Effective AI Content Strategies For SEO in 2024
With Special Guest Dustin W. Stout, Founder of Magai.
Discover the cutting-edge AI content strategies that will dominate SEO in 2024! In this show, we’ll explore the latest techniques and tools for creating high-impact, search-optimized content using artificial intelligence.
Learn how to stay ahead of the curve and maximize your online visibility with AI-driven content. Don’t miss out on this game-changing information, which will revolutionize your SEO strategy!
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#1 – Dustin, what problem do you see Magai solve?
#2 – What do you think is the fundamental attitude Google has connected AI generated content?
#3 – At the end of 2024, where do you personally see the landscape being connected to AI content?
#4 – What do you see as the biggest mistakes people are making in using and discussing AI connected to digital content production?
#5 – What are some of the business tools and services that you use to run your business daily that you could recommend to the audience?
#6 – If you return to a time machine at the beginning of your career, what essential advice would you give yourself?
This Week Show’s Sponsors
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The Show Main Interview Notes & Links
[00:00:11.900] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP-Tonic This Week in WordPress and SaaS. This is Episode 888. I’ve got a fantastic guest. We’re going to be talking about all things AI, content, and much more. We’ve got Dusty, Dustin Stout, founder of Magai, with us. It should be a great show. We’re going to be, like I say, delving deep in the world of AI and content. Dusty is an expert on this, and he’s got a startup around providing services in the AI area. So, Dusty, would you like to give us a quick 20-30-second intro about yourself?
[00:00:59.230] – Dustin W. Stout
Sure. I’m an entrepreneur. I’ve been self-employed, working for myself, ground it out for the last probably closer to 14 years now. Started as a side hustle, building WordPress sites for clients and teaching businesses how to use social media for marketing. That quickly turned into a full-time business for me, consulting and learning SEO because if you’re building websites and attempting to drive traffic through social media, naturally, you want to find other channels and not just pursue one channel. SEO was obviously the biggest show in town as far as driving free traffic. I learned everything I could about SEO, everything I could about social media marketing. As I was building websites for clients, my whole goal was to build them a site that actually gets traffic from multiple different marketing channels. I did that for about 12 years and found very quickly that I’m a bit of a perfectionist. Scaling a service-based business as a perfectionist and scaling a service based on business. As a perfectionist, it’s very difficult to do because I’m the guy who will spend an hour and a half trying to decide how round the button should be. And have we optimized this page enough for Google’s latest algorithm?
[00:02:13.660] – Dustin W. Stout
I move to creating digital products. I love working with clients, but I found that I can put my perfectionism to good use in creating a product that helps many people at once, and I can focus on making it as good as possible. That’s where I’m at today. Founded a Magai back in late March and saw where the AI industry was going and how great ChatGPT was, but how many shortcomings it had, and I sought to improve that for businesses.
[00:02:42.790] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. It should be a great show. Before we go into the meat and potatoes of the show, I’ve got a couple of messages from our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks.
[00:03:59.030] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re coming back, folks. I want to point out we got a new sponsor, and he’s going to be with us for about a month. It’s Omicend. Omicend is an SMS service plug-in. I had a significant following in the Shopify area, but he’s building a great solution in the WooCommerce space. We’ve got a great special offer. We’ve got three months with 30% off. You can find that and other great offers and a created list of the best plug-ins by going over to the wp-tonic-slash-wp-tonic-slash. Com. Com/deals, w-hyphen-tonic. Com/deals. You find Omicen’s new offer and some other great offers from our other great sponsors. Thank you, Omicen, for supporting the show. It’s much appreciated. Let’s go right into it, Dustin. What do you think Magseed solves? What made you decide that you’re going into the world of SaaS products? You look pretty relaxed, but I’m sure trying to build a SAS product will change that quite rapidly based on my own experience.
[00:05:31.960] – Dustin W. Stout
I’m a bit relaxed. Maybe it’s the allergy medication. My allergies have been… Yesterday, here in Bakersfield, I lived in Southern California. I looked out the window at one point, and it looked like I was in the movie Dune. Dust was blowing everywhere, and it looked terrible outside of me. So my sinuses have not been having a great couple of days. But it does make for a much better podcast voice if I do say so myself. Oh, But why SaaS? Well, like I said, I’m a bit of a perfectionist. My first software venture into digital products was actually a WordPress plugin. That’s when I discovered that building digital products is much better than how I’m built because I can really perfect one thing and help many people. Once I got started on that, it was like, I’d like to get rid of these clients so that I can help thousands and millions of people instead of one or two people at a time. But when ChatGPT first came out, I had been searching for the following product to build. I came off the tail end of a couple of failed digital products after leaving my WordPress plug-in company back in 2020 and had some other ideas.
[00:06:47.450] – Dustin W. Stout
They didn’t pan out. Long story short, I lost a lot of money and was at a really low point in my career as an entrepreneur—really dark place. I was just looking, I was… I feel like I had a season of drought creatively and entrepreneurially. I was like, What is that next thing that I can really bring to the world and help the people that I’ve set out to help, which are typically the creators? They are the content creators. They are the consultants, the coaches, the builders out there who are creating things in the world. How can I help other creators? Then ChatGPT came around. I have been working with AI for years now with AI copywriting tools, and they always fell short for me. They were all predicated on these templates, and you had to fit your ideas and somebody else’s templates. Then the stress of having to pick a template from 1,000 different templates to get the right AI output was just daunting. I think that’s why it never really hit the mass market. But when ChatGPT hits the scene, it’s not just lowering the barrier of entry. There is no barrier to entry.
[00:08:00.110] – Dustin W. Stout
You don’t have to search through a thousand templates. You just talk to the AI, tell it what you want and it gives it to you. It was magic to me. That’s where the name Magi came from. It was magical. But instantly as an entrepreneur, I start using a thing and I start to find all the friction points. I’m like, Oh, why doesn’t it do this? Why doesn’t it have that? I wish I could do this other thing. Those things just started piling up as I was using ChatGPT prolifically, both personally and for businesses and for some clients I started taking on at the time. Simple things like search and filter. Why can’t I just search my old chats and find them, the ones that I made a week ago? There’s no search and filter function inside ChatGPT. Why can’t I put things into folders? I would love to do that. Why can’t I do that with ChatGPT? Why can’t I just give it a URL and it goes to that specific URL and scrape the page? Why can’t I feed it a YouTube video and have it just know to pull the YouTube transcript? So all these things started piling up and I was like, You know what?
[00:09:04.140] – Dustin W. Stout
I know how to build and I have no other products that are successful right now. So this might be the next thing, the next problem I can solve. I can make ChatGPT better. From there, I just continue to listen to my users, to listen to the market and see what are the things the market needs and how can I solve those problems and make this completely revolutionary mode of using AI? How can I make it easier, more accessible, and more productive for professionals like me?
[00:09:34.150] – Jonathan Denwood
What are some of the key features that you have got the best response from the user base so far that you like the most?
[00:09:46.700] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah. People really love the ability to search and filter. They made a chat last week and they’re trying to remember what it was or where it was and they can just easily in Magi search and filter. People love staying organized. So in Magi, we have the ability to have separate brands or workspaces where you can separate clients. It’s not all one giant list of content you’ve created. You can actually separate them out and have some degree of organization. They love being able to put things into filters or not filters, folders. Create their own folders and stay organized that way. And then a huge feature, which OpenAI just basically copied from Magile, is the ability to have personas. Now, personas are the magic of getting AI to actually produce content that sounds like you, that aligns with your values, that aligns with your brand. Essentially, what a persona is, is just giving the AI a personality or giving it a specific set of instructions on how it should behave in the conversation. Best example is I want it to write in my voice. Magile gives you the ability to create a persona based on your own voice and have the AI write in a way that it seems like it came right out of your own head.
[00:11:08.500] – Dustin W. Stout
We also have a bunch of premade personas, things like Expert Copywriter or Marketing Expert or Social Media Manager, whatever goal you have, it’s always best to assign the AI a role and tell it specifically what you want. What that does is it makes it so that the AI isn’t pulling from its huge swath of generalized knowledge. You’re giving it a very laser-focused field to pull from and you get much better results when you do it that way. That has been probably the most successful feature for our users. Now OpenAI just recently announced that they’ve got these things called GPTs and allows you to do exactly that.
[00:11:54.670] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I thought we’d probably be delving this because you were probably well aware of this when you entered this market. Obviously, you are always… I’d be interested in how you dealt with this mentally, working out your business model, because it was obvious that there’s always a good chance that you’re going to be Sherlock. Yeah. And all the people that are building… I was listening to another from Professor G, his podcast, and he was actually talking about these people building products and OpenAI and being Sherlocked. You’re probably quite aware of that risk.
[00:12:41.950] – Dustin W. Stout
Actually, in my eyes, it’s not a risk.
[00:12:44.940] – Jonathan Denwood
And here’s why. That’s why I’m interested to get your insights about this, how you mentally work this out yourself.
[00:12:51.540] – Dustin W. Stout
The problem culturally with us right now is everything’s a subscription. You’ve got 50 different streaming service subscriptions, and you’ve got a subscription to your favorite, the shaving tools. You got a subscription to your favorite steak. I don’t know. People have all kinds of subscriptions. Your favorite coffee, it’s a subscription service. This subscription fatigue is a real thing. In the world of AI, ChatGPT is not the only game in town. Not by a long shot. In fact, it has its closest competitor, ChatGPT is still trying to catch up in many respects to it. It’s called Anthropic, the company, and they have an AI model called Claude, which is extremely sophisticated, may not be as creative in terms of artistic language that it might come up with, but it’s extremely capable. And so what you are having in the marketplace is not just one AI company that’s doing all the innovative things, you’re having a lot of them pop up. So Google has their own AI that’s popping up. Meta is creating their own AI chatbot. Then you have, of course, all the other types of AI, the Generative Image AI. You got things like Midjourney, DALL-E, you have Stable Diffusion, and all these companies out there trying to create the best image generator, right?
[00:14:17.280] – Dustin W. Stout
What Magi’s ultimate goal is to save people from having to subscribe to all of them, because inside of Magi, our users get access to ChatGPT, GPT-4. They also get access to Claude. They also get access to Google’s Palm Bison model. They also get access to Metaslama model. They also get access to Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 3 and Midjourney and the image generators. It’s not just us building a wrapper over OpenAI. It is us saying, look, you’re going to want to use and leverage all of these AI things. It’s great to have them all in one subscription, in one unified interface, so you don’t have to relearn how to use every single one. It’s also great to be able to use it in a team environment, which Magseed also has plans for teams and you can invite people in. Every time OpenAI makes an update or Claude makes an update, or any of these AI companies make an update, all that does is increase the value of the product that we’ve built because it gives people access to all of the AI models in one unified place.
[00:15:27.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I love it because I suffer from stuff, sorry, on term. I have dyslexia, so I’ve always listened to audiobooks and video and podcasting, but it’s helped enormously with all my… It’s one of the reasons why I got into tech and web design and development, because I’ve always been very artistic. It’s just been fantastic, this new technology has helped so much and it saved me a lot of time and I love it. On to the next question. What do you think Google’s attitude towards content that’s produced by AI? They seem to, as always, be giving contradictory statements to some extent. Obviously, they’re using machine learning in their own looking at websites and reducing the need for link signals. That’s pretty obvious. They’ve been using this for quite a while. They’re in a tricky position because if they destroy search, they destroy the major money center for the whole business. They’re in a very, very tricky spot. But what’s their general attitude? Because I’ve been updating content, writing new content, utilizing my writer team. Some of the content I write for UAI, Google seems to love others. It doesn’t seem to index at all. It’s all over the place.
[00:17:18.220] – Jonathan Denwood
But I found a much more recently over the past six months, a much more volatile situation around content anyway about… It seems to be all over the place. There’s about six questions in one there, Dusty, so choose whatever. Let’s start with how Google is looking at AI, what content generated content. What do you think that the way they’re viewing it?
[00:17:49.620] – Dustin W. Stout
I think it’s a really fascinating conversation because Google is in this really existential crisis right now. A lot of people are trying to treat AI chatbots like a Google search, which by the way, don’t do that. It’s not great at surfacing accurate information. Claude actually is much better at surfacing accurate information, but GPT, some of the other models, they tend to make stuff up. So don’t use it like a Google search. But I think in terms of how Google is looking at AI-generated content on websites, I, too, have connections inside of Google and I have spoken with engineers and they will often tell you different things.
[00:18:33.020] – Jonathan Denwood
I think it’s done on purpose myself, actually.
[00:18:36.350] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah. Well, some of it’s on purpose. Some of it is just literally like people are working in different departments.
[00:18:43.250] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, some of their… Sorry, I do this, hopefully because I’m English, I like my quick one-liners. Well, I think some of their engineers think it’s alive already, don’t they? They do. That’s a problem, isn’t it? They do.
[00:18:55.970] – Dustin W. Stout
But in terms of content on websites, here is where I stand on this. Google cannot detect AI content, period.
[00:19:07.990] – Jonathan Denwood
If you’re using- You mean all that money I’ve been giving to these AI recognition tools, all the money that I’ve got now is wasted my body, Dustin.
[00:19:16.440] – Dustin W. Stout
You are. I will go on record and say these tools that say the AI content detection, not very good. You can put in literature, you can put in stuff that you’ve handwritten, and it might get it accurate once and then the next time get it completely wrong. What they’re looking for are specific patterns, and these patterns with more modern AI models, especially with GPT-4 and with Claude 2, and with even this last week’s update to GPT-4, it’s undetectable, especially if you put a persona behind it. If you give it some degree of direction on how to write, it’s going to completely fool any AI detection thing out there.
[00:20:00.050] – Jonathan Denwood
I think you’re spot on there because I spend a lot of time researching the topic and I give it a lot of guidance. It just allows me to write better stuff. It’s a tool. It just helps me so much and my team write better stuff. But these people that say, Oh, there are certain tools out there and we’re not going to name them because it’s not right and I don’t want to get sued. You can put in a load of titles and it’ll churn 100 articles out and sign up for this course and we’ll make you a seven-figure fortune churning out. I don’tt think you’re going to, in my opinion, I don’t think you’re going to get very far very quick. No.
[00:20:49.390] – Dustin W. Stout
Those things have been around longer than AI and they never work. And there are lots of technical reasons why they don’t work. But I would say, yeah, absolutely don’t. Ai is really good with iterative approaches. Its strength is in short bursts of content. If you’re using it, and this is one of the things I’ve taught all of my users in hundreds of conversations, do not give it a simple prompt to have it write 2,000 words. That will result in very poor, low-quality content, and it’s just the nature of where AI is at this given time. The more that it has to write it once, the more low quality it gets. It deteriorates over the longer period of having to write. If instead, you prompt it iteratively one at a time, one section, one paragraph at a time, it focuses all its energy, all its intelligence on that short burst, you get a lot better quality out of it. And you can iterate as you go, making it smarter and smarter as the content that you’re building goes instead of wasting it all in one go. I have an entire blog post about this, but suffice to say short bursts of content, not huge bits of content.
[00:22:09.430] – Dustin W. Stout
And that’s why I think what you’ll get is a lot of these websites saying, Oh, I wrote this article with AI and Google didn’t even rank it. Well, you probably had it run a ton of low-quality content at once instead of really constructing the content the.
[00:22:27.210] – Jonathan Denwood
Way it works. Well, I actually do read it and I edit it, and I editit, and I get other people to edit it, and we add feeds to it, and we get it to rewrite it. I normally add videos that I produce, podcasts, charts, external. I try and knock up something that’s got some value. I think a lot of people don’t do that, do they?
[00:22:53.850] – Dustin W. Stout
No, they don’t. No, they want an easy button. They want to say, Write me a 2,000-word article about dog grooming. Then they hit the button and they just want to copy and paste the article. That’s why I think you’re getting a lot of sights and a lot of experts out there saying, Oh, Google detects AI. This article didn’t rank and my whole site was affected. Well, you put up crap. But I think also at the same time, I think Google is rapidly, like I said, they’re in an existential crisis. They have to figure out how to balance their algorithm to take on this new challenge of swaths of AI-generated content. I think to some degree they’re iterating to improve their quality controls. Ultimately, Google’s job is to surface the highest quality results. That’s their goal. That’s how they make their money by surfacing the best content for people’s queries. I think at times, in order to do that and to maybe fight against the AI-generated content, they might be overcorrecting in some instances. I think what we’ll see over the next 6-12 months is an up and down volatility that we haven’t seen in Google for a while because they’re trying to just figure it out and they haven’t figured it out yet, as far as I can see.
[00:24:20.690] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s also just me. You’re much more of expert. I’ve had to become an expert because I run a business. One of them, I do business as a business outreach, and then I have business to consumer, and I use content marketing as the main vector that I utilize. I’ve invested a lot of writers time. There’s over 300-400 articles on the WPtonic. I do podcasts, two podcasts, three podcasts a week plus videos. It’s a machine and there’s only three of us in the team. We’re- That’s amazing. -producing a lot of content, right? Yeah. But is the main contradiction? Google wants to see signals. They come to your website, they see that they get the information that somebody doesn’t go to another website. But on the other hand, when I’m searching, even if I get… Because there’s… To me, there’s different levels of search, and I’m just basing it on mine. There’s factual information. You do a search to find a fact, but then there’s deeper search where you’re trying to find out the right questions to ask because you don’t know the subject. You’re trying to find out the search parameters that you need to know to make decent searches.
[00:25:58.880] – Jonathan Denwood
Is that making sense?
[00:25:59.930] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah, absolutely.
[00:26:01.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Then you do a deep… When you know about a subject, you want to refresh yourself because you have to deal with some, especially you’re running your own business, you’re juggling so many balls that you can’t keep up with everything, especially tech, because it changes so quick. You’re refreshing that’s another type of search. Then there’s influencers, or terrible term, but we have to use it. But there’s people that you respect their content. You get the feeling that they’re at a higher stage than you and you get the feeling that they do know what they’re talking about. You read this stuff because you hope some of their brilliance rubs off on you because you’re just a normal guy or woman. This is right. Am I on the right track? So there’s all types of searches. Yeah.
[00:26:51.360] – Dustin W. Stout
And the term that marketers have used for a long time now is intent. We have different intents. I think over the years, Google’s gotten really good at categorizing or determining the intent of a query. And that’s why you have things like, if you search for the term coffee shop, it knows that your intent is to find a local coffee shop near you, not necessarily to find an online coffee shop where you buy coffee. It’s not necessarily, I’m looking to franchise a coffee shop. It figures out the intent and it’s usually pretty good because it has a lot of data to determine the intent. And so whether that intent is research-oriented or whether it’s fact-oriented, they tend to do pretty well with guessing the intent of the user’s query. And so you’re spot on there. There are different modalities of what you might be searching for. And I think Google has gotten really good at that.
[00:27:56.270] – Jonathan Denwood
And the other thing is, I won’t name them because they’ve come after… They’ve come after me a couple of times, threatening to sue me, so I call them the Chocolate Factory. You won’t know what I’m talking about. But there’s a couple of very large WordPress-focused websites that utilize Far Eastern content churning farms to knock out really crap content. The most awful. But they regularly dominate because they swamps and they use Black Hat, SEO too, and they’ve… But Google’s just allowed them. It seems that Google’s attitude seems to be all over the place. There’s some really awful websites that have great domain authority that their content is just awful, but they still google just religiously puts them on the top of a lot of WordPress search terms. What’s that about? Do you got any insight? I think that you see that in a lot of sectors, don’t you? Some really crappy that you use. There’s this snobby attitude towards AI, but they were using content mill farms in the far east anyway for years. What’s the difference?
[00:29:11.970] – Dustin W. Stout
I think the Google search algorithm is so complex and so nuanced, and some people have just gotten really good at gaming it because it’s a big business and some people just have a ton of money to just throw into all of that. I think it’s just a matter of… Quality, for one, is subjective in many cases. Somebody might read, and this happens all the time when I speak to, or not when I speak, when I attend other people’s talks on AI, I might be sitting there as the expert going, That’s pretty terrible advice. But the people there don’t know. They don’t know better. They’re new to it. I think to your.
[00:30:01.350] – Jonathan Denwood
Case, I think a lot of them- You’re saying you’re intuitively spot on because a lot of this content is aimed at the newbie in WordPress. Right, yeah.
[00:30:09.000] – Dustin W. Stout
I’ve seen that. Coming up in the WordPress space, I’ve seen all of.
[00:30:13.050] – Jonathan Denwood
These- I think you know who I’m talking about anyway. I think I do.
[00:30:17.140] – Dustin W. Stout
I’ve seen a lot of these sites where they cater towards the beginner. I think because they’re beginners, they don’t know how good or bad the advice is. They’re just looking for an answer to their-degree, right? And so Google’s job is just to surface the result that seems like most people like. And when you have a lot of cash, you can throw at marketing and content distribution, and you can throw a lot of cash at back links and doing all of the SEO things, you tend to get up there in the search results and people are lazy. They may not spend the time to click down to the fifth and sixth thing. So if you can get up there in the first three results and you can get people to stay on the page for a long time, Google looks at those signals like how long do visitors stay? Are they coming in and out of different results? If they stay on one result or one link that they’ve clicked on, they stay there for a while and they don’t come back to the search, Google sees that as a huge signal as that was the right result.
[00:31:20.810] – Dustin W. Stout
That was the right search.
[00:31:22.030] – Jonathan Denwood
Result to give them. For understandable reasons. Yeah.
[00:31:25.590] – Dustin W. Stout
So a lot of the quality issues that we might see as experts or as highly experienced people in that field, the beginners, the content that is meant for the people who don’t know what we know, they might not know enough to know that’s not very good content. Andso we’re in this place of we know too much and therefore it’s almost sometimes hard to get past our own knowledge of we know too much and therefore maybe we’re not as resourced as these other companies that aren’t spending time on the highest quality content. They’re able to churn it out faster and distribute it more quickly and stay at the top of those results because they’re doing enough to get there and they’re able to stay there. I think it’s much harder for them to knock them down when they’ve done all of that distribution and attracted all those beginner traffic.
[00:32:29.850] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, thanks for that. You put that so succinctly fantastic. I’m not being sarcastic here. I thought you did a fantastic job there, actually. You clarified it in my own mind because it’s just puzzling, but I think it’s understandable in Google’s eyes, really, isn’t it?
[00:32:47.410] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah. They’re in a hard spot because they can’t sit there and the algorithm isn’t perfect. It’s not perfect and it can’t analyze from an expert standpoint, Is this content is a good advice? Is it accurate advice? Is it deep advice? It does that to a degree, but its biggest signal is user behavior.
[00:33:09.360] – Jonathan Denwood
Does Black Hat link farm still work to some extent?
[00:33:14.220] – Dustin W. Stout
Oh, I don’t know. I want to say no, but.
[00:33:19.840] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t have the confidence. Because what’s said behind the scenes is this guy’s built a whole link farm in the far east and that’s how he…
[00:33:28.710] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah. I have to think that to some degree, link farms and backlink gaming and buying still works because I will log into my email every single day and it never fails. There are- Never ends, does it? I have new emails saying we’d like to.
[00:33:47.540] – Jonathan Denwood
Do a link- I never replied to any of them, but it must work. Somebody must be replied to these.
[00:33:53.960] – Dustin W. Stout
Right. My email app has this fun little feature where when I hit Command B, it blocks that person from ever emailing me again.
[00:34:03.110] – Jonathan Denwood
Please don’t do that to me. I’ll be nice to you so far. I think we’ve had a good chat, actually. I’ve got a very wandering mind. I think it’s around my dyslexia, really. One of those questions was in six parts, wasn’t it? But I think you handled it. Sometimes I get guests and they just look like me, like I’m on some drugles. But you dealt with it.
[00:34:29.740] – Dustin W. Stout
Quite- It keeps things interesting.
[00:34:32.310] – Jonathan Denwood
Very tactful. I can tell you’re an extremely tactful person. I’m not. I can be what I want to be. All right, let’s go for our break. It’s been a great discussion. I’ve really enjoyed the chat. We will be back in a few moments, folks.
[00:34:47.840] – Dustin W. Stout
This podcast episode is brought to you by Lifter LMS, the leading learning management system.
[00:34:55.490] – Jonathan Denwood
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[00:34:56.980] – Dustin W. Stout
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[00:35:25.480] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re coming back, folks. Just want to point out, don’t forget about our new sponsor, Omosend. It’s a really cool plugin to send text messaging, especially if you’re around woocommas. Let’s face it, woocommas needs some text message. No, it needs a good solution and this looks quite good actually. So go and have a look at it. I’ll make sure it’s in the show notes and go to the deals page and all the details will be there. I also want to point out, if you really want to support the show, why don’t you become a WPtonic partner? We’ve got some fantastic affiliate deals and you really be showing your support to the show. If you’re building a learning management system, a membership site or a buddy boss site, we’re a great hosting partners. Go over to wp-tonic/partners, andbecome a partner. We love you to become part of the tribe and you’ll be shown your support for independent media. We go on our journey. I think you touched upon it in the first part of the show, Dustin, but really, I’m asking the impossible question, really, but they never stopped me. Where do you think we’re going to be at the end of 2004 when it comes to AI?
[00:37:03.010] – Jonathan Denwood
Can you rub that crystal ball or just look into it and just give us any feelings that you think we might be at the end of next year?
[00:37:13.850] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah. I think there are several advancements that are happening in AI that are going to come to pass within a year or so, maybe 2-3 years. One of the things that I am simultaneously a fan of and not a fan of are prompt engineering and this idea that you have to find the magic, the right combination.
[00:37:39.930] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s all in the prompts, baby. You can achieve everything with the right prompts.
[00:37:45.450] – Dustin W. Stout
Right. I think where AI is going and where it ultimately has to go, if it’s going to continue to move forward, is it’s going to be easier to just simply converse with the AI in simple terms and not have to do all this prompt engineering. And there are those who would disagree with me, but I think with the iterations that OpenAI in particular has been making in this past week alone, they’re showing us that they are actively trying to help people with prompting by just getting better at being intuitive and understanding the intent, like Google, understanding the intent behind the query. And what it does is it rewrites the prompt on the back end. And you’ll see this if anybody’s used the OpenAI Dolly 3 integration, creating images inside the chat. It will, in effect, rewrite your prompt in better ways. And so I think over the next year, we’ll start to see prompt engineering becomes a thing of the past, and you won’t hear much about it anymore. And people will just… Number one, people will learn that all I have to do is just be articulate. To just articulate what.
[00:39:01.720] – Jonathan Denwood
I want. I’ve got a slight problem, ain’t I?
[00:39:04.540] – Dustin W. Stout
I think you’ll be fine. But on.
[00:39:08.220] – Jonathan Denwood
Top of that- Don’t my listeners tell me I’ve got a problem there.
[00:39:13.470] – Dustin W. Stout
But yeah, so on top of that, I think the AI will just get better. They’ll get better at understanding what we want and we won’t have to do all this prompt engineering because it’ll do it for us behind the scenes. In terms of SEO, I don’t think Google will get its act together in the next year, just historically. I don’t think they’ve done things quickly.
[00:39:38.360] – Jonathan Denwood
They make so much money, they’re gobs of money, just gobs. And they’re a funny old… You don’t know what to make of them really. I suppose we could get some of the… Most of your companies are filled with PHBs. But you’ve never worked at a university, you realize because you’ve got a load of PHBs, doesn’t mean any sense is spoken though, do you?
[00:40:03.600] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah. Actually, a lot of universities are starting to use Magseye because it’s way easier to give their students access to all of the AIs with one subscription. Working with the University of Notre Dame recently and they’re doing generative AI. They’re actually teaching a class on prompt engineering, which again, I’m a fan of, but I’m not a fan of. I think it’s helpful for this current season of AI where people are just learning to, How do I talk to them? How do I interface with this? We all went through that with Google, right? We all had to figure out how do I craft a search query? But there was no search query engineering that happened.
[00:40:45.410] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, it’s funny. It’s great to hear that you’re getting some traction with universities, but I actually see AI being a great boom for education because at the present moment, it’s saying, Oh, everybody’s going to be replaced and the world’s going to collapse. But I actually see one of the great areas, obviously, Merce and pattern recognition is another factor, but in education, because we found with the revolution of information over the past 25 years that we’ve had all this information out there. But it hasn’t filtered out in improving a lot of people’s educational outcomes. Having all the information out there is great, but you need a teacher, you need somebody to be able… And for the elite, the 1%, they can buy individual tuition, they can buy the best suiters, they can buy the best one-to-one, but the rest of us, we can’t. But that’s one of the promises of AI, isn’t it? To have a mentor, a teacher that can customize learning to your individual style to increase your ability to learn? Or am I totally lost.
[00:42:13.000] – Dustin W. Stout
It, Dustin? No, I think you’re ahead of the curve. I think that’s something that is the most exciting part of AI, is having those more personalized and customized experience. My wife is a teacher. She is a language arts teacher at a local middle school.
[00:42:31.480] – Jonathan Denwood
God bless her. I couldn’t do it. I had to smack those kids who were over the place if they got lippy. If they got lippy with me, I’d just smack them one. I’ve lost half my audience already. But it’s just true. That’s why I’m not a teacher.
[00:42:48.520] – Dustin W. Stout
I’m with you. I’m with you. I worked with teenagers for a number of years before becoming an entrepreneur. Then my wife will come home with these stories of how these middle school boys are acting. I’m like, I would have slapped them. I would have thrown them across the room. I would have definitely gotten fired. So I don’t know how to hats off to all the teachers out there. You are so underappreciated.
[00:43:10.940] – Jonathan Denwood
I was a dreadful kid, actually. It was awful thinking back. I’d say surprising, isn’t it?
[00:43:16.110] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah. I’m seeing firsthand how teachers are using it to help them with their workload because teachers are always overworked. There’s so much to get to and sometimes they don’t have time to come up with an entire lesson plan or quiz, and they can use AI to augment their expertise and come up with stuff faster and be more efficient. But on top of that, they can use AI to come up with these customized approaches to individual needs. Actually, many of her students have, I wouldn’t say special needs, but they require a higher degree of attention in their educational process. And so she’s able to bounce ideas off of the AI inside of Magie and just get some different perspectives and get some different examples to use or maybe some different illustrations that might work with that particular student’s way of seeing the world.
[00:44:12.240] – Jonathan Denwood
I think especially when it comes to mathematics and more technical, because learning mathematics is a bit like learning music. If you haven’t got that innate liking to it, it’s such a mountain to get. And a lot of people drop out and we need to get people up to a certain standard. If you haven’t got that innate liking of mathematics… I never learnt calculus or anything like that because they thought I was an idiot, but I’ve always liked business math. I’ve always been able to… I can add up pretty quick, if I say myself. Sodo. But I think in America and in the UK and a few other countries, people drop out of the technical subjects because calculus and some of the basic, if you’re going to do higher scientific, you’ve got to learn those basics. A lot of people find it so difficult, don’t they? Because they don’t get that one-to-one tuition that the 1% gets, because a lot of those struggle, but they just get more and more resources thrown at it to get to a certain standard. I just see that as being a promise of AI. Or am I deluded, Dustin?
[00:45:38.580] – Dustin W. Stout
No, I think you’re spot on. Like I said, my wife is using it to help with the diversity in perspectives and learning styles. I think there are all kinds of use cases that we’re going to discover, just like we discovered with Google. We discovered, at first, it was just like searching for Charlie, bit my finger, right? We were just searching for funny stuff. And then we realized, oh, I can search for local news. I can search for local restaurants. I could search for phone numbers. Oh, I can actually put math problems into the Google search bar and it’ll calculate it for me. So it’s this discovery growth curve that we’re encountering with AI where the more we use it, the more we will realize we can use it for. And I think that’s a pretty exciting and fun thing for me to experience because I love learning and I love discovering new things. I think you’re.
[00:46:37.650] – Jonathan Denwood
Spot on. Because I think it’s really important because if we don’t get people up to a certain standard, they can’t even be part of the discussion, can they? Because if you listen to quantum, anybody talking about the universe or quantum mechanics or anything, if they start, they tend to have the picture at using normal language. The thing is, if you’re dealing with any of these higher concepts around science and that, is that you can’t use general language. You have to go into… And as soon as you do that, you lose 95% of the audience straight away after about five minutes. You’re back to general terms that are great. There’s a constant problem, isn’t there, with a lot of these discussions, isn’t it?
[00:47:29.100] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah.
[00:47:30.230] – Jonathan Denwood
You never thought you’d be discussing that on the podcast, did you?
[00:47:34.370] – Dustin W. Stout
I did not anticipate quantum mechanics.
[00:47:36.920] – Jonathan Denwood
No, I didn’t. There we go. Let’s go on. What are some of the business tools, some of thebusiness tool service you touched on, and I totally agreed with you, it’s one of the great things about WordPress is… Because I totally agree with you and it’s one of the great things about your product that you were so kind to point out, is subscription tiredness. Love SaaS, but I think you’ve got to be realistic as well about it. But what are some of the products and services that you utilize on a daily basis that you just couldn’t… I have like Zoom, Grammarly. There’s about half a dozen that I do subscribe, but everything else I utilize, WordPress for. But what are some of the tools and services that you utilize?
[00:48:37.690] – Dustin W. Stout
There are just a few that I literally could not live without. I am a Todoist user. To-doist is my productivity tool of choice. I love to-doist. I love their UI. I love the simplicity. They’re just masters at crafting beautiful experiences. That’s my to-do list, that’s my product project management. I absolutely couldn’t live without Slack because I hate email and so all of my team communication happens through Slack.
[00:49:10.380] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I’ve got a hate love affair with Slack. I utilize it every day with my team because I hate email as well. But is it me or is it a dog’s breath of the interface, isn’t it?
[00:49:29.110] – Dustin W. Stout
It is… It has its own set of challenges that are… And the more communication you have, the less helpful it becomes. So thankfully, my company is that… It’s just me and my virtual assistant, and I just hired two developers to help assist me with the building. So there’s not a whole lot of communication. But back when I had my first SaaS product, we had a team of, I think, six or seven. And if you’re in there communicating daily, it becomes overwhelming. I think Slack is ideal for small teams.
[00:50:04.680] – Jonathan Denwood
Can you mention a nasty manager over you, pinning you for this, and he says, Ding, ding.
[00:50:10.710] – Dustin W. Stout
Ding, ding, ding. Yeah. It could not have only been worse than email in a lot of respects. But for me, when our team is small, it is very helpful.
[00:50:22.350] – Jonathan Denwood
Anything else?
[00:50:24.430] – Dustin W. Stout
Notion. I’m an avid Notion user. If you’ve ever used Notion.
[00:50:29.560] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s a religion. I never got into that. What’s it about you, Notion people? It’s like a tech religion.
[00:50:39.480] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah. By any means, I’m not a power user. I mostly use it for internal documentation, stuff that we wouldn’t share outside of our organization, stuff like vision and roadmap, internal roadmap, that thing, standard operating procedures. It just makes it easier to share amongst the team. But I do geek out every now and then with Zapier integrations. I have a calendar where every time a new sale goes through, a new purchase goes through, I have a calendar that shows me how many sales per day. That’s just like a morale booster.
[00:51:14.580] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. It’s nothing like having a rough day and then a few sales come through.
[00:51:19.250] – Dustin W. Stout
Right, yeah.
[00:51:19.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Your day just improves straight.
[00:51:21.990] – Dustin W. Stout
Away, doesn’t it? Yeah, it changes your day. I have that calendar up. Also, I’m a… I ditched Google Analytics a long time ago for privacy reasons and just for the fact that it was just so wieldy. There’s just so much in Google Analytics. I switched over to a company called Fathom, use fathom. Com, and I use their analytics product. And I’m a bit of an analytical guy. So as I’m sitting here, I have an iPad set up to the left that always shows my stats and my analytics to make sure, okay, what’s the traffic like? Is there a spike? Where are people at? Just monitor things. And so in terms of my business, I could not live without having good analytics that are helpful and not overwhelming. But that’s about it. I try to keep my tool stack pretty slim if I can.
[00:52:20.450] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I’ve only got about half a dozen business, SaaS, like I say, a lot of the other stuff. But I’ve always got some WordPress people and they’re religious as well, and you utilize the SaaS product, you’re going to be disembowed. But there just are some SaaS products that are just better than the WordPress alternatives. There isn’t a good sales… The fluent CRM is a fantastic, better, in my opinion, than the active campaign, but there isn’t a good sales CRM alternative. But I’m not a great fan of HubSpot. Salesforce is great, but for the right type of business. I utilized Zillow for that, even though it’s got some rough edges, but I’ve been utilizing Zillow CRM as my digital hub for years and it does the right job for me. Let’s move on. You touched upon the bitter experience of your previous SaaS. We’ve all got those arrows. You seem to have recovered. You seem quite jerpy. Obviously, the sales are coming through with the new product. That always helps, doesn’t it?
[00:53:50.050] – Dustin W. Stout
It does, yeah.
[00:53:51.270] – Jonathan Denwood
It makes me happier. What are some of the things you’ve learned? If you could go back… Before I go to the TARDIS question, if you don’t want me asking, if you don’t want to discuss it too much because it’s a bit like a bad marriage, you get over the business, you don’t want to talk about it anymore, do you? Yeah. What was the… Obviously, you thought about why the previous SaaS didn’t work out. Are there one or two things, conclusions? Was it doomed from the beginning? Was it market fit? Thats it was one of the factors or was there a couple of little tips you could give to the audience?
[00:54:35.290] – Dustin W. Stout
I’m happy to talk about it. I think it’s as important, if not more important to talk about our failures than it is to talk about our success.
[00:54:43.770] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s depressing, though, isn’t it?
[00:54:45.450] – Dustin W. Stout
It is. But I think in talking about the failures and how you’ve gotten through it… Again, I was in a very dark place. I was really having a hard time mentally. My wife, my family was going through some personal things. My wife’s health was up and down and it all accumulated. It was.
[00:55:06.350] – Jonathan Denwood
Like a. Well, it’s always the same. It’s dealing with one problem, but you always get six problems and they come out. They come out. You never even saw it coming, did you? Yeah.
[00:55:19.880] – Dustin W. Stout
So when I was in that place, hearing about all these success stories was just making me more depressed because it was like, Why can’t I… I’m seeing everybody else succeed but me. But then I would get this glimmer of hope in seeing somebody talk about their hardships and how they made it through them, rather than just talking about the success. And it gave me hope. So I have no problem talking about my absolute failures because hopefully it helps somebody out there who is in a place where they need to hear some hope. So for me, the two product ideas that I had, I’d been sitting on for years. And ultimately what it came down to was I had this great vision for one of the products in particular that was light years ahead of its time. But the development cost of bringing that full product to life would have been multiple six figures. I was talking about doing AI things with imagery before AI was-.
[00:56:15.640] – Jonathan Denwood
You just couldn’t go down to San Francisco and find these VCs that just waited to give you seven figures. They just throw money in you, right? Just give you a runway of seven years. Do you.
[00:56:30.200] – Dustin W. Stout
Mean you.
[00:56:30.580] – Jonathan Denwood
Could require that.
[00:56:31.530] – Dustin W. Stout
To us. Now, I’ve been a bootstrapper. I’ve always been a bootstrapper. I’ve never taken venture capital, never taken on investors. I’ve always been like, Let’s grind it out and see if I can do this myself. This idea that I had was AI before AI Images was a thing, but it was going to cost so much money and I didn’t have those resources. So what you find yourself doing as a product creator is you whittle it down. What is the minimum viable product that we can build that will get us some of the way there and maybe allow us to build further. The idea was come up with the simplest form of this idea to get enough people to buy into the idea.
[00:57:12.550] – Jonathan Denwood
It sounds quite good. What was the matter with that?
[00:57:16.850] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah, well, fun development, right? But the problem was the money was short and the minimum viable product just kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And when we finally whittled it down to a place where I could afford to have it built because I would have to outsource the development. When we brought it to market, it took more money than we anticipated and it took more time. And by the time we got the product out, the value that it gave was not enough to attract the audience. So we didn’t have the product market fit, and people just didn’t get the value of it. They didn’t see the vision for it. And you can’t just sell people a vision and hope they will just.
[00:57:58.200] – Jonathan Denwood
Pay you the- If only they would get the vision.
[00:58:02.690] – Dustin W. Stout
What’s that?
[00:58:03.660] – Jonathan Denwood
If only they would.
[00:58:04.840] – Dustin W. Stout
Get the vision. Right, if they would get the vision. Some people did get the vision and I had a very small group of people who believed in the vision, but not everybody can afford to bank on something that may come to fruition. Some people were like, Well, I need to do things now. And if you don’t have the thing that I need now, then I’m going to go use this other thing. It was very hard to dissuade people from Canva because that was pretty much my competition was Canva.
[00:58:29.960] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, dear. Oh, yeah. I’ll get the picture then.
[00:58:33.520] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah. I was up against the lot and we never found the product market fit, never found the user base to support further development for it. And so it just fizzled out. It was a hard lesson. A hard lesson in just first finding what that product, instead of whittling the product down and saying, What’s the least amount of product that I can build?, spend way more time talking to your customers and saying, what is the one problem that you need solved? Starting with a vision and working backwards can often be very cerebral and very self-focused. As an entrepreneur, we have this idea of what we want to build. You have the Steve Jobs mentality out there that I tend to lean towards where it’s like, if I ask people what they wanted, I wouldn’t have built the revolutionary product that I built or the Henry Ford example. If I would have asked people what they wanted, they would have told me faster horses.
[00:59:30.170] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I just think it’s a mixture of both.
[00:59:33.230] – Dustin W. Stout
And it is. It’s a nuanced mixture.
[00:59:36.060] – Jonathan Denwood
If it was one or the other, it’s like most things in business. That’s why I love chatting with people, but I don’t read it. I listen to a few business type books, but I don’t… Because by the time there’s too many variables, there’s too much gray in this. There are certain practices that I think are best practice, but there’s so much gray in these business journeys that you can’t think too much from it, can you?
[01:00:10.180] – Dustin W. Stout
Right. You have to become good at balancing what you think the market wants and what the market is actually telling you they need. You have to meet the needs before you exceed and teach them something that they didn’t realize they needed. That was the hard lesson that I found. It’s a balance of meeting their needs where they’re at.
[01:00:30.400] – Jonathan Denwood
But also- You know the other thing that a lot of people don’t know what I’ve come to the conclusion, Dustin, which none of us like?
[01:00:38.380] – Dustin W. Stout
What’s that?
[01:00:39.260] – Jonathan Denwood
You need a bit of luck.
[01:00:41.160] – Dustin W. Stout
A little bit, yeah. Lucky does help. Timing is very important. I think it all goes into the mixture of how fast, how far you go.
[01:00:53.410] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. We don’t like obviously hard work, dedication, knowing what you’re doing, having some idea what you’re doing. But the one thing we don’t like is you need a little bit of luck and you just didn’t get the break, the luck, so it’s simple. Let’s go to my final question. You’ve been a very gracious guest. You dealt with me superbly, actually, to us. I’m obviously from the UK, the suburbs of North East London. I live in America for the past 15 years, but I’m very, very English still. I’vesure I have been told. My relatives, my close relatives in the UK reckon I’ve become Americanised, though, but I don’t think it’s new to you. I’m a great, as a kid, a great fan of Doctor Who than the TARDIS, the time machine. If you had your own TARDIS and you could go back at the beginning of your business career, you can consult yourself. What is there one or two tips, insights that you would love to be able to have told yourself?
[01:01:59.060] – Dustin W. Stout
I would probably go back to, I don’t know, 2005, 2006-ish, tell myself, buy all the Bitcoin. That’s the first thing.
[01:02:17.820] – Jonathan Denwood
Buy all the. By the Tether. Go buy Teva. That’s a sensible thing to do, isn’t it? It’s amazing they’ve kept on going, those people, isn’t it, Teva? It’s not going, are they? Everybody else collect. But those drug dealers need a way to move their money, don’t they?
[01:02:36.510] – Dustin W. Stout
I suspect that’s true. I think the other thing is-.
[01:02:42.700] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s just got me a letter. I’m going to be sued in our game. You can see why I regularly get letters. Can’t get dusted.
[01:02:50.160] – Dustin W. Stout
Do you get them physical letters in the mail?
[01:02:52.370] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I’ve had a few. You can’t see them, but I treat them as trophies, actually.
[01:02:59.250] – Dustin W. Stout
That’s wonderful. But in terms of business advice, I guess I would say.
[01:03:07.260] – Jonathan Denwood
Fight for yourself. By the way, the Chocolate Factory sent me free.
[01:03:11.540] – Dustin W. Stout
Did they?
[01:03:13.790] – Jonathan Denwood
Because it doesn’t stop me, I get worse, actually, about them. I called the founder, Willy Wonka, and I called the company The Chocolate Factory. Sorry, I put you off, Dini.
[01:03:31.800] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah. No, sorry. I lost my train of thought. I was thinking about Willy Wanka and how I want to watch that movie again now. We actually have a board game. My kids and I love to play. It’s Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory.
[01:03:43.920] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s like a lot. We all have a deep side of ourselves that we don’t want people to see. But I might be totally wrong, but I sense what you project publicly is what you get privately. I know this is a render, I’m very like this in person, but there are other people whose public persona is a total sham. Willy Wanker is the same. He makes out, he’s friendly, he’s always smiling, and he isn’t in private at all. But that’s just life, isn’t it? As you get older, you realize there are a lot of people that charm. People mix friendliness with shallow charm, and they’re two very different commodities, aren’t they?
[01:04:38.180] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah. Being in the world of social media marketing for a lot of years, there are plenty of people who fit that bill. With your Willy Wanka example, he’s friendly and maybe a bit eccentric publicly, but as they might say in where you’re from, behind the scenes, he’s a nutter. He is an absolute nutter.
[01:05:03.340] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, there we go. Justin, we’re a little bit over the hour of respect for your time. You need to get back to getting more sales as we all do. It’s been a pleasure discussing this with you. What’s the best way to find out more about you, more about the company, and more generally?
[01:05:24.490] – Dustin W. Stout
Well, thank you so much for having me. I love this conversation. This is going to be the highlight of my day. I’ve had a lot of fun here. The best way to learn more about me and what I’m doing with Magie is just to head over to Magai. Co, M-A-G-A-I. Co.
[01:05:39.080] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. We’ve got some fantastic guests coming up in the next couple of weeks, and then I’m having a couple of weeks off. We already have some great guests for January. I’ve really enjoyed this discussion with Justin. Hopefully, you will come back sometime later in the new year.
[01:05:57.050] – Dustin W. Stout
I would love to.
[01:05:58.180] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s great. I think we’ve covered some exciting stuff. I’ve enjoyed the discussion. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye. Hey, thanks for listening. We really do appreciate it. Why not visit the Mastermind Facebook group? And also keep up with the latest news.
[01:06:14.700] – Dustin W. Stout
Click wp-tonic.com/newsletter. We’ll see you next time.
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