I think one of the biggest challenges agencies face is how do you communicate the value? How do you get the client to feel that, yeah, as long as they are with you, they're continuously getting value. And I think performance is one of those things which enables an agency to continuously offer value. As long as they are with your care clients, they will have the fastest website possible.

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 Akschat Chowdery, founder of VlogVault, Malcare, and WP Remote, and Airlift, which is their new product. And today we're exploring how AI is going to impact agency life, the challenges of managing support as you grow, why the most important asset in your agency is your team, why you shouldn't cowboy code on live sites and much more. I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us.

Thank you again for having me.

Thank you. Good to see you again. Well, thank you for being here. And I just want to publicly thank you again for your support for our community and uh and specifically our Mavcon events. You are, of course, one of our partners again at Mavcon in October in San Diego. I'm very much looking forward to hanging out again. Are you going to make it this time or are you sending a team member?

Uh yes, I'm sending a team member. Someone from my team will be there. I would have liked to make it a hat-trick uh in person because I really love attending and just hanging out with you guys and the whole team. But uh just uh some commitments mean that I cannot fly down to the US. But someone someone from my team will be there and uh Karishman will come with fantastic. So I think uh and I'm looking for and we are looking forward to the event in a big way.

Great, awesome, yeah. So are we. We had a great event last week or two weeks ago on the Gold Coast here. Uh Mavcon, it was fantastic. It was probably our best Mavcon. I don't know if I'm gonna say best Mavcon ever, but it was definitely our best Mavcon in a long time. I think it was Mavcon number 19. So in San Diego in October, it'll it'll be Mavcon number 20, which we're very excited about. So again, thank you for continuing to support us for those live events. Just means that we can do some really nice things, like we can feed people a nice lunch, we can put on good tea and coffee throughout the day, and uh we can record the events and and put the recordings up. So all the uh support from our partners really m helps make all that possible. So thanks again. And for those that don't know who you are, just give us the too long didn't read version of who you are and what is WP Remote and what are the other uh products that you have under your banner.

All right, so I'm the founder of WP Remote. WP Remote uh uh if you're an agency, you definitely have uh a care plan or a maintenance plan with your with your clients and you're taking care of their website. So uh WP Remote lets you manage those uh care plans or manage the websites through a single dashboard. We take we ensure that all your websites are up and running and you're able to do backups, security, uh performance updates, and everything else. Send send them all, send your clients a great report, all in an easy and uh really reliable manner. I think the most important factor is really reliable. That's what we really focus on. And we ensure that your websites are up and running and you're not firefighting all the time or you're not getting calls at at odd hours. Right? So though that's what WP remote is about. Some of our other products, which we actually started with, are Blog Vault, which you must many of you might may have known. That was our first product that was that that lets you back up websites. We have uh Malcare, which is uh which lets you secure your website, identify malware, and then clean them with a click of a button. And uh our latest one is Airlift, which lets you optimize a website and make it really fast with a click of a button. We also the best part about WP remote is it brings all our other products and puts it all into a single dashboard. So not only so WP remote gets the best of airlift, best of uh uh Block Vault and best of Malca onto a single dashboard for an agency.

So tell me like why would someone use Blog Vault these days without using WP remote?

So fine agencies, you know, since if you're speaking to an agency, they will all use WP remote. Right? But if you're a small business, uh you don't need like a 20 websites, you don't need uh reporting. Some of those functionality is just not required. You don't need white labeling if you're in if you are a small business yourself. Or in fact, even if you are a large business, many of the large businesses, we have Fortune 500 customers, for example. They will go and buy our blog wall plan simply because they don't need all of that functionality, as well as uh they need great backups.

Got it. If you're a single site owner, if you're a WooCommerce, uh e-commerce site owner and you've got a single site, or maybe you've got a couple of sites under your brand, you might not need WP remote, but you'll certainly be using um Blog Vault. Um and there's also an argument there to be using Malcare and Airlift. But if you're an age agency, so if you're so if you're a single site operator um or a small brand, you'd be using the plugins individually. But if you're an agency bundling all of those plugins into one dashboard to manage all of your WordPress websites from one place, that's the value proposition for WP remote, right?

Yeah, that's that's correct. And uh we uh uh yeah, and frankly, we uh all things that and then there are still a very small number of plugins and small number of features. All the uh all things on we are very unlike many uh many WordPress companies. We don't do too many things, it appears as many things, but over this lower period of 10 to 12 years, we are focusing on a few areas and trying to ensure that we do them really, really well and really reliably. Because each of these things, making each of these things reliable and work really well takes an insane amount of effort.

Yeah, I can only imagine. Yeah, I I've seen under the hood of a few WordPress plug-in companies, and I know the amount of work that goes into making just a simple plugin and keeping it up to date, I can't imagine because you know you're you're you've got to take into account, you know, from a security, just from a just from a security point of view, every time someone updates all the plugins and the theme on their own WordPress website, I imagine your product then going into overdrive to make sure that everything is still intact and that nothing breaks. Whereas if if you're just a single plugin developer and you have one plugin, you just have to worry about your plugin. You just have to worry about keeping your plugin up to date. Whereas you've really got to be across the entire WordPress ecosystem. Um is that a fair assumption?

Yes, and that is that is important, you know, when as updates as things as updates happen, and let's look at it from a security perspective. Now uh update means things are changing on your website. Are those valid changes or are they not? Because many a times an update will look like a malware, right? Because malware also means things are changing on your website. Now, for us, we need to actively understand is this a good change or not. And it's very easy to flag that something has changed. But if you're an agency running uh uh uh 20 websites, if if you're a 100, our largest agency runs 2500 websites, you can imagine that. Now, if you are you don't want an alert that hey, something has changed. Even with 20 websites, because someone is always making a change, right? And we might have a teammate who's making a change, and you don't want an alert saying that something has changed. What you want an alert is hey something is really wrong, and that's the only time you want an alert because otherwise you will just start ignoring those emails. So at uh at WP, what we try and ensure is that if you get uh an email from us, then you better take a look and act on that. And otherwise we will not email you. So that and that's the that's the I think that's a value proposition for us that uh we have to be reliable when we say something is wrong, then something is really wrong. But we will try our level best to ensure that it never goes wrong.

I mean, I'm in a lot of Facebook groups where there are lots of WordPress agencies, right? And you know, I see the conversations that are happening. I think one of the reasons that um we really enjoy partnering with you guys is because so, first of all, I was using another solution to manage lots of websites, just of my own personal projects, right? Not I mean, I got out of client work back in 2017. So, you know, back in the day, long time ago, I started out using Manage WP when it was a great product, when it when it first launched, you know, back in the heyday. And then over time, I got out of client work and I was just managing my own websites and I was using a couple of different platforms to do this, and they were all kind of buggy and you know, a lot of some of them got bought out by bigger companies, and then it all, you know, it's kind of just it felt a bit weird and it just wasn't what none of them were working. So I actually went looking for, and my journey to WP Remote is that WP Remote was originally built by the guys at human-made, but it was a completely different product. And then you, as the owner of Blog Vault, you kind of acquired the name and the brand and the reputation, but then rebuilt the product from the ground up, right? And we've we and we we talked about that on the previous podcast episode. I encourage people to go listen to that because it's a really interesting journey. The reason that we have partnered with each other for so long is because every time I see a conversation in a Facebook group where something goes wrong with one of these platforms, right, and things go wrong, that thing, I mean it's technology, right? You're you, I always see you in the comments, right? Like helping people out or being like really transparent about what's been happening and yes, this happened, and we're working on this and we're fixing this. That kind of transparency and authenticity is what really appeals to me is, you know, and that's why I started using WP Remote. Because I was like, all right, well, I need another solution. I've never used WP Remote. I'm gonna I know of Blog Vault's got a good reputation, I'm gonna start using WP Remote. And then the whole experience was was fantastic. Um, but I think more than the product, it was it's your commitment. And I'm not just saying this because, you know, you're a partner of ours. You're a partner of ours because of this attitude and because of this authenticity and this transparency that you have in the WordPress space. And I I think it's a pretty difficult thing to maintain over such a long period of time. And I think you and your team have done a really good job of maintaining that reputation. So I I don't know whether that's part of your strategy, like if you proactively do that or if you just respond when when comments come up, but it's something that I've noticed and I applaud you for it.

Thank you for bringing it up. Uh, frankly, it's not been a part of our strategy at all. But we are doing it because you almost end up being like uh so some of these groups, so let's take a step back. We are here in India, right? And uh and many of our customers, actually, uh most of our customers are all over the world. I think there might not be a single country in the world where we don't have a customer, maybe one or two, and you can almost name the countries uh simply because of various restrictions in this country. But uh because our customers are all over the world, and us being in India, how do we learn about what's going on? And we frankly are never in a we are not an agency, as far removed from running an agency as I can get. And in such a case, how do we learn what's really happening? And so we started hanging out with Facebook groups, which are really, really uh active, and agencies seem to, yeah, you know, they are very transparent, they are very they discuss all the challenges that they are facing, and we we started participating in them just to learn and understand hey, what does it even mean to run an agency? And even today, that's actually the single biggest reason we we become a part of it. Now, obviously, when you're participating in something and uh uh you can't be healthy palau. The idea was not and even today, and I'm glad to actually hear this, and I think it also reflects in why many a times agencies get uh, you know, people end up uh any business ends up working with an agency is because of the people. And it's because of the personal touch, personal touch. And for us, we're learning it was not a part of the strategy, but we are learning it that hey, even this can actually cause a business to work because you know we end up thinking so much that hey, you need to have the best product in the world, and which is what we strive for always, and that's what causes people to buy your product, but it it is more than that. It also is about who you are, uh, the fact that you are available and you someone does not have to ring up a call center when something goes wrong. Those those factors play a role, and I will not have guessed that even going back a couple of years, frankly, after I'm telling you, it's just uh it's a realization. I think with now we play to our advantage, but that was not the boom.

It's hard to scale support, right? We've seen it happen with most of the big companies in the WordPress space. We've seen it happen. Like at as they grow, they get more and more customers. Then you start hearing complaints about their customer support. Oh, it used to be good, now it's fallen off because they've grown too quickly, right? How do you manage support that comes in in a timely fashion? And and how have you managed to how have you maintained that level of support as you've grown?

Uh I think the team gets all the credit because uh there was a time when I was manical about support, and I would be awake all all hours. Fortunately, the team has taken over to a great extent, or I to all like not to a great extent, they they take care of everything. Um and uh what we aim to do is uh weekdays 24-7 support, have someone available at every hour or all the time to make sure that uh uh they are there to answer questions against the kind of product we are. It's good to have timely support because you only reach out to support when something is wrong, right? And having a quick answer uh makes a big difference. So uh for weekdays we have 24-7 support, we have someone available all the time, and uh on weekends again we cover 24-7, but the responses may be a couple of hours or an hour away because we try and prioritize uh urgent tickets first, and then uh maybe uh and then the lower priority tickets. So people are available, it's just that the number of people available is lower at any given hour, so things take a bit longer. But uh, our aim is to cover as much of support as possible uh and make it as fast as possible. It frankly it's a retention strategy, also for like two things. One is we want to be treated as well as we can, but we also realize that it's a retention strategy. Once you have great support, you actually come at a hundred cranks with product. It's almost funny. Like we spent so much energy on product, but we like hey, it's the great support which people are buying our product for or venue year on air for. So so and people are and it's very strange how people are so forgiving if you have good support.

Well, the the reason that people leave other platforms is because something went wrong. The reason that I left the other platforms, and I've used I would say all of them, is something went wrong, I couldn't fix it, and I couldn't get the support, and I was left kind of high and dry. And so you go, okay, well, now I've got a bleeding wound and I need to put a band-aid on it, and I'm not getting any help from these people, so I go looking for a new band-aid and I've found WP Remote, and that's why I signed up in the first place, right? So the the only reason people leave a platform like yours is because they're not getting the support that they need or the product is not working. And so I, you know, I I think support actually is part of the product.

Absolutely. And it's some, you know, some as product makers, sometimes we don't realize it and we don't understand. And even now, right, we keep trying to improve our support, and that's always the case, but we almost always think that uh hey, it's the product, and let's keep fixing the product. There's no reason why anything should go wrong with the product, and that's never going to be the case. The reality is there's always going to be some situation which you never thought of, and that's where uh the human touch makes a difference. And yeah, it's a realization as a uh as an entrepreneur, I would say that realization is important, and I think it applies to I think what applies to us also applies to agencies to a great extent. Because what you're talking about, the agencies are partnering with us or deploying uh uh basing the business on us is because of personal reasons. And I think every business, small business when they work with an agency or every business and when they work with that agency, that person is the single biggest reason more than anything else. And being if they are responsive, if they are there to take care of things, but at the same time, you know, as an agency you don't want to be available 24-7, then you'll ruin your life in the process.

100%. That's right. Uh, a couple of couple of the key features I want to talk about of the actual product itself. I want to talk about smart merge because this is, and I'm I'm totally throwing you, I'm putting you on the spot here. This is one of the biggest problems that I remember when I was building WordPress websites. And again, full transparency. I don't build WordPress websites for clients these days. I faff about in WordPress for my own kind of hobbies. Our agency Mavericks.com website is still on WordPress. The troidane.com.au website's still on WordPress. Uh, I still love WordPress as a platform. We use high level for a whole bunch of other things now for funnels and and marketing stuff and CRM. So I don't use I'm not I'm not in the weeds running an agency managing multiple WordPress sites for clients. All of our coaches are still doing that, and of course, all of our clients are still in that in that game. But when I was doing this, the biggest challenge with staging sites was uh you would pull the live site down onto a staging environment, you would add some functionality, whether it was, you know, a function, a new function PHP file or a set of plugins to add some functionality to the website or some custom theme development, you would test it on the staging site. Maybe that would take you a week to get that right. In the meantime, new content has been published to the live site. You then go to publish your changes from the staging site back to the live site and you realize that things break because you haven't taken into account the new content that's been published on the live site, right? How does the smart merge to by the way, if you're listening to this and you're cowboy coding on live websites for your clients, please stop and take the website onto a staging environment and play with it on the staging environment? And you can do that with WP Remote, and they'll even set you up a staging site on their WP remote staging servers. So it's a you know, click of a button and you're done. So please don't cowboy code on live sites, it's not good practice. How do how does the smart merge tool work? Am I right in saying that you can make the changes on staging and then merge it back to live and and and merge the the live content with the changes you've made on the staging environment?

No, not exactly. So we do provide some of that functionality and we have tried to solve it for a long time. I just think that it's a very tricky problem to solve. It is. So we don't give you that complete functionality. What do we do? Let you do uh do is like okay, fine, pick parts of the site that you want to, or but at a fine level, not really at the database level. So the database merge is not something that we support. We we do track a few things, frankly, the risks involved is so high. So what we realized is that while we can make it work sometimes, but we don't want to take risks with live site. And that is so and it's not worth it. And every WordPress website is slightly different. And when that is the case, then we don't want to take take the risk with a live website, and we don't want to give you this function this magical tool which works 90% of the time or 85% of the time, because the other 15% of the time you're dead. That's right. And that's that's right. And that's not a and that's not a we we realize that uh frankly, that kind of uh if you can't give assurance of things working almost every time, it becomes really, really uh difficult to use uh the product product to be able to rely on the product. And in these cases you want a reliable product. So and which is why we said that do not try and avoid doing it because the risks are way too high. It's it's a problem which I still think sometimes maybe with some of the AI stuff we can do it in a better manner, but uh I don't think uh it's not something which we recommend doing uh on the live in this manner, and that's an intractable problem as it stands right now. Some many people have attempted it, if you'll see, and we ourselves have attempted it. Actually, if you look at our stage site, you'll notice that we track every change happening to your website inside another table. So we are doing some of that stuff, but uh it the we saw that the reliability was just not there. It's all and which is why we keep focusing on reliability because if your solution works 85% of the time, it is not good enough, it is just not good enough, and uh it has to work every time.

I agree, and again, that just goes back to what we're saying before that that's why people. People will leave a product because it'll work 85% of the time, and then the 15% that doesn't work, that's when you're in real strife. And if you don't get the support you need and it's not doing what you expect it to do, you go looking for another solution. The other thing I want to talk about is the client reports that WP remote, because this is, you know, one of the if you're listening to this by the way and you don't have clients on some kind of care plan, regardless of the platform that you're on, by the way, um, then you should definitely be uh encouraging your clients to get onto a care plan. It's great for recurring revenue, but also it actually allows you to keep an eye on their website every month and make sure that things are, you know, running smoothly. One of the challenges with this, though, is that clients want to know what they're paying for. And, you know, working out a report and putting together a report is timely and um and takes time, and that means your profit's going out the window. Uh now I know some of these other platforms that I've used in the past do have uh, you know, these kind of sample client reports, but they're pretty rudimentary and and uh not very good, to be honest. I'm looking at yours on the website. If you go to wpremote.com and go to client reports, you can then view a sample report. It's very detailed. And if you I mean, how much of this is automated, first off?

So yeah, so like you mentioned, client reports play an important role with every agency because a lot of the work you do happens in the background, right? And especially on a client's monthly retainer, and the client is always wondering what the hell are they paying for because they don't see a lot of it, like the backups happening, the updates happening, it's all you're putting in an insane amount of effort, but how do you communicate with the client? And reporting is one of the ways where you can send them monthly reports. What we do is we let you, because everything is happening through our platform, we let you we track all of everything that's happening on the platform, all the backups, all the security, uh, everything else that's going on with the website. And then we put it into an automated report, which you can customize to a great extent. And I'm glad that you noticed that that so in the past one year we have made that uh customization. I think no other product even comes close to it. So we give you incredible level of control as to what goes into the report, we bring data from sources, which again uh is really difficult to get otherwise. So, for example, we have a built-in firewall um and we keep track of all the attacks that are happening on your website, and then we convey it in a uh uh in a manner which again, because no other product has a firewall, we convey all of that, and then that adds value to your clients to know that if they are part of um uh your care plan, then their sites are being protected on an ongoing basis. So those are that's again everything is automated once a month or once a week. I think you can set your own schedule and then you can send it out in a completely customized with file table. It appears as though it's coming from you. We now also have read receipts. So if someone, if your client opens the and you know, this is something which uh you you send out a report and you are you're like, does anyone even open it? But when they open it, you can see you you can see it on the dashboard that hey, the client actually opened that.

Oh, that's neat. That's neat.

So those that's again a that's again a functionality that we have added recently, and I I and you can keep track of that.

That's great. So yeah. I would send it weekly, by the way. So I can see you can schedule a one-time report or you can autom automatically send it weekly or monthly. I would send it weekly, right? Even if not much has happened, I would send it weekly because that just means every Monday morning my client on top of mind with my clients. I used to do this with um um my SEO tool, which is now called agency analytics back in the day. I had a team doing all the SEO work for my clients, and I would just have a white label PDF go out every Monday morning with their Google Analytics and their and their rankings and their keyword tracking to all of my clients so that every Monday morning they woke up to a report. If they didn't open it, that's fine. They saw my name and my email address and the fact that I'd sent them a report every Monday morning, so it kept me top of mind, and that was a way for me. I just think a month is is too long, so I would do it weekly, and it's fully white labeled with WP remote. You can put your own logo on it and you can send it from your own email uh address, which is also awesome.

Hey I love one part of it. I'll just interrupt you there. Sorry. The fact that you said that the my name is there on the email, I didn't never imagine it like that. Yeah, like they are they are seeing an email from me, they are seeing I would have always thought that and I think that rinks true to me, that the fact that the email is coming from me makes sure that hey, this uh Troy exists or this agency exists or Akshut exists, and it's not uh it is not something which is written. That's the fact that somebody says that I exist itself is a reminder and that itself I think uh plays a role. You don't even need to open that import in that.

That's right. It's like a bill, it's just like a billboard in their inbox every Monday morning, right? Um that's all good. I think it would be remiss of us not to talk about AI at some point, and I have not briefed you on this at all, and so I don't know what your take is, but what do you think the opportunity is for agencies to be using AI? And then what do you think the risks are? And how do you think AI is gonna impact security? I mean, I have this kind of dystopian vision of the future where the robots are trying to hack websites and the other robots are keeping them out. I mean, is I mean that we're kind of I mean, we're kind of already there, aren't we? Like what's your take on what's happening with AI and how's it gonna impact the agency life?

All right, so yeah, no, AI is uh something which I think if you're in technology in any way, uh it just cannot escape you. You are thinking about it all the time. The world it has not yet changed, but you know you can see it change. It's almost uh and I think uh Troy, uh we are uh we are almost of the same vintage, so you can almost think of what uh internet was like, and you knew that if you're coming from publishing in a different uh genre, and then suddenly you saw this internet thing happening, and you knew something was happening, and then a lot of people transitioned and and you and then it became everything changed, right? And we we almost can foresee uh the same thing happening with AI. So it's not yet there. We also know that we have all tried our hand at it, we all have certain tools, certain uh things which have made our lives so much easier, but we know that the real promise is still out there. It is still going to happen, right? And it's maybe a couple of years away. It's very difficult to put a finger on it. Even if you talk to like the even if you listen to, I haven't been talk to, while also listening to a lot of the great minds in the world, right? There's there's still an apprehension about when exactly things will start changing and to what extent. And I think that's that's an approach to take where you when you see the greatest minds in the world having that lack of clarity, that let's not jump the gun, but we also know that it's going to happen sooner sooner than later. So it's very easy to uh it's very easy to think it's all doom and gloom because AI is going to take over everything that we ever do and we always learn to do. And we that's that's one way of looking at it, right? And that that I I I've spoken to many agencies and there is that fear that everything exists, and not only in agencies, but also as a business owner myself. Like what's going to happen, everything is uh and there's one angle to that, but I don't think that's the way to look at it at all, right? And and simply because frankly, how it'll play out is nobody it's anybody's guess, as as it stands right now. Now, uh I think that there are huge opportunities with AI. I that's the way I look at it. And I uh one but and we we spoke about I think you spoke about it at Lent at at uh MAFCON at the previous NAFCON, right? And it was such a fantastic, I think on on stage, I think half your time went went on uh we spoke on AI, if I if I'm right, in uh in US last year. Is it just makes everything that you want to do, uh or you you can make it happen in so much so much efficient manner, that is one. But also just be able to do so many things which otherwise was not possible. The way we look at AI is you as an agency or as a business, what you'll be able to accomplish is you'll be you know, the potential of a website is so high, or potential of a small business is so high, and especially their website. And today, just because of the lack of resources uh at any level, right? Even as an agency, when they hire you as an agency, you only have so many so much resources that you can bring to it. And because of the lack of the resources, you're not able to take you're not able to maximize what a put a website can achieve. And I believe with AI, what you'll happen is you will be able to do things to such an extent that people will be able to get so much more out of their website. Today you might not be able to run 20 different types of ad campaign, you might even not be able to think about ads or page marketing simply because you don't have the resources, the client does not have the resources to uh be able to do Facebook ad, TikTok ad, uh you know, Instagram ad, Google ad, everything at the same time. Because uh but with AI, how will that change? Or how do you optimize each one of these flows to such an extent? Those those things will start changing with AI for sure. And it'll give you that capability. And I'm just I'm still talking service level, some obvious thing. But what will happen is we think if you're looking at it from a maximizing the potential of a small business or maximizing the potential of a of a website, we think that AI will let give you that capability and give every agency that capability. So what a big team and b some of the largest marketing teams would accomplish, that AI will enable you to do uh and enable you to do for hundreds of clients at the same time. So I think that is the potential we see with AI. And you you start seeing like you earlier you were waiting for clients to give you content. Now you know that you can do content yourself, and these are these are small things, but you are seeing the we are seeing uh you are seeing uh those activities uh show up in your workflows, creating images, creating graphics, all of that. We are seeing clients earlier. You would take forever, and most of many a times you would end up using stock graphics, stock images. Those things are improving, and they're they continue to improve. But earlier, you like we spoke. I think there was uh this person who came from a video background, uh, who was a great video editor and uh would build videos at Mavcon last year. And if he knew that he knew he said that video is incredibly powerful, but it is incredibly expensive to do. Right? It's very, very expensive to get rid of it takes an insane amount of effort. Now, how does video change or can you include video? And we have seen ourselves in our business whenever we have included video and something, and uh it improves the uh the impact of the of that marketing or that flow significantly. Even even with yourself, you can see that we've built such a great great studio. And when you invest in video, it makes a difference now. Uh how will AI change video? Or will it be a will it will it democratize video to such an extent that you can include video even if you don't have that kind of budget sloppy? So we just think that, or if you don't have and budgets does not really mean money. Frankly, many times we say resources or budgets in terms of money, but it rarely is money. It's time. It's more about it's time, it's it's about able to find the right person. And if you can't find that good person, then it's effectively not worth doing that for.

Yeah, that's right.

Like finding the right agency itself is so difficult, right? And then the agency has to find that video guy. So that's that's the way we look at it. Like AI will enable you to get, you know, democratize some of these things, which even if you had the money, you're not able to. So we're not saying that you want to give it for cheap. In fact, as agencies, you should always try to do high-quality work at high quality prices. Never, and uh, you are the biggest advocate of it, right? Always uh don't vote cheap. That's that's uh um that's a dead man's game.

Yeah. I think uh, you know, it's gonna be interesting um how we begin to interact with the web through AI. I mean, I've been talking to ChatGPT for a while now, uh, because I don't like using a keyboard uh mainly because I'm terrible at it. And so I like to just talk to ChatGPT and ask it what I need, and it responds, and we have a conversation. It's quite remarkable, actually. And I I'm curious how that's gonna I'm also really curious about spatial computing. And I'm really uh I can see that Apple are about to release a new version of the um Apple Vision Pro. I think they're just gonna get smaller and smaller and they'll eventually just look like reading glasses and they'll be, you know, have a bunch of cameras and microphones built in. Um and so spatial computing really interests me. And I I just wonder, when we're not looking at screens and we're talking to ChatGPT, how web design changes? And are we going to be optimizing our websites for search in three years, or are we going to be optimizing our websites for GPT assistants or GPT agents in three years? And if so, then how what does that mean for design? Do we still need websites that look like a great user experience, or does it all just come back to semantic markup and fast loading, you know, really well thought out content that's really useful? And does does actually user interface design become less important? It's a it's a really interesting time, and I'm really curious to see what happens to the internet over the next three years. I think we're up for some big changes ahead.

I frankly, uh I would have it's a it's almost like a once written twice shy. So we saw this happen 2008, nine, or maybe I think it really is peaked at 2013-14 timeframe, where it was like, hey, it's only going to be apps and no websites, right? What we do know is uh what my perspective is this, and I think uh this because people also ask me, hey Akshati are all doubling in doubling down on websites, why don't you uh why don't you uh de-risk your business, right? Because we are going in more and more and emphasizing so what we have our understanding is that websites will continue to be the most important asset a business can have. Right? While some of its content will enable a chat GPT to get better answers about your business, at the end of it, the kind of personalized experience which anyone wants, it will always be available through your website. It's almost like when you go to a Google Maps, you will see the reviews, you'll see the rating, but when you see the link to a website on that Google Map, anytime to see a phone number, you might even call that person, but if you see that link to a website, if you're just checking for a restaurant or any small business, and in spite of it being inside the Google Maps interface, you end up clicking on that website. Right? And I think the website will always be the most powerful way to communicate with your clients or potential customers or your other stakeholders. And the way I think again, if let's go back to 2001, I uh it's almost like uh the website websites used to be terrible, right? They used to be nothing was in there. And as technology improved, again, it brought great websites to I think what appears like what appears as a terrible website today was an incredible website in 2001. Like people would pay an arm and the leg and God only knows what to get a website like that and to be able to manage that content. So what will happen is I think the kind of interaction that will be possible through a website uh will again uh change dramatically, and simply because the tooling required to create that will get democratize. So at least that's my perspective that websites at least some form of websites will always uh let's not call it always will exist to a much longer term than uh then we would you know get swayed. We should take a step back and be like not get swayed by all the noise. At least that's what I would think. How do you make that more and more powerful and how do you enable your clients to or businesses to get every interaction, every time somebody visits that your website it that person should buy like uh should the likelihood of that person purchasing your product should go up dramatically? And how do you enable that? I think that's uh you will just see that increase significantly because uh you'll just see that improve significantly because of AI. It's like when you go to you know, when you click on a page or on a link, and it whether it's on Google search or whether it'll be on Chat GPT or something, when you go to a page you really want to buy that product, frankly nobody goes to website thinking, hey, I don't want that product. It is just that the website does not do justice to to the communication. And uh and uh and that's why I think it's one of my favorite sayings, and that's not my own saying, but I don't remember where it got it from. It's like when you go to a movie theater to watch a movie, but uh you want it to be the greatest movie in the world. Nobody goes to a movie theater thinking that it's I want to watch a CD movie, right? It might turn out something else, but so it's almost like when people take that action, people want great results. And how do you enable that great result to happen? How do you increase that likelihood? Is I think that's the opportunity for us.

Interesting. Well, it's a nice segue into the just before we let you go, the latest addition to the WP Remote Family is a plugin called Airlift. You can find this at airlift.net. Again, give us the elevator pitch. What does Airlift do for uh your website?

All right, so everybody wants a fast website, right? And uh again, for eternity, everybody has always wanted a fast website. But having a fast website is incredibly difficult. You know? Uh websites, you know, you built this greatest website, and just speaking to agency owners, you've spent all this effort, made sure that you have optimized everything, you've used the right theme, the right page builder, everything else to make sure that the website is really fast. Go in three months later. Uh and that itself is incredibly difficult, very, very difficult to get that right. But is suppose you even put in that effort and you get that, and or most likely you have inherited a website which is filled with every single bad practice that exists out there, right? But even when you've done a great job with a website, what you see is the client will go in, or the client will say that, hey, I need this pop-up and I need this thing. And as soon as they add that pop-up or you add this widget, the performance goes out of the window. And you we have seen, like, if you look, even go to any of the showcases. If you go to whocommerce.com, you see the showcase websites. Like these are the websites that they think are really great. And when you go to the performance, you'll see that the performance is shit. Uh and these guys, these companies have millions of dollars also spent on their website, and they are spending it, and simply because performance is such a difficult problem to solve. Making a website fast is really difficult. But we also know that when you improve the performance of your website, conversion rate skyrockets. So you will not one is every customer who comes will see more pages, they will act more, act faster, they will buy more products. Then the second thing because of this is Google will send more traffic. Everyone, every person wants to send you to fast website. So both of these we see is so important, and uh a fast website is worth pursuing, but it's really difficult to get it. With Airlift, we let you get a fast website with a TL power button. And the way we do it is uh I'll just make that one one short pitch. I I know I've been rambling on. Uh no, no, no, it's okay. Yeah, so uh the way we do it is we look at your website as an expert performance of as a performance expert. Our systems look at it, it's all technology. And we load your website in a browser, in multiple browsers, and five, we see what the behavior of the website is. Then we go deep into the website and fix every single thing that that is causing your website to be slow. And we do it all automatically. So we we are not going to go and change your theme or change even a remove even a single plugin, but rather we look at the behavior of what is causing it, what that plugin or that uh theme is doing that is causing your website to be slow and how to fix it. What's the what's the right way of solving that problem? And we apply that fix automatically. And we do this day in and day out for the entire website.

Got it. And at the moment, you said pre-show, you said airlift is free at the moment, and you're trying to figure out a pricing model for agencies. Is that is that right?

Right. So airlift is uh we can airlift will continue to be free to uh to a great extent, right? And uh, that's one of our that's the I think the technology we have built enables us to do that. But also for agencies, you know, uh agencies want a white-labeled product. Agencies don't want the Airlift banner or any of the airlift branding to appear on their client websites. They want a level of support, they want the best of airlift for their clients. And do it at a man at a pricing which is uh which is still very um uh you know uh affordable so that they can give it to all their clients. So we we have uh agency pricing in the works so that they get a white labeled experience. And for us, the pitch to agencies is this is that as long uh I think one of the biggest challenges agencies face is how do you communicate the value that you are providing and a report is a great way to do it, but how do you communicate, how do you get the client to feel that, yeah, as long as they are with you, they're continuously getting value. Right? And I think performance is one of those things which uh enables an agency's agency to continuously offer value. As long as they are with your care plans, they will have the fastest website possible.

Got it. Airlift.net. Yep, airlift.net is where you check it out. And airlift is part of the WP Remote uh dashboard as well, right? Yes, airlift is also part of Web, so it's part of that bundle experience. Great. So airlift.net and wpremote.com are really the the links that you want to check out. We'll put them in the show notes. Again, thank you so much for joining us on the Agency How podcast, and thank you also for supporting us to bring MavCon to San Diego in October. The dates, I think, are October 14, 15, and 16 in uh at the uh Spring Hill Suites Marriott, downtown San Diego, right opposite the water. We're very much looking forward to that event. It's gonna be awesome, and uh big shout out to you guys there at WP Remote for continuing to support us there. Really appreciate your time here on the podcast, AKChat.

Thank you again for having me, Try, and we are really looking forward to attending Mac1 again.

Awesome. Thanks, ma'am. Talk soon. Bye for now.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Hey, thanks for listening to the Agent Cow podcast, and a massive thanks to AKChat for joining us. As I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, Mavcon San Diego is happening in October, and tickets are still available at the time of recording this. Check out the link to this episode and get the early word offer while tickets last, I will sell out pretty quickly. Okay folks, remember to subscribe and please share this with anyone who you think may need to hear it. And remember, people used to enter the phone by saying ahoy instead of hello. I'm Troy Dane, let's get to work.