We Discuss How to Make Non Sexy Products and Services Sexy

Struggling to sell dull offerings? Discover how to make non-sexy products sexy using storytelling, emotion & smart positioning. Start standing out!

Kevin MacGillivray, CMO, Pressable

This Week’s Sponsors

Kinta: Kinta

LifterLMS: LifterLMS

Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro

The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:22.150] -Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic show. Um, in this show, we’re going to be discussing How to make a non-sexy product or products in the service or product area sexy. And we got expert, we got Kevin McGivory, CMO of Pressable, with us. He worked for Shopify for over 5 years. And like I say, he’s been the CMO of Pressable. How long have you been the CEO of Pressable, Kevin?

[00:00:56.230] – Kevin MacGillivray, CMO Pressable

Uh, so I joined Pressable in July of 2025. So I’ve been there for, what’s probably 9 months, 9, 10 months now. Yeah. So not super long, but enough to, enough to be in it.

[00:01:09.090] -Jonathan Denwood

Should be a fantastic discussion. I’ve also got my co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?

[00:01:18.560] – Kurt von Ahnen

Sure thing, Jonathan. My name is Kurt, Kurt Van Ahnen. I own an agency called Mañana No Más, and we work directly with the great team over at WP Tonic as well.

[00:01:26.510] -Jonathan Denwood

Yep. So Kevin’s got enormous amount of experience in the service pro— online product area. Should be a fantastic discussion. Before we go into the meat and potatoes of, of the show, I’ve got a message from our major sponsor. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:01:47.420] – Kurt von Ahnen

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[00:02:20.570] -Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back. I’d like to say, love you to support our major sponsor, um, and also our other sponsors. You can do this by going over to wp-tonic— sorry, wp-tonic.com/deals- and you’ll find special offers from the sponsors plus a curated list of WordPress plugins and services all aimed at the WordPress power user, freelancer, and agency user. It’s a great resource. If you could do that, we would be very appreciative. So, Kevin, let’s go straight into it. So, as I say, you worked for Shopify for about 5 years as Director of Revenue and Product. What were the, um, couple of things that stick in your mind that you learned through those 5 years, Kevin, that you think are relevant to the audience?

[00:03:21.530] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

Yeah, great question. I think one of the things that was super, super important at Shopify, which is also true, very true within the broader WordPress community, is that obsession with the customer. This is, this is super central at Shopify. When I was there, everything we did was designed to what the slogan was, make commerce better for everybody. And then the revenue part of that was like, make money so you can keep doing the, you know, create a better experience for your user and your customer. So that obsession with that and always solving for that first is something that, you know, really strengthened during my time there. I think a few other, a few other things, moving quickly is incredibly important, you know, shipping things fast, building things quickly, learning as you go, and not being super, super precious about, you know, making little blunders or having to pivot if you need to along the way, as long as you keep moving. That was a really, you know, big, big cultural thing. And I think the last thing I’ll say, which is another thing that really stuck with me, was the difference between, you know, doing things and making an impact.

[00:04:36.340] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

So motion and momentum are quite different concepts and you could feel busy and you could be doing a whole bunch of different things and you may not be solving any problems at all or making progress. So being able to prioritize and pick the things that are going to be the best use of your time when there’s 100 things to do, what are the 2 that you can choose that’ll be the most impactful to that end user? That concept and way of thinking has really stuck with me also.

[00:05:05.960] -Jonathan Denwood

So you mentioned pivoting, but how many, um, active Shopify websites was there on the platform? Because it’s, it strikes me, I don’t know how many were, probably hundreds of thousands plus.

[00:05:20.720] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

Millions.

[00:05:21.440] -Jonathan Denwood

But, oh, millions. How, you know, when you’ve got established platform like that and you’ve got tens of thousands of people’s livelihoods depending How can you be nimble and pivot when you’ve got such an established platform? Can you give some insights about that?

[00:05:41.780] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

Yeah, I think it becomes harder, um, and it means you have to be a little bit more deliberate and focused around what you do and how you do it. Um, and at Shopify, as an example, um, you know, being able to separate the— you know, if you think of a human body, being able to separate the heart and the brain from the fingers So like being able to test and accelerate and grow and do things quickly in the fingers or the toes in areas that were a little bit more nascent and new and growing, you know, is much easier to continue. You do have to be a little bit more thoughtful around, you know, if you’re Shopify and or any other company and you’re tinkering with your heart or your brain of the product, you know, you absolutely have to be a little bit more thoughtful and you can’t be as willy-nilly about making changes. It doesn’t mean you can’t iterate and test and learn and move quickly and move in increments. It just means you have to be a little bit more conscious of consequences that could impact hundreds of thousands of businesses. But when you get to that scale, you also have the infrastructure and people and tooling to be able to monitor that quite a bit more effectively without slowing down.

[00:06:56.840] -Jonathan Denwood

So I thought I’d ask you that because I think your experience with Shopify has a lot of relevance with WordPress really. Because am I correct, it’s been over 6, 7 years ago that I last did a major Shopify build out. It’s still built on Ruby on Rails, is that correct?

[00:07:17.150] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

That’s right.

[00:07:18.460] -Jonathan Denwood

So, I don’t think so, but some people in the web development would see Ruby on Rails as kind of, put this gently, old-fashioned maybe. Well, that kind of attitude that they might also put on PHP or WordPress, they could put that on Shopify using Ruby on Rails. Do you think I’m on the right track?

[00:07:48.630] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

Kevin? I think you’re on the right track from a perception standpoint. And I think perception often differs from—

[00:07:58.010] -Jonathan Denwood

Well, from a certain group of developers, certain people.

[00:08:02.120] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

Yeah. I think the counterbalance to that is what comes with having something that’s relatively established or has been part of the infrastructure for so long is stability. And a lot of what stores on Shopify, but also high-traffic WordPress sites, whether it’s stores on WooCommerce or other like really, really, you know, large businesses, that stability matters for a lot, right? Like it wasn’t just created 6 months ago and you’re rolling the dice with what’s going to happen. You know, you’re taking less chances with outcomes because it has been around for so long. It’s tried, it’s tested, it’s, it’s stable. So I think that’s the trade-off.

[00:08:41.540] -Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, because I see very clear differences, but also very clear linkage. You got a, a very passionate, still probably growing community around Ruby on Rails, around David’s leadership, and then you also got this passion and this large group of developers and people in the WordPress. So I see a lot of overlap. Between those two scenarios.

[00:09:11.420] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

Yes. But I also think there is— and the example you just shared is like community around Ruby, community around WordPress. What I’ve noticed in this transition for myself is there— when you think about the Shopify community, you think about it related to Shopify rather than about Ruby on Rails. In many instances, yes, there is a technical community, but the community around WordPress is almost unique. It’s almost unmatched, I think, in the technology space about how big it is, how, and this is a lot to do with open source, but how big it is, how passionate it is, the influence that community has on where the platform and all the different, you know, businesses and folks operating on the platform go. That’s something that was eye-opening for me coming over to WordPress about how robust that community is here, which is super cool. Like, that is a very unique thing to have running in parallel to, you know, the commercial enterprises that run on WordPress or work with WordPress.

[00:10:13.610] -Jonathan Denwood

All right. Thanks. Over to you, Kurt.

[00:10:16.080] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I kind of feel like I want to blend the responses in your discussion into the next question. And that’s, you know, a friend of the show, Katie Keith, is, you know, somewhat famous for you know, having an established plugin company in WordPress and then branching out, you know, later and doing Shopify stuff, right? And, and reporting through her X account, like the differences in her experiences between Shopify and WordPress. And then, you know, I have a, a co-agency, someone that I work with closely who commonly refers people from the e-commerce perspective to go Shopify, even though their websites in WordPress, and we see a lot of this inner blending. And so it kind of leads to the obvious question, right? What attracted you, Kevin, to jumping into Pressable and the role that you have there as CMO? Like, what was the attraction? Because you were kind of in a cool spot. And now you’re with Pressable. So if you could explain to us kind of like the decision process, that’d be awesome.

[00:11:16.120] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

Yes, 100%. So I think a few things at play here. Number one, on a personal level, I get the most workplace joy from building rather than running. And I’m not saying Shopify is at the running stage because they’re building a ton of great product and they always will be. But the opportunity at Pressable and, you know, Automattic at large to build is huge. And Pressable is, is one of the parts of Automattic is growing super quickly. We’re building super quickly. We’re able to react, move nimbly and react to the needs of our users. And, you know, as the market changes, there’s like a building, like a really, you know, at its root building culture here, which is very, very cool, which I was attracted to. Obviously, Automattic is another company. Impressible, you know, within that is another company that is very customer focused. So it wasn’t a huge departure from like, oh, suddenly I’m going to some industry that hates customers and does all sorts of, you know, sketchy stuff. No, like, this is another, you know, company with a philosophy that is very aligned with my own. And as a marketer and marketing leader, this is a huge opportunity to build a marketing function within Pressable that is able to operate, you know, in the world that we are moving into and have already started moving into with AI and AI tools and all the different magic that comes along with that.

[00:12:46.490] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

And really build, you know, not only the product, but the function within Pressable to meet this moment without tons and tons of like institutional backing or background that you kind of have to take into account. Those are, those are a few, few reasons. And obviously, like things like WooCommerce being so adjacent, that’s right in my wheelhouse too, right? Like, you know, WooCommerce is, is in the e-commerce space and being able to work with actually a few few other ex-Shopify folks there as well. It’s super cool.

[00:13:20.230] – Kurt von Ahnen

As, as an extension to that, as, as a follow-up, and, and you kind of brought this up a little bit, you mentioned AI, but I was like reviewing Pressable’s homepage, right? And I’m like, so what is the core messaging of the homepage? And we can see, you know, high-volume websites, e-commerce, which obviously in my mind I instantly thought WooCommerce with the automatic connection there. Yeah. And then agency-focused, you really stressed the, the agency focus. And then at the same time in your answer stressed, you know, nimbleness. What is, what is the AI injection and AI at the agency level of implementation? What is that doing to Pressable as a host? Like, yeah, I would imagine it’s exponential, the bandwidth needs and stuff like that, that people are coming to the host with.

[00:14:05.280] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

100%. And I’ll caveat my answer upfront with we learn so much every day from the users of our product about what they’re encountering and the things they’re experimenting with and tinkering with, with AI in their own world. Particularly on the agency side, and it’s a constantly evolving thing. But to directly answer your question, a few weeks ago we actually shipped something called Pressable MCP, which is really designed with agencies in a lot of respects in mind to do things that would have taken them days or hours to do in minutes. Essentially what it is, it allows agencies to use whatever AI primary AI tool they use. For me, I use Claude in this instance and, and operate their Pressable dashboard for tens, hundreds, thousands of sites just in plain text. And I was just looking at an example from yesterday. Rather than an agency doing something 80 times for 80 different customers or sites, they did it once and it took them a minute. So if you think about the knock-on impact of that is allows agencies to do a few things. It allows them to do tasks quicker, freeing up time to do other things like marketing and business development and building and, and, you know, extending their, their business and, and space within, within WordPress.

[00:15:28.800] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

Um, and you know, that’s something that’s gonna benefit everybody involved, you know, the host, the agency, the WordPress world to be able to kind of have that, um, bandwidth available to do other things.

[00:15:42.390] – Kurt von Ahnen

That’s a super interesting answer. I mean, in my own agency journey, I’ve consciously made the effort to say, how can I focus more on sales and less on marketing? Which to some people might sound crazy, right? But it’s like, yeah, we spend all of our time marketing. We never get to the nuts and bolts of actually selling something. And once I physically, like, made that change in the last month, we’ve just put out proposal after proposal after proposal. But for 3 months before that, it seemed like we were dead. If an agency could leverage AI the way you described it, I think of all that space being like, now you’re freed up for the actual follow-up sales calls, reducing that pipeline funnel down to something actionable, which is kind of cool.

[00:16:27.200] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

And we’re not even talking about the other AI use cases that agencies can use to help them with marketing or help them with sales. I think sitting where I do in the organization, I have never in my career felt closer to sales as a marketing leader. Like the— blur is maybe the wrong word, but the cohesiveness that AI and AI tools are allowing me to be closer to deals, to be closer to business, to be closer to pain points and closed won reasons and closed loss reasons, like all the business operators out there, the Information and data is king and helps you be a better business overall. And AI is doing a great job in making that easier than it’s ever been to do as an operator as well.

[00:17:09.620] – Kurt von Ahnen

Nice. Nice. Jonathan, over to you.

[00:17:12.510] -Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, it’s fantastic. Well, Kevin, I, I personally feel one of the biggest problems with WordPress, and I know Automattic have been trying to do things about this. So, but unfortunately, um, I think there’s a lot more that needs to be done. Um, there’s other factors that have probably pushed the ship off course a bit, but I don’t want to go into that with you because it wouldn’t be appropriate. And be quite truthful, I’m a bit tired of the whole drama in the WordPress space. I’m a little bit tired of it, really, Kevin. Um, personally, and those that foster it a bit, but I do personally think there’s a big problem in the way that WordPress promotes itself compared to Shopify, basically. First of all, would you— do you think there is still a big problem? And secondly, is there, based on your sizable knowledge, because it’s one of the factors why I so wanted you on the show is your experience with Shopify. Is it possible to do a lot better in your opinion?

[00:18:31.890] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

I think there’s always room for improvement and, you know, we should all across the entire WordPress ecosystem be moving in that direction. I think one of the big differences between how a Shopify operates and a WordPress or Automattic or Pressable operate is Shopify is one thing. Of course, they work with partners, but their whole product is centralized around, you know, the green bag, like they have one brand to sell, they have one experience that they’re talking about, which makes it easier in many ways to be a marketer and tell that story. That’s, it’s just a different way they operate. A great example to illustrate this is Shopify is, if you think of Lego and a Lego set, Shopify is selling you a built Lego set. They’re like, this is the castle. This is the pirate ship. This is whatever it is. This, it’s complete. It’s exactly what maybe you want in this instance, but this is what it is. You can’t really tinker with it too much. On the flip side, automatic or WordPress is here’s all the Lego pieces and you’re free to build whatever you want and make it yours exactly what you need, exactly what you, um, you know, want to do.

[00:19:44.110] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

In some instances, here’s the instruction manual about how to build something super cool. But we’re very much on the, like, the building side of it. Now, one of the inherent problems or associated things with that is, you know, all the Lego pieces are different colors in many instances. And you’ve got WordPress, you’ve got WordPress.org, you’ve got all the, you know, hundreds and thousands of businesses out there that are doing kind of their own thing within WordPress. So it’s, it’s not apples to apples from a comparison. But I think there are a few things that, you know, the broader WordPress, you know, world can do from a marketing standpoint. And we try and do this at Pressable as well, is you have the central value of working in WordPress, which is, you know, largely based on open source and community. And there’s some robust values that come along with that. And I think in our world, it’s also incumbent on every commercial player in this space to be integrating that into the story we tell, not only about the services we offer, you know, from a Pressable standpoint or a managed host standpoint, but like, you know, we’re selling to existing WordPress users we want to bring over to Pressable, but we’re also selling to, you know, non-WordPress users that are considering WordPress with Pressable or Woo or or whatever.

[00:21:07.880] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

And it’s incumbent on each of these players to tell a bit of that story themselves and continue that narrative to flow through the, you know, most visible commercial side of WordPress.

[00:21:20.650] -Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I totally see you. But I think, and we had Matt on the show a couple of months ago to talk about AI, and he was very gracious to agree to come on the show. Um, but I think, um, obviously the major hosting providers in some ways are trying to build on WordPress, but they’re kind of own flavor, their own version, and using AI. Um, like if you look at GoDaddy, they’ve got their own web builder, haven’t they? Others is using WordPress, but they’re using AI. And it depends, obviously with Pressable, it’s more the kind of professional markets, the agency market. It’s people that are running large e-commerce or large websites. That’s, I presume, what you’re aiming at. But what I put to Matt is, it’s great having all these Lego, but with AI and the ability to just knock out a plugin. I think there’s a— I think some in the community say it’s the end of large commercial plugins. You’ll be able to code everything either yourself or you hire a developer implementer that will be able to use AI and it just be a custom solution. I don’t really agree with that totally.

[00:22:49.340] -Jonathan Denwood

I might be wrong. I think people like to see if it’s major technology. They want to see that it comes from a plugin company that’s got a track record, and they’re not— it’s probably the wrong word to use, Kevin, but I can’t find a better word— to be entrapped with custom coding from one developer. Um, in some ways you still want the flexibility that you’ve got this plugin you’ve got these core plugins, but you want the plugins to be secure, reliable. And I see, and I put this to Matt, that commercial plugins, there should be a section in the directory for commercial plugins where they’re charged a fee, but they’re checked over, they’re given the blue tick from Twitter. That they’ve been checked over, that they’re secure, that, that you got reassurance that, that they’re not what you would find in the free directory, which is great stuff, but it’s free. You can’t expect it to be checked and, and all, all that. Am I making sense, Kevin?

[00:24:14.190] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

I think you’re hitting on a couple of things that are really important, which are You know, why in a world where you’ll be able to do more and more via AI, you know, what are, what are the values and things that remain in some of these spaces that are important for, you know, all the businesses operating in WordPress to lean into? You touched on one, which I think is incredibly important, which is trust. So you can, like, this is a bad analogy, but like you could build your own house if you wanted. You could, you can go buy the materials and look up a manual online on how to do it. But most people don’t because there’s a trust component that a builder or architect or whoever, you know, you could apply the same thing to a bridge. There’s risk if you do it yourself. And for a lot of these, these businesses out there, they carry a lot of trust, not only for themselves, but for a whole slew of clients that they work with. Trust as we move into the AI world is going to be even more important. So the agencies and businesses and operators that win here are going to be the ones that are able to leverage AI operationally to make their lives and jobs easier, more efficient, more effective.

[00:25:26.260] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

But they’re selling trust to their users. It’s just like AI is going to have a hard time replicating a doctor or a lawyer. Sure, you can get the information, but like you’re paying for the, like that, that blue tick to your, to use your analogy. So I think that’s one piece. I think a lot of these providers and Pressable’s no stranger here either via, you know, the stuff we’re building with MCP is a lot of these businesses need to find the best way so they can be the go-to place for AI to plug into. So knowing that everybody out there, including their end clients, are going to be AI native, how are they making their products the most operable with AI? So there’s like an operations piece. And the last thing I’ll really quickly touch on is around scale, where you’re running 1,000— let’s say you’re an agency going after 1,000 sites or, you know, 100 sites. You are not always still able— going to be able to do every single thing yourself, nor should you from like a time management standpoint. So there are, you know, plugins and tools and, you know, businesses out there that are going to be able to offer something that is going to still help people or businesses operate their business at scale as it grows.

[00:26:45.430] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

And I think there’s going to absolutely still be a market for, for those things. So the three kind of areas more, but those are kind of the three that came to mind.

[00:26:53.240] -Jonathan Denwood

It’s fantastic. Kevin, right. I think it’s a great time to have our middle break. We’ve had a fantastic discussion with Kevin. We’ve got some fantastic stuff to discuss in the second half. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:27:06.130] – Kurt von Ahnen

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[00:27:43.260] – Speaker 4

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[00:28:20.810] -Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back, folks. I want to point out this, this is independent media. We’re totally reliant on our sponsors. If you want to support the show, why don’t you leave us a review on iTunes or Spotify? If you’re listening to this podcast on your mobile device and you’re listening on those two platforms, it’s really easy to leave a review. And if you could do that, It supports the show and it supports the sponsors as well. Please do that. Over to you, Kurt.

[00:28:57.400] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I feel like I, um, I feel like I got stuck with this question, right? So, uh, I’ll preface this with upfront. I have very strong opinions that, that WordPress, uh, has super strengths, flexibility, customization, ownership, all those things. but I seem like I project that onto a lot of people, especially when we do these episodes. What do you think, Kevin, are, are like WordPress’s like biggest strength? And, and then honestly, what do you think is the biggest weakness that, that we deal with, especially maybe from an agency perspective?

[00:29:32.100] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

Yeah. So I, I think we’re, if I, if I think of WordPress’s biggest strengths, I’m not gonna comp it to the fact that it’s like a, the biggest flourishing kind of publishing platform out there. I think it’s 40-some, low 40s percentage of the web runs on WordPress. That in itself is a strength. It’s a giant platform to be able to have and operate successfully at scale. It’s one of the most extensible and customizable and flexible tools out there that is available to the most people. I think personally, when people ask me like, What do you— what is, you know, what, what is a through line through a lot of your career around like the products you work with? One is getting tools in front of the most tools in front of the most people that is going to make a demonstrably positive impact on their life. At Shopify, that was all about like running businesses. At Automatic or Pressable, it’s a little bit more broad than that because it’s not just businesses, but it’s getting people access to things they would not have necessarily been able to do on their own. That’s a really, really cool thing about the WordPress platform.

[00:30:39.450] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

I think that’ll always be my number one. And, you know, Automattic and Pressable as a commercial arm of that, it’s nice to have like WordPress operating in that kind of long-term home where you’ve got the, you know, the commercial side backing the open source platform. That’s a really important piece too, which I think is a huge strength. So That’s kind of my answer to the strength piece. I think, you know, from a weakness standpoint, I think it’s part perception and part turning what some people may think is a bug into the fact that it’s a feature of like the, you know, for lack of a better word, fragmentation or distributed nature of WordPress and open source. You know, it’s a lot. If you’re, if you’re coming in and trying to work and get into it for the first time, you know, there’s a lot to look at. There’s a lot of different things going on. It’s not your like cleanly packaged, you must go down this path ecosystem or product. So I think it’s part of its perception around turning like, that’s actually really cool. Not only regardless of what you’re doing, can you, you know, access a whole bunch of things at a much lower price point than what you may have been doing elsewhere.

[00:31:59.240] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

You can, you know, build things specific to your needs rather than what someone’s telling you you should need. You can, you know, work with the best of the best in each area you’re looking for or, you know, working within WordPress to build your stack that is uniquely yours. And turning what, you know, people who don’t think about it very much might be like, oh, that’s confusing to actually— this is a huge superpower of working in WordPress. And as a marketer, like fighting that perception gap is, is an exciting thing for me. And one of the most effective ways to do that is saying, Kurt or Jonathan, here’s someone who looks exactly like you and exactly like your business. Here’s what they did from their own mouth. Here’s what they built and here’s how they were able to achieve success in this particular space. And having the like show me approach is really, really effective in kind of working against or in a positive direction with that perception. And that’s like a marketer’s dream almost is like really strong product, need to build like the marketing storytelling muscle to get that message across. That’s a really strong place to be in.

[00:33:11.460] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, I like that.

[00:33:12.570] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

Good answer to your question. I want to make sure I address it.

[00:33:16.660] – Kurt von Ahnen

It’s, you know, we talked about it on one of the other shows that Jonathan and I do. I did a sample product in school And yeah, it was an easy platform and I got a course up really quickly, but there’s only like, there, there’s one choice. Do you want light mode or dark mode? And that’s it. And then we, we do a lot of LifterLMS and, and LearnDash sites. And of course, you know, you can put whatever you want, right? It’s, someone says, can we do this? You go, yeah, it’s WordPress. We can do whatever you want. Might cost some money or time, but we can do whatever you want. And that’s, that to me is, is really cool.

[00:33:44.230] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

100%. And you’ve got the community there too, as like the, yeah, you know, it’s not just the commercial side that you can go and find answers and get resources from. There’s the, you know, very vibrant community that’s out there for, you know, pushing the platform forward as a whole.

[00:34:00.140] – Kurt von Ahnen

Absolutely. Jonathan.

[00:34:02.550] -Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, just another factor is that we’re going to do another show with Kurt, which we’re going to do this afternoon, and we’re going to— part of it’s going to be about Etsy. And the reason why we’re discussing it, Kevin, is that it came came on my YouTube feed. Um, there was a podcast, but a YouTube show where they consult with Etsy, um, shop owners where they’ve been knocked off the platform, Kevin. They’ve just been— um, they’ve been a lot of these Etsy people, they’ve been on there for 8 years, 9 years, and they don’t really know why that why they’re not being suspended, Kevin. They’ve just been knocked off and they can’t get any coherent answer out of Etsy why. And they’ve lost their business. They’re, they’re, you know, I think it’s quite dangerous to rely, you know, obviously Shopify is a bit like that, but I trust Shopify. I agree with you. About your remarks about the culture at Shopify. I personally would have more confidence with, confidence with Shopify than I would what I’ve seen about Etsy. But that’s my opinion. But I think it’s dangerous to build your whole business and then you just might get an email and say, your 9 years, it’s over.

[00:35:37.630] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

Yeah.

[00:35:38.530] -Jonathan Denwood

I wouldn’t like to rely totally on that, Kevin. Now let’s get on to the AI tools part. And I like to broaden it out a little bit. Like to ask you partly, is there any particular AI tools that you’re using? And secondly, obviously with your background on Shopify, lately SaaS and some of the leading SaaS companies have been decimated on their stock value, like Adobe, Salesforce, HubSpot. I don’t know how well Shopify’s done. Um, in some ways, um, we don’t know what’s going to happen. You know, we don’t know what’s going to happen in a month or 6 months, especially in these times that are very interesting. Um, but I, you know, if you really got Salesforce and your whole company is relying literally for running the whole business on Salesforce, are you really just gonna dump it and move to some custom solution? Um, you might use it as a, as a ploy to maybe get a reduction when your contract comes up for renewal, but are you really gonna dump it completely? I don’t I don’t think so. So what was your making of what’s happened? You know, when it— I suppose the one that I wasn’t— it’s just my opinion— is Adobe because of their general business practices, which are very different to Shopify.

[00:37:21.120] -Jonathan Denwood

But what was your opinion about what happened to all these SaaS companies lately?

[00:37:27.380] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

Yeah. Well, it’s a very kind of like, may you live in interesting times type moment. For a lot of these companies whose, whose business model for the last, you know, 15-ish, maybe a little more than 15 years has been kind of the crème de la crème model about how a lot of these tech companies have been able to be super successful. I tend to agree with you on— I don’t think that model is going away. It’s just going to change. Like, like any technology adoption, there’s a curve. And we’re like, like a standard deviation and we’re on the upswing of that curve right now. I actually think we’re earlier than maybe other people do around adoption. But if you think about the businesses out there that use some of these— you mentioned Salesforce, you mentioned Adobe, you mentioned HubSpot. HubSpot’s another good one.

[00:38:22.900] -Jonathan Denwood

Or Shopify.

[00:38:24.190] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

Or Shopify. These businesses are in like a lot millions, if you look at all of them together, of businesses are entrenched in this technology. And it’s actually the barrier to switching just because of the level of integration I think is quite high. So the like dangle the lollipop of like, you know, you could do it yourself now. That’s not a, that’s not a proposition at this moment in time that I think a lot of bigger businesses are going to like jump off and like rip out the foundation and go do something different. I think it’s more of a slower change, especially like the higher you go up the value chain. And I think the companies that are going to win from like the HubSpots, the Salesforces and whatnot are the ones that are going to create reasons for businesses to stay with them largely by what they’re able to build with AI. So like you don’t have to leave to gain the efficiency or you don’t have to leave to get the cost savings. Or, you know, we’re going to change our model that is more in line with how you’re operating as a business now.

[00:39:29.560] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

And I think that’s actually going to be more of the common path for most people. You will get people who rip it out and go do something else. I think what you’re more likely to see is new businesses that are starting are not going to go down some of those paths at all to start off with, and they’re going to build in a world where they don’t necessarily need to be reliant on a major SaaS platform. The last thing I’ll say is I think there’s different tiers is like you’ve got, you’ve got your AI tooling, like your Anthropic, your ChatGPT, your OpenAI, your Gemini, your Googles, all those things that are sort of like the way you interact. You’ve got a tier of companies that are like where you interact with them. So like Pressable, as an example, is, is in that second tier where you can use an AI tool to interact with Pressable to get something done. I think the ones that are most interesting are the, are the companies out there, or SaaS companies that deal with the final product. So like we are a SaaS company that creates a paid ad visual, or we create a— like Figma is another example, which is like an interesting one.

[00:40:35.620] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

Like a lot of that is end product. And that’s a little bit more susceptible in many ways to some of the changes that are coming from AI. But the infrastructure layers are a little bit more entrenched. That’s my, my humble perspective.

[00:40:51.820] -Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think the biggest disruption obviously is in, in development really, but also online marketing. You know, you, I, I still believe in the traditional SEO techniques and models, but, um, I think, um, obviously with the large learning models, um, decisions are being made at earlier stage long-tail searching. I was watching a couple of videos by Neil Patel. I don’t agree with everything that guy says, but in some ways he— but on the other hand, he’s no idiot. Um, I think also what Google is doing around ad, you know, paid, paid-for-click, what Facebook are doing, um, things are changing on the online marketing. You know, what are some of the things that in this very dynamic, very changeable market in the next 18 months, what, what does, what’s some of the things that you think you can really pin your marketing strategy around Pressable?

[00:42:03.790] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

Good, good question. I think the first one that comes to mind is something we touched on earlier around trust and how you build trust with prospects and, you know, potential users and customers for your product in any marketing environment or in any product set in a world where AI and like the darker side of that is like all the slop that’s out there now that like is just, you know, it’s the same. So things like in-person events, like we just came back from WordCamp Asia. Last week or the week before, rather. And the amount of valuable in-person conversations we were able to have with existing and future customers that were just more genuine than anything you’d be able to do in this day and age online is, is super interesting. It doesn’t have to be at a conference. You can have micro type events and just meet with people in person. I think that’s huge. I think another thing that kind of combats the, the age we’re kind of moving into from a marketing standpoint is telling more real stories about real customers and real users. So case studies like just, you know, low-fi video conversations and interviews with people using your product, things that build trust a little bit more organically than like a paid ad, that’s going to be really, really important.

[00:43:20.960] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

And I think as a marketer, you have to be very careful about how and where AI kind of enters what stage of marketing. Because AI by definition leads you to the average. You will never, as a marketer, create something novel or something that is like those— you think of the best ad campaigns you’ve ever seen. AI is not going to create those for you from scratch. It’ll take you to the average of things that have already been created or spoken about. So you really still need that judgment and leadership and creativity, at least as inputs. And AI will help, help you go the distance. But to be the best of the best in marketing, you still need that, that human kind of input and creativity, which AI is not going to replicate for you. It’ll help you, but it won’t get you to that upper echelon.

[00:44:15.330] -Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think the other thing— I don’t know if you agree with this or if you have your own insight, I think what people don’t realize, this is my own opinion, when it comes to large learning models, when they do, when they do a fan out, I think, and you do like 3 to 4 separate fan outs, you’re gonna get different results. And I think part of the setup is that’s done intentionally. They don’t want marketers and people to, inbuilt into the technology is they don’t want patterns to be seen. Like, they want, they want the, um, the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. They don’t— they, they intentionally introduce— I wouldn’t say disruption, um, I’m struggling for the right word, Kevin— but they don’t want a pattern that’s pretty obvious because they don’t want online marketers to, you know, there are platforms that say that they can see the fan out and they can see patterns. I, I’m not too sure because I think part of the technology is to hide any consistency. Is this making sense, Kevin?

[00:45:37.780] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

100%. The word I was thinking about was distortion, like the best you can kind of like garble, um, a little bit, uh, to, to protect your, your intellectual property or whatever, for lack of a better term. It’s not quite that, but you know what I mean.

[00:45:54.770] -Jonathan Denwood

But you agree that they, they’re actually in some ways disguising any kind of pattern that, uh, on online marketers could see? It’s done intentionally to some extent.

[00:46:05.510] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

When you say they, who are you referring to?

[00:46:07.350] -Jonathan Denwood

Well, the large learning models like ChatGPT GPT.

[00:46:10.060] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

And I think to an extent, um, that also might be giving them too much credit around like, sure, maybe in some instances, but in some instances I think it’s just like you’ll see the same boring trend that many other people pull from the LLM and it’s just not unique. Like there was a thing I was reading on LinkedIn yesterday or earlier this week where all marketing is starting to sound the same because everyone’s speaking in in the LLM-generated voice. And the more people do that, the more that’s what LLMs will then train themselves on. And you’ll see every marketing like, it’s not just this, it’s that. And like, how many times you’ve read that turn of phrase in, you know, basically everything you’ve read in the last 6 months. So, you know, I think that’s more what’s likely going to happen rather than anything more distortive. But I’m I’m sure there are some instances of that for sure.

[00:47:04.140] -Jonathan Denwood

Over to you, Curt.

[00:47:06.790] – Kurt von Ahnen

Y’all just spent 5 minutes talking about the how AI is not great, and then I get the question, what AI tools would you like to share with the audience that you commonly use? I mean, you’ve already mentioned Claude.

[00:47:17.950] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

Yeah.

[00:47:18.910] – Kurt von Ahnen

But, but like, what’s, what’s it, what’s in your personal wheelhouse, Kevin? What, what are you comfortable in?

[00:47:23.380] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

Yeah. So we, so I, I personally have made an effort to continue leveraging all the major LLM tools just to see how they’re progressing. So that’s ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. I use Gemini for Nano Banana for a lot of like image creation stuff. Claude is not a good image generator, at least right now. Grok, I also, you know, take a look at Perplexity. They’re all kind of got their like thin sliver of pie that they’re they’re good at. Claude, though, for all-purpose right now is my favorite. It’s allowed me to build things as a non-coder that I wouldn’t have ever have been able to do previously. So that’s the one that feels closest to magic. Obviously leveraging our own Pressable MCP product, it actually allows us to build things like demo environments and like all sorts of interesting things using that tool for our own product. We also use like marketing creation type stuff like Descript for video. They have a bunch of like, one of the interesting things we did recently was just something as simple as making sure audio follows along a video you’re narrating properly. Like that’s really, that you’d have to pay an editor to do that without AI.

[00:48:44.590] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

And then AI can come in and help you do, do tasks like that. There’s a few other examples that kind of fall into that category. And the extension of a lot of these is creating applications that will do competitive monitoring for you, SEO checks, AIO checks, all the different kind of marketing functions that will help you gather information and make better decisions. You know, there’s, there’s a lot of those out there, but it’s, it’s having a profound impact in how our stack kind of proliferates. And we’re also now able, via a couple of other tools, to like plug into our internal information and all of our like history and projects and product to make sure we’re validating things within our own ecosystem too.

[00:49:33.010] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, that last thing that you mentioned, you know, I couldn’t help but think though, like that Google Notebook LM just popped right up, you know, because you can kind of restrict, you could put your library in there and then the answers really just come from your own library, right? Which is like really cool. And to your point, I’m in the same boat. Like, I love the Grok app in my phone. I can talk to it. You can, you know, pick the voice that it talks back to you in. And it’s kind of fun, like for personal stuff, but I don’t use it really for business. Whereas I tried to explore SEO a little deeper because I, you know, if we have to pick like our own personal weaknesses, right, as an agency owner, I’m like, well, I could probably learn more about SEO. And so I tried it in ChatGPT, I tried it in— I tried it in other tools and then I tried it in Claude and Claude gave me like the best, like, here’s the layman, here’s layman’s terms on how you’re going to improve your website. Here’s step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4.

[00:50:29.670] – Kurt von Ahnen

And, and I shared that with Jonathan. I think he agreed that, you know, that, that Claude tool for SEO analysis was really great.

[00:50:35.850] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

Yeah, it’s a great—

[00:50:37.050] -Jonathan Denwood

clear outlines. I’ve got things to discuss with you about that, actually. Um, so let’s go to the last question, Kevin. It’s been— you’ve been a fantastic guest. You have to come back. Um, hopefully you enjoyed the discussion. So if you could go back to the beginning of your career, is there any kind of quick, like, one or two 5-minute little chat you could give to yourself? Is there any little insight that you would like to give yourself?

[00:51:08.780] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

I think, you know, if you go back earlier in your career, I think in like the first 2 or 3 years out of university or college, I was like, oh my God, I want to grow, I want to move up, I want to like go, go, go, go, go. In retrospect, I’m like, these are some of the core learning years of your career where like the most value you’re going to get is actually from investing in learning skills, investing in learning subject matter, getting really good at things. That compounds a lot down the road. So just investing in yourself and skills and exposing yourself to as many people and knowledge and experts as you can is really, you know, a good thing. And maybe the second thing I’ll say is, like, young people and folks early in their careers think a lot about networking. For me, the most value I got was like just getting in the trenches with people I work with and solving things and working and building rather than like a forced, let’s get together over a slice of pizza or coffee and talk about something. You tend to build trust and relationships faster by doing and like working through something difficult with people.

[00:52:17.800] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

And then that trust and network come organically as a result of that. And yeah, I think maybe the last thing I’ll say is there’s, there’s a, it’s a Latin phrase called festina lente, which has been applied in a few different scenarios, but it’s basically, it means make haste slowly, which is like move quickly, but be thoughtful about it. And it may sound like those two things are at odds, which they are. So it’s a mental model to force you to always have, at least in a professional setting, have those two things be the diametric forces that are like, move quickly but be thoughtful about it, you know, and have them have tension with each other because both are, both are correct. That’s, that’s— and I think about that for my career as well. It’s like moving quickly is important, but you don’t want to be moving quickly in the wrong direction. So take the time to, you know, be thoughtful.

[00:53:16.130] -Jonathan Denwood

Can I have a quick You know, obviously we’re in, especially online marketing and online in general, we’re in a very dynamic— what do you think in the next year, 18 months, one really critical skill that somebody needs to be an effective marketer, online marketer?

[00:53:37.860] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

There’s only one, I think. And you say online marketer, but I think this is true of marketers in general and doesn’t just apply to marketing. And it’s 100% adaptability. What we are talking about today will not be true in 3 months. It will not be true in 6 months. It’ll be even further from the truth in 12 months. So being able to be flexible in your processes and structure and even how you operate and think and do things, knowing that you’re optimizing for something that is constantly changing, is going to be really important. And on a human level, not to let that get to you. We have— the human nature is to feel comfortable in stability and sameness, and, you know, something like, like you can always go back to and trust that something’s going to happen a certain way. We’re not operating in a world that moves like that anymore. So the ability to be adaptable and not let that throw you off as a human is, I think, going to be the biggest skill. Like, just realize this is where we’re at. Put your head down, keep going. We’re all going through the same thing.

[00:54:48.140] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

You’re not behind. You’re just another journeyer in this space. I think that’ll be the biggest indicator of success.

[00:54:56.510] -Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. We’re going to wrap up the show. So, Kirk, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?

[00:55:04.020] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, if you want to get in touch with me personally, it’d be through LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn almost every day, and I’m the only Curt Von Ahnen there. And then the business is Mañana No Más. We’d love to see you there, too.

[00:55:14.140] -Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. And Kevin, what’s the best way for people to follow you or hit you up and have a discussion about Pressable?

[00:55:23.860] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

Yeah, I mean, LinkedIn similar best way. Folks hit me up on LinkedIn, Kevin McGilvrey. I don’t think I have the honor of being the only one on LinkedIn, but you’ll find me pretty quickly with Pressable.

[00:55:36.520] -Jonathan Denwood

Thanks for coming on the show. It’s been a fantastic discussion. Like I say, if you want to support the show, leave us a review. It really does help us and get some quality sponsorship as well. We will be back next week for our monthly roundtable show. I think we will see you soon, folks.

[00:55:54.130] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

Bye. Hey, thanks for listening. We really do appreciate it.

[00:55:58.130] -Jonathan Denwood

Why not visit the Mastermind Facebook group? To keep up with the latest news, click wp-tonic.com/newsletter.

[00:56:08.690] – Kevin MacGillivray CMO Pressable

We’ll see you next time.

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