[00:00:00] Speaker A: I think one of the biggest challenges agencies face is how do you communicate the value? How do you get the client to feel that, yeah, as long as they are with you, they're continuously getting value. And it performance is one of those things which enables an agency to continuously offer value. As long as they are with your care clients, they will have the fastest website possible.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Welcome to the agency hour podcast, where we help web design and digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams and their communities. This week we're joined by Akshat Chowdhury, founder of Blogvault, Malcare and WP Remote and Airlift, which is their new product. And today we're exploring how AI is going to impact agency life. The challenges of managing support as you grow, why the most important asset in your agency is your team, why you shouldn't cowboy code on live sites, and much more. I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us.
All right. Without further ado, please welcome back to the agency hour podcast, Akshad Chowdhury from WP remote.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: Hi, Akshad.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: How are you, my friend?
[00:01:03] Speaker A: Hey, Troy. Glad to be back here. Thank you again for having me.
[00:01:07] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: Good to see you again.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: Well, thank you for being here. And I just want to publicly thank you again for your support for our community and specifically our Mavcon events. You are, of course, one of our partners again at Mavcon in October in San Diego. I'm very much looking forward to hanging out again. Are you going to make it this time or are you sending a team member?
[00:01:28] Speaker A: Yes, I'm sending a team member. Someone from my team will be there. I would have liked to make it a hat trick in person because I really love attending and just hanging out with you guys and the whole team. But just some commitments mean that I cannot fly around to, to the US. But someone from my team will be there and Karishma will come with. Fantastic. So I think.
And I'm looking forward. We are looking forward to the event in a big way.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: Great. Awesome. Yeah, so are we. We had a great event last week or two weeks ago on the Gold coast here. Mavcon. It was fantastic. It was probably our best Mavcon. I don't know if I'm going to say best Mavcon ever, but it was definitely our best Mavcon in a long time. I think it was Mavcon number 19. So in San Diego in October, it'll be Mavcon number 20, which we're very excited about. So again, thank you for continuing to support us with those live events. Just means that we can do some really nice things, like we can feed people a nice lunch, we can put on good tea and coffee throughout the day, and we can record the events and put the recordings up. So all the support from our partners really helps make all that possible. So thanks again. And for those that don't know who you are, just give us the too long, didn't read version of who you are. And what is WP remote and what are the other products that you have under your banner?
[00:02:45] Speaker A: All right, so I'm the founder of WP Remote. WP Remote.
If you're an agency, you definitely have a care plan or a maintenance plan with your, with your clients and you're taking care of their website. So WP remote lets you manage those care plans or manage the websites through a single dashboard. We take, we ensure that all your websites are up and running and you're able to do backups, security, performance update and everything else.
Send your clients a great report, all in an easy and a really reliable manner. I think the most important factor is really reliable. That's what we really focus on. And we ensure that your websites are up and running and you're nothing. Firefighting all the time or you're not getting calls at odd hours.
Right? So that's what WP remote is about. Some of our other products, which we actually started with our blog vault, which you must be, so many of you might may have heard that was the first product that was that that lets you back up website.
We have Malcare, which is, which lets you secure your website, identify malware, and then clean them with a click of a button. And our latest one is Airlift, which lets you optimize the website and make it really fast with the click of a button. So the best part about WP remote is it brings all our other products and puts it all into a single dashboard.
So not only so WP, what gets the best of airlift, best of blog vault and best of malk onto a single dashboard for a latency.
[00:04:24] Speaker B: So tell me, like, why would someone use blog vault these days without using WP remote?
[00:04:30] Speaker A: So while agencies, you know, since if you're speaking to an agency, they'll all use WP remote, right? But if you're a small business, you don't need like 20 websites, you don't need reporting, some of those functionality is just not required. You don't need white labeling if you're in, if you are a small business yourself, or in fact, even if you are a large business, many of the large businesses we have Fortune 500 customers, for example, they will go and buy our blog wall plan simply because they don't need all of that functionality as well as we need great backups.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: Got it. If you're a single site owner, if you're a Woocommerce ecommerce site owner and you've got a single site, or maybe you've got a couple of sites under your brand, you might not need WP remote, but you'll certainly be using blog vault.
And there's also an argument there to be using mount care and airlift. But if you're an agency, so if you're a single site operator or a small brand, you'd be using the plugins individually. But if you're an agency bundling all of those plugins into one dashboard to manage all of your WordPress websites from one place, that's the value proposition for WP remote, right?
[00:05:41] Speaker A: Yeah, that's correct. And the yeah, and frankly, all the sudden there's still a very small number of plugins and small number of features. All things.
We are very unlike many, many WordPress companies, we don't do too many things, it appears as many things. But over this lower period of ten to twelve years we are focusing on few area and try to ensure that we do them really really well and really reliably. Because each of these things, making each of these things reliable and work really well takes an insane amount of effort.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: I can only imagine.
I've seen under the hood of a few WordPress plugin companies and I know the amount of work that goes into making just a simple plugin and keeping it up to date. I can't imagine because you've got to take into account just from a security point of view every time someone updates all the plugins and the theme on their own WordPress website, I imagine your products then going into overdrive to make sure that everything is still intact and that nothing breaks. Whereas if you're just a single plugin developer and you have one plugin, you just have to worry about your plugin. You just have to worry about keeping your plugin up to date, whereas you've really got to be across the entire WordPress ecosystem.
Is that a fair assumption?
[00:07:01] Speaker A: Yes, that is important as updates happen. And let's look at it from a security perspective. Now, update means these are changing on your website. Are those valid changes? Are they not? Because many a times an update will look like a malware because malware also means things are changing on your website. Now for us we need to actively understand is this a good change or not. And it's very easy to flag that something has changed. But if you're an agency running 20 websites, if you're a hundred, our largest agency runs 2500 websites, you can imagine that now, if you are, you don't want an alert that, hey, something has changed, even with 20 website, because someone is always making a change and you might have a teammate who's making a change and you don't want an alert saying that something has changed. What you want an alert is something is really wrong. And that's the only time you want an alert because otherwise you will just start ignoring those emails. So at WP, what we try and ensure is that if you get an email from us, then you better take a look and act on that and otherwise we will not email you. So, and that's the, that's the, I think that's a value proposition for us, that we have to be reliable. When we say something is wrong, then something is really wrong. But we will try our level best to ensure that it never goes wrong.
[00:08:26] Speaker B: I mean, I'm in a lot of Facebook groups where there are lots of WordPress agencies, right? And, you know, I see the conversations that are happening. I think one of the reasons that we really enjoy partnering with you guys is because, so, first of all, I was using another solution to manage lots of websites, just of my own personal projects, right. Not, I mean, I got out of client work back in 2017. So, you know, back in the day, long time ago, I started out using manage WP when it was a great product, when it, when it first launched, you know, back in the heyday. And then over time, I got out of client work and I was just managing my own websites and I was using a couple of different platforms to do this and they were all kind of buggy and, you know, some of them got bought out by bigger companies and then it all, you know, it kind of just felt a bit weird and it just wasn't working. None of them were working. So I actually went looking for, and my journey to WP remote is that WP remote was originally built by the guys, a human made, but it was a completely different product. And then you, as the owner of Blog Vault, you kind of acquired the name and the brand and the reputation, but then rebuilt the product from the ground up.
[00:09:36] Speaker A: Right.
[00:09:37] Speaker B: And we talked about that on the previous podcast episode. I encourage people to go listen to that because it's a really interesting journey. The reason that we have partnered with each other for so long is because every time I see a conversation in a Facebook group where something goes wrong with one of these platforms and things go wrong. I mean, it's technology, right?
I always see you in the comments, right? Like, helping people out or being, like, really transparent about what's been happening. And yes, this happened, and we're working on this and we're fixing this. That kind of transparency and authenticity is what really appeals to me is, you know, and that's why I started using WP remote. So I was like, all right, well, I need another solution. I've never used WP remote. I mean, I know of blog vault. It's got a good reputation. I'm going to start using WP remote. And then the whole experience was, was fantastic. But I think more than the product, it was, it's your commitment. And I'm not just saying this because, you know, you're a partner of ours. You're a partner of ours because of this attitude and because of this authenticity and this transparency that you have in the WordPress space. And I think it's a pretty difficult thing to maintain over such a long period of time. And I think you and your team have done a really good job of maintaining that reputation. So I don't know whether that's part of your strategy, like, if you proactively do that or if you just respond when, when comments come up. But it's something that I've noticed, and I applaud you for it.
[00:11:02] Speaker A: Thank you for bringing it up. Frankly, it's not been a part of our strategy at all. We are doing it because you almost end up being like, so some of these groups. So let's take a step back. We are here in India, right? And many of our customers, actually, most of our customers are all over the world. I think there might not be a single country in the world where we don't have a customer, maybe one or two, and you can almost name the countries simply because of various restrictions in this country. But because our customers are all over the world and us being in India, how do we learn about what's going on? And we, frankly, are never in, we are not an agency as far removed from running an agency as I can get. And in such a case, how do we learn what's really happening? And so we started hanging out with these Facebook groups, which are really, really active. And agencies seem to, you know, they are very transparent. They are very, they discuss all the challenges that they are facing and we started participating in them just to learn and understand, hey, what does it even mean to run an agency?
And even today, that's actually the single biggest reason we become a part of it. Now obviously when you're participating in something and you try and be help people out, the idea was not, and even today, and I'm glad to actually hear this and I think it also reflects in why many a times agencies get, you know, people end up, any business ends up working with an agency is because of the people and it's because of the personal touch. Personal touch. And for us they're learning it was not a part of the strategy, but we are learning it that hey, even this can actually cause a business to work because, you know, we end up thinking so much that hey, you need to have the best product in the world and which is what we strive for always. And that's what causes people to buy your product. But it, it is more than that, it also is about who you are, the fact that you are available and someone does not have to ring up a call center when something goes wrong.
Those factors play a role and I will not have guessed that even going back a couple of years, frankly astute and telling you, it's just, it's a realization. I think now we play to our advantage, but that was not the goal.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: It's hard to scale support, right. We've seen it happen with most of the big companies in the WordPress space. We've seen it happen like as they grow, they get more and more customers. Then you start hearing complaints about their customer support. Oh, it used to be good, now it's fallen off because they've grown too quickly. Right. How do you manage support that comes in in a timely fashion? And how have you managed to, how have you maintained that level of support as you've grown?
[00:13:45] Speaker A: I think the team gets all the credit because there was a time when I was a manicle about support and I would be awake. All ours. Fortunately, the team has taken over to a great extent or to all, like, not to a great extent. They take care of everything.
And what we aim to do is weekdays 24/7 support, have someone available at every hour or all the time to make sure that they are there to answer questions. Again, the kind of product we are, it's good to have timely support because you only reach out to support when something is wrong. Right? And having a quick answer makes a big difference. So for weekdays we have 24/7 support, we have someone available all the time. And on weekends again we cover 24/7 but the responses may be a couple of hours or an hour away because we try and prioritize urgent tickets first and then maybe, and then the lower priority tickets so people are available. It's just that the number of people available is lower at any given hour, so things take a bit longer. But our aim is to cover as much of support as possible and make it as fast as possible. It, frankly, it's a retention strategy also for like, two things. One is we want to be treated as well as we can, but we also realize that it's a retention strategy. Once you have great support, you actually commit 100 times with product. It's almost funny, like, we spent so much energy on product, but we like, hey, it's the great support which people are buying our product for, our renewing year on year for.
And it's very strange how people are so forgiving if you have good support.
[00:15:35] Speaker B: Well, the reason that people leave other platforms is because something went wrong. The reason that I left the other platforms and I've used, I would say all of them is something went wrong. I couldn't fix it and I couldn't get the support and I was left kind of high and dry. And so you go, okay, well, now I've got a bleeding wound and I need to put a band aid on it and I'm not getting any help from these people. So I go looking for a new band Aid and I found WP remote and that's why I signed up in the first place. Right. So the, the only reason people leave a platform like yours is because they're not getting the support that they need or the product is not working. And so, you know, I think support actually is part of the product.
[00:16:22] Speaker A: Absolutely. And it's, you know, as product makers, sometimes we don't realize it and we don't understand. And even now, right. We keep trying to improve our support and that's always the case. But we almost always think that, hey, it's the product and let's keep fixing the product. There's no reason why anything should go wrong with the product, and that's never going to be the case. The reality is there's always going to be some situation which you never thought of, and that's where the human touch makes a difference. And, yeah, it's a realization. As a, as an entrepreneur, I would say that realization is important, and I think it applies to, I think what applies to us also applies to agencies to a great extent, because what you're talking about, the agencies are partnering with us or deploying, basing the business on us is because of personal reasons. And I think every business, small business, when they work with an agency or every business, when they work with that agency, that person is the single biggest reason more than anything else and being if they are responsive, if they are there to take care of things. But at the same time, you know, as an agency you don't want to be available 24/7 then you'll ruin your life in the process.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: 100%. That's right. A couple of the key features I want to talk about of the actual product itself, I want to talk about smart merge because this is, and I'm totally throwing you, putting you on the spot here. This is one of the biggest problems that I remember when I was building WordPress websites and again, full transparency. I don't build WordPress websites for clients these days. I faff about in WordPress for my own kind of hobbies. Ouragencymavericks.com website is still on WordPress. Thetroydine.com dot au website still on WordPress. I still love WordPress as a platform. We use high level for a whole bunch of other things now for funnels and marketing stuff and CRM. So I don't use, I'm not in the weeds running an agency managing multiple WordPress sites for clients. All of our coaches are still doing that and of course all of our clients are still in that game. But when I was doing this, the biggest challenge with staging sites Washington, you would pull the live site down onto a staging environment.
You would add some functionality, whether it was a new function Php file or a set of plugins to add some functionality to the website or some custom theme development, you would test it on the staging site. Maybe that would take you a week to get that right. In the meantime, new content has been published to the live site. You then go to publish your changes from the staging site back to the live site and you realize that things break because you haven't taken into account the new content that's been published on the live site, right? How does the smart merge to by the way, if you're listening to this in your cowboy coding on live websites for your clients, please stop and take the website onto a staging environment and play with it on a staging environment. And you can do that with WP remote. And they'll even set you up a staging site on their WP remote staging service. So it's a, you know, click of a button and you're done. So please don't cowboy code on live sites. It's not good practice. How does the smart merge tool work? Am I right in saying that you can make the changes on staging and then merge it back to live. And merge the live content with the changes you've made on the staging environment?
[00:19:42] Speaker A: No, not exactly. So we do provide some of that functionality and we have tried to solve it for a long time. I just think that it's a very tricky problem to solve. It is so, so we don't give you that complete functionality. What do we do? Let you do is like, okay, fine, pick parts of the site that you want to or, but at a file level, not really at the database level. So the database merge is not something that we support. We, we do track a few things. Frankly, the risks involved is so high. So what we realized is that while we can make it work, sometimes we don't want to take risk with live sites. And that is so, and it's not worth. And every WordPress website is slightly different. And when that is the case, then we don't want to take the risk with their life.
And we don't want to give you this function, this magical tool which works 90% of the time or 85% of the time because the other 15% of the time you're dead.
[00:20:41] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:20:42] Speaker A: And that's, and that's not, and that's not a. We realize that frankly, that kind of, if you can't give assurance of things working almost every time, it becomes really, really difficult to use the product, to be able to rely on the product. And in these cases you want a reliable product. So. And which is why we said that do not try and avoid doing it because the risks are way too high.
It's a problem which I still feel sometimes maybe with some of the AI stuff we can do it in a better manner.
But I don't think it's not something which we recommend doing on the live in this manner. And that's an intractable problem as it stands right now. Some, many people have attempted it, if you'll see. And we ourselves have attempted it, actually. If you look at our staging site, you'll notice that we track every change happening to your website inside another table. So we are doing some of that stuff.
But we saw that the reliability was just not there. It's all. And which is why we keep focusing on reliability, because if your solution works 85% of the time, it is not good enough. It is just not good enough and it has to work every day.
[00:21:56] Speaker B: I agree. And again, it just goes back to what we said before. Thats why people will leave a product, because it will work 85% of the time and then the 15% it doesnt work. Thats when youre in real strife and if you dont get the support you need and its not doing what you expect it to do, you go looking for another solution. The other thing I want to talk about is the client reports that WP remote because this was, you know, one of the, if you're listening to this, by the way, and you don't have clients on some kind of care plan, regardless of the platform that you're on, by the way, then you should definitely be encouraging your clients to get onto a care plan. It's great for recurring revenue, but also it actually allows you to keep an eye on their website every month and make sure that things are, you know, running smoothly. One of the challenges with this though is that clients want to know what they're paying for and, you know, working out a report and putting together a report is timely and takes time and that means your profits going out the window. Now, I know some of these other platforms that I've used in the past do have, you know, these kind of sample client reports, but they're pretty rudimentary and not very good to be honest. I'm looking at yours on the website. If you go to wpremote.com and go to client reports, you can then view a sample report. It's very detailed. And if you, I mean, how much of this is automated, first off?
[00:23:13] Speaker A: So yeah, so like you mentioned, client reports play an important role with every agency because a lot of the work you do happens in the background, right. Especially on a client monthly retainer. And the client is always wondering what the hell are they paying for? Because they don't see a lot of it. Like the backups happening, the updates happening, it's all, you are putting in an insane amount of effort. But how do you communicate with the client? And reporting is one of the ways where you can send them monthly report. What we do is we let you, because everything is happening through our platform. We let you track all of everything that's happening on the platform, all the backups, all the security, everything else that's going on with the website, and then we put it into an automated report which you can customize to a great extent. And I'm glad that you noticed that. So in the past one year, we have made that customization. I think no other product even comes close to it. So we give you incredible level of control as to what goes into the report. We bring data from sources which again, is really difficult to get otherwise. So for example, we have a built in firewall and we keep track of all the attacks that are happening on your website. And then we convey it in a. Yeah, in a manner which, again, because no other product has a firewall, we convey all of that. And then that adds value to your client to know that if they are part of your care plan, then their sites are being protected on an ongoing basis. So those are, that's again, everything is automated once a month or once a week. I think you can set your own schedule and then you can send it out in a completely customized white label. It appears as though it's coming from you. We now also have read receipts. So if someone, if your client opens the. And you know, this is something which you send out a report and you are, you're like, does anyone even open it? But when they open it, you can see you, you can see it on the dashboard that, hey, the client actually opened.
[00:25:09] Speaker B: Oh, that's neat. That's neat.
[00:25:12] Speaker A: So those, that's, again, that's again, a functionality that we have added recently and I. And you can keep track of that.
[00:25:19] Speaker B: That's great. I would send it weekly, by the way, so I can see. You can schedule a one time report or you can automatically send it weekly or monthly. I would send it weekly. Right. Even if not much has happened, I would send it weekly because that just means every Monday morning, my client, I'm top of mind with my clients. I used to do this with my SEO tool, which is now called agency analytics. Back in the day, I had a team doing all the SEO work for my clients and I would just have a white label PDF go out every Monday morning with their Google Analytics and their rankings and their keyword tracking to all of my clients so that every Monday morning they woke up to a report. If they didn't open it, that's fine. They saw my name and my email address and the fact that I'd sent them a report every Monday morning. So it kept me top of mind and that was a way for me. I just think a month is too long. So I would do it weekly. And it's fully white, labeled with WP remote. You can put your own logo on it and you can send it from your own email address, which is also awesome.
[00:26:15] Speaker A: Hey, I love one part of it. I'll just interrupt you there. Sorry. The fact that you said that my name is there on the email id. Never imagined like that. Like they are. They are seeing an email from me. They are seeing. I would have almost thought that. And I think that links true to me that the fact that the email is coming from me. Make sure that, hey, this troy exists or this agency exists or akshat exists, and it's not. It is not something which is written. That's the fact that somebody says that I existed itself is a reminder, and that itself, I think, plays a role. You don't even need to open the report in that field.
[00:26:51] Speaker B: That's right.
It's just like a billboard in their inbox every Monday morning. Right.
[00:26:57] Speaker A: That's so good.
[00:26:58] Speaker B: I think it would be remiss of us not to talk about AI at some point. And I have not briefed you on this at all. And so I don't know what your take is, but what do you think the opportunity is for agencies to be using Aih? And then what do you think the risks are, and how do you think AI is going to impact security? I mean, I have this kind of dystopian vision of the future where the robots are trying to hack websites and the other robots are keeping them out. I mean, we're kind of. I mean, we're kind of already there, aren't we? Like, what's your take on what's happening with AI, and how's it going to impact the agency life?
[00:27:38] Speaker A: All right, so, yeah, AI is something which I think if you are in technology in any way, it just cannot escape you. You are thinking about it all the time. The world, it has not yet changed, but, you know, you can see it change. It's almost, and I think we are almost of the same vintage. So you can almost think of what Internet was like, and you knew that if you're coming from publishing in a different genre, and then suddenly you saw this Internet thing happening, and you knew something was happening, and then a lot of people transitioned, and then it became. Everything changed. Right. And we almost can foresee the same thing happening with AI. So it's not yet there. We also know that we have. All right. Our hand at it. We all have certain tools, certain things which have made our lives so much easier, but we know that the real promise is still out there.
It is still going to happen. Right. And it's maybe a couple of years away. It's very difficult to put a finger on it. Even if you talk to, like, the. Even if you listen to, I haven't talked to, while also listening to a lot of the great mind in the world. Right.
There's still an apprehension about when exactly things will start changing and to what extent. And I think that's. That's an approach to take where you. When you see the greatest mind in the world having that lack of clarity that, let's not jump the gun. But we also know that it's going to happen sooner than later. So it's very easy to, uh. It's very easy to think it's all doom and gloom because AI is going to take over everything that we ever do and we've always learned to do. And we. That's. That's one way of looking at it, right? And that. That. I've spoken to many agencies and there is that fear. That thing exists, and not only in agencies, but also as a business owner myself, like, what's going to happen? Everything is. And there's one angle to that, but I don't think that's the way to look at it at all. Right. And simply because, frankly, how it will play out is. No, it's anybody's guess as it stands right now. Now, I think there are huge opportunities with AI. That's the way I look at it.
And we spoke about. I think you spoke about it at length at the previous Navcon. And it was such a fantastic, I think, on stage. I think half your time went on. You spoke on AI. If I'm right, in us last year, it just makes everything that you want to do or you can make it happen, but so much efficient manner. That is one. But also just be able to do so many things which otherwise was not possible. The way we look at AI is you as an agency or as a business, what you'll be able to accomplish is you'll be, you know, the potential of a website is so high or potential of a small business is so high, and especially that website. And today, just because of the lack of resources at any level, right. Even as an agency, when they hire you as an agency, you only have so many, so much resources that you can bring to it. And because of the lack of the resources you are not able to take, you're not able to maximize what a website can achieve.
And I believe with AI, what will happen is you will be able to do things to such an extent that people will be able to get so much more out of their website. Today, you might not be able to run 20 different types of ad campaigns. You might even not be able to think about ads or page marketing simply because you don't have the resources. The client does not have the resources to be able to do Facebook ad, TikTok ad, you know, Instagram ad, Google Ad, everything at the same time. Because.
But with AI, how will that change? Or how do you optimize each one of these flows to such an extent. Those things will start changing with AI for sure, and it will give you that capability. And I'm still talking surface level, some obvious thing. But what will happen is we seen, if you're looking at it, from maximizing the potential of a small business or maximizing the potential of a website, we think that AI will give you that capability and give every agency that capability. So what a big team and some of the largest marketing teams would accomplish, that AI will enable you to do, and enable you to do for hundreds of clients at the same time. I think that is the potential we see with AI. And you start seeing, like earlier, you are waiting for clients to give you content. Now you know that you can do content yourself. And these are small things, but you are seeing the. We are seeing, you are seeing. Those activities show up in your workflows, creating images, creating graphics, all of that. You are seeing clients earlier. You take forever, and most of many times you would end up using stock graphics, stock images. Those things are improving and they continue to improve. Earlier, like we spoke, I think there was this person who came from a video background who was a great video editor and would build videos at Mavcon last year. And if he knew that, he knew, he said that video is incredibly powerful, but it is incredibly expensive to do.
Right? It's very, very expensive to get rid. It takes an insane amount of effort. Now, how does video change? Or can you include video? And we have seen ourselves in our business whenever we are ignored at video and something, and it improves the impact of the, of that marketing or that flow significantly. Even, even with yourself, you can see that you've built such a great studio. And when you invest in video, it makes a difference. Now, how will AI change video? Will it be a really democratized video to such an extent that you can include video even if you don't have that, that kind of budgets? Normally we just think that, or if you don't have. And budgets does not really mean money, frankly. Many times we say resources or budgets in terms of money, but it really is money.
[00:34:07] Speaker B: It's time.
[00:34:07] Speaker A: It's more about it's time. It's. It's about, you know, to find the right person. And if you can't find that good person, then it's effectively not worth doing that work.
[00:34:17] Speaker B: Yeah, that's wrong.
[00:34:18] Speaker A: Like, finding the right agency itself is so difficult, right? And then the agency has to find that video, guys. So that's, that's the way we look at it. Like AI will enable you to get, you know, democratize some of these things which even if you had the money, you're not able. So we're not saying that you want to give it for cheap. In fact, as agencies, you should always try to do high quality work at high quality prices. Never. And you are the biggest advocate of it. Right. Always don't go cheap. That's, that's a, that's a dead man's game.
[00:34:50] Speaker B: Yeah. I think, you know, it's going to be interesting how we begin to interact with the web through AI. I mean, I've been talking to chat GPT for a while now because I don't like using a keyboard, mainly because I'm terrible at it. And so I like to just talk to chat GPT and ask it what I need and it responds and we have a conversation. It's quite remarkable, actually. And I'm curious how that's going to. I'm also really curious about spatial computing. I'm really, I can see that Apple are about to release a new version of the Apple Vision Pro. I think they're just going to get smaller and smaller and they'll eventually just look like reading glasses and they'll be, you know, have a bunch of cameras and microphones built in.
And so spatial computing really interests me and I just wonder, when we're not looking at screensh and we're talking to chat GPT, how web design changes and are we going to be optimizing our websites for search in three years or are we going to be optimizing our websites for GPT assistants or GPT agents in three years? And if so, then what does that mean for design? Do we still need websites that look like a great user experience or does it all just come back to semantic markup and fast loading, you know, really well thought out content that's really useful and does actually user interface design become less important? It's a really interesting time and I'm really curious to see what happens to the Internet over the next three years. I think we're up for some big.
[00:36:17] Speaker A: Changes ahead, frankly, I would have. It's almost like once written, twice shy. So we saw this happen 20080 nine or maybe. I think it really speaks at 2013 to 2014 timeframe where it was like, it's only going to be apps and no websites, right? What we do know is what my perspective is this. And I think this because people also ask me, hey, Akshay, are all doubling and doubling down on websites. Why don't you, why don't you de risk your business, right? Because we are going in more and more in emphasizing so what we have, our understanding is that websites will continue to be the most important asset a business can have, right? While some of its content will enable a chat GPT to get better answers about your business, at the end of it, the kind of personalized experience which anyone wants, it will always be available through your website. It's almost like when you go to a Google Maps, you will see the reviews, you'll see the rating, but when you see the link to a website on that Google map, many times you see a phone number, you might even call that person. But if you see that link to a website, if you're checking for a restaurant or any small business, and in spite of it being inside the Google Maps interface, you end up clicking on that website.
And I think the website will always be the most powerful way to communicate with your clients or potential customers or your other stakeholders. And the way I think, again, if let's go back to 2001, it's almost like the websites used to be terrible, right? They used to be. Nothing was in there. And as technology improved again, it brought great websites to what appears, like, what appears as terrible website today was an incredible website in 2001.
Like people would pay an arm and a leg and borrowing those what to get a website like that and to be able to manage that content. So what will happen is I think the kind of interaction that will be possible through website will again change dramatically and simply because the tooling required to create that will get democratized.
So at least that's my perspective, that websites, at least some form of websites will always, let's not call it always will exist to a much longer term than we would, you know, get paid.
We should take a step back and be like, not get swayed by all the noise. At least that's what I would think. How do you make that more and more powerful? And how do you enable your clients to or businesses to get every interaction, every time somebody visits that your website, that person should buy, like should the likelihood of that person purchasing your product should go up dramatically and how do you enable that? I think that's, you just see that increase significantly because you'll just see that improve significantly because of AI. It's like when you go to, you know, when you click on a page or on a link and whether it's on Google Search or whether it will be on chance DPT or something, when you go to a page, you really want to buy that product. Frankly, nobody goes to a website thinking, hey, I don't want that product.
It is just that the website does not do justice to the communication. And that's why, actually, it's one of my favorite sayings, and it's not my own saying, but I don't remember where it gets from. It's like when you go to a movie theater to watch a movie, but you want it to be the greatest movie in the world. Nobody goes to a movie theater thinking that it's, I want to watch a shitty movie, right? It might turn out something else, but. So it's almost like when people take that action, people want great results. And how do you enable that great result to happen? How do you increase that likelihood is. I think that's the opportunity for us.
[00:40:27] Speaker B: Interesting. Well, it's a nice segue into the. Just before we let you go, the latest addition to the WP remote family is a plugin called airlift. You can find
[email protected] dot. Again, give us the elevator pitch. What does airlift do for your website?
[00:40:44] Speaker A: All right, so everybody wants a fast website, right?
Again, for eternity. Everybody has always wanted a fast website. But having a fast website is incredibly difficult.
You build this greatest website, and just speaking to agency owners, you spent all this effort, made sure that you have optimized everything. You've used the right theme, the right page builder, everything else, to make sure that the website is really fast going three months later.
And that itself is incredibly difficult. Very, very difficult to get that right. But suppose you even put in that effort and you get that and or most likely, you have inherited a website which is filled with every single bad practice that exists out there, right? But even when you've done a great job with a website, what you'll see is the client will go in or the client will say that, hey, I need this pop up and I need this thing. And as soon as they add that pop up or add this widget, the performance goes out of the window. And you, we have seen, like, if you look, even go to any of the showcases, if you go to commerce.com, if you see the showcase websites, like, these are the websites that they think are really great. And when you go to the performance, you'll see that performance is shit.
And these guys, this company left millions of dollars to spend on their website, and they are spending it. And simply because performance is such a difficult problem to solve, making a website fast is really difficult. But we also know that when you improve the performance of your website, conversion rate skyrockets.
So you will not one is every customer who comes will see more pages, they will act more, act faster, they will buy more products. But the second thing because of this is Google will send more traffic. Everyone, every person wants to send you to fast website.
So both of these we see is so important in a fast website, it's worth pursuing, but it's really difficult to get it. With airlift, we let you get a fast website with a click of a button.
And the way we do it is I'll just make that one short pitch. I know I've been rambling on.
[00:42:46] Speaker B: No, no, no, it's okay.
[00:42:47] Speaker A: Yeah. So the way we do it is we look at your website as an expert, as a performance expert. Our systems look a little. It's all technology.
And we load your website in a browser, in multiple browsers, and find we see what the behavior of the website is. Then we go deep into the website and fix every single thing that that is for your website.
And we do it all automatically. So we are not going to go and change your theme or change even, or remove even a single plugin, but rather we look at the behavior of what is causing it, what that plugin or that team is doing that is causing your website to be slow and how to fix it, what's the right way of solving that problem? And we apply that fix automatically. And we do this day in and day out for the entire website.
[00:43:35] Speaker B: Got it. And at the moment you said pre show, you said airlift is free at the moment and you're trying to figure out a pricing model for agencies. Is that right?
[00:43:44] Speaker A: Right. So we continue to be free to a great extent. And that's one of, I think the technology we have built enables us to do that. But also for agencies, you know, agencies want the white labeled product. Agencies don't want the Alf banner or any of the ALS branding to appear on their client website. They want a level of support. They want the best of airlift for their clients and do it at a man, at a pricing which is, which is still very affordable so that they can give it to all their clients. So we have a agency pricing in the works so that they get a white label experience. And for us, the pitch to agencies is this, is that as long. I think one of the biggest challenges agencies face is how do you communicate the value that you're providing? And the report is a great way to do it, but how do you communicate, how do you get the client to feel that, yeah, as long as they are with you, they're continuously getting value. Right. And I think performance is one of those things which enables an agency's agency to continuously offer value. As long as they are with your care plans, they will have the fastest website possible.
[00:44:59] Speaker B: Got it. Airlift.net. yeah, airlift.net is where you check it. And Airlift is part of the WP remote dashboard as well, right?
[00:45:07] Speaker A: Yes, airlift is also part of WP mode, so it's, it's part of that bundled experience. Great.
[00:45:13] Speaker B: So airlift.net and wpremote.com are really the links that you want to check out. We'll put them in the show notes. Again, thank you so much for joining us on the agency hour podcast. And thank you also for supporting us to bring Mavcon to San Diego in October. The dates I think are October in at the Spring Hill Suites Marriott downtown San Diego, right opposite the water. We're very much looking forward to that event. It's going to be awesome and big shout out to you guys there at WP remote for continuing to support us there. Really appreciate your time here on the podcast, Akshat.
[00:45:49] Speaker A: Thank you again for having me, Troy. And we are really looking forward to attending Mac one again.
[00:45:53] Speaker B: Awesome. Thanks, ma'am. Talk soon. Bye for now.
[00:45:56] Speaker A: Thank you. Bye bye.
[00:45:59] Speaker B: Hey, thanks for listening to the agency, our podcast, and a massive thanks to Akshat for joining us. As I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, Mavcon San Diego is happening in October and tickets are still available at the time of recording this. Check out the link near this episode and get the early Bird offer. While tickets last, they will sell out pretty quickly. Ok folks, remember to subscribe and please share this with anyone who you think may need to hear it. And remember, people used to answer the phone by saying ahoy instead of hello, I'm Troy dean of let's get to work.
