Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Things are always more complicated and what happens is the state of the art always keeps improving. So what people expect from a website will always change. So today what people get is like a basic website, tomorrow the brochure website. The expectation will go up so much higher. You might be able to do everything end to end and the expectation will go up to a completely different level.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Welcome to the Agency Hour Podcast. And it's my birthday. That's right. We are so committed to helping you guys that I get out of bed on my birthday and come to work and host an episode of the Agency Hour podcast. This is a podcast where we help web design, SEO, digital marketing agencies of all types create abundance for their clients, themselves, their teams, their families and their communities. Let me just take a minute to define what I mean when I say digital agency. If you're in the business of selling any kind of marketing related services to other businesses, then you are exactly who we help. So you could be selling video content funnels, content, podcast growth, YouTube growth, copywriting, branding websites, search engine optimization, LLM optimization, AI consulting services, automation services, paid advertising, social media management, email marketing, marketing automation strategies, you name it. If you are selling any service to other businesses that helps them with their sales or marketing, then this podcast is for you. And when I say create abundance, what our job here is to help you guys do the the best job you can to serve your clients and make your clients more successful. Because if your clients are more successful, then you will be more successful. And if you are successful and your clients are successful, then what we know is that we're helping create wealthy, healthy and happier communities all over the world. And that's what we mean when we say that we think that of agencies as a distribution channel for abundance. And that's why we get out of bed every day. All right, having said that, I just wanted to kind of get that off my chest. Today's episode. Our guest is Akshat Chowdhury from WP Remote. Now, WP Remote are a partner of ours, but they're also the reason they're a partner of ours is because they make an awesome suite of products. If you are managing any more than two WordPress websites for your own purposes or for clients, then you should definitely be using WP Remote and manage all of those websites in one dashboard Blog Vault is their backup plugin, Malcare is their security plugin, and Airlift is their performance plugin. If you get WP Remote, if you're using WP Remote, you get all those plugins built in. So go and check it out wpremote.com and Akshat is currently in San Francisco. He's just been to WordCamp US and he is now currently at the HubSpot Inbound Conference in San Francisco and he's taken some time out to come and hang out with us. So without further ado, let's go and have a chat with Akshat from WP Remote.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Agency Hour podcast with a return guest from WP Remote, Akshat Chowdhury. Akshat, how are you my friend?
[00:03:03] Speaker A: I'm doing well and glad to be back. How are you, Troy?
[00:03:07] Speaker B: I'm very well, thank you. It is, yes, it is my birthday today and I. And listen, I couldn't think of anything I would rather do on my birthday than hang out.
[00:03:18] Speaker A: No one's going to believe this one.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: Then hang out with like minded folks on the podcast.
No, it's a pretty cruisy day for me. I've just been eating some cupcakes and after this I'm going to go and play guitar. So it's very cruising. Now listen, what are you doing in the States? The last time we had you on the podcast you were based in India and it was 6:30 in the morning. It's now 6:30 in the evening. What are you doing on the West Coast?
[00:03:42] Speaker A: Yeah, so I was here for the WordCamp US which happened last week. And then this week I extended my trip for HubSpot conference which was here in San Francisco.
So I thought I'll make the most of it.
[00:03:55] Speaker B: Well done.
Talk to me before we get into the HubSpot conference because I want to unpack that a bit. But talk to me. What was the vibe like at WordCamp US?
[00:04:04] Speaker A: So you know, coming in there was a lot of trepidation, especially given last year's, you know, the whole drama around it. But things eased out quite a bit. So things were generally positive. I had some really good conversations. In fact, I've not had such a productive wordcamp for a long, long time. So I, I had my team book conversations with customers just back to back and good, long focused conversations as to how they are using our product and what we can do better and just generally about agency life, you know.
So, so, so yeah, overall.
So the other thing is, you know, as much as we in the we think so much about the drama, there were so many folks who are totally oblivious to it. Totally. To them it was just another word camp.
[00:04:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
Was there any kind of drama or politics with sponsors and stuff at this Word Camp.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: No, things were much better. So things. I think next year's word camp should be back to normal, hopefully.
So completely normal. And yeah, generally it was a good word camp. It was a good word camp.
The footfall was on the lower side. But you know, this word camp, you guys, where they repeat the location.
Tons of people. Because no one wants to visit the same city twice.
[00:05:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where was it this year?
[00:05:35] Speaker A: It was in Portland.
[00:05:37] Speaker B: Portland. So they have it in the same city two years in a row, don't they?
[00:05:40] Speaker A: Yeah, they do that for the US one.
[00:05:44] Speaker B: It's weird. Yeah, it's.
[00:05:45] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, it's. It's like it becomes an excuse to go and visit a new place. Like, what can Europe happens in a different place every time and it becomes a great excuse to.
To visit a new place and.
But what camp.
What camp Us. They repeat it and yeah, the second time around, it. It almost always doesn't have the same charm to it. Yeah.
[00:06:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Well, that's good to hear that it went well. Now, for those that don't know, by the way, Akshat is the owner of WP Remote. I'm just going to walk you through very quickly the product stack. So Blog Vault is your backup solution. WP Remote is your all in one dashboard to manage all of your WordPress websites.
You've got Malcare, which is your security plugin, and you've got Airlift, which is your performance plugin. Have I missed anything?
[00:06:39] Speaker A: No, no, you're doing well. So, yeah, that's our. That's our sweet.
[00:06:43] Speaker B: That's the family of products.
Now talk to me about how different.
So coming from WordCamp and then going to the HubSpot, is it inbound? Is that, Is that the HubSpot?
[00:06:54] Speaker A: Yeah, that's. That's what it's called.
[00:06:55] Speaker B: So how different. How different was inbound to. To WordCamp and also what were you expecting from Inbound and how did it live up to your expectations?
[00:07:03] Speaker A: So.
So yeah, because it was happening at the same time and I make San Francisco my base almost every time I visit, visit the States.
So because it was happening here, I thought, let me just spend a few extra days and make the most and just try and explore what's going on. Because I've never really been to.
To inbound.
HubSpot is a huge, you know, ecosystem. It's like tens of billions of dollars.
It's a very valuable company. 3 billion plus revenue.
And, and you know, and they play in somewhat the similar ecosystem that we do.
Only thing is, they tend to Be slightly more valuable. So, you know, or actually, I would say, I think slightly is an understatement. They tend to be more valuable. They're serving more valuable customers. And that's always a nice thing to do, you know, to understand what's. Why are people willing to spend more money on software or on services? So you have agencies who are.
The software itself, like the marketing stack, costs at least 60,000 a year, if not more.
And you have agencies who are charging a lot more for the implementation. So just to try and get a sense of what is going on, what causes people to.
To spend so much money, who are the kind of customers and why. Why are they even coming and attending this conference? You know, the conference ticket is $1,200 compared to a Word camp, then. Yeah, and here you have. So one of the things is here you have actual customers coming.
And so one of the people I spoke to was a.
Was a nonprofit from Florida, and they were using it for their.
I think they were using it. And they were, they were. They had an extensive.
They had an extensive implementation of HubSpot. And they had like a bunch of people traveling from. All the way from Florida. And that's an expensive. If you can think about it, that's a. That's a big commitment from the. From the nonprofit. Right. From the organization.
And you see that.
Why are they making such a big commitment to come to such a conference to learn about a software that they use so much?
And then in WordPress events, we don't see as much of customer participation.
So to learn what's going on on that front was interesting. So. Yeah, and the conference will continue for two more days. So the goal is to get a sense of what's going on on this front and what can we learn?
How can we charge more money? You know, you keep talking about that. How can we charge more money? How can we allow agencies to charge more money? How can we allow agencies to derive. To give the value that a HubSpot allows HubSpot agency to charge? You know, because it's all about giving that value. And how can.
How can a WordPress agency offer that a similar value? Or how can we enable a WordPress agency to offer similar value to their clients? So those are some of the thoughts. That's the whole idea behind attending this conference.
[00:10:32] Speaker B: So the HubSpot conference, you're in the middle of it at the moment. It's still going, is it?
[00:10:35] Speaker A: Yes, it's two more days of the conference. I'm obviously not at the conference right now. It's done for the day, but yeah, there are two more days of it.
[00:10:43] Speaker B: Yeah. A couple of observations. You know, I'm sort of back in the WordPress space. I'm building a couple of websites for some projects that I'm doing, some my own personal projects that I'm working on. My wife's just launched a psychology business. I've got some other music related projects that I'm working on. The thing about WordPress that is appealing is also the thing about it that's the most frustrating.
[00:11:00] Speaker A: Right.
[00:11:01] Speaker B: Is the thing about that it's appealing is that you don't like if you want to, if you like. We were a HubSpot user for, you know, a couple of years. We signed a two year contract with HubSpot and we were spending over $50,000 a year with HubSpot and we could not send someone an SMS natively out of HubSpot. We needed a third party app to do that. And the whole promise with HubSpot really is that it's an all in one solution. That's certainly why we went into it. And so then I just discovered that, you know, not only are we spending $50,000 a year on HubSpot, but I'm also now spending another $12,000 a year on these other bits of software because HubSpot doesn't do the thing that I want it to do. And you know, when we started using HubSpot and this is not a HubSpot bashing session by any stretch because they do some amazing work and it's very innovative platform and they really did innovate the small business, small to medium business sales and marketing automation platform. They were really the innovator in that space. They were kind of up against infusionsoft and Office Autopilot back in the day and they really, they kind of took over in that space. Infusionsoft pivoted to become keep and has now been sold for a few dollars. That was a bit of a tragic end to that story.
But with HubSpot, what, what the, what we discovered was, you know, the frustration with a hosted platform like that is that if you want a feature that it doesn't have, you either have to find a third party app that plugs in which costs you more money or you wait for HubSpot to decide that they're going to roll out that feature. So for example, calendar rescheduling and canceling. When we started using HubSpot, we came from Calendly. You could not reschedule, the customer could not reschedule or cancel an appointment. You can now they, they completely redeveloped and refactored their calendar engine, but when we started using it, you couldn't. It was a nightmare. Right? So however, the simplicity of not having to worry about update plugins or not have to worry about your host or your server or, I mean, I'm working on a project at the moment, I just had to ping my, my server guys here in Australia and say, can you increase their memory to 1024? Because I'm doing something pretty complex with Elementor and it's just not playing Ultra. You have to worry about any of that with HubSpot. You don't have to worry about any of that with High Level. Right? You don't have to worry about any of that with any of the hosted platforms. But the problem is if you want to extend it and you want to add something, a feature to it, you have to wait for the platform to update it and it becomes, you know, you then beholden to them.
So the value proposition for me is if you're an agency, it doesn't really matter whether you are a HubSpot agency, a high level agency, a WordPress agency, your job is to help the client leverage the technology to get the outcome the client wants, right? Because at the end of the day, any of these platforms has a learning curve and you, the client, can either do it themselves, which we did because we're kind of developers and we kind of knew what we were doing with HubSpot, or you hire an agency to do it for you. Same with WordPress, same with high Level, right?
So as an agency, I think you have to keep this in mind is your job is to help wrangle the technology to get the outcome for the client. And if you want the flexibility of being able to just quickly add plugins and do things and extend the functionality, then WordPress and that ecosystem is probably still your best option on the market.
But it does require, and this is not a plug for WP Remote by the way, but it's just naturally going that way. It does require you to keep on top of your updates, right? Because that is what your client's paying you for is to, is to wrangle the technology. So I just wanted to make that observation. The other observation I wanted to ask you is, is there any talk at the HubSpot conference? Have you heard any talk at the HubSpot conference about high Level? Do they think of High Level as a competitor?
Because I've heard whispers, you know, are we sitting here in two years time and HubSpot have bought high Level. I mean, Google tried to buy HubSpot last year. You know, like, where. Who are HubSpot? Where are they going? What's their roadmap?
[00:15:02] Speaker A: So frankly, I'm too much of an outsider to have any inside track. You know, I'm trying to just, you know, frankly, in any of these conferences I'm more of the wallflower. So having any of these conversations is quite an effort. But I'm trying to get those conversations in. I'm too much of an outsider right now. Maybe in a year's time when I've got my way around a bit more, then I comment better. But right now though, the High Level guys are fantastic. I think both of us know them well and they are doing such a great job, truly.
[00:15:40] Speaker B: So what's your motivation for being at the HubSpot conference? Because you run a WordPress product business, right? So, so what's your.
[00:15:48] Speaker A: It just. I was, it's like I was in the vicinity, I thought, let me check out this other thing which is, which is relevant to the overall ecosystem I am, I'm working in. Because, you know, it's so. It's so easy to have blinders on and then you just don't realize what's going on outside of your ecosystem.
And sometimes it takes a lot, sometimes it takes you a lot more effort to internalize what, what you have experienced. But it's super important to experience it. To go and see, to even go and walk through the sponsorship booths like, what's going on? Talk to the sponsors, why are they sponsoring? Who are the people they're talking to? Who are the people who are visiting?
You know, if there, there's just so much, so much to learn from, from learning from the ecosystem. Because we are not in the WordPress space per se. We call it this. Like that's the software we do. But I think it's the same reason why you guys are agency mavericks are not WP elevation, right? I'm guessing because it's. And we are WP remote. But the reality also is that we are enabling agencies and we are enabling websites to be great or we are enabling businesses to get the most out of their online presence or their marketing presence in some ways. So now what's the canvas we are, we are painting on? We need to determine that and it is good to understand what's the bigger picture.
[00:17:30] Speaker B: Is there a future where you guys move into products or plugins or platforms that are not specifically just for WordPress? Do you think there's a. There's an opportunity there.
[00:17:41] Speaker A: You know, we have thought about it a lot.
What I think is the. Again, given the size of our company, it just keeps making sense for us to double down. So what we realize is instead of being, you know, being not so good in two different software, we can be great in WordPress and which is what we have done, you know, each of our software, we just keep doubling down on making things better. And making things just like the product can be so much better at every level. And if you keep doubling down on it, the best businesses, the best websites will always require the best solution. And those best websites are not going anywhere in WordPress. So the goal should not be to diversify, but rather to double down on the stack that we know well and make sure that we are the best at it.
[00:18:35] Speaker B: A couple of things I want to talk about.
We might just be able to put an underline under this because I'm not exactly sure what the latest update is, but Morpheus, when all the stuff happened last year and WordPress were kind of blocking some hosts from updating plugins, you spun up a mirror to the WordPress plugin repository, effectively allowing people to update their plugins no matter where they were hosted. Is that still a thing? Is it still a part of your business strategy?
[00:18:59] Speaker A: So it's an open source, so it was never a part of the business strategy as such. We were, we built it because we thought that the ecosystem. Because there was so much again, if, you know, even today we were talking about the fear and every. All the drama that happened and all the. Everyone was fearful as to what.
What will happen to my updates or what, what if I'm. I get cut off. I feel that over time better senses prevailed.
And while the software continues to be open source, I feel, and I genuinely wish that I think the worst is behind us and we can almost continue to trust on the, on the de facto or the, you know, the, the system that we are used to.
The software is available in case anyone needs it. I can see some use cases, but it's limited use cases and not.
It's not something which I feel we need to worry too much about as. At least as things stand right now, if anything's changed, we can always relook at it. But at least from my understanding of things right now, people are making amends.
[00:20:19] Speaker B: I mean, it's interesting. I don't want to spend too long here in the politics of it, but it is interesting that WordPress is open source, but it's very centralized, right? So it's kind of like a. And if you think of crypto and you think of blockchain and you think of the kind of the wish to decentralize. I mean I'm kind of in the almost about to pull the trigger to divorce from Google as a product suite and move everything, all of my personal stuff, move it into Proton which is a private Swiss run organization which offers most of the thing it doesn't offer is Google Docs or Google spreadsheets. It offers a very basic doc editor. But I, you know, I kind of, I don't. I like the idea of things being decentralized and I like the idea of having a sense of agency. Right. And If I've got 150 websites and all of a sudden someone decides that I can't update the plugins because I'm hosted with the wrong host. Right. That puts my business at risk. And I think that was the value proposition for Morpheus is like well, we don't care. You know, we want to empower you to keep running your business.
[00:21:20] Speaker A: Right.
[00:21:21] Speaker B: So I think there is a use case for it and I think that, I think the open source nature of WordPress, I think we do need more decentralization. I think having it all centralized is risky.
[00:21:33] Speaker A: You know, personally I feel while that's there is a political and there is a argument to be made just from an intellectual perspective, I think for almost all of us we should not like the amount of mental energy we spend on those things. It's.
That's used better, better used in so many other places. Sure. And you know, it's almost like you don't know what your blind sides are. So you might be thinking that Proton is this but there might be something else which will trip you up. So the question is thinking it's good to.
It's. It is good to go down that path but also understand the limitations of your own thinking.
And I seriously don't think you should. At least I am of the opinion that don't, don't think, don't fall into the fud of you know, there's so much noise around these things. So until and unless you are truly and and it's great to have true believers because true believers move the state of the art forward.
But unless you're a true believer for a lot of us it's good to be laggards.
It's good to be in that comfort zone of I'm okay using Google, I'm okay using I'm okay driving the, the petrol or diesel car until EVs become good enough for all of us.
And it is fine. I, I personally believe that you should know what your personal space is or at least for, for whichever dimensions of the world and then try and stick to that as much as possible. And then there are places where you want to be the leader and in that part you make be the leader in that part. But if you try and be follow this thing that, hey, I need to be decentralized because of do it if you truly believe in it and it is the most important thing for you, if not, you'll make your life worse and you might not do a good enough job.
[00:23:46] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's interesting because I think we've, and the pivot I want to make here is to talk about AI a little bit because I think we're, we're in a similar situation with AI, that a lot of the AI tools are centralized, there's a handful of players that are owning all the data and I don't think we really understand. I'm a big Claude user. I still use ChatGPT a little bit, but I love Claude, but I still don't think, do I know enough about Anthropic, the company behind it? No. Do I? You know, like I, I don't know what my blind sides are. Who knows what they're doing with our data? I don't really know. So it's, you know, there are risks, but we're all using it because it's convenient.
So which leads me to my question is how are you looking at AI in terms of it being able to improve processes or productivity for the software stack that you've currently got?
[00:24:34] Speaker A: All right, so two things, right, how we work. So first part of AI, and this is something we've been working on for two years now, is we have been big believers in just improving our own productivity, or not really productivity, but more in terms of just the quality of software we believe we can create or the quality of product we can create.
We know that AI can enable us to do so. It's not been a straightforward journey, but we have got a brand new dashboard where every line of code has been written by AI.
[00:25:06] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:25:07] Speaker A: And we have rewritten the entire like hundreds of thousands of lines of code, if not more from scratch, all using AI, even before cursor or some of these things became a thing. And we are big believers in it. We have seen significant improvement in quality of, of output. There are challenges also. So we tend, you know, AI tends to pull you into the sense of, hey, it can be done within minutes and Then you are the white coding thing. And we try to avoid white coding, but there are those challenges and you know, as agencies, we, all of us, this is one of the biggest risks we face where our clients come and see these demos and then they demand, they think that what the work, real work we do is equal to that demo and it is not that. And sometimes even as a sophisticated business owner, if I may call say so, or person who has been building software for such a long time, we get so easily swayed by, hey, this work can be done so easily.
When building a great product is just not easy. It takes so much effort and AI makes it just a bit easier, but it still takes a lot and lot of effort.
So that was one part. There's a second part to it bringing AI to our products and bringing AI to making it easier for agencies to add value to their clients and to the day to day maintenance of what they do. I think that we'll see come in very soon. I think there are so many opportunities right there which we can provide and I think you will see some of that getting integrated into our product. But first we wanted to improve our own understanding and how we use AI internally before we expose AI to, through, to, through our products to our customers.
[00:27:05] Speaker B: Are you saying, do you think that five years from now that we're still going to be building websites for clients and with everything that's happening with search with, you know, ChatGPT is now a serious referrer. We had an event in Bali, of course that you, you guys were a part of and we had a customer there and we said we didn't know him, he's from Fiji actually. And we said how did you find out about us? He said, I asked ChatGPT I was going to Bali anyway. And he said, I asked ChatGPT if there are any conferences in Bali around about this time for agency owners and you guys came up and I was like, wow, that's really interesting.
How do you like what, where do you, where are we in 5 years time? Are we still building brochure sites for clients and optimizing them for search and LLMs? Is that where you think it's going?
[00:27:59] Speaker A: So, you know, it's so difficult to predict like, but I, but some thinking is, you know, when you're old enough so I can, I'm sure you'll understand this year just a tad bit older than I am, if, if not younger, tad bit younger than I am, let me put it that way.
[00:28:20] Speaker B: It's my action, it's my birthday today and I don't mind sharing it. Today I'm 52 years old so I'm.
[00:28:27] Speaker A: Just a tad bit younger than I am really.
[00:28:32] Speaker B: Come on. I remember, I remember before the Internet. So you know life on dial up modems.
Yeah.
[00:28:40] Speaker A: So anyway, so you know we, we had front page if you remember and used to make. And then suddenly we like hey we can. A person can make website by themselves and it never. You never. So things get, things are always more complicated and what happens is the state of the art always keeps improving. So what people expect from website will always change. So today what people get is like a basic website, tomorrow the brochure website, the expectation will go up so much higher so you can get like the conversions you might be able to do everything end to end and the expectation will go up to a completely different level. But it is not that I still feel websites are going to be super important to businesses.
And while there will be a lot of people who will pull up their own websites and they will make their own websites because hey I, I've got a birthday party or I've got an event and let me just pull it up. The, the world will be, I think more people will need more websites and not less. And when more people will need more websites and for more occasions you will see and with more and better content you will see that agencies will always will be required to fill in that gap there because the quality, the end to end vision that they bring, the expertise an agency brings, you will just see that that will not go away.
There are so many things a person can do fairly easily but we still rely on an external expert to do it because you don't want to. It's not when something is not up your is not your expertise, you don't want to deal with it like I, yeah, I can do so yeah I as a business and you know, and that's the beauty of businesses and that's. And businesses think very differently from how and an individual thinks in their personal life.
So I feel that the expectations will go up significantly. For example, having an incredible graphic or an incredible motion graphic was impossible. Nobody could even think of getting something like that on a website because the costs were like having a website with something like that. The costs would just skyrocket and even then most likely that project would fail simply because finding the right artist was an impossible task.
Today or maybe in a couple of years you will know that AI will get there and now the agency owner or the designer can build a website which he always wanted to build but he never had that artist available to make that kind of graphic. So you just see that the opportunities will open up. The kind of.
Yeah, the kind. The quality of work will skyrocket. I think that at least that's my, that's my reading into it.
[00:31:51] Speaker B: I think the quantity is going to scarrot and quality. Yeah, I hope the quality skyrockets.
[00:31:58] Speaker A: I think no one has U of cities websites today. We, we both know it and we are. So quality goes up, quantity goes up, quality goes up also because nobody wants to deal. Like that's the nature of the world.
[00:32:13] Speaker B: You're right, you're right. I mean, you're right. I think the cream will rise to the top, as they say. The quantity is definitely going to be exponential, I think, you know, I'm not worried about AI replacing agencies or any of that rubbish. I mean, I think, you know, I think the agencies that use AI will replace agencies that don't use AI because they'll just be more efficient. They'll just be able to get things done faster.
And I don't think the whole, the DIY model, well, I'm just going to use AI to build my own website. I mean that's, that end of the market's always going to be there and they're not your clients. So don't, don't, don't worry about that. I do wonder what the, how fractured the CMS space at the moment, like HubSpot, you know, WordPress, framer, high level, you know, whatever or you know, the enterprise cms, how fractured they are now. I wonder how different that's going to be. I was talking to a friend of mine who owns a software company and he said he reckons two years from now that the SaaS business is going to be very different because AI will effectively. You'll be able to create something like HubSpot or High Level or WordPress with sales and marketing automation engine. You'll be able to create that in AI in an afternoon with the right prompts. Right. It's just a computer processing power will be at that level where you can create something very complex very quickly and so do we end up with. Everyone has their own unique software built specifically for them and they just pay the hosting on Amazon or azure or whatever versus having to pay, you know, 50,000, $60,000 a year to be on HubSpot. They just spin up their own CRM with AI. Is that, is that. I don't know. I'm, I, I'm not sure. It's, it's, I think it's a possibility.
[00:34:02] Speaker A: So I think you'll see both of this happening.
So you will see people spinning up their own CRM or for whatever thing, little thing that they want to use. But also the state of the art for HubSpot will go up significantly. And those kind of software, the non HubSpot or the person prompting their way into it will struggle to make or will not make. And then at some point, you know, it just comes down to $60,000 might be a lot of money, but to certain businesses that's not a lot of money.
[00:34:37] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right.
[00:34:38] Speaker A: And they were like, is there something I want to do or do I want to. What they will want is they will want more and more value for that $60,000.
I feel that they are going to spend, in fact they might spend from that 60,000, might become 100,000, but the expectation from it will just keep rising.
And our job as you know, folks who are in this business as entrepreneurs is to make sure that we keep providing that value.
Actually. Yeah, I think entrepreneurs, that's the thing about entrepreneurship, right? We understand the need and we keep moving the, we create needs for people. Like we are not only we solve the needs currently, but we also show them the possibilities that exist for the future. And agency owners, product makers like me, all of us are like yourself, we are all entrepreneurs at the end of it.
And for us that's the, that's the.
And I don't think that is going away. Try like I, I've thought so much about it, but I don't think that is going away because that human ingenuity and people get the way you make decisions, the reason why you make those decisions, some of it might change. There will be software which I, otherwise I would not have made. I will start making that software, but a lot of core critical software I'll keep buying and because I expected the things it will do for me will just keep improving.
[00:36:07] Speaker B: I think there's, I think there's a future where WordPress, where agency. The thing you can understand about HubSpot, right is when you and I know this from experience, when you're spending 60, 50, $60,000 a year with HubSpot, they're effectively a consulting company, right? When you're logged in to your HubSpot account and you're spending 50 grand a year with them, you can open the live chat bubble and put in a request and within five minutes, their promise is that within five minutes someone will call you on the telephone, right? They're there in Ireland, they're In the States, they're in New Zealand, they're in every time zone, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, within five minutes, somebody calls you on the telephone to help you talk through your problem. Now that could be, that could be something you can't figure out how to do in HubSpot. So it could be like just walking you through the product. It could also be strategy. Hey, I've got this thing and I'm not really sure you know which campaign they will help you strategize how to use the product. Right. How to use the product to deliver your campaign goals. So here's the thing. If you're a WordPress agency, I believe the opportunity and where we're going to go, and I've been saying this for a long time, but I think with AI now it's more relevant than ever, is that we'll end up with niche based WordPress agencies. Right. So we are an agency that just builds WordPress websites for amateur sports clubs in America, right. And there's like hundreds of thousands of amateur sporting clubs, junior footy, junior soccer, junior rugby, cricket, whatever it is, right. And all we do is we just build WordPress websites for junior soccer clubs and we help them manage their membership database and their marketing to get more players in and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[00:37:43] Speaker A: Right.
[00:37:43] Speaker B: And so you're a consulting company, but you've kind of, if you, if you build enough of those sites with WordPress enough, and you've got your tech stack dialed in, you've got your host, you've got your plugins, you've got all your automations, you can spin up a blueprint very quickly, then you're effectively a software company with some consulting services. The software just happens to be driven by WordPress and the plugin architecture and ecosystem.
I think that if I was starting an agency again, which I've been threatening to do for a long time now just because of the technology, I would become a niche agency that just serves a specific type of client, get a specific outcome.
[00:38:18] Speaker A: Absolutely. I think even before AI, that's always a strong strategy. The niching down is because the expertise, you just can double down and keep doubling down on that expertise. And these niches are, we call them niches but they are like, it always astounds me the number of, you know, that you said sports club and your junior sports club or for you, you can actually further niche it down to kids under 4 years old and there'll still be millions of them. So these niches are so large and they, and, and they people want quality products around them. Nobody wants to deal with like nobody wants to deal with, you know, pen and paper or some broken form of solving a problem or worse. In fact, pen and paper is more acceptable than bad software.
[00:39:14] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:39:15] Speaker A: That's right, absolutely. Like pen and paper is much better than bad software is more acceptable because pen and paper, at least the end user is in control.
Bad software is frustrating to everybody.
[00:39:32] Speaker B: Totally. I'm filling in some forms at the moment with a new financial planner that we've hired and it's like, dude, come on man, like get with the 21st century. Like this is ridiculous. You know, simple taxonomies don't work. You're right. And I think, and also, you know, it's, then it's, then it's if you're in, if you serve a particular type of client, right. If you just serve junior sporting clubs right. In the tri state area, for example, then it's easy to refer. I'll go and see, go and see John. Because all he does is they did all those guys just build websites for junior sporting clubs in the tri state area? Like that's all they do. Right. So they're the specialists at it. Right. And so it's very easy to own that, that space if you become a specialist. I think it's just the fear of missing out on all the other work that stops or you know, is this niche going to be profitable enough? I think that's what prevents people from, from doubling down on those ideas.
[00:40:23] Speaker A: Right. And actually one of the things, one of the persons I, one of the podcasts or one of the persons whose podcast I try to listen to a lot is Mark Andreessen, the person, you know, behind, who founded the, founded Mosaic or what was the company called? The browser company, the very first. Netscape.
[00:40:44] Speaker B: Yes, Netscape. Never got it.
[00:40:45] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And he mentioned. So his father in law is this real estate developer and he's a billionaire.
Mark Anderson is a billionaire and his father in law also happens to be a billionaire. And apparently if, and I'm hoping I'm getting this right, he made his billions by only focusing on apparently a 2 square mile area around Stanford.
[00:41:09] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:41:09] Speaker A: So what he said was that my father in law built the expertise of understanding that area like no other person in the world could.
And that niche. So you could, you would think that a real estate person needs to know everything about everything in all over United States to make billions and no, he just, but he just had to be. So it's. The niches are the niches are super valuable and no one like, had. If you don't see those, those, you know, those stories, those anecdotes, it's very difficult to believe it. It's very easy to be like, I should do X, I should do Y, I should do Z. And I, I follow. I fall prey to it all the time.
[00:41:54] Speaker B: Yeah, Great advice. What are you most excited about? You're going to get through the HubSpot conference. You leave the States, you go home at some point in the near future. What are you most excited about over the next 90 days?
[00:42:05] Speaker A: All right, so our new dashboard is something which you are super excited about. We are slowly rolling it out to all our customers.
It is completely revamped.
Again, I'm talking about our product. But it has been an insane amount of effort has gone into.
Is super fast.
It's also a work in progress, but I think it'll save agencies so much time. It is beautiful to look at.
It has everything very logically laid out. So I think agencies would love it. So we already had, you know, the very best backups, the very best security, bulletproof backups, best security, best visual regression and everything else. But sometimes our UX was our weak point or UI ux and now that is also.
At least I can, I can say we are putting that behind us. So we have a great design team in place now and this is something we are super excited about. So we are slowly rolling it out. Given the number of customers we have, we have to be very careful.
Having 30,000 plus customers means that you cannot make any sudden moves.
So we have to be very. We are very carefully planning the rollout of.
[00:43:24] Speaker B: I'm looking forward to it. I just logged into our WP remote account actually, and I don't have it yet. So I'm looking for.
[00:43:30] Speaker A: So the most valid, the most important customer will get it last because I want to make sure that when you log into it, it is, it is.
[00:43:38] Speaker B: Going to be perfectly well done. Nice save.
I'm looking forward to that.
Awesome.
So the new dashboard, how big is your team at the moment? Where are you these days?
[00:43:53] Speaker A: So we are almost 40 people, I think. In the range of 40 people now. Exactly.
Honestly, we keep, we keep hiring and things, you know, your teams evolve, so.
But I think around 40 is our current strength.
Wow. Well done.
[00:44:10] Speaker B: Congratulations.
It's. It's awesome. It's so good to see you guys keeping on innovating.
And thank you so much again for spending some time with us on the agency. Our podcast. We'll definitely get you back again at some point. WP Remote are a partner of ours and they have been for a couple of years now and I've been using WP Remote for a long time and so yeah, thanks again for bringing your generosity and your insight to the Agent Seattle podcast.
[00:44:34] Speaker A: No, again, thank you again for having me here, Troy, especially on your birthday.
It means a lot to me.
[00:44:43] Speaker B: It's a pleasure. I look forward to hanging out again soon sometime.
[00:44:46] Speaker A: Yep, same here.
[00:44:50] Speaker B: Hey, thanks for listening to the Agent see how podcast again and spending some time with me on my birthday birthday. If you know anyone who could benefit from this, please share this podcast with them. It helps us get in front of more people just like you and it helps us help more agencies which is our mission. Like subscribe, do all those things. And of course, if you want some help growing your agency, if you want one on one mentoring and accountability with a dedicated client success manager and a customized plan to help you grow your agency and accountability where we will hold your feet to the floor fire and make sure that you get the things done. Then click the link near this episode, near the video or the audio that you're consuming now and have a chat with our team to see if you're a good fit. It's not a sales call. We just want to make sure you're a good fit and if you are, we can tell you how it works. All right, I'm going to go and enjoy the rest of my birthday. I hope you're enjoying the podcast as much as we're enjoying making it. And remember, Finland has more metal bands per capita than anywhere in the world. I'm Troy D. Let's get to work.
