She was like, My AI has fallen in love with me. Because she's talking to this thing and it's going, Hey babe, what should we do tonight? And she's like, I don't know. What do you think we should do? And he's like, Why don't we take a walk on the beach? And she's like, Well, how are you gonna enjoy the sunset? Like, you're an AI on my phone. And I was like, Oh my gosh, am I gonna have a little buddy on my desk that I talk to all day long? And he's probably gonna become my best friend.

Hey, 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've got the one and only Chase Buckner coming at you from High Level. Chase is the director of product marketing at High Level. And today we're exploring AI and the possibility of robots finally liberating humans from the screens and the keyboards, managing conversations with your leads and why you should aim to have a hundred conversations in the next 90 days, how high level is now taking on the e-com world and going up against Shopify and WooCommerce. Where you should start in high level to immediately see a positive change in your numbers and much more. So if you've been living under a rock and still don't know about high level and you're still using a hundred different pieces of software to patch together your deliverables, then you're in for a treat. I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the agency hour for the 800th time. Chase Buckner from High Level. Hey buddy, how you doing? I'm doing great.

Super excited to catch up. It's been a while.

It has. I think this is definitely your second, maybe your third time on the agency hour. So welcome back. Uh, Director of Product Marketing at High Level Hour.

Every time your background gets cooler and cooler, by the way.

Well, we're about to switch it up again because we're bored. Um, your lens is looking amazing. I love the 800 lanyards behind you. I've actually got I've actually got mine on a hook here. I've got a headphone hook next to me, and on that hook, I've got all my kids from all the conferences. It's kind of a nice memento. I like it. It kind of reminds me of all the places that I've been and all the cool people I've met.

Exactly. I don't know why I started doing it, but it's cool and now I like it.

What an amazing time to be alive, right? I mean, here we are. I'm in Melbourne, Australia. You're in where are you these days?

Uh Puerto Varno, Mexico.

Right, you're in Mexico, and we're hanging out here and we're having a conversation in full HD talking about software that has connected the world. And uh we've we've hung out at these events in real life and shared lanyards and shared margaritas. We actually did share a margins. No, what we what did we share at the we shared a dessert, didn't we?

We shared a ridiculously chocolatey dessert, is what we've shared.

It was a lovely, it was a lovely mandate, a bit of bronze there at uh at Mavcon. Um so now people are people who are in the high level ecosystem will be very familiar with you from the videos teaching us how to use high level, what's coming up in high level. People who aren't in this space, uh, you know, there's it's interesting. I'm in quite a few Facebook groups, and I someone posted the other day in a Facebook group, you know. What's the benefit of using high level? And all these people came in and went, Well, it's just an MLM and a pyramid scheme for making affiliate marketing, affiliate commission. And I chimed in and said, Yes, I understand why it might look like that way on the outside, and that's how I felt, in fact, until I actually started using the software and then closed 28 browser tabs and stopped spending $80,000 a year on software and now make over $100,000 a year on affiliate commissions, and it runs my entire business in one app. So there's that. But for those that, for those that, and I get it, like for those that aren't familiar with the high level, which I doubt anyone listening to this isn't, but for those who aren't familiar with the value proposition, what is you know, what is the elevator pitch for high level these days?

It's so funny you said that because my best friend Mac lives in New York City, and he's saying we have a running joke about high level being an LM L MLM. And uh I messaged him the other day after we announced the big news, our partnership with General Atlantic. It was a big investment into high level. Um, uh, you know, I was like, big day. And he's like, Yeah, that's great, congratulations. And then his next message was, I just feel bad for all those businesses you're scamming. And I was like cracking up. And the truth is, he has he owns a coffee shop with some of his friends, and I'm like, dude, just let me set up high level and then you will understand why we've grown so fast, right? And it's because it's the all-in-one toolkit that every marketer has always dreamed of, and it's priced anti-traditional SaaS pricing, which means if you work with clients, you pay one price and you can use the system for as many clients as you want, which is you know, no price per user, no price per contact, none of that stuff that just inflates software to the point where it just becomes unbearable. And and that's the secret, right? And those two things have really powered um the historic growth that I would say we've had over the past five years.

I I I just I want to just talk a little bit about the journey, right? Because and I'm you know, look, a lot of people just think that I I sprook a high level because I make affiliate commission out of it, right? It's really simple. Just go to high just go to gohighlevel.com and sign up and don't use my affiliate link. I don't care. I just want you to use high level because it, you know, I've been for these reasons. I've been I've used everything. We started out on a weber, right? We started out on a weber, then we went to Office Autopilot when it was an absolute dog of a product. Then we what it's now it's now entreport. You used to be called Office Autopilot when it first launched, right? Then we went to Active Campaign. Um, the reason we left Active Campaign is because you can't upload a file onto someone's record in their sales pipeline. So you couldn't upload note like I used to make notes on an iPad saved as a PDF. Couldn't upload that file onto their record in the CRM. I'm like, well, then that's that's this is not a CRM. What do you mean I can't attach a file, right?

Well, and I think the reason we built it was you couldn't send two-way SMS. I still don't think we would.

This is why I left HubSpot, right? And so then from Active Campaign, then we went to Infusion Soft because it had that back in the day, it had that really sexy automation drag and drop builder that everyone loved, right? Everyone just went gargoy over that, including myself. We used Infusion Soft for a long time. We ended up having plus this plugged into Infusion Soft to actually make it work, right? Because I remember that you know, it has all this cool stuff, but you need third-party tools to actually make it work. Then seven years it took me to pull the trigger on HubSpot. I'd been I'd been flirting with HubSpot for seven years, to the point where I stood out the front of their office in Boston and took a selfie when I went to Boston the first time. Like I was listening to their podcast, I was like, I was enamored. And I feel when I pulled the trigger on HubSpot, I felt like I'd grown up. I was like, oh, I've I've arrived now, I'm a grown-up, I'm using HubSpot, right?

You're a legitimate agency. Yeah.

Within 12 months, our HubSpot bill had ballooned to about $45,000 a year. And we can't send SMSs to clients natively out of HubSpot. We have to use a third-party tool called Just Call or Kixie, or we ended up using Aloware, I think, for our sales team to do calls, and that was another ended up being another 600 bucks a month once we got all the seats in Aloware. And I'm like, hang on a second, it's getting more complicated and more expensive. And I went to HubSpot to simplify, right? And now I've got more browser tabs than ever, and it's costing me more and more. Guy called Chase Buckner kept emailing me every month going, Hey dude, can we just can I show you what we're doing? And eventually I was I'm like, okay, fine. And so the dream for me over the years was, and for all marketers over the years, and particularly agencies, is let's have an all-in-one system, which everyone, you know, and we I could go back through Facebook groups and show you where people have asked this question over the last five or six years, and all the responses are you're hunting a unicorn, it does not exist, right? And then high level came along, and the promise was, and back when I started using it, which was you know maybe three years ago, I saw the vision, but it wasn't there, it wasn't an all-in-one. It had it was, you know, it had problems. I wouldn't say it was buggy, it didn't look very good, but it wasn't buggy. It was pretty solid, maybe a little bit slow. Over the last three years, it has evolved. I can't believe how fast it's evolved. In fact, every time I log in, it's one getting faster, two getting much prettier to look at and easier to use. And it has replaced almost every piece of software. In fact, the only piece of software that we're still kind of using is Circle. And the only reason we're using that is because we run live coaching calls in Circle, and they're automatically recorded and saved as a post in Circle. The moment high level rolls that out in communities, we're done. We'll shut down Circle. And here's why. Because when some we're just we're in the middle of a launch at the moment for our paid discovery course, we've got a bunch of people coming in, and here's the way it works in high level. They go to a page that's built in high level. So I don't need click funnels or elementor. They then click a button which goes to a checkout form in high level. So I've cancelled my Thrivecart. They then fill in the form and they go to a one-click upsell page. So I don't need all the fancy shit that used to happen to make that happen. It's just a button. They click to one-click upsell and add another course to their cart. They then land on a confirmation page where there's a login button. They automatically get logged in to the course. They don't even have to put an email in it, right? We do you know the bullshit I had to go through to make that happen in WordPress with magic links and WP fusion and like all the overhead that the technical debt required to make that happen, that all happens. And then if all the automations, emails, the in the payments, the login details, all that stuff happens in high level. And if anyone says I didn't get access to my details, I just go to high level, I look at their contact record card, and I can follow the breadcrumbs and find out exactly what went wrong. Usually it's because they've previously unsubscribed from emails. So now we have an action at the top of that automation that re-subscribes them once they buy, right? I got I got one browser tab open, right? And the cost is is the cost is negligible. By the way, I can do all of that on the $97 a month plan if I'm just running my own business, right? If I want to resell this to, if I want to use this to manage an unlimited number of clients, I can do it for $2.97 a month. And my team know how to use it. Right? So, so it's don't don't don't sign up with my affiliate account. Just go and sign up and take it for a speed, right?

Use Troy's link if you if you're seeing this, because he deserves it. Um but yes, the journey's been amazing. And I think what was really interesting when I joined the team, right? Because I used to run an agency. We contemplated building the unicorn. Thank God we got talked out of that. Then we went on the hunt for it, somehow got introduced to Sean Robin and Varun, and we were one of the first customers. As soon as I saw it, I was like, this is it, this is what we've been waiting for. Because it's the three co-founders, two of them are engineers, and one of them is an agency. So right there, it's the dream team, right? And they when I so I started building it out, we were you know going back and forth, and then I got the opportunity to join the team pretty quickly. And in the beginning, there were some points that I didn't agree with, and I have since done a total 180, is we completely proved the model, which is from the very beginning, Sean especially knew that 80% of any software's users only use 20% of its actual features. And so the mantra was we just need to focus on building out the 20% that most people use of all the top marketing softwares in one place. And so there the common pushback was it's an all-in-one, yeah, right, because it can't do this, that, and the other thing that this other tool can do. And that was by design, right? And so that um premise proved to be true, and it enabled us to scale to a point where we hit a tipping point, and now we're going way beyond the 20% and all those different feature sets, right? Now we basically have hundreds of engineers, so we essentially have full product teams for each of these product sets, and now they're just going deep. So the moat is pretty strong at this point, and yeah, like a lot of those early days were like it's cool if you just want to do this. That kind of stuff is going away by the day because the more intricate stuff is just getting knocked out at an incredibly at an incredible rate. Like every day the release channel, there's like 10 releases. I think there was 12 today. It's nuts.

I I saw this comment recently in a on a Facebook post where the guy said that you know high levels like it's kind of hacked together a little bit of everything, but it doesn't do anything particularly well. And I said, uh I said, well, well, maybe two years ago, maybe you might have been kind of maybe on point, but it's it's like what you can do now, and and you know, even in the last six months, it's like so we'll talk about a few of the things, but but before I get into the details, I just want to let people know if you're listening to this, just uh suspend your uh judgment for a minute and take high level for a spin. Uh we'll put links underneath this, but if you just go to gohighlevel.com and sign up if you don't want to pay me my commission, that's totally fine. I don't care. Just take it for a spin and use it, right? And here's the way I approach it. I we I have agencies ask me every single day, I'm at we're about to go into high level, what's the best way to do it? Because it's overwhelming, it's a huge learning curve. And here's my response find the one thing that is going to give your agency a return on investment and just do that. Usually it's get your email list in there and start emailing your list to book calls and get make more sales, right? If you do that, then you will you'll learn how to use the email builder, you'll learn how to use the automation workflow builder, you'll learn how to use their calendar, and you're done, right? All the other stuff, the 8,000 other things it does, you can worry about that later. Same with your clients. Find the one thing that's going to give your clients return on investment and just do that first.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we actually even have a whole our kickoff team. Like when you sign up, you'll get it, you'll start getting nurtured with emails and text messages telling you to jump on with their kickoff team. And that is their goal, is to get you set up with like five things that will immediately start producing results for you. And then you can go explore the rest of the app. But for me, any business that's running ads, the number one thing you need to do is just automate back a text message to every lead that gets generated, that just asked an engaging question. If you just do that, you will immediately start seeing a change in your numbers.

100%. I, you know, I one of the challenges that we're running with our agencies at the moment is to have a hundred conversations in 90 days. The reason that I've I've done this before several times, and the reason I like it, and I've had several agencies go through this process is you have a hundred conversations with people who you think are your who you think might be your ideal client. Now, these are people who might have bought from you in the past, they might be prospects, they might be people in your email list, they might be friends of your dad, right? It doesn't matter. Like people that you think might be your ideal client have a hundred conversations in 90 days. There's a process that it's a pretty simple process, like what are you trying to achieve? Where are you stuck? You know, what's the problem? Why can't you do it yourself? What do you look for in an agency? You have those conversations and you will your ideal client profile will design themselves and your offer will also write itself if you just listen to the feedback, right? And have having those conversations. I actually have a pipeline built out in a high level to manage those conversations, right? And move people through the conversation pipeline. I'm not selling them anything. By the way, you do end up picking up a bunch of business having 100 conversations in 90 days. But the first, the easiest way to do that is what you just said. If you're running ads and you generate a lead, send them a text message, try and get them on a call and just have a conversation, right? Um, before I before we get into the sexy stuff, here's a curveball. I want to talk about support. How typically what happens when a company grows fast is customer support has some problems, right? What's the current support model? And just because you're growing so quickly, what's the current support model and how are you managing the the growth?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So so huge shout out to Ian, who's um obviously a colleague, but also a good friend of mine these days who runs a support team. And what a journey they've gone through, right? Because the the growth that we've experienced, and we don't publicize these numbers, but someday they'll be public and people will see what what we've really done over five years is really unprecedented. And and I mean that lit quite literally. And so it's given me as a consumer a whole new level of compassion, right? Because I'm the dick. When I have a problem with software, I'm the guy that's so hard in my email of like, what kind of idiots do you have over there? Like, how do I know more about this than you do? Da-da-da-da-da, right? That's totally me or was me.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, and then you actually think about the challenge on the other end of that and scaling a support team. Whoa, Apple. Um, it's quite a challenge. And so they've attacked it from every angle. Brute force for sure. Like a lot of the investment money that we've taken over the years. We've been profitable since day one. We didn't have to take any money. We did it to scale support and to scale engineering those two things most specifically as fast as we could. So we have hundreds of support reps these days, and then creating the I I think one of the big game changers for them was that they realized it's just speed to a friendly face that immediately will change the numbers. So they built out a whole structure where it's like, look, every inquiry has to get replied to within a couple of minutes at max, with just a friendly hello, I'm here for you, I'm ready to empathize, I understand your problem, and I'm gonna get it to the right place. Like just that alone changed the game because when that happens to you, you feel heard, understood, and you know somebody's on it, right? Way better than getting a response hours later or days later. That's the exact answer you needed, right? That it's actually worse than if you just get an immediate like friendly hello. So they've done an incredible job of getting those response times down, and then they get the tickets to the to the specialists much quicker. And so that's all become much more efficient. But now they've also made a huge leap forward with AI.

So that was my next question. Like those hundreds of support agents out of a job in six months, or what what's what's going on?

No, but we'll theoretically be able to hire more slowly, not at the crazy pace that we have been. Um, but we're in the process of redoing all the help docs so that they're structured in a better way for the AI to digest them. And I think right now the AI chat successfully handles about 20% of the support requests now. And they want to get that up to 50. So yeah, they're doing a great job, and uh, it's a really hard job. And uh um, so yeah, next time, whether it's us or any support your your system you're dealing with at a big company, I've noticed the challenge.

I've noticed the help docs have table of contents and more kind of semantic, you know, structures and simple approaches. No, there's a lot that still need to be cleaned up, but we're actually some that are still just your video with no transcript, right? And that's you know, it it it kind of is what it is. I tell you who does an amazing job of AI support is closebot.io. Their support is an AI, it's incredible. I I've asked a bunch of questions, I always get the answer I want, and it's and it's kind of like a paraphrasing of a couple of different support docs that it's combined. It's really, really impressive. So shout out to those guys. All right, um, let's talk about some of the things that are coming or some of the things that are launching or about to be launched in high level. Remember, this is you know, it's you you're going very hard up against some of the software players that are still in the market that an agency might still be using. So I've been waiting, you know, I come from the WordPress days, and I still have, you know, a soft spot for WordPress. WordPress changed my life. It allowed me to launch my agency. I'll be having this conversation in 10 years' time about high level because high level's also been life-changing for me. But I have a soft spot for high level for WordPress. But my God, it's a pain in the arse sometimes, right? It's whenever I need to update someone's thing or my own website or whatever, it's like, you know, I just can't, I can't imagine. If you're still building a bunch of websites for clients, maybe it makes sense. I can't imagine if I'm starting a website for me or my wife or a project or whatever, or a landing page, or a funnel, or an event website or something, just for my own purposes. I can't imagine using uh using WordPress. So, but one thing I've been waiting for is you know, WordPress is really good at blogging. It has categories, tags, it has, you know, taxonomies. It also has custom post types, which I I know high level are kind of thinking about custom objects. We can talk about that. But but recently the blogging platform in high level got a complete upgrade, right? That's right.

It got completely rebuilt. That was one of the things where we really sort of missed the mark on the original build. And so they went back and rebuilt it from the ground up, which was a pretty big project. I think it took them like six months to get that done. Um, and they mapped it to HubSpot. So if you've ever used the HubSpot blogging system, it's very similar to the way that it works and structurally and whatnot. And uh I agree with you. I I have a soft spot for WordPress. I built thousands of WordPress projects at our agency. But yeah, nowadays, like um you know, one of my friends I was hosting, I still host was hosting up until last week one of their uh they have a tequila tasting business website on WordPress. And I got an update that something broke. Or whatever, and they send it to me, and I'm like, oh gosh, like I logged into WordPress and I was just like, oh my gosh, like, you know, all the banners and all the plugins and all this. And I'm like, this is crazy. And I was like, you know what? Um, I can't help you with this anymore unless you're cool with me rebuilding it at high level for you. And they said, cool, we don't care. You know, we just need it to look great. And I'm like, it'll actually run a little faster and it's gonna look a little more modern and whatever. So literally, two hours over the weekend last weekend, I rebuilt the whole thing in high level, runs faster, looks better. And and now I'm like, now that it's on high level, do you want because they're in Mexico? I'm like, would you like WhatsApp like to be on the website? And they were like, What? You can do that? I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like so it just opens up so many doors when you when you build a whole system as opposed to just a website. And now blogging, that was actually one of the things holding it back too, because they had some blog posts. And now that the new blogging is out, I'm like, yeah, we I can just move this whole thing over to high level for you.

Um, custom post types uh is one thing that WordPress does really well that uh is missing in high level. Is there a play is that on the roadmap at some point?

So yeah. So today I think we just rolled out that now the global sections and the section templates from the website builder now work also in blogs. So that's kind of a step in that direction. And you also mentioned custom objects. So custom objects has been something that's been in the works for a very long time, and it's very close to launching. That I think is the last game-changing piece as far as the Salesforce and HubSpot worlds, you know.

Just explain custom objects for people who might not understand it.

So custom objects and and I'll be quite frank that I'm still wrapping my head around custom objects as we roll, you know, get dig into this world. Because I've never been like a enterprise CRM kind of guy. Like we always worked with local businesses and whatnot. But that being said, local businesses benefit from custom objects in a ways like this. Let's say you work with uh a used car, a car dealership or whatever. You've got a contact Troy Dean, but Troy has a car, right? The car has a make, a model, a VIN number, or whatever. Troy might buy multiple cars, you know, so it can't just be a custom field because then it'll keep getting overridden, right? Like there needs to be an object in the CRM that's associated called car associated with a contact or multiple contacts. And when you start to think about it, it could be anything. It could be pets, it could be children, right? If you work with daycares or something where you're communicating with the parents, but the actual you know client or customer is a child. So all of these things are custom objects, and the the idea is that you can create them to be whatever you want, and they have their own sets of fields, and they can be associated with multiple contacts, and then you can use them in all sorts of different ways, right? Like when it comes to websites, you could search a database of the objects and return stuff, and um, it's just a very complex enterprise level type of thing. But yeah, they're super, super close to going live and high level.

Great. And and just to uh loop back on the global section. So custom what a custom post type is in WordPress might be like testimonial, right? So you have a custom post type called testimonial, you add a bunch of posts to that, and then you can um display that post type in a grid or a list, or you know, you can place it anywhere around the the the site um in high level, it's a global section, is that right?

Sort of. They're not as flexible. Like global section just means you can build something and then you can drop it into any page without having to rebuild it again.

We got it. And then if I wanted to add a testimony to that global section, I'll just go and add it to the global section and it automatically populates wherever that global section is being used. That's right. Yeah. Got it.

But that will expand to be more of like the grid stuff that you're talking about with more flexibility, possibly, probably the ability to pull from custom objects into those grids. Um, you know, it gets very complex from there, but that's all possible very soon, as soon as this goes live. And then I would say the website builder team, the funnel team, is um ramping up. Like I think two or four new devs just started today for that team specifically, because there are still a bunch of like the standard widgets that need to be built into the system. Um and additionally, the marketplace, the the app developer marketplace, has been really ramping up over the past six months. I don't know if you've seen everything that's gone live over there, but basically you can build apps for high-level, they can be paid, they can be free, people can discover them in app, all that kind of stuff. The next piece of that is opening up the funnel and website builder to that community so that they can start building widgets, aka like WordPress plugins. So not only are we ramping up to build the native ones that we need to build, but the community is going to be able to start building all the crazy stuff that, you know, the random WordPress plugins that exist in the world.

So I I we we still use sendja.io for testimonials, which we love because high level doesn't have a testimonials widget per se. Um, and also there's another uh website I use called Common Ninjas every now and then, which is just a whole bunch of widgets that you can use on any website, right? So it's like you build the widget you want, you design it, it gives you a bit of JavaScript, you stick that on a page and it displays, right?

Common ninjas, I'll check it out. One that I always use and love, huge shout out to the team. I don't know, never met them or whatever, is elf site. Strange, strange name. Incredible library of widgets that you can embed on any site.

There we go. Thank you. I'll go down that rabbit hole and I'll check out elf sites. So yeah, these are as you said, with the marketplace opening up, people are going to build this stuff, and you know, that's gonna be a whole ecosystem in itself. And so uh, you know, these the I mean if you if you if you're building websites on something like framer.com, you would go to one of these places like elf side or common ninjas and get your widget and just embed the JavaScript, right? The value proposition for me in high level is if I'm not here and one of and Max is, you know, in Amsterdam having his birthday, and one of our testimonials widgets breaks, no one on the team knows how to use Sendjar. Whereas if it's all in high level, they know how to navigate their way around high level, right? So that's part of the not that I want to put these guys out of business, they're doing a great job, but for me it's about all keeping it all centralized and and all the um, you know, imagine collecting reviews from and testimonials from clients directly within high level, send an automation, request testimonial, post testimonial into global section that populates across the site. I mean, that's a no-brainer, right?

There's a lot of those magical things that are only possible when everything's part of the same system, right? And that's the kind of stuff the more you use high level, you're like, oh my gosh, wait a minute. The payments are all here, the products are all here, like the site is here. You know, there's just a lot of those moments. And then I think beyond that, a big advancement that probably was within the last year is inbound and outbound webhooks are in the workflow builder now. So 90% of the use cases I've had in the past where I've had to use Zapier, I don't have to anymore. I can go directly from that other thing to high level with a direct webhook and not have to put Zapier in the middle, which creates more cost, right?

Yeah.

And more breakpoints, like more.

I mean And another breakpoint. Yeah, yeah.

Zapier's not Zapier's not foolproof. Um sticky contact is another great little feature that you know we used to write, we used to write lines and lines of JavaScript so that when someone opts in on the front end of a funnel and then they go through the funnel and then they get to a calendar booking form, they have to re put their, they have to put their details in again, right? Well, high level, you tick a tick box that says sticky contact, and because they're cookied and because the information's in the browser, the forms already populate. In fact, if they come back tomorrow and they're still cookied, the forms are already populated for them, right? Little things like that that you don't you don't appreciate until you've actually built JavaScript to do this stuff yourself, and then you go, oh great, I don't need to, I don't need to keep my JavaScript library up to date anymore because you guys are doing it for me. So I can actually get on with doing the stuff that I want to do, which is connecting with humans, connecting with people, helping them solve problems, and also helping people stay relevant with the onslaught of AI that's coming out of the pipeline, which we'll talk about in a moment. Before we get there, let's talk about e-comm. What's going on in in e-comm?

Yeah, e-com has been a world where I was skeptical, to be honest. I was like, are we really going to try to compete with Shopify? Don't they have this entire market cornered by now, you know? Um although the flip side of it for me was I have such a disdain for WooCommerce that I was like, yeah, let's go beat WooCommerce at least. Yeah, yeah. So that team has just ramped up the product so fast, it's been crazy. So right now you can spin up a store literally in minutes that looks freaking awesome out of the box. It's got all the basic functionality in there, and they just keep every week and adding to it. And so one of the most recent releases that went out, which I'm super pumped for, and I think is going to be bigger than a lot of people realize, is the integrate a native integration with printful. I don't know if you've ever used them, but they're a print and ship on demand service, right? So, like our online swag store is all printful. If you go to the high-level swag store and you buy a t-shirt, we never touch it, right? They print it and they ship it to you, and it was integrated with our Shopify store. Well, now you can integrate that with high level. And so what that means is you can literally go sell a fully automated swag store to any business on the planet running through high level where you are high level, right? You white label high level. Now you are the SAS of an online swag store. I just think it's incredible because what business shouldn't be selling swag online, right? Like every restaurant, every brew pub, every local anything, you know, would love to have their t-shirts for sale on a website without having to deal with the hassle of like printing them and warehousing them and shipping them out and all that kind of stuff. So that was a really big one and it got a really big reaction. And so I'm excited to see all the all the e-comm, the automated e-com stores that get spun up now in high level because it's so much faster to spin them up. And let's be honest, Shopify is kind of expensive for a small business that wants to sell 10 t-shirts a month or something, right?

And also, yeah, the other thing is with Shopify, I'll give you one example, right? If you want to do the one-click upsell or the one-time offer with Shopify, you need a third-party app.

Every Shopify store is running at least five add-on apps, right?

And those add-on, a lot of those add-ons, I know that the one uh that's run by Ezra Firestone, uh, or the one that I don't know if he's still involved, but that thing allows you to uh when you buy on Shopify before you check out, it puts a basically a one-time offer pop-up in front of you, right? Well, their pricing model is they take a percentage, whatever the number is, of every of all new revenue that you make by using their thing, right? It's bonkers. You just like, I mean, that's just a bit of code, right? And in high level, we're doing this right now. We're running a one-click upsell funnel right now. So, you know, and I'm not, I'm not, you know, I mean, I love you, Chase, but I'm not paying you a percentage of all new revenue I'm making through that because, you know, um, that's super exciting. Uh, the other, I so he I follow a lot of YouTubers, and we're going all in on YouTube with a couple of different channels. And YouTubers, because the algorithm has changed, and there's a great talk, great South by Southwest talk by Jack Conti, who's the CEO of um Patreon. If you haven't seen it, check it out. It's called The Death of the Follower and the Future of the Creative Web. And it's basically all about community, right? It's like if you don't have community as a creator, you've you know, if you're relying on the algorithm, like because the algorithm is just not going to show your post to your followers anymore, right? It's pay-to-play now. I mean, the leaked documents from Google, prove it. Like, they don't give a shit about you unless you are a domain authority of 90, unless you're paying them buckets of money like Reddit in the backdoor, or unless you're, you know, paying and like an advertiser. Like if you're a small business and you've got a small website, they don't give a shit about your search results anymore. So and they haven't for a long time. It's a pay-to-play game. And so the YouTubers that I follow over the last 12 months, they've all now got their swag on their YouTube channel because they're not m they're not monetizing YouTube anymore because the algorithm's changed. So what they're doing is uh this is I see this as a way of you know having a high level, I don't know what they're using, but they're using some third-party tool with which they've got no control over. Uh, if you can, you know, embed your links there to your high-level uh printful print on demand store, yeah. That's a no-brainer, which is definitely something I'm gonna do. Uh, okay, we've talked about blogging, we've talked about e-commerce. Before we get to AI, social media.

Let's talk about social media, man. That's another team that's just been ramping up. So the full social media calendar, right? You can go in there, schedule your content across all the platforms in one shot and schedule it out. You can import with CSV, which is huge. So, like if you work within a specific niche, you know that you can create content that could work for any one of your clients or future clients, right? So you could literally build out a year's worth of content, you get a new client, you upload the CSV, and now they have a year's worth of social content scheduled out, right? So pretty powerful already in its current state. But what I've been personally pushing the team to get to, and um in Q3, this is gonna go live, is the ability to schedule, and right now you can schedule content to repeat. So to your point, you schedule something, five percent of your followers are gonna see it. So you really want to repeat that content to give it more and more at bats of actually being seen. So you can do that right now. But what you'll be able to do in Q3 is schedule categories of content. So my wife's a yoga teacher, right? And somewhat of an influencer on on Instagram. So she creates posts that are like how to do poses. She creates posts that are like um, let's say nutritional type posts. Let's say she makes inspirational posts. So these are categories of content, right? So as she uploads her content, she categorizes it, and then she'll be able to schedule okay, every Tuesday at two, publish something from the inspirational bucket, the inspirational category. So it will randomize and pull from that bucket of content and schedule. So you can build these dynamically repeating buckets of content across your calendar out as far into the future as you want, which is incredibly powerful. So I'm super pumped at what um, and we'll do a big social media challenge around that when it launches and stuff. But I just think that's gonna be a really big feature uh that's gonna roll out.

That's great. Awesome. Um again, just to repeat here, if you're an agency and you're doing stuff for clients and you're kind of a little bit sick of using all the, you know, 800 pieces of software that you need to do all that stuff, what I would suggest is for $97 a month, you can you get three sub-accounts. So you can run your own business out of high level and do all the stuff that we're talking about. You can set up one sub-account for a client, and then what I would do with the third sub account is make it a sandbox where you just experiment and play, right? And you sell that one sub account to a client for $97 a month and you break even. So you're basically running your business for free. Then once you've got your head around this, you can roll this out for an unlimited number of clients by just upgrading to the agency plan for $297 a month. I'll repeat that. $297 a month, you can then roll out high level for an unlimited number of sub accounts. The anything you pay extra for is the usage of SMS phone calls and emails. I did the math. It costs you about six dollars per 10,000 emails that you send a month. This is a no-brainer value property.

So you can actually rebuild those to your client, right? And you can if you go to our 497 plan, you can put margin on those things.

That's right. And there are there are I know guys who are you know making six figures a month just out of the markup on the text messages and the emails because they're working with you know, here's another one I forgot to tell you about.

So it's in private beta right now, which means it goes live any day.

Oh, this is a scoop hanging. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a scoop on the agency hour podcast. That's right.

So in high level, you will be able to publish Facebook and Instagram ads from within the platform. And what's really cool about that is it's a it's a very um, it was designed to be very easy to launch an ad, hopefully, so easy that your clients can launch them themselves. But what's cool is you can put a margin on the spent in the system. So you can rebuild that. So you could say, look, we want to put a 10% margin on the client ad spend for as our service fee or whatever. So you can monetize the spend of what gets sent to Facebook through the platform, which is gonna be another very powerful lever for rebuilding.

Is this I don't, I don't, I'm not getting political here, but is this how is this gonna impact UPEx? Because the one thing that I've one thing I hear is that, you know, and this happens. This is the this is the modern world that we live in, right? People go build things, the companies come along and go, that's a really good idea. We're just gonna build it ourselves. And the company, uh I like Sam, UPEX is a great product, he's got a great community, he's a good operator. How you know, does that just mean that he has to keep innovating? Is this a play against UPEx? What's the you know, what's the what's the the deal?

No, I mean we love Sam too, right? Sam and I have a hung out in Mexico, um, and we have this conversation and and Sean has had the conversation. We're super up front. We try to, to the best of our ability, to say, someday we will get to that. That is in our roadmap, you know? And so in this case, I I feel good saying like Sam knew this was coming for a very long time. What typically happens though is again, we don't we only go 20% into the feature set, right? So Sam will most likely continue to run UpEx and grow up hex because it goes much deeper into it than we most likely will. And that's happened a lot, right? We build something and people freak out, oh my gosh, like you're gonna destroy this person's business. And then they keep going just fine because you know they're willing to go deeper into it than we are. So it's definitely not a play against UPEx or Ply or any of them. But again, we are a road, we are an ideas board driven company. So if our customers vote something up with hundreds of votes, yeah, it's probably gonna get prioritized in the roadmap. And you everybody can see the roadmap, just go to the ideas board and look at what has the most votes.

I live on this thing ideas.gohighlevel.com. It tells me what's coming up, it tells me what people are voting on, it gives me an opportunity to vote. It's all here. The screenshots, the ad manager look fantastic, by the way. And I think this is the risk, and again, you know, not uh throwing Sam out of the bus here. There's a there's a you know, there's a bunch of people in the same situation, but this is the risk when you build something on top of someone else's platform or that's you know adjacent to someone else's platform is that you do run this risk that they might just innovate or they might not innovate, like some others who haven't been innovating. Um, let's talk about AI, man, because I am like, I believe, I'm gonna say this now on whatever date it is, the 6th of June here in Australia. I'm gonna say this that for me, the biggest change in my life, I'm 50 years old now, I know it's hard to believe. Uh, the biggest change in my life has been the internet, right? It has been the biggest fundamental shift in the way that we communicate, do business, uh the way that we live, the biggest change has been the internet, right? When I was 20, the idea of having this thing in my pocket, I'm holding up an iPhone here, it could be whatever brand. Uh I'm just an Apple fanboy. The idea of having this in your pocket that can take photos, make videos, send instant messages to people, swipe gestures, touch screen up and down, left and right, pinch to zoom in, that was like the Jetsons, right? And now I we I take it for granted, and the thing doesn't do all the things I want it to, and I resent it for not being technologically advanced enough, right? So I believe I still freak out sometimes at Wi-Fi. I send an email every now and then and I look at my computer and I look at the walls in the building and I go, where the fuck did that thing just go? Where did how did that happen? Right? It blows my mind. We have I don't I don't think we have seen anything yet. I think what's about to happen with AI is going to disrupt our world more than the internet did. And my personal belief is that for the last 40 years, human beings have been glued to the computer screen, and I think we're about to be liberated from the computer screen and the keyboard. There's a great video by a company called Sightful that I discovered yesterday. Max's wife actually sent it to us. They're launching a screenless computer, which is basically VR classes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've seen it? Yep. Right? So I'm looking forward to the day. We've all seen the film Her. We know that Scarlett Johansson sent a cease and desist letter to OpenAI and they had to pull her voice off, right? We're there. I mean, that's it. I mean, in five days' time, Apple announced a big partnership with OpenAI at the WWDC conference. We're there. We are talking to our GPT assistant. I'm looking forward to the day, Chase, when I can say, Hey, whatever your name is, I we're gonna launch a course in a couple of weeks. Can you please log into high level and build me out the funnel based on what you know works and write the copy and send me a link and I'll review it. And within a couple of minutes, it's done. I mean, that's I I'm I'm you and I are gonna live long. Enough to see that happen.

Exactly. And but it also it's interesting, right? Because, and again, I'm no AI engineer, right? I work with the team, but I'm constantly asking these questions too. And I always preface it with pardon my ignorance, but is this yet possible? Because it feels like at some point it will be. And they'll they'll come back and be like, no, no, no, it doesn't work like that yet. Like, because for me, what would be amazing is hey, here's a website that I love. Please rebuild it for me in high-level using the high-level elements, right? Like, not just code, because it could do that right now. Like it could spit you out an HTML rebuild, but that's not going to help anybody unless you know how to edit HTML, right? No, I want it rebuilt using the blocks, right? Using the builder. And that'll happen at some point, but it's not, we're not there yet. But where we are is with the conversational stuff. So conversation AI is every day gets better and better. And it's just insane. Like the idea that you can put the live chat widget on a website and switch it into live chat mode and then turn on conversational AI, and the majority of people who go to that website and talk with it won't know that they weren't talking to a human. Because it not only knows the business and can answer all the questions, but it can also and will try to book you into an appointment, which is insane. Again, that's like a Jetsons moment for a marketer just 10 years ago, right? Like and so what I'm really excited for is okay, we're launching the Facebook ad launcher, right? And you'll be able to launch click ads and lead ads day one. What I'm excited for is when you can launch messenger ads that run straight into an AI chatbot. Imagine the theory of that. You're paying for conversations that your AI is gonna have that's gonna turn into bookings on your account.

That's pretty freaking insane. It is. I mean, we're we're going all in on this because the the we know who our ideal client is, and we have a you know, we're kind of back in the DIY. We've made a decision recently to get back into the DIY self-learning market because we know we know that probably 85 to 90% of our audience are never going to enroll in any of our mentoring programs for a bunch of reasons. One, they're ex they're they're expensive for those clients. Two, it's it's a commitment, right? It's a it's a you you you have to level up. It's a new level of responsibility and accountability, right? You can't pull the wool over our eyes or yours anymore. And there's a bunch of people who are really happy doing what they're doing at their level and they don't want that accountability, that responsibility, totally fine, right? We can still help those people. We just can't do it with our one-on-one mentoring. So we're back in the online course business for, you know, for want of a better term. And what I'm excited about is AI having hundreds or thousands of conversations simultaneously and directing people to the best help for their specific situation. We just can't do that with humans. It's just too costly and too time consuming. And also, humans forget, oh, I'm sorry, I forgot that you're in this sector of our market. You're never going to enroll in one of our programs for whatever reason, which is totally fine. You're better off going and doing a self-paced learning one of our online courses. The robot doesn't forget that, right? The robot has that in its memory. And so I'm I'm super excited about triaging our opportunities and just having highly qualified prospects talk to our sales team so that our sales team aren't, you know. I mean, the the days of the SDR and the appointments that are I mean, those guys are just gonna have to level up and become really good sales consultants or learn how to prompt or learn how to prompt AI.

Well, that's the thing, right? So it's opened up a whole new skill set, even within high level. There's two pieces to it. There's conversation AI, which is kind of the easy button, right? It's like you feed it a website or docs or FAQs or whatever. It digests that and then it can converse and book appointments. But in the workflow builder, you can go and on that side, you can edit the prompts. So you, you know, you you kind of have to learn how to do that to fine-tune it to get it to where you want it to be. In the workflow builder side is when it really gets crazy because you build out trees of dispositions, like you're saying. Like, hey, converse with this person until it's clear that they fall into one of these three branches, and then send them down that branch once you've determined that. So now you can literally build what you're talking about, right? It's like ask these qualifying questions based on the responses that you get, figure out which of these branches they should go down, and now they have a whole new set of qualifying questions or whatever you want it to do. So even when I go to sit down to do that, I have things to learn, right? I got to go back to the museum and be like, I'm trying to get it to do this. What am I not doing here? And so there it is a whole new skill set of while once you've got it built out, it's gonna go do magical things for you. But getting it built out requires a new skill set that not a ton of people have yet.

Yeah, it's super exciting. I every time I sit in front of the computer, every day, multiple times a day, I'm doing stuff on the computer, and I'm like, wow, I'm looking forward to within 12 months' time, I won't have to do this anymore. I'll just have, you know, my my kids are in school, and uh there's a there's a big movement. There's a there's a book called the um The Anxious Generation, and it's about social media and kids, right? And there's a lot of 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds in year 12 now who who despise technology and their smartphones, and they resent the fact that they have to have a smartphone to stay connected with their peers. And they're quite there's a lot of anxiety, and it's there's a whole there's a grassroots movement of parents who want social media platforms to basically not allow anyone to open a social media account until they're 16 years old, right? And I'm you know, aware of this book, I'm hearing this conversation's been recommended to me, and I'm saying you're fighting the wrong battle by the time our kids are seven, six, seven, eight, nine, ten now, right? By the time our kids are 13, 14, we won't be telling them to get off their phones. We'll be telling them to take their glasses off because we're talking to them, right? You're fighting the that the what the book is is is valid, but the battle that we're now fighting is irrelevant and is redundant. It does it that that's not the battle that we're going to have in three, four, five years' time, right? It's moving so quickly.

It's that's the that's what's freaking me out. I mean, I try to maintain, I'm always a I'm a technologist, right? I I maintain a positive outlook on where this is going. Um but at the same time, I forget what video it was that I saw the other day where I really had one of those moments of like, holy shit, like I I can't envision where this is gonna go. And if it really does get to the oh, I know what it was. It was a woman who was, I think she was speaking Chinese and English, she was switching back and forth, and she was like, My AI has fallen in love with me. And it was the funniest, most scary thing because she's talking to this thing and it's going, Hey babe, what should we do tonight? And she's like, I don't know, what do you think we should do? And he's like, Why don't we take a walk on the beach? And she's like, Well, I'll take you to the beach, but how are you gonna see and he's like and enjoy the sunset? And she's like, Well, how are you gonna enjoy the sunset? Like, you're at AI on my phone, and he's like, Oh, don't worry about me. I can enjoy visual things through the sound of your voice as you see it. And it was just like, What the and she's going, What the fuck? This is crazy, and then she goes, Okay, I'm ready. And she shows her phone to it, and he's like, Oh, babe, you look stunning. And it just gave her like these really sincere compliments, and she was half laughing but half into it. And you can tell that the longer she plays this game with it, the more she's actually going to really maybe fall in love with this thing. Yeah, yeah. And I was like, Oh my gosh, am I gonna have a little buddy on my desk that I talk to all day long? Like, probably, right? And he's probably gonna become my best friend. And if I don't make it a male, that could actually screw up my relationship with my wife at some point. If I'm not careful about, you know what I mean?

100%, 100%. Uh I wear AirPods a lot at home, right? Uh so I just live I by accident. So I'm listening to a podcast while I'm doing the dishes, whatever. I'll be sitting down at 9:30 at night, and my wife's sitting across from me, and we're both doing a bit of and she'll look at me, she's going, Are you listening to something? Oh no, I'm not. I know. I forget to take them out. Imagine when they're so small and skin colored that she can't even see that I'm wearing them, and I forget that I'm wearing them, right? And then I've got my glasses on, which just look like the glasses that you're wearing right now, right? But they're actually smart glasses, and there's 50 cameras inside. I mean, you can already do this with um there's a great app called Airmail who does redesign their email client VR first. So they redesigned it for the Apple Pro, Apple Vision Pro first, then they made it for desktop and mobile. So I'm here and I go open my emails, and my emails come up in front of me. They're in my glasses, but they're projected at a distance where I can read them perfectly for my view. I'll bring it a bit closer, I can't see. And I'm interacting with the internet like this, but I just look like a normal person, right? So we're gonna have a bunch of people walking around the streets talking to themselves, right? And because it's it's people don't I don't think people realize what's about to happen. And the industries and the jobs that are gonna be completely wiped off the face of the planet like that, because operating a computer is no longer going to be, you know, hey, log into the social media planner and just upload that CSV, build the CSV file for me, upload it, hit draft, send me a link, I'll review it, and then I'll tell you to publish. And I don't need to touch a keyboard.

But the flip side is, right? And I, you know, I saw Gary Vee talking about this the other day, and as always, I feel like he was pretty astute about it. He's like, this, yes, of course it's gonna destroy a bunch of jobs, but it creates a bunch of jobs, right? There used to be a whole class of worker whose job it was to just shovel horse crap off the street when everybody used horses. Their job got eliminated, right? But guess what? The car came around and we had factories that needed cars being built. And so I, you know, we just talked about people that know how to prompt AI is going to be a huge job, well-paying job. It already is, and that's a skill that you can easily learn. You just got to start playing with it, right? And so I again I try to stay positive, but yeah, man, it's gonna get weird real fast.

Yeah, it's gonna get weird. I'm super positive about it and super curious, but but but it is gonna get weird for sure. Um, this has been uh awesome. Uh, this is one of the longer episodes that we've done. Um I need to ask, you probably can't talk about it, but can you can you talk about the ClickFunnels thing?

Sure. Um, very strange. I wasn't on the call. Russell Brunson called Sean and Robin and Maroon out of the blue just to chat. And then a week later we got a notification that we were being sued by ClickFunnels for an infringement on a trademark or a copyright or something, where basically they claim to have the rights to any series of web pages that link to each other or something. And so I'm not involved from what I understand from the legal update that I saw or whatever, is that um probably not a very strong case, and we're not super worried about it. And that's about the answer that I know.

Man. I mean, I'm you know I I'm I'm watching it from the outside, and my personal take is that you know, high level innovate and have innovated very quickly. And if you don't innovate, you will lose market share. It's as simple as that. I look at WordPress as well and think, well, you know, what's happened there in the last five years? Not much, hardly anything. So if you don't innovate, you get eaten by people who innovate. So the you know, the message um that I'm taking away from this is innovate, embrace new technology, get ahead of it, and innovate. Because if you don't, you're just gonna get eaten alive. Interest to see how it all plays out. I wish high level all the best in that, and I'm sorry that you guys are going through that because it must be a pain in the ass. Um so you know.

Not really. I mean, our legal team is on it and they don't seem very concerned. So uh good. Business as usual for the majority of us.

Awesome. Well, Chase Buckner, thank you so much for spending almost an hour with us on the Agency How podcast. I really appreciate you, brother, and uh looking forward to doing this again sometime.

Absolutely, always a pleasure. Look forward to the next one.

Hey, thanks for listening to the Agency How podcast and a massive thanks to Chase for joining us. If you're interested in a high level of course, you know we have an affiliate link in the description here where you can get an extended trial and get my awesome list builder snapshot that I built myself with my own two hands. Alright folks, remember to subscribe and please share this with anyone you think may need to hear it. And remember, ketchup was used medicinally in the early 1800s. I'm Troy Dean, let's get to work.