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00:00matt recently hit his uh macbook his m4 macbooks limit the other day i did i did for the first i didn't think it was possible i didn't think it was possible you crashed your ram uh everything on my laptop was like you heard that you heard the fans going yeah they were the first time he's ever heard the fans kick in and then i sent him a picture i sent kevin a picture of um all of my open cloud instances all right well that was a that was a fun cold open i guess welcome everybody this is the 2x engineers podcast i am one of your two hosts matt joined by the wonderful devious yet also conniving is not the right word we'll call him the person who's gonna pull the rug on the ai industry introduce yourself hello i am darren also known as big bro dc on instagram and today

00:58we have actually our first guest someone that i've known for quite a few years he has an amazing dog he has recently just moved to begin his we'll call it a new chapter in his life what is up yo yo my name is kevin coming from cali now living in ohio how's it going guys who are you man darren only kind of knows about you from what i've said kevin salas that's my last name s-a-l-e-s uh mexican mother iranian father and dude i'm a freaking marketing kevin man that's what i've been doing with the past seven years just living inside of the google ads manager and facebook ads manager for clients now with this ai stuff like this is what i tell all my clients like if you're not going to choose me and you're going to go with somebody else make sure that they're at least using some ai software because man you're going to get left behind without it if you want to scale your business and i'm your

01:54guy you say you started seven years ago how in the world did you actually stumble into this industry or was some was it something that you had pre-planned to get into or like some kind of horizontal or vertical growth from wherever you're doing before didn't really have you know scholarship or anything to go to school didn't really have like the money to even go to college either met a couple of people just kind of hanging out i met friends like my buddy raul i think he was probably one of the first people that introduced like marketing the whole concept to me i've always heard the word and kind of knew what it was but it's just such a broad marketing is just such a broad term it could really mean so many different things right through my buddy raul maybe when i was he must have been 18 years old and i must have been 20 maybe a year or two after high school met him in downtown los angeles and he was doing what's

02:50called real estate wholesaling basically he gets reaches out to somebody looking to sell their home gets them to sign a contract and he'll look for an end buyer and he'll just have a fee for connecting the two people that's essentially high level what he does one of his main pain points was getting sellers to reach out to him to sell their home right looking to sell their home that's when i first learned about facebook ads was kind of through him right we learned about it we maybe ran a campaign did okay from a course i think about like a digital course online it did all right and it really didn't turn into anything what really picked everything off was when my mom and i wanted to really my mom's shout out to my mom i love my mom she's everything to me when she had this idea it's always completely her idea to sell traditional mexican uh sauce basically it's called mole i think i was telling

03:49matt about this it's called uh mole but the twist was that it was the sauce was dehydrated right so it had a long shelf life and it tasted just as good because mole is like 12 or 13 different ingredients it takes like 12 hours to make it's really good but it's really hard to make and getting the ingredients here is really difficult it's like a lot of native ingredients from mexico so we had it actually imported in from mexico but before that i was like okay well how are we going to get clients right like i think i made the website we might have had like a sample or two that we had bought it created a quick wordpress website i don't know if you guys are familiar with wordpress but we made a wordpress website we used the plugin an elementor plugin it's like if you're looking back at it now it looks hilarious compared to like the websites i make now uh or landing pages but we made the website and i'm like okay sick now what like how do people just show up magically or how like they told me to

04:51make a website to sell my stuff like all right here it is now now what and that just opened up the whole the door to facebook ads seo and like everything and anything to do with digital marketing getting people in digitally from there uh i actually took like a digital marketing boot camp at long beach state for a year learned everything there was to do like with facebook ads like google ads as well that kind of went through the platform like the psychology behind why people buy the things that they want to buy and just some other like cool little nuggets here and there that they showed me and then i met some pretty cool people in the boot camp as well and then right after that we started selling the mole it was like a year and in between that course i was also selling the mole and we started selling a bunch it's like dude the mole is awesome like it's cool but like i like the digital marketing stuff way more than

05:50selling the sauce right like which we're still doing by the way uh my mom is kind of taking over that little business uh side note but uh from there uh applied to a bunch of places that's when i moved to texas and i got my first digital marketing job full-time media buyer digital guy um for a credit repair company there's more history from there but that's kind of like how things kicked off for me about seven eight years ago when i was about 20 21 years old yeah interesting how would you say seo and or marketing has changed since the age of ai in the past i guess six months right you see so many different videos of business owners from 10 years ago who relied solely off of seo and how google's random algorithm change like i'm not i haven't even got into the ai part which obviously completely took over

06:45the search engine result page the cert page um but it's just the seo stuff is amazing because it's essentially free traffic but fake google's algorithm is just so unpredictable and from one day to another it can just completely change what they consider a high ranking page and it's just kind of unreliable but again if you can like figure it out for your business like it's just such it's free traffic free conversions who doesn't love free conversions right and of course now with ai the first link isn't even at the top anymore you're going to get that ai overview and then the google maps stuff and then you got to scroll damn near damn to the bottom of the page even get the first link so um it's kind of transformed into um i forgot the term that they call it now it's like a a o exactly yes so it's like now

07:44setting up markdown files for the ai ball to be able to read your page and what it's about and on top of all of the seo practices that you need to apply into your website right so it's just it's just evolved so much throughout the year and it's going to continue evolving you know who knows if we'll even have a search bar here in the next we'll have a search bar but who knows if we'll have a search result page here in the next couple of years right it might just be straight to your destination or straight to your answer who knows but it's evolving and it's evolving fast so for the landing pages do you feel like that's still something that all businesses still need in terms of like figuring out like marketing landing pages in order to help drive i guess business to your offer or like businesses offer two different instances here right like you have your website that has like your menu different pages about us uh blog articles and that's what's going to drive a lot of the seo

08:44um a landing page is really meant for dedicated traffic like let's say you're running a campaign on facebook or google you'll want to create a dedicated landing page completely different from a website right you're not able to click out you don't have a menu you don't have different links to have the user bounce out of the page for essentially right if you're running paid traffic definitely create a dedicated landing page you don't want to waste that precious ad dollar on on a user that's just going to check out a blog and then bounce out you want them to fill out an action on on your website right and the website on the landing page i'm sorry and then the website's still a powerful tool for the seo or aeo stuff right like we're getting and we can go into a little bit on our product map but we're getting some hits just based off of blog articles that we've made on common queries that you can look up on google trends or you can ask the ai bot back in the day would be google trends we'll look up a search term

09:41and it'll give you varieties of things that you can create articles on right or your google search console administrative page but now you can really just ask the ai to schedule 10 articles a week and review them make sure that they are legit and boom so much faster now and better honestly yeah getting getting the agents to recommend you is definitely this new art because instead of before it was this weird spidering effect of the web you know spidering and web right where you would want so many links that connect to one thing that is related to your terms and that would be the thing that would surface forward and then it was also kind of related to what the advertisements were being pushed around it and those links would be on top but now since people are less about wanting to see the most search maybe it's less about people it's more like the business themselves google and these other

10:39these other search engines they are all in the industry race of being the source that recommends you the thing that you should click on right because now you're speaking to an ai and it's like i think these five things in this order are the thing that you should be picking from it's a different game now now we're trying to make sure that the ai wants to recommend us and how do you get that you make sure that you have reviews you make sure that you have blog articles that like speak well about both your business and the fact that you might be a subject matter expert regardless exactly you know if all of those things are fabricated one big thing that i've been noticing around the interwebs with like seo people or marketing people they've been saying like a listicle type of stuff where like shopify or these

11:35other big tech companies just create listicles of like who's the best at blah blah blah and they always put themselves as number one right exactly so then it's like google google and i think these other search engines have i think identified that in these types of listicles that people were doing previously that were getting them to like the top rankings and stuff like that where now it's like their seo traffic has dramatically like decreased because of that yeah and yeah i've seen i've seen like some graphs of like oh i think uh click up was a major one their seo apparently like someone was doing a deep dive on their seo in like the past like three or four years and they're like yeah just don't do what click up has been doing because they literally just killed their own seo for the past like three years they killed themselves exactly you explain like what they killed themselves because of because of how

12:31they're writing their articles and everything like that i mean they're pumping out like a lot of articles and blog posts and anything like that but the way that they're writing it is like self-promotion and all these other things that aren't actually talking about what they're actually providing and or it's not like the information is not actually correlating to the product and the reason why they should be actually using their product right yes exactly they're trying to make like something out of nothing and also recommend themselves out of that nothingness if you're in it's like they're targeting like random keywords that will somehow correlate back to their product but their actual part of product has nothing to do with those keywords or those search terms or the actual search traffic oh okay i was thinking too like whatever listicle they were on top five like no matter what they were number one like you know even that too as well as like for their right like for their own like listicles that they're creating they're

13:30always like top three same thing with like shopify i think recent like shopify does that a lot too so i don't know in that whole space of articles and blog posts and you know creating your own blogs and listicles of putting like self-promoting yourself i don't know if that's a continuing trend that you should do or other people should do but yeah in that same vein though regarding specifically you darren because you're in this like you're in like that third party kind of space like listicles in your sense would be oh these are some really cool collectibles for the season yeah for me i think it's like for that aspect in the e-com space right like i'm just doing like reviews which figures or which things i actually want or like what people actually want from there is like oh you guys could get this at our store if you decide to choose our store oh also google has like these different other markers

14:28like it's like there are also backlinks that will like also judge how reputable a brand might be right like let's say hubspot also backlinks on an article click up right then that's positive and then if that website let's say in this example amazon uh recommends click up and then i don't know why we're giving click up so much promotion but uh let's say amazon does like amazon is obviously an extremely reputable site already in google's eyes having a backlink from them compared to any given random site like if we just made a website right now and gave them a backlink it would not be as valuable so there are so many other markers on top of that which is kind of a good thing because then click up can just do what they were doing and then be number one on everything so i think the ai might be better at hopefully is

15:26better at identifying all that bs and putting an actual top five list that's actually and i think it does right like it does a way better job than just reading a blog article or something yeah it's definitely good yeah it's kind of it's kind of interesting how like when you take a look at like the i guess query span like when when you research like what's the best website to do blah blah blah and you like look at the curry span of like how the agent or how ai is actually figuring out to identify that and i'll like go through and like look at all these different websites and then like aggregate that data and then like give you like a best guess based on that it's interesting which websites it actually chooses right because sometimes from my experience even the even in like the i guess collectible space or toy business space right it's like where do you get the like where

16:22do you get toys or collectibles and then it'll reference like really old websites or really old blogs right and then those blogs just have like a history of like being around for like 20 30 years still maintained i don't know how much traffic i don't know how much traffic those blogs actually get right it's just like you know these these i guess gen xers now right in there that were born in the 80s that created these websites for like transformers or like gi joe and stuff like that i started way back then they just have a reputation or whoever that created these websites right so it's kind of like age in one sense is another marker right yeah so it's kind of but then and in the aspect is like for example like the new age of collecting like our generation like millennials and younger like gen zers

17:18are always like hyping like the trading card market right like the trademark market is popping off of like pokemon magic and all that other right like all these youtubers are like pumping it like steve aoki is all over it right so it's kind of like okay you also get to see i think in the search results now for just google gemini right that where it will also reference like youtube videos and like sometimes like reels and stuff like that yeah and social right so then is chat gpt claude and all these other chats also going to start looking into socials right like social media and then are the descriptions and the transcripts going to be not important versus like these old blocks because the old blogs are kind of like in a sense getting outdated in my opinion right so then is that at some point going to change is my question i think it is

18:20because in terms of like traffic a blog post on those websites aren't getting like millions of views versus like a social media post right a real isn't that like so amazing though like rather than relying on somebody a company's algorithm on what the best result is it's a machine actually listening to transcripts looking at exactly of all this other stuff like i think it's so much so much better than relying on just google's right and then also like the whole list quote thing right like where articles in the old world in the old essence right like these older websites like maybe shopify has been around for like a while now right and like other websites have been around for a while now and even their articles that they're publishing might not be even the best what do you call it um authenticity compared to like a social

19:20media post right so then maybe that weight the weight of what is being recommended is slowly getting changed as we speak now like i don't even know right like these things are happening and changing so fast that next month or two weeks from now they might just change how it's grabbing data or like where it's referencing that makes me think about the um and i'm surprised i'm not sure how well it took off for chadgbt but when they released their browser i thought that when i first saw the email and the news like chadgbt came out with the browser i was like oh it's over google google's dead it's over obviously that didn't happen and it wasn't that big of a deal as i as i thought at least but curious to see like what happened there like why didn't people up on that bandwagon or just google just that much more powerful

20:17that it's just not gonna happen you know it's more so like in in terms of like tech and like people are using certain things when they get comfortable using something for so long they exactly they try not to change unless it's actually better yeah and much better right so then in the sense of a browser google chrome is basically one for the past i don't know how long five six seven maybe longer 10 years yeah right 15 years maybe right yeah so then like getting the us in general to switch off of google chrome is very hard and then if they even were to try a different browser how much better is it than just using google chrome and then like okay google search just already already get like gemini already gives me like a little summary of like what i'm asking for versus like just going to chat gpt or something like that yeah yeah yeah yeah no exactly that's a

21:20that's a great point yeah yeah oh that's one thing that chat gpt or open ai has to battle with in terms of with battling google in terms of like other ai chats or ai models is a totally different beast but yeah yeah i think sorry what were you saying kevin no i was gonna say yeah just super interesting to just think about how it's going to be like a year from now like ui changes with chat not just chat but all of the ais right like they've been changing over the years already adding different like features where now you can see an actual excel sheet in there or it'll actually open up a google doc so yeah i'm curious to see how that that would change over the years or what google has in store for that i think google just recently really like announced like how

22:17they're how they're going to be changing how google search which looks like right just and yeah they're they're thinking of like different ways to and improve right google search in general just to make sure that you know chat gpt doesn't take their market share because yes they were worried right and they went all hands on deck probably just to make sure that they're not losing their monopoly on search yeah yeah well it's like they still have search down pat because i still think people are googling things just by typing it into the the bar which is their their single greatest uh like point of interaction right and the only race that google has unequivocally lost for now because we all know that they're gonna come out with something great is that people don't really look

23:14to gemini specifically as like top dogs in we'll call it daily use ai or like business professional use ai because chat gpt and claude have um have have easily um cemented themselves as the one and two one one one thing that i will say on that is like in in the aspect of like which lm is the best right chat gpt and claude is pretty much neck and neck right but then if you think about it in terms of like enterprise type of software and usage right microsoft was something that you know their suite wasn't really the best suite but a lot of enterprise companies go with microsoft suite right and or

24:12google suite yep but and also i wouldn't put google out of the race in terms of like enterprise business integrations because then it's like if you're on google suite gemini might automatically just be included right and then these businesses yeah and these businesses will be like just use what google is providing us why why even do the enterprise plan with claude and or chat gbt if we're already using google and it's already included and it's like already more or less good enough for like these basic use cases for people right like if you're going like super in-depth very analytical very technical like chat gbt and claude are probably like the way to go for the more tech savvy businesses but for the non-tech savvy businesses that are already using like google suite then they're probably just gonna

25:12stick with whatever google has to offer 100 and yeah google ads is also introducing well they've been having it maybe the last couple of months but like ai features like beta ai features that they're starting to roll out obviously don't know how well they work i wouldn't trust any beta feature especially from google i've like learned my lesson on that a couple of times kind of just stick to what's already working um but yeah i'm sure that's all gonna roll out in tandem too because whatever this new thing that they're gonna roll out they need to also make sure they're making money off of it so um once these two tab that they have on google ads is fully rolled out and generating consistent results like it'll look totally different if you think about it as well like for the ai rollout

26:12chat gpt and claude they don't have like a recurring revenue stream like google does like google like google's business is already solid right and they could they could have they could have chat gpt came out with their ad manager about a month or two ago right but it doesn't mean that they're profitable business no yeah right yeah so then and even if it's a hit in their eyes or for whatever their marketing they're pushing like look at the balance sheet right if you look at the business's balance sheet google's balance sheet is great it's a profitable business if their ai rollouts are a miss they could take a hit open ai and claude they have to hit every single time and they have to make sure that whatever choices that they make is actually a revenue generating decision right and the

27:13the harder part is that they're still just wildly bleeding right regardless of if they start to make more money on subscriptions because the adoption is so low in comparison to what their like yearly spend is they're they're like they're incinerating money yeah yeah i mean there's they're trying to do like i mean chat gpt specifically is trying to do the whole ad game right they're trying to play as into their chat right just like probably like basically google right in some sense some way or form right so then it's kind of like how many people are going to switch from just google search to chat gpt search query chat right it's good it's so interesting because like when you think i think for regular people that aren't into ai like that but no ai exists it's like when you first thought of the internet like oh yeah look

28:14something up you wouldn't say like internet it right you would say google it and that's what chat gpt has kind of become like oh just check on chat gpt like now i think i'm starting to get more people like around work like hey which one's better claude or chat gpt it's starting to kind of conversation starting to come up now claude starting to get in there but chat gpt is like the google it for ai search right now and it's just they're all that says like they're the number one ai company right now and yeah they're just so negative they're just losing so much money which is yeah even even even so right even though they're number one in ai search their household name in the ai u.s industry right even then still have a yeah still not a profitable business but that's what is that is that is that just sam altman

29:14like like the is that like just too much power they're using compared to what they're generating obviously they're not generating enough money but what's like consuming most of their cash it's like cap will spend on these machines that they have right yeah you gotta you gotta have these data centers in order to do that type of search power right or like compute right which is why i'm saying like google has the compute they also have their own chips right they've made their own chips for their own types of data centers and stuff like that like you're you're competing with a conglomerate that has the whole infrastructure of the cloud industry because they already have google cloud they already have engineers and people working on their own chips right so them rolling out all that stuff

30:12and they're not worried about being the best model out there right because they probably know for themselves how are people going to even utilize that if if people want to utilize that aspect of like being the best model in terms of like coding or whatever they could go to these other unprofitable businesses and they'll slowly roll out whatever they need to roll out slow and steady wins the race right but if you think about it um in the 90s right google wasn't the first household name in terms of search no yahoo yahoo yahoo and ask jeez were in the game yahoo was definitely in the game i was using yahoo all the time yahoo was a top dog right so if you if you think about it it doesn't matter who's first to market or who's first and best

31:11they could be the best people could think that's the best but even if the who cares if they're the best of the business can be a actual profitable business they could just go under and then the business is gone and then who's still left google's still around everybody just migrates i mean everybody's still on google anyways so dang that is such a great like parallel that is such a great parallel for sure yeah google might just cat gpt might not be around here very soon who knows yeah i don't i don't see how they continue to burn this much google has it easy because even for them at least from the public facing eye they've been really pimping out their ai for the phone usage so like really just making it work super well for like pixel phones and anything you want to do on it so i think they're they're still maintaining strong and

32:06they have easily the what what number one most accessed video platform in the world like it's kind of hard it's kind of hard to beat that yeah but they have the data they they got it they have the slow game we know they're all working on some top dog model it's just probably not in a state that they're ready to uh roll out to the public i mean they don't have like the researchers like open ai or claude either no they got poached yeah well it's because of the bank rolls right like claude and open ai have the bank rolls in order to poach them google is just like yeah we don't we don't don't need to do that so then they're not gonna do that yeah they're not they're not playing that race yeah everyone that wants to build their own product using some ai wrapper or use ai to build things like us which we

33:06are just we are all in the the market of using i to build our own businesses that kind of leads me to um one of the reasons why i wanted to to have you talk to to darren today because obviously you and i have been have been have been working together on something uh since you know i call it the inception day black friday last year literally but what even what what even occurred on black friday was not even the inception of how you even got started building your own thing where you just wanted to sink some leads lead sync lead sync the legendary inception uh event so i would love to for you to give like a a little mini timeline to all of that because i don't believe i've given darren the story and even

34:04like how you got started using the ai in the first place the first it was through arden oh and joe it was arden and joe which funny enough ended up becoming clients of the product yeah um like they're using the product now um arden and joe two other marketers in the east coast as well uh they do ads for like insurance car insurance or just different types of insurance companies right and like one attorney and i was doing like i do marketing like the niche i focus on is like real estate like the wholesaling thing that i was uh speaking on earlier just connected through with them from my client and i guess they needed some ideas on marketing and what kind of content they can

35:03use uh so i got connected to them they basically gave them some game and then in return they showed me this website called lovable lovable.dev uh are you familiar with that uh darren have you heard of that website of course who hasn't right like their ads are everywhere um so they showed like i was like yeah like we use ai to build websites i'm like oh yeah like chadgbt and they're like no we use lovable and i was like what do you mean and then like i went on and they kind of showed me what they built and i was like oh sick like i'll build a website on this a landing page for my ads right like cool long story short i was wanting to send facebook and google have this feature where you can send like your clients and your leads uh data back to the ad platform and in turn it kind of learns from that

36:00data and you get better results essentially from your ads but to do that you needed to access their api and i'm not a developer by any means right so i didn't even know at the time fully what an api was or really what it did or how it worked this was like six months ago by the way uh or like maybe eight months ago now probably i'm not sure less than a year ago now i was like oh wait i can just tell this ai bot this lovable ai bot to connect to facebook's api and google's api and i can just start to sync my leads um so i built the first draft of the what's now deal oracle what matt and i are working on first draft of it it was like man it looks so lame compared to what it is now but we were able to do it all the leads that came in from my ads would essentially sync up to this

36:57platform that i created on lovable and any time that one of my clients tagged it as a positive signal it would hit facebook and google's api and feed it that data to not just know hey this person fill out a form but this person actually scheduled the booked call or this person closed like this person actually purchased into the service you feed that data back into google facebook and you get better results from your ads right and there are a couple of other platforms that already did this but it was like it was like 40 000 a year or like 15 000 uh like some crazy amount i'm like dude this is just to send data and for reporting and to send data bags is insane so i've known matt for years already i've always wanted to like connect with him on something but i wasn't just gonna like hey dude just wanted to call you and just say what's up like i want to do something with you i don't know what but i want to do something

37:56with you uh but this was like the perfect opportunity and uh matt was not a fan at first of vibe coding um at all he was like guilty i don't think any i don't think any engineer was a fan of what vibe coding was because any engineer did not trust it and when they first saw like level board or whatever they're like oh that's that's like so beneath us right yeah until the great 4.5 came out no like even even for me because i believe kevin i have to like go back in the receipts but it was like somewhere either end of october or like super in the beginning of november where kevin was like i have this it's working pretty well which what kevin made by himself unlovable crazy so i will always i will

38:55always give him the kudos for for building what he did there and he's like all right yeah if you can come and just help me whatever scale this or you know build on top of it it's like all right i will come over on black friday and i'll dive it in i'll dive in with you for this entire weekend and we we did that we cranked nice we cranked for like four days straight on yeah yeah and a lot of things this was before like lovable has like a database uh integration now where it's like hey we just you can have a database inside of low uh inside of lovable now uh but back then literally just six months ago or whenever november um they didn't have that so i would have to connect to a super base separately give it the key and then it would start to work like that with super base already like built out like on a third party right like so which is perfect now because if i would have done

39:55it the other way it would have been impossible to get that data out of lovable how it is now essentially into super base or it would have been a pain in the ass at least not impossible but a pain in the ass for sure yep um and so by this point i kind of understood okay an api you ping basically to get information i still don't even fully know i can't remember what the acronym stand for right but i just know that you can ping it and it'll ping your the products database and you can fetch information for specific categories however the developer uh designed the schema for the api right um and i was like dude like i got this working internally which is one thing right with building it internally for yourself an internal tool is one thing but building a tool that everybody and anybody can just come in and click and use for themselves is a completely other thing it's some like completely different world so i thought i was like bro fucking

40:52let's just crank this out two three months and let's just launch this thing bro i can run ads bro i'm i'm an ads expert dog like i'll just three months like let's just work till the end of the month i might have even said boom six months goes by before we finally decide version one is ready um it was like what mid to end of march it was in march right yeah that was the first that was the first uh paying customer yeah we wanted to launch january 1st i think is what it was that was yeah yeah i think i think what what the thing is is like a lot of people have a conception of oh it's just a website oh it's just an app how hard how hard is it to how hard is it to just build a website or an app so there's so many people already doing that oh shopify already creates an e-commerce thing you could do that it's simple you just click you just click a couple things right 100 100 100 definitely

41:56not that if you think about it why was amazon why did amazon take so many years to become amazon why did google take so many years to become google it's just a website so it was a completely like man i'm a really like stimulated guy like like doing that's why i like marketing right because you get run ads boom results in a few hours even right like clients happy boom making money amazing so this was for me like man like ah it was such a i had to be so patient i was like dude i'll fucking mad stripping dude i'll fucking do this shit in a month bro no no no no not at all so yeah matt put me on yeah you you initially built this to just make your life as a freelance like agency guy better like you were using it to manage your own leads like for your customers so even if it ended there you still found a way to build a tool to reduce the the level of effort

42:58for you to just execute on your day-to-day which you know net positive right uh we'll call it net positive until you know people really look at how many lovable tokens like you go through and how much that costs and how it does this it just goes to the moon and it not to mention the mistakes too like all the credits that you waste on mistakes that lovable does like it'd be cool if like yeah it costs a lot but fuck it was perfect you know like it came out good every time but like i probably spent more money on fixing the mistakes than it actually executing on what i wanted it to do um yeah which obviously cursor and vs coded with with claude is day and night you know so but we have to also talk about a sin which is why i i will still have a chip on my shoulder with regards to gemini because you know after i dove in the first night with kevin yep it's like

43:59all right lovable is cool but we have to do this proper so it's like i was so again and i was so against leaving level like dude matt like just staying low you're dude like no dude you're just feeling i was so against it dude you you ask any real engineer they will tell you to get out of those things immediately if you're trying to build something seriously a scalable product a scalable solution where you're trying to make like i would say in the six seven eight figure range yeah right if you're just trying to hit like low six figures with a simple like solution for yourself have at it lovable great right small little tools small little businesses landing pages right sure right if you're trying to sell software or software is the business no no no no you could get started and prototype yeah but then even

45:02then you gotta take that prototype and give it to an actual engineer and figure out how to do this correctly the day one when i was like all right hey kevin okay is there a way for me to look at the code of like what lovable generated he's like yeah you click on this and i shit you not i think it was i think it was one file over four thousand lines that was like good to me looks lg2 baby looks good to me and then but also do you need me to get to you oh but oh but sir you're listening the ai is always siri i'm not talking to you my phone my phone triggered sorry oh now you're triggered yeah literally siri go to bed thank you dude and talk about talking about siri i can't wait to hear the new

45:58siri that they're gonna come out with it's gonna be so much better from what i've heard yeah um but yeah i have no hopes but i'm hopeful hopefully it's helpful there's a drop there's a drop in that bucket oh all that to say though like you said lovable is amazing for i still use it for a landing page to just drive traffic it's amazing just because it was also a learning curve man understand like shout out to matt dude like i'm not sure how many different times i asked him what a pull request was for example or how when to do it like dude do i pull do i do poor because i just made a change okay that are still working it's like oh i have to do a pull request now you just made a change like just all that whole rhythm of understanding environments to build your product on what's also another yeah was also something else so which is why developers are still

46:59you know we're still needed just just we're not needed we're not needed no i mean you guys a team you guys can just be reduced to a team of one one exactly you guys can just do so much more now that's the the beauty of it but yeah 100% pr request dude pull request get no but i i have to tell this horror story and this is this is why i am still waiting for gemini to be good so i i pull kevin off of lovable i'm just like whoa this is a hot pile of dog water we have to do something proper as i adjust my glasses like an anime protagonist and it's like all right i'm gonna get us on ds code we're gonna get an api token we're gonna use gemini i guess they might be good i do this let's hook up gemini token we hit the daily limit of what oh yeah and i could do

48:04i think in two hours the daily limit in two hours the 20 that's like the 20 dollar plan right uh no api tokens is raw raw well i i remember back then like google google's ai suite had a lot of limitations and it wasn't that good no it sucked so i think i think i think like six minutes ago might be decently better now but back then when they first released everything like everything was like gated like even if you tried using it it's like not working or like they'll just restrict you you're just like why even release this garbage yeah but it was i mean i was using their video models at the time and it was vo4 i think so that was like the best at the time video generation model

48:59out there yeah at the time their image and videos were always good it was their code gen which was completely coding yeah yeah they had that's the whole reason i think they had to build anti-gravity because they needed more code to train their models yeah that's another whole story like with all this data and like all these ai models and these tech companies trying to find the data to train their models that's a whole another pile of dog water yes in the industry and in the world i mean you would think that copilot would be good the fact that it is github but you know microsoft be microsoft you know and then after we dealt with i think it was literally two days i think two or three days of us kind of stumbling and failing through the weekend but still feeling super hopeful because we got we got deal oracle to a

49:58semi-running state we stumbled upon one of the probably still one of the best like uh vibe coding tools in market which is cursor and we use that for quite a while still do yeah i think yeah you still do you still do quite a bit and then i jumped full ship to clod like end of december yeah it was very interesting i my whole thing was i was using cursor because my company was providing it oh interesting time at one startup so that i was using cursor a little bit and then i was telling my manager at the time that hey i've been seeing cloud code get some buzz where it's really good can i use it and get access to it and they're like okay uh sure let let's let me ask you know it was like a whole

50:59process and it was taking forever and then at that time somebody else was pushing me poaching me to join another startup and then i was like okay what can i use you can use whatever you want darren oh say no more that is when i jumped ship and i needed to look at what the hell these ai models can do and i went full deep dive into the rabbit hole of ai and i went completely off cursor as soon as i joined that second startup i no longer use cursor other than maybe changing like very small things in the the actual code and then after that when cloud desktop came about i just completely went straight to cloud desktop for cloud code

51:55for other reasons i haven't i haven't changed because to me it does the notifications for when the terminal session is ready to for me to look back at it so it gives me those notifications for free it is basically my agent operating system that i don't have to rebuild from scratch because i just have multiple sessions in the cloud desktop app yeah and it's easy for me to use when you were at the other company the one you left and you were using cursor what llm were you guys using we were using um copilot and what else oh we're using copilot and i believe we had uh we were able to use like cloud code and and i think um cursor's default model composer and then um yeah and then um chat gpt but i think we

52:56were i think we were heavily chat gpt at the time um and then i kind of just was like i don't like this red tape um i get it i was working at a health tech company so i get i get that there was like pi data our like customer like data concerns about all that type of stuff right i get it so i didn't want to stay there because i couldn't move as fast as i wanted to and i tend to do that for a lot of companies when i decide to leave companies because i see something interesting in the tech space where i want to get my hands dirty on and i go full rabbit hole into those aspects so i will leave companies for that aspect because i am wanting to be at the frontier of what i'm seeing

53:53you're just a you're just a lover of your craft we just love yeah darren's a new i'm an engineer but i'm also very like is it really that good i don't think so a lot of people talk up their booty holes but yeah he's a he's a he's a skeptical engineer which is unique i'm very skeptical not not not always a person or like a bunch of things but when it comes to like engineering is kind of like is that really necessary i've come to learn that over over the years of like working in multiple different companies i mean and that leads us through today deal oracle is alive it's kicking we're going through a major v2 set right now we're preparing to run another

54:49huge set of ads hopefully to bring another set of customers but probably in in your own words because again i am not the marketer one two i'm not the subject matter expert three those two i try to think of a third how how would you describe deal oracle and who is who is it for really yeah which by the way i think matt now knows a lot about marketing compared to six months ago i've become a junior developer mark matt become a junior marketer for sure um i know some things i've actually been able to answer some questions in our in our calls with clients which is kind of cool yeah no seriously yeah i mean deal oracle is meant for anybody that's running online traffic running ads um even seo we've um built out a pretty strong attribution platform that basically tells you

55:50exactly where every single of you uh where every single one of your leads come from whether it's an organic google search your email campaign soon affiliates coming rolling with that out soon um but most importantly it's ad uh ad traffic not only are you able to see like exactly which campaign and which ad that lead came from for you to attribute back to but it also connects to your facebook and your google and your pinterest and your linkedin and your snapchat and almost every single ad platform that has this conversion tracking feature um you're able to connect to them and feed it data without having to hire developer which traditionally you need a developer to um set up any sort of api um we made it so you can just come in no code it install one line of code into your website copy and paste

56:47that onto your entire website and now you're tracking every single movement that a lead comes to and uh through your website um which there are some software already that some softwares already that do that that but they cost an arm and a leg one or two they don't send the data back to the ad platform which is mind-blowing right like why would you just want the attribution yeah it's cool to know like where the ad came from and it's important but really it's feeding it back into the ad platform that's the uh the hidden gem there you know uh diamond in the dirt that is the oracle amongst a ton of other cool features that we're going to come out you can also track your kpis cost per lead cost per generated lead whenever you close a deal stuff that the ad platform can't give you because it doesn't know what's happening offline um so yeah that's that's still oracle it's really meant for anybody looking to run at anybody that's running ads that wants to get better results or agencies

57:48marketing agencies uh looking to find a way to do exactly that get better results for your clients and also have a kpi manager and reports accurate reports um for your clients that they can also access it's only 300 bucks for an agency which we're actually raising our price soon can be 500 soon um and if you're just a solo ad person looking to just get better results it's 150 a month and just like that install one line of code you get 17 better results on your ads not according to us it's according to facebook themselves and these ad platforms they themselves say it 17 better results if you implement this exact strategy that we've helped build out for essentially yeah and i think one one aspect around this entire we'll call it the the loop that is the the ad um the conversion

58:44tracking that i don't think is it's not really explained well anywhere until you explained it to me it's that if you're not telling facebook google whatever that a lead converted back to them because obviously when there's like a purchase made it's probably like an easy direct point of contact and you can just immediately send up right but for one of the industries such as kevin's which he deals with um wholesale um what was uh what do you call your industry again yeah it could really be any service-based business service businesses yeah any service that is lead generation not like e-commerce we can also help we track which uh uh what the api and because that happens online but really like it helps with the service-based businesses that do lead generation so like

59:41insurance people that do insurance right that fill out forms anything that has to do with filling out a form on the website you know form closing a deal that might not even be instant and you want to tell facebook google etc that these things have closed so that they can use using that information understanding the ad that you used can find more customers that fit that bill to like find you future customers which is that 17 percent so it's not like it's you also don't see it immediately but the data just happens to be there but that's that's that's what deal oracle does and one of the the quietest features that i think if from my pov is one of the strongest value props is the whole user journey like seeing because of the uh the tracker that we allow you to install on your website it hits every single page that we know that that user is like interacting with and we get their their

1:00:39complete user journey to them actually becoming said lead so it helps you get that um that deeper peek to becoming one of your customers that one's huge uh you're able to see if they've visited a blog and the blog was what turned them on into converting into your you know converting to on your form or also it could be a scenario where they clicked on ad a first bounced out and then they saw an ad later and saw ad b and then that converted them right doesn't mean that it at a sucks it's just that generated the first click for you keep running that ad because it's gathering top of funnel traffic for example and continue running uh putting a little bit more budget into ad b for example so you're able to make more decisions like that when facebook isn't providing any of that information and you're kind of flying blind on whether something's working or not deal oracle dot io don't yeah deal oracle dot io in all of its majesty i see

1:01:45but now to shift it slightly i guess in the other camp uh i've explained to you a little bit about what what what big is trying to do what darren and i are building with big now to get us to to handle from your lens as the you know the agency what things that should we prepare on our side to make sure that we are optimized for success like what various things should we check off i've done i've done the aeo related stuff there's no blog yet um and then obviously like there's other trackings so like what what stuff can we do or what things should we be privy to to set us up for the future in regards to well i i think like the organic traffic stuff you guys have down right that you

1:02:45guys understand seo and aeo pretty well from what i've gathered this information uh during this call are you talking also about like ad traffic potentially yeah i see us running ads eventually yeah content in general what i always like to explain is like the user journey or the lead journey before they become clients right like you have uh users that are in the awareness stage consideration stage and then the decision stage basically and when you're running ads you really want to focus in on people that are ready to make a decision um so creating content around that funnel so one example would be like we have a competitor and all they do is on our biggest competitor they're always like dude if you're paying for this product um we'll do it for you at 300 or whatever their

1:03:47pricing is right and that's their entire angle so you guys can do that exact same thing with many chat the biggest competitor which i've used myself i i'm a client of many chat and i've used it with other clients in the past um and you can completely just on many chat because nobody else is doing that we can't do that angle because our competitors already doing it and it's just kind of tacky but if they were doing it i would have definitely hit that angle but if i were you guys i would completely just trash on many chat saying you're paying we're we're trashing on multiple businesses at the same damn time that right there is an angle and like again and then just hitting on people that are in the decision stage right like looking up like asking claude like hey what are stuff that people that are ready to make a decision what are they

1:04:43looking up like what kind of questions are they asking and then creating content around that right making it really desire like high desire and kind of vague it's kind of annoying like marketing is kind of annoying that way but like be kind of vague with what the product is but super high desire right like hey if you want like what are your users desires right i'm asking you guys now like what would you say is like one of your users what are their desires when they when they're switching out of many chat or they're looking into many chat or looking into big like what would you say is like something that they're looking for they want automation dms they want basically to turn their social media into basically a business we are the place to go in terms of handling any sort of attribution and in the dms in your forum applications in your whatever you want and desire

1:05:47we're that platform and we're that platform to kill off multiple different software solutions to bring it all in-house for boom for anybody out there either you're a content creator you're a regular business that has a social media account our platform is that platform that's the plan and to do that holistically that's what i'm doing in a way in a way where we're not nickeling and diming people where our free premium type of offer is actually to get you to have skin in the game because at the end of the day i created this and i pitched this idea to matt because i'm a teeny tiny creator i don't even have a hundred followers i'm trying to use these free options from these different platforms

1:06:50i can't even use their free offers i instantly within like a week or two already get asked oh you need to start paying to do blah blah blah blah blah blah i don't even have a following how why do i need to start paying how do i know that your platform is actually helping me so so yeah that's that's what big is we help people get bigger yeah i work with a lot of creators where they're in the high six figure multi seven figure range right and this was just something that i was also experiencing with them right because they they're also working with multiple different softwares for example and you got you got many chat you got time form and they're always asking me

1:07:46as an engineer how do i make my i guess operations better and then i just look at their softwares and i'm like okay let me let me take a look what let me set it up for myself to see how you can make it better i can't even freaking it's like a mess there's a hundred percent a mess with everybody else's things and i'm like okay why is this so bad and then one their documentation is no good also for example their freemium versions are no good like i stated before and then all the data is scattered amongst multiple different platforms and it's not all in in-house in one platform where you cannot even connect your ai clod or chat gpt software to even enhance how you're doing things right because everybody is asking me that how do i use ai

1:08:42to get this within my dm automations and my applications and all this stuff and then if in the whole ai agency space they're like oh we're just gonna do that work and it's gonna cost you like you know 30k 50k for these ai agencies to coach you and offer right i don't even want to do that i just want to kill all that out and also all these software companies out all at the same damn time at a nice cost basis where it's actually you know actually what the cost is i could i could i can school all these companies and show them show people what it actually costs for these companies to run these types of businesses and what they're actually charging you for that right because exactly

1:09:40right yeah so holistically how do we do this to cause the software apocalypse to cause everything apocalypse with ai building big that is the goal narrowing down on your niche like your buyer persona and then hitting on exactly all those points you just mentioned right like hey like stop paying if you're paying for many chat if you're paying over a hundred dollars for many chat you're overpaying there our software will do exactly what many chat does for ten dollars a month or twenty dollars a month right or and more exactly it how's yes and we'll house all all your information it's a and then use buzzwords of course right like a it's ai backed you can use clod connector clod your ai bot into it a couple you know just a couple couple different angles again i'd make the ad all about the desire

1:10:42making them want to get the end result don't talk i would not go into oh by the way you you can create a form and you can also create this this and then you can also like dude no just what just hit on the desire of what they're going to get and then let the land once they click through let the landing page do all the talking essentially from there okay just let the ad do the click through the ad does all the talking for you and then whether you guys are going to do a sales pitch on the call with them or not or if they're going to go straight into the software that's a couple two completely different conversion optimizations that we have to do right if it's a sales call like we optimize the sales call or the zoom call or if they're going to go straight into the software what does the onboarding look like right is it really easy there's are they going to get they're going to bounce out of onboarding right or are they going to connect all the way through and start using it and then once they connect everything are they using the software right that's another journey right you don't want them to just connect and leave and then they're going to your ltv your um your ltv is just three months

1:11:46or something like that right you want people to stick around for 12 months for over a year two years forever realistically right yeah so uh yeah just a bunch of little optimizations that you really can't you can get a marketer right that has some experience and can help you kind of cheat code your way into what could possibly work but at the end of the day marketing is also a b testing right like okay we tried this like matt and i like we boom i think a good price is 300 just i think right we hop on a couple of calls with these people they make it a no-brainer they don't even hesitate on purchasing the product okay even some we even get feedback like oh you're underpriced you know directly from people so it's like okay okay boom optimize let's raise the price now right and then you go from there kind of so it's just it's like an evolving marketing is an evolving product just like the software it's just like the software it's just over time you're optimizing for better results

1:12:45yeah yeah the game is always always shifting and even on our side running as for deal oracle our highest effort ads got a lot of clicks but our our yielding ad was like a throwaway image yeah can i can i share screen on here uh you should be able to can i you can it'll make it'll make my edit a little funny but it's okay i'll i'll deal with that i mean i'd be just i'd be down to kind of show off kind of what we were doing and yeah it's a great it's great insight we'd love it all right here let me pull up the page here too i don't know how we are on time either i don't want to take up too much time no we're okay i never sleep it's friday dude deal no team no sleep no team no sleep i work i work

1:13:41every day yep i have it going okay so everything good okay cool discord is making a bunch of weird noises i don't know uh so we pause the camp so i'm moving right i moved to ohio it was like i couldn't and usually it's matt and i we both hop on the calls right and i couldn't help on any calls so we paused the campaign but um marketing again just testing we tested this campaign um spent two hundred dollars got no hits we had to adjust right um i think i set up this test never launched it uh because i was doing more research on sas ads and then this campaign is finally the one that hit so this is the back end of facebook ads by the way facebook ads manager um so essentially the ads that we spent like matt said the

1:14:40ads that we spent a lot of money on which was this one right like i hired a video editor i like i recorded myself i hired a video editor to do all these motion graphics and i was like showed it to matt so excited like bro we're about to kill it bro this thing is killer video what ended up really generating results for us here let me filter out this ad set here was um this image ad that we mistracked we actually got two results from this ad it just didn't uh track it it was just this image which i already know in in marketing there's this phenomenon called ugly marketing where you purposefully make basic generic even ugly looking ads depending on your industry like in real estate you put a really ugly looking looking photo of a of a house like a broken down house digitized like like 140p like it's really low quality and those perform like it speaks to the people i don't know how to explain it it just

1:15:39fucking works um myself included i'm just like i could see that you put a lot of effort into creating this piece of yeah but you know i don't know how to create a great piece of content i just want to see an average person with average editing with average whatever that just wants to give me results yeah dude and darren you bring up an amazing point that i was explaining to matt as well and to all of my clients that they're people come into marketing like dude i want to fucking hire a production company and get all these cameras and these actors and all like dude you're on facebook and instagram where people are posting cat videos memes viral photos that's not going to fit into the platform that's they're going to see that they're going to see right away oh this is over edited this is an ad the best kind of marketing the best kind of ads do not feel like ads they feel organic they feel like they don't feel like

1:16:36ads at all that's what again why i mentioned like don't go through the features don't talk about every little bit of that that the platform does on the ad just talk about the desire and what they're going to get and the end result and be a little bit vague about it and let the landing page which also showed the landing page um but yeah so this one and then obviously this one got it gave us six results at a pretty good price the finger one and this is another awesome phenomenon you can see here i tried a meme that didn't really work but um voiceless content void like again with the images the images you're able to see everything you want right there and then you don't have to watch a 30 second video same with the voiceless stuff the voiceless stuff you can make a short video from like this like this one here let me open this ad preview where it's a 22 second ad it's voiceless and it's just this finger pointer talking about if your ad uh score looks like this it's underperforming if you want it to look like

1:17:35this deal oracle will do it for you it's 22 seconds straight to the point i just say copy and paste this code into your website and watch your score go up i don't never talk about the features i never talk about what deal oracle does it's just the end result you have a low score on your on your ad um event match score um and you want it to be higher don't copy pay for the software copy and paste this code and boom 17 better results on your ads and this one did we need to film more of these like i need to bust out a stack of these basically you need more fingers you need different fingers you need different different colors yeah different sizes different colors i need them all yeah um and at this first campaign here we ran uh the one we spent 200 on we ran directly to our website we got no hits again i already knew this i just was like i don't know what i was doing i was like maybe it's software right like

1:18:32other software companies run directly to the websites it might work didn't work so we created a dedicated landing page right so um you click on here share this tab and here is the deal oracle landing page you can't click into the menu doesn't take you to the website there's no menu for you to click out of it's just what deal oracle does connects to all your platforms gives you better results how it works bozzy bozzy blog which is compared to our website it has a bunch of information navigation and all this stuff right yeah all this other stuff that people are just and we installed microsoft clarity where you can do like heat mapping and recordings on your website and people would go in here scroll down here they would click on the blogs click on this article here leave the page never come back it was over um so that wasn't huge for us as well when we relaunched the campaign but um yeah dude

1:19:33what would you say about like you know how you're talking about like the whole like landing page strategy like you're doing this for like a software business do do people do this aspect in e-commerce too i know some people have that for those type of things if they're doing like a specific product if they're like a one one product shop right and they have a landing page for that but what if you're like you know you're a brand and you have like multiple different products like how do you how do you do that do you just do that type of offer for like multiple different products for like all your different you know landing pages and stuff like that is that is that the game dude it depends on the campaign but what e-commerce products will do is they already have an on shopify you already have a product page a product page essentially where you know when you click on a website you go to the

1:20:32product and then it's just like the overview for that specific product they'll run traffic to the product page not the entire website we have a client um right matt he uh his ads are pretty broad uh he sells peptides right like they're like hype right now uh oh yeah they are all the yeah all the injections yeah all that yeah i know we're we're waiting for a package still by the way um not really if you're not really but kind of just kidding um he he runs his ads directly to his website and his website has all the different uh peptides uh like six or seven different products and then from there uh his users will just choose what they want uh but his ads are pretty broad but he also has uh ads that for specific for example what were one of them at i can't remember right now one of the products is like

1:21:30the name of one of the peptides um dude i don't remember any of these exactly right now for example was one of them right so he'll have the he'll have an ad of the ozempic steak and that one will just the destination will be the product page for example so it would just depend on the the campaign the kind of ad you would create but yes exactly they'll create a dedicated product page for that product or just straight to the website for you come i'm kind of curious as well like i don't know if sam cart does this but it might be sam car or some other software businesses that kind of like generate these type of landing pages where then that landing page in itself can have like a whole checkout flow yes that's like an interesting thing right because then i'm doing e-commerce i'm kind of building my own e-commerce platform not just using like shopify or sam car or what have you out there

1:22:26right so yeah it's kind of like where can i build these types of integrations into my operations to basically flesh out and beat and do a better job at that without having to do multiple different things and then either decide to license out my implementation of all that right so very interesting thank you for going over that yeah no no absolutely um yeah exactly so yeah man ecom is a completely different beast but yeah but it's awesome a lot of instant money you don't you don't have a conversion cycle like on a sales call you have a cycle you need to wait for you to generate run money right there and then right your marketing just has to be money it just has to be good well yeah i i you might just stick to

1:23:24ugc for this but it might make sense to to run ads to funnel people to the the play of pando market oh for us yeah yeah yeah my god the play side is gonna be that's gonna be fun it's gonna be crazy yeah man we're feeling too many we're feeling way too amazing shut up this is this is the reason this is the reason why we have adhd man there's no way it's not the reason you have it you're just utilizing it yeah i'm utilizing my adhd uh in in short kevin um there's a new card game it i think started this year was it this okay last year last no last month last oh wow it's that it's that young uh new new trading card game akin to like you know magic yu-gi-oh etc one piece and we went to anime expo we met the guys at the actual booth azuki shouting them out i love the card game and i whipped

1:24:25up an entire online simulator of the game the day that we went to the booth one day only took one day it was like it was like one couple hours yeah how stoked was he uh i mean the the guy yeah i showed it to him yeah you can play it on your phone right now they were how stoked the guy though was was he like i want this to be a real thing or you you're talking about the you showed it to the creator of the card game right yeah yeah what did he say was he stoked does he want to do something or he was just like they were just like they were just like supportive they're like oh yeah that's great that you could do that and they're like oh yeah if you want to release it perfectly fine we were just trying to make sure that we didn't you know we don't want to like release it and then just get it yeah i'm surprised they didn't want to partner or get your contact or something i guess like that for them they want to see if it gains traction because like anyone can say that they've made a simulator does

1:25:24it work well what can it do you know yeah all those kind of things right and we plan on actually going to their office in four three four days yeah yeah tuesday right yeah on tuesday because they hold they hold local tournaments so i mean we're players we play in the game like i have the cards i have the cards over there we're just two ex-engineers just doing randomly like yeah so i'm gonna we're gonna walk up we're gonna play in the tournament and then i'm also gonna be like here's my laptop oh any of you 60 people in this room want to practice your decks against people online for free go play on panda market now and then like we'll probably have like oh if you play a certain amount or like if you beat our ai bots at a certain high level right after so so many

1:26:19plays maybe we'll have like battle pass or whatever right like if that's the case then you could get discounts discounts on panda market we sell trading cards that that's the whole thing like darren's selling not only like toys and collectibles but also will be selling the cards yeah i mean like i got distribution with them so i'm like i'm in the whole card space i'm and the awesome thing about that space too is not like my corporate space is where it's hard to convince somebody to fill out a form to sell their house right like there's already a following for this marketing for this kind of stuff is really it's natural it's really easy just get the eyeballs out there and people are just gonna hop on because there's already a following for this kind of stuff you know yeah it's kind of just like do you want to play the game for free go for it do you want to you want to earn like a free 10 discount after playing a certain amount of times go have at it yeah yeah booster boxes are expensive be or do the

1:27:20annoying thing right like put ads on the thing and pay a dollar to get the ads off or some like that you know and like yeah over 10 000 people that's fucking ten thousand dollars you know it's god 10 000 people is a lot of traffic man but it's a good problem it's a good problem well how many people play the game how many users like are there on the game um well the the in-person the in-person tournament that just that just happened at their headquarters was 63 attendance probably across the us there's like a probably like thousand maybe a thousand yeah we're very early if this thing blows up at least a month ago yeah that's why that's why i want to release this simulator like i told darren like it's gonna be done done before we walk in on tuesday i plan on i mean it's in a state where we probably could play by the end of tonight and my store is not ready though my store is not ready we're not open for market but you can come

1:28:16play you can come play the simulator yeah yeah he's fixing the other like regular part about the store i have so many bugs and so many things to go over but yeah he was he was telling me because we were at anim expo right while fable released and he's like yeah i had to go through a bunch of things i had like refactor yeah everything broke it doesn't run right now yeah because i found i was like because i was like oh okay i want to make like the problem with like shopify and like a lot of e-commerce things it's like it's not you're not building a omnipresence type of shop right where you could like you can have a direct to consumer and then you could like integrate with amazon you can integrate with like walmart you can integrate with like tick tock you can integrate with like all the different places and all the different places right like you don't have like a freaking platform where you could do all that and have all your marketing have everything like that like again i'm the guy that thinks about like how do i do my business and how would i want it for myself for my own business

1:29:17right i just want it all in one place i don't have to do like this thing i don't have to like oh shopify has like 10 different apps that i have to pay for they all don't work the way i want it to work great now i gotta test this one test that one and it's just like a headache right i forget about that it's shopify is like wordpress where you can buy plugins but you gotta buy them that's the thing yeah exactly right like it might not be easily integrated and then like oh no they have an application for that okay how is it free no you gotta pay like 50 a month for it i already paid 50 a month for shopify why i gotta pay an extra 50 for your for some app that some other developer decided to create and i'm also pushing data to them i don't know how they built that freaking thing or if it even works correctly and if it doesn't work correctly now i gotta ask for a support ticket when i am the freaking engineer why do i gotta ask them for a support ticket when i could just fix the goddamn thing myself

1:30:15yes so that's that's that's where i'm at right like one i'm an engineer that understands business in the sense of like what would make sense for myself to make my life easier and other people's lives easier in my business if i decided to hire like that's that's where i come in no yeah yeah we're just trying to tackle every side of every industry in this wonderful sass apocalypse i just want to say yes thank you kevin for joining us today and giving us your insight both on your history and also giving us um some key things to note as we build out the the marketing arm of of big which landing pages and figuring out that side because i am unironically the person in charge of of building out this for this product and i'm trying

1:31:14to like to use what i've learned from from you on deal oracle so it's definitely uh you know my yeah i do my rabbit holes of seo geo geo i follow a lot of different industries i'm i'm a adhd like person that doesn't only look at just engineering aspects i look at like every single different industry because at the end of the day i want to know how i could grow my business in whatever aspect right so it's kind of like how do you teach your employees best practices if you're the owner that doesn't know the best practices right and or have like a decent knowledge of something that's one thing right and if somebody is better than you at something else i want to hire someone that's good how do i know someone is good

1:32:11without even understanding what good means right so that's that's where i come into play right or that's how i want to run things and how i want to hire i want people that are good that i believe are good that makes sense and without that knowledge how can you define that yeah the vetting process is definitely the hardest part about the age that we live in and it's definitely making this uh this age of ai now going forward we can get anything done but how can you say it's like oh that's good or how can you say that's actually your ideas and your work and your decision making and this new age it comes down to can you make the decision the ai can make the decision for you but how do you know that decision is good yeah

1:33:11you gotta have the know-how man you have to have the experience and the know-how and that doesn't matter it doesn't matter what industry it could be engineering it could be marketing it could be like designing it could be anything right ai can give you its best guess but you have to be the deciding factor if that guess is good is there anything that you would like to to say pimp out shout out final words uh are you as doomer as as some of us are i'm definitely in the doomer camp i am and definitely in the doomer camp but i would like to pause the doomer do me yeah we'll be we're a part of the apocalypse but you know we've accepted that yeah anything you want to shout out shout out to deal local.io um shout out to god jesus christ um shout out to the family shout out to man shout out to

1:34:11darren shout out to this podcast oh thanks and um yeah man i think hopefully the ai in the future can resolve all of the inadequacies that humans create so it's not a total doomer at the end hopefully they come with yeah i can come up with a result uh with the solution with all this going on so ai god that's where kevin sits i think it'll be smarter than than most of us in the future it already is it already is yeah it already is yeah so agi is coming and then uh you know uh super intelligence asi is also going to come in like another two years i would much rather i'd much rather prefer ai save the world then destroy

1:35:07the world for sure hey hey i believe it hopefully well hopefully all right well thank you gentlemen as always for for sitting down and talking shooting the we are the two ex engineers my name is matt that's darren my name is darren big bro dc yeah big bro dc and i'm i i as much as i like i love my handle i absolutely hate saying the handle because i don't think of it as like a name i always just think of it as like oh it's just a brand because like you you are big bro dc but like i can't i think it's also the problem that like my name is a verb and it like pisses me off when i think about it because like it is ascend it's like ascend but you can't really say as ascend is like a noun so or a proper noun it yeah it's like a mental

1:36:05gymnastics thing that i'm i've like always hated but it's like it's my it's my forward-facing vector in life it has to be i have to be doing something that makes me feel like i'm progressing somewhere or just don't feel good but none of that belongs to me today yeah human human nature all right i'll see you guys 2x engineers plus kevin oh 2x