. Uh shipping out products, you know, like uh internalizing tools, CRM, for example. We have our own uh WordPress staging uh tool internally, which we call staging C. I did that. And uh sales, of course, you know, and helping. I do have a sales team as well, so I like work with them, give them approvals and stuff like that. Partnerships, that's one of my biggest ones. Uh, you know, talking to our existing customers, partners, some of them are you know, $100 million plus companies also, whom we work with. So every role you can imagine, not imagine.

SPEAKER_04 57:39

Wearing all of the hats. Yes. So in in the business specifically, your co-founder then you you had do you have a a a C-suite team or presumably a head? Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 57:50

Yes, yes, we do. We have a lot of people in the company working for almost like a decade also, eight, nine years plus as well. And uh but we divide and conquer, like all everybody. Like for example, I have you know um operations leader, her name is Monica, so she's my VP of ops. So if I have 150 websites under development today, right now, I don't have to look at it. I can trust Monica or Nusrath from my team, and I know uh they will handle it. But I know if there's an escalation, they will figure it out. Okay. So uh so we have a team aligned like that, whether it's operations, you know, for website development or maintenance care. We have a very good team also and hardworking people. We incentivize them well as much as we can, you know. And uh yeah, we get by.

SPEAKER_04 58:40

What's the uh what's the long-term vision now for the for the agency? Are you continuing to push for growth every month and are you building towards an exit at some point?

SPEAKER_00 58:48

Well, uh I think that WordPress maintenance part, like I mentioned, uh I'm very bullish on it. Okay. So definitely uh when the time is right, you know, having the right investor or exit, obviously it's always on the cards, right? You don't mind it. Uh but as of now, because of wpmaintain.com, there's a lot of excitement happening. And with the headless ecosystem, there's a lot of excitement happening. And uh you know, there's I I'm just fully focused on growing a maintenance business. I think that that's gonna grow more and more. Most importantly, because everybody's wanting to at least upgrade their website, if not develop it again from scratch, at least get get an upgrade. Okay, so if somebody's an old Divi or a AWADA theme in the WordPress ecosystem, they want to upgrade it to Elementor or something like that, or WP Bakery, etc. Because they just want things humming perfectly. So think about in the grand scheme, in the grand in the big way, like 40% of this internet is on WordPress.

SPEAKER_04 59:54

How many individual websites design do you know?

SPEAKER_00 59:56

Um maybe like 70 million, 100 million, something like that.

SPEAKER_04 59:58

Oh wow, what a what a market.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:00

Think about it deeply. Uh it's not gonna fade away in one year or two years.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:05

No, it's that's very professional.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:07

That's massive. You know, some of the websites which I come across on WordPress and people wanting to upgrade, they're insane. They're like you have to pinch and zoom. They're not even optimized for phone. I remember very distinctly. Like last week, somebody came for to us for a website upgrade. It was an ostrich egg farm in the US. These Americans, what business ideas they have there, right? So, but you it was such an old website, like 2009 or 2010 built Borders website. You couldn't even see it on a phone, you had to zoom like this, you know? And they need an upgrade, right? And uh they might have all the budget in the world. We quoted in $2,500, and they said, okay, let's go. So that's a very good market.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:48

So why were WordPress able to secure such a massive market share? Were they just the first or or they're one of the oldest.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:57

So Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, and a few others also came in. Uh it's just that the a lot of factors. Number one, the community was really strong. There was something called as WordCamps in the WordPress ecosystem. I've been going to them for six, seven years, seven plus years now. The big ones are in Europe, uh, Asia, and the US. This one next month in Phoenix as well. So they're massive. Okay, and WordCamps, this community is really strong. Uh, the leadership at WordPress.com is also very strong. Matt Malimag is the founder of WordPress, you know, he's done an incredible job in taking it forward. So I think it comes down to the leadership also at the end of the day. So they have, I think, 1500 remote employees, 1600 remote employees, WordPress ecosystem. So they're doing something, right? Of course. Right. And uh, but Drupal and Joomla, they all started fading away. Their plugin, I don't know if there was a plugin ecosystem there anyways. WordPress has a very, very massive plugin ecosystem. You see, WordPress, anybody who's building WordPress websites, they know they can install plugins, pay $50, $100, $200 a year, get licenses, and build a website on top of those plugins, or with those plugins. Like membership. Membership. You know, let's say fitness instructor. If you want to launch a monthly subscription fitness instructor website and you're on a budget, okay, you cannot do it for $1,000 if it's not on WordPress. Even with Cloud and AI, it's going to be more expensive and you will need a lot of experience to do that. Because you will still have to connect Stripe, Square, PayPal, et cetera. But with WordPress, you need a $25 hosting plan. Uh subscription plugin, let's say with Learn Dash or MemberPress, you know, which is like $100 a year or $200 a year, and maybe some work with Claude and you're done.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:48

Do you think the way that we experience web will completely change now that the possibilities are infinite? Because we talk about plugins and web and WordPress, and that's really as much about ease of access as it is about the actual functionality itself. But now that functionality can be built. Of course, you need to get past the actual belief that you even can build something yourself, which is a huge part. Like people don't even believe that they can go onto Wix and build themselves a great website, but would be able to build rustle up something themselves. Do you think web experience is going to change exponentially over the next 10 to 20 years? Will websites mold or merge and converge with software more so?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:33

Yes, it will. So the web is going to become more beautiful, in very simple words, every single day. Okay, like this ostrich egg website which I'm talking about. You have to pinch and zoom. Can you imagine the sheer number of websites like that existing right now? Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. So every college student should attack those customers. If you see a website and you have to pinch and zoom to read, that's your customer, right? So all of those are gonna get upgraded. It's inevitable. Now, are they gonna spend $2,000 or are they gonna spend $20,000? That's the question. It's up to the appetite of the business owner, also. Okay. So if somebody has an appetite upwards of $10,000, this is my opinion, okay? They will not opt for WordPress. If somebody has an appetite for less than $5,000, uh they will definitely not, they should not uh think twice and just go for WordPress. Again, this is my opinion. Because uh I in either ways, the world becomes a better place. The experience of the websites, everybody becomes it just becomes a better place. LLMs will read uh websites like those also in a much snappier way, you know, because every all all of these websites will have an LLM file, it won't be blocked by robots and stuff like that. So I think in the grand scheme of things, you know, the customer is gonna win, you know, and uh the consumer who's uh triggering queries on ChatGPT, you, me, everybody else looking for doing RD, like we will come across better and better results. You know, so it's inevitable.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:19

Because web agencies will just who go headless, will just end up creating their own CMS.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:23

A lot of people are doing that already, right? I'm doing it. My my like I did what I'm doing with host list and uh girl dad, like they're all custom. It's on superbase, you know, next.js. Like so I figured it out. I'm sure a lot of other people are doing it also. So like uh you're doing it.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:40

So I mean, even just like the we do we could we can explore new ways to make it easier for the client to uh even update their website and and change things. They can send a text message to an agent that then goes and does it for them. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:53

Yes, yes, this is this is a topic. Uh in fact, my co founder Ryan he was pushing me uh on this topic a lot. He was really Pushing me for this, okay? Uh, to do we should automate as much as we can. We are trying to do that also, and I'm sure a lot of agencies are already doing it, but I think that uh it's not that easy. But WhatsApp to repair it exists in some way because of think about Claude. Claude has that feature right now. It's called dispatch, is there, right? So, how far away are we that we WhatsApp or just say, hey Siri, can you update this for me? We are almost there. Okay, we can just talk to Siri and update up. That's funny. So so it's gonna happen, right? We talk to and it's and it updates your websites. Yeah. It's it's only gonna become better. Okay. But still somebody needs to set it up in the first place. Yeah. Okay. Is it gonna happen with WordPress? Now that's a good question to ask. Is it gonna happen with WordPress that you can talk and get it done? I think they will have to. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:02

They will have to.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:03

Yeah. The cloud connector already exists with WordPress, by the way. It's not really good, but if you use cowork, it just does the job for you.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:12

To me, I think the art is being able to take someone to because uh so I observed one of the first things I did when I would when I got into creating applications was I created a central operating system for the business, and I wanted the team to be able to have access to the massive data that we have, and we created a whole bunch of AI employees and so on. Well I noticed that the easier and easier and easier I make it for people to get great output, the lazier they are with their prompting. And it's just like the easier it is, the lazier the prompt. And so you have to work really hard to make sure the middle prompt, so the shit prompt meets the great prompt, and then the output's really good. And so, like in your instance where you have a massive agency with huge amounts of data on what good even is, the the hard part is then when the client messages on WhatsApp and says something which is open to mass interpretation, and then they still end up with a good output on the on the other side of what they they want. And I think that's the hard piece that you can only really get if you've got a real depth of experience and a lot of data that you can input into the HP.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:10

I was I was about to say that, but it's mostly down to experience. Without experience, even with the best AI, like even with Fable, let's say you have unlimited tokens of Fable, you know, but you have no experience in making a website, can you? You know, you said your dad, he's does not want to touch air right now, or even though he's a software engineer.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:28

It's a shame because he'd be an animal if he did.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:30

I know. I know, but think about him having Fable. Okay, and you just spending two hours with him to give a rundown of what you know. Can you imagine? He won't be sleeping uh for the next two years.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:44

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:45

But uh it's inevitable. Sooner than later he'll come around. Yeah. Is he using a cell phone?

SPEAKER_04 1:08:51

Uh yes, but it's not a clinical. I think it almost an I think it almost angers him that he spent his entire life learning this go. Because he was, I mean, this is a this is a man that understands every computer language to its core. And so it's like when you've dedicated your entire existence to that craft and now uh you know, when I first explained AI to him, he said, AI does not exist, it's just a predictive model. Let's not let's not think about the definition of it, let's just try the thing, get it to diagnose some code and see what you've got. And that's I think it will become progressive. But to me, I just see his retirement sat there.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:23

I know, I know, I know, I know exactly what you mean. It it it it this must be it it he must be like, oh, what's going on? Yeah, and he doesn't want to accept the fact that it can do similar or better jobs in like 15 minutes.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:36

But is also the answer to all his prayers.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:38

I know, I know, I know. I think uh coming back to this part also, like the WordPress uh team is trying to keep up, okay, and they're doing an incredible job in doing that, but they need to mimic it as close as possible to uh actually what next you can do with NextJS, Astro, Docusaurus, Nuxt, and all these technologies. Uh otherwise the cool kids they will lose out on the cool kids, you know. Yeah. I I don't think I'd like I know a lot of my young cousins, you know, my wife's cousins, etc., those who are in their 20s, they don't want to touch WordPress. That's the hard truth. It's the hard truth. Um but uh if they can come around with something very, very cool and very interesting and it can work as in a snappy way, just like um, you know, next year's et cetera, sure. But plug-in ecosystem, that's another story. You know, they will have to get rid of the plugin ecosystem to make that happen. Because the hard truth is with headless, headless development, you don't need any plugins, right? You can connect with anything, you can make any APIs, you can do anything. So that's the one thing which the WordPress uh community needs to think about.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:54

I know it's only been a relatively small amount of time that you've really kind of exposed yourself and got really deep and allowed AI to consume your world. Um but um if you were starting the agency today and you you didn't have all of the complexity and the knowledge and science.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:17

I think it would be a headless agency. To be very honest, I just it's not like I don't like WordPress, but if I was given an option, but again, how many people can adapt to it also? I have been able to adapt to it and sh I'm proud to say in a shockingly good amount of time. And I have proof with not one, but several websites, several projects. But I know a lot of people have not been able to do that because it is tough. These puffy eyes, it's not because you know I'm not sleeping just as it is, because I'm consumed. I spend a ridiculous amount of time and tokens on this because I'm trying to scale myself up. So yeah, if it is me, Gotham, and if I were to start an agency now, it won't be a WordPress first agency, being very honest with you. It is what it is.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:08

Yeah. And then how would that look from like a like a tangible perspective? Like, because you you won't need as many teams. And and if you were built if and you would let's say someone, let's say you wanted to bind people, and that's something that I've kind of gone through myself. It's like I find it quite hard to find people who are because you go full AI engineer, and that person is is is coming from a a different perspective entirely, and it's uh it's through the the deep n understanding of LLMs. You go full developer and it's someone who's already got preconceived opinions of how things should be. So the the the there's a very new age role where someone is very fast and very quick and very uh adaptive to new tools. Um how do you find and define those people?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:54

Finding is impossible. I'll tell you why. See, here's the thing when it comes to AI usage and uh you know using it to the best, you need people with critical thinking skills. Now, can you teach that to somebody? Let me ask you this question. No, you cannot. Either you're born with it or you skill up to develop those critical thinking skills. This is the biggest challenge, you know. Uh this is a very good point to discuss, actually. If I were to start a new agency, it's kind of linked to this, okay? And uh will I even be an agency? No, I'll be a one-man show. Because it's impossible to find somebody of even somebody who can do even 30% of the work I can do. It would take me more time to teach that person. I would rather do it, I would give a command, and I will just get it done with. That's the hard truth. So I don't know.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:42

I feel that so deeply in my core. I've I I made this. So it's one of the businesses I have is I teach agencies and I mentor agencies and help them launch, build, and scale. And I made this call about 12 months ago that, hey, everyone should hire, because it's going to be so important to get an assistant who's going to be building AI systems and so on in the business. I was so wrong. The founder has to be the person to dive really deep into this if you actually want to innovate the company. And every example I've found where an agency has looked to hire a developer who's then building systems on their behalf, is doing it in this lacklustre I could build this stuff in in two weeks, and you've just spent six months with this team member because they don't have the depth, they don't have the understanding. And it's a really interesting thought that it's like the it's all depth of knowledge which allows you to be this superhuman when using the tools. But you try and bring people in who don't have all of that context, and and it's a very tough one.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:43

Yeah. There's another thing I'll say honestly. You can say what you want to say, but I don't want to teach people also. Why should I? I've worked so hard to skill up myself. You know, I'm working 16, 18 hours a day, sometimes 20 hours a day. Talk to my wife, she's angry at me all the time. She's like, What the hell are I even plotted? What is it? What is there? I've got her hooked to Fable also, by the way, now. So she's working on her stuff too.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:07

And you're like, look, I have Goldad. I have Gowdad, it's for the family.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:10

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Like, I wanted to launch a fashion brand, like for whatever reason, for a really, really long time. It was just something in the back of my mind. So, you know, I have the girl dad is uh actually gonna have his own set of teas as well. You know, I don't want to bore you with that today, but it's gonna be launched soon. You know, I have the website is done, it's ready. I'm just figuring out the marketing and the social media cycle. I just don't have the bandwidth to do it. How much can I do? Yeah, you know, that's the thing. But coming back to the topic, that I don't want to teach my it's there's nothing, see, there's nothing patented or there's nothing trademarked, you know, about what I'm doing or what you are doing, you know, shipping out. But why do we want to teach our skills so quickly? You know, uh do we want to do that? Do we want to teach that? If you're making money out of it, like if you're mentoring and coaching founders of other agencies, yes, of course, such a profession. But how much do you want to like I have developed a custom skill? It's called Tara in name of my daughter. Okay. And that skill includes a lot of stuff. I have built it and perfected it over the past six months. And it can do stuff. I kid you not, like even the best software engineers cannot do. I've really trained it because I love SEO, I have 10 years worth of experience. So why should I give that skill to anybody? Call me selfish or whatever you want to say. But but uh I think I will give us some, even if I have to hire an employee for, let's say, some headless work, hypothetically, I will give some part of it. You know, because that's what people will do. They will just try to like, you know, uh start compete with you. That's the first thing agency people do.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:46

Yeah, because it's like you're giving people a superpower and then they won't know what to do with that unless they are directly in the world.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:52

Do it yourself. I taught myself everything. Did you should try and do it yourself also? That's the number one tip, also. To every agency founder not immersed in uh AI right now, ask AI to teach you AI. That's the best tip. If you don't know an answer, just ask how to do it. Like I like I don't know if I mentioned this, did I? That I didn't even know what Vercell and Netlify were till about five months ago. I did not know that they even existed. But it's only much later I realized that the sheer size of these companies and how crucial and important they are to the headless ecosystem.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:25

Yeah. Right? Yeah. They've grown insanely.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:28

Yeah. Vercell team, I have I have mentioned they need to do something about support ticket times. It takes a month to get a reply back. A month. Can you imagine?

SPEAKER_04 1:17:38

Well, fortunately, uh what what are you what are you getting for sale tickets for? I haven't even had the the need to do something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like figure it out.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:48

I'm gonna do a actually I have a blog article on about that on my own website, Gothamkarana.com, because I was helping my parents out with this massive astrology portal. It's called Deluxe Astrology, and it's got like 100,000 plus pages translated in 50 languages. So it's got millions of pages, tens of thousands of visitors, and there was something called as ISR and caching. Long story short, a hundred dollar a month bill became $3,000. I had two options either I stop the spending and let my website shut down or let it go. And what do I do? So, what do I do? I open a subor ticket and it takes so much time, so much back and forth. I had to involve people on LinkedIn to resolve that issue. I can't even I have a whole article about this. Eventually, they helped me out, but they could not help me out fully. I had to sort that out myself because it's a very rare issue that a hundred dollar bill became three thousand dollars in two weeks. You see, and ISR caching, I don't know what it means. I had to learn. Eventually, long story short, it was uh a bot firm in China trying to spike up the bill or trying to you know crawl some stuff, and I just had to figure that out my own and set up custom firewall rules, et cetera. But it's okay. I call it Harvard education.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:02

From a from a client volume, maybe not a revenue perspective, because a lot it takes a little while to get to the point where you need to be paying for the sale when you're first signing up, but from a client volume perspective, the sale must be one of the fastest growing companies of all time. They must be signing thousands of clients on a daily basis.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:20

Netlify also, both because if you go to Cloud uh any other LLM, they just recommend Versal and Netlify. And they have the direct connectors also, it just talks to it. So it's a no-brainer. So that's another that's a that's a very cool topic to discuss at some point that other hosting companies will have to do it. You know, GoDaddy, HostEnger, Bluehost, any other company.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:42

Have direct integrations with the likes of Claude? Yeah. Yeah. They don't? Nope. GoDaddy, doesn't it? Nope, nope. Oh, that's crazy.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:49

Nope, nothing like that at all.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:50

Oh, that's crazy.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:52

I know. I know you still have to go in, do a lot of stuff. Even with Vercel and Netlify, you still have to go in and add the environment variables, etc. But it's like a small step, it's not a big deal. But uh it's not like you do a git push and it checks whether it's deployed or failed. Nothing like that exists in the in this ecosystem right now.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:13

That's very interesting. I wonder if we're gonna have centralized like digital footprints where when we when we start new projects and all of our keys and so on, or maybe things won't even work in the same sense they do with APIs and and so on at the moment. So integration is a lot easier across Africa. It's very easy.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:29

It's super duper easy. Like I've done experiments with uh hostless is one of them. There's so many tools there. On my own personal site also, I have this brand name, trademark generator, talking to a lot of APIs. You try to search for a name, it will check the domain name, whether it's available or not. It will check the trademark also is available or not. I could have never thought of doing that in my life on my own.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:47

I wonder if blockchain technology can be used as far as as far as security is concerned. Because there's gonna be huge problems with people who are just not gonna protect, they'll be saving their API keys on their on their iPhone notes, and those things are so easily hackable and so on.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:02

That's a good point. I've never looked into it, to be very honest with you. But yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe that finally crypto will have some good use.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:11

Yeah, that'd be nice. Yeah. I've lost all my money in NFTs. I lost so much money in Luna that it was crazy. I just watched it drop down.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:21

I know somebody who lost $10,000 and won't name who, but I'm gonna when I say this on a cat coin, you know, because uh he thought that cat coin will become like a $10,000 investment because he got an internal tip will become hundreds of thousands of dollars.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:35

It's horrendous. I I'd hate to say I lost significantly more than that, but uh just watch it drop have a little cry for a moment and then move on, take the lesson.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:45

I will just say I invested a thousand dollars on NFTs during COVID or whatever, it became fifteen, twenty thousand dollars. I reinvested those fifteen, twenty thousand dollars and it became zero. So I didn't lose anything. Okay, so I'm just happy because it was part of the game. Yeah, I got these lions and this monkey and whatever. So the thousand became twenty, twenty-five thousand and it became zero. So I I'm like done. I'm not wasting time on that ever in my life.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:10

Yeah, that one's like I've I've actually got some quick fire questions for you. All right. So uh one brand that you'd love to work with, actually I'll reword this one website that you'd love to redesign that you haven't.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:22

Oh, that's uh so I want to redesign seven eBay.com. Yeah, because I'll tell you why. 2007-8. I got into the gemstone and jewelry business with my mom and dad because of eBay, and we made a lot of money during that time pre-recession, 2009 recession. We like we all became entrepreneurs. My mom and dad were in their jobs, we were all struggling a lot, you know, at that time. We made a lot of money because of eBay. And eBay has always been in my family, my blood, but the website is not good, it just doesn't look good. And I love auctions, by the way. But that's another story for another podcast. I love the auction ecosystem, so I would love to design, redesign eBay.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:59

Nice. One thing that you wish you'd learn earlier in your career.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:04

Being a software engineer. So now everything is a level fairing, but at least you know it would have given me s like uh some sort of like uh an advantage, you know, on a lot of the products which I've been trying to build. But it's okay. Now no excuses anymore.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:21

One habit that keeps you grounded every day.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:22

Oh, I love to work out. Okay, like I mentioned, I was really obese. I lost like 40 kilos in the past and a half, three years. So I love going to I have a Barry's bootcamp class three days and uh like when I go to that room, the red room, when I'm training with 50 people and I sweat it all out, and even after 400 or so classes, I have a blog post on it. I know that shit I could have done better, so it helps me it keeps me grounded, you know. And it I know I have to push better and just unlocks so many ideas for my business, you know.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:52

So you say three days a week, you do that?

SPEAKER_00 1:23:53

Yep. Three hours that's the mindset. Three hours a week, and the grand scheme of things is how much? Three hours a week. That's it.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:00

Nice. Uh one trend in web agency that you think is overhyped right now.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:06

There's so many things overhyped right now. Okay, but I think the one trend which is really overhyped is answer engine optimization. It's a little uh spicy uh in the way that SEO has become tougher than ever before. Okay, people think the shipping out content has become easy and stuff like that. The reason I'm saying it's overhyped is because everybody's trying to sell AEO Geo service. No, it's not it's not that complex, also. It's just about really, really good organic content. Okay, Google, okay, this is one thing I'll finally say Google will give love to your websites, ChatGPT Proplexity will give love to your website as long as you're authentic. If any business owner, agency business owner or any other business owner can just think about this. It's called the EEAT algorithm. Just Google it, okay? If you just set that up, if you just think with this, you will get rewarded. Even if you have very minimal backlinks, you don't need thousands of backlinks, you need 10 quality backlinks, believe me, in a quarter. Maybe five quality backlinks in one quarter. Okay. And you need to have genuine authentic content. Google LLMs will reward your website. I have seen it decade, I have a decade worth of experience. I'm doing this successfully with my a lot of my online properties. Uh it's just super overhyped. You know, people are trying to sell shitty, crappy SEO tools, you know, stuff like that.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:33

How do you define authentic content then?

SPEAKER_00 1:25:35

You just uh don't fudge stuff because LLMs in Google know. So authentic means in the sense like if you're describing some numbers or some data points or whatever, just don't overhype it and don't use M-dash every year. You know, that's another pro tip I'll give. Most important is like, you know, even if you were to ship thousand pieces of blog articles in a month, it's fine. Google says is go for it. As long as it's adding value to the end user. When I say authentic, I mean like, is that piece of content, whether it's one a month or a thousand a month, is that piece or pieces of content adding value to the consumer of that article? That's what I meant.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:13

Is there a minimum amount of pieces of content that you think a company should put out to survive an SEO and GEO?

SPEAKER_00 1:26:18

I would say even two to five pieces per day nowadays. A day? What's the big deal with LLMs? AI?

SPEAKER_04 1:26:25

So it's okay to use AI to write the content?

SPEAKER_00 1:26:27

Yes, 100%. Use as much as you want. I do there's another thing. Like I mentioned, SEO, okay. Pragmatic SEO is something which I truly love and enjoy. It's a challenge, by the way. Some of my websites which I'm working on, some of my projects, secret projects I'm working on, they don't get indexed at all because I did some mistakes. And I'm telling, but everything boils down to one thing, okay? You need to add value to the end user, and you can ship out even hundreds of pieces of articles every single day, which is not possible. If you are actually adding value to the end user for a particular niche or a particular project, can you ship out hundreds of pieces of articles every single day? You can't. You can probably ship out two, four, maybe eight pieces a day, and that's fine. As long as you're adding value to the reader, consumer, it works. For example, simplest example, you and me talking about this is authentic. If we embed this video in the blog piece relevant to context, it's not possible Google will not reward you and me both.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:29

Fine. And so when we're talking about content, we're talking about blogs mainly.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:32

Yeah, yeah. Blog solution pages, services pages, depending upon your site, whatever.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:36

Yeah, I love you talking about this, by the way, because the the guest I had another guest on this morning who owns an SEO agency is actually quite anti programmatic SEO.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:44

Wow, bring it on. We should have a panel on it. I would love to discuss this topic.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:48

Awesome. Okay, very interesting. How would if a company was to want to uh build uh a system that they could use to to to to to pump out lots of content, uh would you You say you know they would just need to marry together all of their content sources, calls, any videos they put out, and then create an engine which which extracts insight from that and then turns into blog posts?

SPEAKER_00 1:28:12

So there are two options. That, but it it's require it requires a lot of other things to it. It's not that easy. Second, they can hire me. I charge a lot of money for that though. But there is a way to go about it. Okay. You'll have to make 10 or 15 tools, talk together, give output, re-audit it. But pragmatic SEO is doable. I am doing it successfully. Okay, not only with one project. I have three or four projects going on where I'm doing it successfully. Yeah. So you have you just have to, but you have to spend a lot of hours, like a lot, a lot of hours to come up with that. Tooling is one thing. Auditing those tooling is another. Simplest example: if a website has 10,000 pages, if you activate another translation, just one language, that's 10,000 more pages.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:05

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:05

Will Google index those pages immediately? No. It has something called as a crawl budget. Okay. And very few people understand the uh the meaning of what it means. As the name suggests, crawl budget. Do you know did you know about it? No. As the name suggests, Google will index your site, okay, but will choose to not give value to that page because it has a budget. Think about the number of websites being launched every day on Google. Okay, so it even if your website has 10,000 pages and you deploy and you translate into Japanese, so there are 10,000 another new pages, it might read it, but it won't give value to more than 50 new pages. It will do it in the next read, in the next read, the sector. It's called a crawl budget. And there's no way you can speed that up. You cannot pay. I wish there was a way. I would spend my life savings. I will sell anything and everything I have for uh you know doing that. But uh it is you can't game it, you just can't game their system. Yeah. So crawl budget. So the person who said about programmatic SEO sector, you know, I will just say that uh, you know, just look at crawl budgets and just go slow, especially somebody's launching a new website. I've learned this the hard way also. If you want to launch a lot of new pieces of content, uh do it slowly and organically for the first six months. There's no uh cheat code to it. You can't unless you buy a domain, you know, which has a lot of DR and juice and history to it. But even then, it's there's no guarantee. Slow and steady is the best way, especially for a new business.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:39

Finally, one or the best book that you ever read.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:43

Oh my god. I have I have three actually, but I'm gonna say shoe dog is my number one.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:46

Shoe dog.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:47

Yeah, by Nike. That's the Nike story.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:49

Have you read it? No.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:50

Oh my god. Every business owner should read Shoe Dog. Okay. The three, okay, because I was actually discussing this topic with my brother the other day. Shoe dog is the true story of Phil Knight, the Nike founder. I've read it twice, and it's a true story of perseverance, you know. Think about how Nike where Nike is today. You know, I just read it. It's a very, it's a very lightweight and nice book to read, anyways. And uh another one which I really love is the uh the Matthew Perry story. You know, Friends, everybody has seen it and sad and funny at the same time. But I must say, we've anybody who's and everybody who's watched Friends as a TV show, you know, they must see the Friends movie. And the third one is called Rider for Lifetime, the Disney founder, the Disney CEO, Bob Iger. And uh not the founder, Disney CEO. Incredible story. Awesome.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:41

Yeah, Gautam, thank you joining me.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:43

Thank you for hosting me.