[00:00:00] Speaker A: I actually think AI is going to ruin written content. My warning to small businesses is make a brand and a personality in your community people can connect with. I think this is a huge thing.
[00:00:15] 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 Tom Finelli, founder and CEO of Convicio. Convicio are one of our partners here at agency Mavericks. They do sponsorships to some of the podcast. They're also one of our partners at Mavcon, which is completely sold out now and is coming up in a few weeks in San Diego, and we're very excited about that. Convico is a niche platform built on top of WordPress that helps e commerce and agencies grow and scale. They have some really interesting features in their ecosystem, including Convicio Convert, which is a marketing automation platform similar to Klaviyo and Convicio Pay, which is an alternative to stripe. So if you're in the e commerce space or you're wanting to e commerce enable a website for selling digital products or courses or memberships, then this episode is going to be super interesting. I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us.
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[email protected] dot usually when the countdown timer stops and we're recording, I do this thing where I go, welcome to the agency hour. Thomas, finally from Convicio. And usually then what happens, right, is you watch the guest kind of get all tighten up because they know that we're recording. So I'm not going to do that this time. We're just, we should just continue the conversation.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: I like it.
[00:02:30] Speaker B: I'll introduce you at the start. Yeah. How's that?
[00:02:33] Speaker A: Sounds good.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: So for those that don't know, for those, that's called a patent interrupt. Ladies and gentlemen, for those that don't know, who are you and what are you doing here on the agency hour podcast?
[00:02:44] Speaker A: Well, my name is Tom Finnelli. I'm the founder and CEO of Convexio, and we are on a mission, really, to help e commerce site owners and agencies scale and grow. And I have been a early, you know, I was kind of. You probably don't remember this, but when we first met at Wordcamp, I was a little starstruck because I think I was, like, an early customer of yours. And, I mean, I've been in this space a long time. So, you know, I have been a fan, admirer, customer, and now partner with wow. Agency mavericks for a while.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: Wow. Now, we met at. Thank you, man. I do. I remember we met at Wordcamp us when it was in.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: It had to be right before the pandemic. So it was 2019, I think.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Oh, really? Was that Phoenix? No, it was Phoenix. It was 2020. It was February 2020, and it was Phoenix, actually.
[00:03:42] Speaker A: Right. It was Phoenix. I don't think that was word camp us, though.
[00:03:45] Speaker B: No, it wasn't. It was word camp because that was.
[00:03:47] Speaker A: The last word camp. It was that or Miami. No, the last word camp. Right before the lockdown.
[00:03:52] Speaker B: Right before lockdown. That's right. I remember. That's right.
[00:03:54] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:03:55] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, so a lot of people listening to this are going to go great. Troy's got a WordPress hosting company on the podcast, but we were just talking about this in the green room, if you like. I think we just need to call it out. Right. Like, explain to people the difference between you and, you know, a siteground or a WP engine or a grid pane or a wherever else I can host my WordPress website.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: Yeah. So we are really.
So we built a platform that's a bit unique. And our sort of superpower early on was we are really good at scaling. And what we found was that works great for people like online learning, e commerce, people who have lots of big rushes of traffic. Right. And so we really are passionate about helping these e commerce businesses or even the agencies. My pitch to agencies is, look, do you have sites keeping you up at night where you're worried, you've got two or three in your portfolio, you're worried, what would I do if they crash? I'm not sure what to do about it. And they bother you?
Those are the kind of sites that we deal with. So we are obsessive about service support, but we really enable from the hosting side of things. We enable high performance sites. And I don't say that loosely because everyone says they're the fastest and bestest and strongest. We are like a team of experts and infrastructure experts at scaling. Woocommerce, our largest client does over 10 million a month and 110,000 orders a month. In Woocommerce, our largest trafficked site gets over 20 million visits a month. Okay? And so what we do is we serve sites that do fifty k a month too, right? Our average store does about 300k in revenue a month, the average ecommerce site on Convesio. And so we define this as the mid market to enterprise. All right? Now when you have a site like that, if your site goes down like you need people there, you're not filing tickets, this, that and the other. So we support our clients in slack. We monitor all of our sites 24 hours a day. We're usually the ones that know there's a problem before our customers. Now that's the hosting side. What makes us really different is we are very specialized in e commerce and we broadly define that. Online learning, memberships, course creators, publishers that sell memberships to their stuff. We have two new products that we've brought into the market in the last few months. One is called Convexio Convert and we acquired that. It's a marketing automation tool for Woocommerce and several other WordPress like easy digital downloads, things like that. And it's basically a competitor to Klaviyo. It does website personalization, engagement messaging, all based on orders and transactions, cross sell up, sell abandoned carts. And then we just launched in the last 30 days in beta a payments solution. So this is an alternative to stripe. And so we have spent nine months working on this and we're super excited about it. And what we're going to be doing is sharing a portion of the payment processing fees back to the agencies that we work with. And so we're really trying to be a full stack alternative to Shopify.
[00:07:35] Speaker B: Got it built on WordPress Woocommerce. Yes.
And so I want to unpack a little bit this a minute, but I'm curious, what percentage of your customer base is agencies serving e commerce versus just direct e commerce store owners?
[00:07:48] Speaker A: You know, I get this question a lot, and one of the things that makes it a little hard to figure out is sometimes agencies have clients that are so big they're like you just go to the host. So they refer us a direct relationship instead of what you might think. The traditional agency hosting model is where they resell hosting and they bill for it. Right? So it's a little bit hard to say, but I think about 40% of our customers are agencies, 60% are direct.
[00:08:18] Speaker B: So let's talk about. So convicio convert was grow matic, right? That was a product called Grow Matic that you guys acquired. So now, I'm not that familiar with Klaviyo. We have some agencies in our program who are e commerce specialists for Shopify stores. What's the value proposition? Like, if I'm listening to this and I'm thinking, well, you know, I've then got a, you know, woocommerce, I gotta update it, I've got to manage the plugin. Like what's the value proposition of doing something like that versus just using Shopify and Klaviyo? Like why would I think about using Woocommerce and I convicio convert and pay? Like why don't I just use the hosted platforms that I know and trust already?
[00:08:59] Speaker A: Yeah, really, really good question. And by the way, and I know we won't, we're going to get into it later, but this is an area where I think WordPress has been slightly asleep at the wheel.
They were the de facto leader in e commerce until Shopify came and pretty much has dominated, making it easy for people to get started with a store. It's still difficult. They're trying to do a lot to fix it, but it's still difficult in woocommerce to get started with. That said, there are use cases in the WordPress woocommerce ecosystem that really do not have a parallel in Shopify. I'll give you a few. First of all, if you're in a regulated industry, so your CBD, cannabis, firearms, you know, certain financial investment things, they're no goes in Shopify. Now, Shopify is loosening some of the reins on cannabis and CBD, I think. But a regulated industry might be a reason you won't go to Shopify if you are a course creator membership site, online learning LMS platform, not a good solution on Shopify.
And I really do think, although they've had these portals have come up to try and compete with this, I do think the most robust online learning tools, if you're going to do really sophisticated things, are in platforms like Learndash and lifter LMS and these type of WordPress solutions. So I think there are certain use cases and I broadly define ecommerce. Most people, when you say e commerce, they think, oh, like a yemenite beauty supplies or products that are going to ship to you, to us, e commerce is really anyone transacting online. So this is publishers that sell memberships to their site using awesome plugins like Pigeon, which is a membership killer membership plugin for helping publishers get more revenue from their content.
And so online learning course creators, membership sites, digital downloads of products, that's another good niche for if you have a digital product, easy digital downloads is one of the best tools you can use, really. Not a ton of solutions in the Shopify marketplace that are as established as that. So no, there's not. There are use cases for woocommerce. But I will be honest with you, if I was a new person starting out, you know, and I've done this before, people want to sell like, I have a product, I want to sell, okay, go sell it on Shopify.
And I understand the frustration of agencies, man, I'm telling you, it's like, and this is part of the problem that I have with the WordPress ecosystem is it is becoming so difficult to run a WordPress business and I'm not talking an agency because those people are technical, right? It's becoming difficult to run an e commerce store with all of the plugins that you need, all of the services that you need, the constant updates, the variety of security issues. And that's really what we're trying to make much easier, let alone you get a lot of success and it's all of a sudden your store is crashing on you and it can't scale, right?
[00:12:17] Speaker B: I mean, you know, you and I have spoken about this and people listening to this know that I'm a big, I've been using WordPress since 2007, right? So I've seen it go through so much growth and so many iterations. People also know that I'm a high level user and we're a high level partner and you know, we sell and manage our courses these days in high level and we have had to let go of a lot of functionality, functionality that we used to have years ago because one, our business model has changed a little bit and we're not so much a online education platform these days. We're more a mentoring coaching company. And so the platform that we use now, high level, is just somewhere for us to park our curriculum that we can refer people to. We don't do gamification and leaderboards and all that kind of stuff. We used to, we used to do all that in learndash a hundred years ago when Justin owned Learndash and it was a great platform. But man, we had three developers full time in the Philippines managing that, updating plugins, security backups, right, all that kind of stuff. And it became, you know, even to run our blog these days which is, which is you know, I mean we publish a podcast which we're doing now, we put YouTube videos, we have blog posts, you know we have some downloads right I mean even to do that, the amount of plugins that we have and the amount of licenses that we need and it's just such a fractured ecosystem. The WordPress ecosystem is so fractured and part of the benefit of that has been that there are plugin developers and personalities like Yoast for example that have, that have brought tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people to WordPress as a platform right and those that developer community that have added functionality to WordPress have really been the growth strategy for WordPress. I feel like the problem now is it's so fractured that again if I mean I'm moving my personal website off WordPress because I mean it's a really one pager right I don't need, I don't, it doesn't do any business for me. It's just a, it's a business card right I'm just sticking it on high level because I don't want to think about it.
But the learning curve and managing a basic WordPress website is a pain in the ass and so if I just go back, I dont know, close to ten years. Brian Clark at copyblogger when they developed the rainmaker platform they built something on top of WordPress that was an all in one. Just come here and do everything you need to do in one platform right and I feel like this is, this is what needs to happen because there's such a lack of leadership and strategic direction from WordPress itself partially because of the open source nature of the whole project, partially also because I think it's part blogging platform, part developer platform, it's got this identity crisis, it doesn't really know what it is and no one's prepared to put a line in the sand and say well this is what it is and so it's left to the community and people like yourself to build these kind of niche solutions on top of WordPress. And I feel like thats what Convicio is doing.
[00:15:28] Speaker A: Correct me if im wrong yeah thats exactly right. I mean were trying to specialize in solving really hard problems for a particular customer profile and its been challenging because theres not like if you look at the audience of WordPress right, its like theres not a lot of stores doing over fifty k a month, theres even less doing over a million a month in revenue and its like were trying to tackle that really difficult, challenging segment, but theres a lot of value that we can add there because we can short circuit it. And one of the things I tell a lot of our clients is its hard because theres so few stores doing overdose, you know, one hundred k a month in revenue. It's like the amount of developers or WordPress community, people who've worked on a real store live in production is even less. And so it's like now you have this shrinking pool of talent that when you're an ecommerce store and you're like, man, I'm doing one hundred k a month. How do I get to 300k? Okay, well, it's like you have a very small, you have a lot of noise out there. There's a lot of people out there building sites that do no revenue or our brochure wear, but theres very few people that know the pool shrinks very quickly. And so thats what weve chosen to focus on. And I find it extremely rewarding and fulfilling and its definitely a niche. I do think, though, just to go back to your comment about the lack of direction, I think theres even in the last couple of weeks, I was on another podcast and we were talking about how there's conflict in which direction should WordPress go. Some people think like, hey, you should be building Gutenberg to be competitive with the square spaces of the world, right? Like build it so that they're, the editor gives you a modern editor feel. So it's competitive with the wixes and the squarespaces of the world. And other people are like, no, we want to build collaboration features or we're going to build other things. And it feels like there's a lot of going in different directions now or pulling in different directions, I would say. And that makes everything go slow when you're at the size WordPress is at. And so it's a challenge. And I know it pains me to hear you say you're leaving WordPress personally because I got into WordPress because of people like you. And, you know, but, but I also understand, and if we're going to be honest with ourselves about how to fix the issue, we have to be like honest about we have problems, you know, and it's, you know, I mean, and it's, yeah, it's a tricky thing to solve, but I think hopefully we're going to try and help solve that for e commerce stores better than it's been done before with a one stop shop, if you will.
[00:18:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, look, I don't want to make this a WordPress beat up session. But I think Gutenberg was a big example of what happens when you just leave it to the community to figure stuff out and there's no direction and there's no leadership from the top. I mean, there's no direction at all. Gutenberg. I mean, for my personal opinion, it's just such a massively missed opportunity and full transparency. Convicio are a partner of ours.
You guys sponsor some of the episodes of this podcast. We've also had Wix studio come along and sponsor some episodes of this podcast.
[00:19:04] Speaker A: Those guys are building really good, dude.
[00:19:07] Speaker B: Right? I was like, when they reached out to me, I'm like, okay, do you know who I am? Like, you know, I've been talking about WordPress for the last 15 years and now I'm talking about high level and I still talk about WordPress. Don't worry, we still have websites on WordPress. I haven't completely abandoned the platform because, I mean, it does what it does, right? It's like there are things I can't do on high level that I can do on WordPress. So I'm not completely abandoning WordPress. I've just opened my mind to what is the best platform for the job at hand. And you look at, you log into WordPress and start collaborating on a website with some other designers or developers, and then you log into Wix Studio and go, well, this is just a completely different experience, right?
And you look at the page builders that are available in WordPress and go, what's Gutenberg? I don't even understand what, I don't even understand how that happened. I mean, I didn't understand how we, someone missed a meeting somewhere. I don't even understand how we got there.
[00:20:01] Speaker A: But, well, we have a large client that is replatforming from squarespace to WordPress for a number of reasons that are not really awesome, but they loved, they're like compliance and workflow and functionality stuff. When I say not really awesome, but they were on squarespace and they're like, Gutenberg, just work like squarespace. And after watching them use how they use squarespace, im like, why isnt someone doing this for Gutenberg? Like what? Like, this is such a better experience for the designer, the visual creator to create, right?
[00:20:37] Speaker B: 100%. And so I think theres a couple of what I find interesting is this, you know, what you guys are doing is solving a specific problem for a specific part of the market.
And I don't actually think, like, for me, and it's funny because I go back to Wordcamp Europe in like 2000, I don't know, it was in Leiden, a little town about an hour south of Amsterdam. And I don't even know what year it was. Maybe 2012, maybe it was that good.
[00:21:11] Speaker A: Of a trip, huh?
[00:21:12] Speaker B: It was, yeah exactly. It was. I don't remember much about it. And it's all Zach from Treehouse. It's all his fault actually.
Anyway, I remember Matt saying that WordPress, you know, democratize, democratizing blogging was the original mission of WordPress. And then at Wordcamp Europe he said, well, you know, we're now here to democratize development.
And I think that was the beginning of the splinter. It's like, well you kind of have to pick, you kind of have to pick one and be really good at it, right?
Because I don't think it does either very well. So what I find interesting, and again, just to go back to what Brian at copyblogger was doing, was building these kind of niche solutions on top of WordPress and so therefore the underlying tech doesn't really matter, right. It's what I'm buying with Convicio is this ability to scale my e commerce site.
I can't do digital downloads or access to course platforms like I can in WordPress. I can't do that on Shopify. I've tried. Right. I can't even, I can't do in WordPress what I, you know, what I can do in high level, you know, sorry, I can't do in high level what I can do in WordPress. Right? If I'm building a gamified platform with leaderboards and you know, really advanced functionality, I can't do that in any other platform except WordPress because of the plugin, the extensibility in the plugin architecture that allows me to do that. But with that comes technical debt and overhead that I have to manage. Right. So if Im scaling an e commerce platform or a, say im building something like Patreon, if familiar with Patreon, whether the, yeah. So Jack, the founder and CEO of Patreon, Im a massive fan, a big follower of his, I think hes built a really interesting platform. Again, its a hosted platform so Im restricted. I cant add functionality that they dont offer. But if I wanted to build something like Patreon, WordPress would be where I would go because of the extensibility and the functionality of it. But then I get to a point where ive got 17 plugins that Im managing.
What level of support do I get from Convicio to just make all those problems go away? And this is an ignorant question, I dont know the answer to this. So Im not setting you up here, just educate me. I'm a creator, I just want to create content, I want to put it up, I want to monetize some of it. I want to build a community right? I don't want to think about the tech at all, I just want it to work.
[00:23:41] Speaker A: So that's exactly what we do. So we support our clients in Slack. And so you have developers, senior PHP developers, database admins, scaling experts, security experts all in a slack channel with you. Kind of like you run the agencies agency Maverick Slack. Imagine your team is in there just like your customers are with your team, our customers are in that with us. And we basically do everything from, we will handle any performance issues, site errors, compatibility problems, security issues, warnings, Google search console problems. I mean we pretty much act like a technical agency to our client. By the way, this is one of the reasons agencies love to work with us because imagine you get like the people, you'd have to go higher on codable and pay hourly. Now we're not a low cost host so there's that. You pay a premium for those services from us, but that's the level of sophistication we give you with convesio. And because we're hosting everything and it's in our ecosystem and it's in our infrastructure, we know how to fix a lot of the common problems very quickly. So page speed issues, database query slowness, we diagnose things with new relic on a regular basis for customers, tell them which plugins are slow, suggest alternatives to it, identify like hey, your database is missing this index, we should put that in there for you.
We will do all of that completely hands on for customers. So they will never have to touch a line of code, never have to touch a database admin. Our goal is to be the technical team facilitating all the scalability and performance of your site. And you just do what you do best, which is create, manage your store, publisher content, all of that type of thing.
[00:25:43] Speaker B: Because when I hear support from hosting companies, yeah, you know, it's like, well we have fresh desk and you send us a ticket and we get back to you within 24 hours and we tell you what to do and you know, whereas this feels like a different, this feels like I consider our, I consider, I mean we, okay, we, our company is a little different. We don't do any done for you, right, we do done with you. But I consider ourselves as the SWAT team that works behind the scenes to help agencies be successful at what they do and we kind of take care of a lot of the business side of things. Right.
And it feels to me like this is a similar position that you guys take, whereas you're like the secret swap team working behind the scenes to make sure the agency can just get on with serving their clients. And if there's something technical that's gone wrong with the site, you guys are just going to take care of it, which is a massive. Yeah absolutely massive relief.
[00:26:36] Speaker A: We function in many ways like how agencies function with their developers, right. We sort of take the place of that and you know, that's an area where we're very, very good at what we do and people love our platform and our performance, but the thing that people rave about is the level of support and the caliber of the people they get to work with. At Convesio.
[00:27:01] Speaker B: I want to pivot just a little bit and talk about convert and pay and I want to talk about AI, of course convert. A quick question about convert. Does convert work on any site or is it on any WordPress site or is it specifically just for woocommerce?
[00:27:14] Speaker A: No, any WordPress site.
[00:27:16] Speaker B: Okay, and talk to me about the personalization just for those that dont know, like what is website personalization mean in 2024?
[00:27:25] Speaker A: Yeah its really cool and I think its honestly something that the product, it was sort of a sleeper feature of the product. Its really something that it excels at and I think does better than Klaviyo does and these other competitors in the marketplace. So basically imagine that you have a marketing engine plugged into all of your customer and your by the way, it integrates with HubSpot that all of your customer data, all of your purchase data for your customers, the pages that they visit, how many times they come to your website and you can build rules around. If a person saw this page on the website, show them this dynamic content on another page of the website. If a person came from this referring source of traffic, show them this message. So a good example would be, you know, if your travel site, you know, you might pop up on your lead page. We have special offers for people in Florida where I'm at right now, you know, get, get our deals, you know, for Florida vacations or something. So you can personalize the content of the website based on the browsing behavior and traffic behavior or the purchase history and customer data stored in your store.
[00:28:46] Speaker B: So this is something I've been trying to do for a long time. And the use case is go to the website, download a free resource once you've downloaded that free resource. The next time you visit our website, you're going to see a different call to action because I know you've already downloaded that free resource and maybe I know you've opened it. So now when you're on through a smart link or a trigger link, and now you're on the website, I'm going to sell you a course that helps you implement that free resource.
[00:29:13] Speaker A: Right, exactly. And that's exactly what it does. Because convert is a full email marketing platform. So when you set up an automation, you can say you can, by the way, you can do forms, you can do pop ups, you can integrate with gravity forms, your favorite form builders. But basically what happens is you can have someone go through a sequence like that, you could tag them as a segment. So free download segment, and then you could say any returning visit, that's a free download visit, show them this the next time and trigger an email two days later if they left and didn't take the next step. So you have this website, personalization plus email automation engine that all works together.
[00:30:00] Speaker B: Love it. I have to ask, any plans to integrate it with high level?
[00:30:05] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely, we have plan. I mean, I would love to. By the way, because of you, our entire business is on high level. So we use high level. And probably, like you, I was frustrated with the fragmentation of tools that we were using. And I'm like, you know what, I don't care if this thing isn't as good as calendly, just the fact that it's all these tools are together. I will sacrifice features to have a collective, unified platform with my data that I can get accurate attribution of what's happening together from sales dashboards to lead tracking, lead source tracking and all that stuff. And so we do that with high level. And thank you because I met the guys at high level at the last Mavericks conference and we dove all in and it's great. I think what they're doing is extremely promising. So I want to definitely get convert in that ecosystem because I want to use it, because I do think for website personalization and for email automation, I do like convert slightly. We do use a lot of email automation and go high level for lead follow up. But I think that there's some cool stuff convert does. I want to get it wired into that. And I also want to get convessiopay working with convert because I have heard and I've seen on the forums grumblings about payment options on high level.
[00:31:34] Speaker B: So talk to me about pay. What is the value proposition.
[00:31:36] Speaker A: Why?
[00:31:37] Speaker B: I mean, because payments is a massive pain in the ass, right? I can't imagine what the sleepless night you've had over the last nine months to build this thing. Just from a regulatory compliance point of view, right?
[00:31:45] Speaker A: Yes, exactly.
[00:31:45] Speaker B: But why? Why make the beard any grayer than it needs to be, Tom.
[00:31:50] Speaker A: So, okay, the reason why is, and I want you to think about the magic of having a fully integrated stack, that is your hosting, your marketing and your payment data and what you can do if you layer AI on top of that to surface insights around performance benchmarks, how youre doing, how your average order size is, whats being engaged. We think that theres a play there where the sum of the parts equal a much greater amount if we have them all in one shop. The other reason is some of the biggest challenges people have is getting things like accelerated payment methods working in WordPress. You would be shocked at how difficult it is sometimes abandoned carts, that's more of a convert thing. But getting Google pay, apple Pay, all working, not having stripe problems, issues with stripe, with support. So there is a whole host of pain in the butt factor with traditional payment solutions. Authorizenet, have you logged into any of these credit card portals before that are not stripe? They look terrible, like these antiquated merchant service provider platforms that are just awful in the US. And so we thought that we could really level that up. We thought there was be a sort of a level of intelligence on payments we can get to eventually. And then the big thing was we tried to partner with Stripe and they did not want to share any revenue with us. They were very stingy. And so im like, you know what, theres a decent amount of revenue being made in the payments and everyones keeping it for themselves.
And so I want to create a new revenue stream for agencies by, look, you know the grind of slinging websites every month, month after month, you know how hard it is. I want to build a sustainable, recurring revenue stream for agencies that they don't because I'm from the agency space, I know agencies I've got friends I care about deeply. In the grind where it's like every month I got to find five new website customers and sell maintenance plans and all this stuff. And so I want to create a high profit, low touch revenue stream for these agencies. And I think sharing payments, revenue back to them could be a game changer for some of these agencies. And here's, here's what I mean because it's hard to tell an agency, I was telling you about this earlier, learn how to go build woocommerce sites. Their heads are going to explode. That's like if you don't build ecommerce sites there's so many things you have to know but you have a ton of businesses. I got a client that is here locally with me that has like a couple hundred sites. We did a portfolio analysis.
His customers are transacting over $600 million a year in revenue. Okay. His clients and the number one thing hes asked for is all these local companies were like, can you payment enable my website? Well, who are you using for credit card processing? Usually quickbooks or something? Well, no, I cant really do that because thats like a closed ecosystem and it doesnt integrate with WordPress and im not going to set up woocommerce for you. Thats overkill. So we are going to have in the next 30 days a QuickBooks integration for convexiopay where you can literally connect it to QuickBooks and the minute an invoice is generated it will send out a convexio pay branded invoice for the customer to pay online. Now the agency can go to all those local businesses and be like, hey, I can payment enable your website and we'll be able to have a branded experience where they come back to their website. There'll be a little pay widget on their site, put the invoice number and click pay and check out. Now you've taken offline businesses and you've helped bring them into the modern world of transacting online. Now just bear with me a moment. Imagine you take convert and you now layer that on top. You can automate fully branded emails, reminder emails if they don't pay, collection notices if they don't pay. You can now start to trigger based on QuickBooks financial data, email automations like an e commerce store, triggers, cross sells, upsells and all that type of stuff. You can now do that and automate your payment operations. That's where we're going with it.
[00:36:29] Speaker B: Love it, love it. I had to do this recently for a website. We had a member of our Mavericks club who fell ill. I was halfway through building a bunch of projects.
He had a very distressed wife who had no idea what to do. I jumped in, a bunch of our members jumped in and we just took over a bunch of projects and finished them for him while he was recovering. Good news is fully recovered now and he's back, which is great news. And I had to talk to one of the developers because there was a company that did. I can't remember what they did. But you had to pay a deposit before they came out and did the project on your house, right? It was all, it was in the residential construction space. And they had this, it was, man, my God, it was a, there was this one plugin that did the thing. And the company, the client wanted a Google pay. They were, you know, we want our clients be able to pay with Google Pay. I'm like, no, sorry, can't, that just can't happen. That just, that just, and the client was like, I don't understand. It's 2024. Like, what do you mean we can't use Google pay? I'm like, yep, I wish we could, but we can't because there's one plugin. She goes, what's a plugin? I'm like, here we go. Here we go. You know what's a plugin? What's a plugin? I'm like, here we go, sweetheart. Bingo. Here we go. Right, this is, this is the problem, right? The fractured ecosystem. So now, and also things like dunning credit card update, like, your card's about to expire. I imagine you lay AI across that. It can forecast, it can say, hey, this credit card is going to expire in 30 days. Let's send the person an email through convert. Let's get them to go to the website and update their credit, like. So it replaces all of that and keeps it all in one centralized house.
[00:38:11] Speaker A: Yes. And the beautiful thing about our payments platform is it's wired into all the tokens on the visa and Mastercard network. So things like automatic expiring cards update automatically across the networks and all that type of stuff. So that is absolutely something that will just happen seamlessly. But to your point, though, exactly. Think about the things with the complete picture and AI layered on top. Who's late? What are trends I need to watch out for? Hey, your accounts receivable is higher than it needs to be. And the goal is that we do have a down the road. And by the way, we want agencies to use convesio pay.
One of the reasons we're building the Quickbooks channel is so that the agency can actually do their payment processing in Convesio Paydeh. One of the things that we're looking at is how can we layer AI on all of this and give people insights? And that is going to be a down the road thing that we're working on. And I'm really excited about it. I think it's going to be really cool. We're going to be able to see some very interesting things as AI continues to evolve and mature. But I think that data set for the ecommerce store and for the agency is going to be a powerful set of data. And we like to think we're somewhat innovative. And I'm excited to see what we're.
[00:39:41] Speaker B: Going to bring to market in January 2020. Sorry, February 2021. The world had been in lockdown for almost a year. I was running a virtual version of Mavcon, which we now do every February, actually, as a result of that, it was so good. And I did a presentation called the agency of the Future and the, and, you know, some of it, I borrowed some of it from Hormozi's thinking around, you know, when he, when he transformed gyms.
[00:40:10] Speaker A: Right, right.
[00:40:12] Speaker B: He, he pivoted the model, which was, let's sell a gym membership. And then while you're here, let's try and add on personal training. Let's try and talk to you about your nutrition. He was like, no, no, no. Let's put, let's make the gym membership free as long as you sign up to one of our body transformation boot camps, whatever it is. Right. Which is like six months, itd be like $2,500 will completely transform your body. You get one on one personal training, you get group training, you get nutrition plans, you get a list of ingredients to go shopping every week. Well, just send that to you via text message. So you just go to the supermarket and buy exactly what you need. Heres the meal plans. Oh, by the way, you get complimentary access to our facility while youre in this bootcamp. Right. So he completely devalued the gym membership and sold everything else first.
And so thinking about that, I said to the agencies, if you don't solve a problem as a done for you. So, for example, if you're generating leads for a local business and they're not calling them or they're not following them up, or they don't know how to close them, it's not your responsibility, but it would be in your best interest to help that client understand how to close the deal, how to follow up the lead, how to automate the thing. Right. Example, I inquired about getting solar panels on the roof when we bought our house last year. I wanted solar panels and I wanted a battery on the side of the house. I put in my details into this website and three phone calls in the next ten minutes, right. I'm cooking dinner. I've got kids screaming at me only. So I didn't answer any of the calls, but only one guy sent me a text message. The other two didn't text me. One guy, Patrick, he texted me and said, hey, Troy, I just called, I'll try you again tomorrow. Just wanted you to have my details. It's Patrick from Ziko. I'll call you again tomorrow. Who do you think got the job? Patrick from Ziko. Because the other two. Right. So the agency's job, if you're not doing the thing for the client, is to help the client understand how to get it done. And that might just be through an information pack or a playbook or a best practices guide. Right. I see Convicio pay as a great and convert as a great tool that you can add to your toolkit to say, hey, we've built you a website and we're doing some marketing for you, but we can also help you solve these problems which ultimately impact our ability to succeed as an agency because that's the thing that's now letting the whole system down. And guess what? We've got a solution for that.
[00:42:37] Speaker A: Right. Well, and I think one of the interesting things is once we start to see, and convessiopay is still in its early beta, once we start to see agencies understand that they can build these commerce enabled websites, and I'm not talking an e commerce store but a commerce enabled website for a local service company and they start to understand the calculus of the money they can make off of payment processing, I think it is going to change the way they think about who they go after as ideal clients. Because when you start to think about this through the lens of how much revenue is that business going to generate for me based on their sales, now you can go after a target audience that has the ability to give you a sustainable, healthy revenue stream. And payments is high stickiness. It doesn't churn like SEO and websites and all that kind of stuff.
And by the way, payment enabled website, a commerce enabled website churns even less because that thing is critical for them. So the closer the agency can get to the revenue of the business, I think theyre in a stronger position overall.
[00:43:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree 100%.
Talk to me about, I know weve spoken a little bit about it, but what are you most excited about with AI coming down the pipeline? By the way, for those listening, Mavcon San Diego, October 14, 1516. I think at the date completely sold out, you cannot get a ticket. Im so excited to say Tom, Zack and the team from Convicio are going to be there in the room for the three days and the nights whenever we're hanging out. I'm super excited to have you there. So we'll talk more about this, but just wanted to let people know they've gone completely sold out and in no small part due to the help that Convicio and e two m and our partners have given us to make this event a huge success. So we're going to talk more about this in a few weeks. But tell me now, what are you most excited about with Aih?
[00:44:37] Speaker A: Wow.
So, I mean, like you, I'm using AI every single day, and the level of productivity enhancements that you can get out of it are just unbelievable.
Actually, I'm going to start with something I don't like. I actually think AI is going to ruin written content. Okay. I really, really do. And I think this is going to be why having a founder led brand with a real person that people can connect to. And I really do. I'm going to prophesize here, okay. My warning to small businesses is make a brand and a personality in your community people can connect with. Because I think that the noise of all the marketing noise and content that's being created with Aih is going to make the concept of a Persona a real, like, person Persona, right. Is going to make that even more one that people can see at shows and see at events in your local chamber and all that kind of stuff. So I think that that's an interesting dynamic where all this AI is going to increase the value of the personality of the brand and the person behind the brand specifically for local businesses. I think this is a huge thing. You know, they're going to want to know who are the people behind this business. So I think that's a negative thing happening that can be turned into a positive. I think that the thing I'm most excited about is lately, okay, beyond the elementary stuff of, like, manipulating content and creating it and operationalizing and all the stuff you talk about with your sops and all that. I have actually noodling on this idea that I think we might have a situation where every business is running their own private LLM.
They're not leveraging these off the shelf ones, but they're actually running perhaps a cloud based LLM. But it's private to their business. It's their private information, it's their internal information, and they're building tools that they can own the data. They don't have to give it up. It's their most confidential stuff, their financial data, their HR data, their sops, their secret sauce. And then they can build apps like chatbots and various other tools off of those and we see this happening with Olama and some of the off the shelf models that are out there and the ecosystems around them.
And Im wondering lately, is this going to be a boom for particularly hosting companies that host these LLMs and infrastructure companies where its like, I dont need a massively powerful thing, I need a slice of a gpu that I can power for my ten or 15 person company with my confidential information in it that I feel safe and secure where Im not giving it up to these large companies that are using it for training purposes or who knows what. Right? And so im wondering if thats going to be a trend were going to see as the tools and the apps and the agents start to get much more powerful and much more comprehensive. Its like today. Its like, yeah well everyones got chatbots, right? But wait until weve got all sorts of things. Wait until we have agents that answer your phone, you know, and can tell people availability for your business, you know, things like that. And you can run those off of private models. They're not SaaS companies. The other thing too is like, I mean the SaaS monthly spend for a business with all this AI is going to get higher. And I mean, I don't know about you, but I've got like a dozen AI tools I'm subscribed to now that I didn't have two years ago.
[00:48:31] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:48:31] Speaker A: So I think there might be an economy of scale. Now. Let me tell you what I'm working on for agencies. I'm going to give you a little, this is cutting edge, man.
I'm giving away a little secret sauce here. I hope I don't have any competitors or ambitious developers out there that go build this out from under me, but here's what we're working on. We have mocked up some AI features in our dashboard where you can ask AI about traffic patterns and resource usage and all that. I showed it to some really sophisticated agencies and you know what they told me? They gave me some great insights. They said this is great, but what we really need is AI to tell us what to do to improve a site. We need AI to generate the actionable list of stuff we're going to do for customers because that's the hard part where it takes an expert to go in and look and analyze Google Analytics and your ad data and your performance data and whatever and figure out what do I need to do to improve. So what we're working on is, and my vision for our hosting platform and eventually convert and pay is we're working on taking a metrics style system, like a new relic grafana and pumping all of your logs into it, along with all of your data from Cloudflare because we integrate with them on the edge and then having it act as an expert to analyze your log and your performance data and your woocommerce logs and your error logs and start to analyze that and create like this needs to be fixed, this needs to be fixed, this needs to be fixed and working through automation tools to pump that into ClickUp or whatever your project management tool would be. And so this is sort of the R and D stuff we're working on at an early stage here, as we're thinking, can we create for agencies kind of an automated diagnostic tool that will just give you things to sell to your customers to make their site better. We call it continuous improvement. It's like we want to continuously improve your site.
And so the worst thing we find is people have just so much technical debt piled up, logs full of errors and all that, because they've nothing done anything. They think WordPress can just run without any problems, right? And ten developers have worked on it and so we're trying to automate that using AI. And so I'm really excited about that type of application for AI as well.
[00:51:06] Speaker B: Wow, that's super exciting.
It ties very nicely into, we call it a growth plan around a live stream a couple of weeks ago on the Facebook group and how to use chat GBT at a very basic level to kind of write yourself twelve months worth of work as a growth plan. I mean, this is this. I mean, every month you could go to your client and say, well, if we do this and this and this, it's likely going to improve that. The growth hacking mentality I find really interesting too, because if you have a laundry list of things that you could do, you then apply the growth hacking mentality and say, well, let's work on this one first, because it's likely going to give us, it's the big domino that might knock over these little ones. There's a high chance of success, it's going to be fairly easy to implement, and you're never going to run out of, of ideas on that laundry list of things that need improving. Right?
[00:51:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:51:51] Speaker B: Say this all the time. No one ever wakes up and ticks off their last item on the to do list and says, well, guess what, darling, the business is done. I finally finished it.
[00:52:00] Speaker A: I'm telling you, you'd be shocked, like, I know you know this stuff and your audience knows it, but just taking your Google Analytics data on your shopping cart conversion funnel and literally just pasting the metrics into chat GPT and saying, benchmark me against other things. I mean, it will write an awesome, that used to take me research and all sorts of stuff, hours to do. It'll write an awesome e commerce analysis of your site, your performance, how it's benchmarking your, oh, you're add people adding to the cart, they're falling out of the funnel here. This is below average. This is above average and tell you exactly what you have to work on. And so that type of application, that's really one of the reasons we literally would take, I would take a site's Cloudflare and I would literally copy and drag and I'd get unformatted text and I would dump it raw into chat GPT and be like, create an executive summary of the last 30 days of traffic. And it's like, it just does it and it's beautiful. That type of acceleration for agencies is like, if I was going to start an agency today, it would be heavily anchored in that. And you can produce beautiful things. And there's apps like Gamma out there. If you've seen that, you can literally paste in, you can tell chat GPT, build a slide presentation for me, paste the raw text in, and gamma will spit out for you a beautiful slide deck, you know, with AI images and tables and iconography and everything. And it's really, really amazing.
[00:53:34] Speaker B: So thanks for that, rabbit hole. I know what I'm doing this afternoon.
[00:53:37] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Gamma. Yeah. So anyway, it's so exciting. We're in such an exciting time with AI. I literally thought I missed the hottest thing with bitcoin of my lifetime. But I actually, I think I have a do over here. It's like, I really do think it's going to be AI.
[00:53:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. I feel like the Internet happened in the nineties for me, about 94, 95, right? That blew my mind. And I was like, and it took me a minute, probably 20 years to realize this has changed. This is the biggest change in the world, right, is when the Internet happened in the mid nineties. I think AI, and particularly spatial computing, I'm really excited about, I think is going to disrupt society more than the Internet did. Because, you know, I have a seven year old and a four year old and all the parents at our school are kind of going, well, you know, I'm concerned that my kids are going to be doom scrolling when they're teenagers. I'm like, no, no, no, these things are a relic. These things are gone. Like, it's going to be all wearable, man. It's like little nano pods. It's smart glasses and watches. We're going to be saying, take your glasses off, I'm talking to you, not put your phone down, right? It's a brave new world, man. It's exciting. It's terrifying. And I'm glad we've got partners like you in our corner to help us navigate it, Tom, because it's going to be a wild ride. Hey, thanks for joining us on the agency hour podcast and really looking forward to hanging out with you and the team in a few weeks in San Diego.
[00:55:06] Speaker A: Likewise. Likewise. We'll be there.
[00:55:08] Speaker B: Where can people reach out and say thanks and get in touch?
[00:55:11] Speaker A: Yeah, so the social media platforms, I'm on all of them. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook. But come to our website. You can look us up there and you can email
[email protected]. and I've got tons of free advice, so if you have problems with your site, just feel free to ask me. I'm happy to help.
[00:55:30] Speaker B: Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.
[00:55:32] Speaker A: Thanks a lot, Troy.
[00:55:35] Speaker B: Thanks for listening to the agency, our podcast, and a massive thanks to Tom for joining us. I'm really looking forward to catching up in person again at Mavcon in San Diego in October. Speaking of Mavcon, as I mentioned, you can't come. Sorry, but we are officially sold out, which is a massive effort by everyone here on the team to achieve that, and we're super excited. Our next Mavcon will most likely be in Bali in June 2025. So keep your eye out on your email and the socials for the announcement around that. They're incredibly transformational events, but they do sell out. So if you see the notice of Bali June 2025 being promoted, get tickets while you can. All right, folks, remember to subscribe and please share this with anyone that you think may need to hear it. I'm Troy Dean, and remember, the average person spends six months of their life sitting at red lights.
