From The Longest Night To Making $114,238 in 15 Days
We have a great interview coming up with Dustin, founder and CEO of the popular AI tool Magai. He has an amazing personal story, and we will also discuss some of the major lessons he has learnt from growing Majai. Why don’t you join us live with your questions for Dustin?
Special Guest Dustin W. Stout, Founder & CEO of Magai.co.
This Week’s Sponsors
Kinta: Kinta
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:45.540] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 985. We’ve got a returning guest here. We’ve founded a really successful SaaS-based business, Magi, and we got Dustin. Dustin’s out with us, and he’s going to be talking about his journey. We got some great questions for him. He said he liked the questions, so it should be a good show. It should be a great discussion about the realities of building a successful SaaS at the end of 2025. I don’t know where the years ‘ gone. It’s just blur, basically. So, Dustin, would you like to do a quick 10, 15-second intro to the tribe? And then when we come back, we can delve a bit more into your background.
[00:01:41.520] – Dustin W. Stout
Sure. My name’s Dustin, CEO and founder of Magi, the all-in-one AI platform, the last AI subscription you’ll ever need. And also a big WordPress buff. I’ve been building WordPress sites. I’ve built WordPress sites for about 12 years or so. Started My first SaaS was actually a WordPress plugin, and I left that company in 2020 to start a couple of other ventures. And long story short, AI hit, and I saw the writing on the wall and thought, you know what? Let’s make AI as accessible as possible for the average person. Here we are with Magi today.
[00:02:21.560] – Jonathan Denwood
You’ve certainly done that. I’ve got my great co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:02:30.980] – Kurt von Ahnen
Absolutely, Jonathan. My name is Kurt, Kurt von Annen. I own an agency called Manana No Mas. We also work directly with the great team at WP Tonic.
[00:02:40.040] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, as I mentioned, we’re going to be talking to Dustin about his struggles before he started Magi, how he dealt with them, and what the journey has been like. He’s built a fabulous business. He’s done really fantastically with it. I think he’s up for giving us some real insights about the process. It should be a really informative show. But before we get into the meat and potatoes, I have 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. I also want to point out that we have some special offers from our sponsors, as well as a curated list of the best WordPress plugins and services for power users, small freelancers, and agency owners. It’s a great list. It will save you a ton of time. And, as I mentioned, there are some fantastic deals from the show’s sponsors. You can get all these goodies by visiting wp-tonic. Com/deals, wp-tonic. Com/deals, where you’ll find all the goodies. What more can you ask for, my beloved tribe? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page.
[00:04:05.120] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m sorry to disappoint. I’ve made a career of it. Let’s go straight to Justin. Could you provide us with some background information about what was happening before you started Magi, particularly the 12 months leading up to its launch? What was going on? You’ve been quite open about some of the struggles in your posts and other podcast appearances. But maybe you can give the tribe a background, those 12 months leading up to the launch.
[00:04:44.540] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah, so we really need to back up a little bit further. Like I said, I started a WordPress plugin company. I had two partners in that business, and we did fairly well. It became quite a well-known plugin in the WordPress space.
[00:04:57.460] – Jonathan Denwood
Can I ask what it was, actually?
[00:05:00.000] – Dustin W. Stout
It was called Social Warfare. It was a social sharing.
[00:05:04.240] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah.
[00:05:06.160] – Dustin W. Stout
So we were the founders of it. And after several years of doing quite well with it, my partners and I, if I say we drifted apart, I was in the business every single day, and they both had other projects that they were working on. And so we just grew apart creatively, just strategically. We had different ideas. And in 2020, I finally decided to to exit that company. At that point, we had many, many competitors just flat out copying our product, and I needed to move on to something else. And so I exited. But this was actually in the midst of a lot of personal crisis. So in 2019, my wife started to have a lot of mysterious health issues, and she was struggling a lot with her health. And I was trying my best to be a good husband and a dad to three kids and keeping it all together. Meanwhile, my My business was failing, and I knew I needed to exit. All the while, feeling like nothing I was doing was actually working, struggling with depression, and just all the pressures of life really started to cave in on me. I began to have thoughts of just ending it all and not wanting to be around, feeling like I’m failing as a husband, failing as a father, failing as a businessman.
[00:06:24.300] – Dustin W. Stout
And then I had a friend who is a very outspoken advocate for suicide prevention and mental health, very prominent in the online space, he actually took his life, and that was devastating to me. But just an all too real reminder that we need to talk more about mental health, and we need to surround ourselves with people who are going to lift us up, and they’re going to support us in our time of need, not run away because they’re only chasing to to be aligned with the people who are winning at life every single day. So 2019 was rough. 2020 exited the company that I helped start.
[00:07:12.260] – Jonathan Denwood
This is the plugin. This is the plugin.
[00:07:14.700] – Dustin W. Stout
Plugin Company. Yeah, I exited that company in 2020 and had two ideas for products that I thought were really great ideas. The problem was that both of these products were multimillion dollar product ideas that were going to take a lot of resources to build. So I had I had to find a way to get some resources. I didn’t have a lot. And I had to find a way to MVP both of these products into a much cheaper, easier to execute product. Long story short, I found a couple of investors who gave me $15,000 each to build these products, launched them. It took about six or nine months for both of them to be released into the wild, and they both failed miserably. I got maybe a few dozen users to sign up, but the traction was not there.
[00:08:09.800] – Jonathan Denwood
Can I ask a quick question before we go on to the next question about that? Because you’re a smart cookie. You’re no idiot. I like to think so. No, I know you’re not. I’ve been told. No, you’re no idiot. You can be as bright as you like, and you still have blind spots. We’re just human, but you’re no idiot. Have you come to any conclusion why these two products failed?
[00:08:42.240] – Dustin W. Stout
Oh, absolutely. It was really just a matter of product-market fit and finding a unique value proposition that was greater than the current solutions on the market. So the primary product was really a social media graphics generator. What What I wanted it to be, what I envisioned it to be, was an AI-powered social media graphics generator. But this was well before AI was accessible to anyone. This was even before the Jasper and the copy AIs of the world, pre-ChatGPT. I mean, it wasn’t even accessible. So I would have needed to raise $100 million just to get the real version of the product down. So what I ended up doing was tearing it down to you can create a social media graphics in bulk by filling out a form. And that was all we could do at the time with the resources that we had. And the value proposition just wasn’t there. People were already using Canva, and it was just easier for people. They already knew how to use Canva and the Canva’s magic resize to get the different size graphics. So we just didn’t have a compelling enough value proposition to get people to make the change.
[00:09:57.000] – Dustin W. Stout
Getting people to change their behavior and their established tools and workflows is incredibly hard. And we just did not have our little MVP that in the end probably cost me closer to $40,000 to build. Just wasn’t enough. And all the marketing skill I had could not convince people. So two years of just grinding, trying to find a way to make that product work. And then the other product, which was called Social Remix, the idea was you We’ll put in a link to your blog post and we’ll create a bunch of social media assets out of it. Zero AI.
[00:10:35.440] – Jonathan Denwood
That sounds interesting.
[00:10:37.060] – Dustin W. Stout
It did. It sounded very interesting. But this was, again, before AI, so it was not AI-powered at all. It was just pulling little snippets, right? You had to fill out a form. Again, you type through it. And the resulting graphics and assets just weren’t super compelling. So we couldn’t really convince people that it was worth paying an ongoing recurring- Couldn’t you got army of fibers?
[00:11:05.680] – Jonathan Denwood
People done it manually, but there’s loads of AI companies that say, Oh, I’m going to go all the- Yeah, in the pre-AI world, it just wasn’t good enough.
[00:11:19.040] – Dustin W. Stout
Two years of grinding and just feeling like an utter failure, like I can’t come up with a good idea to save my life. I probably burned through $65,000. Our savings were gone.
[00:11:31.740] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s 60… Because you’ve been really upfront about this, and I don’t want to push you in any direction. Well, you seem to.
[00:11:41.640] – Dustin W. Stout
I’m an open book.
[00:11:42.620] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, right. Because I’m English, so I’m a bit like Scandinavian, we don’t discuss money and that, but I do now. You burnt through a lot of your savings and burnt through this investor’s money. So where were you? Because you said your wife had some health problems. Was she still working? Did she have a job?
[00:12:09.740] – Dustin W. Stout
She had never worked, actually. As long as we’ve been married, she did nanny for a while and did some, I guess, tutoring. But that was very brief when our kids were very young. But I mean, ever since, I think it was around 2012 or ’13, maybe, she hadn’t worked since then. And so she was just a stay at home mom. But she She was having a lot of these very mysterious and strange health issues that no doctor could help figure out. Thankfully, near the end of this journey that I was on with these two failed products, her health had recovered. She was doing much better. She was finally able to start looking for work because I had had… I mean, I was at my wits end. I really thought there was nothing- And your relation was solid because unfortunately, a lot of relationships, they break up when there’s some…
[00:13:05.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, the real reasons were there from the beginning, but it sounds like you had a strong relationship there.
[00:13:11.210] – Dustin W. Stout
Well, yeah. God blessed me with the best woman in the world, and she has more faith than I do at times when things are hard. She was the one that kept me going.
[00:13:29.420] – Jonathan Denwood
For It means, emotionally and financially, Dustin, aren’t too great.
[00:13:37.820] – Dustin W. Stout
They were dire. I was really worried about how I was going to pay my mortgage, how I was going to raise my kids.
[00:13:42.760] – Jonathan Denwood
There’s a lot of people that say that, and you find out that it wasn’t really.
[00:13:49.520] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah, no, our bank accounts were empty. I had started taking on a few more clients again. I had two clients that were just keeping us afloat. At that point, my runway from the exit of the WordPress company, the runway had run out. My payout had finished, and I had two clients that were just paying me enough for us to get by. I had actually started looking for work. So I, for the first time in 12, 14 years maybe, had started applying for jobs and applied for many companies. I went even through seven different interviews at two different companies just for them to tell me, No, sorry, you seem like a flight risk, so we’re going to go a different direction. Both companies- I love that, every year, a flight risk.
[00:14:43.760] – Jonathan Denwood
I love it.
[00:14:45.740] – Dustin W. Stout
Because they knew I’m an entrepreneur and I have ideas. At that point, I was ready to give it up. I was ready to just stop trying to be an entrepreneur because everything was failing. I had not seen a win in two years at that point.
[00:14:59.540] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I think you’ve been a little bit harsh on yourself. The plugin you just mentioned for a time was a really big plugin in the WordPress space, wasn’t it? So I think you’ve been a little bit… So I’m interacting a little bit too much.
[00:15:14.460] – Dustin W. Stout
Well, it’s hard to see through the clouds, right? When you’re in a storm, it’s really difficult to see through those clouds. I mean, you can- Tell me. Yeah. Because you can have all these successful moments in life, and you have these thoughts of like, Well, that was then. And what about now? Have I passed my peak? Am I no longer creative enough? Am I no longer smart enough? Am I no longer good enough? Has the world passed me by? You start having all these intrusive thoughts, right? And it’s just the clouds that are around you. You can’t see through it. That’s why you need good people. That’s why I thank God for my wife, because she was able to see through those clouds.
[00:15:53.120] – Jonathan Denwood
She believed in me. Things are looking so where did the essence of Magi come from then? Where did the idea- There was this moment where, again, I was in a very dark place, but I knew I had to press forward every day.
[00:16:13.660] – Dustin W. Stout
My family depended on me, and my wife had started looking for work. She’s now a teacher at a Christian school teaching middle schoolers. But I had to keep these clients happy. And then ChatGPT hit the scene. I was one of the first people to sign up for the public version of ChatGPT. I started using it, and I thought to myself, oh, my gosh, this is what we’ve been waiting for. We’ve had AI copywriting tools up to then. Jasper was already established, copy AI and all the thousand the copy cats of copy AI. They were around at that point, and I’d use them, but they were really bulky. They were hard to use. They were all predicated on fill out this form to do this template, and then search through these templates to get these And it was like walking into Netflix and going, what am I going to watch today? It’s like, well, what template do I need today? And it was difficult and bulky to use. But when ChatGPT came and it said, just tell the AI what you want, and it gives it to you. And then you can have a conversation and have it edit itself.
[00:17:18.600] – Dustin W. Stout
This was mind-blowing to me. And it was almost like I had a vision of what the next three to five years is going to look like and where this technology was going. And it was just one of those things, I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced a product or a technology or anything in life, really, where the minute you interact with it, you feel like you understand it in a way that you can start really applying things to it. And so I just started applying the technology to my client’s work, to my work, and I just understood it and started to learn more and more about it just to take advantage of it. But just like any good product person, any good entrepreneur, you start to use something daily and regularly, you start to see all the cracks. You start to see all the gaps. You’re like, Oh, this is great, but why doesn’t it do this? And why doesn’t it have this thing? And why can’t I just search through my chats? Man, I wish I could put these into folders. I wish I could be more organized and have workspaces so I could separate my client work from my personal work.
[00:18:20.040] – Dustin W. Stout
All these little things, they start to pile up. As an entrepreneur, you’re like, Well, maybe I can think of a way to make a better version of this. That’s exactly the feeling I had was, What if I could make a better ChatGPT? Just a better interface for ChatGPT, because that’s my forte was building interfaces.
[00:18:41.020] – Jonathan Denwood
I was wondering this. So your experience, you are designing- Yeah, I started as a designer.
[00:18:47.880] – Dustin W. Stout
Started as a graphic designer, taught myself web design. And by web design, I mean I would customize WordPress themes. And that’s what I did for clients for many, many years before starting the WordPress plugin company. The thing I realized about building websites for people was I was really good at it. I could make things look really good, but I took too long. I was the designer who would spend an hour and a half trying to figure out how round and what color the button should be, and that doesn’t scale very well. I could help maybe three or four clients at a time, but I couldn’t scale my perfectionism.
[00:19:23.720] – Jonathan Denwood
So you experience UX interface designer. You got this idea. We all got ideas, but the difference between you, you made the idea a real product. How did that… Did you know some developer types that could help you? Because you used- Yeah, I did.
[00:19:50.100] – Dustin W. Stout
But the thing is, I couldn’t pay them.
[00:19:52.480] – Jonathan Denwood
They won’t help you then, will they?
[00:19:55.060] – Dustin W. Stout
Right, and they weren’t money. They’re not interested unless you can give them the gold, isn’t it?
[00:20:01.750] – Jonathan Denwood
Even if you’re going to give them half the company.
[00:20:03.600] – Dustin W. Stout
I’m a firm believer of pay people what they’re worth, and so I wasn’t going to cheap out it. I literally had no money to pay anyone. So what I had to do was figure out, okay, I have no money. I have Free time. That’s really the only resource I had at the time. And I have to make something work. My mortgage and my kids food and clothes depends on me figuring something out. And so I just And I just decided I’m going to figure out how to make a better version of ChatGPT without having to hire developers because I can’t afford to. And so I just went to work researching no code tools that were out there, looking at the framer and all these other things, Bubble, and a bunch of other no-code apps that were popping up left and right, and happened to find a course creator. His name’s Seth. He has a website called no-code. Mba, and he had a course about how to build an AI chatbot using APIs of all these different companies. And so I took that course and I was like, Oh, my gosh, I can build exactly what I’m wanting to build.
[00:21:12.760] – Jonathan Denwood
What node code builder did you use?
[00:21:15.440] – Dustin W. Stout
Bubble. So I started with Bubble.
[00:21:17.420] – Jonathan Denwood
Bubble, you use Bubble. You do. All right.
[00:21:18.840] – Dustin W. Stout
And I just learned as much as I can, as fast as I can. It reminded me of when I was learning WordPress.
[00:21:24.260] – Jonathan Denwood
See, I know what you’ve done. I don’t care if this is a You’re a real fighter, Dustin. I give you 12 out of 10. I don’t normally say that. I don’t normally say this, Dustin. God, sorry. Keep going. I’ll keep interrupting.
[00:21:47.210] – Dustin W. Stout
Well, yeah. I took the course on how to learn Bubble, and then I looked up 100 other different YouTube videos, how to build things on Bubble. And every step of the way, I’m just learning, how do I I put this vision that’s in my head into reality. I know people are going to benefit from this. I know how business owners work. I know how professionals work. Right now, ChatGPT just isn’t enough for them. So I need to build these features that will help make life easier. And oh, wait, there’s these other companies out there that are competing with ChatGPT. Claude is really good. And then Google at the time, theirs was called Bard. I don’t know if anybody remembers that. It wasn’t called Gemini. But I was like, oh, well, all these different models, they seem to have different strengths, what if I could bring them all into one app so people don’t have to have 15 different subscriptions? And I can bring an image generation, too. I can probably figure out how to incorporate that. And what if I could build… And again, this is coming from having had a subscription-based business before. The plugin was a yearly subscription.
[00:22:50.640] – Dustin W. Stout
And already my customer research in that told me that people are getting burned out from having so many subscriptions. Subscription fatigue was a real And so I thought, well, now it’s going to be overload because they’re going to have to have five different AI subscriptions. What if I could put them all in one place? That’s going to solve a major problem financially and logistically. Putting them all in one interface makes it easier to use, makes it more accessible. And the fact that you can use them against each other or with each other in tandem, that’s a huge utility. So I knew I had the value proposition starting to build with this product. But the The harsh reality was I’ve been so beaten down over the last two years that I still didn’t believe anybody would buy it. But I knew I had to build something, right? I was desperate. I had to build something and just pray to God, Lord, Lord.
[00:23:48.840] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve taken up almost 20 minutes of this interview, and my co-host has been really patient, but hopefully you can stay on and we’re going to have some bonus and we’ll come back. But I’m going to throw it over to Kirk for the next question, and then we deal with that, and then we probably extend it by five minutes, and then we go for our middle break. Over to you, Kirk.
[00:24:13.040] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, if anyone’s a regular listener or viewer, they’re probably going to think that I’m on your payroll, Dustin, because I seem to mention Magi quite a bit. So everything that you mentioned, for people that haven’t seen it, don’t understand it, the strength to me is you get the multiple sources of AI, but I really like the consolidated folders, the chat history, all of it’s there as someone that used, because I am not prolific in AI. I’m not some expert. So I would struggle like, Oh, did I look that up in grok? Did I look that up in ChatGPT? Can I find the history? Hey, I looked that up a month ago. Where the heck is it? But if I use the Magi format, it’s all right there in my folders, right? So that, to me, is worth the price of admission right there. I feel like you were starting to get to this next question about subscription fatigue. I have subscription fatigue. Again, regular listeners and viewers, they’ve heard me say, I am a sucker for a lifetime deal. My computer is full of lifetime deals. Half of them I don’t even use anymore.
[00:25:20.320] – Jonathan Denwood
Justin, I thought I was bad, but it’s a lot worse to me.
[00:25:26.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, Black Friday rolls around, and in the WordPress space, I’m like, buy it, buy it, buy it, buy it. So talk to me a little bit about your decision to offer a lifetime deal or not, the difference between a lifetime deal for revenue generation for a launch versus long term, or what are your insights or thoughts related to lifetime deals?
[00:25:50.820] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah, when I decided to do a lifetime deal, and I was heavily opposed to it at first, because I had done lifetime deals before previous products. Now, in the traditional SaaS space, software is fairly low margin, sorry, low cost, high margin. The cost to build a WordPress plugin and let people keep using it is almost zero. The only cost you have is whatever cost you have to pay the developers to keep updating it or the support person to answer the support questions. That’s the only cost. You don’t have to house or host the WordPress plugin, right? There’s no cost to that. You don’t have to pay every time somebody uses the WordPress plugin, right? They’re using their own resources to run it. So the cost is nil, really, in reality. But when it comes to AI, the cost is heavy. This is not a traditional SaaS model. This is more- It’s more like hosting in a way, isn’t it? Kind I actually liken it to retail because every time a transaction takes place, there’s a cost associated with it. I guess the same is true with the server. The server is running, and so there’s cost.
[00:27:10.900] – Dustin W. Stout
But it’s much higher with AI, especially image and video, because image and video is very expensive. One image, just the most simple basic image generator right now is going to cost you about six cents per image. And then you have VEO, Google’s video generator, An eight second video is going to cost you $3. 50. So it is a heavy, heavy cost for this AI. Now, the LLMs are much cheaper, but the longer the conversations get, the more expensive they are. So it’s almost like the weight of a fruit. The larger the fruit is, the more it costs. Well, the larger your chat conversation is, the more it costs every time you send a new message. So it’s a very complicated financial structure. So doing a lifetime deal for a product that costs more every time the customer uses it, you are risking a lot. And the reward has to be really worth it to be able to support a user who pays once and then gets that lifetime access to that product that costs you every time they use it. So you have to be really smart. You have to be really good at math.
[00:28:20.880] – Dustin W. Stout
Thankfully, I’m fairly good at math. And I had a friend named Charlie. Charlie runs and founded Rocket Hub, which is basically an AppSumo competitor. It’s a lifetime deal place where they run lifetime deals. Now, the difference with Rocket Hub is that Rocket Hub tends to have more high ticket lifetime deals, whereas AppSumo tends to stick around the $30, $40 deals, or at least it did. I think they’ve expanded a bit since then. Now, the other thing, too, is I’ve been approached several times by AppSumo. In fact, Noah Kagan reached out to me at least once wanting to acquire social warfare. And my partner- I bet he did. My partners declined. I was interested. My partners were not. But I was familiar with AppSumo, and they approach me to do lifetime deals for my other products that were failing. And when they told me the structure of these deals where they would keep 70% of the revenue and I would get 30.
[00:29:25.420] – Jonathan Denwood
70? 70?
[00:29:27.560] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah, a lot of people don’t know this. I was like, sorry, there’s no way I’m giving away 70% of my revenue, and especially with an AI product. Again, my costs are huge, so the reward would have to be massive. And at the time, you look at some of these AppSumo deals and you realize it really kills more businesses than it launches. So when Charlie approached me, he’s extremely smart. And so he explained, with our lifetime deals, we do a 50/50 split. We’ll do all the advertising. We take the advertising out of our cut of all the revenue, and we’ll give you all the assets we produce. We’ll produce graphics, we’ll produce ad copy, Facebook images. All the assets they produce, he gives over to us at the end. And he said, We could do a limited run. We’ll do only X number of things. And I was like, You know what? We’re early on. This was literally the first six months of Magia’s existence. It started to catch traction right away. So when I launched the product March 31st of 2023, just five months after ChatGPT hit the scene, I knew right away that people liked it.
[00:30:42.700] – Dustin W. Stout
So I thought, well, I don’t want to do all the marketing stuff that I did with my past failed products, because what if it fails again and that would really suck? And I’d rather just the product speak for itself and not do any marketing and just see if it spreads organically. But I decided to partner with Charlie because he gave me a really good… He made a great case for the lifetime deal. And so we did. We partnered together and we created a limited amount of different plan options and had, I think, three different plans that people could buy, three different levels. And within two weeks, we only ran it for two weeks. That was my other stipulation. I only want to do a limited supply, and I only want to do it for two weeks, where normally they run promotions for four weeks, like a full month. So I said, No, we’re only going to do it for two weeks. We’ll see how it goes. And that two weeks, we generated over $115,000 in sales. And I knew, well, this is going to be… We actually have something here. We have a product that people are really interested in and people really want and they really see value in and they’re willing to pay for.
[00:31:48.100] – Dustin W. Stout
So that was my experience with lifetime deals. I don’t recommend it for AI products unless you’re really good at risk mitigation and doing the math of what that actually looks like. But that was a risk I took, and I think it was well worth it.
[00:32:07.780] – Kurt von Ahnen
I feel like I almost want to follow up with this because I look at it like so a lot of people know that I work directly with Lifter LMS, and they have deals that they sell and stuff, periodically. And we’ve noticed, like you said, support, but it seems like the support is mostly front-end loaded. And when someone’s a user for any length of time, that support wanes And then you’re literally just taking that subscription over and over again. Or if it was a lifetime deal, that cost is mitigated over time. But with AI, and I hesitate to say it the way I’m going to say, but it’s going to come out. People don’t seem to get it. I think that with the AI space, I don’t know if that support would ever go away because everyone’s making these broad leap assumptions that AI is going to fix this, fix that, be automatic. And why doesn’t it do this? And why doesn’t it do that? And the guy on YouTube said it was easy. And I see that your ramp in your space doesn’t seem like it has a down slope. It seems like it would, if anything, just keep going up.
[00:33:14.920] – Dustin W. Stout
It is very difficult because exactly what you said, people have a lot of assumptions. They assume AI is just a computer, and it can do any computer thing that they tell it to do. That is not true, not by a long shot. So there is a lot of education we have to do. Our support team, I have a full-time support person. Actually, I have two full-time support people, and they are working nonstop to fulfill customer requests and answer questions. We have an AI agent that will also help to answer those questions and try to get them the help they need before it sends it to a human. And it works actually about 80 % of the time. About 80 % of our queries that come in, get answered and fulfilled by the AI agent. But our two support people are still working nonstop. And the large majority of requests, it’s not a bug with Magi or Magi fail, it’s something. It’s the user expected something to happen that the AI actually doesn’t do. Because maybe they saw another app do this? And they think, well, if that app can do it, all AI things can do it.
[00:34:18.900] – Dustin W. Stout
Well, no. The reality is AI is one thing, and then the tooling and the features built on top of the AI are completely separate and unique to that app. So, yeah, you’re right. There’s a lot of education and a lot of poor expectations, or rather just misaligned expectations of what AI can and can’t do. And we have to be the front line educating people about why that thing didn’t work and why it’s not as easy as they thought it might be. And it hasn’t slowed down. There are more… I mean, as education becomes more prolific in the space, we’ve invested heavily into a lot of AI content creators, giving them whatever resources they need, because I feel very passionately about the education of people in the world of AI. But even though that’s happening, there’s still so many people that don’t have the education. They don’t have the experience. And so their expectations are just out of left field sometimes. And we have to do our job to guide them in the right direction.
[00:35:24.100] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. Sometimes I feel like the average person thinks they’re on the USS enterprise and Star Trek. They walk into a in the room and say, Good morning, computer, execute X, Y, and Z for me. And then they’re like, oh, that didn’t work. This thing’s a piece of crap. It’s like, no, you’re just being crazy.
[00:35:40.660] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah. It’s something we deal with. And we expect. And we try our best to be compassionate because you never know where someone’s at with their AI usage. It might be the first time, it might be the third time. So we try our best to be compassionate and patient with people when they are angry that their expectations haven’t been met.
[00:36:04.700] – Kurt von Ahnen
And I think I’m going to have one more follow up on this, and I’ll pass it back to Jonathan. In our space, in the agency space, because now you were an agency for a while. You made sites, you had clients. Jonathan and I have had clients in the past where people vibe code something and they go, Oh, can you do this for us? And we go, Yeah, that’s going to be $7,000. And then they go, Oh, well, we’re going to hold off. And then three weeks later, they go, I asked ChatGPT, are you familiar with AI? I had a conversation and it made me my own plugin. I just need you to zip the file and load it to my site for me. I’m like, That’s not how the Internet works. We’re not into that game. And now we’re talking to you.
[00:36:48.920] – Jonathan Denwood
You’re on the other side of the fence. We’re going to zip all the liability to you.
[00:36:59.560] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s It’s interesting because we’re both on the same game, but we’re on the opposite side of that fence. And so how do you or how would you recommend agencies, because we have a lot of agencies that listen to the show, how would you recommend agencies deal with this scenario? Because to me, it’s bonkers nuts. But to 80 % of the society out there, they think, well, I see it generate code and plugins all the time. Why can’t you just use it?
[00:37:24.580] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah. Actually, yesterday, every week we do an AI Academy. So all Magi, you just have access to this weekly teaching where we teach something about AI. It was a little bit spur of the moment because it was sparked by a conversation. But I’m really passionate about this subject of vibe coding and the hype that surrounds it, that basically tells the person with zero code experience, Hey, you can build a fully functioning app with just telling the AI to do it for you. And You’ll make millions. And that’s as easy as it is. But the reality is it’s not that easy. And if you have any experience with code whatsoever, you know, and if you tried it, you know that these AI are not as good as they’re touted to be, as the hype wants you to believe. They run into errors all the time. They rewrite code and they break things and they fix things and then they break something else, and then they fix that, and then they break the that they fixed two steps ago, right? And they go into these endless loops. And so people just don’t realize how the pipe dream or the hype dream, like I call it, is just not what it is.
[00:38:46.300] – Dustin W. Stout
The reality is that it’s not easy to just code a plugin and make it work.
[00:38:51.220] – Jonathan Denwood
Sam’s such a great salesman, isn’t he?
[00:38:54.380] – Dustin W. Stout
He is. Sam and the Bolt. News of the world, the VOS of the world, the lovable devs, the cursor AIs. They need to sell that dream of anybody can write code because they have venture capital, the capitalist behind them saying, We need to make more money. Sell that dream. And they hire the best marketers in the world to sell the dream. And I’m not saying anything bad about these companies. They’ve created some really great products, but those products are best in the hands of actual developers. Because if you’re a developer and the AI breaks something, you can look at the code and go, oh, that’s where it broke it. Fix this one thing and don’t do this other thing. Or you can just rewrite the code yourself. So I feel your pain. We actually talked about it yesterday in the AI Academy, how it’s a big problem and people need to Be very cautious and set realistic expectations of what AI can code for them and what it shouldn’t code for them and when to call for help.
[00:39:55.780] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, that’s important. Jonathan, over to you.
[00:39:58.620] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, so I think it’s a great to have our middle break. The conversation so far has met my expectations. I think it’s just been a fantastic conversation with Dustin. We’re going to be back in a few moments. We got another couple of messages from our sponsor that we really appreciate. They really help finance the show. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, and I’m going to throw it over to to Kurt because he’s got a message for our October sponsor, but we’ve decided to give our October sponsor a couple more weeks because I made a total mess of doing the first week. So as a generosity, we give it a couple of weeks to our October sponsor. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:40:50.120] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, we’re excited about the sponsor, too, because it fits into our wheelhouse really well. We’re up as we’re sponsored by Misterio LMS, and here’s why we’re They’re excited about it. They have a free version and it’s not a trial, right? So it’s a free version and it’s not limited. So it’s not limited in the sense that you could have unlimited courses, unlimited lessons, unlimited students, and that’s forever. There’s no credit card required for that. And you can build your entire course without paying a cent, which is cool, right? But you can also set up PayPal and Stripe at that free level. So now you can sell those courses. If you want to get into certificates and dripping the content or some other advanced features. They do have a pro version, and you can get more information at misterio. Com. That’s M-A-S-T-E-R-I-Y-O.
[00:41:38.440] – Dustin W. Stout
Com.
[00:41:39.380] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Thank you, Kurt. So let’s go straight back into it. You launched, you did the lifetime deal, you’re getting traction, and I don’t know how long you’ve been running it now because time goes so quick. I can’t even remember when you first came on the show, which was another fantastic conversation. But what’s been a couple… Have there been any new lessons that you’ve learned on this journey so far that you could share with the tribe?
[00:42:12.960] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah, I mean, one of the most One of my mind-blowing lessons is there are influencers, and then there are influencers. So being a marketer for the past 12, 15 years I work with influencers. I’ve been on all sides of the table. I’ve been considered an influencer at one point, taking brand deals and promoting people’s products on my platforms. I’ve been the marketer, facilitating the deal between a client and the influencer and tracking those campaign metrics. And then I’ve been the advertiser, looking for influencers to help share my products. And just this past year, we finally started doing some of our real marketing. But it wasn’t until I was He’s invited onto a podcast by a guy named Brad Lee. Brad has been running his podcast called Dropping Bombs for many years now. Brad has over 5 million followers across social media. His content gets massive amounts of engagement, and it shows a pretty big deal. He invites people on who are very successful business people. It’s a show all about business, and he’s a multimillion He’s a multimillionaire, many successful businesses. A lot of people he has are like real estate moguls. He’s had politicians on.
[00:43:37.210] – Dustin W. Stout
He’s had Tai Lopez on. He’s had rock stars, music producers, film producers, all sorts of very high level, very successful and wealthy people. So his audience is very attuned to business advice and financial type making. When he invited me on, I thought, well, gosh, This is probably one of the biggest podcasts I’ve ever been on. Hopefully it works out. And I’ve been on some big podcasts. Michael Stelsner of Social Media Examere, very popular podcast. My friend Ryan Hanley has a very successful podcast as well for insurance agents. I’ve been on many podcasts, and sometimes they move the needle a little bit. You’ll see some sales come through and a little bump, and that’s always great. I love teaching. I love talking. I’m an extrovert. So invite me on a podcast. I’m there, whether or not it helps my business or not, hopefully it does. But I just like talking to people. But I go on Brad’s show, and he makes me come down to Las Vegas and record in his beautiful studio down there, his beautiful office complex. And we record this episode in, I think it was April or so. And he’s like, okay, yeah, the team is going to put it together, and it’ll probably release June 26 or so.
[00:44:56.780] – Dustin W. Stout
June 22nd is when they actually released it. So I was a little caught off guard. I was actually traveling. I was visiting my hometown in Pennsylvania. When I get the email like, hey, your episode published today. And I was like, oh, crap. I wanted to get my marketing team behind this. I’m scrambling. In the week wake, and this was a Friday, actually, or maybe it was a Sunday. It was a Sunday. The week after that podcast released, our customer base grew by, I think, 30 % in a a single week. And by the end of four weeks, our customer base had doubled in size. And it was one of those holy crap moments where you really realize that some people in this world have influence, but some people in this world can move massive amounts of people to action. And Brad is one of those people. I was fortunate up to get a spot on his podcast and talk about our company. And holy cow, it completely blew our business up in the best of ways. And now there are some downsides to that because our servers have been struggling ever since. Our support team was overwhelmed by the volume of new customers.
[00:46:13.240] – Dustin W. Stout
Double the amount of customers means at least double the amount of support.
[00:46:16.760] – Jonathan Denwood
I call those the problems you don’t want.
[00:46:19.620] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah, well, you don’t want them. But the resources, the funding that that brings in, the cash flow that it brings in is extraordinary extraordinarily helpful in increasing the team. So we went from a team of, I think we were a team of seven or so at the time. We’re now a team of twelve. And so it allowed me to hire some more help. It allowed us to do some more aggressive marketing things. And man, it’s just been a lesson in when you’re looking for people to connect with and you’re looking for people who have influence, there are people who do have audiences who actually listen to them. And it was just mind-blowing. I never thought those results could come from a single podcast appearance. And so it helped me reevaluate how we’re spending our marketing and where we’re investing our time. And that’s a lesson that- It’s a bit of an eyeopener, isn’t it? Yeah. I mean, for me, I care more about how I invest my time than how I invest my money because time is the one thing we’ll never get back. It’s the most valuable resource that we have that we can decide what to do with.
[00:47:33.840] – Dustin W. Stout
We can decide where to put our time, what podcast to be on, what meetings to take, what projects to work on. And this was one of those things where I realized, holy cow, I really need to invest more in the right people, the right appearances, the right meetings. So after that happened, I probably say no to about 80 % of the podcast requests I get now.
[00:48:04.960] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I appreciate you coming on this show.
[00:48:07.140] – Dustin W. Stout
Absolutely. And this is one of those ones. It was an obvious yes, right? Because you guys have- Why was it?
[00:48:12.780] – Jonathan Denwood
Because funny enough, I was showing Kirk my 90 days. It’s nothing like the guy. But I think you were reasonably impressed with the amount of downloads I got in 90 days, weren’t you, Kurt?
[00:48:22.420] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I was pretty surprised, to be honest with you.
[00:48:24.460] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, there we go. And not because Kurt is me. But no, I thought we did reasonably well. Yeah, so that’s the main one. Any other lesson? Or is that the main one?
[00:48:36.800] – Dustin W. Stout
The other lesson is perseverance. It’s one of those things where if you’re not ready to commit to a five-year plan, you probably shouldn’t be in business. You should probably go try something else. If you’re not willing to grind it out and work out all the kinks to get to the thing that you actually want to get to, business may not be for you. I toiled for 10 years trying to build a personal brand and 12 years trying to build an agency in a business, and another four years trying to build a software product that eventually was fairly successful, but then stuff happened, right? And all the while, for me, the goal I want to make so much money or I want to be a successful businessman. For me, the goal is always to be, I want to be the owner of my time, and I want to be the owner of who I work with and what I do so that I can fund things that really matter. To me, we sponsor a number of children over in Rwanda. That’s the stuff that I… I want to be successful in business and do the things that I love so so that I can help others in different ways.
[00:50:02.920] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s exactly what I’m looking at. Have that vision.
[00:50:06.120] – Dustin W. Stout
If it’s not just about accomplishing things and making your life easy, being wealthy or rich or famous, if you have a greater vision than yourself, you can persevere and you can accomplish great things. You can get through some of the hardest crap that business and life will throw at you if you have that greater vision. And so perseverance I think of the ultimate lesson anyone needs to learn if they want to accomplish anything great.
[00:50:37.400] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m going to throw it over to Kurt, the next question, and then he’s probably going to have to dash off because he’s got a prior commitment So over to you, Kurt.
[00:50:46.660] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, Jonathan, I’m looking at the questions that we have, and I’m thinking that that number five, the AI world and general intelligence, is probably a good one to bring up. So in this AI world, considerable discussion about this artificial general intelligence, and you’re working in the AI space, right? So what are your thoughts on this general intelligence versus this thing that recognizes patterns and kicks out answers?
[00:51:13.080] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah. So if you pay close attention to, particularly Sam Altman, who is the father of this chase, in most people’s minds, this chase after AGI, the definition of AGI has really changed over the last year and a half dramatically. And I really don’t think anyone knows what it is. And it’s one of those things we’re like, well, we’ll know when we see it. Will you, though? And will we see it anytime soon? I don’t think so. Because here’s the real challenge. Ai has already been trained on all the data in the world several times over and through several iterations. Now they’re creating synthetic data to train the AI. So what you’re really seeing is, and I forget You get the company and the research study that was done, but you’re seeing basically an intelligence curve that went up, it spiked, and now it’s flat-lining, it’s plateauing.
[00:52:09.300] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s called skyline, isn’t it?
[00:52:11.680] – Dustin W. Stout
Yeah. So the leaps in intelligence are hitting a ceiling because there’s no more data to train on. And what do you do when you’ve exhausted all of the things that it can possibly learn? You’re just relearning the same stuff, maybe more efficiently. But I think AGI is one of those things that is still science fiction. Now, we’ve got all this talk about quantum computing, right? And a lot of interest in that. But even with the quantum computing that we are experimenting with today is not sustainable. It lasts microseconds.
[00:52:49.640] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, that’s got its own problems, hasn’t it?
[00:52:52.100] – Dustin W. Stout
Right. Yeah. A whole host of problems that need to be overcome. And so I think- Well, Elon says we have to put it in a canyon on the moon. Yeah, it may be.
[00:53:01.060] – Jonathan Denwood
I think Elon’s got his own problems with Tesla.
[00:53:07.820] – Dustin W. Stout
The thing that I keep trying to tell people is AGI is one of those things that we’re not going to see anytime Anybody who tells you… There were people, literally last year, an influencer I know who, and I respect, really smart person, was so caught up in the hype cycle. Agi is here. We’ve seen AGI. They scored this score on the AGI test. Agi is here. And I kept going, no, it’s still just an LLM, and it’s still just predictive generation. And I think now we realize a year later, oh, yeah, I guess Dustin was right. And just like I said, the definition is even changing because we don’t actually know what it is, and we don’t know really what it’s going to take to get to that point where we have the singularity, the self-aware AI, the sky net or the Vicky, if you’ve seen iRobot. I don’t think we’re anywhere close to it. And I don’t think we really even know what it’s going to take to get there. Maybe five years from now, we’ll have a better grasp. We’ll have a better understanding of what it will take to get there. But I don’t think current technology, current physical and scientific things that we have, whether it’s physical limitations or just intellectual limitations that we haven’t discovered the right things yet.
[00:54:39.530] – Dustin W. Stout
We’re a minimum of five years away, I think, from even understanding what it will mean to have AGI. Yeah. But in the meantime, there’s a lot of really cool stuff we could do with AI, and we have to have AGI to really use AI to its fullest. And maximize our creativity, maximize our ability to execute things. I mean, it really is the, I think AI, just like just like books. And I’ve said this from stage several times, I think the invention of AI or the onset of AI is a great paradigm shift as the written word was when the Gutenberg press was first invented. The Gutenberg press took books in writing from a luxury that only the richest people could afford to something that the everyday person could have. It democratized knowledge, access to knowledge. And in the same way, AI is democratizing access to creativity and the ability to execute knowledge and to put knowledge into action. And so I think we’re at a really cool and interesting and very fortunate time in history where AI is allowing us to do much more, much faster. And we should really dive headfirst into it and figure out how to apply it to our lives responsibly.
[00:56:07.200] – Dustin W. Stout
But as- Well, it’s funny that you bring up the Gutenberg example because I use a ton of AI for various reasons because I use a lot.
[00:56:21.040] – Jonathan Denwood
But you’re pointing out the Gutenberg, and printing books, printing the Bible, the word of God, Which leads to the reparation, the prostitent and Catholic, which then leads to a 100-year European war. Half of the Of Germany. Half of Germany and the central states of Europe are burnt to the ground in almost a 60, 70-year war period. But who would have believed that people with access to the Holy Bible, would then turn them into religious zealots and butcher their fellow Christian just because they believe in something slightly different to yourself.
[00:57:13.620] – Dustin W. Stout
Sure. Technology has capacity for good, capacity for evil. It’s a delivery system for information and knowledge. As much as current technology is trying to divide us as well, and be divisive-Yeah, I don’t blame the technology. I just- Our own actions are all we can control, right?
[00:57:40.090] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, the example is a bit of a downer, wouldn’t it? But I am English, but But I’m not blaming the technology. I just think you got to be… There’s something in the human condition. It wants to blame other people for everything, doesn’t it?
[00:57:55.800] – Dustin W. Stout
Where- Start with Adam and Eve, right? Yeah, there’s God asked Adam, What have you done? And Adam goes, She did it. You gave me.
[00:58:09.580] – Jonathan Denwood
She did it. We’re going to wrap up the podcast.
[00:58:11.720] – Dustin W. Stout
We’re going to do our DNA to blame others.
[00:58:13.780] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re going to wrap up the podcast part of the show because Kurt’s got to go off in the next couple of minutes. Are you up for some bonus content, Dustin, or do you have to clear off on the out?
[00:58:24.620] – Dustin W. Stout
No, I’m good to go.
[00:58:26.070] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, thank you. We have some bonus content, folks, which you’ll be able to watch the whole show and the bonus on the WP Tonic YouTube channel, and you should subscribe to that. So, Kurt, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you, Kurt?
[00:58:42.040] – Kurt von Ahnen
For business, you can reach me at maniananomas. Com and Manana Nomas on all the social channels. And then, boy, if you just want to connect personally, just hit me up on LinkedIn. I’m the only current fan on on LinkedIn. It makes me easy to find.
[00:58:54.600] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. And, Dustin, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and your views of AI.
[00:59:02.160] – Dustin W. Stout
Well, I’m @dustinwestout on all the social things, and you can always head over to magi. Co to find out more. M-a-g-a-i. Co.
[00:59:12.560] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s been a fantastic interview. I’ve really enjoyed it. We’ve been on the roll the last few interviews. We’ve had some amazing discussions. Like I say, we’re going to continue the discussion for about 10, 15 minutes, and you’ll be able to watch it all on the WP Tonic YouTube channel. We will be back next week with another great interview. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye. So bonus content. Where do you see the development of products around AI in the next 18 months. One of the factors with your own product is, I don’t know, have you done grandfather deals deals with these around the tokens and supply, or are you always balancing the amount of credits you’re offering your own customers with the amount of credits that you’re using up with the suppliers? Is it a balancing act or did you get some special deals or whatever? I’m not even sure you want to answer that question because maybe that’s a bit too personal.
[01:00:26.130] – Dustin W. Stout
No, not at all. So it is a balancing act. It’s a constant… We have to have constant attention on how pricing changes and how models shift. So one of the very difficult lessons I had to learn was when AI models went from a context limit, so for those not familiar, every model has a limited memory, how much text it can process at once and how long the conversation can be before it needs to remove pieces of the conversation in order to process it all. So in the beginning, the best models had like 9,000 tokens that they could process. That was their maximum context limit, which means conversations would never get beyond a certain cost. If you’re processing 30 tokens, it only costs a little bit. If you’re processing all 9,000 tokens, it costs a lot more. But you can really manage the cost easily by knowing, okay, what’s the maximum cost this will ever be for a new message? It’ll be this much. When those models went from being capable of 9,000 tokens to 200,000 tokens, and people started leveraging that, all the calculations we had on the back-end didn’t take that into account. And so we started losing money hand over fist on these higher context models because we just didn’t account for that in our calculation.
[01:01:53.520] – Dustin W. Stout
And so I had one customer. I remember when I was investigating this, one of our lifetime deal customers cost me over $80 in a single week when they paid $100 one time. A single week, they consumed $80 worth of AI. So we had to make some adjustments, and and make sure that we were calculating the usage versus the cost in a way that wasn’t going to put us out of business. And so we have to constantly monitor that. Right now, we have mechanisms in place that have a multiplier system that is It’s fairly sophisticated and allows the user to get the maximum amount of use without us going in the negative for it.
[01:02:38.900] – Jonathan Denwood
Knocking on the door. You need to buy some. Yeah.
[01:02:41.900] – Dustin W. Stout
But even now, we’re actually reevaluating it because it is so sophisticated, and I believe there’s a way to make it simpler. We’re trying to work through a system that’s going to be more directly correlated to cost because right now it’s fairly obfuscated. We’re counting words. We’re not counting processing tokens, but the LLMs charge us tokens. But to make it more complicated, they also charge for, say, web search. That’s a different charge, a different cost. And they also charge for image generation. That’s a different cost. It’s not associated with tokens. It’s just associated with media size. So we have to find a way that is more directly tied to the actual cost rather than trying to find a bunch of workarounds. And so we’re working on that right now. And what it will allow us to do, hopefully, is give people even more access, even more usage, while still maintaining our margins so that we’re not going in the negative. And so it’s very hard. Anybody who’s thinking about building AI products just know that the hardest thing you’ll ever do is figure out how to limit the usage and manage your cost usage.
[01:03:53.900] – Jonathan Denwood
You don’t know, but you don’t know precisely, but you’re in the game. Do you think like ChatGPT, OpenAI and the other large providers, do you sense they’re bleeding money?
[01:04:11.860] – Dustin W. Stout
Oh, absolutely, they are. Yeah, in fact, it wasn’t too long ago that OpenAI openly said that they are losing money on ChatGPT users, that even the $20 a month subscribers, they are spending more on the compute power to give these users the access they’re using up. And that’s just the nature of the game. They’re building for scale. They have to give away as much as possible in order to attract as many customers as possible. And they’re not going to be able to sustain that forever. At some point, somebody in Silicon Valley is going to look at Sam Altman and go, man, I’ve given you enough money. I’m not giving you any more money. You need to start making a profit. So it’s not going to last forever. And they’re going to have to start charging more and more. And so they’re hoping that people will be so hooked on their product that when they raise those prices or lower the amount of usage they get, that the pain of switching to a different product will be too great, and they’ll just stick around. So, yeah, I think we’re in the Wild West period I love these AI apps.
[01:05:15.870] – Dustin W. Stout
And one thing that I’ve always valued with Magi is I’m going to be transparent with our pricing. I’m going to be transparent with usage. I’m going to give people as much as we possibly can, but we’re going to stay profitable. We’re going to stay profitable because we don’t have venture capital. We’re not backed by billion dollar companies. We want to be profitable so we can create and sustain a product that helps people in the long term. And I don’t want to be another fly by night AI app because there’s already been hundreds of them sitting in the AI graveyard because they were so aggressive, trying to compete at a scale of open AI. Meanwhile, we just want to build a great product for real people working.
[01:05:57.740] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I know Kirk, since I know Kurt uses your service and he loves it. I haven’t because I got… I think you weren’t on my radar and I bought, I wouldn’t say a lifetime, but I bought a big package from Koala AI, and I’ve been using that. I’ve been using that. But when I’ve used up my lifetime tokens with them, I will be using your But let’s move on. We’ve had this infamous report from the Massachusetts School of Technology when it was looking at business to business use of AI. I know it got a lot of criticism, the report, because I didn’t read it. I’ve just observed it, I’ve observed other influences in the space. There seemed to be some problems with the report. But on the other hand, I think I sense there’s a lot in the corporate and the business-to-business about how to really use AI. Obviously, recently, we’ve had job Sackings, whatever term you want to use from some very large Fortune 500 companies. We had the Salesforce, and then we’ve had other Mass removal jobs. But I’m not too sure this is totally down to AI, really. Where do you sense where AI in corporate America and utilizing it, where we all really are, really, Dustin?
[01:08:04.560] – Dustin W. Stout
I think there are many businesses out there trying to find their footing. They’re scared to be losing ground to their competitors. A lot of the marketing out there uses AI, or your competitors are going to, and they’re going to pass you by. And so they’re scrambling. And we’ve worked with many of these large companies that are trying to figure out how to invest in AI and integrate it into their workforce in a way that will, number one, increase their bottom line. Number two, maybe reduce our overhead, and number three, protect our corporate interests. That’s another key point: many of these companies have proprietary assets. They possess proprietary information and sensitive data that they must protect. They have user data that they have to keep private. And that’s another big driving factor in how these companies are implementing it and why they’re struggling to do so, because most of the AI tools out there do not respect your privacy. They will use every interaction you have for training their new models. It’s very challenging for these corporations to invest in a way that’s both safe and secure, and easy to implement at scale for large workforces.
[01:09:20.040] – Dustin W. Stout
So it’s just that there’s a lot of chaos. And that’s why I think one of the fastest-growing industries right now is the AI consultancy, because they’re helping these businesses implement. We have many AI consultants who are Magi fans, helping these big companies implement Magi in universities, government agencies, and large corporations. They often lack knowledge and guidance and need assistance to navigate these complex systems. And so, yeah, we’re in a crazy field. I think that over time, what’s going to happen is that it’s going to normalize. The systems and workflows, and frameworks are going to be put into place and adopted more widely. And they will be winners and losers in terms of corporate and business AI solutions. Hopefully, Magi is one of the winners because we respect privacy and strive to make things easy at scale. But yeah, I think that’s where we’re at now, and we’ll see where it goes once these frameworks are in place and AI is pretty much commoditized, and it’s as common as installing windows on a machine.
[01:10:30.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, you’ve summed up my own views on it. Thanks for that. One last question before we wrap up. We mentioned general intelligence, and I came to a very cynical conclusion: from Claude, from Plexity, from OpenAI, from Sam, and from a group of people, they were pushing us. I came to the conclusion that it was just a grab to get more investment. Basically, it was partially that, and also partially to establish some regulation that suited them, but it was mostly to get the investment class to commit fully to this. What’s your own view? I don’t think you’re wrong.
[01:11:32.620] – Dustin W. Stout
I think you’ve hit on one of the many layers of the AI problem, specifically raising capital, as it is a capital-intensive industry. And the promise of AGI is an alluring one. Once you’ve blown the world up with AI technology, LLMs, and all the investors are scrambling, and now that investment money starts to peter out, you have to think of what’s the next thing. Okay, we need to sell them the next thing so that we can continue raising money. And AGI, I think, was that thing. I think you’re 100 % right.
[01:12:13.540] – Jonathan Denwood
Right, yo. I think we wrap it up. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Hopefully, maybe in the next year, you will decide to come back because I think it’s been a fabulous discussion. Actually, I think it’s been one of the best I’ve had this year, to be truthful. So thanks so much, Dustin.
[01:12:32.460] – Dustin W. Stout
Absolutely, Jonathan. Happy to join you.
[01:12:35.700] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re going to end it now, folks. We’ll see you next week. Bye.
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