Andrew saw Saturn through a telescope and launched MetaMonster's new UI, but users won't activate! 🔭 Getting 1-2 daily signups with zero engagement while testing Phantom Buster for LinkedIn scraping. Sean presents his Michelin star agency framework and they debate reviving Chart Juice as a ChatGPT app. Plus: why web design agencies might be better customers than SEO agencies.

Links:

For more information about the podcast, check out https://www.smalleffortspod.com/.

Transcript:
00:01.07
Sean
Howdy.

00:02.27
Andrew
Hi, hi, hi.

00:03.52
Sean
and We've had so many false starts of season four, think.

00:08.60
Andrew
Yeah, is this not season eight? I thought we were on season eight now.

00:11.73
Sean
You're right, you're right, you're right. It was a limited series for the first but past four seasons.

00:16.07
Andrew
One, two episodes.

00:17.93
Sean
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like those those like which TV shows did in the middle of COVID, and you know? It's like, yeah, season's over. We'll just, yeah.

00:25.89
Andrew
Yeah. I feel like I haven't talked to you in forever, and you're... so busy now that you don't even respond to my slack messages

00:35.68
Sean
Sorry. Hold on. I don't like that you said those things together because you made it sound like I'm the reason we haven't talked in forever.

00:43.15
Andrew
you are no no no it's like 25 true i was gallivanting in the woods for two weeks so i was away from atlanta for a month uh i was

00:43.93
Sean
which Which is 75% true. didn't realize you were going for two weeks. I thought you were and that you're only... how How was it? Whoa.

00:59.42
Sean
well

01:00.47
Andrew
Yeah, I went in cat sit for my parents for a week. I went to Washington for two weeks, hung out with friends, went backpacking, then rented a car and drove around the Olympic Peninsula by myself, which was fucking awesome.

01:13.33
Sean
Nice.

01:14.15
Andrew
Jumped in the Pacific Ocean, jumped in Alpine Lake, climbed some sketchy mountains, saw a ton of beautiful views, walked in the rainforest, saw Saturn through a telescope.

01:25.43
Sean
Whoa. Whoa.

01:26.43
Andrew
It was, yeah!

01:26.92
Sean
What?

01:28.38
Andrew
I feel like that's the one I always mention last, and that's the one that people get most excited about.

01:28.45
Sean
You've been like on

01:32.82
Sean
Yeah. You've had like a whole secret life of Walter Mini situation in the past.

01:33.96
Andrew
One night, dude, it was great.

01:37.56
Sean
Uh-huh.

01:38.45
Andrew
I made a friend hiking down a trail one day, and she was telling me that she'd just come from this campsite and was checking the little board at the campsite and saw that the rangers were doing a telescope night.

01:51.67
Sean
Right.

01:51.74
Andrew
And so she said it was great. It was super fun. So I went and stayed at that campsite the next night. and they were doing it again and it was awesome there were like 50 or 60 people who drove up to the top of the mountain and parked and were just like walking around in the dark because you can't have white light it ruins the ability to see through the the telescope and everything it you know dampens your night vision so there were like 50 or 60 strangers

02:11.72
Sean
right

02:19.55
Andrew
milling around in the dark, just quietly chatting with each other, waiting in lines to look through telescopes. And they had four huge telescopes trained at different things in the night sky. And one of the things we got to see was Saturn.

02:31.90
Andrew
It was like a little little tiny little tiny Saturn. it was you know these These telescopes were not big enough to blow it up. yeah We weren't looking through the James Webb Space Telescope, but it was still really cool.

02:39.31
Sean
Sure.

02:42.07
Sean
Right.

02:43.74
Andrew
You could see the rings.

02:43.91
Sean
Yeah.

02:44.78
Andrew
It's like, holy shit, that's planet.

02:45.19
Sean
Whoa.

02:48.54
Sean
Cool. Nice.

02:49.75
Andrew
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. And then I was in San Diego for a week. So fully, fully my fault. there's There's at least a month in there that was fully my fault.

03:01.06
Andrew
I'd had kind of aspirations of like, maybe I'll drive to a coffee shop and we should do like a podcast episode from a coffee shop on the Olympic Peninsula.

03:01.41
Sean
Okay.

03:10.62
Andrew
And yeah, no way that was happening.

03:13.08
Sean
we can We can split it fifty fifty It's both our faults.

03:17.92
Sean
That's cool. You ever think about like how like crazy it is that when human... like you know I understand, like okay, like you're like, oh, hey, there are things in the sky. I want to go look at things in the sky and tell magnifying glass exists. We keep stacking them. We can start to see things in the sky.

03:33.30
Sean
And then just like the realization of, like oh, shit, there's more like giant balls of things out there.

03:40.80
Andrew
The thing that the always gets me is when I start thinking about how you're looking back in time because of how light travels and everything.

03:50.64
Sean
Right, right, right.

03:52.07
Andrew
you Light can only travel so fast. And so when something's 100 light years away, And you're seeing it. You're literally looking back in time 100 years.

04:04.85
Sean
Yeah, that doesn't make sense in my head.

04:06.99
Andrew
It's fucking batshit.

04:07.19
Sean
But yeah, that is pretty cool.

04:08.39
Andrew
It's so cool. Space is wild.

04:12.38
Sean
Yeah, yeah.

04:12.59
Andrew
Hot take.

04:13.39
Sean
Physics is...

04:16.09
Andrew
The coldest take possible.

04:16.81
Sean
physics Physics is so is wild.

04:20.00
Andrew
Yeah.

04:22.19
Sean
Anyway, how doing?

04:23.62
Andrew
How...

04:23.84
Sean
How's it been?

04:25.86
Andrew
uh how am i doing but but good and bad and medium and all the things uh the hiking and being in the woods was fantastic brighton seo was a lot of fun i made a bunch of new seo friends uh there were a couple of times where i didn't

04:33.18
Sean
Okay.

04:48.95
Andrew
want to be an extrovert. I didn't want to talk to strangers and I made myself do it and i had a lot of fun doing it and yeah, mean made a bunch of friends. Hasn't turned into leads or customers yet, which is to be expected.

05:05.80
Andrew
you know I wasn't really going there expecting this time to get a bunch of customers. It was more about let me build relationships, let me make friends because then

05:12.14
Sean
Sorry.

05:18.01
Andrew
you know, those are more, those are people I can lean on to amplify content and ask questions and get advice and get feedback and, and all that. And it was just a chance to like test our elevator pitch over and over again to see what works and what resonates with people.

05:36.21
Andrew
So i I felt like I got what I wanted out of it. And, and yeah, we'll see if you know, if it amplifies anything we're doing. I'm going to another conference in December, so we'll we'll see how that goes.

05:51.04
Andrew
And then the other big thing is we launched the new features, I think, between the last podcast and now. So Metamonster is a totally different tool now.

06:01.81
Andrew
It's the tool that I've been talking about for a while. So you can you can sign up for free. We also updated the pricing model to be credit-based. And users get 500 free credits that don't expire.

06:13.88
Andrew
So you can sign up for free, no credit card required. You get 500 credits. You get to crawl one site, max of 500 pages. then... and then Yeah, and then you can use those credits to run prompt templates and and interact with the chat.

06:28.71
Sean
Nice.

06:32.02
Andrew
i And so, yeah we went from a tool that could only optimize page styles and meta descriptions, and it was a total black box. You couldn't edit anything to now.

06:42.78
Andrew
It's like a flexible spreadsheet almost with SEO prompt superpowers. So you can... We automatically generate vector embeddings of everything so you can do semantic search and content clustering with like cosine similarity stuff.

06:59.60
Andrew
We do and then we've got prompt templates to do everything from like generate page titles and meta descriptions like we used to to image alt text, internal links, even like SERP analysis and content refreshes and we just added a web search tool so now you can you know include web search and sort of research, have the agent do some research as part of a content refresh workflow.

07:25.63
Andrew
So the tool is getting a lot more flexible, a lot more powerful. I think the flip side of that is the learning curve is a little bit higher now. So you know we're trying to figure that out.

07:36.74
Andrew
The numbers we're seeing, we're getting one or two people signing up every day.

07:41.31
Sean
well

07:42.19
Andrew
which is cool. Most of them are not activating. So they're maybe crawling a site, but they're not running prompts.

07:52.38
Andrew
So that's one thing we got to figure out. We're also working on some stuff to enable more powerful workflows. Because I think the thing I keep coming back to is like the on-page optimization stuff is annoying, but it's not, you know,

08:08.36
Andrew
The things that really move the needle are keyword research, content generation, backlinks, and and reporting. like Those are the things that really move the needle for agencies.

08:19.64
Sean
Yeah.

08:21.52
Andrew
And we can't really do those things super well now. So we're we're also doing some work to make the tables even more flexible so that we can import other data, keyword data,

08:35.16
Andrew
We can start doing content generation, content creation kind of stuff. And then I've been testing a couple of like rough backlink workflows that'll get a lot better once we have flexible tables.

08:47.44
Andrew
So we're working on that. were working on We're thinking about workflows and how to make everything easier. So it's like both make it more powerful, but also make it easier and really make it easier for people to like just kick stuff off quickly.

09:04.77
Sean
Mm-hmm.

09:05.43
Andrew
so

09:06.59
Andrew
and we just like I think the frustrating part is it's just slow going. you know We've been adding a lot to the tool, but you just haven't, we're not adding customers. I'm having conversations with people, but those conversations are mostly ending in, yeah, this is cool. There's something here. This is interesting.

09:29.92
Andrew
And like, I'm hearing patterns. Like I had this great conversation with someone the other day who said, was almost like he was reading off of our homepage. He was like, yeah, the the thing i just hate, like copying and pasting between chat, GPT and spreadsheets. And like, Screaming Frog is cool, but you have to like rerun a crawl every time you want to generate something with AI. And I love that this lets me like crawl once and then generate, generate, generate.

09:55.61
Sean
I

09:56.35
Andrew
And so there was like, that was really cool. And I was like, awesome. So do you feel like there's enough there for you to buy? And he was like, well, I'll use my credits and then we'll see.

10:08.01
Andrew
And it's just like, oh, how do we get,

10:10.30
Sean
i see

10:13.07
Andrew
Over this hump, how do we make some, like the tool is getting to the point where it is cool, it is useful, it is powerful, but we're we're clearly still not solving, we're clearly still a vitamin.

10:27.52
Andrew
we're We're firmly stuck in that vitamin territory where it's like people are like, oh, this is like cool, interesting, nice to have, I should use this, but they don't.

10:38.54
Sean
yeah

10:39.37
Andrew
And so it's like, how do we get to that painkiller you know, how do we get to that painkiller territory? And right now, our best guess is like, you know, is we got to be able to do keyword research and content creation kind of stuff.

10:57.30
Andrew
And then we got to be able to make it all easier to to execute on.

11:02.61
Sean
Yeah. Hmm. That's sick, though. I didn't realize you were getting, like, one to two sign-ups a day. That's, like, you know, that's pretty significant.

11:10.35
Andrew
Yeah, at least for for the last week or so. Part of that might be, although I don't think so because I don't, maybe. So we just launched a prompt library as this like SEO, programmatic SEO experiment too.

11:23.74
Sean
Hmm.

11:26.54
Andrew
So we took all these prompts that I've been testing and working on over the last like few months as we've been building these new features. And we put them out for free on the website so you can go

11:36.06
Sean
Nice.

11:36.79
Andrew
to our website, click on the prompts library, and then you can yeah you can click on the prompts library and then read through all the prompts, copy and paste them.

11:46.14
Andrew
We modified them slightly so you can use them in other tools. And that seems to, we just launched that like a week ago on the site, and that seems to already be generating some organic traffic and then got picked up by like a newsletter.

11:59.70
Sean
nice

12:00.91
Andrew
And so my hope is that that's helping. And then, but yeah, we're getting one to two free trial signups a day on average.

12:13.93
Sean
Nice. That's pretty good.

12:16.29
Andrew
but But yeah, they're not activating and and certainly not paying. So

12:22.15
Sean
I mean, I wonder if,

12:24.33
Sean
are they using their credits?

12:25.92
Andrew
no, that's what i'm that's what I'm saying.

12:26.76
Sean
OK. Oh, that's what you mean.

12:27.59
Andrew
They're not using any of their credits.

12:28.28
Sean
They're not activating it.

12:28.95
Andrew
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

12:29.02
Sean
thought you meant. I see. I see.

12:30.85
Andrew
So they're, For the most part, they seem to be crawling there's the site. So they're at least getting in and like crawling a site, but then they're not using any credits. So couple things might be happening here. yeah and The crawls take some time, and so they might be losing interest while the crawl is happening, and yeah we're having trouble getting them to come back. Or then they're getting in, and they're it's too hard for them to figure out how to optimize things and how to work

12:59.85
Andrew
with the tool or yeah it's just like there's too many other things going on in their world and you know they're losing interest

13:00.98
Sean
Yeah.

13:08.82
Sean
Yeah, that makes sense.

13:12.98
Sean
Hmm.

13:14.64
Andrew
or it could be like that we're getting the wrong people in the door too that's that that is a possibility and but i think it's

13:21.71
Sean
they are But they're they're real signups, right? Like, are they are they all like Gmail's? or I mean, i'm not saying Gmail's aren't real.

13:29.43
Andrew
It's definitely mostly Gmail's.

13:31.43
Sean
okay Okay.

13:33.62
Andrew
I've been pulling up the our dashboard right now. And by dashboard, I mean our database.

13:39.31
Sean
Okay, okay. I was going ask you.

13:40.52
Sean
Okay, go ahead.

13:42.43
Andrew
Yeah, we are definitely seeing... yeah I mean, there's there's for sure some bullshit. There's row 267 is GFGR. there's row two sixty seven is gfgr like Their organization name is up jump dream But then, you know, I'm seeing some in here like WP Expert, SEO Hero, Digital Hawk, Nipro.

14:07.74
Sean
Nice. Wait, wait, wait.

14:09.69
Sean
I don't think you can say those things out loud.

14:13.63
Sean
Okay. It depends in terms of service. I don't know. I guess I'm just too used to like security, B2B, client things. or the clients like If you say our name, will cancel our contract.

14:24.30
Andrew
I don't think these people care. Yeah. I'm not saying they are endorsing the tool in any way, shape or form. I'm purely saying that that they have signed up.

14:33.64
Sean
Yeah.

14:36.03
Sean
Fair enough. Fair enough.

14:37.17
Andrew
Yeah. You're probably right. I probably you should be a little bit more careful about that. But it's all good.

14:41.75
Sean
Yeah.

14:43.92
Andrew
Sorry to SEO hero and WP expert.

14:51.46
Andrew
Yeah, the point is there's definitely some organizations in here that are legit. You know, it's not all of them, but there's definitely some in here that that are legit.

14:57.18
Sean
Nice.

15:03.46
Andrew
So,

15:04.40
Sean
Cool. Cool. I...

15:06.01
Andrew
yeah.

15:07.58
Sean
cool

15:07.79
Andrew
but

15:08.01
Sean
i

15:08.46
Andrew
But then, again, like, yeah, if i if I go down the row, so since we switched, dropped the free credits, we did like an initial promotion that was like a thousand free credits.

15:20.38
Andrew
Since we switched the free credits from a thousand back to 500, I'm seeing credits, 500, 500, 500, 450, 200, 500, 500, 500. So those like the person has not done anything in the tool, pretty Like they've maybe crawled site, but they haven't run prompt.

15:32.08
Andrew
so any of those five hundred like the person has not done anything in the tool

15:37.18
Sean
Yeah.

15:37.78
Andrew
pretty much like they've maybe crawled a site but they haven't

15:41.12
Sean
Yeah.

15:41.40
Andrew
they haven't runro

15:43.68
Sean
Makes sense.

15:45.91
Sean
I mean, i feel like I feel like this is where like email nurture comes in too, right? Like they are reminded.

15:50.43
Andrew
Yeah, and I have a nurture i have a nurture campaign.

15:52.06
Sean
okay

15:52.79
Andrew
i don't think it's doing much. I mean, I'll keep an eye on it. it's only We're only a weekend, and the nurture campaign is like kind of... yeah I try not to overwhelm people, so I space it out.

16:05.93
Andrew
But... so yeah, we'll we'll see if some of those... if we get people back in over the next week or two. But in general, you know, we've had the credit system live for at least a month now, I think, or close to it, and have not, yeah, haven't seen anyone convert yet, so.

16:30.08
Sean
tim

16:32.01
Andrew
Yeah.

16:32.45
Sean
Okay.

16:32.57
Andrew
We've seen a couple people use up all their credits or or most of their credits.

16:35.33
Sean
Cool.

16:37.03
Andrew
you know you know We've got one or two people who've used 800-ish credits, 900 credits.

16:45.16
Sean
Okay.

16:46.19
Sean
Have you spoken to those people?

16:46.51
Andrew
But... No, because they're not like responding to our emails.

16:51.51
Sean
Oh, okay. I see. Damn.

16:54.87
Andrew
Yeah. This is the thing. People... Like one thing that kind of annoys me is people are like, why haven't you asked them? Why haven't you talked to them? And I'm like, I send them all an email as soon as they sign up saying like, hey, what brought you to Metamonster? And if no one responds to that, the chances of them responding to a follow-up email in my experience are zero to none.

17:12.79
Andrew
And so it's like,

17:13.04
Sean
What if you like, what if you, what if you like offer more credits though? Like for the people that actually use like 800 credits.

17:18.75
Andrew
We have that in our in our loops, in our like in the PS of our automated emails.

17:19.30
Sean
I see. I see.

17:25.23
Sean
Damn.

17:26.95
Andrew
And in our automated emails that go out when you run out of credits, we say, do you need more?

17:30.30
Sean
Right.

17:32.37
Andrew
like Hit reply to this email, and we'll give you more.

17:32.81
Sean
Yeah.

17:36.30
Sean
Yeah. Damn.

17:40.09
Andrew
Yeah. Everyone always thinks they have the easy answer, and I'm just being a dummy. I'm just teasing.

17:48.44
Sean
Yeah. Users suck, man. Wait. Yeah. Go back to running an agency.

17:57.02
Andrew
I'll take users over clients.

17:59.33
Sean
Fair enough.

18:02.92
Andrew
How was your big leadership retreat?

18:05.41
Sean
It was good. It was good. It was good to, like, I mean, and you know, i got I've been playing catch-up since we got back.

18:12.01
Andrew
Of course.

18:12.97
Sean
But, I mean, it was good. It was good to see, like, Ben and JJ in a place. And, like, this is the next second time we've done it. It was way better than the first one. i think we left with some really solid...

18:25.89
Sean
direct like i think we we're relying on direction i think last time it was like half work it was like 75 work 25 of time to talk and it was like two days this time we you know clients knew about it we canceled meets during our blackout week at the end of the month where we don't take client meetings so it's a lot less calls to be on and you know we have a project manager as well so it's nice to it's nice to have someone else sort of direct some of the work that's coming in from clients It was good.

18:53.94
Sean
You know, I think it was also right after my like Michelin speech to the to the team.

19:01.34
Andrew
Yeah, talk about that because obviously listeners haven't haven't seen that.

19:05.41
Sean
you mean You mean our listeners aren't just the people that work at Miss Carians?

19:09.18
Andrew
and They might be. but it

19:10.48
Sean
No, I hope not. I don't think think there's maybe one or two people that occasionally tune in. Yeah, i basically it's been this idea that's been in my head for years since running the agency.

19:26.13
Sean
And... it was it was like It was because I conflated someone else's, a friend's point. He was telling me how like a lot of, you know, really, he was he was like, don't like don't always like look up to like some of the top tier agencies because they run like Michelin shops where they have razor thin margins and whatever.

19:45.08
Andrew
Hmm, that's funny.

19:45.92
Sean
But that was not my takeaway from that. I like definitely heard that. was like, oh i should just run my agency like a Michelin star restaurant. But I i think like there's a lot that you know there's a lot of parallels to learn from it.

19:57.86
Sean
last Last year, I started writing like a blog post series that has completely died off called Agency Confidential, which was just more thoughts on this stuff. And I think like when you start thinking about the analogy between the two, right? Like they're both service businesses.

20:11.43
Sean
They're both service businesses. One just has like expiring food and you get burned and you have like angry Gordon Ramsay chefs and you know not the highest pay in the world like and and all that sort of stuff.

20:22.12
Sean
And the other one you sit at the comfort of your home. But there's other you know there's other trade-offs. Like we don't technically have like account managers. So we don't have like servers. our chefs are also serving the food and talking directly the clients.

20:35.07
Sean
So there's there's some there's some parts where the analogy isn't perfect, but that's what analogies are. The whole point of it is basically that in terms of like agency operations, like like as someone who's never worked as an agency, i think I've begun to look more and more towards how I imagine Michelin star restaurant.

20:56.23
Sean
is run and i think there's a lot of like learnings from it so like like you know having like mise en place right which is like food prep to me is about sort of prepping like when a client sort of starts like do you have all these things prepped for them when we or even to the point that like when we we're on a call with them

21:04.08
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

21:15.15
Sean
you know, do we, do we like have our things ready to share, which like most of the time, yes, but also there are times where, you know, someone's on a call and thinking about something else or focusing on something else because they're not the main person and then it's their time to share and it's not, it's not ready. And like, those are like the little things that like don't offer the same sort of mission star experience. And that's what I really want to get to. And ultimately I think the reason, like the reasons why i think our, at least for our team, why they work at,

21:43.77
Sean
work here is that they you know they do want to do excellent work and provide a great uh outcome and experience so right

21:51.15
Andrew
I think the other part I like about it is the emphasis on service because so many agencies hyper focus on the product, the work, the output. And yes, a Michelin star restaurant without really fucking good food is going to fail.

22:07.05
Andrew
but a michelin star restaurant with great food and shitty service that like if the food comes out late if the food if you don't know what you're getting until it's on the table uh if you you know if you're not able like if you don't make people feel good when they come to the restaurant you're going to fail just as fast if not faster and so like clients so often

22:12.39
Sean
right

22:23.71
Sean
Right. Right. Yep.

22:31.82
Andrew
care less about the food quality than you do like you carry care more about about the food quality they just want it on time done handled they want to feel listened to they want to feel like it was their idea they want to you know and so like they want to feel like you made them a superstar kind of

22:42.10
Sean
right

22:52.40
Sean
Right. Yeah. hundred percent. hundred percent. I think this all sort of spawned out of like, you know, we have a lot of great talent. and, and like the product is good, but I think we needed to do a realignment on like, uh,

23:07.05
Sean
we we are very focused like for the past four years four and a half we've been very much like our bar for what we're like if we're doing well or not or is is the client happy which like with happy with the final product but that's like that that's like the end that's like the outcome of all the other things you do you know

23:18.55
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

23:29.38
Sean
and and i think uh i think there's like two parts of it there's like one one part definitely the service the other part was like operationally like as we sort of grow and are hiring more people you know like i think that the team nodded i either the team nodded or or were shocked by me saying like you know a figma health inspector came into our org like we would be shut down tomorrow And it's not because like things are misnamed, but it's the fact that like everything is everywhere and we're doing so many things. So it's like everything, everywhere, all at once.

24:01.33
Sean
you know Not all of our projects have covers on it, for example. like there's There's all these things that we could be doing better. And yeah, I mean, I think I think it's been helpful.

24:10.79
Sean
Our leadership upside ended up becoming in part, like, how do we actually, like, what are the actual things we accomplished that we did like reviews for the whole team. So like, how are they fitting into sort of like these new principles are replying, right?

24:23.94
Sean
Like who, who, who needs more work on their knife skills? Who needs, you know, who needs more work around like their prep skills there?

24:32.16
Andrew
How many principals were there? Weren't there like 19 or 23 or something? Yeah.

24:36.70
Sean
Yeah, yeah, yeah. in the bear, I think apparently there's like 23. Oh, this was also for the context of everyone listening.

24:42.04
Andrew
yeah

24:44.11
Sean
It's also because like Miscreants is just like the bear without like the dead cousin and and and like anger, like mental health issues plaguing the the the the owner or chef.

24:58.71
Sean
Yeah, I think in the bear, Carmi has like 23 principles. I think you see like 11 or so of them on screen. According to the internet, there's 23.

25:04.88
Andrew
Yeah.

25:05.89
Sean
don't really know. You know, they talk about service.

25:07.68
Andrew
By the way, i kind of feel like 23 is way too many.

25:08.07
Sean
They talk about food. They talk about being a great chef.

25:10.90
Andrew
I feel like it needs to be like five.

25:11.26
Sean
Yeah, 100%.

25:12.22
Andrew
People can't remember 23.

25:14.40
Sean
100% 100% ended up having like seven or eight at the end at that point I like lost Steve i was like I'm not I'm not writing any more of this stuff this sucks also also there's some of them that start to like blend into each other but yeah i mean I think they they think if they're like you know non-negotiables about being like a great chef right it's cleaning as you go it's uh uh one there's like respecting sort of tradition but also like like uh up leveling yourself and like learning about new things and new skills and and anyway it's good i mean it's a it's a good thing for us to like continue to refer back to now when we do like performance evals or conversations with people but yeah it's one of those things where

25:51.06
Andrew
yeah

25:59.78
Andrew
I like the presentation a lot. I know it was an internal presentation, but the deck looked great. I really think I would love to see you give it to an external audience at some point.

26:05.58
Sean
thanks

26:10.92
Andrew
Ideally, after you have... you know, done a bunch of work to turn miscreants into the Michelin star agency that you want to be.

26:14.44
Sean
We are a Michelin-South restaurant. Yeah.

26:20.83
Andrew
And then you can point to how all of these things did improve the, you know, bottom line of the business and the quality of life of employees and et cetera, et cetera.

26:24.38
Sean
Yeah.

26:30.05
Sean
Yeah.

26:34.30
Andrew
But even just now, as like an idea, a metaphor that you're exploring as a way to, to help communicate to your team what you expect i think it would be really really really interesting i almost wonder if there's a chance for us to promote it as a like a metamonster sponsored webinar kind of thing where it's like like hey we're we're gonna i don't i don't know if that's interesting to you at all but like you know our audience is agencies it's a different kind of agency but well not really you're a marketing agency

26:58.77
Sean
yeah, I mean, are? Mm-hmm. Yeah.

27:02.16
Sean
yeah i mean you are

27:12.64
Andrew
but yeah uh you know i'd be super intrigued to like run a webinar that's like michelin star agency something

27:22.100
Sean
For what it's worth, I was really against it until you offered that part. think... of i think of

27:30.76
Andrew
like if i can get the people there and like organize it all then that that kind of thing

27:34.72
Sean
No, no, it's not that. It's not that. It's that if if if i can if I can bring in agency people to Metamonster, I'm significantly more inclined and to do it.

27:42.04
Andrew
oh

27:43.79
Sean
when you When you said I should give a talk, it's like, no, I don't want to talk on stage. I guess it sucks. Yeah.

27:51.54
Andrew
i mean i do also think it would be know probably just a cool networking thing for you hopefully of like you yeah getting some of your ideas out there although obviously like you know the thing that's going to drive the most value to you all is talk for

27:57.100
Sean
Yeah. 100%. Yeah, I just... yeah just

28:10.20
Andrew
related to like cybersecurity vendors, and this talk is not going to be super interesting to

28:13.12
Sean
Yeah. Listen, i have the opportunity to do that too and i still i have i get the opportunity to do that too, and I still don't want

28:20.15
Andrew
really people who have asked you to to give talks at like security conferences or something.

28:24.68
Sean
There's a there's a security marketing conference. I mean my my product market is gonna give it and we're gonna do a workshop So I'm gonna be there and help with the workshop but like I think I think it I think it's about like purple teaming your messaging so like Like like how to how to find like how to how to find like competitive angles with your messaging, but then also how to like defend it Like as the market continues to grow stuff like that

28:30.90
Andrew
Oh, rad. What's the topic? Yeah, it's a fun metaphor.

28:49.02
Sean
I don't know, I haven been haven't seen the full, I think she's still working on the full talk. it's I'll leave it in how it goes. But yeah, I think it's a messaging exercise. I think, you know, I think i think because, like, don't know, just the way we found how we, like, the miscreants way of doing messaging, like, brings in brand a lot early on, and also, like, often starts to the end in mind of, like, the website, so...

29:13.83
Sean
when I've done it with other marketers, it's been, when we've run it with other marketers, they've been very surprised by the difference in our process versus others, which, I mean, I guess I've never run through someone else's process, so it's very surprising to me, but yeah.

29:29.83
Andrew
Cool. When is that?

29:31.85
Sean
Anyway, December, December, yeah.

29:33.95
Andrew
Oh, nice. Cool. It's coming up.

29:36.81
Sean
Yeah, I'm excited to see everyone again.

29:36.98
Andrew
Great.

29:39.67
Sean
Yeah.

29:39.72
Andrew
Cool. Have you ever heard of this tool, Phantom Buster?

29:44.86
Sean
No, what is that? Okay.

29:46.61
Andrew
It's...

29:46.72
Sean
Hmm.

29:47.26
Andrew
i I found out about it at Brighton SEO.

29:50.13
Sean
okay

29:50.71
Andrew
It was in in the keynote talk. She she mentioned an AI workflow someone had built and, like, Phantom Buster was part of their workflow. So, as far as I can tell, they're... They try to... They position themselves initially as kind of a general purpose, like,

30:08.61
Andrew
web scraping tool specifically for for prospecting for outbound sales so but i think what people mostly use them for is they have a useful linkedin workflow and so and apparently linkedin is notoriously hard to scrape without getting shut down and so

30:23.04
Sean
Yes.

30:29.23
Sean
yes

30:32.75
Andrew
I am testing out Phantom Buster as a way to try to reach out to people who are familiar with some of our quote unquote competitors.

30:44.71
Andrew
One of the things that I felt like I found again at the conference that I see in these demo calls that I take from time to time is that like the people who get it the fastest are the people who have used Like, if you've never used Screaming Frog's OpenAI integration, if you like you're if you don't even know that exists, there's too much education for me to do to convince you that Metamonster is going to be valuable to you.

31:10.38
Sean
For sure.

31:15.10
Sean
but sure

31:16.18
Andrew
But where the tool is now, you know if you've used Screaming Frog's OpenAI integration, if you've tried to set up some automation with GPT for Sheets, if you have tried using Search Atlas Auto SEO,

31:30.85
Andrew
We had one of our customers. This is one of only two like kind of organic customers that we have right now that we didn't get ourselves.

31:41.30
Andrew
that we didn't know beforehand. They scheduled a demo. Austin actually had to take the demo because i was I was busy that day. And this person was like, oh, cool.

31:50.93
Andrew
Like, this is Search Atlas, but more affordable and less shitty. And one of our other customers had said to us, like, you she was trying to use GPT for Sheets. She tried to use Search Atlas. Neither of them were working well.

32:06.40
Andrew
They were a pain to, like, Search Atlas was just, like, the output was not good.

32:11.65
Sean
yeah yeah

32:11.84
Andrew
GPT for Sheets was, like, brittle, and it was, like, really hard to work with to get it to do what she wanted it to do And so, yeah, it's, like, clearly people who have experimented with some of these tools get Metamonster faster.

32:24.97
Sean
yeah

32:25.26
Andrew
And so the play that I'm going to try to run with Phantom Buster find posts or people or pages talking about Screaming Frog, about GPT for Sheets, about AirOps, about Search Atlas, and then, you know, scrape people who like or comment or interact with content about those.

32:50.97
Sean
Yeah.

32:52.59
Andrew
And then, you know, try to find their email addresses and then reach out to them and be like, hey, you we're an ex-alternative and try that to see if if we can use that to kind of get over some of the education hurdle and like find people who maybe are experimenting or actively experimenting, maybe have a little bit of a deeper pain point, have felt or have felt the pain in a more real way.

33:23.51
Sean
do you Do you feel like, well, i think I think the answer is yes with Search Atlas that like you would go for like replace like, it's a replacement budget play.

33:34.30
Sean
Do you think that with someone?

33:34.05
Andrew
Mm-hmm. Well, Search Atlas as a whole does a lot more than we do. But like auto SEO like is like a core feature of Search Atlas.

33:40.92
Sean
i see.

33:43.36
Sean
Yeah.

33:44.84
Andrew
And so like we would replace auto.

33:45.05
Sean
Oh,

33:47.23
Andrew
I don't think we would replace Search Atlas because Search Atlas has you know is trying to replace Ahrefs.

33:51.25
Sean
I see.

33:52.74
Andrew
So they they have their own keyword data and all this shit. Yeah.

33:56.30
Sean
Gotcha. Gotcha. I didn't know that. i thought I thought Search Atlas was just the auto SEO part.

34:01.42
Andrew
Yeah.

34:01.47
Sean
Okay.

34:03.77
Andrew
And they do like local, they're truly trying to build like an all-in-one tool that can do fucking everything.

34:03.73
Sean
Yeah. I see.

34:09.36
Sean
I see. and see

34:10.94
Andrew
But apparently it does none of it very well, is what I keep hearing from people.

34:15.15
Sean
That is also what I keep hearing from people. Yeah.

34:17.68
Andrew
Yeah.

34:17.86
Sean
Yeah. yeah The folks in the the SEO group that I'm in, the sketchy SEO group I'm in, I think I saw a thread. It's like, yeah, they all all kind of hate it So cool.

34:28.42
Sean
Sick. I think, yeah, I think that's a good plan. I think that makes sense.

34:32.05
Andrew
Yeah, with Screaming Frog, it's obviously, I'm you know i'm not gonna try to convince someone to replace Screaming Frog with MetaMonster. Screaming Frog's fucking awesome and it does a million things, but it's it's more like, sure, do your crawl with Screaming Frog if you want, whatever.

34:41.48
Sean
Hmm.

34:47.09
Andrew
And then, but like, again, it's feature replacement. Don't, like, Screaming Frog's AI integration

34:50.67
Sean
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

34:54.16
Andrew
is like, you know, people love it, they say it's fucking cool, but I'm like, but it's, you know, it's pretty clunky to use, because, yeah, for a million reasons, you know, you can only use it when you're running a crawl, that means you can't, if you, if it's kind of fucks up and

35:03.27
Sean
yeah yeah

35:13.97
Andrew
the output is not it's like really hard to test rapidly test the output of a prompt and and tweak it and everything you have to recrawl something every time you want to want to redo the output you it's hard to do just a few pages at once like yeah

35:25.55
Sean
Yeah, just the built-on versus... Yeah, built-on versus built-on is a very different experience. Cool.

35:33.35
Andrew
yeah yeah so yeah yeah i'm man i'm hopeful

35:36.62
Sean
Okay, excited to see how goes.

35:42.57
Andrew
If this doesn't work, I don't know. We've also like, we've stopped and started with ads a bunch of times. And the most recent conversation we had, we decided to kill ads because like, I keep hearing from people that to get enough data to really make ads work, you need to be spending like five grand a month.

35:50.22
Sean
Mm-hmm.

36:01.53
Andrew
And we just don't have that to spend.

36:02.07
Sean
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

36:04.83
Andrew
and then And then also it feels like, you know

36:10.39
Andrew
When we have run ads, they've converted at a crazy high rate. but But it feels like we don't learn a ton from them.

36:21.11
Andrew
Like, because we're not having conversations with people, we don't learn a ton from them. And so and we can't tell, know, why someone's not using the product or why, know.

36:30.37
Sean
yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean i think it's kind of like like you're not supposed to run an ad ads for your newsletter or your like blog or something until you feel like you're like content market fit right of like you know why so

36:45.85
Andrew
Makes me really fucking jealous of VC-backed companies. It's like, fuck, I just... If I had a little bit of funding... And, you know, Austin I have some cash we could throw at Metamonster, potentially, but, like, we don't want to just throw it at Metamonster until we...

37:02.03
Sean
Yeah.

37:04.13
Andrew
Like, just to learn until we feel confident that we've got something. So... This stage is just a slog, man.

37:14.13
Sean
yeah

37:14.54
Andrew
It's fun. Like, I do, and I don't mean to just be down about it. Like, I enjoy the challenge. I enjoy the puzzle. Like, I want to make it work, but it's like, i wish I was better at it. I wish I was getting there faster.

37:29.15
Sean
I don't know if, like, I think, I think there are plenty of people who are good at it, but I don't, I find it hard to believe that anyone who is good at it, like can make it significantly fat, like in let's say half the time it'll take for Metamonster to pick up. You know, I feel like, I feel like every type of sad success overnight story is always like 10 years in the making. Yeah.

37:54.44
Andrew
Yeah.

37:55.06
Sean
yeah

37:55.35
Andrew
I met the founder of Adaptify.

37:59.02
Sean
Oh cool.

37:59.78
Andrew
you know Do you know that that one?

38:00.74
Sean
No. What is that?

38:01.87
Sean
What is that?

38:09.66
Sean
Okay.

38:11.55
Andrew
There's a couple of others that have more name recognition, I think. I see them mentioned from time to time. you This is, you know, it's kind of like that one you sent me from one of the marketplaces, right?

38:26.56
Andrew
Like there's a million clones of this popping up all over the place right now that's just like, it churns out blog posts and claims to do some keyword research.

38:33.44
Sean
Yeah.

38:35.94
Andrew
I think theirs is a little bit higher quality and does more, like,

38:36.35
Sean
yeah

38:40.93
Andrew
You they do reporting, which a lot of the tools don't super do I don't think. They do reporting, they do keyword research, they do backlinks, and they do content. They're not cheap. And he said ads is like what was the first channel that really started to take off for them and what what really worked. And it sounds like they grew super fast.

39:05.04
Andrew
and And he was he was telling me to like kind of smoke test stuff and, you know, just put...

39:08.68
Sean
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

39:11.32
Andrew
pricing options on your website that you can't support right now and then and then if people buy them just go and build them i'm a little skeptical of that approach i feel like people are kind of skeptical of smoke tests these days and also know austin's only part-time so we can only build stuff so fast but

39:18.98
Sean
yeah

39:33.79
Sean
yeah

39:37.46
Andrew
But yeah, it was interesting to talk to him and it's been interesting to look at like, because they're clearly like, we're, we're clearly, you know, circling around some of the same ideas.

39:50.24
Andrew
The tools look pretty fundamentally different and right now are focused on different use cases.

39:52.75
Sean
Mm-hmm.

39:55.99
Andrew
Looking at them as part of what has, and their growth as part of what has led me to the hypothesis that we, that the on-page optimization stuff we're doing is not painful enough for most people, that you keyword research, content creation or are kind of the things we really need to be able to help help people with eventually.

40:16.31
Sean
Yeah, I mean, I think i think that the... Okay, so I have a... That's that's an interesting point. Like, I think you're right, and... But I don't think that... Because I'm thinking about it now where...

40:34.21
Sean
the tools that are like yours, the people they target tend to be like like a Webflow developer, right? There's plenty of like help you generate schema, help you generate like meta descriptions and all this sort of these tools or help you generate like alt text or any of these things or like on-page SEO. And like the thing that it, I mean, between myself and my Webflow developers, they all like your tool because it solves like a pain for them because it's monotonous and tedious to go and like,

41:03.43
Sean
and do all that sort of stuff. So maybe the pain point that you're actually hitting with the current solution set isn't for SEO agencies, it's for like web dev agencies.

41:12.55
Andrew
Maybe I have tried pushing on that a couple of times and haven't gotten any bytes other than you guys, really.

41:13.87
Sean
Hmm.

41:18.39
Sean
Hmm.

41:19.53
Sean
I see.

41:20.02
Andrew
I did, you know, one of my, the friend who I've been meaning to introduce you to seemed excited to try Metamonster.

41:23.87
Sean
Hmm.

41:26.59
Andrew
I don't think he's signed up yet. I should probably reach out to him and just see if I could get him on a call and do a demo.

41:37.48
Andrew
Yeah, I'll probably use

41:39.63
Andrew
use introducing you as a chance to uh yeah as a chance to follow up with him about about doing a demo but because yeah i and part of it might have been i talked i think a lot of people who fit that demographic want integrations which we don't have yet and then

41:39.97
Sean
Yeah.

41:44.50
Sean
also do a demo

42:01.46
Sean
yeah

42:05.76
Andrew
Yeah, I don't know. It's worth trying again. I feel like the cold email I'm doing right now is kind of broad. Like, I think I've got some, a bunch of people in there who are just like marketing agencies.

42:21.30
Andrew
I don't know if I specifically did a web design agency campaign though. I should test a web design agency campaign and just see.

42:29.16
Sean
yeah it'd be cool

42:30.46
Andrew
And test some messaging that's more geared towards web design agencies. like Yeah, yeah, good call.

42:36.50
Sean
yeah you could try the you could try the like framer framer crowd too like because seo with framer is a pain like like one of the reasons people say webflow is better than framer is the seo portion but yeah might be something to solve.

42:52.16
Andrew
But why is that? Is that because the framework CMS doesn't support metadata and stuff very well?

42:57.60
Sean
no i think it does it's honestly like the experience is honestly pretty similar i have two theories for you one is just like how you build websites in framer isn't class based and you just build kind of like figma based it's a figma s experience right so there's that like on-page optimization cleanliness the other thing is uh framers very much built like i feel like webflow is built for someone who like has learned html css and javascript

43:07.57
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

43:24.95
Andrew
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, Webflow is just a visual, like a GUI on top of CSS.

43:26.02
Sean
and and other yeah yeah 100 whereas framer was built for like from a designer first mindset like that's why it feels like figma that's why they want these features and like like the like the distance between designer and seo pro versus like developer and seo pro is like probably wider.

43:51.80
Andrew
I

43:53.45
Sean
So maybe there's that. I don't know. I mean, try it out. I'm curious how to see how it goes.

43:59.34
Andrew
wonder if there's like a meetup or like a web design meetup or what's wait I thought Jamstack was more like app dev kind of stuff

44:03.95
Sean
You are in Atlanta, the land of of Jamstacks.

44:16.85
Sean
Uh, maybe I'm thinking of something else. I'm like, like, hold on.

44:22.58
Andrew
Whoa, their site is, their SSL cert is currently down. Oh, no, Jamstack.

44:28.10
Sean
Framer?

44:30.84
Sean
Oh.

44:31.39
Andrew
they're Their SSL cert is currently broken, so you get security warnings when you check your other site.

44:34.28
Sean
Oh.

44:36.51
Sean
Oh, yeah. Oof.

44:37.85
Andrew
huh

44:38.34
Sean
Whoops.

44:38.91
Andrew
Huh, do they have some sort of meetup in Atlanta?

44:39.84
Sean
Huh.

44:43.70
Sean
I think Atlanta has, forget what they're called. starts with M. But they're big. There's like a a dope design dev agency over there in Atlanta.

44:53.76
Andrew
Oh, okay.

44:56.62
Sean
Yeah, but a couple friends have worked there. there's Anyway. I think they are like they do they've done a lot of Jamstack.

45:01.16
Andrew
Cool.

45:02.94
Sean
They do a lot of Next.js stuff now, too.

45:07.54
Andrew
I will say one thing I'm testing out today that I've been thinking about trying for a while is the... the

45:18.08
Andrew
that would kind of fit with that Jamstack crowd. Be kind of interesting. So i I use Astro for the MetaMonster website, which you know for a little while i was like, shit, I should have built this on Webflow so that we could build a Webflow integration or whatever, and then it would be easier to update stuff.

45:34.06
Andrew
And then agents got good enough that I'm like, oh, I think I can just export the CSV from Metamonster, drop it into Cursor, and then just be like, take all of these things in the CSV and apply them to my pages.

45:46.11
Andrew
And so i'm I'm really excited to try that workflow today. And if it works, that that would be an interesting you play is to like reach out to you know Jamstack, Astro kind of dev shops, be like, hey,

45:49.02
Sean
nice

45:58.08
Sean
yeah

46:01.44
Sean
Yeah, I mean, I wonder if there's anything you can also do with, like, the new OpenAI agent kit. So, like, instead of you building, like, an integration, you know, build one.

46:07.61
Andrew
Yeah.

46:10.62
Andrew
Yeah. Well, I think that if we were going after like devs, we would just build an MCP server. We would just have MCP server so that you could like yeah just work with Metamonster remotely.

46:17.19
Sean
Right. Yeah.

46:21.98
Sean
Yeah.

46:23.79
Sean
yeah

46:24.90
Andrew
Yeah, like the the AppKit stuff is kind of is more for like surfacing a UI inside of ChatGPT, which like we've we've been talking about it for sure. Actually,

46:36.50
Andrew
funny thing, Austin is not working on Metamonster this week for that reason. Do you want to guess what he's working on instead?

46:45.36
Sean
oh

46:47.76
Sean
and I don't know, just more agent kit related stuff. for aren Oh,

46:52.02
Andrew
Yeah, so we're we're looking at the We were looking at not Agent Kit specifically, but the ChatGPT app store that they're like trying to launch and get off the ground.

47:02.34
Sean
I see. i say

47:03.99
Andrew
So Austin is seeing if he can rapidly prototype a ChatGPT app that is not a Metamonster app, but is actually something totally different.

47:18.40
Sean
Cool.

47:19.63
Andrew
Do i you want to try to guess what what app, it is related to projects I have worked on.

47:28.17
Sean
Is it, I don't know, is it a charge user? Oh, shit. OK. Yeah.

47:32.37
Andrew
is trying to test out a ChartJuice app to see if we can be like, if it's if we can just like quickly throw something out there and be the first like easy app like chart designer inside of ChatGPT.

47:40.10
Sean
yeah

47:45.35
Sean
yeah

47:47.66
Sean
Cool.

47:48.08
Andrew
just as Just as like a let's this the timing feels too good here we've got all of the and infrastructure like you figured out like a ui for it let's just like kind of throw something out there and see if anything comes of it and and if

47:55.62
Sean
Right, right.

48:01.73
Sean
Yeah. Yeah. And then it explodes and it becomes super popular and then you hard pivot it back to chart use.

48:08.31
Andrew
it would be fucking wild

48:08.87
Sean
Right? That's what you're doing. Uh-huh.

48:11.64
Andrew
i I don't think that's going to happen. It's also, i mean, it'll just be such a different product because it's got to be consumer focused. Like, like it it'll be the version of Chart Juice that I probably have talked about on this podcast wanting to build at some point, which is like,

48:27.62
Andrew
you know, make ChartJuice free to use with a watermark, you know, give people five chart types for free or three chart types for free. And then if you want to unlock extra customization ability, if you want to remove the watermark, you pay a very small amount, you know, $8 to $15 a month, something in like the Canva range.

48:45.80
Sean
yeah

48:48.95
Andrew
And then if you want you know API access to do like other stuff with or something, some small subset of people maybe pay us more. But would be mostly a consumer play.

48:58.27
Sean
I'm

49:02.58
Andrew
So, you know, we're going to see how far it gets.

49:06.61
Sean
excited. That sounds cool. Yeah, I didn't realize.

49:08.59
Andrew
Yeah.

49:09.38
Sean
and Yeah, something been like it's on the back burner.

49:14.04
Andrew
The focus is still Metamonster, by the way. it's just This is just like timing felt too good.

49:17.42
Sean
Right, right.

49:20.16
Andrew
It's like, all right, let's just let's do a very tightly scoped experiment and see if anything comes from it. And if anything comes from it, maybe you maybe it it does well enough to be kind of that stair-step business that then frees up our time to be able to you know really focus on Metamonster or have some budget for Metamonster kind of thing.

49:32.10
Sean
right

49:41.79
Sean
cool cool and on on the topic of like app stores did you know that reddit is like but big pushing their reddit apps

49:51.11
Andrew
No, I didn't even. i I noticed that Reddit has like games in the sidebar now.

49:55.33
Sean
Yeah, and yeah, yeah.

49:55.39
Andrew
Is this is this related?

49:57.11
Sean
Yeah, these are Reddit apps.

49:58.72
Andrew
Oh, weird.

49:59.06
Sean
And they're trying to push, like, subreddit owners like, build an app for their subreddit. So it doesn't have to like you know it doesn't have to be a game, right? It's just games tend to be, like, oh, like like like a calorie like tracker for, like, a fitness subreddit.

50:06.70
Andrew
What else would it be, though? Like, what? Oh, OK. Yeah,

50:12.56
Sean
or i don't know.

50:13.98
Andrew
I don't.

50:13.94
Sean
i don't It's, like, it's very weird. and I think that's why games have kind of taken off first.

50:17.28
Andrew
yeah i don't

50:20.82
Sean
But it kind of seems cool, kind of, you know. kind of feels like the era of Flash games.

50:25.07
Andrew
Yeah, if you're if you're playing in, like, the consumer social space, yeah, yeah it would be an interesting thing to try.

50:28.88
Sean
Yeah.

50:33.34
Andrew
Yeah, like like, I feel like the first person who figures out how to, like, build something really for Reddit, like, build a game that, like, leverages karma and, you know, gets shared and amplified within Reddit, like, almost like

50:39.78
Sean
Yeah.

50:43.93
Sean
Yeah.

50:48.16
Andrew
almost like the april fool's day experiences or something that they've been doing for years the first one time someone manages to do something kind of like that i could see it going really viral and huh

50:51.33
Sean
Hmm.

50:56.05
Sean
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. i think I think this idea probably spawned off of like how many of these like Reddit native, like, like what is it?

51:06.31
Sean
Like don't press the button or or like these like, yeah, cross up.

51:08.54
Andrew
yeah yeah that's kind of what i'm talking about i guess they weren't all april fools but

51:10.81
Sean
Yeah. Right, right. Yeah, it looks super cool, though. or looks you know I think it's one of those things where like I think you and I like have heard the advice of like when first-mover advantage helpful here.

51:28.87
Sean
helpful here

51:29.91
Andrew
Yeah, it's for sure a thing.

51:31.83
Sean
Yeah.

51:32.78
Andrew
Yeah.

51:33.62
Sean
Yeah. Cool. I mean, I haven't had any time to do anything related to SAS, to margins. Like, or, you know, at the very end of that offsite, you're like, so are we going to work on this thing or not?

51:40.71
Andrew
Yeah.

51:46.12
Sean
It's like, yeah.

51:46.73
Andrew
this is the problem dude it's so fucking hard to run an agency and and stand up a sass at the same time like this is what we talked about it it's just like unless you just put someone on it full-time and and then yeah they kind of got to be an entrepreneur in residence type they've kind of got to be a founder type and they've got to be fucking reliable which is hard to find so and

51:47.33
Sean
But, yeah. Yeah.

51:59.10
Sean
Mm-hmm.

52:04.70
Sean
Yeah.

52:07.09
Sean
Yeah.

52:09.47
Sean
It's very hard to find.

52:11.05
Andrew
unless you can like find that magical person it's just like it inevitably ends up getting like pushed to the side for you know agency work the stuff that's paying the bills

52:22.03
Sean
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Anyway, that's where we're at We've done nothing since our since our engineer left.

52:32.03
Sean
His start looks cool, though. His start looks like it's going super well.

52:35.67
Andrew
really cool

52:36.26
Sean
Yeah, it's gtmengin.ai, I think. their whole he It's not his startup. i think he's a founding engineer. It's a bunch of these other people. But and this idea that like you know humans should not be meant to clean their CRM.

52:49.29
Sean
What if we just piped all your calls and everything into HubSpot and Salesforce and then did a bunch of like other things on top of that? Just like a cool yeah like a cool premise.

52:55.91
Andrew
Nice.

52:57.81
Sean
haven't seen anything like it.

52:58.26
Andrew
Yeah, I mean, this is kind of has some overlap with the direction that Scout is like playing around with. And yeah, super interesting.

53:04.76
Sean
Yep.

53:10.41
Sean
Cool. Mm-hmm. Sure. Yeah.

53:12.36
Andrew
talk Cool, cool. Sorry, I got distracted by it. hey a Slack message. It would be super fun if Chark Juice had a second life.

53:22.74
Andrew
like I don't expect Chark Juice to be a super viable business, right? like it'll It's 100% a stair-step type business that'll like plateau at some point and be probably...

53:34.27
Sean
yeah

53:36.83
Andrew
you Especially if it does... if If we get some traction in this more consumer-y direction, then Churn will be super fucking high It'll be like... yeah it's it's a would be a tough business to to build but uh one i would love to not be paying for something that's has zero revenue i would love to get the you know it doesn't cost much to run it costs 100 bucks a month or something to run but and be less if i wasn't if i made some other architecture choices but

53:52.04
Sean
Yeah.

54:11.71
Sean
Mm-mm.

54:13.98
Andrew
But also, i just always loved the name. And so I just, I would love for it to like exist and in some little state.

54:16.81
Sean
Yeah.

54:19.39
Sean
Yeah.

54:22.26
Andrew
You know, even if it's making like 500 bucks a month or something, like that would be killer.

54:21.94
Sean
Yeah.

54:28.10
Sean
That'd be pretty cool. I mean, it would would be pretty cool. You could always, like, you know, you could always sell it.

54:30.56
Andrew
Yeah.

54:32.44
Sean
Let someone else take it on. who

54:35.62
Sean
Yeah.

54:36.04
Andrew
Yeah.

54:38.39
Sean
Cool. Sick. Want to arrive there? All right.

54:42.59
Andrew
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. good to Good to finally get back on the mic. What is that?

54:50.41
Sean
Mike wagon. On the Mike wagon. We're back on the Mike wagon.

54:53.26
Andrew
I don't like that.

54:53.50
Sean
Yeah.

54:54.44
Andrew
I don't like that at all. Yeah.

54:55.71
Sean
Okay.

54:56.79
Andrew
But yeah. Good to be back. Who knows when the next one will be? We'll see. Maybe next week.

55:02.36
Sean
Hopefully. Yeah. We'll see you next week. Probably. well