960 WP-Tonic Show: Is Online Marketing Dead In The Age of Google AI?
Is online marketing dead in the age of Google AI? Discover how to adapt and thrive in this new digital landscape today. With special guest Mike Stott.
In this insightful show, we delve into the question: Is online marketing dead in the era of Google AI snippets? With the rise of AI-driven search results transforming how users engage with content, we explore the implications for marketers and businesses. Join us as we analyze trends, expert opinions, and strategies to adapt in this evolving landscape.
#1 – Mike, can you give some more background info on how you got into WordPress and working with Automattic?
#2 – What are some of the major lessons you have learnt launching commercial plugins and themes that you are happy to share with the audience?
#3 – Recently, Scott Galloway has said that traditional branding has been dying over the last ten years, and AI is only accelerating this process. What do you think about this?
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andrew-tindall_the-era-of-brand-building-is-dead-scott-activity-7191753331541745664-fnlI/
#4 – Have you got any insights on how a new WordPress or SaaS product can get any traction in the ever-increasing world of online chatter?
#5— Are there any AI tools or services you have been using remotely or regularly that you would like to share with the WP-Tonic tribe?
#6—If you had your time machine (H. G. Wells) and could travel back to the beginning of your career, what advice would you give?
This Week’s Sponsors
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The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:20.470] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back to the WP Tonic Show this week in WordPress and Tech. So in this show, we’ve got a great WordPress entrepreneur. Now, he works for Automatic. We’ve got Mike Scott, Mike. He’s well known in the WordPress community. He started several successful plugins, starting with Social Gallery, then started the plugin and theme shop, Epic, and was also involved in 0BS CRM, which was sold to Automatic in 2019. We’re going to be talking about all things marketing. Is it worth thinking about online marketing in the age of AI and other subjects related to building successful businesses in WordPress? It should be a fantastic discussion. Mike, would you like to give us an additional 10- 20 seconds intro, and then we’ll talk more about your history in the central part of the show?
[00:01:41.270] – Mike Stott
Yeah, sure. I’m Mike. I’m based in Manchester, UK. And it’s sunny for a change here. I usually stare into gray skies, but now I get a bit of winter sun, well, spring sun, dazzling me a little bit. Worked in WordPress and around WordPress since about 2010. But before that, I was a pensions consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers. So, one of those little-known facts that people do not know. I qualified as an actuary, and on the side of doing that, I was building side businesses and quit my 9:00 to 5: 00 in 2016 to go all in on WordPress. So that’s a very short synopsis.
[00:02:23.880] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. And I got my ever-patient co-host and individual of reason, and… I know it. I’ve got my co-host, Kirek. Kirek, would you like to introduce yourself?
[00:02:38.140] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, my name is Kurt von Ahnen. I own an agency called MananaNoMas. I also work directly with Jonathan at WP Tonic, his team, and the great folks at Lifter LMS worldwide.
[00:02:50.420] – Jonathan Denwood
Poor old Kirk, he’s become my unofficial therapist. There we go. It should be a Great show. I’ve been looking forward to this particular chat. But before we go into the meat and potatoes of the show, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. Also, I want to point out we’ve got a fantastic free resource for you. We’ve got some great, yummy special offers from the sponsors, plus a curated list of the best WordPress plugins and services for particular areas, all listed in the nice list, all recommended and used by the WP Tonic team. It’s a great resource. You can get all these goodies by going over to Wp-tonic. Com/deals. Wp-tonic. Com/deals. What more could you ask for, my beloved WordPress professionals? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’ll get from that page. I’m not doing that on the roundtable show, beloved tribe, because Spencer keeps interrupting me. So I’m not going to buy it. But you seem to like it still, my beloved tribe. So let’s go straight into it. So, Mike, now you’ve gotten into WordPress. What about your former career before your WordPress career made you think WordPress would be so much better?
[00:04:39.730] – Mike Stott
Good question. When I worked in pensions, we spent a lot of time in human resource services, trying to help people manage their employees better, look after the benefits of the high earners, and all that stuff. I did a lot of work with Excel, and many of the younger associates that were coming in, even the managers, weren’t very good with Excel. And I went from a computer university background, where I just picked up Excel. I could do all sorts of stuff in VBA programming at the time. And so I thought, why not do this as a side gig? There must be other companies that struggle with Microsoft Excel simultaneously. And this is, oh gosh, probably 2010 time. So I was writing pages in HTML. And I created my logo. I can’t remember what I created the logo for. I then tried to do headers, and then I’m like, oh, I need an About page. So then I’d have to go back into every single one. HTML will be used to add an extra link to all of those. And then at a certain point, I’m like, right, I’m going to need a blog.
[00:05:47.380] – Mike Stott
And then it just got real like, how do I do this with HTML and CSS? So did some googling. Wordpress came up as the only choice, really, as blogging software at the time. So I learned I set it back up on WordPress, so it was a lot easier to start adding content, start adding things like forms, all the type of stuff you want if you’re trying to get leads into your failure of an Excel business. My domain was actually excel-lens, so excelence. Info. So it was. Info domain. I knew nothing about websites at the time, and that’s how I got started there. Fell in love with WordPress, started using it a lot, and started having a lot of other side business ideas. So when I decided to leave PwC in 2011, I then went back into insurance and life insurance. And we had a like a three-month notice period where you put on gardening leave, so you couldn’t work on clients, so you didn’t take your knowledge to another consultancy. So my senior manager at the time said, why don’t you write an e-book on how bad you are at Call of Duty? So So I’m like, fine, I’ll do that.
[00:07:02.470] – Mike Stott
Wrote the e-book and it was 101 tips to get worse at Call of Duty. Put it on Amazon. And that was my first online dollar, so to speak. So that went on to probably sell about $3,000 in its lifetime. Back in 2011, I had the crazy thought that I can do this better than Amazon. So I used a WordPress website to become a social e-book store. Installed Body Press, started to build a community community of members there. And then one of the authors of that site said, Look, I’m doing a new book. I’ve got five different book covers. I want to have a gallery on my author page. And people click it and it opened up Facebook. And it didn’t exist and I didn’t know how to do it. So I put a job post up on a freelance board and a freelancer called Woody applied for the job. And he said, It’s probably going to cost about a grand, a thousand dollars, a thousand pounds to build it. I’m like, I’ve not got that. No one’s buying the books from my failed bookstore. So we did an agreement where he built it for free and we split the proceeds, put it on Cold Canyon, and that was our first bigger success because that took off quite well as a Cold Canyon products.
[00:08:22.130] – Mike Stott
It got us elite authors probably in 2013. And at this point then I was like, I like this as a And that’s when you got the taste for building Pro Plugins and other products on WordPress.
[00:08:40.460] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s where it started, really, Mike.
[00:08:42.810] – Mike Stott
It did. So it started with… So I’d not done a lot in PHP type coding at the time, but I’ve done a lot in, let’s say, BBA and MATLab. Went throughout my degree. And then I saw I can make money with premium plugins. So then alongside, I kept in touch with Woody at the time and we built a lot of… We had a lot of challenges where I tried to release a plugin, he released a plugin and we tried to see which one would be best.
[00:09:09.550] – Jonathan Denwood
I think we’ll leave it there because we’re starting to overlap into the next question, and I want to give that to Kirk. So, Kirk, over to you.
[00:09:18.760] – Mike Stott
Yeah, no worries.
[00:09:19.860] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, Mike, I was listening to your answer, and I was just trying to put myself back in that headspace because I started working with WordPress in 2004. And as you were talking, I was like, the guy wants a gallery that opens up in the Facebook and does that. And you’re like, it didn’t exist. And I’m like, Oh, my God, he’s right. It didn’t. And I think about where we’re at now, right? So now we’ve got 60,000 plus things in the repository to choose from. Wordpress does all this crazy cool stuff. So looking at where we were and where we are, what do you think of the major lessons that you’ve learned in launching a commercial plugin in a way that you could share it with our audience that might be thinking the same thing? Because things have changed a lot since inventing something that’s needed.
[00:10:07.520] – Mike Stott
Absolutely. So I think it’ll always be for me with Social Gallery, even with ZBS CRM, it was to launch it early. So we launched sooner than we thought. So the first Social Gallery version just had a Facebook like and a Facebook comment. And then we built on the back of that after listening to customers. So we got the first version out. If we’d have waited until we had, I don’t know if Instagram existed when we first did that, but if we had the Pinterest buttons and all the other social share icons, we wouldn’t have launched. And so we just got version one out and then started listening to what people were asking us for going forward. And that was true to ZBS CRM as well, was the first version was very much a lot fewer features, and we just started to listen to customers, talking to customers, and just trying to get the word out. So with Social Gallery, the thing that made the sales pick up on that one was a partnership with, I don’t know if you remember, NextGen Gallery, all those years back. So we got a blog post on there and integrated with NextGen so that if you clicked on a NextGen gallery image, it would pop up in the Social Gallery.
[00:11:18.280] – Mike Stott
So that type of partnerships and not treating everyone as a competitor because everyone’s in it together to make the web a better place. That was the way we went. There was just doing that type of stuff. But I agree it is getting harder with more plugins, with AI making it. You can just talk to an editor and have it create a plugin. That’s a real challenge for new people starting out.
[00:11:45.160] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. We actually just had that experience last week, and that was unique because they’re like, Oh, I talked to AI and I had this plugin made. Can you add it to my site? And I’m super hesitant. And I’m sure a lot of other people are going to face this coming, right? Where people are going to say, Oh, I made this. Because if you’re in charge of the site and the maintenance and the hosting, and now you’re just going to add something that AI made, that’s a little freakish. So then you say, well, maybe we need to check it out first or maybe we need to look at your code. But then if you’re going to do that, you might as well charge them to make a plugin, right? So do you have any thoughts on that? It wasn’t the original question, but we opened that can of worms right there. We did.
[00:12:27.600] – Mike Stott
And I think that will happen. It’s hard how if you’re getting AI to be your AI engineer in a new product, then still have somebody that understands the code. Like, do we check it’s still secure, check it’s not doing anything, allowing any privileges, privileges, escalations and things like that. I always put the hard words to try and get out of my mouth. So I think that as long as you have someone that understands the code, depending on the size of the plugin, then that could be part of a new service is like, Have an AI engineering team and then offer the service to get this production ready. But I think as AI gets better, it’s looking at everyone’s code anyway, that’s open source, and there’ll be fewer instances of these type of potential issues. So it will just move faster with bigger context windows and lots of ways to just make it easier to build a plugin. And then that circles back to what makes the plugin successful? Is it the idea? Is it the distribution? Is it the marketing? Is it the team behind it?
[00:13:35.370] – Kurt von Ahnen
I really like when you said not considering people competitors. I have a favorite saying that I stole from somebody else, and it was, you don’t have to worry about someone getting your piece of the pie because you can always just bake more pie. Jonathan, over to you.
[00:13:53.300] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s really interesting. I don’t know where it’s going to go, really. Well, I’m part of a professional-level Facebook training community, and I was in one of their premier Zooms yesterday run by John Luma. People were there discussing what Marks Atterberg has been saying lately that Facebook or Metta are clearly saying that they really want to cut out most of the agencies, the low-end agencies, and provide a AI service that really can basically… A small business client can say what result they want and what average they want to run, then the AI just manages the whole thing, and that’s his vision. So it’ll just be interesting to see what happens. So one of the questions, because you By looking at your previous interviews and your background, you seem to be one of these individuals that have broad abilities, i. E. You’re in the world of marketing, online marketing, you also have some technical abilities as well. So you got a broad span of insights, and I listen to quite a lot of a major influencer online. I don’t agree with everything this person says, Scott Galloway. But on a few of his interviews and some of his own podcast, he’s been saying that he really sees the world of traditional marketing dying.
[00:15:55.280] – Jonathan Denwood
And I just thought your own thoughts, because I think I can see where he’s coming from, and in some ways, I think it’s already happened. But on the other hand, I think more around community and being foreign online influence influences, which is a form of branding, is it not? It seems to have still growing, and there still seems to be a need for more of it from the consumers? What’s your own thoughts about all this, Mike?
[00:16:36.890] – Mike Stott
Yeah, this was the question that kept me awake most at night was, is brand building still important? And I think if you look at some of the older brands in WordPress, like Jetpack is one of the first major brands that came out, and people either love it or hate it. And the people that hated it back in the early days, hated it for a particular reason, that may not be true anymore. And you have heard of these before, it’s bloated, it slows down websites. But then if you look at what’s the shift where we did individual plugins, that’s moving away now that it’s actually speeds up your website with jet pack boost. There’s lots of things there. So that brand building, I think, is still important. And it becomes like brand building, brand perception, and even for a company brand. But then also alongside that, now I think it’s more important to personal brands as well. So for yourself, if you’re growing WP tonic, then to look at the person behind that and what has Jonathan done? What’s he being involved in? Has he been to communities? Has he done speaking? Engagements and things like that.
[00:17:45.830] – Mike Stott
So I think personal brand is as important as business brands. But I do think brand building is and brand marketing is still important as well from all sorts of brands, whether it be WordPress. And Matt tweaked a few days ago, asking for agencies that could help elevate the WordPress brand. And the biggest example I could give very recently in my mind of the brand side is the BYD car. So I’d never heard of BYD, and it was only when we were looking for a new car and we saw it as part of Mercedes, we were like, oh, what’s this? But then we started looking into it and they’ve done all the brand marketing, they’ve got all the influencers talking about it, doing reviews and doing And the high BYD assistant showing the screen and it’s got all the tech. And then you look at it even deeper down the rabbit hole, it’s now overtaken Tesla in revenue and it’s sold more EV vehicles. And I don’t think that would have happened if they hadn’t done that brand building over, in particular, where they originated from. So I don’t think it’s dead. I think it’s just shifting that brand building will be easier with AI again.
[00:18:57.720] – Mike Stott
You can talk to various AI agents to help you know what to do next. If you’re stuck with how you get your brand to the next level, if you’ve got your brand perception of a particular place that you want to change, then how do you go ahead of doing that? So hopefully that answers the question.
[00:19:15.790] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, it was a very broad question, and you really had a… I’m sorry to hear that I made you not sleep, actually, Rob. My own view about it is, I think in the Pacific, obviously, Scott, when he was a leading consultant to very large brands and companies, the example he gave, the broad example, was taking a mediocre product and then using mass marketing and mass branding to get a premium margin on a semi-mediocre product. I think he’s right about it. The gist of it was that, taking quite mediocre products and marketing them sophisticated and getting a much better margin If you didn’t do that, and the marketing was at such a lower rate that you still got an enormous payback. But I think that is probably dying, and was dying Because you could just go on TikTok, you could just go on YouTube, you can just go on a thousand different platforms and read reviews and what people are saying. Obviously, a lot of those reviews are being manipulated by sponsorship and by other factors, but it’s much harder. So There really has to be a lot more behind the brand than just marketing. There has to be some real value in the brand, but the idea that I’ve known loads of WordPress products that were really good, but the people never did any marketing.
[00:21:24.440] – Jonathan Denwood
They had no marketing strategy, and they never went anywhere. So So what do you think about what I’ve just laid out? Do you think I’m on the right track or would you disagree?
[00:21:38.450] – Mike Stott
I don’t disagree. One of my favorite sayings is you can put lipstick on a pig and it’s still a pig at the end of the day, no matter what you do to it. If it doesn’t have a product market fit, then it’s going to be harder to get those customers and things like that. So on the flip side, the Are there products that don’t get the traction, I think it depends on the people behind it and if they are comfortable marketing, comfortable talking to customers, because I think it all goes back to what does the customer want at the end of the day? So are you building your products based on a demand and then going from that, are you thinking, trying to drum up that demand for a product that might seem like a good product, but there’s not that customer demand and customers aren’t asking for it. So back to the social gallery example, it was people were asking for it. We didn’t just think, are we just going to copy Facebook? There were people saying, I want this functionality on my WordPress website. And it was the same with CRM. It was, again, a number of people that were using it saying, I want to see everything in one place in my website.
[00:22:49.930] – Mike Stott
I’m spending all my days like going out quoting for building services, and I don’t have time to essentially learn this complicated software. So we made a very easy version in WordPress. And it’s that listening to customers and talking to customers and then that word of mouth marketing that I think some products, some engineers potentially don’t like the marketing side of things. They just like to move on to the next feature and build the next thing and put the next plugin out.
[00:23:20.040] – Jonathan Denwood
What do you reckon, Kurt?
[00:23:23.440] – Kurt von Ahnen
Marketing is an elusive ghost for me. I get lost in it myself. I can think of two I have two examples where I might not necessarily like the technique, but it’s obviously paid off for them. And I’ll pull some big names out. I bought a Grant Cardone book a couple of years ago, probably four or five years ago. No matter what I’ll do, I’ll never get off that man’s email list. Him and his team of salespeople, it’s emails every week and all that stuff, and it’s super annoying. And I think that that’s from a developer’s perspective or someone that’s marketing a new product, I think they have that fear of, I don’t want to be that person that everybody hates, right? For trying to be pushy for something they don’t want. But you nailed it when you said product-market fit. When the product fits the market and it’s a no brainer. Like, yeah, that’s awesome. But it’s still, I think Jonathan and I personally have spoken to many people that had good product market fit, but still didn’t have growth, almost like they put too much into making the cool product and not enough into the marketing.
[00:24:32.300] – Kurt von Ahnen
And I think nowadays it is really confusing for most people right now to go, okay, I built this really cool thing or I am building this really cool thing. How do I get everyone to know about it? Even if I have product market fit, I’m not able to get the eyes that I need to get. Your example was the car. Here in the United States last week, a car was announced, a truck was announced called Slate, and it’s a $20,000 EV, like a mini truck, and it’s super, super cool. For 20 grand, it’s amazing. But I knew nothing about it until last week. And then it was everywhere on X, and a bunch of people started talking about it, and then I didn’t hear anything this week. But they made a giant investment, a giant splash in influencers and gross posting. And maybe that’s just what it takes. Maybe you just have to really commit to it and really spend the money to get those eyeballs on it and then see if it works.
[00:25:30.240] – Jonathan Denwood
The reason I’m bringing this up, Mike, because obviously, were you the founder or the joint founder of 0BS CRM?
[00:25:39.920] – Mike Stott
Yeah, we were. Do you think-Sorry. Go ahead. I would say it was me and Woody, again, the same person that did Social Gallery with, so it just spans backwards.
[00:25:51.450] – Jonathan Denwood
Now, I don’t know too much about this. Obviously, you sold it to Automatic in 2019. The things that we’ve been discussing in this first half, do you think anything that we discuss on reflection applies the zero BS? If so, what were some of the lessons you could share with the audience around your journey with this particular product?
[00:26:23.090] – Mike Stott
Sure. Again, ZBS, when we launched it, there was periods where it made hardly any sales very early on. And there’s points where like, This isn’t going to work, nobody wants it. And then we thought the biggest… The thing that moved people to buying was we had five extensions at the time and we were looking at the Woocommerce model and the easy digital downloads type of extension model. And they said, well, let’s do some bundles. And when we put the bundles in place, that then started to slowly tick up. But we did also around at the time, a period of just sponsoring WordCamps, and we went out to all sorts of… I spoke in WordCamp Nepal about my target to successful products when we were still relatively low and just trying to sponsor word camps, trying to just speak, I went to a number of local word camps and spoke to agencies and gave up business care, all the type of stuff that was out of my comfort zone at the time was just going and trying to network with people to say, look, it’s a new product, maybe give it a go. It’s completely free because the search volume on wordpress.
[00:27:38.340] – Mike Stott
Org for CRM was relatively low. And even now, there’s more CRMs now than there were. And if you compare it to the install counts of contactfarm7, none of the CRM products are that massively adopted in WordPress native, but it has grown from my Maybe the less than 10 installs that you get on a new plugin that is just… That’s like the TikTok 200 or the Instagram 200 jail, where you can never get past that number of views. But it did slowly start to pick up, and we got about a thousand active installs at the time of the acquisition. And then since then, we’re up at about 30,000 now. So we’ve gone up a big jump since joining Automatic. So I think we could have… If we didn’t join Automatic, would it have been different? Would we have stayed low? It’s really hard to tell. But I think the early things, again, was just going out and networking and guest posts, again, like we did with the Social Gallery and NextGen. We did a few… We spent probably about $500 at the time, which was a lot for us of just guest posts to try and get on WP Mayor at the time and WP Cube, all of these.
[00:28:52.930] – Mike Stott
I don’t know if you remember all of these websites back then, but we spent a big chunk of our money at the time to try and just get some search engine juice coming in. And I think that probably helped as well. So this is 10 years ago now, when we first, almost 10 years ago. So things have changed in the world of, let’s say, the AI and the AI snippets, which is what we’re covering as well.
[00:29:20.070] – Jonathan Denwood
So how long was you running this particular product before you sold it to Automatic?
[00:29:30.080] – Mike Stott
So we started working on it in 2016 and then we officially launched in around June, June 2017. And then when we started to see sales pick up, we incorporated as a separate company in October 2017. And then we got acquired in… The acquisition discussion has probably started around February, February 2019. It was quite a quick acquisition process when we got to there. So all in, probably about three years of that from idea to being acquired.
[00:30:09.010] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, that’s fantastic. We’re going to go for our midway break. We got a couple of messages from our major sponsors, and we’ll be back in a few moments. Three, two, one. We’re coming back. We’ve had a feast of nodding for Mike. He seems quite relaxed. It hasn’t been too painful, I don’t think. But it’s been a great discussion so far. I just want to point out that if you’re looking for a great hosting provider, much more a real partner in really building out membership, community websites or any big project, why don’t you have a look at what WP 20 has got to offer? We’re much more than a hosting provider. We’re a true partner. You can find more by going over to Wp-tonic. Com/partners, wp-tonic. Com/partners. If you’ve got any additional questions, you can always have a chat with me. What more could you ask for? Over to you, Kirk.
[00:31:20.600] – Kurt von Ahnen
A dollar.
[00:31:22.520] – Jonathan Denwood
Anything. He’ll pay me not to have a chat with him. He’s got to the stage, he thinks, Should I pick this Pick the phone up. Rob.
[00:31:32.390] – Kurt von Ahnen
This next question, it’s almost like we’re just extending the conversation from the first half of the show, but I think it’s a little more specific, and that is someone’s new, right? So we talked about, how did you market this? How did you market that? But someone’s new. So have you got any insights on brand new WordPress or SaaS product? How does someone get that traction? We talked about product-market fit, and then we mentioned a couple of outlying cases where people just really doubled down on social stuff. But bear tactics, right? You’ve made your WordPress plugin or your SaaS product. How do you just get that first get that first bit of momentum and get going?
[00:32:19.500] – Mike Stott
It’s hard. If you want to do that, be ready for maybe a year of nothing, I don’t know. Maybe that’s a little bit pessimistic, but don’t expecting to get like thousands and thousands of users as soon as you put your first post out. It took me quite a while, but when I did it with the plugins, we were quite far from that. And Cold Canyon at the time was a decent marketplace. Since like, Envato elements and all things like that started coming out. And I’ve got a post on my Epic Plugins blog about the fall of Cold Canyon. I didn’t title it that, but it was an open letter to Envato that actually ranked higher on Google than when you search Cold Canyon, than Cold Canyon did. So that was quite an interesting piece where it’s not the same as it was. And even product hunt launches, I’ve got another post on Epic Plugins where I looked at how I got ZBS featured, and there was a lot of work there. So I was tweeting Nia Al at the time, who’s the author of Huckt and Indistractable. And I’m just like, I’ve just read your book.
[00:33:29.990] – Mike Stott
This This is great. I’ve just launched this products. We did a lot of things around the teachings from your book in this products. I’d love it if you could give it a retweet. And he did. So that like, I’m like, wow, I wasn’t expecting that. And he popped over and he upvoted it on Product Hunt at the time as well. So I think starting out like that, you have to try things like that, things that don’t scale. Do a lot of manual one to ones. If you get people using the products, say, look, I’ll spend an hour with you just to make sure you can understand it and I can understand the pain points that you’re hitting. So I was quite fortunate that I had a bit of the money coming in from Cold Canyon. But then I was also freelancing as well and building WordPress websites and talking to people at the same time and then pushing my solutions as well at the same time because this person needed a gallery. I’m like, well, why don’t you use this social gallery? I can get you. I’ll give it you for 50 % off or things like that.
[00:34:28.200] – Mike Stott
So that was quite a nice way of doing it. And even in the early days of CRM, it was a similar tactic where we’d listen to customers and they’d have a particular idea. I’m like, well, we can work with you on a freelance basis on that. And then that money then helps us put it into the wider marketing budget that we had to try and grow the actual products. So we used to do a thing where we’d say it’s a great feature, but it’s very specific to your use case. But more people might be interested. So why don’t we knock 50 % off the development costs and then we’ll launch it into the bundle and then you don’t have to pay for any maintenance or anything going forward. So that was a nice way that they got what they wanted, but it also enhanced the product at the same time. So I think if you’re just trying to do a product without anything else backing you up, it’s going to be a lonely road. But if you can try and if you’re building websites, if you’re doing other things, you could also talk to people about your product as well.
[00:35:29.430] – Mike Stott
That would be a way to get it going. So that would be my advice there.
[00:35:34.000] – Kurt von Ahnen
I wanted to jump in with a follow up question on that. How many people do you think that develop a product, get nervous or second guess the price, and start hacking away at the price as the possible solution, rather than realizing they failed at the hard work of promotion?
[00:35:52.940] – Mike Stott
Probably a lot. I think we probably underpriced CRM at the time, when we first launched it. And it’s still a really good deal now. If you look at CRMs, it’s $200 a year for access to everything. And I think even now that’s probably we could increase those prices. We’ve not increased them for years because it’s I think you got it dead on that. I think you mess around with the price thinking that’s the problem, and it’s more like the distribution. It’s the talking to people. It’s the adding the extra thing, potentially adding the features. Or is it just getting that tweak from an influencer to help lift your brand. And then always change prices later.
[00:36:39.140] – Kurt von Ahnen
Another price related question would be, what are your thoughts on the freemium example? Like, hey, here’s a core piece for free, and then it does these extra six things for $200 a year.
[00:36:52.450] – Mike Stott
That’s pretty much the only pricing model I tend to use for most of the products we’ve done. So So it was slightly different, but it was a core. So we framed it like WordPress itself. Like there’s the core CRM with all the plugins that you could add on. But then most of my other stuff, we always had a light version and a paid version. And so that’s a nice distribution that people can use the free version and then they can upgrade for some extra stuff. So with Social Gallery, the upgrade, which you got a few more sharing buttons, and you also got a standard page on your website for each image, which we got a Social Gallery page, which then helps sharing on social networks, because if you share just an image URL, it didn’t do all the rich text that you would get, the title, the description, the image. And so those are the very basic things you could add on to social gallery. So I think that works well because you can get the free version out there and most people will try free and then they can start to unlock it. And I think it can work quite well, depending as long as it’s not just your free version, it’s just a demo and you can’t do anything.
[00:38:00.820] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, yeah. Thanks. I appreciate. Jonathan?
[00:38:04.380] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I’d like to go back to your thoughts about zero BS, because obviously in the end, it had a pretty good outcome for you. It’s enabled you to build your relationship and career with automatic. In the end, it’s had a good outcome. But do you think I’m right about this statement? I see CRM’s a bit like the term managed hosting. It’s become a diluted term to the level where nobody really knows precisely what it means. What I mean by this is a CRM. A CRM can be like sales force, very about the management of sales teams, smallish or medium or large, and with a manager, very sales-orientated with around details about customers and Then you can have a CRM that’s very marketing-orientated around landing pages and triggering marketing optimization. Then you can have a CRM that’s even bigger on that. And there’s been companies that have built like Salesforce, other ones that built multimillion dollar companies on CRM, the term CRM. And then you got products like Zolo, CRM. It’s all over the place. Do you As you have been so frank, you did build it and it was moving forward. Obviously, automatic could see some real benefits by buying it.
[00:40:17.260] – Jonathan Denwood
But do you think what I’ve outlined about… I’ve never used it, so maybe you can… Where would you pitch what you were trying to do with it and what it did in what I’ve outlined, and I like your thoughts about what I’ve outlined. Do you think I’m right that it’s been one of the problems in trying to get traction in the CRM? Is it organizational or is it really a term around getting leads, getting actual customers? Because it’s a very broad church, isn’t it?
[00:40:55.170] – Mike Stott
Welcome to the last 10 years of my life, Jonathan.
[00:40:59.440] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, I’ll get a by your response. I was quite right about this thing.
[00:41:06.210] – Mike Stott
I’ve known my wife for 10 years, and even now she’s like, What the hell do you do? I’m like, CRM? And she’s like, What is that? So I think that’s the the challenge is it’s such a wide term. And even when people… We probably get, I don’t know, this has probably been, again, low balling the numbers, but at least a couple of feature requests a week for CRM. And a lot of them aren’t CRM. And it’s so wide-ranging that they just want it to do employee leave management. They want it to do performance reviews. That’s not a CRM. So a lot of it is people are trying to grow the business. When you think of the outcome of a product is what we’re trying to do with this solution. And we went with CRM because we wanted a way for leads to become customers. So that’s the main thing. You have your website, you’ve got a form, you want to lead, and you want to then convert that to a customer if you can, if you do that.
[00:42:05.390] – Jonathan Denwood
So I think that was the thing. It’s only the first time I’ve interrupted you during this interview. No worries. Because I’m trying to cut down interrupting. So really, you were more into, and I like your response, you were more in the area of what Fluent CRM does. Is that correct?
[00:42:26.450] – Mike Stott
Not quite, no. So Fluent is very much marketing automation side of things, whereas we were essentially aimed more at the small businesses and the people trying to get out of the spreadsheets, get out of the thousands of notes on your desk and just say, get yourself organized, get the data you want from your forms into your CRM.
[00:42:48.880] – Jonathan Denwood
So more like Zolo, maybe.
[00:42:53.040] – Mike Stott
Zolo? Do you mean Zohal?
[00:42:56.620] – Jonathan Denwood
Pardon?
[00:42:59.270] – Mike Stott
Zohal. Soho.
[00:43:01.380] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, Zohal. Sorry, it’s my pronunciation. Soho CRM.
[00:43:06.260] – Mike Stott
Probably it’s similar. We’ve always been quotes, invoices, contacts, trying to get the plumbers, the roofers, the every person CRM to help people not rely on spreadsheets and start using everything in one place. So you don’t need to sign into all these different tools. That is all in a central location. So there’s different businesses So again, all these CRMs, they are targeting different use cases. So we just seen a comment come in.
[00:43:39.110] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m sorry. That was me. I didn’t mean to distract you guys.
[00:43:41.940] – Mike Stott
Oh, no, isn’t it?
[00:43:42.670] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sometimes I put notes in for the audience.
[00:43:46.110] – Jonathan Denwood
I was boring, Mark, anyway. No, I’m not even kidding. Over to you, Kurt, for the next question.
[00:43:53.970] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I’m like a sweet dash user because I signed up for a lifetime… I’m a sucker for a lifetime deal. And so I use that for years. But then when I was studying your product, it does invoicing and interacts with Woocommerce and stuff like that. I see it more like a… Almost like, yeah, manages customers, but project management, invoicing, proposals. It’s more like a sweet dash solution for WordPress, which to me is super interesting.
[00:44:17.360] – Jonathan Denwood
It is. But you can see the problem with this. Like I say, I think Mike agrees with me, and I love you for doing that, Mike, because most of the guests don’t, but I don’t blame them. But It is very difficult because manage hosting, it’s such a diluted term. You got to spend so much energy trying to explain and position in precisely which area of this very diluted, broad picture that you’re going to plant your flag in. That can be frustrating. Sorry, I interrupted, Kirk, but I’ve been a good boy. No, no, it’s all good. I’ve been a good boy, haven’t I?
[00:44:59.800] – Kurt von Ahnen
You have. Let’s just jump on. So we’ve mentioned AI a ton. So give up the goods, Mike. What are the tools or services that you use on a regular basis? It’s got to be more than just ChatGPT, right?
[00:45:16.230] – Mike Stott
It is. So I use quite a lot of AI in coding editors now. So I still tinker around with learning different AI tools and things like N8n is quite a nice one. So get your workflows running I’ve been using Kleinbot, which is quite good for… Again, it’s another VS Code extension that you can choose which model that you use out of lots of different ones. So it’s not just the cursor, basic and things like that. So I use that quite a lot for things like thinking around programmatic SEO and things like that. It’s been quite useful to talk to ChatGPT on one side and say this is what I’m thinking. And then I’ll give the output from ChatGPT into the editor and say, okay, I’m trying to grow my personal brand. So what things could I look at? So you’re both in the US. If you were to open up Google and search best newsletters, then I’m actually somehow starting to write number one for best newsletters on my personal website because of this experiment with programmatic SEO. So I don’t know how I’ve done that, but that was very much AI-driven around how do I use to help me with content and personal brand building and that type of thing.
[00:46:35.590] – Mike Stott
So I use ChatGP for that. I’ve used Jetpack AI since that came out just to help me structure my outlines to articles as well and then start creating them. I did use the image generation of jet pack AI very early on when it was like DALL-E and that was quite painful to try and get it to do any images with the right things. But that’s starting to move on. I do use ChatGPT to, literally, as my little imposter syndrome therapist, sometimes when I’m feeling like I’ve…
[00:47:08.120] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve got Kirk for that. So He still laughs so much. I can be quite amazing, Kirk. I might be bonkers, but I am amazing. It is. Not all the time, though, am I? No.
[00:47:25.360] – Mike Stott
And then the other thing we’ve just been trying recently, because my wife runs a travel business. And she’s had me build when I was on sabbatical class in June for my Automatic. I said, I’ll help you get your WordPress website out. And then so we did it. And I was like, I don’t like it anymore. So I’m like, I don’t have time to build you a whole new thing.
[00:47:44.340] – Jonathan Denwood
The boss has spoken. She’s spoken.
[00:47:47.560] – Mike Stott
So she’s got this idea. Like a web project. So I’m the CTO of her travel business somewhere. I didn’t sign up for this. I said, give the wordpress. Com AI builder a try because you can chat with it. You can do all the images and things. You can learn a little bit as you do it because she is a complete beginner. And so she’s been really enjoying that side of things. But I say they’re the main things with AI that I use. For now, when I am wanting to experiment with Hey, Jen, if you’ve ever heard of Hey, Jen, for doing videos and tutorials and things. So I tried it a while back and it was eerie and the person wasn’t breathing. So when it did It’s a decent video. I can’t watch myself because it was just like the body was still, but the head was moving. So I think that’s moved on a bit now as models are getting better.
[00:48:40.080] – Jonathan Denwood
It sounds like a pain, Mike.
[00:48:42.960] – Mike Stott
Well, we’re actually talking to an AI the whole time.
[00:48:48.070] – Jonathan Denwood
I think a lot of the audience would want that, actually. But there we go. All right, let’s move on.
[00:48:55.850] – Kurt von Ahnen
You’re it, Jonathan.
[00:48:57.880] – Jonathan Denwood
So if you had your time machine or TARDIS, Doctor Who, I’m showing my age, and you could go back to the beginning of your career and just have a quick five minute chat with yourself. And there was one little tip, insight you would like to share. Is there anything that comes to your mind, apart from not coming on this podcast?
[00:49:19.860] – Mike Stott
No, this has been good because my career has been split into two. I’m going to probably say two little tips. So my first one would be, don’t commute to work if you can help it. Because since I left, I’ve been working remotely since 2016. We spent 2017 and 2018 traveling the world on a honeymoon, just working from everywhere. And thinking back to it, when I was working in an office, I would probably spend sometimes three hours a day sat in a car. And I’m thinking, over the period, that’s a lot of time. It’s a lot of money in petrol as well. So that would be my first thing.
[00:49:59.080] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s gas for our American audience. When I go back to the UK to see my family, they think I speak American there. I got told off by my older sister, when I start using terms like gas and other terms. She said, What the hell are you saying? But I think I’m still very English, actually. So it’s commuting, it’s keeping away from the commuting. That’s the main thing.
[00:50:27.630] – Mike Stott
So that’d be one tip, and then So back to how American have you become, do you say aluminum still? Or do you say aluminum? Oh, aluminum.
[00:50:37.360] – Jonathan Denwood
I can’t even pronounce aluminum. I do have a speech Which, I was going to say defect, I have a slight problem around that on certain words, but I could be very fluent in other words, as Kurt will We’ll say. I think it’s time to wrap up the podcast. Are you up for another 10 minutes or do you have to clear off?
[00:51:08.190] – Mike Stott
No, I’m good.
[00:51:09.800] – Jonathan Denwood
Because Kurt’s got a hard deadline. He’s going to go off and run another online forum, whatever. We’re going to end the podcast. Mike, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?
[00:51:25.810] – Mike Stott
Sure. I say probably the easiest way, you can just find me on Twitter. It’s at mikes. Wp, and then my website is just mikes. Me, so it’s nice and easy to find. Or you can Google best newsletters and get there that way.
[00:51:42.530] – Jonathan Denwood
We will be. And Kurt, What’s the best way for people to find out more about you, what you’re up to in your latest thoughts?
[00:51:51.780] – Kurt von Ahnen
I keep seeing people say, Find me on X, and I agree, I’m there, but my main thing is LinkedIn. I’m the only Kurt von Ahnen on so you know you got me.
[00:52:02.860] – Jonathan Denwood
You got him there. It’s been a great show. We’re going to have some bonus content, which you’ll be able to watch the whole podcast and the bonus content on the WP Tonic YouTube channel. It’s rapidly growing. I’m going to, hopefully in the next month or two months, get up to 10,000 subscribers. Love you to join there and watch the bonus content as well. I think by subscribing to the YouTube channel, you are supporting WP Tonic and this podcast. And we would appreciate that. We will be back next week with another great interview. We’ve got some fabulous guests. I’m fully booked up till July, and we’ve got some fantastic people like Mike coming on the show. We will be back next week. You see you soon. Bye. So the bonus content. The bonus content. I want to get back to your experience is XeroBS because do you think that was one… Because obviously, I can tell that you are an entrepreneur. You understand what you got to do. Was it one of the things that was slowing its growth? It was coming, and obviously, automatic could see real value with it. But was it that whole thing about being able to explain what it is quickly?
[00:53:43.780] – Jonathan Denwood
Because if you’re dealing with a complicated thing like a CRM, and you’ve only got 20 seconds to really hook somebody without misleading them and trying to explain in language that really means something to the target audience and hooks them so they stay on the page and read more. This is difficult stuff. This is not easy. Was Was one of the… I presume what you actually built technically did what it said it was going to do. But was it the whole area of really finding the right niche, the right language, and explaining it in a way that really related to the target audience? Is this some of the struggles you were always dealing with?
[00:54:40.520] – Mike Stott
No. So this is That’s a good question. So it was just the people side of things. So we were at the point where we were growing fast. We were trying to hire a support person. We were struggling to find an engineer. And then we just got an email through from Automatic to say, let’s have a explore collaborations and partnerships. And we just went from there. And then it just turned out that an acquisition would be a good fit. So that helped the products. And we weren’t thinking of exiting. We weren’t going to various people. We didn’t put any tenders out for other companies to bid for us because we always said, if we were to ever exit, it would have either been to someone like Automatic or someone like Base Camp at the time because they like very much remote work. So it was very much like it just seemed a good fit. Like everyone we spoke to at the time was super nice and they still are. Automatic is a great company. And it also like, fitted in like at the time of my life, where we just got married, we were expecting a baby, we needed that stability as well.
[00:55:58.190] – Mike Stott
And like being And the approach to be acquired by automatic didn’t happen very often either. So it was one of the things I would try.
[00:56:06.200] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s a great achievement. So I’ve got that bit wrong. So you did find that you had found the right target audience, and was it around what it basically does? It’s more about being your central hub to allow you to organize your small business.
[00:56:29.560] – Mike Stott
Yeah, Yeah. So we always targeted entrepreneurs, so people like ourselves. So about to use the product yourself every day was our main thing. We didn’t want to have a product that we never used. So we were using it every day. We were improving it for ourselves every day. Our target was always entrepreneurs trying to get their business off the ground, trying to get started. So it’s a very fitting conversation to this. But I think the wider, there’s a ton of entrepreneurs out there that probably don’t realize they could benefit from using Checkboxer So at the time it was ZBS CRM because we didn’t want any of the BS that were in the bigger ones. So we just aimed at that. It seemed to resonate, the name seemed to resonate with entrepreneurs, but maybe not so much with bigger companies that were like, I can’t sell this to my boss because it’s got a swear word in it. So a lot of the back and forth there. And I think that’s still the challenge, even to this day, is how do you get a website to realize that they should probably use a CRM? And even when I said my wife’s got travel business, she’s writing quotes, she’s sending invoices, she’s trying to get leads.
[00:57:34.310] – Mike Stott
That’s what she’s trying to do. But then she’s like, isn’t sure she needs a CRM. So then unless I’m sitting down and my concierging her through the process and saying, connect your from here and then it’ll text you when somebody fills you in, fills the form in, and then you can go and reach out to that person. That’s the benefit of doing it, that you’re seeing everything in one place. So that’s been the main thing is just it’s still the awareness of you can do it and it can sit in your WordPress website. You don’t need to be logging in over there. You don’t need to be using spreadsheets. And there’s a number of real users I’ve spoken to over the past few months as well that are still doing the same things. They’re still managing the contact data in spreadsheets. They’re having Google folders with driver’s licenses in to verify the ID and bringing all that into one place next to your promotional Our website is the benefit of using a CRM tool. But like you say, it’s such a broad term that it is hard to-Well, it’s very difficult because funny enough, a couple of months, I do another…
[00:58:44.250] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I do a couple of other podcast on that. Bonkers, Mike. I actually have a product, which is a CRM, but it’s in the real estate industry sector. And in the podcast, we were doing a review of free CRMs, not solely aimed at the real estate market, but the broader market that might be adapted for a real estate agent. It was quite surprising that there is a lot of competition in the sector, but a lot of it is really very rubbish. Even their website The one that I… I think it’s ClickBank. They do a good free version, but the problem is they’ve thrown everything in it. If you’re just an average small business person, you logged into it, there’s so much in it. You find that with a lot of CRM systems. They are truly feature-rich. I’m going to pronounce it. I was confusing you with my pronunciation, ZOO CRM. It’s quite similar, but ZOO, the company, has got so many products. Some of them are quite good. Others are very mediocre. Others are pretty good. I think they’re CRM, but they’ve got all these add-ons, and the free product has some very arbitrary restrictions on it that don’t totally cripple it, but really don’t make it as useful as possible.
[01:00:50.390] – Jonathan Denwood
So it’s a very competitive market, but in some ways it isn’t as competitive as people think, because I still see a load of opportunities to you there. What’s your own thoughts?
[01:01:03.440] – Mike Stott
Yeah, I agree. So again, back to my wife’s example. So there’s 150,000 independent travel agents across the US and UK as part of the company that she affiliates with. So it’s more popular in the US. But those 150,000 travel agents all need a easy to use CRM. They need a website where people can book it. And so if you look at, if you add up installs of all the WordPress CRMs, you’re not even going to hit that single vertical use case. And then when you look at all the plumbers in the world and all the builders and all the people that never get back to you with a quote, all those people can benefit from moving things online and being reminded. And even as AI starts to build into that type of software to say, okay, you’ve not followed up with this person. Let me do it for you. So I think there is still a lot of opportunity, but it seems to be slower. I was expecting it to be faster when we created the WordPress CRM, there was very few CRMs. And even now it still feels like there’s a lot of upside potential when we start getting all of these small businesses off some of these tools, like ClickFunnels and things like that, onto WordPress and onto a CRM for the business, because that’s what…
[01:02:24.740] – Mike Stott
The 150,000 of these travel agencies, they all get a website as part of their subscription, but it’s not WordPress, and it’s really hard to do anything with, and it doesn’t have all the extra stuff that she’s now finding that she would like as she starts to grow. So Instagram feeds and all of that. So I think there is an opportunity to grow WordPress, to get people, all these entrepreneurs and small businesses onto WordPress, onto CRM, and take it that way.
[01:02:51.950] – Jonathan Denwood
Just to finish off at the beginning of the conversation, I think it’s been a really interesting conversation I think we’ve covered some areas that you don’t normally see, so regularly around WordPress. Around AI, I always see business is that normally most people in business, either they lose a lot of money or they can make a reasonable living, and then there’s a few people that make a lot of money. The people that make a lot of money, I They need a strong work focus. Not always, but they do. And for various reasons, they just stick at it. But they need to… And I think in business, there’s always what I call, pinch points. There’s always a narrowing of the flow. And if you have control or you’re in a sector that is having a pinch point, that’s when you get explosive growth and explosive opportunity. Now, I just see with online marketing, and website is part of online marketing. I see things, I see AI as being a disruptor, and it clearly is. Because the pinch point at the beginning of the late ’90s, early 2000s, maybe even up to the mid 2010s, Having just a functional, decent website gave you edge.
[01:04:52.400] – Jonathan Denwood
Then we had the rise of social media, which you know about because you built a good plugin. Social media became the thing, and it’s still there, but around TikTok, around YouTube, where I think the actions of Facebook, Meta, Twitter, NowX, around reducing organic reach and having to pay money. I think that’s one of the reasons why Meta is really looking at cutting out the small business agencies that are running campaigns for smaller businesses, because they can absorb that margin. Because Facebook has become so expensive to small businesses to get any reach that they’ve backed off on it to some degree. Where do you think the pinch point is going to be on online marketing? Have Have you got any view about this, or is it so up in the air still that there is no clear answer to that?
[01:06:07.450] – Mike Stott
I think it’s just moving fast. I think what will happen is it’ll be more important to own your own content, so have your own story on your own website, and then AI can help accelerate what you produce. So whether that’s different microsites for your business, whether it’s different directories, whether it’s programmatic SEO parts of your website to get more traffic. I think Google will still send traffic your way, even in the age of the AI snippets where you might do a search term, but now you see maybe five websites that you go and visit instead of just the top one. So I think it will help smaller businesses to have more importance on getting your website out there, getting the content out there, and just doing this marketing, doing this talking, and people buying from people, as opposed to just seeing a brand. I’ve seen a number of tweets where people say, If you don’t have an About page about you, then I ain’t going to touch your product. I need to know who’s behind it. I need to know if it’s somebody that I can connect with. And a lot of… Over the 10, 15 years I’ve been doing this, Probably the number one differentiator is the support and the ability to talk to the person behind the product as well, like with the users.
[01:07:21.590] – Mike Stott
They much prefer that than just having this cool product that they can’t get in touch with anybody with. They would rather choose maybe the not so cool product where it’s super fast to support. They can talk to the people behind it. They feel like they’re being heard. It’s more important than that. And if you don’t have your website with all of the background, if you don’t start building up your personal brand, then it’s going to be harder to build that trust and authority in whatever you decide to do.
[01:07:52.110] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think you’re really spot on. It’s like wind against tide. We seem to have competing flows, where I think people want… I totally agree with what you’ve just outlined, yet then we’ve also got this, Oh, you can automate everything. You don’t even have to be a real person. Like me, I’m not real. Can you see where I’m coming from? We seem to have these two totally contradictory flows at the same time. Do you think I’m right about that?
[01:08:32.720] – Mike Stott
Yeah, I think you’ll try it. I tried it for a little while. I tried again, in sabbatical, I used vibe coding to build a Twitter engagement bot that essentially was supposed to tweet like me and do a tweet every half an hour, looking at the history of my tweets to say this is what my tone is like. And it just produced nonsense. So even though I was trying to automate it, people were DMing me, asking if that was a recent tweet. I’m like, no, it wasn’t. And they’re like, well, I follow you because I follow you, not for the number of times you tweet. So I think it’s always going back to trust and authenticity and the personality of the person you choose to do business with. Sure, the products are… If it’s the best product in the world, it will attract many users. So there is that trade-off and, like you said, the wind against the water. It’s tough. At this point, what you automate and what you do not automate will be a challenge as well.
[01:09:35.450] – Jonathan Denwood
I think you’re spot on on that. I’ll give you a little… It’s just a personal date. I’ve noticed a bit about my usage of YouTube, and after I noticed my behavior, I thought about it. If people are putting on informational content, and it’s obvious they’re using AI and they’re using AI for the voice, and you can’t see them, or if you do see them, you can tell that it’s an AI figure, I tend to block the channel.
On the other hand, some people make small films and use AI video creatively. I watch some of them, I like them, and I follow their channel. Up front, it’s all being produced using AI video, but they’re using AI to make a story. Do you think my reaction is just peculiar to me, or is my reaction to how AI has been used on YouTube? Probably the same reaction to a lot of people?
[01:11:04.380] – Mike Stott
I think it depends on the type of AI content. So I quite like the Fireship YouTube channel because it feels AI-generated, but I don’t think it is. And that’s got probably four million followers now on YouTube, subscribers on YouTube. And it covers all the trending topics in coding and tech. I could see that moving more and more AI-wise. But when you see some of the AI stuff, which is definitely AI robotic voice, then I’m like, you have it, I can’t watch this. And I think people are just trying to put the content out there to try and get quick money through gaming trends. So I think that’s a similar thing.
[01:11:52.490] – Jonathan Denwood
You get a feeling that you’ve been conned. I think it’s not quite that. It’s just got the taste of it.
[01:12:03.090] – Mike Stott
Yeah, but then the ones that are done well, that they’ve spent the time on, like crafting AI into the story and using AI to help do the storytelling. Even if it’s got specific snippets of the person throughout the video, I think that’s fine. As long as it’s got that story and engagement, and it’s not too AI, then I think that works quite well.
[01:12:24.200] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. It’s been a fantastic discussion, Mike. I think you need to go off and sort your children, whatever. Mike, what’s the best way for people to learn more about you?
[01:12:37.510] – Mike Stott
Again, probably Twitter is the best way. I am on LinkedIn as well. Just search Mike Stott, and Twitter is @ MikeStottWP. Again, my website is just micestott. Me. And then you can find me around Jetpackseram. Again, pretty much all over the place.
[01:12:57.520] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s been a fantastic discussion. Hopefully, you’ll decide to come back and have another conversation with us. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
[01:13:05.260] – Mike Stott
Thank you.
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