A hosting company’s journey to discover innovative tactics that fueled growth and improved client relations.
In this informative interview, we take you behind the scenes of a hosting company’s venture into marketing automation. Witness firsthand how they implemented innovative technologies to optimize their marketing efforts, improve lead generation, and create personalized customer experiences.
With Special Guest Tom Fanelli, CEO of Convessio
#1 – Tom, what were the main business reasons for Convessio’s development of its marketing automation platform?
#2 – In May 2024, Convessio bought Growmatik; what were the main lessons you and your team learned from the purchase?
#3 – What major trends have you noticed lately in hosting and providing services to WordPress agencies?
#4 – Lately, a lot of frustration has been expressed in public by some of the leading influencers and trainers in the WordPress space connected to Gutenberg. What are your thoughts connected to Gutenberg?
#5—How do you see AI changing online business, including your own, in the next 18 months?
#6—If you had your time machine (H. G. Wells) and could travel back to the beginning of you?
This Week Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
Omnisend: Omnisend
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:00.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back to the WP-Tonic Show this week in WordPress and SaaS. This is episode 926. We got a friend of the show, somebody who’s been on the show a few times. But we got Tom Finale, the CEO of Converseo, with us. We will be talking about Converseio’s recent Accusa pathway into marketing optimization and what led them to that. What are some trends he’s noticing in the professional WordPress space? His thoughts about some of the controversial comments around Gutenberg and my attempt to get him into trouble, but he can handle me so easily. Tom, would you like to give an intro to the tribe quickly?
[00:01:12.240] – Tom Fanelli
Love to. Thank you. It’s great to be back with you. Hopefully, we’ll be back more frequently these days. So it’s always good to hang out with all of your listeners and you. I’m Tom, the CEO and co-founder of Conversion. Historically, we’ve done scalable WordPress hosting for mid-market to enterprise e-commerce stores. But as Jonathan just alluded to, we’re broadening our product set. And really, the plan for us is to transition from just a hosting company to more of it- Don’t give all the reasons.
[00:01:50.550] – Jonathan Denwood
You want to give that when we come back, Tom.
[00:01:53.510] – Tom Fanelli
All right, very good.
[00:01:55.260] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. Sorry to interrupt, but you’re going into full… You can tell me if enthusiasm, couldn’t you, tribe? So, Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers quickly?
[00:02:09.620] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, my name is Kurt von Annen with MananaNoMas. We focus primarily on membership and learning websites and work directly with providers like WP-Tonic and Lifter LMS.
[00:02:20.060] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Before we go into the meat potatoes of this great interview, I got a couple of messages from our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I also want to point out that we got some great special deals from the sponsors, plus a list of the best WordPress plugins and services aimed at WordPress professionals and power users. You can get all these free goodies by going over to wp-tonic. Com/deals. Wp-tonic. Com/deals. And you find all the goodies there. What more could you ask for my beloved WordPress professionals? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’ll get on that page. I’m sorry to disappoint. I’ve made a career of it. Tom, sorry to interrupt. You were going into full flow there, but I just had to rein your back, did I, Tom? No problem. But maybe you can go now into some of the business logic and the discussions you were having with your team and why you decided that it was the right step for Convertio to enter the marketing optimization area.
[00:03:49.880] – Tom Fanelli
Sure. Well, actually, I want to go back to, not to pick on my fellow hosts, but a trend- I do it all the time. I know you like a sizzle. So let’s jump right in. We’ll go. It’s always bothered me that hosting companies have acquired plugins. And the reason why, I understand why they do it. But it feels like I’m going to go to a host, which is this holistic platform that will provide the infrastructure to run whatever I have. But they’re then going to acquire and be like, you get these every suite of plugins that might do a very narrow thing. And so it always felt like a shoehorning people into, hey, you get these plugins with us. Again, I understand all the various reasons why hosts might want to do that, but it was something that I knew we were likely not going to do in the same way other hosting providers did it. And so what we’re really focused on is trying to help e-commerce stores grow and scale. And we want to be as aligned incentive-wise as possible so they can sell more. And so if you look at the alternatives out there, you will see that Shopify is doing a great thing, but they’re very closed, right?
[00:05:20.480] – Tom Fanelli
It’s a closed platform, and it works well. They’ve done a lot of great stuff. We are really trying to be a open source hosting stack alternative to what Shopify is doing. And so in order to do that, we wanted to provide this powerful platform to scale Woocommerce, and And commerce-based websites. That could be, membership sites like Lifter and LearnDash. It could be publisher sites where you’re monetizing your audience. And so part of that is that’s a great foundation to have. But then how do we get customers to to come back to these stores. We noticed a pretty large gap that even mature stores weren’t doing abandoned carts and cross-sell/upsell at the level that they should. So we actually started helping people implement things like cart flows. And so we saw great success. It was like, we could implement cart flows on someone and more than pay for their investment in Convexio. And so when we started to realize we could help stores actually drive revenue by just coaching them and standing beside them, we saw the opportunity for that. And that’s really what started to shift our thinking of, could we be this full stack, where you could host, convert, and now pay?
[00:06:48.180] – Tom Fanelli
And so you’ll notice in the last couple of weeks, we’ve launched a payment solution. So our NAV on our sites really changed. We have hosting, which is what people know and love us for. We’ve got convert, which is this product that we acquired, which was an amazing platform by the Artbees team. That’s the team behind the Jupiter X theme on Theme Forest. It’s one of the biggest WordPress themes out there. And also, Sell Kit, which is an awesome cart flows alternative. So they had built this stand-alone marketing automation platform for Shopify, WordPress, and a variety of plugins, integrates with HubSpot. And so we basically We took that over and rebranded it, Convesio Convert. And then finally, we’ve been working for the last year on a payment solution. And so we just launched that publicly on our website as well. So this is the first we’re making a public announcement of it on this show, Jonathan. Breaking news.
[00:07:47.010] – Jonathan Denwood
Breaking news. Thank you for that, Tom. I’m going to ask you the obvious question here, but that’s what I do, Tom. I ask the obvious. What you’re attempting is a bit tricky in some ways because obviously you want to offer more value to your target audience. And by offering more value, for them to be more loyal to Converseio. But on the same breath, you’ve mentioned Cartflows a couple of times now. The problem is, well, I don’t know if it is a problem, and that’s why I’m going to ask you this question, is that you’ve built a semi-competitor now to Cartflows. You’ve built a semi-competitor to a host of other plugin providers. They’re no longer going to have a lot of goodwill for you, Tom, and they’re not going to send anybody, maybe to Converseio, Because you’re no longer a neutral hosting provider. You’re now seen as a quasar competitor. You must have thought this out because you’re much brighter than me, Tom. You must have discussed this with your team. What was the discussion and why did you decide to move forward? Was this a thing that you were thinking about or has the whole thing just outlined, you reject as a concept anyway?
[00:09:34.720] – Tom Fanelli
No, I think that our first… By the way, we’re not prohibiting anyone from running any plugins on our platform, so they can run whatever they want to run. For us, there’s a difference between having the ability to solve real problems that we want to innovate on. For for our clients. I can’t control what CARTFlows does, and we have this vision. And by the way, I will tell you that this vision right now is beyond WordPress. So we feel like there is a lot of other e-commerce platforms out there. And the reality is, and I’ve spoken about this before, there will come a time people outgrow, Woocommerce. And we We have clients doing over 100,000 orders a month on Woocommerce. So we have scaled it to the largest stores using Woocommerce. And I love WordPress and Woocommerce, but we will lose people from the ecosystem if we feel like Woocommerce is the solution for everyone. At some point, people make business business decisions to go off of WordPress. And so we want to be for those that are interested in still using an open source solution, a platform for them that’s agnostic and not married into one content manager Management platform.
[00:11:16.150] – Tom Fanelli
And so that’s the interesting thing about this acquisition is it is completely… It’s a SAS application. It does have a WordPress plugin to integrate to WordPress, but it’s a SAS application. And it has historically, although We’re not marketing this feature and using it as historically integrates to Shopify. And so we’re really trying to be an open source home for all commerce-based businesses. And we want to provide a suite of tools that allow you to convert your customers, pay, and host. And we think we can do that better than the competition can. And we think a unified solution we can support holistically around that that will accelerate the growth of these stores is going to be the best thing for our customers.
[00:12:05.030] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. Thanks a lot, Tom. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:12:08.110] – Kurt von Ahnen
To expand on that from a customer perspective, thinking about who the avatar is and who the customer is. When you add features, I get excited and I always think, Oh, that’s awesome. We’re going to add all these features. People will be able to do this, be able to do that, we’ll grow the business. I see that positive spin. But then there’s the other side of the coin where it’s adding friction and growth and that whole onboarding process. What a nightmare did that present? Or has it yet? Are people slow to adopt or are people excited and jumping in?
[00:12:44.550] – Tom Fanelli
Well, I will give you one little tidbit on this, which, and by the way, this is to your point, we’re very different than the mainstream hosting providers out there. We don’t sell. You don’t do business for 15 or $20 a month with Convexio, right? And so our average customers spending for a single site between four to $600 a month. These are mission critical stores. Our average e-commerce store does 300K a month in sales on Woocommerce. And so we have, by nature, a more premium, hands on approach. We support our clients in Slack, for example. So the fact that we do charge more a enables us to provide a much more concierge, white glove type of service. So we’re used to that. That’s part of our DNA, is to be very high touch with our clients. And that’s why we’ve been hesitant to go down market, quite honestly, is that’s a big identifier. If you talk to anyone that uses Convacio, they’ll rave about our support. And you can’t do that at the price is Hostinger is charging, right? Bluehost are charging.
[00:13:58.460] – Jonathan Denwood
Did Did you have to swear there, Tom? We’re trying to keep it family-friendly, Tom.
[00:14:08.990] – Tom Fanelli
If you’re comfortable with that, that’s great. But these stores need more of this handholding. I don’t know if we are into the whole marketing automation game deep enough yet, Kurt, to tell you it’s been hard or it hasn’t been hard. I will tell you one of the things as we talk about, we have greenfield customers who don’t have anything. Very excited to talk about this. And here’s the message that resonates. Anytime you talk, nobody wants to change hosting, but they want to grow revenue. And that is a completely different conversation than, can I get you to host? Our strategy at Convertio is that we do think Convert will be a front door. You don’t have to host on Convessio to use Convert. Today, we’re pretty much taking it to our customer base, but eventually this thing could be a new front door of people signing up and getting to know Convessio through that as well. And so I think people are very interested in the conversation because it’s growth oriented instead of just switch hosting, which hosting can be a love-hate relationship with folks. Yeah. Yeah. Nice.
[00:15:28.730] – Kurt von Ahnen
If I stick more to the questions, do you think that there was any main lesson or any great obstacle you guys surpassed in the purchase process for this product and come in the market?
[00:15:42.750] – Tom Fanelli
This was just a very good example of being in the right place at the right time, talking to the right people. The conversation with us and Art B is started actually over partnering on Selkit, and having a relationship there. And that was such an impressive plugin. And that team, I can’t sing their praises enough, they build extremely high quality stuff. They are very, very good. And so it just so happened through those conversations, they’re like, well, we have this other product that we’re actually sunsetting, and we’re trying to find a home for it. And so maybe this would be something you would be interested in. And the fact that that team had spent all of the time to build this as a stand-alone SaaS application, and that it married with our future vision of going even beyond WordPress and not being a strictly a WordPress plugin just really worked with us because we want to take that and integrate it into Convexio Pay. It currently is integrated into Stripe. And so you can start to imagine all the wonderful things you can do when you have the infrastructure for the e-commerce store, the email personalization and automation engine for your customers, and the payment processing.
[00:17:16.870] – Tom Fanelli
And so imagine when you can look at all of those things holistically, and when a customer has a big sale, you can tie all of the increased resources to sales, to payment processing. You can start to see the velocity at which transactions were occurring. There’s a whole host of things. And just to give you a little teaser, if you have access to all of that data and you layer something like AI on top of that with an LL PM, you can begin to surface some very interesting insights about your customer shopping behavior, your purchase behavior, your store’s behavior, conversion rates, all of that stuff. So it’s very, very interesting interesting when you start to look at what we’ll be able to take to market with someone who’s using the holistic Convexio stack. And that’s the dream.
[00:18:11.470] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nice. Jonathan, over to you.
[00:18:12.950] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I got a quick follow for your question. I’m sure you thought about this as well. When you’re in the process of deciding to go down this road, were you concerned about diminishing your marketing message? What I mean by that, Tom, is that you’re a hosting provider, but now you’re adding the marketing automation. Are you a marketing SaaS provider or are you a hosting provider? Or were you less concerned about that because of the type of clientele that are attracted to Converseio in the first place?
[00:18:58.930] – Tom Fanelli
Yeah, that’s a good question. We have this conversation internally a lot that people come to us expecting a hosting provider. We don’t want to distract or diminish the conversion rate of that traffic, of course. So we have to figure out a way to make this messaging all work together. But I will tell you that strictly from the perspective of the hosting terminology, we have tried to stay away from that. You’ll notice that we refer to ourselves a lot as a platform. We’ve tried to distance ourselves from what I would call the traditional hosting solutions, because we are this scalable, Docker-powered platform. And so we’ve tried in the past to present ourselves as more of a platform play, and we’ve tried to go above and beyond what other hosting providers would provide in support in services that we offer, like New Relic diagnostics, and infrastructure consulting, and all that stuff. But I think now is the time where we’re really just we’re beginning to become that larger platform solution. And so We’re sensitive to that. We definitely don’t want people to get distracted if they’re looking for product A on product B and C. But I think that the messaging that we tell our customers and our prospects about us being this holistic solution is actually resonating much better than what the traditional hosting message was.
[00:20:38.900] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I’m just surmising. I would imagine the price point that you start with, you’re going to attract more established businesses. They’ve probably being exposed to a lot of solutions. So They’re probably more open to a message around platform than maybe other people. What I mean by that is that a lot of the hosting providers, the more technical, they tend to aim at the agency, at the power freelancer market. That’s why they go to word camps a lot, and Or even some of the bigger providers, that’s why they support WordPress because they want access to the agency market. But I don’t know how much of the agency market is part of your customer base, but what has been their reaction to what you’ve attempted to do?
[00:21:57.630] – Tom Fanelli
Very strong. It’s interesting The agency market, and I don’t have a… I’m not sure that I would say this is what I’m about to say is gospel. It’s observation. I’ve been in the agency space for 20 years, 30 years. Getting ready to be 50. So actually about 30 years. I’ve been in the agency space and been working with agencies. And I found an interesting dynamic that agencies seem to not often focus on email, email marketing and email automation as much as they do. That’s like a specialty, almost. There are agencies out there that just do email marketing and do it very, very well.
[00:22:45.310] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I think… I’m sorry to interrupt. Hopefully, I’m contributing something rather than just being rude. Is those services tend to be performance-orientated, aren’t they? It, and that’s why they shy away a little bit from it, don’t they? Because building the website and providing the technical side of it through support plans is fine, isn’t it? It’s black and white, where if you get into the marketing consultancy, it’s all around performance where you’re going to be judged, isn’t it? Do you feel incorrect about that?
[00:23:25.420] – Tom Fanelli
Yes, absolutely. It’s not so much you’re measured on a deliverable, but you’re measured on now results. So it’s like, hey, why is my open rate low? Why didn’t I get so many clicks from my email? And that stuff is somewhat foreign to the person who’s building websites and maintaining them and a technical resource. Now, one of the things we’re really evangelizing is, and this is why we built Convexio Pay. So the goal with Convexio Pay is we want to allow agencies to earn a revenue share off of the fees that their customers were incurring for payment processing. So we haven’t merchandised or talked about this message yet. We just have the retail page up on ConvexioPay, but this is going to be a model to attract agencies. And so you’re going to see my messaging start to change over the course of the next few months, where I’m going to be evangelizing to agencies agencies that they need to stop building brochureware sites and start building commerce-enabled sites to create a recurring revenue stream off of the customers’ payment fees, which, by the way, Stripe, WU payments, None of these guys are very generous at all in sharing any of that back.
[00:24:50.190] – Tom Fanelli
They’re keeping that revenue all for themselves. And so we wanted to build a payments model that enables agencies to be able to get a additional revenue streams from their customers revenue that they’re generating. Now, this goes hand in hand with the notion of convert, which is agencies have been very interested in talking to us because knowing how much we work with them to consult with them and handhold them and provide support for them, they’ve been like, how can I take convert and sell it into my customers? And can I get a reseller revenue share, revenue split off of taking Convert into their customer base? And so the agencies have been, I think they’re willing to add on additional revenue streams. In fact, I would say they’re desperate to find revenue streams, but they want to find revenue streams that are somewhat easy for them and in their comfort zone. And so this is really, we want to take the notion of a hosting company and make it a revenue generator for agencies and not just a cost center.
[00:25:59.010] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. That’s fascinating. Thanks for that insight, Tom. I think it’s a great spot to have our middle break. We got some more messages from our major sponsors that we appreciate so much. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I want to point out that if you are working with a client or have a client and you’re looking for a great partner that can help you build a membership or community-focused website, why don’t you look at WP Tonic? We want to partner with you. We offer some of the most fantastic packages in the industry. You can go here and find more, and we can build something fantastic together. To find out more, go over to the WP-Tonic. Com/partners, WP-Tonic. Com.edalmonic. Com/partners, and then you can book a chat with me and we can see if we’re a good fit. So on we go. Back over to you, Kurt, for the next question.
[00:27:11.670] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, we were just talking about agencies. And now the next question dives into Gutenberg and blocks and stuff. I almost wonder if they’re related, Tom, in your opinion. So lately we see a lot of frustration. It’s been expressed publicly by especially some the talking heads we’re used to seeing on YouTube channels. And the confusion or the frustration is the user experience or the tools that agencies and other people might choose in editing these sites. What are your thoughts on the Gutenberg process? And to expand that question, what are your thoughts on the agency’s position within all these tools as well?
[00:27:58.670] – Tom Fanelli
Well, I mean, I know this, Jonathan is not going to answer.
[00:28:01.690] – Jonathan Denwood
This is the question that Tom doesn’t really want to get involved with. Do you, Tom? You’re going to have to green a bear, aren’t you, Tom?
[00:28:10.970] – Tom Fanelli
This is the one thing. Anywhere I go, people ask me about Gutenberg. I’m like, This is the one thing. I’m like,. Okay, look, personally, I say this with- Can I interrupt again?
[00:28:27.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Tom wants the WordPress, obviously, because a large part of his business is around WordPress, and I want the best because almost all my income comes from WordPress. So whatever we say, folks, it’s for the best we feel we’re saying it because we want WordPress to be successful. Sorry for that, Tom, but I thought I would say it.
[00:28:51.680] – Tom Fanelli
That’s good. Okay, so I am a believer, and I’m all in on good and and a supporter of it, because I do believe it is the future of where WordPress is going. They are putting automatic, it’s putting a ton of energy and effort behind this. And I feel like, and I say this with the most respect and love for my fellow colleagues who disagree with me, but we really probably should all get on the Gutenberg bus, because I do think it is going to be the, it is the standard for this, It’s going to get better. Now, has it been bumpy? Absolutely. It’s been super bumpy. In fact, it’s bumpy for, I see agencies struggling with plugins they’re used to using that are trying to start supporting Gutenberg. And it’s like the process of these plugins updating to support and take on compatibility and extend and do this, really. It’s a very turbulent process. It’s very uncomfortable. I think the Gutenberg editor itself is making tons of… I mean, think of how far it’s come from where it was. I mean, it’s amazing to see the progress that it’s made. Is it where it needs to be yet?
[00:30:16.370] – Tom Fanelli
No. But I am a big believer in Gutenberg. I evangelize. My go to solution when people ask me is Cadence and Gutenberg, and I evangelize people should be building on Gutenberg. If people ask me what builder should they learn, I say Gutenberg. I am barely sold out on Gutenberg being the future.
[00:30:42.610] – Kurt von Ahnen
That’s so interesting to hear you phrase it that way, because Jonathan and I are advocates for the whole cadence in Gutenberg solution as well, right? But then we also have our fingers out with other developers and talking heads in the space And it’s this constant, Elementor divvy. And now, bricks is this overwhelming presence. And when I first tried to use bricks, I came on the show and said, I can’t figure it out. I’m getting bright yellow flashing things on my screen. I can’t select the blocks. And I’ll tell you, Tom, in the last month, I’ve built two websites now with bricks successfully and very cleanly. But I always go back to, did I need it? Do I need to have this crutch in the back of my site to build this thing, or could I have just done this in Gutenberg anyway? And then I started to look at other people’s provided sites, talking heads in the space, looked at their websites and said, let’s forget about what they say, but let’s look at what they do. Let’s look at their own websites. And I’m like, you could build this in blocks just like this.
[00:31:48.540] – Kurt von Ahnen
And so I’m starting to see that, like you said, Gutenberg has come a long way, and there’s a lot of design options and spacing options and things that we used to complain about a year ago that It seemed to be a lot better today.
[00:32:01.730] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I think it’s all a bit of a witches brew, really, Tom, isn’t it? Because I know this is banded around a bit too much, Tom, but I think a lot of the problems is a total lack of consistent communication and really seeing that you’re not just doing, you’re just not listening just for the PR exercise, that you really show that you’re listening to your user base in a very straightforward and actionable way. I just feel that’s been totally lacking, Tom. Just sending key people on to podcast tasks and saying the right thing and not really doing actionable things that clearly show that you are listening. I think some of the criticisms about UX and usability are justified. I also think some of the criticisms around how Gutenberg have applied intrinsic design in the solution Some of the criticisms there are totally spot on, especially when it comes to mobile, Tom, that you can’t override a lot of the settings. That It’s just bonkers as far as I’m concerned. I have no idea. But I think that’s linked to a very small group of people that are actively developing it who are not listening, Tom.
[00:33:43.260] – Jonathan Denwood
I think that causes a lot of resentment and frustration. How would you respond? Do you think I’m on the right track or am I? Because we’re friends. I classify you as a friend, Tom. For sure. Even if you disagree with me, I have no problem with it.
[00:34:01.070] – Tom Fanelli
Well, I don’t disagree with you. What I would say is I think that those things are spot on. And I think one of the… We had a client come to us who was replatformed, want to replatform in WordPress, and they had a big lofty enterprise project, and they had done everything in Squarespace.
[00:34:22.270] – Jonathan Denwood
So you’re doing it again, Tom. You’re swearing the guy.
[00:34:26.640] – Tom Fanelli
And I got looking at the Squarespace. I’m Why in the heck isn’t Gutenberg doing some of this stuff? I’m like, What? It’s hard, hard to go from that to Gutenberg. And here’s where I get into my little crystal ball. Why have they not listened? Because I don’t know if it’s people not wanting to listen. I think that there are powers that be. You also have to remember, there are politics involved in this stuff at Automatic, and Automatic is an enterprise company, and we know all enterprise companies move slow. And so I don’t know, because I got to get my crystal ball out here and figure out, I don’t know the why behind this. But I think the questions you’re asking are extremely valid questions. And I think if you take a step back, and the other thing, too, is I’m not entirely sure, and I’m not close to the Gutenberg development project, so I don’t know the answer to this. But I think we have different audiences out there that Gutenberg is being built for. And so it’s like, are you trying to build something for the person coming from Squarespace, or are you trying to build a more robust platform that can compete with Web Hello.
[00:35:45.650] – Tom Fanelli
I don’t know the answer to that necessarily. People more in the WordPress clips probably do.
[00:35:54.390] – Jonathan Denwood
I think it was linked to a conversation where we had with one of the most publicly The critical Velanjus against Gutenberg to some extent. That’s Kevin Gary. We had him on last week and he just pointed, and I don’t agree with everything Kevin says. I don’t agree with anything I think anybody says totally. But he pointed out it would have been better to have built something to a high technical, aimed at the quasar professional and then work down to somebody who’s a DIY person that wants to build on Squarespace to some extent.
[00:36:35.840] – Tom Fanelli
We came in the middle.
[00:36:37.210] – Jonathan Denwood
Doing it from a DIY focus and then trying to build something that Kevin’s tribe would look at is a bit difficult, in my opinion.
[00:36:52.230] – Tom Fanelli
I’m not even sure we’ve successfully built it from a DIY perspective. I don’t feel like we built it from the middle. We built it from the middle and we’re trying to go out to both directions.
[00:37:02.700] – Jonathan Denwood
I think you’re spot on there, actually. Back over to you, Kurt.
[00:37:08.590] – Tom Fanelli
I think we’re on question three, aren’t we?
[00:37:12.340] – Jonathan Denwood
I think you jumped to question, or did you combine both? I’m losing track, Kurt.
[00:37:16.860] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, we talked about agencies. Yes.
[00:37:20.640] – Tom Fanelli
Talk about AI. Ai is exciting. Yeah, it is all right.
[00:37:24.150] – Kurt von Ahnen
Ai is exciting.
[00:37:25.730] – Jonathan Denwood
He wants to get off Gutenberg, Kurt, because quick as possible.
[00:37:29.220] – Kurt von Ahnen
Get me out of We didn’t even get to say my catchphrase that I’ve been using all the shows. We did talk to Matt and he said, We’re only seven years into a 10-year project.
[00:37:37.940] – Tom Fanelli
There you go.
[00:37:40.490] – Jonathan Denwood
If he keeps saying, I’ll be dead. I’ll be dead before that bloody thing gets finished. I’ll be in my grave soon. I’ll be dead and buried, Tom.
[00:37:50.640] – Kurt von Ahnen
I love repeating that. Ai is coming. Ai is already here. How do you see AI changing the online businesses? And not just today, but if you could try and pull out that crystal ball you were just talking about, what’s it look like a year and a half from now?
[00:38:08.150] – Tom Fanelli
We’re doing a lot of experimentation with AI in so many different areas, and it’s moving so fast. I am a huge AI hacker. I don’t know what you’d call it. I’m willing to try anything with AI.
[00:38:23.920] – Jonathan Denwood
Are we talking to the real Tom? Or was this a first short time? You don’t know.
[00:38:26.410] – Tom Fanelli
I’m an avatar. Here’s what I’ll tell you. My insights have been as of late. So I think, aside from all the stuff you can do with AI, I think that AI is going to force companies into having founder brands, because I’m convinced AI is going to ruin written word. There is going to be so much crap on the Web generated from AI, for content production, speeding up content It’s great at producing decks and documents and all sorts of things. It used to take hours. You can do it minutes or seconds now. The problem is you’re going to flood the web with so much content. And now we have AI avatars on video that I was playing with a platform the other day. It’s scary how good it is. Talking head video, totally AI, unbelievable. And it just makes me realize that me as a real person, needs to be the face of my brand. And people need to know me. They need to be able to see me at events. And I think that the importance of the founder brand idea behind a company, you are going to have a bunch of nameless faceless companies, and you’re going to have the companies where people know the founder brand, and the founder brand is the image of the company, and they know that’s a real person.
[00:39:56.690] – Tom Fanelli
And I think with the rise of AI, the rise of the founder founder brand is going to be even more important. And I don’t say that just as the founder has to be the brand, but real people, real people putting their real present on the content.
[00:40:12.890] – Jonathan Denwood
I agree with you to some extent, but there’s also a tricky side of this, which I’ve sampled myself, as you know, Tom, about being entertaining, in my opinion, and not being Because there’s a lot of people that are effective as a CEO, but they’re dreadfully boring, aren’t they, Tom? But there’s a reason because it’s safe, isn’t it? But if you’re pushing it a little bit, there can be consequences, can’t it, Tom? So you got an insight about that?
[00:40:54.420] – Tom Fanelli
Well, this is the thing. I’m making a concerted effort to get out on social more. And I am not the person… I’m not on social. I don’t like social media. I’m not a naturally social media oriented person. So I have to force myself to get out there. And it is challenging, and it’s scary. And you question like, oh, is anyone going to watch this? I totally get all of that. And I think that’s what’s going to make it harder for these companies that are behind the scenes, where you don’t even know who the CEO of the company is, right? And you don’t even know who the key players of the company are. They have to get out there and differentiate themselves. And maybe you can do that with a killer product, and you don’t need a personality behind it. Maybe it’s something you’ve got to find people on your team to have do. Maybe it’s not the CEO that wants to do it. So I don’t know. I’m not sure where it’s going, but it is going very quickly, very fast. And I think that in the next five years, I can’t even imagine where we’re going to be.
[00:42:05.610] – Tom Fanelli
I really can’t.
[00:42:06.650] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, hopefully you’ve noticed that I have my little English sarcasms on social media, but I don’t normally go into toxicity. If you look at my streams, Twitter, X formerly known as Twitter, and other I don’t think you’re fine. There’s only one area where I really publish my personal views, but it hardly has any following. But in general, I don’t go in. But I think there is a medium way where you can have a voice without having to go down the two paths, either being totally… A lot of social media that’s driven by a A company is totally forgettable, isn’t it? Then you got those that really want to spend all their time on these platforms in a very toxic, tribal way. But I think there is a middle road. Would you agree with that?
[00:43:20.640] – Tom Fanelli
Yeah, I do. In fact, it’s interesting because I don’t like those people that do that, like toxic, combative. Everything needs to be poking at people because that’s not who I am as a person. That doesn’t match up- I don’t really see the point to you because people are not going to listen.
[00:43:40.870] – Jonathan Denwood
If you start going it, they’re going to blank you off.
[00:43:43.970] – Tom Fanelli
It’s surprising. Some people do. Some people do. But I’m not going to build my brand that way. And I think that the other thing, too, I think that’s interesting is, did you guys see the whole thing that happened with Moo, the The business card people, the sticker company, or was it Moo stickers? I think it was. That whole thing. I wasn’t even aware of this until I saw people from the WordPress ecosystem. They posted something about the assassination of Donald Trump, one of the CEO, one of the founders did. And it was that he just got scorched by people. And I take the take the philosophy that my tribe, my customers, they’re not coming to me for political commentary. They’re coming to me about performance and e-commerce, and sales, and all of that. And so it’s like, I don’t feel like it’s my position or role to talk about things outside of my lane. It’s like, you don’t do business with a company to get some personal perspective. You know what I’m saying? I realize why people come to Convessio, and I realize that’s the thing we’re going to drive value for, and we will drive value for businesses of all types.
[00:45:08.510] – Tom Fanelli
To me, it’s always been really clear to stay in that lane. It’s difficult.
[00:45:13.720] – Jonathan Denwood
I look at the over 1,000 hours of material that I’ve produced over a nine-year period, Tom. Must be over a thousand hours of audible and video discussion. I got hammered for 15 minutes of that thousand hours. And I made a mistake and I got hammered by a certain group for 15 minutes of 1,000 hours of content, Tom. So it is tricky, isn’t it?
[00:45:48.500] – Tom Fanelli
Yes, that is human nature. There’s that story of Einstein, where he wrote down one plus one equals two, two plus one equals three. And he did five problems, and he made a mistake on the last one. And his whole classroom criticized him. He said, I got 90 % of them right, but no one said anything. And it was the one wrong one that people talked about. And that is very true of human nature as they gravitate towards that. Now, some people have the ability to turn that into positivity somehow.
[00:46:23.910] – Jonathan Denwood
Which you must, wasn’t you?
[00:46:25.030] – Tom Fanelli
Yes.
[00:46:26.040] – Jonathan Denwood
The alternative is the bottle, isn’t it? Right, let’s go. So you’re upbeat. I’ve got very mixed feelings about AI. I use a lot of it, as Kurt knows. He’s amazed how much for old phobia, I move quick, don’t I, Kurt, when it comes to new technology? But also, I also The drift side of it, almost every, and I’m not classifying yourself a Converseio in this bucket at all, but it’s literally every company of any size seems to have jumped onto the AI bandwagon and say, We’re going to adopt AI, and we do. And most of it’s total flannel, isn’t it, Tom? In my my opinion. It does seem to have been overpumped, but I suppose that is… I think it’s going to take a bit longer to really see how it really does benefit companies and individuals in a much more coherent trend. Would you agree with that?
[00:47:56.920] – Tom Fanelli
Yeah, I do. I think right now we’re in a spot where there is really good use cases. I would not classify them a trend, but I’ll give you a really quick example of one way we use it that’s really been awesome, is we support our clients in Slack. So we have a continuous stream of Slack conversations when we support people. Well, that would be locked in Slack indefinitely. And so what we do is we literally copy and paste that conversation And you can put that in ChatGPT and say, create a knowledge-based article, create a help article. And so it’s like repurposing stuff that would normally take a person to have to go write something down. That is a great immediate benefit of the time that we spend supporting someone, that we can now take that and leverage it as a document that we can share with others who have the same problem. And so that is a really really good use case. The case of accelerating the business processes that you do internally so that you can be more efficient, be more effective, be more communicative. So that’s one of the things that I think is just a real world example of how you can take the existing basic tools that are there today is to repurpose the stuff that you’re doing and get it into something that’s a more shareable format.
[00:49:27.140] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I also think there’s an enormous I’m going to some amount of hypocrisy and nonsense talk about the written material because some of the biggest brands in WordPress base their business model in churning out really low-quality offshore sourced content at a mega level, basically producing internal content farms, producing content at a low-quality level. That being replaced by AI, I don’t see the difference myself.
[00:50:06.670] – Tom Fanelli
It’s probably going to be better.
[00:50:08.090] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s probably going to be better. I think also blending that content with video, audio, webinars, social, community-based discussion and blending all that into something that’s attractive. Will be one of the key elements of online successful marketing in the community.
[00:50:37.280] – Tom Fanelli
I’m stealing that. I’m stealing that idea. You’re right. You’re right. Because this goes to the founder brand, the heart of what I was saying. It’s like people are going to be prioritizing real interactions with real people. And so it’s even to augment my statement about the founder brand, it’s not about having just the founder, but a community of people who can engage and share, because AI is going to make it really easy. You’re not going to have to read. I published a social media thing. One of my favorite hacks I’ve come up with, I don’t know if anyone else is doing this. I love these long videos by big influencers and everything where they’re like, I’m going to give you these 30 tips. It took me 15 years to figure out. I will copy and paste the transcript of that hour video into ChatGPT. I’ll summarize this with action items. And I don’t watch the video. It’s like people aren’t going to read content because that can shrink the time to digest it.
[00:51:34.700] – Jonathan Denwood
I think the other area which is the totally opposite, and I think will get hammered, is pro-matics SEO, where you actually use scripts to produce a flood of poor quality content and do it quasar-automatic. I don’t I do that. I’ve pursued a hybrid pathway, and I’ve been very careful about that. I think Kirk, who helps me, would agree I have. But there’s been others that have championed online and in the WordPress developer community, problematic SEO, and I think they’re going to get hammered myself. What’s your own thoughts about that?
[00:52:29.170] – Tom Fanelli
Yeah, we’ve experimented with this a bit, this whole concept of, what I tell people is we’ve all spent hours crafting a really awesome piece of content, only to never have it rank at all. And so there’s this new school of thought, where it’s like, produce 100 pieces of programmatic content a month. See what ranks, rank first, edit second, is the philosophy, versus the old way of doing it, which was, edit the hell out of something, and then never have it rank. And we all had that. We’re so proud of something. It just gets no eyeballs. And I think where I’m settling on this, as we experiment with it, is I think that it’s like things like having your content where you’re using AI to maybe generate components of an article, give you statistics to put in using perplexity, researching stuff It’s an assistant to the process of optimizing and creating a piece of content. And that is really powerful because it used to take hours and hours to do that stuff. Throwing in schema markup and having ChatGPT, put your content in ChatGPT, or give me the schema code, boom, drop it into a block.
[00:53:50.760] – Tom Fanelli
That, to me, is the way you do this in a way that’s really, really good, where you don’t have to have hours of research in something. And by the way, if you’re producing content for any generic industry, like travel, your research should be almost nothing now, because ChatGPT can make it go so much faster.
[00:54:13.800] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, you’ve seen the actual developers utilizing AI to assist you in the coding process. I don’t think anybody would question that, but I’ve known a couple of people that have insanely bragged about building a whole plugin or a whole solution because they frame the code in…
[00:54:41.740] – Tom Fanelli
They’re in charge of the AI code, yeah.
[00:54:44.230] – Jonathan Denwood
And I think Are you insane to publicly state that and to actually you think that somehow you’re going to be treated as a professional programmer? Or am I being too harsh, Tom?
[00:55:00.780] – Tom Fanelli
No, I think it’s a novelty right now. I’m not sure. That type of stuff, it’s like, I almost wonder if those people are doing it because they can say they did it first. I don’t think any real commercial company is going to have a product that… You have to have people who know what they’re doing at some point. Maybe your MVP is done that way. Maybe you can get a few features out. But eventually, you’re going to have You’re going to have to have developers in the field.
[00:55:32.930] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I take it as a sign that they’re an idiot. I’ve known the people that should know better that have promoted these people. I just take it as a sign that they’re just a drifter and an idiot because anybody that knows anything about coding, the last thing, they would be looking at it and utilizing it as a tool and increase their product. A lot of programming is mind-blowing repetition, isn’t it?
[00:56:07.550] – Tom Fanelli
Yes, exactly. Documenting your code, that’s a great use. We’re using this for documenting code because nobody wants to document their code. That’s not fun. So it’s really good at that. It’s really good at translating and troubleshooting errors in WordPress, dumping these cryptic errors in from plugins. And it’s like, hey, give me five things I can do to to troubleshoot this. So it’s going to take the people who know some and amplify their capabilities significantly. But the people who know nothing, who are trying to do it all in ChatGPT or AI, They’re in the danger zone because they don’t know where their limits are, and they think, I’m going to have a commercial plugin based on code written by AI.
[00:56:55.120] – Jonathan Denwood
So do you want to do the last question, Kurt, before you have to fly off to your? Sure. Sure.
[00:56:59.650] – Kurt von Ahnen
I get the privilege of asking the question, and I’ll watch the replay to see the answer. Tom, if you had your own time machine like H. G. Wells or Doctor Who, and you could go back to the beginning of your career, which we’ve already established which is 30 years ago, what advice would you- He’s a young man compared to me.
[00:57:22.680] – Tom Fanelli
Well, that’s a good question. I’ve been asked that before, and I’ll tell you point blank what it is, and it would be to be more fearless. I think there are a lot of people that I look at that are paralyzed by fear. They can’t make a decision, and it’s unfortunate. I’m not paralyzed by it, but I’m also not the most fearless person I’ve seen. And I think that fear is one of the most significant inhibitors people have to reach their maximum potential. And so be more fearless. When you’re young, and you’re just starting, you don’t have to worry about a family, a house, five cars, four kids, and all that stuff. Take risks.
[00:58:07.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think that’s so true. But there’s a lot of family and societal pressure. For conformity, there’s a lot of group speaking and group speaking. If you try and say that nobody has… I have some basic principles that I will not compromise on, and I expect those that I communicate with often or with friends or type businesses. I expect them to meet those requirements. If they don’t, I don’t associate myself with them. But Everything else is discussable because, honestly, I don’t have all the answers. I’m just an average person doing my best.
[00:59:11.430] – Tom Fanelli
I would say that’s a really good point, too, which is to pick your friends wisely and pick people who will elevate you, not people who will drag you down.
[00:59:22.410] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s one of my weaknesses. I’m a little bit forgiving with people’s… The obvious is usually in front of me, but sometimes I tend not to want to see it, and I make a few too many excuses. But in some ways, I think it might be better to be that way because I’ve noticed some other people who are very demanding and unrealistic. I suppose I’m just saying it’s to find the middle ground, right?
[00:59:52.120] – Tom Fanelli
Well, sometimes it takes years to figure that out, though. So the fact that you know all that now is something that most 20-year-olds, 20-somethings, will not know starting their career out. So, that knowledge is a hard-fought experience that gets you there.
[01:00:11.390] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s been a pleasure talking to you, Tom. What’s the best way for people to learn more about you and Conversion?
[01:00:20.140] – Tom Fanelli
Sure. You can go to our website to converse. Com. You can go to LinkedIn and message me. I’m there, Twitter, as well. If you can, hit us on any of the socials.
[01:00:32.390] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, and if you want to support the show, share it and tell people about it. If you’re feeling generous, leave us a review on iTunes. We haven’t had any reviews for a while, but the great news is that recently, the audience has started to grow again, so I must be doing something right. I think it’s just my guess. It has fabulous guests like Tom who are prepared to have fantastic discussions that make the show. We will be back next and have some great guests in August. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
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