I actually think AI is going to ruin written content. My warning to small businesses is make a brand and a personality in your community people can connect with. I think this is a huge thing.

Welcome to the Agency Our Podcast, where we help web design and digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams, and their communities. This week we're joined by Tom Fennelli, founder and CEO of Convictio. Convictio are one of our partners here at Agency Mavericks. They do sponsor some of the podcasts. They're also one of our partners at MavCon, which is completely sold out now and is coming up in a few weeks in San Diego, and we're very excited about that. Convictio is a niche platform built on top of WordPress that helps e-commerce and agencies grow and scale. They have some really interesting features in their ecosystem, including Convestio Convert, which is a marketing automation platform similar to Flavio, and Convestio Pay, which is an alternative to Stripe. So if you're in the e-commerce space or you're wanting to e-commerce enable a website for selling digital products or courses or memberships, then this episode is going to be super interesting. I'm Troy Dane, stay with us.

You're just one website crash away from losing a major client, damaging your reputation and putting your entire business at risk. The thought of it keeps you up at night, wondering if you're doing enough to prevent the worst. But what if you could eliminate that risk altogether? Convestio's white glove service is the answer. Our expert team provides proactive support and management so you can focus on growing your business, not worrying about hosting. We've got your back. With Convestio, you get real-time access to our team of experts via Slack and a tech stack that scales with your business so you can take on high-stakes projects with confidence and reap full rewards. Don't wait until it's too late. Discover more at Convessio.com.

Usually when the countdown timer stops and we're recording, I do this thing where I go, Welcome to the agency hour, Thomas Fanelli from Convisio. And what and usually then what happens, right, is you just watch the guest kind of get all tight up because they know that we're recording. So I'm not going to do that this time. We're just, we should just continue the conversation. Okay. I'll introduce you at the start. Yeah. How's that? Sounds good. So for those that don't know, for those that don't that's called a patent interrupt, ladies and gentlemen. For those that don't know, who are you and what are you doing here on the Agency Hour podcast?

Well, my name is Tom Finelli. I'm the founder and CEO of Convessio. And uh we are on a mission really to help e-commerce uh site owners and agencies scale and grow. And uh I have been a early, you know, I was kind of you probably don't remember this, but when we first met at WordCamp, I was a little starstruck because I think I was like an early customer of yours. And I mean, I've been in this space a long time. So, you know, I have been a fan, admirer, customer, and now partner with agency Mavericks for a while.

Wow.

Now we met at thank you, man.

I I do I remember we met at um WordCamp US when it was in uh it had to be right before the pandemic, so it was 2019, I think. Oh, yeah.

Oh, really?

Was that Phoenix? No, it was Phoenix, it was 2020, it was February 2020. It was Phoenix.

Actually, you're right, it was Phoenix. I don't think that was WordCamp US, though. I think that wasn't. It was WordCamp US. Because that was the last WordCamp. It was that or Miami. It was the last WordCamp right before the the lockdown.

Right before lockdown. That's right. I remember. That's right. Yes, yeah. Um, now, so a lot of people listening to this are gonna go, great. Troy's got a WordPress hosting company on the podcast, but we were just talking about this in the green room, if you like. I think we just need to call it out, right? Like explain to people the difference between you and, you know, a site ground or a WP engine or a grid pane or a wherever else I can host my WordPress website.

Yeah. So we are really um, so we built a platform that's a bit unique, and our sort of superpower early on was we are really good at scaling. And what we found was that works great for people like online learning, e-commerce, people who have lots of big rushes of traffic, right? And so we really are passionate about helping these e-commerce businesses or even the agencies. I I my pitch to agencies is look, do you have sites keeping you up at night where you're worried? You've got two or three in your portfolio, you're worried. What would I do if they crash? I'm not sure what to do about it, and they bother you. Uh, those are the kind of sites that we deal with. So um we are obsessive about service support, but we really enable from the hosting side of things, we enable high performance sites, and I don't say that loosely because everyone says they're the fastest and bestest and strongest. We are like a team of experts and infrastructure experts at scaling WooCommerce. Our largest client does over 10 million a month and 110,000 orders a month in WooCommerce. Um, our largest trafficked site gets over 20 million visits a month. Okay. And so what we do is we now we serve sites that do 50k a month too, right? Um, our average store does about 300k in revenue a month, um, the average e-commerce site on Convestio. And so we define this as the mid-market to enterprise, all right. Now, when you have a site like that, if your site goes down, like you need people there. You're not filing tickets, this, that, and the other. So we support our clients in Slack. We monitor all of our sites 24 hours a day. We're usually the ones that know there's a problem before our customers. Now, that's the hosting side. What makes us really different is we are very specialized in e-commerce and we we broadly define that online learning, memberships, course creators, you know, um publishers that sell memberships to their stuff. And so we have two new products that we've brought into the market in the last few months. So one is called Convesio Convert, and we acquired that. It's a marketing automation tool for WooCommerce and several other WordPress, you know, um, like easy digital downloads, things like that. And it's basically a competitor to like a Clavio. And so it does website personalization, engagement messaging, all based on orders and transactions, cross-sell, upsell, abandoned carts. And then we just launched in the the last 30 days in beta a payments solution. So this is an alternative to Stripe. Uh, and so we have spent nine months working on this, and we're super excited about it. And what we're gonna be doing is sharing a portion of the payment processing fees back to the agencies that we work with. And so we're really trying to be an a full stack alternative to Shopify.

Got it. Built on WordPress WooCommerce. Yes.

And so and and so I'm gonna unpack a little bit of this in a minute, but I'm curious what percentage of your customer base is agencies serving e-commerce versus just direct e-commerce store owners?

You know, I get this question a lot. Um, and one of the things that makes it a little hard to figure out is sometimes agencies have clients that are so big, they're like, you just go to the host. So they refer us a direct relationship instead of what you might think the traditional agency hosting model is where they resell hosting and they bill for it, right? So it's a little bit hard to say, but I think about 40% of our customers are agencies, 60% are direct.

So let's talk about so uh um Canvisio Convert used was Gromatic, right? That was a product called Gromatic that you guys acquired. So now uh I'm not that familiar with Tlavio. We have some agencies in our uh program who are e-commerce specialists for Shopify stores. What's the value proposition? Like if I'm listening to this and I'm thinking, well, you know, I've then got to, you know, WooCommerce, I've got to update it, I've got to manage the plug-in. Like, what's the value proposition of doing something like that versus just using Shopify and Clavio? Like, why would I think about using WooCommerce and can VCO convert and pay? Like, why don't I just use the hosted platforms that I've know and trust already?

Yeah, really, really good question. And by the way, and I know we won't we're gonna get into it later, but this is an area where I think um WordPress has been slightly asleep at the wheel. You know, they were the de facto leader in e-commerce until Shopify came and pretty much has dominated, making it easy for people to get started with a store. It's still difficult. They're trying to do a lot to fix it, but it's still difficult in WooCommerce to get started. With that said, there are use cases in the WordPress WooCommerce ecosystem that really do not have a parallel in Shopify. I'll give you a few. First of all, if you're in a regulated industry, so your CBD, cannabis, firearms, you know, certain financial investment things, they're no-goes in Shopify. Now, Shopify is loosening some of the um the reins on cannabis and CBD, I think. But a regulated industry might be a reason you you won't go to Shopify. If you are a course creator, membership site, online learning, LMS platform, not a good solution on Shopify. Um and and I really do think, although they've had um all you know, these portals have come up to try and compete with this, I do think the most robust online learning tools, if you're gonna do really sophisticated things, are in platforms like Learn Dash and Lifter LMS and these types of WordPress solutions. So I think there are certain use cases, and I broadly define e-commerce. Most people, when you say e-commerce, they think, oh, like a you know, beauty supplies or you know, like products that are gonna ship to you. Um, to us, e-commerce is really anyone transacting online. So this is you know, publishers that sell memberships to their site, um, using awesome plugins like Pigeon, which is like a membership killer membership plugin for helping publishers get more um revenue from their content. Um, and so online learning, course creators, membership sites, digital downloads of products. That's another good niche for if you have a digital product, easy digital downloads is one of the best tools you can use. Really, not a ton of solutions in the Shopify marketplace that are as established as that. So there are use cases for WooCommerce, but I will be honest with you, if I was a new person starting out, you know, and I've done this before, people want to sell, like I have a product I want to sell. Okay, go sell it on Shopify. You know, it's and I understand the frustration of agencies, man. I'm telling you, it's like and this is part of the problem that I have with the WordPress ecosystem, is it is becoming so difficult to run a WordPress business. And I'm not talking an agency because those people are technical, right? It's becoming difficult to run an e-commerce store with all of the plugins that you need, all of the services that you need, the constant updates, the variety of security issues. And that's really what we're trying to make much easier, let alone you get a lot of success, and it's all of a sudden your store's crashing on you and it can't scale, right?

I mean, you know, you and I have spoken about this, and people listening to this know that I'm a big, you know, I've been we're using WordPress since 2007, right? So I've seen it go through so much growth and so many iterations. People also know that I'm a high-level user and we're a high-level partner, and you know, we sell and manage our courses these days in high level, and we have had to let go of a lot of functionality, functionality that we used to have years ago. Because one, our business model has changed a little bit, and we're not so much an online education platform these days. We're more a mentoring coaching company. And so the the platform that we use now high level is just somewhere for us to park our curriculum that we can refer people to. We don't do gamification and leaderboards and all that kind of stuff. We used to, we used to do all that in Learn Dash, you know, a hundred years ago when Justin um owned Learn Dash, and it was a great platform. But man, we had three developers full-time in the Philippines managing that, updating plugins, security, backups, right? All that kind of stuff. And it became, you know, the even to run our our blog these days, which is which is, you know, I mean, we publish a podcast, which we're doing now, we put YouTube videos, we have blog posts, you know, we have some downloads, right? I mean, even to do that, the amount of plugins that we have and and the amount of licenses that we need, and it's just it, you know, it's it's such a fractured ecosystem. The WordPress ecosystem is so fractured. And part of part of that has uh part of part of the benefit of that has been that you know there are there are plugin developers and personalities like Yoast, for example, that have that have brought tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people to WordPress as a platform, right? And those that developer community that have added functionality to WordPress have really been the growth strategy for WordPress. I feel like the problem now is it's so fractured that again, if, if I mean, I'm moving my personal website off WordPress because I mean it's a really it's a one pager, right? I don't need, I don't, it doesn't do any business for me. It's just a it's a business card, right? I'm just sticking it on high level because I don't want to think about it. Um, but the learning curve and managing a basic WordPress website is a pain in the arse. And so I, you know, if I just go back, I don't know, close to 10 years, Brian Clark at Copy Blogger, when they developed the Rainmaker platform, right? It was we they built something on top of WordPress that was an all-in-one, just come here and do everything you need to do in one platform, right? And I feel like this is this is what needs to happen because there's such a lack of leadership and strategic direction from WordPress itself, partially because of the open source nature of the whole project, partially also because, you know, I think it's, you know, part blogging platform, part developer platform. It's got this identity crisis and it really doesn't really know what it is, and no one's prepared to put a line in the sand and say, well, this is what it is. And so it's left to the community and people like yourself to build these kind of niche solutions on top of WordPress. And I feel like that's what Conviccio is doing. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, we're trying to specialize in solving really hard problems for a particular customer profile, you know? And you know, that's been it's been challenging because there's not like if you look at the audience of WordPress, right? It's like there's not a lot of stores doing over 50k a month. There's even less doing over a million a month in revenue, you know, and it's like we're trying to tackle that really difficult, challenging segment, but there is a lot of value that we can add there because we can short circuit it. And one of the things I I tell a lot of our clients is you know, it's hard because there's very there's so few stores doing over, you know, 100k a month in revenue. It's like the amount of developers or WordPress community people who've worked on a real store live in production is even less, right? And so it's like now you have this shrinking pool of talent that could when you're an e-com store and you're like, man, I'm doing 100k a month, how do I get to 300k? Okay, well, it's like you have a very small, you have a lot of noise out there. There's a lot of people out there building sites that do no revenue or are brochureware, but there's very few people that know the pool shrinks very quickly. And so that's what we've chosen to focus on, and I find it extremely rewarding and fulfilling, and it's it's definitely a niche. I do think though, you know, just to go back to your comment about the the lack of direction. I think there's even in the last couple weeks, you know, I was on um another podcast and uh we were talking about how there's there's conflict in which direction should WordPress go. Some people think like, hey, you should be building Gutenberg to be competitive with the Squarespaces of the world, right? Like build it so that they're the editor gives you a modern editor feel, so it's competitive with the Wixes and the Squarespaces of the world. And you know, other people are like, no, we want to build collaboration features or we're gonna build other things. And it's there's a lot of it feels like there's a lot of going in different directions now, um, or pulling in different directions, I would say. And uh that makes everything go slow when you're at the size WordPress is at. And so um it's a challenge. And I, you know, it's I I know like it pains me to hear you say you're leaving WordPress personally, because you know, I got into WordPress because of people like you. And um, you know, but but I also understand, and if we're gonna be honest with ourselves about how to fix the issue, we have to be like honest about we have problems, you know. And it's you know, I mean, and and it's yeah, it's a a tricky thing to solve, but I think hopefully we're gonna try and help solve that for e-commerce stores better than it's been done before, uh, with a one-stop shop, if you will.

Yeah. I mean, look, I don't want to, you know, make this a WordPress beat up session, but I think Gutenberg was a big example of like what happens when you just leave it to the community to figure stuff out and there's no direction and there's no leadership from the top. I mean, there is just no direction at all. I mean, Gutenberg, in in I mean, in for my personal opinion, it was just such a massively missed opportunity. And uh, you know, full transparency, uh, Conviccio are a partner of ours. Uh, you guys uh sponsor some of the episodes of this podcast. We've also had Wix Studio come along and sponsor some episodes of this podcast.

Those guys are building really good. I'm dude. Right.

I was like studio when they reached out to me. I'm like, okay, do you know who I am? Like, you know, I've been talking about WordPress for the last 15 years, and now I'm talking about high level, and I still talk about WordPress. Don't worry, we still have websites on WordPress. I haven't completely abandoned the platform because I mean it does what it does, right? It's like there are things I can't do on high level that I can do on WordPress. So I'm not completely abandoning WordPress. I've just opened my mind to what is the best platform for the job at hand. And you look at you log into WordPress and start collaborating on a website with some other designers or developers, and then you log into Wix Studio and go, well, this is just this is just a completely different experience, right? Like it's it's it it it and you know you look at the page builders that are available in in WordPress and go, what, why, why would why am I why would I what's Gutenberg? I don't even understand what I don't even understand how that happened, right? I mean, I don't understand how we I someone missed a meeting somewhere. I don't even understand how we got there.

But um Well we we we have a large client that is replatforming from Squarespace to WordPress for a number of reasons that are not really awesome, but they loved um, you know, they're like compliance and workflow and functionality stuff. When I say not really awesome, but they were on Squarespace and they're like, can Gutenberg just work like Squarespace? And after watching them use how they use Squarespace, I'm like, why isn't someone doing this for Gutenberg? Like what like this is such a better experience for the designer, the visual creator to create. Right, 100%.

And and so I think, you know, um there's a couple of uh what what I find interesting is this, you know, what you guys are doing is solving a specific problem for a specific part of the market. And I don't actually think like for me, and it's funny because I go back to WordCamp Europe in like 2000 and I don't know, it was in Leiden, a little town about an hour south of uh Amsterdam, and I don't even know what year it was, maybe 2012, maybe.

It was that good of a trip, huh?

It was yeah, exactly. It was I don't remember much about it. Um, and it's all Zach from Treehouse, it's all his fault, actually. Anyway, um uh I remember Matt saying that that WordPress, you know, democratize democratizing blogging was the original mission of WordPress. And and and then at WordCamp Europe he said, well, you know, we're now here to democratize development. And I think that was the beginning of the splinter. It's like, well, you kind of have to pick, you kind of have to pick one and and and and be really good at it, right? And because I don't think it does, I don't think it does either very well. So what I find interesting, uh, and again, just to go back to what Brian at Copyblogger was doing, was building these kind of niche solutions on top of WordPress. And so therefore, the underlying tech doesn't really matter, right? It's what I'm buying with Convisio is this ability to scale my e-commerce site. I can't do digital downloads or access to course platforms like I can in WordPress. I can't do that on Shopify. I try I've tried, right? I can't even I can't do in WordPress what I, you know, what I can do in high level. You know what? Sorry, I can't do in high level what I can do in WordPress, right? If I'm building a gamified platform with leaderboards and, you know, really advanced functionality, I can't do that in any other platform except WordPress because of the plug-in extensibility and the plug-in architecture that allows me to do that. But with that comes technical debt and overhead that I have to manage, right? So if I'm uh scaling an e-commerce platform or a uh say I'm building something like Patreon, if you're familiar with Patreon, whether the yeah. So uh Jack, the founder and CEO of Patreon, a massive fan and big follower of his. I think he's built a really interesting platform. Again, it's a hosted platform. So I'm restricted. I can't add functionality that, you know, that they don't offer. But if I wanted to build something like Patreon, WordPress would be where I would go because of the uh extensibility and the and the you know functionality of it. But then I get to a point where I've got, you know, 17 plugins that I'm managing. What what's what level of support do I get from Convisio to kind of just make all those problems go away? And this is an ignorant question. I don't know the answer to this, so I'm not setting you up here, but just educate me. I'm a creator. I just want to create content. I want to put it up, I want to monetize some of it, I want to build a community, right? I don't want to think about the tech at all. I just want it to work.

So that's exactly what we do. So we support our clients in Slack. And so you have developers, senior PHP developers, database admins, scaling experts, security experts, all in a Slack channel with you, kind of like you run the agencies, agency Maverick Slack. Imagine your team is in there just like your customers are with your team. Our customers are in that with us, and we basically do everything from we will handle any performance issues, site errors, compatibility problems, security issues, um, warnings, Google Search Console problems. I mean, we pretty much act like a technical agency to our client. By the way, this is one of the reasons agencies love to work with us because imagine you get like the people you'd have to go hire on codable and pay hourly. You now we're not a low-cost host. So there's that that you pay a premium for those services from us. But those are that's the level of sophistication we give you with um with Convessio. And because we're hosting everything and it's in our ecosystem and it's in our infrastructure, we know how to fix a lot of the common problems very quickly. So page speed issues, database query slowness. You know, we diagnose things with New Relic on a regular basis for customers, tell them which plugins are slow, suggest alternatives to it. Um, you know, identify like, hey, your database is missing this index. Like, we should put that in there for you. And, you know, and we will do all of that completely hands-on for customers. So they will never have to touch a line of code, never have to touch a database admin. Our goal is to be the technical team facilitating all the scalability and performance of your site, and you just do what you do best, which is create, manage your store, publish your content, um, all of that type of thing.

Because, you know, when I hear support from hosting companies, yeah. You know, it's like, well, you we have Fresh Desk and you send us a ticket and we get back to you within 24 hours and we tell you what to do. And, you know. Whereas this feels like a different, this feels like I consider our I consider, I mean, we okay, we our company is a little different. We don't do any done for you, right? We do done with you. But I consider ourselves as the SWAT team that works behind the scenes to help agencies be successful at what they do. And we kind of take care of a lot of the business side of things, right? Um, and it feels to me like you this is a similar uh position that you guys take, whereas you're like the the secret SWAT team working behind the scenes to make sure the agency can just get on with serving their clients. And if there's something technical that's gone wrong with the site, you guys are just gonna take care of it, which is a massive, yeah, absolutely relief.

We we function in many ways like how agencies function with their developers, right? We sort of take the place of that, and um, you know, that's an area where we're we're very, very good at what we do. And, you know, people love our platform and our performance, but I'm everything the thing that people rave about is the level of support and the caliber of the people they get to work with at Convasio.

I want to pivot just a little bit and talk uh about convert and pay. And I want to talk about AI, of course. Convert, a quick question about convert. Does convert work on any site or is it uh on any WordPress site, or is it just specifically just for WooCommerce? No, any WordPress site. Okay. And talk to me about the personalization, just for those that don't know. Like what is what does website personalization mean in 2024?

Yeah, it's really cool. And I think it's um it's honestly something that it the product it was sort of a sleeper feature of the product. It's really something it that it excels at, and I think does better than Clavio does and and these other competitors in the marketplace. So basically, imagine that you're uh you have a marketing engine plugged into all of your customer and your, by the way, it integrates with HubSpot, that all of your customer data, all of your purchase data for your customers, the pages that they visit, how many times they come to your website, and you can build rules around if a person saw this page on the website, show them this dynamic content on another page of the website. If a person came from this referring source of traffic, show them this message. So a good example would be, you know, if you're a travel site, you know, you might pop up on your lead page. We have special, uh, special offers for people in Florida, where I'm at right now, you know, get get our deals, you know, for Florida vacations or something. So you can personalize the content of the website based on the browsing behavior and traffic behavior or the purchase history and customer data stored in your store.

So this is something I've been trying to do for a long time. And the the use case is go to the website, download a free resource. Once you've downloaded that free resource, the next time you visit our website, you're going to see a different call to action because I know I know you've already downloaded that free resource. And maybe I know you've opened it. So now when you're on through a smart link or a trigger link, and now what you're on the website, I'm going to sell you a course that helps you implement that free resource, right?

Exactly. And that's exactly what it does because Convert is a full email marketing platform. So when you set up an automation, you can say, you can, by the way, you can do forms, you can do pop-ups, um, you can integrate with gravity forms, your favorite form builders. But basically what happens is you could have someone go through a sequence like that. You could tag them as a segment, so free download segment. And then you could say any returning visit that's a free download visit, show them this the next time and trigger an email two days later if they left and didn't take the next step. So you have this website personalization plus uh email automation engine that all works together.

Love it. I have to ask, uh any plans to integrate it with high level?

Yes, absolutely. Uh we have we have plans. I mean, I would love to, by the way, because of you, our entire business is on high level. So we use high level. And probably like you, I I was frustrated with the fragmentation of tools that we were using. And I'm like, you know what? I don't care if this thing isn't as good as Calendly, just the fact that it's all these tools are together, I will sacrifice features to have a collective unified platform with my data that I can get accurate attribution of what's happening together from sales dashboards to lead tracking, lead source tracking, and all that stuff. And so we do um we do that uh with high level, and thank you because I met the guys at high level at the last uh Mavericks uh conference, and you know, we we dove all in and um it's it's great. I think what they're doing is extremely promising. So I want to definitely get convert in that ecosystem because I want to use it because I do think for website personalization and for email automation, I do like convert slightly. We do use a lot of email automation and go high level for lead follow-up, but I think that there's some cool stuff convert does. I want to get it wired into that, and I also want to get Convessio Pay working with Convert because I have heard and I've seen on the forums grumblings about payment options on high level.

So talk to me about pay. What is the value proposition? Why? I mean, because payments is a massive pain in the ass, right? I can't imagine what the sleepless nights you've had over the last nine months to build this thing just from a regulatory compliance point of view, right? Yes, exactly. But why, why? Why, why, why make the beard any grayer than it needs to be, Tom?

So, okay, the reason why is, and I want you to think about the magic of having a fully integrated stack that is your hosting, your marketing, and your payment data, and what you can do if you layer AI on top of that to surface insights around performance, benchmarks, how you're doing, how your average order size is, what's being engaged. We think that there's a play there where the sum of the parts equal a much greater amount if we have them all in one shop. The other reason is some of the biggest challenges people have is getting things like accelerated payment methods working in WordPress. Like you would be shocked at how difficult it is sometimes. Abandoned carts, you know, like um that's more of a convert thing, but like getting Google Pay, Apple Pay all working, not having Stripe problems, issues with Stripe with support. So there is a whole host of pain in the butt factor with traditional payment solutions. Authorize net. Have you logged into any of these credit card portals before that are not Stripe? They look terrible. Like these antiquated merchant service provider platforms that are just awful in the US. And so, you know, we thought that we could really level that up. We thought there was be a sort of a level of intelligence on payments we can get to eventually. And then the big thing was we tried to partner with Stripe, and they did not want to share any revenue with us, they were very stingy. And so I'm like, you know what? There's a decent amount of revenue being made in the payments, and everyone's keeping it for themselves. And so I want to track, I want to create a new revenue stream for agencies by look, you know the grind of slinging websites every month, month after month. You know how hard it is. I want to build a sustainable recurring revenue stream for agencies that they don't because I'm I'm from the agency space. I know agencies, I've got friends I care about deeply in the grind where it's like every month I gotta find five new website customers, you know, and and sell maintenance plans and all this stuff. And so I want to create a high profit, low-touch revenue stream for these agencies. And I think sharing payments revenue back to them could be a game changer for some of these agencies. And here's here's what I mean because it's hard to tell an agency, I was telling you about this earlier, learn how to go build WooCommerce sites, their heads are gonna explode. That's like if you don't build e-commerce sites, there's so many things you have to know. But you have a ton of businesses. I got a client that is here locally with me that has like a couple hundred sites. We did a portfolio analysis. His customers are transacting over $600 million a year in revenue. Okay. His clients. And the number one thing he's asked for is his all these local companies were like, Can you payment enable my website? Well, who are you using for credit card processing? Usually a QuickBooks or something. Well, no, I can't really do that because that's like a closed ecosystem and it doesn't integrate with WordPress, and I'm not going to set up WooCommerce for you. That's overkill. So we are going to have in the next 30 days a QuickBooks integration for Convessio Pay where you can literally connect it to QuickBooks. And the minute an invoice is generated, it will send out a Convessio Pay branded invoice for the customer to pay online. Now the agency can go to all those local businesses and be like, hey, I can payment enable your website. And we'll be able to have a branded experience where they come back to their website. There'll be a little pay widget on their site. Put the invoice number in, click pay, and check out. Now you've taken offline businesses and you've helped bring them into the modern world of transacting online. Now just bear with me a moment. Imagine you take convert and you now layer that on top. You can automate fully branded emails, reminder emails if they don't pay, collection notices if they don't pay. You can now start to trigger based on QuickBooks financial data email automations like an e-commerce store triggers cross-sells, upsells, and all that type of stuff. You can now do that and automate your payment operations. That's where we're going with it.

Love it. Love it. Um, I had to do this recently for a website. We had a member of our uh Mavericks Club who fell ill, was halfway through building a bunch of projects. Um, he had a very distressed wife who had no idea what to do. I jumped in, a bunch of our members jumped in, and we just took over a bunch of projects and finished them for him while he was recovering. Good news is he's fully recovered now and he's back, uh, which is great news. And I had to talk to one of the developers because there was a company that um did I can't remember what they did, but uh you had to pay a deposit before they came out and did the project on your house, right? It was all it was in the residential construction space. And they had this, it was, man, my God. It was a they there was this one plugin that did the thing, and the company, the client wanted a Google Pay. They well, well, you know, we want our clients about pay with Google Pay. I'm like, no, sorry. Can't that just can't happen. That just can't, that just uh and the client was like, uh, I don't understand. It's 2024. Like, what do you mean? We can't use Google Pay. I'm like, yep, I wish we could, but we can't, because there's one plugin. She goes, What's a plugin? I'm like, here we go. Here we go. You know? What's a plugin? What's a plug-in? I'm like, here we go, sweetheart. Bingo, here we go, right? This is this is the problem, right? The fractured ecosystem. So uh now and and also um things like dunning uh credit card update, like your card's about to expire. I imagine you layer AI across that, it can forecast, it can say, hey, this credit card's going to expire in 30 days. Let's send the person an email through convert, let's get them to go to the website and update their credit. Like so it replaces all of that and keeps it all in one centralized house.

Yes. And and, you know, the beautiful thing about our payments platform is it's wired into all the tokens on the Visa and MasterCard network. So things like automatic expiring cards update automatically across the networks and all that type of stuff. So that is um absolutely something that will just happen seamlessly. But to your point, though, exactly think about the things with the complete picture and AI layered on top. Who's late? You know, what are trends I need to watch out for? Hey, your accounts receivable is higher than it needs to be. Um, and the goal is that, you know, we do have a down the road, you know, and by the way, we want agencies to use Convessio Pay. Okay. We we're one of the reasons we're building the QuickBooks channel is so that the agency can actually do their payment processing in Convesio Pay. And so one of the things that we're looking at is, you know, how can we layer AI on all of this and give people insights? And that is gonna be a down the road, you know, thing that we're working on. And I'm I'm really excited about it. I think it's gonna be really cool. We're gonna be able to see some very interesting things as AI sort of, you know, continues to evolve and mature. But um, I think that data set for the e-commerce store and for the agency is gonna be a powerful, a powerful set of data. And we're, you know, we like to think we're somewhat innovative. And uh, I'm excited to see what we're gonna bring to market.

You know, in January 2020, sorry, February 2021, the world had been in lockdown for almost a year. I was running a virtual version of MavCon, uh, which we now do every February, actually, as a result of that. It was so good. And I did a presentation called The Agency of the Future. And the, the, the, the, and, you know, some of it, I borrowed some of it from Hormosy's thinking around, you know, when he when he transformed gyms, right? Right.

Mm-hmm.

He he pivoted the model, which was let's sell a gym membership. And then while you're here, let's try and add on personal training, let's try and talk to you about your nutrition. He was like, no, no, no, let's put, let's make the gym membership free as long as you sign up to one of our body transformation boot camps, whatever it is, right? Which is like six months, it'd be like $2,500 will completely transform your body. Uh, you get one-on-one personal training, you get group training, you get, you know, nutrition plans, you get a list of ingredients to go shopping every week. We'll just send that to you via text message. So you just go to the supermarket and buy exactly what you need. Here's the meal plans. Oh, and by the way, you get complementary access to our facility while you're in in this boot camp, right? So he completely devalued the gym membership and sold everything else first. Right. And so thinking about that, I said to the agencies, if you don't solve a problem as a done for you, so for example, if you're generating leads for a local business and they're not calling them or they're not following them up or they don't know how to close them, it's it's your it's not your responsibility, but it would be in your best interest to help that client understand how to close the deal, how to follow up the lead, how to automate the thing, right? Example, I inquired about getting solar panels on the roof when we when we bought our house last year. Um, I wanted solar panels and I wanted a battery on the side of the house. I put in my details into this website and three phone calls in the next 10 minutes, right? I'm cooking dinner, I've got kids screaming at me. Only so I did I didn't answer any of the calls, but only one guy sent me a text message. The other two didn't text me. One guy, Patrick, he texted me and said, Hey Troy, I just called. Um, I'll try you again tomorrow. Just wanted you to have my details. It's Patrick from Zico. I'll call you again tomorrow. Who do you think got the the job? Patrick from Zico. Because the other two, right? So the agency's job, if you're not doing the thing for the client, is to help the client understand how to get it done. And that might just be through an information pack or a playbook or a best practices guide, right? I see Conviccio Pay as a great and convert as a great uh tool that you can add to your toolkit to say, hey, what you know, we've built you a website and we're doing some marketing for you, but we can also help you solve these problems, which ultimately impact our ability to succeed as an agency because that's the thing that's now letting the whole system down. And guess what? We've got a solution for that.

Right. Well, and I I think one of the interesting things is once we start to see, and Convessio Pay is still in its early beta, once we start to see agencies understand that they can build these commerce-enabled websites, and I'm not talking an e-commerce store, but a commerce-enabled website for a local service company, and they start to understand the calculus of the money they can make off of payment processing. I think it is gonna change the way they think about who they go after as ideal clients. Because when you start to think about this through the lens of how much revenue is that business gonna generate for me based on their sales, now you can go after a target audience that has the ability to give you a sustainable, healthy revenue stream. And payments is high stickiness. It doesn't churn like SEO and websites and you know, all that kind of stuff. So our goal, and by the way, payment-enabled website, a commerce-enabled website churns even less because that thing is like critical for them. So the closer the agency can get to the the the revenue of the business, I think they're in a stronger position overall.

Yeah, I agree a hundred percent.

Um, talk to me about uh I I know we've spoken a little bit about it, but what are you most excited about with AI coming? Down the pipeline. By the way, for those listening, Mavcon, San Diego, October 14, 15, 16, I think are the dates, completely sold out. You cannot get a ticket. I'm so excited to say. Tom, Zach, and the team from Convisio are going to be there in the room for the three days and the nights, whenever we're hanging out, I'm super excited to have you there. So we'll talk more about this. But just wanted to let people know Mavcon completely sold out. And in in um, no small part due to the help that uh Convisio and E2M and our partners uh have given us to make this event uh a huge success. So we're gonna talk more about this in a few weeks. But tell me now, what are you most excited about with AI?

Well, um so I mean, uh like you, I'm using AI every single day, and the level of productivity enhancements you can get out of it are just unbelievable. Um actually, I'm gonna start with something I don't like. I actually think AI is going to ruin written content. Okay. I really, really do. And I think this is going to be why having a founder-led brand with a real person that people can connect to. And I I really do. I I I'm gonna prophesize here, okay? My warning to small businesses is make a brand and a personality in your community people can connect with, because I think that the noise of all the marketing noise and content that's being created with AI is going to make the concept of a persona, a real like person persona, right? Um, is going to make that even more one that people can see at shows and see at events and your local chamber and all that kind of stuff. So I think that that's an interesting dynamic where all this AI is going to increase the value of the personality of the brand and the person behind the brand, specifically for local businesses. I think this is a huge thing. You know, they're gonna want to know who are the people behind this business. So I think that's a negative thing happening that can be turned into a positive. I think that the thing I'm most excited about is lately, okay, beyond the elementary stuff of like manipulating content and creating it and opera uh operationalizing it and all the stuff you talk about with your S SOPs and all that, I am actually noodling on this idea that I think we might have a situation where every business is running their own private LLM. They're not leveraging these off-the-shelf ones, but they're actually running perhaps a you know cloud-based LLM, but it's private to their business. It's their private information, it's their internal information, and they're building tools that they can own the data. They don't have to give it up. It's their most confidential stuff, their financial data, their HR data, their you know, SOPs, their secret sauce. And then they can build apps like chatbots and various other tools off of those. And we see this happening with like Olama and some of the off-the-shelf models that are out there and the ecosystems around them. And so I think, and I'm wondering lately, is this going to be a boom for particularly like hosting companies that host these LLMs and infrastructure companies, where it's like, I don't need a massively powerful thing. I need a slice of a GPU that I can power for my like 10 or 15 person company with my confidential information in it that I feel safe and secure, where I'm not giving it up to these large companies that are using it for training purposes or who knows what. Right. And so I'm kind of wondering if that's going to be a trend we're going to see as the tools and the apps and the agents start to get much more powerful and much more comprehensive. It's like today, it's like, yeah, well, everyone's got chatbots, right? But wait until we've got all sorts of things. Wait until we have agents that answer your phone, you know, and can tell people availability for your business, you know, things like that. And you can run those off of private models. They're not SaaS companies. The other thing, too, is like, I mean, the SaaS monthly spend for a business with all this AI stuff is gonna get higher and higher. I mean, I don't know about you, but I've got like a dozen AI tools I'm subscribed to now that I didn't have two years ago.

Yep.

So I think there might be an economy of scale. Now, let me tell you what I'm working on for agencies. I'm gonna give you a little this is cutting edge, man. This is this is I'm giving away a little secret sauce here. So I hope I don't have any competitors or you know, ambitious developers out there that go build this out from under me. But here's what we're working on. So we're we have mocked up some AI features in our dashboard where you can ask AI like about traffic patterns and resource usage and all that. And I showed it to some really sophisticated agencies. And you know what they told me? They gave me some great insights. They said, you know, this is great, but what we really need is AI to tell us what to do to improve a site. We need AI to generate the actionable list of stuff we're gonna do for customers because that's the hard part where it takes an expert to go in and look and analyze Google Analytics and your ad data and your performance data and whatever, and like figure out what do I need to do to improve. So, what we're working on is, and our my vision for our hosting platform and eventually convert and pay is we're um working on taking like a metrics style system like a new relic, Grafana, um, and pumping all of your logs into it, along with all of your data from Cloudflare, because we integrate with them on the edge, and then having it act as an expert to analyze your log and your performance data and your WooCommerce logs and your error logs, and start to analyze that and create like this needs to be fixed, this needs to be fixed, this needs to be fixed, and working through automation tools to pump that into clickup or whatever your project management tool would be. And so this is sort of the RD stuff we're working on at an early stage here, is we're thinking, can we create for agencies kind of an automated diagnostic tool that will just give you things to sell to your customers to make their site better? We call it continuous improvement. You know, it's like we want to continuously improve your your your site. Um, and so you know, the worst thing we find is people who have just so much technical debt piled up, logs full of errors and all that, because they've not done anything. They think WordPress can just run without any problems, right? Uh, and 10 developers have worked on it. And so we're trying to automate that using AI. And so I'm really excited about that type of application for AI as well.

Wow.

That's super exciting. I I ran a uh ties very nicely into, you know, we call it a growth plan. Yes. Uh, I ran a live stream a couple of weeks ago on the Facebook group and how to use ChatGPT at a very basic level to kind of write yourself 12 months worth of work as a growth plan. I mean, this is this, I mean, every month you could go to your client and say, well, if we do this and this and this, it's likely going to improve that. The growth hacking mentality I find really interesting too, because if you have a laundry list of things that you could do, you then apply the growth hacking mentality and say, well, let's work on this one first because it's likely going to give us it's the big domino that might knock over these little ones. There's a high chance of success, it's gonna be fairly easy to implement. Uh, and you're never gonna run out of ideas on that laundry list of things that need improving, right? I say this all the time. No one ever wakes up and ticks off their last item on the to-do list and says, Well, guess what, darling? The business is done. I finally finished it, right? Never gonna have.

I'm telling you, you'd be shocked. Like, I know you know this stuff and your audience knows it, but just taking your Google Analytics data on your shopping cart conversion funnel and literally just pasting the metrics into ChatGPT and saying, benchmark me against other things. I mean, it will write an awesome that used to take me research and all sorts of stuff, hours to do. It'll write an awesome e-commerce analysis of your site, your performance, how it's benchmarking, your oh, you're add people adding to the cart, they're falling out of the funnel here. This is below average, this is above average, and tell you exactly what you have to work on. And so that type of application, and that's really one of the reasons we literally would take, I would take, I would take a site's Cloudflare and I would literally copy and drag, and I'd get unformatted text, and I would dump it raw into ChatGPT and be like, create an executive summary of the last 30 days of traffic. And it's like it just does it, and it's beautiful. That type of acceleration for agencies is like if I was gonna start an agency today, it would be heavily anchored in that, and you can produce beautiful things, and there's apps like gamma out there. If you've seen that, you can literally paste in, you can tell ChatGPT build a slide presentation for me, paste the raw text in, and gamma will spit out for you a beautiful slide deck, you know, with AI images and tables and iconography and everything. And um, it's really, really amazing.

So thanks for that rabbit hole. I know what I'm doing this afternoon.

Yeah, yeah, Gamma. Yeah. So anyway, you know, so so it's so exciting. We're in such an exciting time with AI. I literally thought I missed the hottest thing with Bitcoin of my lifetime, but I actually I think I have a a do-over here. It's like I really do think it's gonna be AI.

Yeah, I agree. I I feel like the internet happened in in the 90s for me, about 94, 95. Right. That blew my mind. And I was like, and it took me uh it took me a minute, probably 20 years, to realize this has changed the this is the biggest change in the world, right? Is is is when the internet happened in the mid-90s. I think AI and particularly spatial computing, I'm really excited about, I think is gonna disrupt society more than the internet did because you know, we I have a seven-year-old and a four-year-old, and all the parents at our school are kind of going, well, you know, I'm concerned that my kids are gonna be doom scrolling when they're teenagers. I'm like, no, no, no, no. That these things are a relic. These things are gone. Like it's gonna be all wearable, man. It's like little nanopods, it's smart glasses and watches. We're gonna be saying, take your glasses off, I'm talking to you, not put your phone down, right? It's a it's a brave new world, man. It's exciting, it's terrifying, and I'm glad we've got partners like you in our corner to help us navigate it, Tom, because uh it's it's gonna be a wild ride. Hey, thanks for joining us on the agency our podcast and uh really looking forward to hanging out with you and the team in a few weeks in San Diego.

Likewise, likewise, we'll be there.

Where can people reach out and say thanks and get in touch?

Yeah, so the social media platforms, I'm on all of them LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook. But uh, come to our website, you can look us up there, and you can email me at tom at convessio.com. And uh, I've got tons of free advice. So if you have problems with your site, just feel free to ask me. I'm happy to help. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

Thanks a lot, Troy. Thanks for listening to the Agency Our Podcast and a massive thanks to Tom for joining us. I'm really looking forward to catching up in person again at Mavcon in San Diego in October. Speaking of Mavcon, as I mentioned, you can't come. Sorry, but we are officially sold out, which is a massive effort by everyone here on the team to achieve that, and we're super excited. Our next Mavcon will most likely be in Bali in June 2025. So keep your eye out on your email and the socials for the announcement around that. They're incredibly transformational events, but they do sell out. So if you see the notice of Bali June 2025 being promoted, get tickets while you can. Alright, folks, remember to subscribe and please share this with anyone that you think may need to hear it. I'm Troy Dean, and remember, the average person spends six months of their life sitting at red light.