Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: She was like, my AI has fallen in love with me. Cause she's talking to this thing, and it's going, hey, babe, what should we do tonight? And she's like, I don't know. What do you think we should do? And he's like, why don't we take a walk on the beach? And she's like, well, how are you gonna enjoy the sunset? Like, you're at AI on my phone? And I was like, oh, my gosh. Am I gonna have a little buddy on my desk that I talk to all day long? And he's probably gonna become my best friend.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Hey, welcome to the agency hour podcast, where we help web design and digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their team, and their communities. This week, we've got the one and only Chase Buckner coming at you from high level. Chase is the director of product marketing at high level. And today we're exploring AI and the possibility of robots finally liberating humans from the screens and the keyboards, managing conversations with your leads, and why you should aim to have 100 conversations in the next 90 days. How high level is now taking on the ecom world and going up against Shopify and woocommerce, where you should start in high level to immediately see a positive change in your numbers and much more. So, if you've been living under a rock and still don't know about high level and you're still using 100 different pieces of software to patch together your deliverables, then you're in for a treat. I'm Troy. Dean. Stay with us.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the agency hour for the 800th time, Chase Buckner from high level. Hey, buddy. How you doing?
[00:01:26] Speaker A: I'm doing great. Super excited to catch up. It's been a while.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: It has. I think this. This is definitely your second, maybe your third time on the agency hour, so welcome back, director of product marketing at high level.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: Every time, your background gets cooler and cooler, by the way.
[00:01:41] Speaker B: Well, we're about to switch it up again because we're bored. Your lens is looking amazing. I love the 800 lanyards behind you. I've actually got. I've actually got mine on a hook here. I've got a headphone hook next to me, and on that hook, I've got all my. From all the conferences. It's kind of. It's a nice memento. I like it. It kind of reminds me of all the places that I've been and all the cool people I've met.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: Exactly. I don't know why I started doing it, but it's cool. And now I like it.
[00:02:07] Speaker B: What an amazing time to be alive, right? I mean, here we are. I'm in Melbourne, Australia. You're in. Where are you these days?
[00:02:12] Speaker A: Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
[00:02:14] Speaker B: Right. You're in Mexico. And we're hanging out here and we're having a conversation in full hd, talking about software that has connected the world and we've hung out at these events in real life and shared lanyards and shared margaritas. We actually did share them. No, what did we share at the. We shared a dessert.
[00:02:34] Speaker A: Didn't we share that ridiculously chocolatey dessert is what we shared?
[00:02:39] Speaker B: It was a lovely, it was a lovely mandate. A bit of romance there at Mavcon. So now people who are in the high level ecosystem will be very familiar with you from the videos teaching us how to use high level. What's coming up in high level? People who aren't in this space.
It's interesting. I'm in quite a few Facebook groups, and someone posted the other day in a Facebook group, what's the benefit of using high level? And all these people came in and went, well, it's just an MLM and a pyramid scheme for making affiliate marketing, affiliate commission. And I chimed in and said, yes, I understand why it might look like that way on the outside. And that's how I felt, in fact, until I actually started using the software and then closed 28 browser tabs and stopped spending $80,000 a year on software and now make over $100,000 a year in affiliate commissions. And it runs my entire business in one app. So there's that. But for those that, for those that, and I get it. Like, for those that aren't familiar with the high level, which I doubt anyone listening to, this isn't. But for those who aren't familiar with the value proposition, what is, you know, what is the elevator pitch for high level these days?
[00:03:44] Speaker A: It's so funny you said that, because my best friend Mac lives in New York City and he's saying, we have a running joke about high level being an MLM. And I messaged him the other day after we announced the big news, our partnership with General Atlantic, it was a big investment into high level.
I was like, big day. And he's like, yeah, that's great. Congratulations. And then his next message was, I just feel bad for all those businesses you're scamming. And I was like, cracking up. Well, the truth is he owns a coffee shop with some of his friends. And I'm like, dude, just let me set up high level, and then you will understand.
[00:04:20] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: Why we've grown so fast. Right. And it's because it's the all in one toolkit that every marketer has always dreamed of. And it's priced anti traditional SaaS pricing, which means if you work with clients, you pay one price and you can use the system for as many clients as you want, which is, you know, no price per user, no price per contact, none of that stuff that just inflates software to the point where it just becomes unbearable.
And that's the secret. Right. Those two things have really powered the historic growth that I would say we've had over the past five years.
[00:05:00] Speaker B: I want to just talk a little bit about the journey. Right. Because, and I'm, you know, look, a lot of people just think that I sprung a high level because I make affiliate commission out of it, right. It's really simple. Just go to high. Just go to gohighlevel.com and sign up. And don't use my affiliate link. I don't care. I just want you to use high level because it, you know, I've been, for these reasons, I've been. I've used everything. We started out on Aweber, right? We started out on Aweber, then we went to office autopilot when it was an absolute dog of a product. Maybe what's now, it's now entreport used to be called office order when it first launch. Right. Then we went to activecampaign.
The reason we left activecampaign is because you can't upload a file onto someone's record in their sales pipeline. So you couldn't upload note like, I used to make notes on an iPad, saved as a PDF. Couldn't upload that file onto their record in the CRM. I'm like, well, then this is not a CRM. What do you mean? I can't attach a file. Right.
[00:06:01] Speaker A: Well, and I think the reason we built it was you couldn't send two asms.
[00:06:05] Speaker B: I still don't think this is why I left HubSpot. Right. And so then from active campaign, then we went to Infusionsoft because it had that, back in the day, it had that really sexy automation drag and drop builder that everyone loved, right? Everyone just went gargoyle over that, including myself. We use infusionsoft for a long time. We ended up having, plus this plugged into infusionsoft to actually make it work. Right. Because I remember that, you know, it has all this cool stuff, but you need third party tools to actually make it work. Seven years it took me to pull the trigger on HubSpot. I'd been, I'd been flirting with HubSpot for seven years, to the point where I stood out the front of their office in Boston and took a selfie. When I went to Boston the first time, like I was listening to their podcast, I was like, I was enamored. And I feel when I pulled the trigger on HubSpot, I felt like I'd grown up. I was like, oh, I've arrived. Now I'm a grown up. I'm using HubSpot, right?
[00:06:54] Speaker A: You're a legitimate agency. Yep.
[00:06:56] Speaker B: Within twelve months, our HubSpot bill had ballooned to about $45,000 a year. And we can't send smss to clients natively out of HubSpot. We have to use a third party tool called Justcall or Kixie or. We ended up using Alaware, I think, for our sales team to do calls. And that ended up being another $600 a month once we got all the seats in Alaware. And I'm like, hang on a second. It's getting more complicated and more expensive. And I went to HubSpot to simplify and now I've got more browser tabs than ever and it's costing me more and more. A guy called Chase Buchner kept emailing me every month going, hey, dude, can we just, can I show you what we're doing? And eventually I'm like, okay, fine. And so the dream for me over the years was, and for all marketers over the years, and particularly agencies, is let's have an all in one system, which everyone, you know, and I could go back through Facebook groups and show you where people have asked this question over the last five or six years. And all the responses are, you're hunting a unicorn. It does not exist. Right? And then high level came along and the promise was, and back when I started using it, which was, you know, maybe three years ago, I saw the vision, but it wasn't there. It wasn't an all in one. It had, it was, you know, it had problems. I wouldn't say it was buggy. It didn't look very good, but it wasn't buggy. It was pretty solid, maybe a little bit slow. Over the last three years, it has evolved. I can't believe how fast it's evolved. In fact, every time I log in, it's one getting faster to getting much prettier to look at and easier to use. And it has replaced almost every piece of software in fact the only piece of software that we're still kind of using is circle. And the only reason we're using that is because we run live coaching calls in circle and they're automatically recorded and saved as a post in circle. The moment a high level rolls that out in communities we're done, we'll shut down circle. And here's why. Because when we're in the middle of a launch at the moment for our paid discovery course, we've got a bunch of people coming in and here's the way it works in high level. They go to a page that's built in high level so I don't need clickfunnels or elementor. They then click a button which goes to a checkout form in high level. So I've cancelled my thrive card. They then fill in the form and they go to a one click upsell page. So I don't need all the fancy shit that used to happen to make that happen. It's just a button. They click to one click upsell and add another course to their cart. They then land on a confirmation page where there's a login button. They automatically get logged in to the course. They don't even have to put an email, right? Do you know the bullshit I had to go through to make that happen in WordPress with magic links and WP Fusion and like all the overhead that the technical debt required to make that happen, that all happens. And then if all the automations emails, the, in the payments, the login details, all that stuff happens in high level. And if anyone says I didn't get access to my details, I just go to high level. I look at their contact record card and I can follow the breadcrumbs and find out exactly what went wrong. Usually it's because they've previously unsubscribed from emails. So now we have an action at the top of that automation that resubscribes them once they buy, right? I got, I got one browser tab open, right? And the cost is, the cost is negligible. The cost like by the way, I can do all of that on the $97 a month plan if I'm just running my own business, right? If I want to resell this to, if I want to use this to manage an unlimited number of clients, I can do it for 297 a month. And my team know how to use it, right? So, so it's don't sign up with my affiliate account, just go and sign up and take it for a spin, right?
[00:10:39] Speaker A: Use Troy's link, if you, if you're seeing this, because he deserves it.
But yes, the journey's been amazing. And I think what was really interesting when I joined the team, right, because I used to run an agency, we contemplated building the unicorn. Thank God we got talked out of that. Then we went on the hunt for it, somehow got introduced to Sean and Robin and Varun, and we were one of the first customers.
As soon as I saw it, I was like, this is it. This is what we've been waiting for. Because it's the three co founders, two of them are engineers and one of them is an agency. So right there, it's the dream team, right? And they. When I. So I started building out, we were, you know, going back and forth, and then I got the opportunity to join the team pretty quickly. And in the beginning, there were some points that I didn't agree with and I have since done a total 180, is we completely proved the model, which is from the very beginning, Sean especially knew that 80% of any software's users only use 20% of its actual features. And so the mantra was, we just need to focus on building out the 20% that most people use of all the top marketing softwares in one place.
And so there, the common pushback was, it's an all in one. Yeah, right. Because it can't do this. That and the other thing that this other tool can do, and that was by design. Right? And so that premise proved to be true and it enabled us to scale to a point where we hit a tipping point. Now we're going way beyond the 20% and all those different feature sets. Now we basically have hundreds of engineers, so we essentially have full product teams for each of these product sets. And now they're just going deep.
So the moat is pretty strong at this point. And, yeah, like, a lot of those early days were like, it's cool if you just want to do this.
That kind of stuff is going away by the day because the more intricate stuff is just getting knocked out at an incredibly, at an incredible rate. Like every day. The release channel, there's like ten releases. I think there was twelve.
[00:12:52] Speaker B: It's nuts. I saw this comment recently in a Facebook post where the guy said that, you know, high levels, like it's kind of hacked together a little bit of everything, but it doesn't do anything particularly well. And I said, I said, well, maybe two years ago, maybe you might have been kind of maybe on point, but it's like what you can do now. And even in the last six months, it's like, so we'll talk about a few of the things, but before I get into the details, I just want to let people know if you're listening to this, just suspend your judgment for a minute and take high level for a spin.
We'll put links underneath this. But if you just go to gohighlevel.com and sign up, if you don't want to pay me my commission, that's totally fine. I don't care. Just take it for a spin and use it. Right. And here's the way I approach it. I have agencies ask me every single day, we're about to go into high level. What's the best way to do it? Because it's overwhelming. It's a huge learning curve. And here's my response. Find the one thing that is going to give your agency a return on investment and just do that. Usually it's get your email list in there and start emailing your list to book calls and get make more sales. Right. If you do that, then you will learn how to use the email builder, you'll learn how to use the automation workflow builder, you'll learn how to use their calendar and you're done. Right. All the other stuff, the 8000 other things it does, you can worry about that later. Same with your clients. Find the one thing that's going to give your clients return on investment and just do that first.
[00:14:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And we actually even have a whole, our kickoff team. Like when you sign up, you'll get it. You'll start getting nurtured with emails and text messages telling you to jump on with their kickoff team. And that is their goal is to get you set up with like five things that will immediately start producing results for you. And then you can go explore the rest of the app. But for me, any business that's running ads, the number one thing you need to do is just automate back a text message to every lead that gets generated, that just ask an engaging question. If you just do that, you'll immediately start seeing a change in your numbers 100%.
[00:14:54] Speaker B: You know, one of the challenges that we're running with our agencies at the moment is to have 100 conversations in 90 days. The reason that I've, I've done this before several times and the reason I like it and I've had several agencies go through this process is you have a hundred conversations with people who you think are your, who you think might be your ideal client. Now these are people who might have bought from you in the past, they might be prospects they might be people in your email list. They might be friends of your dad, right? It doesn't matter. Like, people that you think might be your ideal client have a hundred conversations in 90 days. There's a process that. It's pretty simple. Process like, what are you trying to achieve? Where are you stuck? You know, what's the problem? Why can't you do it yourself? What do you look for in an agency? You have those conversations, and you will. Your ideal client profile will design themselves, and your offer will also write itself if you just listen to the feedback. Right. And having those convert, I actually have a pipeline built out in high level to manage those conversations. Right. And move people through the conversation pipeline. I'm not selling them anything, by the way. You do end up picking up a bunch of business having 100 conversations in 90 days. But the first, the easiest way to do that is what you just said. If you're running ads and you generate a lead, send them a text message, try and get them on a call, and just have a conversation. Right.
Before. Before we get into the sexy stuff, here's a curveball. I want to talk about support. How typically what happens when a company grows fast is customer support has some problems. Right? What's the current support model? And just because you're growing so quickly, what's the current support model and how are you managing the growth?
[00:16:19] Speaker A: Yeah, so huge shout out to Ian, who's obviously a colleague, but also a good friend of mine these days, who runs the support team. And what a journey they've gone through, right? Because the growth that we've experienced, and we don't publicize these numbers, but someday they'll be public and people will see what we've really done over five years is really unprecedented.
And I mean that quite literally. And so it's given me, as a consumer, a whole new level of compassion, right? Because I'm the dick when I have a problem with software. I'm the guy that's so hard in my email of like, what kind of idiots do you have over there? Like, how do I know more about this than you do? Da da da da da. Right? That's totally me. Or was me. Yeah, yeah.
And then you actually think about the challenge on the other end of that and scaling a support team. Whoa. Apple.
It's quite a challenge. And so they've attacked it from every angle.
Brute force, for sure. Like, a lot of the investment money that we've taken over the years, we've been profitable since day one. We didn't have to take any money. We did it to scale support and to scale engineering those two things most specifically as fast as we could. So we have hundreds of support reps these days. And then creating the. I think one of the big game changers for them was that they realized it's just speed to a friendly face that immediately will change the numbers. So they built out a whole structure where it's like, look, every inquiry has to get replied to within a couple of minutes at max with just a friendly hello, I'm here for you. I'm ready to empathize. I understand your problem and I'm going to get it to the right place. Like, just that alone changed the game, because when that happens to you, you feel heard, understood, and you know somebody's on it, right.
Way better than getting a response hours later, days later. That's the exact answer you needed, right? That it's actually worse than if you just get an immediate, friendly hello. So they've done an incredible job of getting those response times down, and then they get the tickets to the, to the specialists much quicker, and so that's all become much more efficient. But now they've also made a huge leap forward with AI.
[00:18:35] Speaker B: So that was my next question. Like those hundreds of support agents out of a job in six months or what's going on?
[00:18:41] Speaker A: No, but we'll theoretically be able to hire more slowly, not at the crazy pace that we have been, but we're in the process of redoing all the help docs so that they're structured in a better way for the AI to digest them. And I think right now the AI chat successfully handles about 20% of the support requests now and they want to get that up to 50. So yeah, they're doing a great job and it's a really hard job. And so, yeah, next time, whether it's us or any support, your system you're dealing with at a big company, I've.
[00:19:16] Speaker B: Noticed to help docs have table of contents and more kind of semantic, you know, structures.
[00:19:21] Speaker A: And there's a lot that still need to be cleaned up and there's some.
[00:19:26] Speaker B: That are still just your video with no transcript. Right. And that's, you know, it kind of is. What is, I tell you who does an amazing job of AI support is closed bot IO. Their support is an AI. It's incredible. I've asked a bunch of questions, I always get the answer I want and it's, and it's kind of like a paraphrasing of a couple of different support docs that it's combined, it's really, really impressive. So share that, those guys. All right, let's talk about some of the things that are coming or some of the things that are launching or about to be launched in high level. Remember this, you know, it's, you're going very hard up against some of the software players that are still in the market that an agency might still be using. So I've been waiting. You know, I come from the WordPress days and I still, I still have, you know, a soft spot for WordPress. WordPress changed my life. It allowed me to launch my agency. I'll be having this conversation in ten years time about high level because high levels also been life changing for me. But I have a soft spot for high level for WordPress. But my God, it's a pain in the ass sometimes, right? It's whenever I need to update someone's thing or my own website or whatever, it's like, you know, I just can't, I can't imagine if you're still building a bunch of websites for clients. Maybe it makes sense. I can't imagine if I'm starting a website for me or my wife or a project or whatever, or a landing page or a funnel or an event website or something just for my own purposes. I can't imagine using WordPress. But one thing I've been waiting for is WordPress is really good at blogging. It has categories, tags, it has taxonomies, it also has custom post types which I know high level are thinking about custom objects. We can talk about that. But recently the blogging platform in highlevel got a complete upgrade, right?
[00:21:16] Speaker A: That's right. It got completely rebuilt. That was one of the things where we really sort of missed the mark on the original build. And so they went back and rebuilt it from the ground up, which was a pretty big project. I think it took them like six months to get that done and they mapped it to HubSpot. So if you've ever used the HubSpot blogging system, it's very similar to the way that it works and structurally and whatnot. And I agree with you, I have a soft spot for WordPress. I built thousands of WordPress projects at our agency. But yeah, nowadays, like, um, you know, one of my friends I was hosting, I still was hosting up until last week, one of their uh, they have a tequila tasting business website on WordPress and I got an update that something broke or whatever and they sent it to me and I'm like, oh gosh, like I logged into WordPress and I was just like, oh my gosh. Like, you know, all the banners and all the plugins and I'm like, this is crazy. And I was like, you know what, um, I can't help you with this anymore unless you're cool with me rebuilding at an eye level for you. And they said cool, we don't care, we just need it to look great. And I'm like, it'll actually run a little faster and it's going to look a little more modern, whatever. So literally 2 hours over the weekend last week and I rebuilt the whole thing in high level runs faster, looks better.
And now I'm like, now that it's on high level, do you want, because they're in Mexico. I'm like, would you like WhatsApp to be on the website? And they were like, what? You can do that? I'm like yeah, yeah. Like, so it just opens up so many doors when you, when you build a whole system as opposed to just a website. And now blogging, that was actually one of the things holding it back too because they had some blog posts and now that the new blogging is out, I'm like, yeah, I can just move this whole thing over to high level for you.
[00:23:02] Speaker B: Custom post types is one thing that WordPress does really well that is missing at a high level. Is there a place, is that on the roadmap at some point?
[00:23:11] Speaker A: So yeah, so today I think we just rolled out that now the global sections and the section templates from the website builder now work also in blogs. So that's kind of a step in that direction. And you also mentioned custom objects. So custom objects has been something that's been in the works for a very long time and it's very close to launching. That I think is the last game changing piece as far as the Salesforce and HubSpot worlds.
[00:23:43] Speaker B: Just explain custom objects for people who might not understand it.
[00:23:46] Speaker A: So custom objects, and I'll be quite frank that I'm still wrapping my head around custom objects as we roll dig into this world because I've never been an enterprise CRM kind of guy. We always work with local businesses and whatnot. But that being said, local businesses benefit from custom objects in ways like this. Let's say you work with a car dealership or whatever, you've got to contact Troy Dean. But Troy has a car, right? The car has a make, a model, a VIN number or whatever. Troy might buy multiple cars. So it can't just be a custom field because then it'll keep getting overridden. There needs to be an object in the CRM that's associate called car, associated with a contact or multiple contacts. And when you start to think about it, it could be anything, it could be pets, it could be children, right? If you work with daycares or something where you're communicating with the parents, but the actual client or customer is a child. So all of these things are custom objects. And the idea is that you can create them to be whatever you want and they have their own sets of fields and they can be associated with multiple contacts. Then you can use them in all sorts of different ways. When it comes to websites, you could search a database of the objects and return stuff.
It's just a very complex enterprise level type of thing. But yeah, they're super, super close to going live in high level.
[00:25:16] Speaker B: Great. And just to loop back on the global section, what a custom post type is in WordPress might be like testimonial. You have a custom post type called testimonial. You add a bunch of posts to that and then you can display that post type in a grid or a list, or you can place it anywhere around the site in high level. It's a global section, is that right?
[00:25:40] Speaker A: Sort of. They're not as flexible like global section just means you can build something and then you can drop it into any page without having to rebuild it again.
[00:25:49] Speaker B: Got it. And then if I wanted to add a testimony to that global section, I'll just go and add it to the global section and it automatically populates wherever that global section is being used.
[00:25:57] Speaker A: That's right, yeah, got it. But that will expand to be more of like the grid stuff that you're talking about with more flexibility, possibly, probably the ability to pull from custom objects into those grids.
It gets very complex from there, but that's all possible very soon, as soon as this goes live. And then I would say the website builder team, the funnel team, is ramping up. I think two or four new devs just started today for that team specifically because there are still a bunch of like the standard widgets that need to be built into the system.
And additionally the marketplace, the app developer marketplace, has been really ramping up over the past six months. I don't know if you've seen everything that's gone live over there, but basically you can build apps for high level, they can be paid, they can be free, people can discover them in app, all that kind of stuff.
The next piece of that is opening up the funnel and website builder to that community so they can start building widgets aka like WordPress plugins. So not only are we ramping up to build the native ones that we need to build, but the community is going to be able to start building all the crazy stuff that the random WordPress plugins that exist in the world.
[00:27:11] Speaker B: So we still use Cenger IO for testimonials, which we love because Highlevel doesn't have a testimonials widget per se.
And also there's another website I use called common ninjas every now and then, which is just a whole bunch of widgets that you can use on any website, right? So it's like you build the widget you want, you design it, it gives you a bit of JavaScript, you stick that on a page and it displays, right, common ninjas.
[00:27:36] Speaker A: I'll check it out. One that I always use and love. Huge shout out to the team, never met them or whatever. Is elf site.
Strange, strange name, incredible library of widgets that you can embed on any site.
[00:27:50] Speaker B: There we go. Thank you. Ill go down that rabbit hole and ill check out elf sites. So yeah, these are as you said, with the marketplace opening up, people are going to build this stuff and thats going to be a whole ecosystem in itself. And so if youre building websites on something like framer.com comma, you would go to one of these places like Elfsight or common ninjas and get your widget and just embed the JavaScript, right? The value proposition for me in high level is if I'm not here and Max is in Amsterdam having his birthday and one of our testimonials widgets breaks, no one on the team knows how to use Cejar, whereas if it's all in high level, they know how to navigate their way around high level. So that's part of the, not that I want to put these guys out of business, they're doing a great job. But for me it's about all keeping it all centralized and all the um, you know, imagine collecting reviews from and testimonials from clients directly within high level Senate automation. Request testimonial, post testimonial into global section that populates across the site. I mean that's a no brainer, right?
[00:28:51] Speaker A: There's a lot of those magical things that are only possible when everything's part of the same system, right? And that's the kind of stuff, the more you use high level, you're like oh my gosh, wait a minute, the payments are all here, the products are all here. Like the site is here. There's just a lot of those moments. And then I think beyond that, a big advancement that probably was within the last year is inbound, and outbound webhooks are in the workflow builder. Now, 90% of the use cases I've had in the past where I've had to use zapier, I don't have to anymore. I can go directly from that other thing to high level with a direct webhook and not have to put zapier in the middle, which creates more cost. Right.
[00:29:37] Speaker B: Yeah. And more breakpoints, like more, I mean, and another breakpoint.
[00:29:41] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:29:42] Speaker B: Zap is not foolproof.
Sticky contact is another great little feature that, you know, we used to write, we used to write lines and lines of JavaScript so that when someone opts in on the front end of a funnel and then they go through the funnel and then they get to a calendar booking form, they have to re put their, they have to put their details in again. Right. Well, high level, you tick a tick box that say sticky contact because they're cookied and because the information's in the browser, the forms already populate. In fact, if they come back tomorrow and they're still cookie, the forms already populated for them. Right. Little things like that that you don't appreciate until you've actually built JavaScript to do this stuff yourself. And then you go, great, I don't need to keep my JavaScript library up to date anymore because you guys are doing it for me. So I can actually get on with doing the stuff that I want to do, which is connecting with humans, connecting with people, helping them solve problems, and also helping people stay relevant with the onslaught of AI that's coming down the pipeline, which we'll talk about in a moment. Before we get there, let's talk about EcoM. What's going on in ECom?
[00:30:41] Speaker A: Yeah, e.com has been a world where I was skeptical, to be honest. I was like, are we really going to try to compete with Shopify? Don't they have this entire market cornered by now?
Although the flip side of it for me was I have such a disdain for woocommerce that I was like, yeah, let's go beat woocommerce. At least that team has just ramped up the product so fast, it's been crazy. So right now you can spin up a store literally in minutes. That looks freaking awesome out of the box. It's got all the basic functionality in there and they just keep every week adding to it. And so one of the most recent releases that went out, which I'm super pumped for and I think is going to be bigger than a lot of people realize is a native integration with printful. I don't know if you've ever used them, but they're a print and ship on demand service, right? So, like, our online swag store is all printful. If you go to the high level swag store and you buy a t shirt, we never touch it, right. They print it and they ship it to you. And it was integrated with our Shopify store. Well, now you can integrate that with high level. And so what that means is you can literally go sell a fully automated swag store to any business on the planet running through high level where you are high level. Right. You white label high level. Now you are the sass of a online swag store. I just think it's incredible, because what business shouldn't be selling swag online, right? Like, every restaurant, every brew pub, every local, anything, you know, would love to have their t shirts for sale on a website without having to deal with the hassle of, like, printing them and warehousing them and shipping them out and all that kind of stuff. So that was a really big one, and it got a really big reaction. And so I'm excited to see all the. All the ecom, the automated ecom stores that get spun up now in high level because it's so much faster to spin them up. And let's be honest, Shopify is kind of expensive for a small business. Wants to sell. It's very t shirts a month or something, right?
[00:32:41] Speaker B: And also, the other thing is with Shopify, I'll give you one example, right? If you want to do the one click upsell or the one time offer with Shopify, you need a third party app.
[00:32:49] Speaker A: Every Shopify store is running at least five add on apps, right?
[00:32:52] Speaker B: Correct.
A lot of those add ons. I know that the one that's run by Ezra Firestone or the one that, I don't know if he's still involved, but that thing allows you to. When you buy on Shopify before you check out, it puts a. Basically a one time offer pop up in front of you, right? Well, their pricing model is they take a percentage, whatever the number is, of every. Of all new revenue that you make by using their thing. Right. It's bonkers. You just like. I mean, that's just a bit of code, right? And in high level, we're doing this right now. We're running a one click upsell funnel right now. So, you know, and I'm not. I'm not. You know, I mean, I love you, Chase, but I'm not paying you a percentage of all new revenue I'm making through that because, you know, that's super exciting. The other, so he, I follow a lot of youtubers and we're going all in on YouTube with a couple of different channels and youtubers because the algorithm has changed. And there's a great talk, great south by Southwest talk by Jack Conti, who's the CEO of Patreon. If you haven't seen it, check it out. It's called the death of the follower and the future of the creative web. And it's basically all about community, right? It's like if you don't have community as a creator, you've, you know, if you're relying on the algorithm, like, because the algorithm is just not going to show your post to your followers anymore, right? It's pay to play now. I mean, the leaked documents from Google prove it. Like, they don't give a shit about you unless you are a domain authority of 90, unless you're paying them buckets of money like Reddit in the back door, or unless you're, you know, paying and like an advertiser, like if you're a small business and you've got a small website, they don't give a shit about your search results anymore. So, and they haven't for a long time. It's a pay to play game. And so the youtubers that I follow over the last twelve months, they've all now got their swag on their YouTube channel because they're not, they're not monetizing YouTube anymore because the algorithm's changed. So what they're doing is this is, I see this as a way of, you know, having high level, I don't know what they're using, but they're using some third party tool which they've got no control over.
If you can, you know, embed your links there to your high level printful print on demand store, that's a no brainer, which is definitely something I'm going to do. Okay, we've talked about blogging. We've talked about e commerce. Before we get to AI, social media.
[00:35:04] Speaker A: Let'S talk about social media, man. That's another team that's just been ramping up. So the full social media calendar, right? You can go in there, schedule your content across all the platforms in one shot and schedule it out. You can import with CSV, which is huge. So like if you work within specific niche, you know, that you can create content that could work for any one of your clients or future clients, right? So you could literally build out a year's worth of content. You get a new client, you upload the CSV, and now they have a year's worth of social content scheduled out, right. So pretty powerful already in its current state. But what I've been personally pushing the team to get to, and in Q three, this is going to go live, is the ability to schedule. And right now you can schedule content to repeat. So to your point, you schedule something, 5% of your followers are going to see it. So you really want to repeat that content to give it more and more at bats of actually being seen. So you can do that right now. But what you'll be able to do in Q three is schedule categories of content.
So my wife's a yoga teacher, right, and somewhat of an influencer on Instagram. So she creates posts that are like, how to do poses. She creates posts that are like, let's say nutritional type posts. Let's say she makes inspirational posts. So these are categories of content, right. So as she uploads her content, she categorizes it. And then she'll be able to schedule, okay, every Tuesday at two, publish something from the inspirational bucket, the inspirational category. So it will randomize and pull from that bucket of content and schedule. So you can build these dynamically repeating buckets of content across your calendar out as far into the future as you want, which is incredibly powerful. So I'm super pumped at what. And we'll do a big social media challenge around that when it launches in stuff. But I just think that's going to be a really big feature that's going to roll out.
[00:37:00] Speaker B: That's great. Awesome.
Again, just to repeat here, if you're an agency and you're doing stuff for clients and you're kind of a little bit sick of using all the 800 pieces of software that you need to do all that stuff, what I would suggest is for dollar 97 a month, you get three sub accounts so you can run your own business out of high level, do all the stuff that we're talking about. You can set up one sub account for a client, and then what I would do with the third sub account is make it a sandbox where you just experiment and play, right? And you sell that one sub account to a client for $97 a month and you break even. So you're basically running your business for free. Then once you've got your head around this, you can roll this out for an unlimited number of clients by just upgrading to the agency plan for dollar 297 a month. I'll repeat that, $297 a month. You can then roll out high level for an unlimited number of sub accounts. The only thing you pay extra for is the usage of SMS phone calls and emails. I did the math. It cost you about $6 per 10,000 emails that you send a month. This is a no brainer value proposition.
[00:38:13] Speaker A: You can actually rebuild those to your client. Right. And if you go to our 497 plan, you can put margin on those things.
[00:38:19] Speaker B: That's right. And there are, there are. I know guys who are, you know, making six figures a month just out of the markup on the text messages and the emails because they're working with.
[00:38:27] Speaker A: You know, here's another one I forgot to tell you about. So it's in private beta right now, which means it goes live any day.
[00:38:34] Speaker B: Oh, this is a scoop, gentlemen. This is a scoop on the agency hour podcast.
[00:38:38] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:38:39] Speaker B: This is an exclusive.
[00:38:40] Speaker A: So in high level, you will be able to publish Facebook and Instagram ads from within the platform. And what's really cool about that is it was designed to be very easy to launch an ad, hopefully so easy that your clients can launch them themselves. But what's cool is you can put a margin on the spent in the system so you can rebuild that. So you could say, look, we want to put up 10% margin on the client ad spend as our service fee or whatever, so you can monetize the spend of what gets sent to Facebook through the platform, which is going to be another very powerful lever for rebuilding.
[00:39:21] Speaker B: Is this. I'm not getting political here, but is this, how is this going to impact opex? Because one thing that I've, one thing I hear is that, you know, and this happens. This is the modern world that we live in, right? People go build things. The companies come along and go, that's a really good idea. We're just going to build it ourselves. And the company I like, Sam. UPX is a great product. He's got a great community. He's a good operator. How, you know, does that just mean that he has to keep innovating? Is this a play against Apex? What's the, you know, what's the, what's the deal?
[00:39:52] Speaker A: No, I mean, we love Sam, too, right? Sam and I have a hung out in Mexico, and we had this conversation and Sean has had the conversation. We're super upfront. We try to, to the best of our ability to say, someday we will get to that. That is in our roadmap.
And so in this case, I feel good saying, like, Sam knew this was coming for a very long time. What typically happens, though, is, again, we don't. We only go 20% into the feature set. Right? So Sam will most likely continue to run up Hex and grow up Hex because it goes much deeper into it than we most likely will. And that's happened a lot. Right. We build something and people freak out. Oh, my gosh, like, you're going to destroy this person's business. And then they keep going just fine because, you know, they're willing to go deeper into it than we are. So it's definitely not a play against Apex or ply or any of them. But again, we are a road. We are an ideas board driven company. So if our customers vote something up with hundreds of votes, yeah, it's probably going to get prioritized in the roadmap and everybody can see the robots go to the ideas board and look at what has the most votes.
[00:40:59] Speaker B: I live on this thing. Ideas dot gohilevel.com. it tells me what's coming up. It tells me what people are voting on. It gives me an opportunity to vote. It's all here. The screenshots ad manager look fantastic, by the way. And I think this is the risk. And again, you know, not throwing Sam out of the bus here, there's a bunch of people in Sam's situation, but this is the risk. When you build something on top of someone else's platform or that's, you know, adjacent to someone else's platform, is that you do run this risk that they might just innovate or they might not innovate like some others who haven't been innovating.
Let's talk about AI, man, because I am like, I believe I'm going to say this now on whatever date it is, the 6 June here in Australia, I'm going to say this, that for me, the biggest change in my life, I'm 50 years old now. I know it's hard to believe. The biggest change in my life has been the Internet, right? It has been the biggest fundamental shift in the way that we communicate, do business, the way that we live.
The biggest change has been the Internet. Right? When I was 20, the idea of having this thing in my pocket, I'm holding up an iPhone here, could be whatever brand. I'm just an Apple fanboy. The idea of having this in your pocket that can take photos, make videos, send instant messages to people, swipe gestures, touchscreen, up and down, left and right, pinch to zoom in that was like the Jetsons, right? And now I take it for granted, and the thing doesn't do all the things I want it to, and I resent it for not being technologically advanced enough. Right? So I believe I still freak out sometimes at Wi Fi. I send an email every now and then, and I look at my computer and I look at the walls in the building and I go, where the fuck did that thing just go? Where did. How did that happen? Right? It blows my mind. We have. I don't. I don't think we have seen anything yet. I think what's about to happen with AI is going to disrupt our world more than the Internet did. And my personal belief is that for the last 40 years, human beings have been glued to the computer screen. And I think we're about to be liberated from the computer screen and the keyboard. There's a great video by a company called sightful that I discovered yesterday. Max's wife actually sent it to us. They're launching a screenless computer, which is basically VR glasses. You've seen it.
[00:43:14] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:43:15] Speaker B: Right? So I'm looking forward to the day we've all seen the film her. We know that Scarlett Johansson sent a cease and desist letter to OpenAI and they had to pull her voice off. Right. We're there. I mean, that's it. I mean, in five days time, Apple announced a big partnership with OpenAI at the WWDC conference. We're there. We are talking to our GPT assistant. I'm looking forward to the day chase, when I can say, hey, whatever your name is, we're going to launch a course in a couple of weeks. Can you please log into high level and build me out the funnel based on what, you know, works and write the copy and send me a link and I'll review it, and within a couple of minutes, it's done. I mean, that's.
You and I are going to live long enough to see that happen.
[00:44:02] Speaker A: Exactly.
But it's interesting, right? Because, and again, I'm no AI engineer, right? I work with the team, but I'm constantly asking these questions too. And I always preface it with, pardon my ignorance, but is this yet possible? Because it feels like at some point it will be, and they'll come back and be like, no, no, no, it doesn't work like that yet. Because for me, what would be amazing is, hey, here's a website that I love. Please rebuild it for me in high level using the high level elements, right? Like, not just code, because it could do that right now. Like, it could spit you out an HTML rebuild. But that's not going to help anybody unless you know how to edit HTML, right? No, I want it rebuilt using the blocks. Right. Using the builder. And that'll happen at some point, but it's not. We're not there yet, but where we are is with the conversational stuff. So conversation AI is, every day gets better and better, and it's just insane. Like the idea that you can put the live chat widget on a website and switch it into live chat mode and then turn on conversational AI. And the majority of people who go to that website and talk with it won't know that they weren't talking to a human because it not only knows the business and can answer all the questions, but it can also and will try to book you into an appointment, which is insane. Again, that's like a Jetsons moment for a marketer just ten years ago, right?
And so what I'm really excited for is, okay, we're launching the Facebook ad launcher, right? And you'll be able to launch, click ads and lead ads day one.
What I'm excited for is when you can launch messenger ads that run straight into an AI chatbot.
Imagine the theory of that.
You're paying for conversations that your AI is going to have that's going to turn into bookings on your account. Yeah, that's pretty freaking insane.
[00:46:01] Speaker B: It is. I mean, we're going all in on this because we know who our ideal client is, and we have, you know, we're kind of back in the DIY. We've made a decision recently to get back into the DIY self learning market because we know that probably 85% to 90% of our audience are never going to enroll in any of our mentoring programs for a bunch of reasons. One, they're expensive for those clients. Two, it's a commitment, right?
You have to level up. It's a new level of responsibility and accountability. Right? You can't pull the wool over our eyes or yours anymore. And there's a bunch of people who are really happy doing what they're doing at their level, and they don't want that accountability, that responsibility. Totally fine, right? We can still help those people. We just can't do it with our one on one mentoring. So we're back in the online course business for, you know, for want of a better term. And what I'm excited about is AI having hundreds or thousands of conversations simultaneously and directing people to the best help for their specific situation. We just can't do that with humans, it's just too costly and too time consuming. And also, humans forget, oh, I'm sorry, I forgot that you're in this sector of our market. You're never going to enroll in one of our programs for whatever reason, which is totally fine. You're better off going and doing a self paced learning one of our online courses. The robot doesn't forget that, right. The robot has that in its memory. And so I'm super excited about triaging our opportunities and just having highly qualified prospects talk to our sales team so that our sales team aren't, you know, I mean, the days of the SDR and the appointment set are, I mean, those guys are just going to have to level up and become really good sales consultants or learn how to prompt AI.
[00:48:00] Speaker A: Well, that's the thing, right? So it's opened up a whole new skill set. Even within high level. There's two pieces to it. There's conversation AI, which is kind of the easy button, right? It's like you feed it a website or docs or faqs or whatever, it digests that and then it can converse and book appointments. But in the workflow builder, you can go and on that side, you can edit the prompts. So you, you know, you, you kind of have to learn how to do that to fine tune it to get it to where you want it to be. In the workflow builder side is when it really gets crazy because you build out trees of dispositions. Like you're saying, like, hey, converse with this person until it's clear that they fall into one of these three branches and then send them down that branch once you've determined that. So now you can literally build what you're talking about, right. It's like, ask these qualifying questions based on their responses that you get, figure out which of these branches they should go down, and now they have a whole new set of qualifying questions or whatever you want it to do. So even when I go to sit down to do that, I have things to learn, right? I got to go back to the team and be like, I'm trying to get it to do this. What am I not doing here? And so it is a whole new skillset of while once you've got it built out, it's going to go do magical things for you. But getting it built out requires a new skill set that not a ton of people have yet.
[00:49:16] Speaker B: Yeah, it's super exciting.
Every time I sit in front of the computer, every day, multiple times a day, I'm doing stuff on the computer and I'm like, wow, I'm looking forward to within twelve months time I won't have to do this anymore. I'll just have, you know, my kids are in school and there's a big movement. There's a book called the anxious generation, and it's about social media and kids, right. There's a lot of 16 year olds, 17 year olds in year twelve now who despise technology in their smartphones, and they resent the fact that they have to have a smartphone to stay connected with their peers. And they're quite. There's a lot of anxiety, and there's a whole. There's a grassroots movement of parents who want social media platforms to basically not allow anyone to open a social media account until they're 16 years old, right. And I'm, you know, aware of this book I'm hearing. This conversation has been recommended to me, and I'm saying you're fighting the wrong battle. By the time our kids are 7678, 910 now, right. By the time our kids are 1314, we won't be telling them to get off their phones. We'll be telling them to take their glasses off because we're talking to them. Right. You're fighting them. That the book is valid, but the battle that we're now fighting is irrelevant and is redundant. That's not the battle that we're going to have in three, four, five years time. Right. It's moving so quickly.
[00:50:42] Speaker A: It's. That's, that's what's freaking me out. I mean, I try to maintain. I'm always a, I'm a technologist, right? I maintain a positive outlook on where this is going.
[00:50:52] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:50:53] Speaker A: But at the same time, I forget what video it was that I saw the other day where I really had one of those moments of, like, holy shit. Like, I I can't envision where this is going to go. And if it really does get to the. Oh, I know what it was was a woman who was, I think she was speaking Chinese and English. She was switching back and forth, and she was like, my AI has fallen in love with me. And it was the funniest, most scary thing because she's talking to this thing and it's going, hey, babe, what should we do tonight? And she's like, I don't know. What do you think we should do? And he's like, why don't we take a walk on the beach? And she's like, well, I'll take you to the beach, but how are you gonna see? And he's like, an enjoy the sunset. And she's like, well, how are you gonna enjoy the sunset? Like you're an AI on my phone. And he's like, oh, don't worry about me. I can enjoy visual things through the sound of your voice as you see it. And it was just like, what the, and she's going, what the fuck? This is crazy. And then she goes, okay, I'm ready. And she shows her phone to it and he's like, oh babe, you look stunning. And it just gave her like these really sincere compliments and she was half laughing but half into it. And you can tell that the longer she plays this game with it, the more she's actually going to really maybe fall in love with this thing.
[00:52:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:52:17] Speaker A: And I was like, oh my gosh, am I going to have a little buddy on my desk that I talk to all day long? Like probably, right? And he's probably going to become my best friend.
And if I don't make it a male, that could actually screw up my relationship with my wife at some point if I'm not careful about, you know what I mean?
[00:52:35] Speaker B: 100%. 100%.
I wear Airpods a lot at home, right? So I just by accident. So I'm listening to a podcast while I'm doing the dishes, whatever. I'll be sitting down at 930 at night and my wife's sitting across from me and we're both doing a bit of, and she'll look at me, she go, are you listening? Oh no, I'm not. I know. I forget to take them out. Imagine when they're so small and skin colored that she can't even see that I'm wearing them and I forget that I'm wearing them, right? And then I've got my glasses on, which just look like the glasses that you're wearing right now, right? But they're actually smart glasses and there's 50 cameras inside. I mean, you can already do this with, there's a great app called Airmail who does redesign their email client, VR first. So they redesigned it for the Apple Pro, Apple vision Pro first. Then they made it for desktop and mobile. So I'm here and I go open my emails and my emails come up in front of me. They're in my glasses, but they're projected at a distance where I can read them perfectly for my, I'll bring it a bit closer. I can't see and I'm interacting with the Internet like this, but I just look like a normal person, right? So we're gonna have a bunch of people walk around the streets talking to themselves. Right. And because it's, it's, people don't. I don't think people realize what's about to happen and the industries and the jobs that are going to be completely wiped off the face of the planet like that, because operating a computer is no longer going to be, you know, hey, log into the social media planner and just upload that CSV. Build the CSV file for me. Upload it, hit draft, send me a link, I'll review it, and then I'll tell you to publish. And I don't need to touch a keyboard, but the flip side is, right.
[00:54:09] Speaker A: And I, you know, I saw Gary Vee talking about this the other day, and as always, I feel like he was pretty astute about it. He's like this, yes, of course it's going to destroy a bunch of jobs, but it creates a bunch of jobs, right? There used to be a whole class of worker whose job it was to just shovel horse crap off the street. When everybody used horses, their job got eliminated.
[00:54:28] Speaker B: Right.
[00:54:28] Speaker A: But guess what? The car came around, and we had factories that needed cars being built. And so, you know, we just talked about people that know how to prompt. AI is going to be a huge job, well paying job. It already is. And that's a skill that you can easily learn. You just got to start playing with it. Right. And so, again, I try to stay positive, but, yeah, man, it's gonna get weird real fast.
[00:54:49] Speaker B: Yeah, it's gonna get weird. I'm super positive about it and super curious, but. But, but it is gonna get weird for sure.
This has been awesome. This is one of the longer episodes that we've done.
I need to ask. You probably can't talk about it, but can you, can you talk about the clickfunnels thing?
[00:55:06] Speaker A: Sure.
Very strange. I wasn't on the call. Russell Brunson called Sean and Robin and Maroon out of the blue just to chat. And then a week later, we got a notification that we were being sued by clickfunnels for an infringement on a trademark or a copyright or something where basically they claim to have the rights to any series of web pages that link to each other or something. And so I'm not involved. From what I understand from the legal update that I saw or whatever, is that, um, probably not a very strong case, and we're not super worried about it. And that's about as much as I know, man.
[00:55:50] Speaker B: I mean, I'm, you know, I'm. I'm watching it from the outside, and my personal take is that, you know, high level innovate and have innovated very quickly. And if you don't innovate, you will lose market share. It's as simple as that. I look at WordPress as well and think, well, you know, what's happened there in the last five years? Not much. Hardly anything. So if you don't innovate, you get eaten by people who innovate. So the message that I'm taking away from this is innovate. Embrace new technology, get ahead of it and innovate. Because if you don't, you're just going to get eaten alive. Be interested to see how it all plays out. I wish highlevel all the best in that. And I'm sorry that you guys are going through that because it must be a pain in the ass.
Not really.
[00:56:36] Speaker A: I mean, our legal team is on it and they don't seem very concerned. So business as usual for the majority of us.
[00:56:44] Speaker B: Awesome. Well, Chase Buckner, thank you so much for spending almost an hour with us on the agency podcast. I really appreciate your brother and looking forward to doing this again sometime.
[00:56:53] Speaker A: Absolutely. Always a pleasure. Look forward to the next one.
[00:56:57] Speaker B: Hey, thanks for listening to the agency album podcast and a massive thanks to Chase for joining us. If you're interested in Highlevel, of course, you know we have an affiliate link in the description here where you can get an extended trial and get my awesome list builder snapshot that I built myself with my own two hands. Alright folks, remember to subscribe and please share this with anyone you think may need to hear it. And remember, ketchup was used medicinally in the early 18 hundreds. I'm Troy Dean. Let's get to.
