Best Custom ChatGPT Bots For Your Membership Website In 2025
Revolutionize your membership website with tailor-made ChatGPT bots. Provide personalized support and increase member satisfaction.
Are you looking to elevate your membership website? This informative video delves into the world of Custom ChatGPT Bots and their incredible benefits for member interaction. Learn how to design a chatbot that caters specifically to your audience, ensuring they receive immediate support and personalized content. Ready to revolutionize your site? Tune in now and see how these bots can make a difference.
This Week’s Show Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
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The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:01.110] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 116. In this episode, we will discuss AI with a specific aim at ChatGPT Bolts and how they can help a membership website. We’re going to have a broad discussion on what we feel AI can help you if you got a membership website, what it can do for you in the first quarter, at the end of the first quarter of 2025, what it really can’t help you with, what we feel is a bit propagandist, and what the real situation is, like I say, in this first quarter, 2025. Unfortunately, I’ve got some bad news to tell you, my beloved tribe, Nicole. For personal and business reasons, he has had to give up. Being my co-host, I am bitter. No, we left on good terms, but unfortunately, she’s had a combination of business and personal things turn up, and she’s no longer able to be with us every week. But I’ve had my trusty co-host from my other podcast agree to help me for the foreseeable future, and that’s Kirt.
[00:01:28.200] – Jonathan Denwood
So he will be helping me, and he has a lot of insight and thoughts about this subject. So, Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the listeners and viewers?
[00:01:42.240] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, Jonathan. And thanks. It’s nice to be back on the Membership Machine Show again. My name is Kurt von Ahnen. I own an agency called Manananomas. We focus primarily on membership and learning websites. We also work directly with WP Tonic and the great folks at Lifter LMS.
[00:01:58.540] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s right. I’m not going anywhere, folks. I’ll be here to the bitter end with you, my beloved tribe. Before we go into the meat and potatoes of this great subject, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. I’m coming back, folks. I want to point out that we’ve got a great resource. We’ve created a list of the best WordPress technology to help you build a membership website, plus some special deals from our sponsors, plus a course at a discounted price that will show you how to make a membership website from beginning to end. It’s a great resource. You can find all these goodies by going over to WPTonic. Com/deals, wp-tonic. Com/deals. So let’s go straight into it, Kirk. So, let’s do a quick intro. I feel there are some definite things that AI can help with. Like if you’ve got writer’s block or you’re trying to build an outline of your call structure and you just got, say, writer’s block, putting a few prompts in and getting suggestions. It’s just beneficial to edit some of your promotional videos that you’re putting on YouTube, and cutting them up for you so you can use them on TikTok is a great thing.
[00:03:49.950] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s a great area. And I use, as you know, Kirk. I’m not negative about AI because I use it a lot. But on the other hand, I think there’s some pure nonsense talked about AI at the present moment, and on the verge of really almost propaganda, almost, that There are people that think that they can… People believe they will use it to build whatever they envision, especially in the WordPress area, where you get all this flexibility and power already. I don’t think that’s been very practical. What are your thoughts about this?
[00:04:40.060] – Kurt von Ahnen
My thoughts are very similar to yours, with maybe just a tiny tweak in there. That is, there are some breakouts, some use cases, and some specifics where we’ll see somebody say, Oh, look what I built for WordPress, only using AI. And it’ll be something that, on the surface, looks amazing. But at the end of the day, they had to become an expert. They had to do the heavy lifting of using that AI and supporting tools, which led to that success. This idea that you can know nothing about the platform and know a little bit about what a GPT is, that it’s the easy button, and that you get whatever you want at the end, to me, is a little bit short of lunacy. And I think we owe it to the new listeners to tell them what a GPT is. We hear it constantly, but it means a generative, pre-trained transformer. And I can’t help that whenever I hear the word transformer, I think of Transformers. But it’s like, Transformers, robots in disguise.
[00:05:52.830] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve based my career on that song.
[00:05:55.080] – Kurt von Ahnen
So when we think about what a GPT is a GPT is a transformer. And that’s in layman’s terms, that’s like it’s a really smart Librarian. It’s like if the Librarian read all the books in the library. And then there’s a different conversation, which is what’s a custom GPT. And that’s where it’s like that Librarian is super smart, but she only focused on specific subject matter, and she’s a heightened expert in those areas. And so when we’re having a conversation today about our topic, it It’s more about custom GPTs and a use case scenario that we brought to the table.
[00:06:35.440] – Jonathan Denwood
Before we go into the specifics of Chat, Custom Chat GPT, I do use AI to lay out and then assist me in the content of articles, but I have to read the whole article. I have to edit quite substantially because But it still saves me time for my specific needs and requirements. It’s enormously helpful. But there are a lot It’s based on out-of-date information, information that even though I gave it a very detailed outline, it still goes off and gives me content that That is not relevant, in my personal opinion, to the article that wanted. So I have to go in, do rewrites, check. I have to check all the facts because sometimes it does literally is wrong, but normally it’s because a lot of the facts are out of date, basically. But I have to do a lot of checking, and I normally write about subjects. I ask for its assistance around subjects that I actually know something about. So I’m in the position to edit them, to check it. If I wasn’t, obviously, I could use online resources, but that would be even more time consuming. So it’s not a perfect situation. I still use it for my personal circumstance.
[00:08:24.170] – Jonathan Denwood
My spending in grammar isn’t fantastic. It’s just easier for me. And It does save a lot of time. But I understand Google’s attitude because they’re not really have a great opinion about articles written with AI. And I think because there’s a lot of people that don’t do the checking, don’t make sure the facts are right, don’t do any editing, they just throw it up. And the same with building websites, yeah, it has a place. In I just think it’s what you get with templates, predesigned. It can do a bit more customization. It can put content in, so it works. So you’re not having to develop straight away. But a lot of this content is very bland, and it’s not going to be very persuasive. So it has its place if you understand the boundaries, and the same in helping you build… The no code movement is fantastic, and I think it’s going to grow with the power of AI to a much higher, that level in the next year, 18 months. But a lot of people, especially in the WordPress space, that are not developers, are using no code AI tools, and they’re building some fantastic stuff.
[00:10:00.530] – Jonathan Denwood
But they tend to underestimate their own ability, because a lot of these people, they might not be active developers, but they’ve been project managers, designers, people that have been building websites for a number of years, and they have all that knowledge. So they can use a no code tool to develop something that you could use as a minimum viable product, but They tend to dismiss that they’ve also got all this knowledge. What do you reckon, Kurt?
[00:10:35.060] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think you’re hitting on something, and you had mentioned in your answer there, you had said maybe it comes up on old content or you have to check it because maybe it refers to something that’s dated or outdated. And that’s where the source of that word hallucinations comes from. So these tools are training on all types and kinds of content from all types and kinds of sources. And so there is the opportunity for the language model to absorb or process information that is out of date. And that or to assimilate or to put information together to make an unnatural pair of information that the AI doesn’t recognize, Hey, that’s not a natural pair of information. But the human eye, the human brain would sense that. And so it’s super important that you have base knowledge about what your topic is so that you can audit it and make sure. And to your point, people are much smarter than they give themselves credit for. And we as as a people, as a race, we’re just taking a lot of liberties and being a little bit lazy, and we’re going to pay the price for it with poor content.
[00:11:53.970] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, there are a few influencers and other people that I think are just pushing it a bit too far, and they’re pushing this narrative. There’s actual marketers selling solutions through Facebook, and that you can use AI to build a whole course for you. I just think that’s ridiculous. Absolutely nonsense. What do you think about that?
[00:12:26.420] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, it’s endless spam in my inbox, and I’m too scared that I’ll miss something important so I don’t filter my emails enough. And I see so much junk. And the one that pops up to me is, you don’t need courses, you don’t need webinars, you don’t need to post endless blog posts, but we’re going to show you how to grow a seven-figure business, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, You’re going to grow a seven-figure business from scratch with no work, no blog posts, no marketing, no promotions, no courses. No, I’m like, We’re using AI. That’s not real. There’s no way that that is real. And the unfortunate thing is, how many people would swipe a credit card and spend $5,000 to find out that whatever that magic sauce is, isn’t magic?
[00:13:16.500] – Jonathan Denwood
Now, actually, what’s your opinion before we actually talk about the specifics of custom GPTs? What’s your general attitude about where we are at the present moment or where we might be in a year? Because I think if we talk more than a year out, it’s total. You could say that if we just talk more than three months or six months out, but I think a year is about as far as we could push it. Where do you think AI is to actually help you develop content for your course? Where’s this sensible middle ground and where is it pushed too far?
[00:14:03.390] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think what is real and what people wish was real are two completely different playing fields. So let’s say I go into ChatGPT or groch or perplexity or something like that, and I want help writing an outline in a course. I can do it. Groch, I actually like. You have a conversation with Grok and it builds up over post over post, remembers the last thing, and you have a conversation with it. And some of them work that way. And that to me is like I could build something, right? I could say, hey, help me create an outline, and then let’s expand that outline, and let’s add some more narrative content to these three bullet points. And you could do that. But I think what people are actually thinking is going to happen is instead of copying and pasting from these platforms, I think they think it’s actually just going to build the website for them. It’s like they’re going to tell ChatGPT, Hey, this is my URL. Trust me, I own it. You don’t need any credentials. Just go in there and add this course. And I think we’re very, very far away from having these platforms be able to manipulate our own dynamic properties.
[00:15:17.980] – Kurt von Ahnen
But I know that that’s what people want. They want this super easy… The word that I hear the most with clients right now is, how do I automate or how do I make that automatic? And they want everything to be automatic. And I think what people miss, and I’ll wrap up my answer with this one, Jonathan, most large companies, people have this misconception That large companies or big production warehouses, they think everything’s automated. They think that the C-suite is just a bunch of people hanging out, looking at giant screens and making sure that all the automations are ticking away. And And that’s not how big business is. Big business is very manual, very process-driven, very hands-on with a lot of things. And we make the mistake of thinking that the only way we’re going to grow or compete with these big businesses is to automate everything. And unfortunately, that’s just a misconception. We need to have processes in place first, and then processes that get done repetitively could be open for automation downstream. But even a very large, successful company wouldn’t automate everything.
[00:16:34.230] – Jonathan Denwood
No, I think also there’s a place for it when it comes to marketing optimization. If you have got a list, if you’ve got all that makes it worthwhile to invest. But normally people want to automate too early and spend too much time on it, and they haven’t really got a minimum viable course. They haven’t got a marketing strategy that can be duplicated, that actually does get possible students into a funnel and does actually convert them. They have not done the basic work, but they are thinking about elaborate optimizations, and then they’re nowhere near that stage. And actually it’s harmful because it takes up-time and energy in areas where they really need to focus. Would you agree with that?
[00:17:38.190] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, that encroaches on that minimal viable course, minimal viable product thing that we talk about often, and that is done is better than perfect. You got to get something out for your people to begin to absorb, and you’ve got to get that first 10 paying clients, that first 15, 20 paying clients. And you got to get that under your belt. And that It only gets procrastinated. It gets put off the more we get distracted by shiny buttons. The amount of work… I once had a client ask me about automating a marketing email funnel, building it all in ChatGPT, exporting it as a JSON file, and then importing it to CRM tool. And I was so confused because I was like, you already own the CRM tool. It’s all right there. Just do it in the tool. By the time you figure out a multi-level prompt with conditional logic and all these things that you want to put in your funnel, by the time you build a prompt to have ChatGPT author that and then audit that, and then And then release it as a JSON file, my goodness, you could have just built the dang thing in the CRM tool and launched it and had customers already.
[00:18:54.150] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s madness, really. But it’s not so I’ve got a story here. A lot of people, when they’re trying to build a community element of a membership, they’re trying to build something that Facebook groups offers and combine it with a forum. And it’s totally understandable because if you do build a good experience, that’s actually there’s a demand for that the actual target community really will use. And these are all major ifs. It will make your memberships business more sticky, more valuable. It isn’t based on pure fantasy. These are powerful benefits. But there are many scenarios where there isn’t the demand, there isn’t So that’s one part. But the other part is that you get people that think, well, my community is going to be using a mobile phone, ‘ and that that’s what they’re going to be on. And a lot of websites and a lot of conversations are on people’s phones. So I need a app, and I need it white-labeled, and I need to get the website, the app, and build a community, and having the app will make the prospect of my community launch semi-guaranteed, and nothing could be further from the truth.
[00:20:44.020] – Kurt von Ahnen
Correct.
[00:20:44.920] – Jonathan Denwood
And they’re talking, if they go to my e-networks or they go to circle and they want to app, that’s why it’s labeled. They’re talking between 15 to $30,000. And they haven’t even got their first student. They haven’t even got the first minimum viable course, which they can base their community. They’ve got nothing, yet they’re seriously looking to put down $15,000 to $30,000. I just think that’s a big mistake, even if you had the money. What do you reckon, Kurt?
[00:21:24.360] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m 100% in on that conversation. You have to have People’s hesitation to put an app on their phone is real. And I think a lot of creators miss this. I recently was asked to speak at the AMEXpo. It’s a big motorcycle thing in Las Vegas. And of course, when I’m there, if you want to know when anything’s going to happen, they want you to put this app in your phone so it can give you push notifications about which speaker is speaking in which room at which time and all that. And the last thing I want to do is have another thing on my phone going ding, ding, ding, a bing-boop. So many people have a little bit of fatigue about the app situation. So you have to come with a really powerful offer or pain point that you’re solving for your audience where they feel they need to have you 24/7 in their pocket. Most memberships aren’t going to carry that clout.
[00:22:24.260] – Jonathan Denwood
Not at the beginning. There might be that industry leader, a big influencer in the particular niche. But I still think even though you got the prospect of being able to market and you already got a voice in your target niche, it’s too much too early, risking too much, too early. It needs to be at the right moment, at the right time. It’s totally logical, and it could really make and benefit your membership and make it a lot more attractive and useful to your target audience. It’s too much, too quick, isn’t it?
[00:23:07.650] – Kurt von Ahnen
The other thing to remember is as you grow an audience, it’s expected that you’re going to improve things or add features as it grows. So if you launch this thing with every shiny bell and whistle, and then a year, two years later, nothing gets added, nothing changes, people lose a little bit of energy on it. If you launch the website and you get to a thousand paying users at 20 bucks a month, well, that’s $20,000 a month, right? Even if you give them two months free a year, you’re at $200,000 a year. Well, now, if you got to spend 20 grand on an app, go ahead. You’ve got revenue, right? And then you’ve got something exciting you can offer. You can say, Hey, we’re up to a thousand subscribers. We wanted to pay it forward. We gave you guys a 24/7 community thing in your pocket. And that makes total sense and it could build excitement if you had an audience. But if you don’t have a audience yet, I really hesitate to advise people to build anything past a minimal viable product course or membership site on just a website.
[00:24:09.740] – Jonathan Denwood
Let’s just talk about custom GPTs before we go for a break. I think if you’re not at the beginning, but if you’re in that middle ground where you’ve done your minimum viable course, it’s proven you’ve got your feedback, you’ve you’ve improved, you’ve got a business model and a way of attracting new students into your funnel, and it’s working, and more student, your churn rate isn’t horrendous, i. E, more people are dropping out that are attracted to the course, and they’re staying on it, and you’re offering additional value, so they keep their subscription going, and you’re looking for your second course, and it’s growing. And when you get to a certain size, you get any online business, having good documentation, good help documentation, having internal documentation about the course, answering questions. This stuff all takes up a lot of time, and being able to to use something like a custom GBT to help you produce help documents that are of a standard. It takes more time than people think to produce really good support documentation. It And he does. Anything that can help you. And also producing, having a Bolt that’s there 24/7, that actually can answer questions with some basic questions without being totally useless.
[00:26:04.610] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s attractive. But all of this will not help. I just… Looking at this when you’re on the start, on the start of your journey, It’s a total waste of time. But if you’re in that middle road of, let’s say, I don’t know, you might differ between 200 and 500 students, and it looks like you are growing and you might get to that looking at these type of solutions are really beneficial. What do you reckon?
[00:26:37.810] – Kurt von Ahnen
I agree with you for the most part. It’s difficult because I know that I run an agency and I’m in the business of selling and configuring these kinds of tools. So it might sound like I’m shooting myself in the foot, but it really comes down to use case to me. If I have 200 or 300 active users, but my knowledge base is well defined. And when it comes to manually answering a support ticket or support request, I’m only getting 10 or 15 a month, and I don’t have a lot of churn, I’m probably not going to invest in a tool yet.
[00:27:19.530] – Jonathan Denwood
I totally believe you. It does depend on the case, doesn’t it?
[00:27:24.320] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. But if I’m in one of those deals where I’ve got 500 active users and I’m getting 50 to 75 emails a week. My head’s starting to split right off the top of my shoulders because I wanted the easy button when I built this thing, and now I’ve got myself this this new full-time job answering people’s stupid questions. I’m going to say, You know what? I built I didn’t build this for freedom. I didn’t build this as a prison. I need to get some help. And then you’re either going to hire somebody or get the right tool.
[00:27:53.110] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it might. And using this tool might be a middle ground before you start hiring a virtual assistant, or it just gives you a little bit more time to grow. But if you’re in the type of community and you’re getting a lot of support, and it’s the same questions that have been asked all the time, something like this could be really useful. So it definitely has a case study. Well, we got to the first half. We’re going to go for our break. And then in the second half, folks, we’re going to be looking at some of the leading services in this particular area of custom GPTs. We’ll be looking at five or six of the leading ones. And Should be of value. We will be back in a few moments, folks. We’re coming back, folks. Before we go into the second half, I just want to point out we’ve got a great free resource. It’s the Membership Machine Show Facebook group. It’s totally free. We love you to go over there and join us, Yasmin, Kirk, a load of WordPress people, but a load of people like you trying to build your membership website. And if you’ve got any questions on any of the episodes of the podcast, it’s a great place, and you could put your questions, and I will personally attempt to answer any of your questions.
[00:29:28.830] – Jonathan Denwood
So once again, it’s a great free resource. It’s the Membership Machine Show Facebook Group. Go over and join it. So let’s have a look. So we’re going to go in and have a look at some of the leading ones. I base, not always, but I base the topics of these shows based on things that come up because we host membership and Community websites. We help We consult, we build. Kirk is part of the WP tonic family. And a lot of the subjects I discuss in this podcast are things that have come up in the weeks of running WP tonic. And this particular subject and observing other conversations on other forums or live or group Zooms and discussing is one of the reasons I wanted to cover this particular subject. Now, one of the leading services that came from Kirk, he did some research for me, is this docsbot. Docsbot. Ai. It provides help documentation. It provides a chat Bolt. It provides a lot of functionality. It was started by a guy called Aaron Edwards. He actually has got a history with WordPress. He was actually on Chris’s great podcast, LMS Cast, which I highly recommend to you, audience, go and have a listen to Chris’s podcast.
[00:31:19.220] – Jonathan Denwood
And Aaron was a guest on Chris’s show, and the link to that interview will be in the show notes. Which you can find on the WP Tonic website at the beginning of next week. So he’s got a history of WordPress, and it starts at $19. I’m giving him prices month to month here, and it starts at $19. And it looks pretty good. It looks feature-rich. If you’re looking for help in providing intelligent answers, you can upload your WordPress data into it, and it doesn’t seem crippled at the lower levels at $19. It seems quite powerful. What do you reckon?
[00:32:14.220] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, for me, the number one thing was who was on the list of people that either put in a testimonial or made a recommendation to me as I was asking around. And when people like Jack from WP Fusion say, Yeah, this is solid, it definitely gets my attention, right? Because that’s a premium product that we carry at WP Tonic. And so the other thing that got me was the cost. The cost was very affordable, and I liked all the different elements of data that I could train the bot on. So it does documents and media. It does Q&A things. It’ll take some raw data from CSV files if you have it, and it does a lot. And there’s other tools tools that you can incorporate or bring into it. If you’re someone that’s really into Notion, you could use Notion to teach this thing. But I say that very much on purpose. When you go the chatbot route, you have to teach it what you wanted to answer your people with. Having that document is foundational. Having the content is foundational to train it on.
[00:33:27.500] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I’ve actually asked Erin to come not on this, podcast, but my other podcast. I’ve actually recently outreached to him, so hopefully you will agree to come on. Yeah, be great. What I think is one of its main competitors is Bolt Sonic. They’re based in San Francisco. They got a similar price structure. Their middle product is actually cheaper. Their middle ground product, their starting product, their starter plan is exactly the same price as. They seem very similar trying to attract to very similar clientele. Also, one thing, because we do help people that are trying to build medical learning learning management systems, and it does offer their service, supposedly as HIPAA compliant, which isn’t going by the reasonable search I did on all these websites It’s not the case with Dott Bolt, but it does seem to be one of its main competitors. These two seem to be competing head-on. Would you agree?
[00:34:57.840] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. The one thing I noticed that was a big difference in their pricing page was that seven-day free trial. I think that that’s a crucial step for a lot of people that are just starting out. You could put in a seven-day trial, give it a shot, and see how close it comes to matching your expectations.
[00:35:17.760] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s a good point. They really do. Did you spot anything that was different between the two? Because I just got the impression that they-I felt like one stole from the other. I really did.
[00:35:34.550] – Kurt von Ahnen
I mean, even the layout, I’m like, Is this an AI-made website? Did they say, Hey, copy this website and put my logo on the top of it? That sounds mean. I’m joking, of course. But no, they’re very similar. The pricing strategies are very similar. A lot of the verbiage in the website was very similar. My only, and I got to stress this, my only my leverage on Docs Bot AI is the people that made the personal recommendation to me about the product. If I was doing research online only and not depending on testimonials from people I knew, it would be a real toss up between the two.
[00:36:15.670] – Jonathan Denwood
I also think because of the founder’s background in WordPress, I’d be very surprised if it didn’t have good integration with WordPress websites. I’ll be amazed because he is a very experienced high-level developer. On to the next one, Chatbot. A good name, chatbot. Com. I don’t know when they purchase that domain. Let’s hope early. It must have cost them early because otherwise it must have cost them a lot of money. But I think it was early because these people are based in Boston, Massachusetts. They’re a funded startup, but in They’ve been going since 2017. They do a number of different products, and it’s one of the bigger companies. They have between 50 to 200 employees. I think it’s a more expensive product. It starts at 65, and then the middle project is 169, and then the last product matches what. Bolt is charging. So it’s 499 per month. If you go month to month. If you’re looking for help documents It just doesn’t seem as feature-rich as the previous two. But the team, you got to respect the team they’ve been around, and it’s a bigger company. And But it just didn’t seem to offer all the features of the previous two.
[00:38:05.070] – Jonathan Denwood
Or am I wrong about that?
[00:38:08.420] – Kurt von Ahnen
This comes down to one of those things where maybe we need to do a follow-up in six months or nine months and redo the topic. Their visual builder to me and the way that they describe the integration of different information sources, I thought made it a player. The visual builder to me is very intuitive. It’s like visually building a process map.
[00:38:39.750] – Jonathan Denwood
When I consult with client- I didn’t verbalize it, but I’m not lying here. That was the only thing, and that’s why I put this question because I was going to see if you brought it up and you read my mind straight away. The builder is impressive. Because the other two don’t Actually, don’t actually show their builder that much, but they obviously are proud of it because they feature it quite heavily, don’t they?
[00:39:15.540] – Kurt von Ahnen
And it’s clean-looking, and it looks super easy to use. But it’s almost twice the price when you look at those lower packages.
[00:39:27.550] – Jonathan Denwood
Well observed and well put. So then you have to look at it. All these that we’re talking about, I think they’re all credible, folks. But you’re just going to have to see if they do… I can’t remember. Do they offer a free plan at all? Or is it you just got to pay out coffee?
[00:39:49.030] – Kurt von Ahnen
They have a free trial.
[00:39:50.630] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. So a lot of these have a free trial, so you can try them out.
[00:39:55.860] – Kurt von Ahnen
The other thing that I think is worth mentioning, and I don’t think we’ve mentioned it yet. If we did, I apologize. A lot of these pricing menus, when you look at them, don’t be blinded by just the features you get for the tier that you pick. Also look at the flow or the volume of answers it gives, because a lot of them say, oh, you get 1,000 answers a month, or you get 5,000 answers a month. And so you might find one that says, oh, those are all the resources I want, but on that plan, I only get 500 answers a month, and I’ve got 6,000 people in my website. Well, then you’re You’re obviously going to need the next year up. So you got to make sure that you’re balancing what’s being offered with what your use case is.
[00:40:36.820] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, that’s a great point. Thanks for that. On to the next one, Custom MGPT. Also in Massachusetts, in Boston, Massachusetts seems to have a few of these. It’s founder Aiden Doroscio, I would totally butchered his name. He’s from a marketing background and a successful one. He had a couple of successful startups and buyouts. Standard is ’99. They only have two prices before you have to get a custom price from them. But their standard starts at 99, and then the next one… The 499 seems popular with all of them, doesn’t it? But the standard I had to look around. I was a little bit lost by their website. It didn’t really shout to me. It did anything better than the first two were chatbot. It’s more expensive, but you got this builder, which you so with laser focus pointed out, which I was hoping for. What’s your thoughts about it?
[00:42:07.070] – Kurt von Ahnen
My thought was customgpt. Ai was probably a really great URL purchase, but they’re trying to make it all back with this pricing. I didn’t see that what they offered really matched the pricing in comparison to the other ones on our list. And that’s unfortunate because God knows they might watch this and then reach out to us and say, Oh, you missed something really important in our offer. But I’m not seeing the really important. To your point, the website is a little lackluster on details or really like that what’s in it for me quotient as a customer. When I see it, I go, yeah, they offer some things, but storage capacity is big to me. So they’ve got 60 million words on the standard plan. They’ve got monthly processing volume at 120 million words. And so when you break that down into work, you start thinking yourself, well, how many words is that? How many words are in the average book? How many words are in the average blog post? And then you start to think about, well, how much volume in processing would this do for that money? And it seems like it’s pretty generous from that perspective, but I’m just not seeing the functionality that I think came with chatbot.
[00:43:22.330] – Jonathan Denwood
I got the sense it was more aimed at, well, they all are. I was going to say something stupid there. Surprised It’s just they’re all aimed at business to business. But that just seemed to be aimed at larger business to me.
[00:43:43.220] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, when you think about it, the ones that we looked at first that were lower priced, that was one user account, right? So that’s one person in charge of the tool. And then the standard in custom GPT, that one comes with three members on the team right out of the shoot. So from a business to business perspective, it’s already saying, Hey, you’re going to be able to build 10 agents in this thing. Agents are like the actual transformers, right? So you’re going to be able to build 10 different AI agents, and you’re going to have three members on your team right out of the shoot with this pricing. So in those terms, when you compare that to the lower priced tiers, you are getting more. You’re getting more processing You’re getting more service, you’re getting more opportunities to express the tool. I just don’t know if the tool has all the features that chatbot pricing had.
[00:44:41.880] – Jonathan Denwood
On to the last one, WNDYRChat. The key is in the name, really. I do like the name WNDYRChat because they are really focused on the chatbot. They do offer the documentation, but it really is focused on on the chatbot side of it. And they’re a company based in Singapore. The pricing, the starter plan starts at 29. So it’s a bit substantially more expensive than the first two. Let’s start at 19. The actual interface, the examples they show, and it seems quite polished. I’m I’m not sure what they’re offering really makes us think better than the first two, even on the chatbot side of it, which is definitely their focus, isn’t it? That’s what they’re pushing, the AI-powered chatbot rather than the first two. It’s part of the mixture, but it’s also about the documentation and everything. What do you, Regan?
[00:46:00.840] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m in agreement. With this one, I went straight to the pricing page again because I’m really interested in apples to apples, oranges to oranges comparisons. And at $29 a month, I was getting a thousand messages a month, and I was getting one chatbot, whereas the last one we talked about came with 10, and then one user account. And so for $29 a month, I’m getting just a trickle of of activity or capacity and just the one person to use it. But like yourself, I dove in a little bit deeper and I was like, hey, the interface looks pretty sharp. Things do look pretty polished. I would be real curious as to how it actually learns on the content and performs in comparison to the others, because it seems like if it can do what it’s If it can do what we expect it to do, looking at that pricing, I think it puts it as a good competitor to DocSpot or BotSonic.
[00:47:09.070] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, that was my fault as well. We were surprisingly on the same page with this.
[00:47:17.910] – Kurt von Ahnen
There’s one thing that always comes to mind with me on this, Jonathan, and I’m going to throw the whole conversation off with this one. Before AI chatbots were the thing, a lot of people just used a chatbot. Do you remember just having the chatbot?
[00:47:35.840] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s why I’ve got a minor, but I’m looking at maybe going to one of these AI ones.
[00:47:41.010] – Kurt von Ahnen
Again, I always go to use case. So Manana Nomas has a chatbot. I’ve had it there for years, and I pre-programmed the questions and the splits. And so ask this question, you go this way, ask that question, you go that way. Conditional logic, blah, blah, blah, blah, Answers, I probably get six or seven clients that go through that chatbot a month. And at the end, it always refers them to book an appointment, book a whatever, and it’s doing the job. And not for nothing, I can’t even remember the name of the tool at this point, but it was one of those AppSumo lifetime deals for $49 or something. And it’s been on my site for years and it’s working great and it updates. So it really does with this AI My thing, like the beginning of our show today, I was like, you really have to analyze, is this the direction that’s right for you in your use case? Because all these things add up. A hundred bucks a month here, a hundred bucks a month there.
[00:48:44.730] – Jonathan Denwood
They do, don’t they? This is the great thing about WordPress, because if you’re trying to build these on SaaS platforms, the whole membership, I can tell you it starts to add up quite rapidly because you’re going to need a lot of external services, which you can do on WordPress at a much reduced price, and a much more value if you host with WP. We provide all that technology as part of our hosting package. But yeah, like I said when we were in the first half, if you get to the correct size and you’re dealing with a lot of queries and it’s taking up time, time that you need to build your next course, time to make your website more sticky, give more value. If it’s taking your time away from things you should focus on, it’s worth the investment. If it isn’t, it won’t help; it won’t produce any new students. Any It just isn’t because really at the early days, you want to be talking to people. You want their feedback because they give you such value in how you should be improving your course and making it more beneficial and sticky.
[00:50:23.310] – Jonathan Denwood
What do you reckon?
[00:50:25.070] – Kurt von Ahnen
I agree with much of that. I was sitting here trying to think, if push came to shove, out of the five we talked about, what direction would I go in? If I had to push, let’s say I have the volume. I have everything we discussed, and DocSpot came highly recommended by other people in WordPress whom I trust. To your point, it was developed by someone with a WordPress background. And then, when you look at the pricing of chatbot versus DocSpot, you’ve done well there. I would have gotten lost there. It’s almost twice as much to go with chatbot, but you get the same thousand conversations a month and the same one builder at those lower prices. So I would try DocSpot because even though the builder is beautiful, I will build it. Hopefully, I’m only going to develop it once or twice. I’m not going to have to keep rebuilding it.
[00:51:28.660] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, that was. We’re on the same wave left for the game. I think, in general, you need to try them all, and it is about the specifics of your particular circumstance. But the general winner is. Bolt, clearly to me, at $19 a month, and the next one up at $49 per month for what it’s offering. So, I can see why it was recommended. I think we don’t need to say anything more than this. I think it’s covered; this episode has a load of value. I think we both did our homework. And I think, funnily enough, we were all… I didn’t want to, which I wouldn’t be able to do anyway, but I didn’t want to prompt you in a particular direction. I just wanted to see, and we were on the same wavelength.
[00:52:38.360] – Kurt von Ahnen
And I think people should pay attention to what we say and see what we do, Jonathan. I mean, we’ve both been very transparent about how we’ve analyzed these tools and come to a decision, and that stuff that people could duplicate for themselves with other products as well. Do the homework, explore the differences, and look for some third-party edification from people you know and trust, and then make your decision.
[00:53:05.160] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, because fundamentally, we could have signed up for the free plans and used them for an hour. But fundamentally, apart from doing the initial, you got to try these out for a couple of days. Who wants to try them all? You need to choose one or two, that seemed to me, and then give them a whack, and then see if they do help with the problem you’re dealing with. So, Kirk, what’s the best way for people to learn more about you, your thoughts, and what you’re up to?
[00:53:44.910] – Kurt von Ahnen
Manana Nomas is our agency’s name and the tag for most social channels. Anything Manana Nomas will come back to us. If you want to make a personal connection, I’m the only Kurt von Annen on LinkedIn, so we can connect there and communicate through that channel.
[00:54:02.300] – Jonathan Denwood
If you want more help, like I said, join the Membership Machine Facebook Group or go to the WP Tonic website and sign up for its newsletter. This podcast covers even more details, such as membership, marketing, the best technology, and everything else. We will be back next week. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye. Bye.
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