Welcome to The Panel where founders talk about building a better business and a better life. I'm Justin Jackson, cofounder of transistor.fm.
Brian Casel:Brian Casel. I'm founder of Builder Methods.
Jordan:And I'm Jordan Gal, founder at heyrosy.com, and we have a special guest today. Corey Haines
Justin:from Conversion Factory. Welcome to the show, man.
Corey Haines:Yeah. Thanks for having me. I feel like a midget amongst giants. Like, you guys are my heroes. And so it's, like, weird to be here.
Corey Haines:I'm like, what do I when do I chime in to say something? Like, I'm just only used to listening to you guys.
Justin:Oh, dude. I mean, I've never sat stood next to Jordan Gal and myself, but I I'm pretty sure you are a giant amongst midgets.
Jordan:Yeah. Look, part of the reason we do this podcast not in person is so Justin and I can avoid that fact entirely. I remember when we first met, we're like, oh. Yes. Another five foot seven or...
Jordan:It was... It's true.
Brian Casel:Justin and Jordan's personalities are a lot bigger than Oh. Than they are.
Justin:That is my favorite thing about meeting someone imperfect. I'm going
Corey Haines:Yep.
Justin:I you would be taller in real life. I'm like, yeah. That's exactly... That's why I live on the Internet.
Corey Haines:Yep. I'm
Jordan:probably... Corey, you have you have a very strong Twitter game. So I think your your status... You you do a lot of stuff. That...
Jordan:That's what kinda gets me. And your post from Conversion Factory always has me like, should I reach out for a redesign?
Corey Haines:Is it is it time for
Jordan:us to do a redesign? Yep.
Brian Casel:I mean, that's what I... I wanted to I wanted to wrangle Corey in here this week because I think Corey, you're you're known as like the marketing guy. You... You've been that... Everyone has like a name plus like thing that everybody knows them for.
Brian Casel:I feel like marketing is the word for for Corey. Yep. And, you know, we know Conversion Factory, sort of like your agency service, but you're doing a lot of other stuff. You got marketing skills which which have blown up, you've got a ton of SaaS products, know, a whole portfolio of those. So I wanted to get you on here because we're always kind of hacking around on like what's what's working, what's not working, how is SaaS changing.
Brian Casel:We can get your thoughts on all that, but also just you as a builder. You're you're like a marketer turned builder. There there's so many places we can go. Mhmm. So I think this will be fun.
Justin:Yeah. Well, let's start, let's start with this Brennan Dunn tweet right here. Remember back when every business marketing bro wanted a technical co founder?
Corey Haines:Mean... Go to.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. I can identify with this. Jordan, what's your reaction to this?
Jordan:I thought it was genuinely a spicy take. Yeah. Because it's a little rude but has enough truth in it that, you know, it's tough to argue with. I I do remember back to this because without a technical cofounder, it was just all talk. You could have as many ideas as you wanted, but you needed to figure out a way for one of these people who contain the secrets to the magic Mhmm.
Jordan:To believe enough in what you wanted to do to join you to make it a reality. And it was... It felt like a very risky danger. First, was very difficult to find the right person. And then and then you you understood from the beginning that they held an enormous amount of leverage.
Jordan:And I remember this was like, you know, one of the foundational conversations in SaaS world, in microconf world, in anything. Mhmm. And it's amazing how it's changed in... Okay. In a lot of ways over the last two years.
Jordan:Yeah. In other ways in other ways, it hasn't changed. I'm continuously reminded at how unbelievably valuable and talented my CTO and co founders.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:So so I... I'm gaining skills, but but I still respect, like, the the real thing.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jordan:But it's interesting to see these hybrids. Corey Yeah. What what was your journey like? How technical were you beforehand? What got you into AI?
Jordan:I feel like you have you have one of, the most popular, like, GitHub repositories for marketing skills. Like... Okay. Explain that. How did that happen?
Corey Haines:I just learned... Not to steal my own horn, but I just learned because it blew my mind that marketing skills is the four hundred and eighty first most popular repo on GitHub in the world of all time. Wow.
Jordan:It's like it's basically just DHH and and yourself.
Corey Haines:Yeah. Right. Yes. No. Yeah.
Corey Haines:It's it's crazy. Well, it's funny too because when I saw that tweet as a formerly nontechnical person turned semi technical enough, My thought too was like, I wonder how much of being a non technical person having to go and pitch and get a technical person on board to build the thing was a forcing function for like validation of your idea. In other words, like, you know, the technical guy, the CTO is gonna be like, okay, dude, cool story, but like, do you have customers? Do you have revenue? Like, is this really a good idea?
Corey Haines:I'm gonna spend the next, you know, ten years of my life potentially building this thing. Like, you have to be really, really sure. And now there's all these nontechnical dudes like me who are, like, just building anything and everything. And where is the validation? Or, like, what does the validation look like now?
Corey Haines:I've to avoid that because I think that I've listened to you guys for way too long. And, and you've been around the block a couple times, right? But I mean, my story was I was a marketer and then I got sick of one, working for companies, so I started Conversion Factory. And then two, got sick of trying to recruit people to build my ideas. So I did a coding boot camp in August 2023, like a month after I started Conversion Factory.
Corey Haines:And this was a boot camp, but it was me going to Ryan Culp's house in the middle of nowhere, Georgia. Yeah. Remember nine of the strangers. And he literally just taught us how to code in his garage by screen sharing and being like, do this now and do that. We, like, build apps together.
Corey Haines:And it was there that I discovered Cursor. And then it was like, oh, there's TragicPT in your IDE. Like, now you can use AI to code. So I built, like, my first two apps from scratch, like, by myself without AI. And then ever since then, I've
Brian Casel:just been, like, button mashing Claude. I'd like, please make it better. Man, so, 2023 to be that... If if that's the year that you went from just being a marketer to starting to learn how to code, I mean that is such an unbelievable year to be doing that. Like, because because I I mean I started long ago, like twenty years ago like as a front end developer designer and and then it wasn't until 2017 that I got serious about learning Ruby on Rails and learning how to...
Brian Casel:For that same exact reason, like trying to gain that magic, that that superpower to be able to take product ideas and be able to ship them end to end. But I was doing the boot camps then with no AI, and if you are... If you're doing that at the outset of AI in 2023, oh man, like that that is like such a magic moment to get into it.
Corey Haines:Yeah, well it like I learned all the things the hard way, for... But I only had to do it once. And then every time after that, I did it the easy way. Right? But like there's definitely something important about that.
Corey Haines:To your point Jordan about like appreciating your CTO, for two of my SaaS products, I still have technical cofounders for them because I'm like, this is above my pay grade. Like, I could probably figure this out, but, like, I'm gonna make a lot of mistakes. It's probably not gonna be as good. Like, should I even be spending my time on that? I don't I'm a I'm a I'm a better marketer than I am a builder.
Corey Haines:You know what I mean? So it's still not, like, the the the silver bullet.
Justin:Yeah. I I think people are gonna wanna know what are the SaaS products you've got going right now?
Corey Haines:Sure. Okay. So the main one is TrueList. It's an email validation tool that salespeople and marketers and product people use to make sure that an email exists. It's very simple.
Corey Haines:It's like super infrastructure, like DevOps heavy. So basically impossible to vibe code, was great. And I got looped into that when Grant, my co founder, he had just made a couple of lifetime sales through posting on Reddit. And now we're paying ourselves a salary. So we're not public about the numbers, but it's going well.
Corey Haines:And, so that's the main one. There's also Magister, which is this AI marketing agent that I'm building with my buddy Elliot, which is kind of like Swipewell two point o for anyone who knows that story as well. This one is essentially born out of marketing skills because I made marketing skills and then everyone was like, Claude Code? What are you talking about? Okay.
Corey Haines:Like, maybe there's maybe there's some kind of SaaS that can encapsulate all the integrations and, like, team collaboration that you need to do to do marketing with AI. And so that's Magister, and we're growing every month, and we're kind of, like, still in this open beta stage right now because it's a very, very, very technical product. And then I have a host of other random projects. I have three SaaS that I built for my church that now I'm getting more churches as customers.
Jordan:Okay.
Corey Haines:I've built some macOS apps. I've... I have a bunch of like random content sites. I've built some mobile apps. I've pretty much built everything.
Corey Haines:And they all have traffic and they all have users and sign ups. Not all of them have customers.
Jordan:Mhmm.
Corey Haines:Like, the first like eight that I mentioned have customers. The other like 20 do not have customers.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. Okay. Still a hell of a track record, Like even if just the top eight and then of course like the top two or three are actually pretty significant.
Justin:The question though is, should you be focusing Corey? Would, would it be better if you just focused on one project?
Corey Haines:Guys tell me....
Justin:Those projects...
Corey Haines:That's why
Justin:I came
Corey Haines:on the show for it.
Jordan:No. Uh-uh.
Corey Haines:No. We're...
Jordan:Yeah. We're... We are the the opposite of, like, overly confident declarative, you know, like, business info. No. No way.
Corey Haines:You don't give prescriptive advice for that?
Jordan:There is no... Yeah. We're we're... No way. There's no right way to do it.
Justin:But you do you, man. Yeah.
Brian Casel:I think it's awesome.
Justin:Of, like, how you're thinking about that, though. Because before we started recording, you were saying, you know, maybe it is too many, too much stuff. Is it too much stuff? Are you thinking, like, you need to double down on something? What what are you...
Justin:What's kind of going through your mind right now?
Corey Haines:Yeah. Well, this is a question that I've been asking myself for years. Like, I was asking myself if I was doing too much by having a newsletter and a course and a job. You know what I mean? Like Mhmm.
Corey Haines:There's kind of, like, always this, like, oh, should I just be, like, focusing on this right now? Or life would be easier, life would be simpler. My time would be a lot easier to manage if I just had this one thing or maybe two things to focus on. Here's why I've landed on this and why I continue to go down this path is that for one, I think that as a marketer, actually, my time and efforts can go further across multiple things as it... Compared to as if I was like a builder or a CTO who was in multiple things, like owning the code and owning the uptime of multiple projects.
Corey Haines:I think that's harder. There's a lot of marketing where you're kind of like, okay, I'm gonna do this thing and I'm gonna wait. I'm gonna do this other thing while this thing kind of like proves out. And so I've always been like, alright, let me make an investment. Let me plant a seed.
Corey Haines:Let me do something and then like circle back to this. And then I just accumulate... Keep accumulating more and more things. But my like overall strategy right now is I have this kind of personal brand. I've done a good job of Twitter, LinkedIn, my newsletter, setting all of this up so I can start making videos and publishing to YouTube.
Corey Haines:And if I can use this as a way, not the way, but a way to drive traffic and customers to at least a couple of my projects, businesses, whatever you want to call them, then it's kind of like a rising tide lifts all boats. And so Yeah. I can have like my personal media business, and then I can have my services business, conversion factory, which is cash flowing and a nice job. And then I can have my products, which are more like my moonshots, my experimental software, my scratching my own itch, my maybe I just build this and sell it, you know, for pennies or maybe I build it and sell it for millions later on, I don't know. But they're maybe all interconnected in some way and can work harmoniously.
Corey Haines:That's This the
Justin:might be a good time to bring in, what Jordan wanted to talk about, which is Josh Pigford launching. Josh Pigford finally focused on something.
Brian Casel:I wanna... Let's get into that. But before we do, I just wanna... I wanna to to Sure. Corey's Yes, portfolio for a minute here because I I think it...
Brian Casel:Personally, I think it's fantastic the way that you're going about this. For for you, like, I think my my thing on this show is always, like, I'm not gonna tell anyone what they should or shouldn't do because each one of us has not only different like strengths and weaknesses and different assets and everything, but per... Different personal goals. Right? Mhmm.
Brian Casel:You're obviously a person here who... Who's who's in a position with a ton of optionality and a ton of... And and a wide skill set from marketing to building that it it does make sense. And what I think is most impressive about what you're doing, Corey, is that like, what I think does make the focus thing hard or the or the portfolio thing hard is if somebody's portfolio is completely dependent on their personal brand. Right?
Brian Casel:Like, if if you're a personal brand and you are trying to market 10 plus products solely through your personal brand channels, that is too unfocused and it's not gonna go very far and you can you can always grab your first 20 customers but beyond that, it's just not gonna sustain, you're you're spreading too thin. But what you have going on is like you have a couple of businesses that are clearly coming from your personal brand, but then like the majority of your portfolio is actually pretty quiet, like there's a lot of stuff in there that most people following on Twitter don't really know about and you're doing SEO, you're doing these little planting the seeds, they're growing over time and like that is to me like a a true portfolio that you can water these plants and give them some love and they can be, they can be low, medium sized revenue and stack up to a portfolio of assets that, like you said, like you, you know, I I just think it's... To me that is a valid way forward. Obviously, it's not for everyone and there are plenty of people who see the world completely differently and that's, that's what this is all about, it's totally cool, you know.
Corey Haines:Yeah. Well there's another part to this too which is, I have to say the word I think we've avoided saying the word now for seventeen minutes and forty seconds, but AI changes things too.
Brian Casel:Thanks, Corey. Thanks for coming on the show. Yeah, yeah.
Corey Haines:Alright. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. No.
Corey Haines:But there is something to that where, like, I I've been setting up Grock, GrockBot this week and I've been testing a bunch of them. You know, I have magisters, like, just for marketing stuff. But I was like, maybe I can get Rockbot to manage... Help me with, like, personal life stuff, like scheduling and email and calendar and, like, all this admin stuff, finances. But maybe I can also get it to have these little hooks and loops for bug fixes, for maintaining an open source project like marketing skills, where like I just closed 130 PRs this week.
Corey Haines:You know what I mean?
Brian Casel:I'm using Grockbot scale. In that way. I love it. Like, I I just did a video on it, it's coming out next week. I have a team of Grockbots.
Brian Casel:Now now it's up and running, finally. It took me a while to get it to get it tuned, but they're doing marketing experiments on a daily and weekly basis. So like every one of these products in my portfolio, I don't have nearly as many as you're running Corey, but like now I can actually work on whatever my next product is while my other ones have growth experiments running. Like bots are pitching ideas, I just get an email, I approve it, they they go do the things, they post the stuff, they they optimize the site, they post content, you know. I approve it, then it just loops, then then they track metrics, they they give me a metrics report, they give me learnings, I approve it, right, gives, like, and that's how like a company can actually scale as a bootstrapper, like company of one with actual bots, like like, installing jobs into these bots to run on a on a loop.
Brian Casel:I think it's awesome.
Justin:Can I can I push back on this a little bit? Because I... I'm also... The skeptical part of me is still, like like, a 120 PRs closed. Like, the volume sounds impressive.
Justin:But I'm getting increasingly interested in that small percentage of the stuff that we do that actually matters, that actually moves the needle. And so I'm wondering how much of this is just, like, you know... I... I'm, like, ripping out a lot of automation right now. We have all these Google actions running on a bunch of our repo.
Justin:I'm ripping that stuff out. It's, like, useless kind of cruft, more lighthouse tests and an href test that runs and, automatic screenshot thing that finds Google search results and screenshots it. And I'm like, no. I I just wanna care enough as a human, as a marketer, that I'm gonna go and do a lot of this stuff manually. And I'm going to do a lot more things manually than I'm...
Justin:Than... And and maybe even reverse some of the automation. So what's... Corey, how are you thinking about that? Like, what's the what's the balance here?
Justin:Is this stuff really moving the needle? Is it... What is the stuff that's moving the needle? Like, what's actually working in practice?
Corey Haines:Yeah. I mean, I think that is feasible and can work if you're focused on probably one thing.
Justin:Mhmm.
Corey Haines:If you're like me and you have, like, literally, I don't know, 30 or 40 repos that I'm working out of, like, there's just no way I can even afford to do anything manually these days. Yeah. I'll give you an example, which is that maybe last week, there was this new library that came out for, like, end to end testing. And it's this great way to like... Okay.
Corey Haines:One of the things that agents struggle with when they're building is they build the code. They... You know, it passes all the the checks and compiles successfully. You know, Vercel says that it's good to to publish. And then you go and look at it, and like the UI is garbage, and some things don't actually work, and you're like, what the hell?
Corey Haines:And so the end to end testing actually makes it click through and act like a user and do things in a way that helps to replicate the way that a real person would use it. And so I tried it on one of my apps and I was like, oh, this is fantastic. Then I had Cloud go through all 30 other repos and implement this library. I think that day I had like 500 commits or something. Like it was just an insane amount of code that was going on.
Corey Haines:That's a level of automation that I think is really valuable and also no way that I'm gonna do that manually myself across 30 of those repos. Of course that's like a super extreme example. Part of, like I'm always looking for like what's the next thing and what's another thing that I can do. Yeah. I'm kind of always pushing like alright, what's next, what's next, what's next.
Corey Haines:So the idea of like, oh I can't do what's next because I'm intentionally constraining myself would make me feel like I'm in a straight jacket.
Brian Casel:And and I think this always gets back to like each purse... Your your personal operating system, like I I I don't think it's ever a good idea to just go automate things because somebody else says you should automate something or somebody on YouTube shows an automation that you should just plug in and and and like even like like Corey, like like your your marketing skills are fantastic but like one of the things that I did was like, you know, I built, was setting up these growth, like Grokbots. I had them analyze a lot of your marketing skills and pick and choose some of the best ideas and some of the best instructions and best strategies so that I can craft my own and I can make a lot of those decisions and and craft my own version of of the things that I'm running. But like also Justin, I think a a key part of it is like, yes, you could throw a lot of stuff at at any kind of AI agent and have it do a lot of stuff but it's only as productive as you can personally manage it and act on it and make real decisions on it.
Brian Casel:Like, spent a lot of time like I had I had them starting up these these marketing agents and at first they were just sending me these huge emails with like all these marketing ideas and reports and things from and like a list of like 50 things for me to review and approve. Was like, I can't. This is not useful, like it's way too much, I can't make any decisions on this, it's it's actually, it just creates a new bottleneck that's just not So gonna I spent like a week or two to recraft how the agents are sending me stuff in more bite sized, you know, like different formats so that I, so that it's in a format that I can actually read and make decisions on and unblock things and and then like keep things moving forward. Like it's it's just like it's it's an iteration thing for each personal operating system, know.
Justin:Okay. Jordan Jordan, I see you wanted to get in. Let's get let's get your take here.
Jordan:Okay. Cool. And and then we'll we'll go to the topic that you tried to bring up a few minutes ago. What what I'm hearing as as Corey's describing his setup, it sounds to me like a like a rational way to manage risk. And and what I mean by that is if if I did a 120 commits, you know, or PRs this week, that means it's moving pretty close to saying I send a 120 emails.
Jordan:It's like, alright. Well, you know, it took some effort but like, you know, it's nothing special. And and the more moves in that direction, the more it makes sense to diversify not the number of projects that you're doing but the different types of projects. So a service based business with a with a customer base and a reputation and a process that creates cash flow that can't just be disrupted because some model releases a new thing. But then at the same time, taking the high risk, high reward bets around products, and automation, and expanding that outward, and then making sure that the personal brand remains at the center of it so that you have more options in the future.
Jordan:So I I I almost see it as like this like risk management portfolio approach and then, you know, a a lot of effort and talent mixed in there is like that that that is what produces the unusual outcome of like a whole bunch of things being successful.
Brian Casel:And that's exact that's exactly the thing that that comes back to the focus question for me like like even sort of what Brennan was was talking about but like, yeah, like a lot of these things are bets, right? So does a does a quote unquote bet like a call it like a small startup SaaS idea, does that deserve 100% of our hours and energy for multiple months at a time if like like that seems like too, yeah too too much risk put in that one bucket when you can when you can actually allocate that like that's that's the advance with AI now is that like we can... It used to be like, yeah, you do have to decide. I'm gonna spend a year to build version one, the MVP and get it in the hands of customers and do all the things. But now with AI you actually can build and ship version one in two weeks and start to validate and start to do some marketing experiments and plant those seeds that then take months and then you can can...
Justin:Yeah. I'm still push back on this. And by the way, I I am the the make a 100 things in a year guy, the mega maker guy. So I I come to this with some experience and some, bona fides. Here's the thing...
Justin:The Pigford thing. So... Okay. This is this is one reason I wanna talk about this because... And not to be critical with Josh.
Justin:I love Josh. I think Josh is great. I would say, looking at his career since Bear Metrics, the one thing some people have said is he he makes a lot of things. He puts out a lot of bets that haven't really gone anywhere. And sometimes it's like, man, you should just focus on one thing.
Justin:Put all of the wood behind one arrow and just focus on one thing. Now he's doing this one thing, which is really service as a software. Is this is this the new term service as a software? Yes. And he...
Justin:I mean, this this ARR thing is a little bit... Come on, Josh. One week in sales done and... Come on what? You can't...
Justin:That's not ARR yet. That you're one week in. It's... The the
Jordan:new definition of ARR is MRR times 12. Period. That is the industry standard and even that people stretch. But, yeah.
Justin:Just just say how much revenue you've earned. Just say, I... I've earned some revenue. It's good. You know, you don't have to call it...
Jordan:Sure. Put put up a measurement that nobody else uses just to be extra humble because that's what the Internet's all about. Like, way. No way. I mean, Josh,
Brian Casel:I I I think it's I think it's awesome what Josh has has launched here. It it is like, it's it's a productized service, it's a software, it's a service as as a software, it's it's it's software powered service, whatever you wanna call it and and I love the way that he packaged it. He, you know, he just tweeted out just totally like, here's what you get for 2,000, you're gonna do all the things for SEO, plug in the box Mhmm. Like, you know, it... The way that he put it together is great.
Brian Casel:Obviously, he's using the asset that he has which is his Twitter audience and the way that you play the game on Twitter is to, you know, post big dollar numbers ARR and that's gonna help the thing spread but, like, yeah, of course Josh is somebody who's done a thousand different projects. I'm not someone who would say that all those projects are quote unquote failures and he shouldn't have been doing them. I think he absolutely should have been doing them because he, because that's, he's a designer, he's a creator, he's a builder, he wanted to build those things, so I think in his view and my observation of him is like, those are successes because that's what he wanted to do with his time and he was able to do that stuff with his time. And this one happened to hit. Like, of course, when you do that many projects, eventually you're gonna hit a nerve and clearly he did with this.
Brian Casel:I just think it's awesome what he's doing.
Justin:Yeah. I still think there's... It's focus. It's like, if we go back to this Tim Suplo
Jordan:quote. It's been a week. It's not... It's the opposite of focus. If if he sticks with it for a year and gets it to 5,000,000 ARR, then it's focus.
Jordan:I don't expect him to that.
Brian Casel:And I... And frankly for Josh, I don't think he should
Jordan:because that's not his that's not his thing. Completely agree.
Justin:I disagree. I, Corey, what are you what are your thoughts over there? So
Corey Haines:originally, when we were... Like, when there was a whole Indie Hacker thing, it was like, oh, now with AI, we can have... Instead of having, you know... Or sorry. Would you rather have 10 startups that each make $1,000 MRR?
Corey Haines:Or would you have one startup that makes $10,000 MRR? And people are going back and forth, I don't Like, I kind of think that it's neither. And this reminds me of Josh, I think a lot of other people that build as well, where, like I said, if your goal is to build a portfolio where maybe one gets to 100 ks MRR, one gets to 10, a couple get to one, a few get to zero, but then that's sustainable and that's going up, like, cool, that's awesome. Where I take issue and where I think that the issue with that strategy is when you get one thing to 50 ks MRR, and then it starts to go down. And then you get the next thing to 10 ks MRR, and then it starts to go down.
Corey Haines:And you're never really making forward progress. There... There's a really extreme example of this. I don't know if you guys are in the circle of of Twitter, but, Justin, know you're not. But there's this guy named Mark Liu.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Corey Haines:And he's this big personality, huge following. I mean he originally started making good money with his Ship Fast. Ship Fast.
Justin:React framework.
Corey Haines:And at one point he was doing like 120 ks per month. Like he was making good money. But it was like this and then it was like this. But he's like, he keeps doing this. You'll have one that goes up, one goes down, one goes up, one goes down.
Corey Haines:If you notice, he has a couple like there's DataFast, his analytics SaaS that does like 30 ks MRR. Awesome. But to me like, again, if it starts to go down, I think I've done something wrong. Like the numbers should kinda always be going up or at least plateau. Why would I keep making more things that go up and then go down?
Corey Haines:I don't wanna play that game personally. I think that's kind of like the losing strategy here. If you keep making things and they're kind of always going up, even if they're going up like a little bit or they're not going up by very much, to me, that's still like a win. Like, cool, you're still building something that is ever increasing in value. I don't like the treadmill type of startup thing.
Justin:Mhmm. Yeah. And I mean, I guess the good... I guess to Brian's point, it it really does depend. Like, there's some people that can do this.
Justin:Some people can... You know, Levels is another one example. Some people can build multiple things and, and do well with them. I think if I am gonna give some prescriptive advice, I think most people could benefit from focus. There's something about wanting it more...
Justin:Wanting one thing and and saying this is a good bet. If we're talking about making bets, like, don't know a lot about playing poker, but I do know if you keep making bad bets, you run out of money. The whole idea about poker is knowing when to make a good bet. And, I mean, I... Every time I play poker, especially with my boys, they want me to, you know, put cash in or whatever.
Justin:I just keep buying in because I just keep betting, and I lose all my money. And my boys are happy to take it all from me. So...
Corey Haines:Can I extend this metaphor?
Justin:Yes.
Corey Haines:Because I I think you're right. Like, the the idea here is, hey, when you have a good, hand of cards in front of you, you have a full house and you just know that you have the best hand at the table and it's just such a like obvious win. Mhmm. Like you're trying to go all in. You're trying to completely shove.
Corey Haines:Mhmm. But what if you can do that on multiple tables
Jordan:at the In same in theory, yes. What what... When I heard you mention, you know, the nature of some products where they climb up and they start to go down, what it made me think of is these individual moments in a product or company's, like, revenue life. And there are plateaus. And when you hit a plateau, if you're not paying attention to it and you focus on five other things, it's very unlikely that you'll do the thing that's required to get it out of that plateau.
Jordan:You know, when you're focused on one thing, you hit a plateau, it's like, you know, it's like this desperate energy and focus of, okay, clearly, what got us here is not gonna get us to the next phase. What do we need to do? Do we need to change our pricing, change our onboarding, change our ICP, change our positioning? So that that part of the focus, I I I think I would feel worried about missing out on. Yeah.
Jordan:Mhmm.
Justin:I I
Jordan:think the hardest thing in all of this is gauging actual potential. The the only framework that I still like around potential is Noah Kagan's, where where he described working at Facebook as, like, totally skewing his understanding of what a hit product was. And so he would he would work on something for two, three months and maybe would get to 10 k MRR and he'd be like, this is not how it feels when it's a hit. Yeah.
Justin:Doesn't matter where
Jordan:it got to. This is not this is not the thing that is on fire and just flies. And and, you know, his explanation for why it appears that everything he does is a hit is only because he just cycles through things until it feels like it's flying.
Justin:Okay. But I got a I got a good example. This is a little spicy. Noah, don't hate me for this. But he...
Justin:Noah tweets this. Confused why people pay so much for kitten beehive. By the way, what he's really saying is I'm confused why so many people use kitten beehive. They're fine products, but they're expensive. A $139 a month.
Justin:It would only be $39 a month on SendFox. Now, SendFox has been around for a long time now. This is Noah Haines' product, one of them.
Jordan:Shout out to Nathan Barry. Yeah. Nathan... The first comment being like, I I I got an answer for you.
Justin:Yeah. And right here. Love you, man. Respect. Respect.
Justin:Hell yeah. But, you know, part of me looks at this and goes, Noah, you're not good at product. And you've started too many things. You're focused... If you are focused a 100% on SendFox, and you didn't have the AppSumo money train going, and you weren't so, divert...
Justin:You know, you didn't have all these projects and you're trying to build all these things, just focus on SendFox. Then see if you'll be a winner. But this product's been out for years now. And I don't know anybody that uses it. So why is that?
Justin:I think it's focus. I think it's, I mean, focus and maybe lack of product sense or whatever. But there's a reason that SendFox is losing. Yes. Isn't this just a positioning play?
Brian Casel:To move...
Jordan:Like, here are the enemies. They're so expensive. They're so bad. We're here for you. I don't know.
Justin:Point is that they're losing. The point is that if you look at that market... Do you guys know anybody that uses SendFox?
Jordan:That doesn't mean they're losing. If they're making a bunch of money, they're winning. Maybe if they're not making as much
Justin:money I don't think they're making so much. For for somebody like Noah Kagan, it should be a massive Yeah. Out of the park hit.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yep. Yeah. But, well, I don't know that everything that he ever does has to be that. But the...
Brian Casel:To to get back to Tigford for a second, again, I'm I'm a big fan of of what he's doing and his whole approach. But to throw a little bit of like maybe some some cold water on on this... On First Index, this SEO service that he that he launched. I mean, Corey, you might have some experience of this with with the agency side, like, I mean, I've I've done these productized service... Actually, what he...
Brian Casel:What Josh is launching has like somewhat similar to to what audience ops was. It was like Yeah. We will just deliver x number of articles for you for $2,000 a month and and we will help you grow your SEO, right?
Justin:Brian, this is the new age of productized services.
Jordan:You're back, man.
Justin:You're back.
Brian Casel:This is literally... Okay.
Justin:So
Brian Casel:here here here are the hard things about businesses like that, right? And and these are not think reasons to rule it out, like I'm I'm still open to doing similar types of services, especially now with AI. Great. Those are all huge advantages compared to when I start... Back when I started Audience Ops back in like 2015.
Brian Casel:The things that I I would predict that something like that for for Josh like he'll run into these things eventually. Number one, like like you were just saying like like it it is built off of... It seems to be built off of his personal audience so like he's gonna have to find other marketing channels to keep new customers coming in all the time because it's the the the Twitter game on that is just gonna run out at some point, like that's why you're seeing the big spike right now. If if he can sustain it with other marketing channels and and sales and stuff like that, that that's how that works But he's gonna need that because churn is gonna be a real thing. This is a marketing service and what I learned about trying to sell a marketing service specifically is there, there's, there was a lot of churn for, and for two very different reasons.
Brian Casel:One is like, this thing is not working so we're gonna allocate this budget somewhere else and the other one is like, this thing is working so we're gonna take it in house. And so like, a lot of time, like more people churned off of audience ops because it was actually successful. They ended up hiring their own writers, you know, and What's
Justin:your view so from that Corey? Do you think, because you're, you're in the marketing game.
Corey Haines:Oh, it's definitely tough. Yeah. Brian is spot on, and I've learned... I knew a lot of that going into it because of Brian, because of audience ops. There's definitely some things working against you.
Corey Haines:There's a lot of... When I see that, I I look at it and I'm like, oof, that looks like a lot of bad clients, like a lot of like headache clients to be honest.
Brian Casel:I mean, there's... That's the other thing, is like the client side of it. I I love what he put in his initial tweet, like here's what you get, list of things that we're gonna do and you're gonna communicate with us through Slack and that's it. No calls, great. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Like, I look at that, I'm like, oh my god, that's the dream. Mhmm. Here's the reality, there is gonna be some percentage of people who are willing to open their credit card and pay 2,000 without ever speaking to you. Most of the world, especially businesses are not willing to do that. Right.
Brian Casel:Most of them are gonna want to just speak to a human for five minutes just to make sure there's a real person there and then they will buy. And I figured that out pretty quickly with audience ops and, and then I made a system out of it and then I hired sales people to, to do that role so that I didn't have to do it. It's, it's totally manageable but like if you're gonna grow this for a long period of time, eventually you're gonna have to have... If you're if you're selling things for multiple thousand dollars, you're gonna have to have people, at least on the sales side.
Corey Haines:I I don't even see it as a marketing service, I see it as a AI implementation service. Yeah.
Jordan:Yes. Because
Corey Haines:I think what people want is they're like, oh man, I've been wanting to get around to try to figure out how to get Claude to do my SEO for me. This guy's gonna do it for $2,000 a month. I might cancel after two, three months and just take the systems with me.
Justin:Yeah. That's the thing. Like... No. No.
Justin:It's not a
Jordan:bad thing. When you have a human powered service, the onboarding and and the first ninety days, there's so much effort and focus being put on that. And that means there's money being spent on it. And so if a person leaves after three or four months, it's a disaster. If they leave under...
Jordan:In under a year, you you may even be negative on on the relationship in general. Mhmm. But if it's software and they churn, it's a lot less costly. It's a lot less costly to onboard. It's a lot less costly for a churned customer and the lifetime value does need to be, based on, you know, over a year, eighteen months or something like that.
Justin:Yeah. As long as you can get... Yeah. Keep it going.
Jordan:I just wanna talk about this for a second from the buyer point of view. Because because right, I run a software company. We do almost nothing for SEO and I feel guilty about it every week. Every week I feel guilty about it. I I I used to spend $12 a month on SEO and did it for a year straight and just did not see the right ROI for that kind of spend.
Jordan:So I stopped. And now I'm doing nothing and I feel guilty and all of a sudden I see the search for $1,500. I'm like, that's a immediate. That's a no brainer. Take my card, go three, four, five months and and then measure it.
Jordan:I could be with them for six months and spend less than I spend on one month. If it works at all, I'm like... That's a great...
Brian Casel:It's a it's a fantastic value proposition, you
Justin:know. Yes.
Jordan:Yes. I I think the the the key is that it's not directly comparable to an... A traditional service. And so the things that we would normally react to around, like, the concern around churn and the price point and calling on the phone, I I think some of the nature of that stuff changes with what's happening under the hood also. That it's also being purchased like software and canceled like software, but it's not as painful to the underlying service as if it were a human powered service with a customer success person and an onboarding person and account manager and everything else.
Brian Casel:I mean, look, I'm the first person who really really wants these done for you services to be sold and bought and operated like products. And that was my whole thing, productized services. Mhmm. But there is a behind the scenes reality of selling really any type of service, but this is included, right? So if you look at SEO, and I've been running some SEO programs similar to what Josh has been doing but I've been doing it for my own products.
Brian Casel:Most of the legwork is off of my desk and I have agents doing it according to processes that are basically just programmed for them to run, but some of those things involve having those agents write pages like product comparison pages or or use case pages and things like that on onto the website. Great. Those those are things that we should have and we should be publishing them and that's part of what Josh's service does. But they're all... I've only been running it for two weeks on my products and already like three different times, I go in and I read the page that AI wrote and I'm like, we gotta we gotta angle the positioning a little bit differently and so I have some feedback and we...
Brian Casel:And I and and I want this revised, right? Mhmm. So I know how to revise that with my bots and I have my systems for doing that internally, but if you're a client of Josh's thing, you're gonna be a client who's gonna be sending in these requests or, or, oh, hey, we just got this new partnership, we gotta make sure we get a we get a blog post about that and oh, I got this other marketing person on my team and they need to get hooked into whatever this external service is doing and oh, there's this technical connection issue that the dev... Now we gotta bug the developers to get it hooked up into Josh's thing, like there's all these little like messy details that these... They can all be dealt with, of course, but like it's not as turnkey as the tweet or as the landing page is gonna make Yeah.
Brian Casel:It seem, you
Justin:Yeah. I... I'm still big on this. I think... What what was that that that, joke video you guys were telling me about, AI in that town?
Justin:What was it? It was some...
Jordan:Yeah. AI in general comment. We've been AI. Yeah. Yeah.
Jordan:Charleston. Yes.
Justin:Yeah. Charleston AI. I mean, I think that could work. I... The the the part that I...
Justin:I mean, maybe this will work for Josh, but the the part that I'm thinking about more is I'm going the other way. I'm doing more phone calls. I'm doing more manual outreach. I'm adding more humans to this. And our, like, our reviews and ratings, everything is going up and to the right.
Justin:Why? Because there's way more people now that wanna talk to a real human, that want that individualized attention. And if you want it enough as a service provider or a product person, and you're looking at the landscape, it's like, what are you willing to do? Are you willing to do a phone call? Are you willing to call to do an onboarding demo for anybody that wants it when people sign up?
Justin:I think the extra mile stuff is gonna start working a lot better as well.
Jordan:I feel like the the the two combined is... It can be really powerful. Like, if if I'm Josh... I mean, Corey, don't know how many people you have at Conversion Factory. But if I look at something like what Josh is doing and the the underlying work is able to be done by agents, I just look at that and I say I say, great.
Jordan:I'm gonna hire two people Mhmm. For every for every 10 clients and we're gonna we're gonna have a beautiful profitable Yeah. Service service company.
Brian Casel:Dude, this
Jordan:is fantastic.
Brian Casel:This really is incredible. I mean, he's literally selling the thing for $2,000. I was selling audience house for $2,000 a month. I had a team of 25 people under that.
Justin:Right. He could hire a
Jordan:team of two, three people, take great care people, do calls, answer in a human way, but underneath Right. Corey, I... When I looked at this, I sent it to my team. Right. We've got like 2,500 small business customers at Rosie.
Jordan:And I'm like, maybe what we should offer to this customer base next isn't another product. Maybe it's a service.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Right. Right.
Jordan:And and so for me, I went toward marketing. In your universe of of marketing services, have you started to see things like this? I mean, obviously is is marketing, but it's kind of its own technical thing.
Corey Haines:Oh yeah. No, there's definitely parts of this, that you can prioritize. There's certain spots. I think SEO in particular has a couple things going for it that makes it really easy to prioritize. Particularly, the people who have an easy time getting on board with the output.
Corey Haines:Oh, it's four blog posts per month, one per week.
Jordan:It's just
Corey Haines:like this very easy, like, okay, here's what I get, here's what I get, here's what I get. When you're selling an outcome, like, I'm gonna do advertising for you, people don't care about how many ads you make for them. They don't care about how much time you're gonna spend in the ad manager. They're like, we'll just make a profitable ad. That's all I care about.
Corey Haines:And so there's like, I don't know, maybe 50% of marketing is more output driven where you can productize and sell the output and that's easy to productize. The other 50% is more outcome driven and people don't care about the output, so it's harder to productize. And that's where I've been trying to figure out like, what is the balance? I actually think we're working on a service right now that's really productized, around AEO. Because there's
Jordan:a lot
Corey Haines:of these things that are very output driven that we can offer at a lower price point that's very automated and AI driven. But most of what we do still like, hey, we're gonna make you a new brand. We're going to run ads for you. We're going to dah, dah, dah. It's like, can't really, I've productized enough that I can in the sense that there's like very clear and transparent pricing, one task at a time, two tasks at a time, three tasks at a time, so on and so forth.
Brian Casel:It's still creative work that needs feedback and approval.
Justin:Yeah. Mean, is another thing we wanted to chat about is we had a question. What's working with SaaS right now in terms of both products and marketing channels? Do you have some thoughts on that, Corey? Like, what's...
Justin:What do you see working right now? If it... And has it gotten harder?
Corey Haines:Oh, yeah. I I see a lot of things that aren't working right now.
Justin:What's not working that used to work?
Jordan:Yeah. Bragging in public. Well,
Corey Haines:yeah, right. Sharing revenue number is definitely, like, kind of sketchy now. No, like, there's a few things I noticed. One is, let's just take Google, for example. Like you can most people are looking at Google from the perspective of organic and SEO, and they're like, oh, well, now AI is eating Google, and so search traffic is down, and is SEO dead?
Corey Haines:Like, I think we all know kind of where that's going. The other interesting part of that is Google Ads. Google Ads have been a phenomenal channel for most SaaS companies because it's search driven.
Brian Casel:It's,
Corey Haines:yeah, I'm looking for a barbershop CRM and then now you can just place your ad at the top. You don't even have to worry about organically ranking. But what happens when now above your ad, there's an AI overview that has this whole answer and like one or two links. And then there's like four to eight ads and then there's the organic search results. We've seen Google Ads get really, really squeezed by the AI overviews.
Brian Casel:Like, that's so interesting from, like,
Corey Haines:Google's Yeah. Way I know. Could see why they would push the ads up
Brian Casel:to the top, but now now when they're, like, putting their AI in front of their own revenue channel for Google, like, that's weird.
Corey Haines:And I think they're figuring out how to, like, basically create an ad product in... Within the AI overview. Right? They're not gonna let that go forever. But we're in this weird middle time of transition where we're all getting caught.
Corey Haines:I had to turn off Google Ads for some of my own products that was like the main... Talk about plateaus, Jordan. Like, True List plateaued a couple of times because there were these big shifts or there was a pricing thing or there was a whatever. One of them was Google Ads back in like May, I think was when a lot of people noticed it. The AI Overviews got launched for like most of the major search terms.
Corey Haines:All of a sudden the costs are through the roof, the clicks are way way down. Like we we literally went from we can acquire a customer for a $100 to now it costs us a thousand dollars. It's just we're not Wow. Gonna do
Jordan:Can you
Brian Casel:get into that a little bit like, again, like going back to your portfolio of especially SaaS tools, I know that you've... You have a lot of these like SEO and and and AEO systems in place and bots and and like recurring loops and you are running some ads, how do you think about your investment in like paid marketing channels versus like organic marketing channel? Is a is it a product by product basis, you think there's an opportunity here but maybe not over there, like how do you spread your bets and when in a Mhmm. In like a start up, like if you're placing all these bets with these different products, when in that life cycle do you start to think like, let me go beyond just the basic SEO and start to experiment with like paid and other stuff?
Corey Haines:Yeah. To me, there's basically an order of operations. Like, I'm always gonna start with SEO, and now that's basically AEO too. And then I'm gonna move on to Google Ads, because it's the same thing, but you're just paying to play instead of trying to do it organically. And then I'm going to keep working down the list.
Corey Haines:I think Meta Ads is having a big resurgence. Their Andromeda algorithm is absolutely incredible for targeting. And you basically don't have to do any targeting anymore. You just make good ads and then they serve it to the right people and still at pretty good price points as well. There's this whole AEO world.
Corey Haines:All the other things that like when I think about my like my bets, you know, if I'm working on my random open source invoicing tool that I have invoice command, I'm not gonna go try to spin up LinkedIn ads for it tomorrow. I'm gonna start with SEO. As soon as that's like kind of done, I'm probably going move on to Google Ads. But then if I really can't make that work, like I'm not going to go that much further down the line. When I think about investing and like when I'm making these bets, when do I go all in?
Corey Haines:I'm looking to kind of keep going down the line of these marking channels. Okay. I'm gonna stack this one on. Now I'm gonna stack this one on. Now I'm gonna stack this one on.
Corey Haines:And as soon as I hit some resistance of one of these, then that's when I start to get a little bit of pause and being like, okay. How much is it worth it for me to now to keep pushing this boulder up the hill? Or should I just move on to the next product and like go down that list? Right? But I still mainly start with SEO and AEO.
Corey Haines:I think Google Ads can still be good in a lot of pockets. I've just seen in general too, when we talk about what's working in marketing, it's incredibly difficult right now to market software to other software companies. Like that's just a hard game play. Because that's what everybody's doing. That's
Jordan:what Bad.
Corey Haines:Bad. See. The early adopters are selling to other early adopters and you're like, cool. But like, what Jordan's doing, what... I mean, honestly, what all of you guys are doing, think is a much better strategy.
Corey Haines:And and why I see this with all of our clients. We have some crazy, crazy niche clients. And it's almost like a a perfect correlation between the more niche they are, the easier they are to market and the faster they grow.
Brian Casel:I wanna ask you about that. That's actually what I wanted to ask you next was like, okay, we know that like someone like you, Corey, have your stuff that you promote publicly on Twitter. Josh has has promoted this this new SEO service off the back of his personal audience, but we also know that you have all these other products that are niche and and your clients have these niche products like, what would you... Like, because there there are definitely people listening who who are just gonna be like, alright, well, if somebody has a large audience, of course they're gonna be at this marketing advantage, this distribution advantage. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:But that's not the case. We we know that especially when selling into like niche industries. So how do you think about that from like a startup perspective, especially like a self funded taking bets, like how do you how do you think about getting those first 50, first 100 customers, what's the time frame on that, what's your investment mindset on that, if you're starting from zero and it's not a product that you can even promote to your personal audience because they're not your personal audience, like how do you think about that kind of thing today Really, in 2020
Corey Haines:really close to the customer, right? So this little collection of church apps that I started to build, I was playing volleyball with one of my friends at church, and then he was like, hey, do you know someone who could build me an app to do, like, check ins for our teen center? We have, an inner city, you know, safe place for kids to come if they don't wanna go back home. And I was like, oh, dude, you're going to look at spending $50 for something that then you have to ask them for every time there's a bug or a new feature, da da da, it's going be really expensive. I was like, I just learned how to code.
Corey Haines:I could give this a shot and and you just pay me like a little monthly subscription basically instead. Was like, oh, that's way better. And then there's been a little bit of word-of-mouth, right? But like he texts me when he has a feature request or when there's a bug report. And like I'm asking him, we'll FaceTime and he'll he'll FaceTime and like share his computer screen from his phone and be like, okay, so I was doing this.
Corey Haines:And then...
Brian Casel:So I love that because it's your friend. Right? Every everyone who who goes to a niche industry, it's... They've got brother-in-law, they've got a friend, they've got a group that they're in. Okay.
Brian Casel:That's awesome because that's that's where you uncover the idea that you would never have otherwise encountered. That that's gold. So you get that first customer, maybe you get five from some word-of-mouth from some friends. What's step two? How do you go from that to to your first 50?
Corey Haines:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Or or is it like, okay, that's just a a seed that I'm gonna water for the next six to twelve months while I while I work on other stuff? Like, how do you think about that?
Corey Haines:Well, I mean, then I think it's about getting to know your customer from a product perspective, but then about like the buyer psychology. So then I'm doing all of the secret shopping, jobs to be done types of interrogation techniques of, you know, okay, so when you were thinking about looking for software like this, like, what did you do first? Did you search on TikTok? Did you go to Google? What did you do?
Corey Haines:Oh, you found this other software and you tried to make that work. Why didn't it work for you? Interesting. Where did that lead you to from there? So I'm trying to just put myself in their shoes of how they would go and search, or not just search, but how they would go find and discover software like mine to reverse engineer what are probably the marketing channels.
Corey Haines:There's a lot of things too about like just the vocabulary, right? How am I supposed to... Well, is another thing that AI has made really easy, but one bottleneck for SEO, for example, was if I don't know the vocabulary that my customer uses to describe their world, their products, their industry, their job, then I can't go find the keywords that they're searching for because I don't know what they mean. I don't even know if they're relevant or
Justin:not. Mhmm.
Corey Haines:With AI though, I can be like, hey, I'm doing keyword research for church administrative pastors. What are the What's their vocabulary? What are the terms that they use day to day? How do they go in search for software? What are their budgets like normally?
Corey Haines:Now, take all that with a grain of salt, but it definitely gives me a huge leg up on a lot of that initial discovery of, Okay, I think this is probably gonna be a viable marketing channel over here. This is not gonna be a viable marketing channel over here. It seems like most people discover it this way, not that way. Cool. I'm gonna do that and not that over there.
Justin:Mhmm. One of my favorite things to do now is I send this welcome email to everyone who signs up for Transistor. What's going on in your world that brought you here today? And then they'll usually say, oh, I found you via... And if they don't say it, I'll I'll follow-up.
Justin:I'll say, curious. How did you find us? It's helpful. Google search, Chatuchi B Tea, recommendation from a friend. Then they'll say, well, Chatuchi B Tea.
Justin:I'll say, could you take a screenshot of that or share that link with me? And now Yeah. I've got their actual language. And it is fascinating. It's like Chatty Bitty, based on what you know about me and my...
Justin:Even... It could be like, based on what you know me... About me and my ethics and morals, which podcast hosting platform should I choose? Based on what you know about me and the kinds of software I like to buy, what podcast hosting platform should I choose? This is now in a whole other world of personalization, but you can still learn all of the lessons from looking at these chat transcripts or the screenshots and seeing what people actually use.
Justin:I I even noticed, I I use SEO testing, and I noticed that there's, like, people's personal, like, searches are kind of leaking into these SEO testing emails, like, for top keywords. I'll see if I can find one. But it's like yeah. Here. Right here, I think.
Justin:Oh, not quite. I'll I'll find it. But it's interesting to see what people are actually... How people are finding things now. And now you actually can get that information, right?
Justin:Like, it's there.
Brian Casel:This really interesting trend with with everything, right? Like I was just listening to... Did you guys hear... See the news about Amazon? How they just recently, I think they're blocking Muse agents, maybe all other agents.
Brian Casel:Yeah. To, like, for all traffic on Amazon because obviously if if it like Amazon is the storefront for for so many buyers and then like Shopify just like, come on in, like bring your agents, let them buy, you know. That is a really interesting trend obviously in e commerce but I think that's gonna be everywhere else where it's like, how relevant is the website anymore, and the human decision, and maybe it's so much more about like, the bot making the buying decision on behalf of
Corey Haines:human. Yeah. Well, speaking of which, there's this whole AEO thing, like that's definitely one of the things that's working. A really quick little case study, we have a client who is in this super, super niche space. Like, they make software for, like, a very old school trade.
Corey Haines:And I can't say who it is because it's like, it is so niche that you would just do a Google search and you just find them. But but they're... We've been doing their SEO for them. We've been doing some ads for them. We did their website.
Corey Haines:We did a bunch of other things. Things are going great. They keep going up and to the right. And then I was like, hey, what have you guys been doing for AI visibility and AEO? And they were like, oh, nothing.
Corey Haines:Like, we were waiting for you guys. We're like, shoot, okay, we should have done that earlier. So we just finished like a three month experiment. And we track it all in Magister because I built like an AI visibility tool in there just because I wasn't happy with the other ones out there. And basically their AI visibility score doubled.
Corey Haines:It went from 14% to 28% in three months. And how all this gets measured and calculated is like still... Like that's a new vocabulary for us to like, is this impressive? Is it not? Like what matters?
Corey Haines:But the thing was that their traffic doubled in three months and their booked calls tripled in three So what I try to tell people too is AEO is like there's this dam of demand that's been like piling up in this lake of people searching in ChatuchPutty, Claude, so on and so forth. Mhmm. And when you can just do some really basic good AEO, you unleash that dam. And then all of a sudden, you're just like turning on this channel for you. Now it's not gonna be
Brian Casel:like What are some like like quick hit, like like basics that like if you... Just a few, like like just just do these like low hanging fruit.
Corey Haines:Yeah. Oh, yeah. So I just talked about this on on my podcast I do with my guys at Conversion Factory, where I said that good AEO is first of all good SEO. So just check that box, buy Josh a service, hire Conversion Factory, I don't know, I don't care, just do that well. Number two, good AEO is actually good product marketing.
Corey Haines:Having good positioning, lots of good web pages on your site. I think a lot of people are getting the idea that your website doesn't matter anymore, but there's a lot of studies that have come out more recently where they found that if the AI is just, the LM is just relying on third party citations, that moved the needle about 20 to 30% on the recommendation for your product. But if it had a third party citation and a page on your website that it could use, then that went up to like 90%. And so it's kind of two sides of the same coin. Like AI, if you think about it, the LLM wants to go search for something about you from your website as like the primary source, And then it wants to verify it on a third party source.
Corey Haines:So you need both of those. Mhmm. So good product marketing is number two. Number three is good SEO, or sorry, good AEO is good brand. I say that because it's like, okay, how many organic web mentions can you get?
Corey Haines:That's what it comes down to. How do you get web mentions? Now we're going back to old school tactics of like PR blasts. We're going to things like backlinks, which is not super old school but it's still relevant. Now people are kind of like, okay, a backlink is a backlink.
Corey Haines:I don't have to just go after the big backlinks, I can get any old backlink. Publishing on YouTube, on LinkedIn, like having web presence.
Justin:Yeah, Lars Lofgren calls that your footprint on the web. Like you need to have you can't just have a footprint in one place because now part of your relevancy and your trustworthiness is scored on, is this a real entity that we can see has customers, has reviews, has multiple footprints across the web, as opposed to just one website or just one Twitter account. Like, that's Mhmm. Too easy to fake now.
Brian Casel:Are are are we hearing that it's, like, the same game as it as it's always been? Like build links, have have strong on page SEO, then build build high quality links, but maybe it's less about like getting those like high authority links and more about just spread the mentions, spread the links.
Corey Haines:It's more of that, yeah. SEO has turned into like you basically only want high quality links. Whereas AEO is where SEO was ten to fifteen years ago. That's going to change again in the future. So like I'll take all this with a grain of salt or if you're listening to this back like two years from now, then don't listen to anything I say.
Corey Haines:But this goes back to something I said earlier, is you want to do whatever you can. Like, I'm going to take anything and everything that you give me from a marketing perspective because that's what counts.
Justin:Yeah, I think it's way I mean, this goes back to Ruben's tweet where he says, you know, most people are approaching AI marketing in the wrong way. They're they're, like, over relying on automation and skipping the manual grindy work that makes good... Makes it effective. And they don't know their customers and buying process enough. To me, this is, like, so much of the game is just I'm gonna go out and do the manual grindy work every day that could be super uncomfortable.
Justin:Like, messaging a customer and saying, hey, I know this is weird, but here's a Reddit thread. I know you've left us a review on Trustpilot, but I'm wondering if you could re... Leave us a similar review on this Reddit thread, because that's where people are seeing reviews. We're a small company. We're five people.
Justin:Like, can you do me a solid here? And that sucks to do that work. It's not fun. But it's what is getting the results right now with AEO. Maybe...
Justin:I don't know if you guys wanna end on this, but I've I've been thinking about that last section of last week's episode a ton. Which one? Well, what came out of it was... Because you're thinking about investing in other companies and stuff. But the thing I keep thinking about is if I got fired as CEO, what would someone else come in and do tomorrow that would help us grow?
Justin:I've been thinking about that a ton. And I wonder if we could pick up on that a little bit too. Like, what... Corey, Brian, whoever... Jordan, what do you think the things...
Justin:Actually, Jordan, you haven't talked in a while. What do you think are the things people are missing? Like, as you're looking at other companies... I'm... You you talk about meta ads.
Justin:Maybe you could talk about that too. But what what are other people missing that if if you bought their companies, what would you be doing that would, you know, that they're not seeing or they're too precious about?
Jordan:I think the nature of this is that everyone brings in their own experiences, biases, failures, successes. And and it's really useful for for the individual. Let's say for example, if I was looking at a company to to acquire, right now my bias is I want a company that I think I can advertise for and let the meta algorithm go out and find customers and basically use my advantage of having capital to spend to grow a lot faster. Yeah. And so because I know that that's my bias, I think what we all do naturally when we when we do Zoom calls with friends is we're kinda asking to borrow their biases.
Jordan:What do you got going on? What's working for you? Yeah. And and then it goes through this filter of, okay, well, would that work for me? Because maybe I should try that.
Jordan:Right? Because all of us filter through this, like, self interest filter. Mhmm. So as we're talking right now and Corey's talking about AEO, you know, in the back of my mind, I'm like, I wonder what we should be doing about AEO. Mhmm.
Jordan:So so I think it's just good to have conversations with other people because it's very unlikely that the exact same thing's happening in their company as is happening in yours. So there's if... Even if there's nothing to learn and it's not gonna work for you, it's just new ideas.
Justin:Yeah. Do you think Corey should be... Like, we talked about Google Ads. Corey or Jordan, do you think that maybe meta ads are gonna replace that... That you have your stack.
Justin:Right? SEO, AEO. Then you went to Google AdWords, but are are you gonna... Do you think that still deserves a spot as number three for most SaaS companies? You think it's still worth doing?
Jordan:I just have a experimental budget that I keep in mind. And I have... Our main channels are Meta and Google. And it's really Meta. Google is there to capture the demand created by meta ads that then go off and search on Google and so we spend like $10 a month on brand ads which is annoying and also extremely effective.
Jordan:So that that's just fine. Now we we we tried to go to the next advertising platform. We we haven't really messed with LinkedIn because I've had bad experiences. It's very expensive, difficult to me, our ICP isn't quite there, whatever else. But but there are other channels out there.
Jordan:So right now, I actually went back to cold email. So I spend $34 a month on cold email because I don't know. It didn't work eighteen months ago. It doesn't mean it's not gonna work now. And...
Justin:How much are you spending, like ballpark, how much are you spending every month on marketing campaigns? About 80 k.
Jordan:Well, you have to compare that with how much we're growing, which I won't tell you. But but the ratio is good. And and that's that's actually the only thing that matters. Can you spend enough, grow quickly enough to get to profitability so that you have an infinite marketing budget effectively? Because you can spend $80, but your bank balance will go up.
Jordan:And it's just a race a race to get there.
Corey Haines:Do you know your payback period right now? Like, what would you say your It's
Jordan:between three to four months.
Corey Haines:Okay. Yeah. So you're Is... Yeah. You're in golden range.
Corey Haines:Yep. Yep. That's right. Right.
Justin:Payback period is just I invest a $100 and it takes me three months to get a $100 back from the customer?
Jordan:Yeah. Or, like, you you you spend $300 on average to acquire a paying customer and their average revenue per user is a $100. Therefore, in three months, you get you get paid back.
Justin:Got it.
Jordan:Like that. And I always look at everything blended because I don't wanna be overly, you know, analytical about tracking because you can't be. There's no precision in tracking anymore. So it's just kinda like, we spent all this, we got all this to... We'll divide one by the other.
Jordan:That's about how much we spend per customer. But on the other channels, there's always something else. So today, I have a call... Well, earlier in the week, I had a call. Next week, I have a second call with an affiliate agency.
Jordan:So I'm basically just setting up the next experiment and that's like $2,500 a month and that's just like I should just keep trying and if cold email doesn't work, I just drop it after three months. But the potential of finding another channel to spend money efficiently in is is so worth it and feels like a smart safe thing to do to try to diversify. I I'm resigned to the fact that, you know, I I have to pray to the Lord Zuckerberg but I would love to experiment with, you know, some diversification.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. Yep. So most most of your experiment, like your experiment budgets and and most of these these programs, you're going out looking for agencies or consultants to like run that. Like you're... Most...
Brian Casel:Correct me if I'm wrong, like most of it is not being run by your team in house. It's... No. No. We......
Brian Casel:Easier faster to experiment with it.
Jordan:Team is built to handle the demand that comes in, not not to create it. That's kind of where we have found ourselves and our strength and everything else, and maybe it makes sense to invest later on in in in having someone specialize in that generation. But right now, all this leverage for us is like the advertising agency. We've we've selectively taken pieces in house. Our agency is great at UGC and video, and we did the street talk interview things that are working well, and they're great in media buying.
Jordan:They're just not good at static ads. And the AI tools these days are great at static ads and so we just kinda yanked that in house, saved ourselves $3,000 a month, and now we we control that piece because it's effective. It's efficient. It's once every two weeks we sit down and go, alright, what should we experiment with? What's working?
Jordan:What's not working? Let's crank, you know, 10, 12, or 20 ads out and then hand it over to the media buyer.
Corey Haines:Sorry. I was gonna say with Jason Cohen's elephant, what's it called, elephant curve
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Corey Haines:Growth curves, s curves. So this whole idea of like, you get a marketing channel to work and it starts to go up, and eventually you start to get the point of diminishing returns.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Corey Haines:But instead of just like throwing your hands up and be like, okay, well, that's the end of marketing then. Guess we just stop there. You layer on these these s curves, and that's what keeps getting you to the next milestone.
Jordan:See, Chase... I'm not smart enough like Jason to understand what I'm doing. I just I just know what makes sense to do next. Yes. Yes.
Jordan:And he he has a great way of kind of analyze. No. Well, this is actually what's happening is you're trying to build an s curve on top of an s curve because you've reached, you know, more or less what meta can do for us for the time being. In truth, those street talk interviews is an attempt to break the flattening of the s curve in the meta channel because it opens up new audiences at the top.
Justin:Yes. Brian, I wonder what you think about this idea because, you know, you've had one channel for builder methods, which is YouTube. Do you think there's opportunity to layer some more stuff on top? How are you thinking about that?
Brian Casel:I mean, definitely, always. I'm just in a much different situation and mindset and phase than I think all of you. I'm just so much more back down to ground zero and thinking about product selection and you know, this actually gets back to something we were talking about earlier on in this episode, we sort of brushed past it, the bets thing. I mean, I don't wanna get back into that debate of like focus versus not, but what I do wanna touch on is part of it is like my years of of doing this that have started to push the pendulum in in a direction that that that like sort of over corrected and what I what I mean by that is like, I... A couple years ago it was it was so much more about like, if I'm gonna do any prod...
Brian Casel:If I'm gonna choose to do any product, I've got a good idea or I observe something in the market or I wanna scratch my own itch, I think there's a product there, I better decide right. I better do the extra rounds of market research, go to market strategy, like yeah, I know I can build any product, I know that. And I've known that for many years even way before AI. But I've been through that cycle enough times where I'm just like, if I'm gonna even do anything Mhmm. I better know that I have a go to market strategy and some vision for like how this thing can actually sustain for a year or longer, otherwise it's just not worth doing, right?
Brian Casel:Yeah. But I do think that there's an over correction there now in 2026, at least just for me personally where I'm over analyzing every idea, so I, you know, obviously I I look at what what Josh put up and I'm like, I I know how to do productized services, I could do something like that, I don't know, not not exactly that of course but like something. I've I've been looking at new product ideas to build, I have a couple that I'm starting to noodle on right now. Really just, when I say a couple, mean I'm trying to choose between which one of these do I want to start to build. I'm not gonna do them all at the same time.
Brian Casel:But I am in this like analysis paralysis. Where I find myself right now where I'm like, literally have like, I would say two definite ideas, maybe a third, where it's like these are products I could absolutely start building this weekend. I could probably ship them within a week. Mhmm. But I've been looking at those products for two months analyzing and reanalyzing and thinking like, there a market here or should I be looking at some other product And so it's that like opportunity cost and over analysis where I'm just like, fuck it, I should just fucking build it and then and then learn once I have the product in hand because now I...
Brian Casel:Now we have that ability. That's what's different today from two, three, five years ago.
Justin:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Because, because today the MVP, the experiment, the bet for someone like me and many of us, Corey included, everyone is like, the, the bet is like, okay, we, I know there's a, there's a product category here, I know there's a problem to solve here, maybe it's a scratch my own itch, maybe I know a market of people, I could build this thing and then I can see how many, how much legs it has and then we learn from there and if, and, and if it passes experiment two, experiment three, then we keep going. If not, then I, then I, maybe I pivot it or maybe I just go on to the next idea. Like, all of that is possible and yeah, like that's where I'm finding myself today and I so think that's really what I spend most of my time thinking about right now is like, what is the product mix? I mean, with builder methods, like it's it's come to a kind of a weird place to be honest, like it had a pretty huge first year and now now it's like continuing, like we have a really strong customer base but the the demand has changed a lot.
Brian Casel:Like even even through YouTube, even when I have high views from YouTube, like they don't really come and convert the way that they used to because the buying mindset has changed, the educational market has changed a lot just in the last six months, especially in AI. AI is so fast to change and then there's just a, like, then there's a lot that I do, lot of personal exploration around like, what am I trying to do here? What kind of business, what kind of work am I trying to commit myself to get into? Right? Like, again, like I can look at a service like what Pigford launched and I'm like, okay, that's great, like he hit something there and maybe there's some version of that that I could do.
Brian Casel:I have the skills and the experience to do it. Is that what I wanna be doing? Because really where I find the most energy, the most gratification from what I do is quiet time in my studio crafting really interesting prob... Products that solve solid problems and and I like to do that on on a on a couple different products. I love doing like customer support for like like customers who who use Flywrite, my my little writing Mac app tool, like it...
Brian Casel:I I love doing customer support for that kind of stuff, like that's a that's a tool that I care a lot about. Mimeo, I've got a couple new customers on there, like I like that kind of stuff. Mhmm. It's an open question on how much opportunity there is left out there and what the playbook for me to go scout out potential product ideas that fit that mold. Yeah.
Brian Casel:But again, it's...
Justin:This is...
Brian Casel:It's analysis paralysis right now.
Justin:Yeah, this is the tension I want us to explore... Continue to explore in the show, is this idea of like, the... Because I I think you're right. Like, in the old days, you could think about what pitches you wanted to hit and, you know, be really careful about what am I gonna swing at. And now it's almost like, yes, but now you can get, like, as many pitches as you want.
Justin:And so that's changed, but also, you could hit a home run and it could disintegrate before it hits the stands. And and so that's...
Brian Casel:Like, think the thing... Think the thing... I think the the... I think the mindset that I have right now where we sit this month is that, like, it's... What I need most is not a new winning marketing channel.
Brian Casel:It's actually a new product. If I'm honest. Because like what I've been working on are these like growth loops so that the products that I do have at least are doing the basics. The SEO, the AEO, the... Those mechanics that like I think every product should just be doing those baseline, right?
Brian Casel:So now I have the systems in place that whatever product I do including the ones that I already have and including the ones, the future ones, now I have a system with bots that I can just plug in and they're gonna be doing the basics, the low hanging fruit. At least getting that stuff right on a recurring basis. But I'm, but my businesses are not in a place where it's like, alright, we've hit this pretty high level of revenue and now we just gotta step on the gas and find a new marketing channel for them, like, no, really what I need is like a new vehicle Mhmm. To, to see what I can grow and that's, what I'm looking around for right now. I've got a couple ideas that I'm noodling on.
Justin:Well, this is good, guys. I got a lunch coming up, so I got a jet. But, Corey, super great having you on the show, man. I'd love to I think you should come back and especially this last thing Brian brought up. I It'd be interesting to get even more granular about, like, you know, which of your projects are just killing it, which You know, what happens, two, three months down the road.
Justin:So, yeah, we'd love to have you come back.
Jordan:I wanna hear about the process of a new product. You know, if if... That's what I'm most interested in. Right. If Josh is like an irrepressible artist, like it's just new thing has to come out, you know?
Jordan:Mhmm. Awesome. So it, you know, what what is that process? Is it just being paying attention to all of your own pain that can be good but can be lead you in wrong directions? Yeah.
Jordan:So I I I think that's good for everybody because there's a lot of pessimism right now about product decisions and what to build and there's nothing feels like it's gonna last and everything feels risky but that's not that's like that's not right.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Actually, and and I know I know we gotta cut it soon and and Justin, if you gotta if you gotta hop to school but the... Mhmm. On that note, like that's that's one of the things that I'm starting to key into is like I I think I'm way too internally focused right now. Like, I've I've got a cup...
Brian Casel:Like how can I figure out how to gain exposure to new niches to discover new product potential Because as as we know and the and the and the theme going around, of course, it's like, if you're gonna sell to other developers or other product builders, that's a that's a tough that's a tough tough road and like, but that's who I identify with? So those are the personal pains that I'm gonna gravitate toward first. Same thing with creators, like I'm noodling on a thing around video creation and it's like, alright, but like how many, how many of these people would pay for this and how much it is gonna get eaten up by AI and all that. So like, But that's the big challenge for someone like me is like if I'm not active in some other niche or some other world, how do I gain access to those ideas, you know?
Justin:Corey, do you have any final thoughts maybe for Brian or anyone else before you go? Like, what does that make you think of?
Corey Haines:Yeah. There's definitely a tension between that internal and external inspiration for products. And it's obviously way harder to get that external inspiration. But that's kind of probably... Well, let's put it this way.
Corey Haines:I think it was Aaron Francis the other day. You know, he's got this whole thing about like do hard things. Like, try the hardest thing possible. Try hard.
Brian Casel:What's his name? Jesse. Jesse Hanley. Jesse Hanley.
Corey Haines:Yeah. And Jesse Hanley. Yeah. They were just talking about it. And, that's definitely how I'm thinking about products now, especially like, gosh, the harder it is, the better.
Corey Haines:Because that means that it's a higher barrier of entry for other people. And it's definitely harder, I think, to go after this external source of inspiration for products where it's people that have jobs in industries that you have no idea even existed before you met them, that's harder. And so that's probably better. And my thing now is I'm always just defaulting to like, okay, what is the harder thing? Even if it's a marketing channel, what's harder for other people to do, to execute on?
Corey Haines:What are marketing channels that I even know exist? I'm gonna really double down on those because I wanna be
Brian Casel:ahead. Mhmm.
Jordan:He's speaking your love language, Justin.
Justin:Great Well place to end That's the that's the place to end it. We're gonna have Corey on every damn week now.
Brian Casel:This is a good one.
Jordan:I want the easy way, but... You get it right. Corey, thanks
Brian Casel:for coming on, Corey.
Jordan:Thank you. It was great.
Corey Haines:Yeah.... You guys. Super fun. Appreciate
Justin:it. Okay. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next week.
Corey Haines:Later, folks.