Things are always more complicated, and what happens is the state of the art always keeps improving. So, what people expect from a website will always change. So, today what uh people get is like a basic website. Tomorrow, at the brochure website, the expectation will go up so much higher. You might be able to do everything end-to-end, and the expectation will go up to a completely different level.

Welcome to the Agency Hour Podcast. And it's my birthday. That's right, we are so committed to helping you guys as I get out of bed on my birthday and come to work and host an episode of the Agency Hour Podcast. This is the podcast where we help web design, SEO, digital marketing agencies of all types create abundance for their clients, themselves, their teams, their families, and their communities. Let me just take a minute to define what I mean when I say digital agency. If you're in the business of selling any kind of marketing-related services to other businesses, then you are exactly who we help. So you could be selling video, content, funnels, podcast growth, YouTube growth, copywriting, branding, websites, search engine optimization, LLM optimization, AI consulting services, automation services, paid advertising, social media management, email marketing, marketing automation strategies, you name it. If you are selling any service to other businesses that helps them with their sales or marketing, then this podcast is for you. And when I say create abundance, what our job here is to help you guys do the best job you can to serve your clients and make your clients more successful. Because if your clients are more successful, then you will be more successful. And if you are successful and your clients are successful, then what we know is that we're helping create wealthy, healthy, and happier communities all over the world. And that's what we mean when we say that we think that of agencies as a distribution channel for abundance, and that's why we get out of bed every day. Alright, having said that, I just wanted to kind of get that off my chest. Today's episode, our guest is Akshat Chowdery from WP Remote. Now, WP Remote are a partner of ours, but they're also the reason they're a partner of ours is because they make an awesome suite of products. If you are managing any more than two WordPress websites for your own purposes or for clients, then you should definitely be using WP Remote to manage all of those websites in one dashboard. Blogfault is their backup plugin, Malcare is their security plugin, and Airlift is their performance plugin. If you get WP Remote, if you're using WP Remote, you get all those plugins built in. So go and check it out, uh WPRemote.com. And Axchat is currently in San Francisco. He's just been to WordCamp US and he is now currently at the HubSpot Inbound Conference in San Francisco, and he's taken some time out to come and hang out with us. So without further ado, let's go and have a chat with AKChat from WP Remote. Uh ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Agency Hour podcast with a return guest from WP Remote, Akschat Chowdere Akchat. How are you, my friend?

I'm doing well and glad to be back. How are you, Troy?

I'm very well, thank you. Uh it is, yes, it is my birthday today, and uh I and listen, I couldn't think of anything I would rather do on my birthday than hanging out.

No one's going to believe this one than hanging out with like-minded folks on the podcast.

Um, it's a pretty cruisy day for me. I've just been eating some cupcakes, and after this, I'm gonna go and play guitar. So it's very cruzy indeed. Now, listen, what are you doing in the States? The last time we had you on the podcast, you were uh based in India and it was 6.30 in the morning. It's now 6.30 at in the evening. What are you doing on the West Coast?

Yeah, so I was here for the WordCamp US, which happened last week, and then this week uh I extended my trip for HubSpot Conference, which was here in San Francisco. So I thought I'll make the most of it.

Well done. Um talk to me before we get into the HubSpot uh conference, because I want to unpack that a bit. But talk to me, what what was the vibe like at WordCamp US?

So, you know, coming in, there was a lot of trepidation, uh especially given last year's, you know, the whole drama around it. But things eased out quite a bit. So things were generally positive. I I had some really good conversations. In fact, I've not had such a productive WordCamp for a long, long time. So I um I had my team book uh conversations with uh uh customers just back to back and uh got long uh focused conversations as to how they are using our product and what we can do better and just generally about agency life, you know? So so so yeah, overall So the other thing is, you know, as much as we in the we think so much about the drama, there were so many folks who are totally oblivious to it. Totally. To them, it was just another word camp.

Yeah. W was there any uh kind of drama or politics with sponsors and stuff at this WordCamp?

No, things things were much better. So things uh I think uh next year's WordCamp should be back to normal, hopefully. So completely normal. And yeah, generally it was it was a good word camp. It was a good word camp. That the footfall was on the lower side, but you know that this uh WordCamp US where they repeat the location turns off people because no one wants to visit the same city twice.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where where was it this year? Uh it was in Portland. Portland. So they have it they have it in the same city two years in a row, don't they? Yeah. They do that. In if for the US one. It's weird.

I would yeah, it's yeah, you know, it's it's like uh uh it becomes an excuse to go and visit a new place. Like WordCamp Europe happens in a different place every time. And it becomes a great excuse to uh to visit a new place. Uh and uh butcamp uh us, they repeat it. And yeah, uh the second time around it it almost always uh doesn't have the same charm to it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh well that's good to hear that it it went well. Now, for those that don't know, by the way, uh Akshat uh is the owner of WP Remote. Um I'm just gonna walk you through very quickly the product stack. So Blog Vault is your backup solution. WP Remote is your all-in-one dashboard to manage all of your WordPress websites. Uh you've got uh Malcare, which is your security plugin, and you've got Airlift, which is your performance plugin. Have I missed anything? No, no, you're you're you're doing well. So yeah, that that's our that's our suite. That's the family of products. Um now talk to me about uh how different. So coming from WordCamp and then going to the HubSpot. Is it inbound? Is that is that the HubSpot is there? Yeah, that's what it's got.

That's what it's called.

So how different, how different was inbound to to WordCamp and also what were you expecting from inbound and how did it live up to your expectations?

So so yeah, uh because it was happening at the same time, and uh I make San Francisco my base almost every time I visit uh visit the states. So because it was happening here, I thought let me just spend uh a few extra days and make the most and just try and explore what's going on because I've never really s been to uh to inbound. Uh Hubspot is a huge you know ecosystem, it's like tens of billions of dollars. Uh it's a very valuable company, three billion plus revenue. And and you know, and they play in somewhat the similar ecosystem that we do. Only thing is they tend to be slightly more valuable. So you know, or actually it's more many uh I would say I think slightly is an understatement. They tend to be more valuable, they're serving more valuable customers, and that's always a nice thing to do, you know, to understand what's why are people willing to spend more money on software or on services. So you have agencies who are uh the software itself, like the marketing stack costs at least 60,000 a year, if not more. And uh and you have agencies who are charging a lot more for the implementation. So just to try and get a sense of what is going on, what causes people to uh to uh spend so much money, who are the kind of customers, and why why are they even coming and attending this conference? You know, the top conference ticket is twelve hundred dollars compared to a WordCamp. Then uh yeah, and here you have uh so one of the things is here you have actual customers coming. And so one of the people I spoke to was uh uh was a non-profit from Florida, and they were using it for their uh I think they were using it and they were they were they had an extensive uh they had an extensive uh implementation of HubSpot and they had like a bunch of people traveling from all the way from Florida. And that's an expensive if you can think about it, that's a that's a big commitment from the from the nonprofit, right? From the organization. And you see that uh why why are they making such an such a big commitment to come and come to such a conference to learn about about a software that they use so much, right? And then uh in WordPress events, we don't see as much of customer participation. So this to learn what's going on on that front was interesting. So yeah, and uh the conference will continue for two more days. So the goal is to get a sense of what's going on on this front and what can we learn? How can we charge more money? You know, you're you keep talking about that. How can we charge more money? How can we allow an agencies to charge more money? How can we allow agencies to derive to give the value that a Hubspot allows uh uh Hubspot agency to charge? You know, because it's all about giving that value. And how can uh how can a WordPress agency offer that sim a similar value, or how can we enable a WordPress agency to offer similar value to their clients?

So those are some of the thoughts that's the whole idea behind attending this conference. So the HubSpot conference, you're you're in the middle of it at the moment, it's still going, is it?

Yeah, so it's two more days of the conference. I'm obviously not at the conference right now, it's done for the day. Yeah. But yeah, there are there are two more days off it.

Yeah. A couple of observations. You know, I'm sort of back in the WordPress space. I'm building a couple of websites for some projects that I'm doing, some of my own personal projects that I'm working on. My wife's just launched a psychology business. I've got some other music-related projects that I'm working on. The thing about WordPress that is appealing is also the thing about it that's the most frustrating, right? Is the thing about that is appealing is that you don't like if you wanted if you like we were a HubSpot user for, you know, a couple of years. We signed a two-year contract with HubSpot. And we were spending over $50,000 a year with HubSpot. And we could not uh send someone an SMS natively out of HubSpot. We needed a third-party app to do that. And the whole promise with HubSpot really is that it's an all-in-one solution. That's certainly why we went into it. And so then I I just discovered that, you know, not only are we spending $50,000 a year on HubSpot, but I'm also now spending another $12,000 a year on these other bits of software because HubSpot doesn't do the thing that I want it to do. And, you know, when we started using HubSpot, and this is not a HubSpot bashing session by any stretch because they do some amazing work and it's a very innovative uh platform, and they really did innovate the small business, small to medium business sales and marketing automation platform. They were really the the the innovator in that space. They were kind of up against Infusion Soft and Office Autopilot back in the day, and they really uh they they they kind of took over in in that space. Infusionsoft pivoted to become keep and has now been sold for you know a few dollars. That was a bit of a tragic end to that story. Uh, but the with HubSpot, what uh what um the what we discovered was you know the frustration with a hosted platform like that is that if you want a feature that it doesn't have, you either have to find a third-party app that plugs in, which costs you more money, or you wait for HubSpot to decide that they're going to roll out that feature. So for example, calendar uh rescheduling and canceling. When we started using HubSpot, we came from Calendly. You could not reschedule, the customer could not reschedule or cancel an appointment. You can now, they can they completely redeveloped and refactored their calendar engine. But when we started using it, you couldn't. It was a nightmare, right? So, however, the simplicity of not having to worry about update plugins or not have to worry about uh your host or your server, or I mean, I'm working on a project at the moment. I just had to ping my server guys here in Australia and say, can you increase their memory to 1024? Because I'm doing something pretty complex with Elementor and it's just not playing nice, right? You don't have to worry about any of that with HubSpot. You don't have to worry about any of that with high level, right? You don't have to worry about any of that with any of the hosted platforms. But the problem is if you want to extend it and you want to add something, a feature to it, you have to wait for the platform to update it and it becomes, you know, you you're then beholden to them. So the value proposition for me is if you're an agency, it doesn't really matter whether you are a HubSpot agency, a high-level agency, a WordPress agency. Your job is to help the client leverage the technology to get the outcome the client wants, right? Because at the end of the day, any of these platforms has a learning curve. And uh you the client can either do it themselves, which we did because we're kind of developers and we kind of knew what we were doing with HubSpot, or you hire an agency to do it for you. Same with WordPress, same with high level, right? So as an agency, I think you have to keep it this in mind is your job is to help wrangle the technology to get the outcome for the client. And if you want the flexibility of being able to just quickly add plugins and do and do things and extend the functionality, then WordPress and that ecosystem is probably still your best option on the market, but it does require, and this is not a plug for WP remote, by the way, but it's just naturally going that way. It does require you to keep on top of your updates, right? Because that is what your client's paying you for, is to wrangle the technology. So I just wanted to make that observation. The other observation I wanted to ask you is is there any talk at the HubSpot conference about have you heard any talk at the HubSpot conference about high level? Do they think of high level as a competitor? Because I've heard whispers, you know, are we sitting here in two years' time and HubSpot have bought high level? I mean, Google tried to buy HubSpot last year, you know, like where who are HubSpot? Where are they going? What's their roadmap?

So frankly, I'm too much of an outsider to have any inside track. You know, I'm trying to just, you know, frankly, like in any of these conferences, I'm more of the Wallflowers. So having any of these conversations is quite an effort. But uh, I'm trying to get those conversations in. Uh I'm too too much of an outsider right now. Maybe in a year's time, when I've got my way around a bit more, then I'm able to comment better. But right now, uh though the high-level guys are fantastic. Yeah, I think uh both of us know them well, and uh they are doing such a great job. Truly.

So so so what's your motivation for being at the HubSpot conference? Because you you run a WordPress product business, right?

So so what's your it just I was uh it's like I was in the vicinity, I thought let me check out this other thing which is which is relevant to the overall ecosystem I'm s uh I'm working in. Because you know it's so it's so easy to have blinders on, and then you just don't realize what's going on uh outside of your ecosystem. And uh sometimes it takes a lot sometimes it takes you a lot more effort to internalize what what you have experienced. But it's super important to experience it, to go and see to even go and walk through the sponsorship booths, like what's going on, talk to the sponsors, why are they sponsoring, who are the people they are talking to, who are the people who are visiting. You know, if there are there's just so much, so much to learn from from learning from the ecosystem because we are not uh we are not in the WordPress space per se. We call it this, like that's the software we we we do, but I think it's the same reason why you you you guys are agency mavericks and not uh WP elevation, right? I'm guessing, like because it's and uh we are WP remote, but the reality also is that we are enabling agencies and we are enabling websites to be great, or we are enabling businesses to uh get the most out of their online presence or their marketing presence in some ways. So now what's the canvas we are pay uh we are painting on? We need to determine that, and it's just good to understand what's the bigger picture.

Is is there a future where you guys move into uh products or plugins or platforms that are not specifically just for WordPress? Do you think there's a there's an opportunity there?

You know, uh I mean we have thought about uh it a lot, but what I think is the again, given the size of our company, it just keeps making sense for us to double down. So what we realize is instead of being, you know, being not so good in in two different software, we can be great in WordPress, and which is what we have done, you know, each of our software, we just keep doubling down on making things better and making things just like the product can be so much better at every level, and if we keep doubling down on it, the best businesses, the best websites will always require the best solution. And those best websites are not going anywhere in WordPress. So uh the goal should not be to diversify, but rather to double down on on the stack that we know well and make sure that we are we we are the best at it.

Um couple of things I want to talk about. Uh this we might just be able to put an underline under this because I'm not exactly sure what the latest update is, but Morpheus. When when all the stuff happened last year and and WordPress were kind of blocking some hosts from updating plugins, you spun up a mirror to the WordPress plugin repository, effectively allowing people to update their plugins no matter where they were hosted. Is that still a thing? Is it still a part of your your your your business strategy?

So it's an open source, so it was never a part of the business strategy as such. We were we built it because we thought that the ecosystem, because there was so much again, you if you know to even today we were talking about the fear and every all the drama that happened, and all the everyone was fearful as to what uh what will happen to my updates or what what if I'm I get cut off. I feel that over time better senses prevailed. And while the software continues to be open source, I feel and I genuinely wish that uh I think the worst or is behind us and we can almost continue to trust on the on the de facto uh or or the you know the the system that we are used to. The software is available in case anyone needs it. I can see some use cases, but it's limited use cases and not uh it's not something which uh I feel uh we need to worry too much about as at least as things stand right now. If anything's changed, we can always relook at it. But at least from my my understanding of things right now, uh people are making amends.

I mean it's interesting. I don't want to I don't want to spend too long here in the in the politics of it, but it is interesting that WordPress is open source, but it's very centralized, right? So it's it's it's kind of like a and if you think of crypto and you think of you know blockchain and you think of the the kind of the wish to decentralize. I mean, I I'm kind of in the almost about to pull the trigger to to divorce from Google as a product suite and move everything, all of my personal stuff, move it into Proton, which is a you know private uh Swiss run organization which offers all most of the I mean anything it doesn't offer is is is Google Docs or Google spreadsheets, and it offers a very basic doc editor. But I, you know, I kind of I don't I like the idea of things being decentralized and I like the idea of having a sense of agency, right? And if I've got 150 websites and all of a sudden someone decides that I can't update the plugins because I'm hosted with the wrong host, right? That puts my business at risk. And I think that was the value proposition for Morpheus. It's like, well, we don't care, you know, we want to empower you to keep running your business, right? And so I think there is a use case for it, and I think the I think the open source nature of WordPress, I think we do need more decentralization. I think that having it all centralized is risky.

You know, personally, I feel well, that's there is uh political and there is uh uh argument to be made just from an intellectual perspective. I think for almost all of us we should not like the amount of mental energy we'll spend we spend on those things, it that's used better better used in so many other places. And uh You know, it's almost like uh you don't know what your blindsides are. So you might be thinking that Proton is this, but there might be something else which will trip you up. So the question is thinking it's good to it's it is good to go down that path, but also understand the limitations of your own thinking. And I seriously don't think you should at least I am of the opinion that don't don't think, don't fall into the FUD of, you know, there's so much noise around these things. So until unless you are truly uh and and it's great to have true believers because true believers move the state of the art forward. But unless you're a true believer, for a lot of us, it's good to be laggards. You know, it's good to be in that comfort zone of I'm okay using Google, I'm okay using I'm okay driving the uh the petrol or diesel car until AVs become good enough for all of us. And uh it is fine. I I personally believe that uh you should know uh what your personal uh spaces are at least for for whatever dimensions of the world, and then try and stick to that as much as possible. And then there are places where you want to be the leader, and in that part you make be the leader in that part. But if you try and be follow this thing that, hey, I need to be decentralized because of the do it if you truly believe in it, and it is the most important thing for you. If not, you'll make your life worse, and you might not do a good enough job.

Yeah, and and I I I think it's interesting because I think we've and the pivot I want to make here is to talk about AI a little bit because I think we're we're in a similar situation with AI, that a lot of the AI tools are centralized. There's a handful of players that are owning all the data. And I don't think we really understand. I'm a big Claude user, I still use ChatGPT a little bit, but I love Claude, but I still don't think do I know enough about Anthropic, the company behind it? No. Do I, you know, like I still I don't know what my blind sides are? Who knows what they're doing with our data? I don't really know. So it's, you know, there are risks. Um, but we're all using it because it's convenient. So, which leads me to my question is how are you looking at AI in terms of it being able to improve processes or productivity for the software stack that you've currently got?

All right. So, two things, right? How we work. So, first first part of AI, and this is something we've been working on for two years now, is uh we have been big believers in just improving our own productivity, or not really productivity, but more in terms of just the quality of software we believe we can create or the quality of product we can create, we know that AI can enable us to do so. It's not been a straightforward journey, but we have got a brand new dashboard where every line of code has been written by AI.

Wow.

And we have rewritten the entire like hundreds of thousands of lines of code, if not more, uh, from scratch, all using AI, even before Cursor or some of these things became a thing. And we are big believers in it. We have seen significant improvement in quality of output. There are challenges also, so we tend you know, AI tends to pull you into the sense of hey, it can be done within minutes. And then you are the white coding thing, and we try to avoid white coding, but there are those challenges, and you know, as agencies, we all of us, this is one of the biggest risks we face, where our clients come and see these demos, and then they demand the they think that what the work, real work we do is equal to that demo. And it is not that, and sometimes even as a sophisticated business owner, if I may call say so, uh, or person who has been building software for such a long time, uh we get so easily swayed by hey, this work can be done so easily when building a great product is just not easy. It takes so much effort, and AI makes it just a bit easier, but it still takes a lot and lot of effort. Yeah. Uh so that was one part. There's a second part to it, bringing AI to our products and bringing AI to making it easier for agencies to add value to their clients and to the day-to-day maintenance of what they do. I think that we'll see come in very soon. I think there are so many opportunities right there which we can provide. And uh I think you'll see some of that getting integrated into our product. But first, we wanted to improve our own understanding and how we use AI internally before we expose AI to through to our pro through our products to our customers.

Are you saying uh are you do you think that uh five years from now uh that we're still gonna be uh building websites for clients? And with with everything that's happening with search, with you know, Chat GPT is now a a serious referrer. We had a a um an event in Bali, of course, that you you guys were a part of, and we had a customer there, and we said, we didn't know him, he's from Fiji, actually. And we said, how did you find out about us? He said, I asked ChatGPT. I was going to Bali anyway, and he said, I asked ChatGPT if there are any conferences in Bali around about this time for agency owners, and you guys came up. And I was like, wow, that's really interesting. What how do you like what where do you where are we in five years' time? Are we still building brochure sites for clients and optimizing them for search and and LLMs? Is that is that where you think it's going?

So it's you know, it's so difficult to predict, like, but uh I what uh some thinking is uh, you know, when uh when we you're old enough, so I can tell uh I'm sure you'll understand this here. Uh uh just a tad bit older than I am, if if not younger. A tad bit younger than I am, let me put it that way.

It's my actual it's my birthday today, and I don't mind sharing it. Today I'm 52 years old.

So I'm just a bit just a tad bit younger than I am. Really?

I remember I remember life before the internet. So uh, you know, I remember life on dial-up modems.

Yep. So anyway, so you know, we we had front page, if you remember, and you used to make, and then suddenly we're like, hey, we can a person can make websites by themselves. And it never you never so things get things are always more complicated, and what happens is the state of the art always keeps improving. So what people expect from a website will always change. So today what uh people get is like a basic website. Tomorrow, the brochure website, the expectation will go up so much higher. So you can get like the conversions, you might be able to do everything end-to-end, and the expectation will go up to a completely different level. But it is not that I still feel websites are going to be super important to businesses. And while there will be a lot of people who will pull up their own websites and they will make their own websites because hey, I I've got a birthday party or I've got an event, and let me just pull it up. There the world will be I think more people will need more websites and not less. And when more people will need more websites and for more occasions, you will see and with more and better content, you will see that agencies will always be required to fill in that gap there. Because the quality, the end-to-end vision uh that they bring, the expertise you an agency brings, you will just see that that will that will not go away. There are so many things a person can do fairly easily, but we still rely on an external expert to do it. Because you don't want to, it's not when something is not up your is not your expertise, you don't want to deal with it. Like I yeah, I can do so yeah, I as a business, and you know, and that's the beauty of businesses. And that's and businesses think very differently from how uh and person an individual thinks in their personal life. So I feel that the expectations will go up significantly. For example, having an incredible graphic or an incredible motion graphic was impossible. Nobody could even think of getting something like that on a website because the c costs were like having a website with some uh something like that, the costs would just skyrocket. And even then, most likely that project would fail simply because finding the right artist was an impossible task. Today, or maybe in a couple of years, you will know that AI will get there. And now the agency owner uh or the designer can build a website which he always wanted to build, but he never had that artist available to make that kind of graphic. So you just see that the opportunities will open up, the kind of uh yeah, the kind the quality of work will skyrocket. I think that at least that's my that's my reading into it.

I think the quantity is gonna skyrocket.

Quantity and quality.

Yeah, I I hope the quality skyrockets.

I think come on, no one has GOS CT's websites today. We we both know it, and we have so quote quality goes up, quantity goes up, quality goes up also because nobody wants to be like that's that's the nature of the right, you're right, you're right.

I mean, you're right. I think the the cream will rise to the top, as they say. The quantity is definitely gonna be exponential. Um, I think, you know, I'm not worried about AI replacing agencies or or or or any of that rubbish. I mean, I think you know, I think the agencies that use AI will replace agencies that don't use AI because they'll just be more efficient, they'll just be able to get things done faster. Um, and I don't think the whole the DIY model, well, I'm just gonna use AI to build my own website. I mean, that's that the end of the market's always gonna be there, and they're not your client. So don't don't don't worry about that. I do wonder what the how fractured the uh CMS space at the moment, like HubSpot, uh, you know, WordPress, Framer, high-level, um, you know, uh whatever, or, you know, the enterprise CMS, I want how fractured they are now. I wonder how different that's gonna be. I was talking to a friend of mine who owns a software company, and he said uh he reckons two years from now that the SaaS business is gonna be very different because AI will effectively you'll be able to create something like HubSpot or high level or WordPress with sales and marketing automation engine. You'll be able to create that in AI in an afternoon with the right prompts, right? That it's just the computer processing power will be at that level where you can create something very complex very quickly. And so do we end up with everyone has their own unique software built specifically for them and they just pay the hosting on Amazon or Azure or whatever, uh, versus having to pay, you know, $50,000, $60,000 a year to be on HubSpot. They just spin up their own CRM with AI. Is that is that I don't know. I'm I I'm not sure. It's it's I think it's a possibility.

Uh so I think you'll see both of this happening. So you will see people spinning up their own CRM or for whatever thing, little thing that they want to use. But also the state of the art for HubSpot will go up significantly. And those kind of software the non-HubSpot or the person prompting their way into it will struggle to make or will not make. And then at some point, you know, it just comes down to $60,000 might be a lot of money. But to certain businesses, that's not a lot of money.

Yeah, that's right.

And they were like, is that something I want to do, or do I want to what they will want is they will want more and more value for that sixty thousand dollars. I feel that they are going to spend, in fact, they might spend from that sixty thousand might become a hundred thousand, but the expectation from it will just keep rising. And our job, our job as you know, folks who are in this business as entrepreneurs is to make sure that we keep providing that value. Actually, yeah, I I think entrepreneurs, that's the thing about entrepreneurship, right? We understand the need and we keep moving the we create needs for people like we are not only we solve the needs currently, but we also show them the possibilities that exist for the future. And agency owners, product makers like me, all of us are like yourself. We are all entrepreneurship at the end of it. And for us, that's the that's the and I don't think that is going away, Troy. Like I I've thought so much about it, but I don't think that is going away because that human ingenuity and people, yeah, the way you make decisions, the reason why you make those decisions, some of it might change. There will be software which I otherwise I would not have made. I will start making that software. But a lot of core critical software I'll keep buying. And I because I expect that the things it will do for me will just keep improving.

I think there's I think there's a future where WordPress, where agency, the thing you're gonna understand about HubSpot, right, is when you and I know this from experience, when you're spending $60,000, $50, $60,000 a year with HubSpot, they're effectively a consulting company, right? When you're logged in to your HubSpot account and you're spending $50,000 a year with them, you can open the live chat bubble and put in a request. And within five minutes, their their promise is that within five minutes, someone will call you on the telephone. Right? Now they're in Ireland, they're in the States, they're in New Zealand, they're in every time zone, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Within five minutes, somebody calls you on the telephone to help you talk through your problem. Now that could be uh that could be something you can't figure out how to do in HubSpot. So it could be like just walking you through the product. It could also be strategy. Hey, I've got this thing and I'm not really sure, you know, uh which campaign they will help you strategize how to use the product, right? How to use the product to to uh deliver your campaign goals. So here's the thing. If you're a WordPress agency, I believe the opportunity and where we're gonna go, and I've been saying this for a long time, but I think with AI now it's more relevant than ever, is that we'll end up with niche-based WordPress agencies, right? So we're an agency that just builds WordPress websites for amateur sports clubs in America, right? And there's like hundreds of thousands of amateur sporting clubs, junior footy, junior soccer, junior rugby, cricket, whatever it is, right? And all we do is we just build WordPress websites for junior soccer clubs and we help them manage their membership database and their marketing to get more players in and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. And so you're a consulting company, but you've kind of if you build if you build enough of those sites with WordPress enough and you've got your your tech stack dialed in, you've got your host, you've got your plugins, you've got all your automations, you can spin up a blueprint very quickly, then you're effectively a software company with some consulting services. The software just happens to be driven by WordPress and the plugin architecture and ecosystem. I think that's if I was starting an agency again, which I've been threatening to do for a long time, just because of the technology, I would become a niche agency that just serves a specific type of client, get a specific outcome.

Absolutely. I think even before AI, that's always a strong strategy. You know, the niching down is you because the expertise, you just can double down and keep doubling down on that expertise. And these niches are, we call them niches, but they are like it always astounds me the number of uh, you know, that you said sports club and your junior sports club are for you you can actually further niche it down to kids under four years old. And there'll still be millions of them. So these niches are so large, and they and uh and they're they people want quality products around them. Nobody wants to deal with like nobody wants to deal with you know pi pen and paper or some broken form of of solving a problem, or worse, in fact, pen and paper is more acceptable than bad software.

That's right.

That's right. And it's absolutely like pen and paper is much better than bad software, it's more acceptable because pen and paper, at least the end user is in control.

Bad software, they lend they it's frustrating to everybody. Totally. I'm filling in some forms at the moment with a new financial planner that we've hired, and it's like, dude, come on, man, like get with the 21st century. Like this is ridiculous, you know. Um simple taxonomies don't work. You're right. And and I think um, and also, you know, it it it's then it's in it's uh it's if you're in if you serve a particular type of client, right? If you just serve junior sporting clubs, right, in in the tri-state area, for example, then I it's easy to refer. Oh go and see, go and see John, because all he does is they just all those guys just build websites for junior sporting clubs in the tri-state area. Like that's all they do, right? So they're the specialists at it, right? And so it's very easy to own that that space if you become a specialist. I think it's just the fear of missing out on all the other work that stops, or you know, is this niche going to be profitable enough? I think that's what prevents people from from doubling down on those ideas.

Right. And actually, one of the things, uh, one of the persons I one of the podcasts, or one of the persons whose podcast I try to listen to a lot is Mark Anderson, the person, you know, behind uh who founded the founded Mozaic or uh uh what was the company called? The uh browser company. The very Netscape, yeah. Netscape Navigator, yeah. Exactly. And he mentioned uh uh his father-in-law is this real estate developer, and he's a billionaire. Mark Anderson is a billionaire, and his father-in-law also happens to be a billionaire. And apparently, if and I'm hoping I'm getting this right, he made his billions by only focusing on apparently a two-square mile area around Stanford. Wow. So what he said was that my father-in-law built the expertise of understanding that area like no other person in the world could. And that niche, so you could you would think that a real estate person needs to know everything about everything in all over the United States to make billions. And no, he just, but he just had to be so it's the niches are the niches are super valuable, and no one like had if you don't see those those uh, you know, those stories, those anecdotes, it's very difficult to believe it. It's very easy to be like, I should do X, I should do Y, I should do Z. And I I fall I fall prey to it all the time.

Yeah, great advice. What are you most excited about? You you're gonna get through the HubSpot conference, you you leave the states, you go home at some point in the near future. What are you most excited about over the next 90 days?

All right, so our new dashboard is something which you are super excited about. We're slowly rolling it out to all our customers. Uh, it is uh it is completely revamped. It is it's again, I'm talking about our product, but it is it has been an insane amount of effort has gone into it. Yeah, I it is super fast. Uh it's also a work in progress, but I I think it'll save agencies so much time. It is beautiful to look at. Uh it is it it saves uh it has everything very logically laid out. So I think agencies would love it. So we were already had, you know, the very best backups, the very best security, bulletproof backups, best security, uh, best visual regression, and everything else. But uh sometimes our UX was our weak point or UI UX. And now that is also, at least I can I can say we are putting that behind us. So we have a great design team in place now, and this is something we are super excited about. So we are slowly rolling it out. Given the number of customers we have, we have to be very careful. You know, having 30,000 plus customers means that you cannot make any sudden moves. So we have to be very uh we are very carefully planning the rollout of I'm looking forward to it.