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How We Became SEOs & the State of SEO and Content Marketing in 2023 Podcast and Video Transcript

[This transcript has been lightly edited to ensure readability]

Ruthi Corcoran: What talking to each other and then posting it to the internet? 

Surprising Alex with the Met Gala

Dave Dougherty: Hello and welcome to a new episode of Enterprising Minds, you know, before we, we jump into the three topics of today, the Met Gala was this past week and, you know, Ruthi and I are quite into at least paying attention to fashion weeks and just keeping an eye on it.

I'm not saying I'm at all super knowledgeable about it, but Alex, I wanted your hot take on who was the best dressed for the Met Gala.

Alex Pokorny: My t-shirts, sponsored by, wait, no, we don't have them as a sponsor, but it'd be hilarious if they were, $5 tees or $6 tees. Which is exactly the cost of this t-shirt. 

Ruthi Corcoran: And could you comment on the legacy of Carl Lagerfeld and how it fit into the theme this year? 

Alex Pokorny: Yep. Yep. They'll look great. They're great.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. Okay. Well, so now that we're, now that we're done with that intro, I have to say I did like Jared Leto's cat costume, and Mary J. Blige is amazing in anything she does, That was pretty much my takeaway from at least what I saw on, on New York Times. 

Ruthi Corcoran: I hope that the pearls stay, like let's just run with the pearls motif. Let's bring them back, it doesn't have to be just a sort of conservative lady situation.

3 Topics for Today

Dave Dougherty: Cool. Now, so going to the marketing focus, which is why, we're here and why people have told us they listened to us. Ruthi, why don't you go first? What's your topic this week? 

Ruthi Corcoran: I want to know how you guys got into SEO. 

Alex Pokorny: Ooh, that's a good question. 

Dave Dougherty: That is a good one. My topic is The Tilt, an organization that was started by Joe Pulizzi after he sold Content Marketing Institute, just came out with some, research on content entrepreneurs or the creator economy that wanted a quick talk on, so Alex, what do you have this week? 

Alex Pokorny: This one's going to be another AI-focused one, but it's where AI fits on your team or does it not fit on your team? And then a bit of a hot take on IBM, just because that was really frustrating to me. So I'm just going to rant about that for a moment.

How We Became SEOs

Dave Dougherty: All right, Ruthi, why don't you, get us started with how you got, how you got in, and then we'll talk about ours.

Ruthi Corcoran: Oh shoot. I didn't know I had to go first. Damn it.

I suppose I stumbled to an extent, which is to say that I like my generation and millennials, I had the wonderful skill of being good with websites and being good with technology. That's how I landed my first sort of marketing tech job. They needed somebody who could manage websites and who sort of could speak to developers and I fit the bill.

So I started off just by doing basic web updates, doing redesigns, and then expanded into other areas of marketing. But it's hard not to be in the web space and looking at your web traffic, but then also realizing: Oh, right, there's this thing called organic traffic. People search on the web and then they find your website. How do we go about making sure that more people find your website?

So for me, it was very organic in the sense that it wasn't something I set out to do. It was something that we had limited resources at a nonprofit I was working at. We were just trying to do the best with what we had. We didn't have a lot of digital expertise built in, but in the process of trying to improve our web experience and the process of trying to improve our marketing, it's hard not to run into SEO on the way.

It was just part of the bread and butter of what I was doing at the nonprofit, and then when I was looking to expand into a different career space, I found out that you could just do it full-time. Your full-time job could just be search engine optimization and that you could be, there were different branches of it. You could do the technical side, you could do content, and it wasn't just an all-in-one thing that you happened to do as part of managing a website.

So then I found my way onto an SEO team that focused more on technical and platform. And that was the happily ever after. 

Alex Pokorny: So what attracted you to it, though? I mean, of all those different things you were doing on a website, you could have gotten into graphic design, front-end development, and back-end development. There are so many other areas too that you were touching. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Well, that's fair. That's a good question, Alex. I think part of it was the analytics. It was fascinating to see, Oh, what were people thinking? How were they stumbling upon us? And seeing that show up and seeing: Okay, we're getting more traffic for these particular terms. I wonder why that is or what are people looking for when they're looking for those terms.

And Google Analytics, I mean, first love, right? It's just a wonderful place to explore. Then you realize, Oh, there's this other thing that Google creates Google Search Console. I can't remember what it used to be called, was that Webmaster Tools at the time?

Yeah, and so a lot of it was just interesting and pulling the thread of what are our users doing. How are they getting here? And how do we think the way that perhaps our customers or users are thinking? 

Alex Pokorny: Very cool. Dave, do you want to go next? 

Dave Dougherty: I had a similar one where I've had this hypothesis and I've said it before that SEO is an interesting field because you don't go to school for it. You have to be introduced to it. Either accidentally through analytics or somebody saying, Hey, here's SEO. Go do it. And that was kind of my introduction. 

I was always the kind of business-minded guy on any of the music projects I was on back in high school, college, and after that. Then, you know, as I was a guitar teacher and recently graduated into the Great Recession with arts degrees. I had to pay the bills, so I had a creative writing degree, and I could write and I could play guitar. Not much has changed since then. 

So I did some freelance writing gigs and you get better clients and better projects, the better your stuff does. Just looking into that, the primary introduction to it was probably some ghostwriting for plastic and cosmetic surgeons and their blogs and I had to learn the difference between the two of them. Because it's a big difference actually. 

But essentially the guy who hired me for it was like, Here's your client list. Here's who we want you to write for, and if you have any questions go to Copy Blogger. And that's how I discovered Brian Clark and the Copy Blogger stuff and that whole community of people. That's how I got into the traditional sense of copywriting within marketing and advertising.

Because before it was just, Yeah, I'm a creative writer. I can write in any kind of voice. I can write in any kind of lens or whatever else. But then honing in that, how do you actually write to persuade people rather than make it interesting and fun and whatever else. 

From there it was just continuing the balloon because part of it too was with the music projects, it was, Okay, I've built this website because that's what every band that I know of has. I've got this album I've produced. How do I get people to know about it if I have no money for advertising or shooting a music video or whatever else? Like, how do you do that? 

Well, you can do that through the website, through social and through any combination of that. So that's how I got into that kind of content creation and promotion side of things outside of writing. Like most things, you start with mimicry because that's your introduction and then you find the way that you like to do it and build up from there.  

Alex Pokorny: Cool. And you stuck with it just because of your continued interest in learning more about it or just became the thing that you're just good at, so you keep on doing it? Or it's still a creative aspect?

Dave Dougherty: No, I have the personality of if I'm into it, I'm 150% into it. And if I'm not into it, there is no amount of persuasion that will get me to do it. It will be physically painful if I'm not into it, which on the one hand serves me pretty well because then I'm used to saying no to things that just aren't of interest.

The thing that keeps me interested in it, and I was reminded of this with Ruthi introducing me to Rory Sutherland, was the behavioral psychology aspect of it, right? Because of the idea of influencing someone while they're making decisions about something they've identified they need without being next to them is a really interesting problem to solve.

Because if I'm sitting and talking to you and you say I'm looking for a painting guy. Who would you recommend? I can just give you the phone number and the name of a guy I've used and say, Yeah, he did good enough work. And that's pretty much good enough for most people, right? 

But if you need to know something, or you're trying to go down a rabbit hole of some kind, and make comparisons, then you have to put in the work. And that's a totally different kind of writing. That's a totally different kind of setup. 

So through the writing, I've always been more of that ecosystem kind of guy. Like, let's build that marketing ecosystem where you can just pull the levers of stuff and adapt to how the market changes around you. Not just this single tactic, you know, myopic kind of focus that the market wants us to be in, as you know, as marketing professionals. Because I think it's more powerful with the connection of everything.

How about you Alex? 

Alex Pokorny: I don't know. A similar story just based on the timeline because of the Great Recession, certainly. In college, I was originally, an economics major. And that lasted for a while. It was doubled with a general business degree, which is pretty common to do.

And then basically as I got higher and higher levels of economics eventually it became theoretical and you start to see where a lot of assumptions are built into some of the equations that are used quite often, like GDP and other things like that. I was a lot into, unemployment and then monetary theory. That was my two focus areas. 

And you get really into that kind of stuff. I mean, fiat money and currencies and stuff. There are some pretty fascinating aspects of just how the world works and that's what I always liked about economics. It was trying to pose a theory of how things work.

But it eventually got too way too theoretical and then I started near my senior year, I started looking at job prospects. Turns out dentists, and economists, they have something in common, which is high rates of depression, alcoholism and suicide. And I was like, wow, that's really bad. 

Ruthi Corcoran: It drops off after you go through your Ph.D., then things are okay. It's just that Ph.D. period. Then… 

Dave Dougherty: See also musicians, writers... 

Alex Pokorny: I know, it was like, wow, this is setting myself up for success on this one. Especially when focused on monetary policy or especially on unemployment, generally speaking, that's a government job or you're sent off to some town or city that's just not doing well. Then you try your hardest to try to turn things around without much help and you also live there, which is also wasn't very attractive to me either. So I was trying to find something a lot more applicable and not theoretical. That was one of the main things, so I upped my general business to a marketing degree.

I did like one extra semester, so did a little extra year or extra half year. And then I have a ridiculously unearned economics minor since it turns out I was like a class away from a BS in it, so whatever. Not really of use. 

Then at that point, the same thing, the Great Recession. I have a marketing degree and while I was at school I knew a guy who knew a guy, so he got me into a tech job on campus because I didn't have a car. So I worked a tech support kind of a job basically throughout all of college. I had a resume that wasn't, there were a ton of random jobs. We can go through at some point, which is just fun because they're bizarre. But then I also had, the most recent thing was a couple of years of tech support and a marketing degree. So, you know, digital marketing. That became the answer there. 

Ruthi Corcoran: I will say as sort of a foreshadowing, the number of jobs Alex has had and the diversity of jobs Alex has had is something for us to discuss in the future because it's fantastic. 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, we could add one to each episode. It would take us through at least half a year.

Ruthi Corcoran: I like it. Find out next week. 

Alex Pokorny: Exactly. Let's go down to rabbit hole, yet another bizarre story that Alex somehow almost died. There were too many of those in those jobs as well. So that's fun. Yeah, a lot of decent paying but not great workplaces. But that was kind of the stuff that I had for a resume. So I had a junk resume. 

Basically, I was trying to figure out what on earth would someone hire me for. I applied like crazy, which I'm sure you guys had a very similar story to that and there was an agency nearby that took a chance on me being an entry-level hire. 

Actually analytics. That's where I started. I was doing all the monthly reporting, which was awful, the awful aspect, not so much from the data. The data is interesting.

Ruthi, I had a shared experience of the fascination of learning more about what people do on a site and the fact that you're able to find out what they do on a site and what they're interested in and what they're not interested in, and how they click around on a site. It's fascinating stuff. It's like, I didn't really know that all that stuff was being tracked. You have that kind of curiosity. And then there's the next piece of it of like, Okay, so how do we get people in the right direction? 

I'd say it was awful because monthly reporting is awful because you suddenly owe a client, like 16 or 20 clients, a report and you have three days to get them all done and that's awful. So, you know, the beginning, 

Dave Dougherty: I hated that part of agency life. 

Alex Pokorny: Oh, it's terrible. Yeah, I'm back at it right now, which is pretty awful.

Ruthi Corcoran: And then on the fun side, are they really looking? And if they do look, are they getting anything out of it? 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. Fun story about that. Once worked at an agency we had a horrible time going through all these reports, and they had to be printed off on legal size sheets of paper, which is bigger than a regular size sheet of paper.

Who has a printer even stocked with that size? But it was hundreds of data points that we manually typed in from Google Analytics and AdWords. It was ridiculous. So eventually I made a mistake and I had to tell a client. We had this awkward meeting of being like, I'm so sorry, I totally messed up. I flipped some figures, flipped two numbers and that totally changes how your month went. 

And the response was, Oh, I didn't see it. And I was like, Oh, okay. So eventually I convinced my boss, and this took, I think, a couple of mistakes too, of just saying like, look, data entry wise, straight numbers, like on average you mess up every, it's like 4%, 3% or something of the time. So if you have hundreds of figures on a page, there are going to be problems. 

So I contacted all of our clients, called them all, and the common response was, Oh, we can't open the file. Because we use Apple's numbers instead of Excel, we save it in a Numbers format, which nobody had. So for months, we've been freaking out about these reports. Nobody ever looked at them. 

Eventually, we created an auto GA report that everybody was fine with. That was good enough. It was so dumb. Just so dumb. The amount of distress from nothing. 

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. That was one thing that happened to me. I created Word templates for that because it was the same thing. Screenshots. A little bit of commentary, which really honestly didn't change all that much each month, so you'd just take the screenshots, put it in, and send it over. 

Yeah, it was the same thing. I'm like, You know what? No. We're going to do this in real-time. When we have our monthly meetup, we're going to open up your analytics and we're going to talk about if anything jumps out at you.

And if not, if you don't feel like talking about it, then we can use the time more strategically. And then I'm not wasting your time and I'm not wasting your money. So, you know, how about that? That seems to be better. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Exactly. That piece, it's analytics are important and seeing what's working and what's not. But you have to have a conversation. Otherwise, it's just a sheet of paper or a document that no one opens. And if they did open it, what's the end result? 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. I know you got so many questions about pages per visit, and bounce rate. I'm glad they switch or switched to an engagement rate. But stuff like that too is like, there's some of that requires a technical explanation as well as. You know, leading someone through those figures or someone who's seen a couple of different sites saying, No, this looks weird now to the business owner.

But, switching back. A quick SEO wrap-up of how I got into it. Basically started analytics and that didn't actually take too long until I switched out of that because the guy who was doing SEO was more interested in doing user experience, so he moved over to that and I took basically that role of doing SEO work.

I found it fascinating because it's similar, at least in my mind, I've seen it similar to economics because what's going in, what's coming out, and there's this big black box in the middle. 

So it's a black box problem, and those are fun because there is no answer to a black box problem. You just keep poking at it and trying to figure out different theories of saying, Well, this went like this. Maybe that's the way it works. And then you find that's not true and you try something else. So it's this continued curiosity and fascination with it that really kept me into it.

And then quickly from there, I got sucked into like the world of affiliate marketing, of online drop shipping online sites, in terms of the solopreneur, entrepreneurial kind of aspect of it. And while a lot of it, yeah, 99% of what you find online related to that is complete snake oil BS. There is some grain of truth behind it.

Being able to build an online business, and of course, many people do successfully do that. It takes a lot of hard work and it takes a lot of years, which is what most things gloss over. But the ability to do it, the fact that one person can do it just seems like such an opportunity.

That always has stuck in my head of SEO is an aspect of what we do with technology, but there's so much more around it. That's the piece that really has kept me in SEO was the fact that it's tied into everything. 

So at one point, I was managing a team of people in different countries who were writing content. Eventually, I created a team of editors because there was so much content they were creating. So I was up at 3:00 AM having these chats with people on the other side of the world who were creating copy for me. 

And I'm like, that's crazy. I mean, it's just such a random opportunity. Eventually, I had like a data entry team as well doing other random stuff and then just doing all these different pieces of it and all these different areas that it keeps pulling you into and different conversations with different people who are specialists in other areas.

That just makes it an engaging, interesting job. If it was like doing my taxes, my gosh, I would not last. As fascinating as that can be. No, no, it's not that interesting. It has to have more engagement, more complexity, more people, more experts, you know, more touchpoints. And that's what's kept me in it.

Dave Dougherty: The fact that you have an economics degree answers some things for me. 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, it probably does. 

Dave Dougherty: Makes some things click. 

Alex Pokorny: Well, I was actually wondering with, Ruthi if you saw some parallel in your background with the kind of the black box curiosity, or did you see it kind in a different way?

Ruthi Corcoran: I'd never thought of it through that lens before, but it makes a lot of sense. Even more so the second part of it's connected to so many other different things that you can pull threads on and explore. I think that to me is perhaps more…

But my background's economics and finance in terms of what I studied in college. I like the data side. I don't want to do only data analysis, but it's something that has been current throughout my intellectual interests. And so I think in that case it's similar. 

I think the black box thing is a bit more of sort of a scientific approach that I haven't had as much, but you guys have introduced me.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. It is an interesting job also because at least if you look at it from the data standpoint, it's data. But it's like Dave was saying, it's so much more than that on the one hand and then you layer psychology on top of it. 

Like why would someone type in this phrase? They search it 720 times if we forget about bucket average and rest that kind crap. They search for it 720 times a month. But what does that mean? 

What are they actually looking for? Are they actually my audience? Is it some high school students who are trying to figure out what is leukemia? Or before we start talking about treatment and local hospitals and you know, where a particular hospital might have a treatment option. Or we can talk about other topics as well. 

What is the exact same kind of question of trying to get within the searcher's head and really fully within their shoes to really understand where are they on this journey to solve this problem? 

Like Dave was saying, at what point are they in, and where are they going to go next? Where can we guide them and lead them if they're in this stage versus this stage? What kind of content would they want? What kind of hook will our content have that will convert them or try to nudge them in this direction toward our product line? 

Ruthi Corcoran: And that, I think, is another big connection back to economics for me too. Economics is very much the study of human behavior and human interactions, specifically in a trading environment, but it looks at incentives. It looks at how people respond to different incentives. And that's, that's very much what we do in the SEO world as well, is taking a look at how are people interacting on the web. 

How are they responding to changes in the search interface? All of a sudden you get additional questions that change how people respond. And that's fascinating to me. 

I mean, the economics of marketing is maybe a topic for another time, but just a little bit of it. One of the reasons for marketing in the marketplace is the spread of information. That's a key way that marketing helps grease the wheels of our economies. That's what search and the internet are all about, is finding information. It's a big world out there. 

SEMRush's State of SEO 2023 Research Report

Dave Dougherty: That's actually a nice, segue into some of the research I wanted to talk about, not just with the content creation, but I remembered another one that I'm going to shout out. So I have two. I'm slipping two in.

SEMRush recently released their search market traffic trends for 2022. They analyze the top 50,000 domains, from their trends data. It’s some ridiculous number of pages on the internet. And I thought what was interesting, you know, we talked about search always being ever-changing and, you know, the human behavior behind that always changing and all of that in one of the graphs. Shows retail traffic, travel industry traffic, and fashion traffic, all, from the graph, pretty much tanked over 2022. 

Right off the top of my head, I haven't done too much research into this yet, but this is where I want your thoughts on either validating the hypothesis or not. Is the impact of TikTok on those industries, preventing searches on Google, or other search engines? 

With the retail side, it's easier just to open up Amazon and buy whatever it is you're going to buy or the Target app, or Walmart app, or whatever stores you tend to frequent. If you are unsure, you go to TikTok, and check out the influencers. Go to Instagram, check out the influencers, and see what's there. Maybe buy from the stores, right there?

What are your thoughts on the changing search landscape? 

If you go to the show notes on the website, we'll have links to all these things.

Alex Pokorny: What were the three? You said fashion, retail…

Dave Dougherty: Fashion and apparel, retail and travel.

Ruthi Corcoran: On travel, are they thinking like, this is my blog about traveling or is it like airline traffic? 

Dave Dougherty: Well, I think travel would be all of the above. 

Ruthi Corcoran: All of the above. 

Alex Pokorny: They're grouped by domains, so it'd be what they consider that category of that domain to be in. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Oh, sure. I was just thinking, is it more the media about travel or is it travel as a service, that's all.

Dave Dougherty: That would still be under the travel industry, no matter how you break it apart though. 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. I mean, some of that I wonder if the COVID effect is an  ongoing effect. Fashion I can definitely see going downhill along with my t-shirt choices, clearly. I mean that's COVID, man that's COVID.

There are probably some changes with that at retail. I think you're absolutely hitting the nail on the head with that one. There are so many data points out there about how e-commerce searches basically start on Amazon. They don't go to Google first. You're not really looking around. So that traffic basically just hits that one place.

But why traffic to Amazon would drop, I'm kind of surprised by search traffic. Because they're just going to go there straight near direct traffic. It's not organic at the moment or, you know, within an app because again, not organic, Retail overall. I mean, they've struggled a bit post-COVID to try to bring people back into stores because people got so comfortable shopping online.

So I see some of that. I've also seen, I don't know, it's totally anecdotal, but I've definitely seen when searching around that the same kind of major domains pop up a lot. There's always been, you know, a theory that Google rewards bigger brands, but there's a lot of tactical reasons for ranking factors of why they actually do well based on backlinks and content and a bunch of other factors. Including, like, they probably have full-time SEOs and small places don't.

But I keep finding a lot of big brands, even for searches that are kind of tentatively attached to them. I bet there's probably a better smaller site that's more specialized. I don't know. It seems like the overall number of domains and it seemed to be, I don't know if I'm remembering it right, but SEMRush kind of agreed with that. 

The overall number of domains is dropping, unique domains, so I keep wondering how pushed we are toward certain venues. And the more pushed you are to a particular brand, the more likely you are to go direct to them and not search for them. So you'd kind of create that, create that push.

Ruthi Corcoran: I think what stands out most to me is how much, I don't have a gut reaction to this. Which is to a great extent my search web behavior has not changed fundamentally since I started using the internet. Or at least the last five, maybe not started using the internet, that's changed drastically, but in the last say, five years my behavior with different websites, with search, with different applications hasn't changed a ton. 

And this, I think is why it's really important to pay attention to data, like what they're publishing. Or to see what consumer behavior is and what consumer trends are. Because my gut reaction is very different than say somebody 10 years younger than I am.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. There was a State of Voice Search that came out too. I was talking about one in three adults basically using voice search, which I hardly ever do. If I do it's through Siri and it's usually pretty bad, to be honest. But like people when they're using voice search, they're using, it was an average of like 43 words in a search. Which man, that's specific. Like that's not looking for a Chinese restaurant near you. That's, they got one very specific dish in there. We're located... 

Ruthi Corcoran: We're looking for Szechwan cuisine located in Fairfax, Virginia. That was recommended by this food blogger...

Alex Pokorny: ...and is opened between these years because I don't know why not. I don't know, like you to get to that many words. That's a very specific search. 

Just to throw on the economic aspect too, looking at those three categories, those are also three categories that are usually kind of on the edge. So when people's budgets are tight, they don't travel as much, and they don't buy many new clothes. I mean, a lot of that stuff kind of changes. So depending on consumer trust, which I thought recently has been pretty solid, that would be a factor. But I don't know. I'm not sure, Dave. 

Dave Dougherty: The limited number of domains that are being shown stood out to me. During the pandemic, I was fortunate enough to be asked to present at one of the local universities, and I created a deck around reputation management and search marketing.

In that, I found a quote from Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, where back in 2013, I believe, he said that reputation is going to be more and more important, and basically the key commodity of the internet moving forward. And I was reminded of that with our discussion on AI and the ability to explode content out there.

We talked about the drop shipping websites where you can just send products from Alibaba to Amazon and then, say you have an e-commerce store in it, what do you do to support that? You have the AI-generated content to go spam the hell out of people, and none of its really good, high quality, but there are enough people who would go for it and buy it that it's reasonable to do something like that. 

In order to not have those types of websites prominent in the search results, I could see why the search engines would want a trusted name to be higher up because it's a more consistent experience and there's probably customer service on the other side of it instead of the drop shipper. 

I thought that was interesting and we'll have to wait and see how it plays out. How it develops around that. 

Ruthi Corcoran: I think that piece is really interesting, which is you've got this huge influx and number of website content because our technology is getting better. It's easier, even if, let's set aside some of the AI-generated stuff, it's just easier to create a website. Just make it right and so one reaction from the different search engines trying to figure out how we filter all this stuff is to rely more on the known names or the backlinks or figuring out some way to filter out the nonsense. 

What's lost in the meantime is you don't get those search results of here's somebody who's super passionate about this topic and is, and is writing in-depth articles. Which I miss. 

I've noticed that I haven't been able to find those as easily as before unless I already know about them or have them linked to, it's much harder to run into those via your average Google result. 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. I got two points to mention, but then I'm going to take this in a slightly different bend. First one, Yandex accidentally at some point released their ranking signals and Yandex is the major search engine in Russia. So not the top ones like Google, Bing, or Baidu. Baidu by population has a bigger user base. But one of the ranking signals, this is again the top search engine in Russia, one of their ranking signals is that they devalue Russian websites, .ru websites. They dropped them down and they also, up Wikipedia. That's just like two random factors that they basically applied. Which was pretty funny.

But I mean...

Dave Dougherty: See again, the previous comment on manual data sorting.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. And quality websites too. I mean, we're definitely seeing some factors there enough to say that we believe our population would be more interested in a site that doesn't actually even have their name (.ru) stuck onto it. That's a pretty big, pretty good point.

The next one would be that I want to make is about programmatic SEO. So like, TripAdvisor is a good example to explain programmatic SEO. If you search for a random city, you may come across an article that says the best activities in Duluth, Bemidji, Afton, wherever, some tiny town. And it's like, Wow, they wrote yet another article on this tiny town.

No, they created thousands of them. Thousands of these articles and cover basically all the cities of interest. So they spawned all this content that's covered up probably all these bloggers because it is likely that they're going to rank a little bit better than the random blogger from some tiny town that says, you know, fun things to do into my tiny town. This gets to my question to you guys, has SEO degraded the web, and the web experience of the web?

Ruthi Corcoran: Pollution on the Internet. 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. I mean, you're talking about spam. I mean, really this is search engine spam. Not spam being sent to your email inbox. This is... 

Dave Dougherty: I do think that would be a topic for a completely different episode. 

Ruthi Corcoran: We might have to bring in some people to interview on that topic as well.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. I'm going to write that down, 

Ruthi Corcoran: I mean, the short answer isyes. To a degree. You start playing the game. You're gaming the search engines is what you're doing, and then you throw in some pretty awesome technology into that, and you've got yourself a mess.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. I'm going to have to think on that one before I say something dumb. 

Alex Pokorny: We can totally hold up. There's a lot. I think we can go kind of back and forth on the pros and cons of if it is improving because of the education of the audience's interests or whether it is negative? 

Because we're getting to think about this in a pretty negative way where we're just spawning to thousands of articles. Are you creating a moat that's an effective moat? Is it something that's actually useful? 

Ruthi Corcoran: And is the landscape of the internet changing in terms of where we are? I remember where, it used to be the cool thing to make a map of the internet, you know, where Facebook would be sort of a region and you know, maybe LinkedIn would be a smaller region.

These are, and I think that concept is still applicable. There are different areas of where we interact in different ways on the internet and the magnitude and importance of those shifts over time. One way they shift over time is by search engines being spammed, so people go elsewhere because it's not helpful. It's not getting them what they need.

Alex Pokorny: And that also kind of pushes along search engine development too. I mean, they try to clean up those results so then certain tactics are no longer used. 

Dave Dougherty: Well, and that's the piece where for the last 10 years people have been saying voice search is going to kill the search engines. And it's just, it's just not. 

What I think is going to assist in voice search is an AI like ChatGPT, like with what Bing is doing. I think that that makes more sense from the voice search perspective than it does the actual SERP, traditional phone or laptop, SERP experience. Just because it is that one answer to then say, do you want more information?

Like, that's one of the things that I appreciate about BARD or, you know, Microsoft's Bing of, Hey, here's the answer, but do you want to search it and find out more information on the topic? Or are you satisfied with the answer? I appreciate that a little bit more than just the standalone GPT where it's at, blah, here's the answer.

Ruthi Corcoran: Really good question though, Alex. 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, I'm kind of thinking back to a fantastic webinar that Dave shared out, from Clayton Christensen. The speech he did at Google. And to be perfectly honest, I've so far gone through about half of, it's like an hour and a half. Gone through about half of it.

But he keeps talking about jobs to be done and basically, you can look at the long-term stability of a corporation, especially when they're tied towards this job that human beings have and they're trying to get it done. So he used an example of shipping. Shipping has always been getting some product from here to there, has always been a thing. It used to be a horse and a cart, and then there was a car, and then now it's, you know, FedEx.

Learning and figuring out information. That has always been a thing. I mean, he used to kind of go throughout the ages. Technology has changed, but the job hasn't basically. And that was his main point and I think of AI more clearly through that lens because if you're satisfied enough…That is also a common mistake I think a lot of businesses make because they try to go for the perfect, but most people are good enough with good enough. You know, that's enough. They don't need perfect and good enough might be ChatGPT's answer. It's the one result because they got a quick question and they just want the one result.

It used to be that you'd have to look it up in maybe an encyclopedia and the encyclopedia would say it, and that's all you have. So that's the one answer. Again, you're not really left with much more and there's not really a great way to question that answer that's given to you. People were perfectly satisfied with that at one point. So that was fine. 

I've also noticed, this is just kind of a random maybe ageism thing, but kind of the bar chat random question has kind of died off because it's not the, I wonder if this happened or something like that, then somebody nearly pulls out their phone, Googles it, and gives the answer and that's it.

Where it used to be kind of a discussion topic and they're like, No, you've gotta be wrong. It could, you know the record for whatever could no way be 50 feet. You know, it's gotta be more like 10 feet. And then you go back and forth and you create this whole conversation off of it. But now you pull your phone and you're like, Nope. The longest, whatever, jumper, whatever, you know, the answer is all that. 

Ruthi Corcoran: I think GPT is going to solve this. 

Alex Pokorny: Well, that's the thing. That's where... 

Ruthi Corcoran: Hallucinations. It's just perfect for bar conversations. Is GPT right on this? 

Alex Pokorny: Oh, the hallucination. Questioning the value of questioning for us. 

Dave Dougherty: Know what else is really good for hallucinations? Rail whiskey. So you don't need GPT, you can just... 

Alex Pokorny: Eventually become obstinate enough. No, it's gotta be. 

Google says it isn't. 

No, it's gotta be. 

Dave Dougherty: Well, I mean that is the origin story of the Guinness Book of World Records. I mean, you guys know that? 

Ruthi Corcoran: No. Tell us that. 

Dave Dougherty: Guinness and the whole bar conversation around what's the biggest long jump someone's ever done. So they went out and they started the Guinness Book of World Records so that you could distribute that and then settle the bar fights before they became full-on brawls.

Ruthi Corcoran: That is amazing. I hope this is true and I'm not even going to Google it to find out. I'm just... 

Dave Dougherty: Absolutely is true. 

Alex Pokorny: There's a perfect example of good enough. Thank you. Thank you, Ruthi. 

Dave Dougherty: It says Guinness on the book. It has to be right. 

Alex Pokorny: But how did they measure it? Was it really metric feet? There's no such thing as metric feet. 

Dave Dougherty: How'd they get the dog to jump in the first place? 

The Tilt 2023 Creator Economy Benchmark Research Report

Dave Dougherty: To your point about the internet changing, I'll just touch on this quickly because we do have the third question to get to.

The Tilt research that came out on content entrepreneurship, that's the term that Joe Pulizzi is using for this creator economy thing because he wanted to segment away from the hobbyists or the social influencers. 

He’s very particular about how there are really three main categories of creator: 

1. There's the hobbyist who's doing it on the side. Just for fun. "I have this blog because it's a topic I'm into." 

2. There are social media influencers, which is really just trading fame for money basically, and attention.

3. Then you have this other category that he's dubbing content entrepreneurs, which is really a digital content first business model, where you go out, you either have some knowledge and some expertise that you can then build a platform around and go convince people that they should either buy from you or whatever else.

I think a lot of us marketers, because we're creative people kind of inherently, or we see problems and opportunities to solve all over the place. We kind of dabble in all of it.

But one of the questions that they asked the network of people that they had was, How long did it take you to build a successful creator business? Some interesting things jumped out. 

So from the moment you launch your project, it takes on average, 4.9 months to earn your first dollar, it takes a little over a year for revenue to exceed your expenses. Most people switch to full-time content entrepreneurship at 12.7 months, but it takes 18 months or a little more for them to fully support themselves off of the business. Then 18.8 months for them to hire their first help.

So I thought that was really interesting because it is actually the kind of roadway for building a digital business. Like now you could do some modeling or some estimations on how long it will take you to actually be successful on this. And they go into How are people funding this? What are you actually devoting your time to? 

Because a lot of the things with the creator economy, you're thinking, Oh, I really like guitars or makeup or whatever, I'll spend most of my time creating content around that. And that's false. You spend less than half your time creating content, according to this report. It's only 46% of your time is content creation. The rest of it is promotion, distribution, business admin, and other things

And what are the most profitable monetization tactics for creators in this space? 

• Consulting and coaching

• Publishing books. (We've talked about the ebook spam with the AI stuff).

• Online courses

• Workshops

The last two might actually be the next thing prone to AI pollution and then affiliate marketing after that. And then after that it just kind of tanks into the other stuff that you do. But it does seem to be an all-in kind of thing where the agency consulting model is blending with a media model, which is blending into a lot of these things that we would traditionally look at. 

And through this kind of business model, I think it does go to the things that we talked about previously of you publishing your content on your own platform thinking that search engines will pick it up, but at the same time, what do you have to do?

You have to actually draw attention to it so the search engines will pay attention to your site. You do that through the webinars, the podcast, the local events, and everything else that you do. So it does become, like we talked about in one of the first episodes, the kind of SEO and organic search as an overall health metric of your business rather than just, Am I doing really well in this one particular tactic? 

I'll drop the link to the research in the show notes on the website and you can go check that out. But, as I've described it, does anything jump out to you on that?

Ruthi Corcoran: Yeah, man. I want to know what the dropoff rate is. I mean, 18 months seems very quick to me, which makes me think this is taking a look at the people who have succeeded and who are left. 

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. If you're getting rid of the hobbyists, then you shorten the runway quite a bit. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Yes. 

Alex Pokorny: What's the take get within the survey group? As you said, this was asked, this was a survey asked of members of the Tilt, I wonder if you have a selective audience who's paying, like, are they paying, you know, $1,500 bucks a year to get access and these are the people you're asking? Or is this a pretty wide, free network kind of a thing? 

Dave Dougherty: So this was a survey of 1043 creators, 397 individuals who want to be creators. They have the methodology here. 

Alex Pokorny: Okay, so they found people and the other stuff. 

Dave Dougherty: Yeah, I mean, it's, it's pretty well done. You would recognize the names on who's working with them on it. It's a number of organizations. 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. I was just kind of interested in and kind of Ruth's point too, of are these people who are really in-depth in this particular field. So you're kind of selectively surveying. 

It's really fast, in comparison to drop shipping and e-commerce. I have to tell you that that's usually like three to five years. It's a really long haul before you start making enough money to support yourself.

There are some really good interviewers out there that get people to start talking about the first couple of years, which are awful. I mean, you just don't make anything and you're constantly building and adding to it, and you're working for nothing during that period of time. So that's a quick payback model. But it's also really funny considering the courses and the like of that's where they're making money. 

Bring that around. I've always kind of had that problem with affiliates and drop shippers because it's like that joke of How do you make a million bucks in the stock market? You say you've written a book about how you made a million bucks in the stock market and you sell it for a dollar each. You sell it to a million people and now you made a million bucks. 

No one makes it. No one actually does it. And there's a whole lot of people who talk about it instead. And then as for the course, I made an AI course, it took about three minutes as the AI generated a course for me this last week. 

It was pretty junky training copy kind of stuff. But there were activities and from what I could tell, it was accurate in the data, and what it was putting together in all the different modules. That said it was a little bit repetitive too, and wasn't very good. But took three minutes. 

Ruthi Corcoran: So you should publish it, Alex. Get it off the ground. 

Alex Pokorny: No, you can have it. It was Advanced Techniques for Jira. I was, I wanted to come up with something that was kind of obscure I was going to just test the model and be curious. 

Dave Dougherty: No thank you. Yeah. 

Alex Pokorny: Oh my gosh. It was, I mean, it's a dry topic, to begin with, but it was, it was not good at all.

Dave Dougherty: To all of our friends at Atlassian, I have used your products and your products are great. But no thanks.

So anyway, I think maybe we'll do a deeper look into this because there was an interesting piece that the average audience size was only about 4,000 people. Because one of the misconceptions is that you really need a crazy amount of audience in order to make this a profitable thing at least for the content entrepreneur side. 

Like if you are doing consulting, if you are doing these other things, you're pretty much B2B, right? So you're not necessarily going to be needing that big of an audience in order to have a profitable organization. Plus if you're only doing digital things, your upfront costs are pretty low. Your tech stack is probably pretty low. I mean, because there are so many good free tools out there that you end up having gross margins that are ridiculous. 

Alex Pokorny: Well, that's what you said about covering expenses. And I was thinking when I went freelance doing SEO work, my expense was a laptop and like the cheapest version of QuickBooks. That was it. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Screaming Frog license, Alex? 

Dave Dougherty: The frog wasn't out back then, I don't think.

Alex Pokorny: But there was, yeah, you're right. There was an annual software cost that I spent on a different platform that was like maybe a hundred bucks a month. But that's what I was like, my total cost for the first year was pretty, pretty cheap. Being able to cover your expenses, I was like, wow, that's not much. 

Dave Dougherty: The thing I appreciate about this research, whether or not it's perfect, because no research is ever going to be perfect and you're never going to have big enough sample sizes to make anybody happy. But it's at least trying to quantify it. Because that is a large part of our economy. And when you ask kids what they want to be and it's YouTube creator, well, you have to have an infrastructure around it if you're going to be having all of these kids try it out.

Ruthi Corcoran: I think we just found our coaching opportunity right there. YouTube coaching. 

Alex Pokorny: Big Tech as well. I mean, throwing an actual full social media gambit. I mean that was, that's always the story about the Gold Rush. Nobody made money mining in the gold rush. It was the people who sold them shovels that made the money. It's like still generational wealth still from that, which is ridiculous. So don't become the influencer, sell to the influencers. 

Dave Dougherty: Yeah, because when they burn out you just get a new one. So anyway, on that lovely, business is not my friend note, Alex, replacing people with AI on your team. What do you want to talk about? 

Where Does AI Fit in Your Business and the Team You Manage?

Alex Pokorny: Oh yeah. So, talk about something timely as well with the Met Gala but the IBM CEO recently made a statement, which I'm going to rant about for a little bit, but then we'll get into a more realistic and actionable topic. I do promise that. 

Basically, he said that they are going to, through attrition, not a direct layoff, but over the next five years, which articles keep glossing over. In the next five years through attrition, they will reduce their staff by 7,600-7,800 people who are in backend office, non-client-facing, non-customer-facing roles. Mentioned a lot about HR and accounting, and that they're going to replace those roles with AI and they will pause on all hires where the roles could be replaced with automation of some sort. I have a lot of problems with that. 

One, over the next five years, you're going to save the company a bunch of money. In CEO tenure, that's a great thing to tell a bunch of people during your quarterly results and never have to fulfill that promise. I mean, that's a heck of a statement.

And he's been all about cost savings and efficiency. IBM has been known to kind of throw its name on the latest thing and try to tie its name into it. And I gotta admit, the last time I thought of IBM was quite a long time ago because I think of AWS with Amazon Web Services and all the servers and AI stuff that's attached to that now. You have Google with all that. You have Azure with Microsoft. I don't know where IBM really fits into the world anymore, to be honest. Somewhere. I'm really not sure where.

And this is the next point, which I was kind of feeding into this thought from, last week. I think this is way too premature to be also stating so clearly that you know, where AI fits and to say that AI can take over a role completely. That doesn't make sense to me. 

Buzzfeed and others who have cut writers, I get that. Yes, ChatGPT and a lot of these LLMs can absolutely create content and the content's pretty decent, so I get that. But the idea that you can replace people in HR, and accounting, I mean, that's been theorized by Goldman Sachs and others that you can potentially cut bookkeepers, lower level ones, but I still don't, I just still don't buy it. And I still don't think we're at the point where people are at the point of saying, this is exactly where AI fits and where you can kind of slot in AI. 

That's the other piece that I've been trying to think about this last two weeks, it's been, on a team, where does AI fit? For instance, I'm a project manager. Let's kind of make a marketing example out of it, I've got a new webpage that I want to get out there. So I need copywriting, I need design and imagery and I need somebody to put it on the site. And I probably want the SEO guy to be involved, or person, sorry, SEO person to be involved with it as well to talk about the keywords and you know, sprinkle on that SEO magic on top of it.

So where does AI fit? I've got a team of people and then in my mind, at my current company, I can think of who I would talk to to do those different tasks. And I could also figure out, okay, some of those can probably fit by AI and some of them really can't be. And if I tell the SEO, Hey, now you're in charge of ChatGPT to create the article and I need you to edit it. It probably won't be as good as somebody who actually is a professional writer, I need to use stable diffusion or any kind of other diffusion model to Midjourney, you name it, to create the imagery. Well, I gotta learn how to use those systems and spend my time doing that too.

And then I need a CMS or something that's user-friendly enough for me to be able to upload it versus a developer's time to add it to the site. There's all these, and then there's testing added to it. So I kind of get where AI fits. I also see a major problem with it too it may increase productivity in some areas, but it's also going to decrease productivity. 

Because now you've got one person doing the job of multiple and jobs that they're not necessarily a professional in and they're experienced with. So the quality probably suffers a bit and now that person isn't doing the other job that they're normally doing. So, that's one kind of piece is like, where does AI fit on a team trying to manage roles?

The other piece of it is the idea of automation in general takes investment and it takes time. Mark Zuckerberg had a point about getting rid of old tools and creating efficiency through that. I totally get that. That totally makes sense. I imagine we all work at a company that has a whole bunch of tech debt that we'd love to get rid of and kick to the curb, but you don't, because it takes a lot of effort to do it and you need to prioritize it. And that takes cost. 

That's my other issue with IBM is the idea that you're just going to not fulfill roles and that somehow these jobs are going to get automated is a joke. That's not accurate. You're going to have to spend money and time to figure out how to automate these roles, create that, implement it, and then also maintain it. That's a whole lot of costs. That's a whole lot of time and projects by a whole bunch of people. So you can't just over time bring in AI. 

Dave Dougherty: A couple of thoughts. So with the BuzzFeed model, and I think you're seeing this in a lot of media sites right now, even if ChatGPT or the large language writer assistant things didn't come around, there's a problem with ad-supported media right now. Buzzfeed shut down its news department because it was no longer tenable with the ad-supported piece. 

You have a lot of the New York Times writers and writers worth their salt doing the Substack stuff, but again, that's a subscription model, not the ad-supported thing. So there's that kind of infrastructure piece.

I've noticed through the smaller businesses, even like 10 years ago, you could tell that through the different automation and the different tech stacks that were coming up, you would have these individual tools, like your QuickBooks, and then you'd have your HubSpots, and whatever else. And each one did a very specific thing. Well, over the last 10, 12 years, they've gotten really good at doing a lot of things because our economy has supported bigness, and being the all-in-one kind of platform for that.

So I can see over time a lot of that innovation of connecting your QuickBooks to your website to handle your automatic e-commerce payment, to then make sure that your invoices are automatically sent. That all of that's been there for small businesses and solopreneurs for years.

But there's never been an enterprise-level thing that does that well. So now you could be at a point where, through ChatGPT or through the tools integrating all of these other things into their offerings to the enterprise clients, you're now better able to do that at that grand scale. 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. I think the systems are too limited. Like we are seeing massive evolution in AI. I mean, don't get me wrong. We're now seeing on a weekly basis some pretty amazing releases for models. So that's going like crazy, but we're still selective in these models where they just do the one thing, you know, Stable Diffusion, diffusion-related models, do their thing, LLMs do text. We don't have, it's called AGI, a kind of artificial general intelligence that ties multiple things together yet. And then also, especially at the enterprise level, my gosh, the random criteria and requirements that enterprise organizations come up with. They have a tendency to kill software.

It's like, I need this, this, and this, and you're going to have to support .net nuke. And they're like, What?! Yeah. It's a requirement. Yeah, it’s a $10 million contract, but you also need to incorporate software from 10 years ago. 

Dave Dougherty: By the way, boil the ocean too. Thanks. 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. Right. All the features. 

Ruthi Corcoran: I love this question, Alex, and I also love your rant at the beginning. That was sort of a good context setting. And I imagine listeners are, have their wheels churning as well, because this is a good one and I think this touches on a lot of the challenges that we see as AI comes online, or becomes popularized. And as we deal with our day-to-day in marketing at enterprises or smaller organizations.

And the IBM CEO, I mean, gosh, a couple of thoughts. One is, I can't help but comment. This is, these are the creators of Watson. They had big ideas of what that could do and that didn't work out. 

Dave Dougherty: They won a chess tournament. Yay. 

Alex Pokorny: I think Facebook won a go tournament. So go Facebook and build a Farmville... 

Ruthi Corcoran: But you know, you and I, the three of us have talked in the past about some of the problems with upskilling over time. It's very hard to do. How do you get a large organization or different groups of people to upskill and think differently about how they've done their role in the past? 

It's like there's technical debt, but then there's also process debt that you have to overcome. And if I'm the IBM CEO, some of the things I might be thinking about are, if we don't take advantage of this technology, we're just going to get wiped out by all the companies who are able to do so. How do we go about solving for that? 

And this is one way to force the hands of saying, we've gotta upscale, we've gotta shift, we have to do things differently. There's not really a choice to it. At the same time, it's a struggle because the people who are left in the roles aren't the types of people necessarily who are going to be able to implement all this automation.

So you need an infrastructure within IBM that'll enable that to happen as well. That works to create those different connections. The thing that strikes me, as you guys are talking about AI, certainly it's evolving fast, but a lot of the technologies to automate are already in place.

The problem is the technical debt is in such a state that you can't use those. If you have sort of a custom set of tools that you've sort of Frankensteined over time, coming in and applying a new tool that automates everything is very challenging. You almost have to, you have to re-platform or you have to find a different set of solutions, which again, takes retraining of roles.

You know, I'm skeptical of we're not going to hire new people, as these go out the door is the only thing that you do to solve for that. You need a new infrastructure and people to support these new automating technologies. 

Dave Dougherty: And Alex, to your point of the average tenure of a CEO. Who can afford to say stupid things? An old CEO who's probably out the door anyway. 

Alex Pokorny: The one with the golden parachute. Yeah. 

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. So you can say whatever you want. It doesn't matter because you have yours already. The rest of the organization is just going to be stuck with either implementing it or changing direction as soon as your replacement takes your spot. 

Ruthi Corcoran: But even if we take it at face value, let's assume the IBM CEO does plan to see this out. Maybe he does. I don't know. Maybe this is a way to force the hand of a company. That's when it's real. 

I think the analogy you've used in the past, Alex, is it's an armada shifting direction, right? Startups are these little boats that can swerve around and things, but if you've got a large enterprise, you've got to coordinate a lot of different groups and teams who are all working on sort of different things. You have to direct them all in one way, and if you want to move them, that is a huge challenge. This is one way you could. This is one way to do it. You just set the expectation. You say this is where we're going, everybody align. 

The other thought that comes up, you asked the question, Where does AI fit in our teams? And I think for me, the answer at this point in time is with what? With the emergent technologies and where we are and knowing that we have existing processes and existing roles in place, it's more of a yes.

And it's not that AI is replacing certain roles necessarily. It's we're using AI to amplify the human capital that we have to say, we can now do more, or we can do better, or we can do different, rather than wholesale wiping out our copywriters. It's okay, now you can take a headstart and you can do better copy because of this, for example. So that's where my mind falls. 

Alex Pokorny: I see it also in terms of where it currently stands today. Again, trying to use that static mindset, which I probably isn't helpful six months down the road because things are going to change. 

But right now I'm thinking of a senior software developer who's gotten a bunch of little random tickets and they're able to crank out a couple extra because they're using ChatGPT to help write code. Developers Googling and copying each other's code is standard. So that's no surprise. So maybe you have one less entry-level hire because you have a senior person who is smart enough and experienced enough to be able to do this quickly, incorporate into their workflow, review it, and then be able to implement it knowing that it's going to work. And then maybe you have one less entry-level, hire per larger team.

I mean, it's still not like a full person either, I think of like, Ars Technica had a good comment section. I got to admit from the IBM article and there are these two comments that really stood out to me. One of them was talking about some different call centers and service lines that they've called and they follow this script. That's just not helpful and they keep kind of running into this and they said, I made this quote of, if you do your job like a robot, you're going to get replaced by a robot. 

And yeah, I get those roles. I mean, yeah. There's some value to a human being in those roles from a kind of empathy standpoint, but if they really aren't able to solve a problem and they're just there to frustrate the heck out of you or something. You know, Comcast, maybe. Yeah, you could replace that with AI. 

And then another comment, which I think was also really poignant, was saying how they refuse in their company to use automated call centers and how their customers are so happy to talk to a person and to feel like they're being heard and connecting with a company and feeling a sense of loyalty.

That also is then a point of differentiation of, if a lot of companies go towards AI-heavy things of again, being the organic one or the human one and saying, No, we're going to do things differently. We refuse to have a 10-minute wait time in a call center. Instead, we're going to have people who are very well trained, or people who have a wide range of kind of bandwidth to be able to solve a problem.

Dave Dougherty: Well, and this goes back to our conversation a couple of episodes ago where we talked about what are you optimizing for? What are the actual KPIs your company cares about? Because if it's only going to be the bean counters that are driving free cash flow. You're screwed. You'll never have a good experience. You won't ever truly be customer first because you're only ever going to be optimizing for capital. 

I do think it makes sense from the start. I'm not justifying what he said, but I do think it makes sense that you start with the backend. Because the front end side, which I think the AI has gotten a lot of attention for in terms of writing all the eBooks, writing the white papers, writing these kinds of things. That is your connection to your customer. That is the relationship, right? 

You don't outsource your relationship! If you think back to junior high and you go, Hey, best friend, I like this girl. Can you go ask her out for me? What happened? The girl goes out with your friend, not you because you didn't step up and do what was necessary! 

That's going to happen. If you're not providing a good experience and you're not owning the relationship, then you know you don't own the outcome either. 

Alex Pokorny: How was prom for you, Dave? 

Dave Dougherty: I didn't go because I had a rehearsal. I was prioritizing music. I had to go do an audition for college that week. So I didn't go, but I did do other dances. So I'm not a total loser.

So anyway, on that cheerful, happy note. Thank you everybody for hanging out. Like subscribe, share, give us show notes, and any of your feedback, episode ideas, or anything. Let us know. 

Hit us up online. You got the links to how to get to us in the YouTube description. And we do put a lot of effort into the show notes and the transcripts on the website. It's a repository of all the webinars and research and links to cool things. So go check those things out. That has definitely been where I have caught up on all of the things you guys have mentioned in putting together those things. 

So, we will see you in the next episode of Enterprising Minds. Thank you and see you next week.