BootstrFM

I want to welcome you all to BootstrFM episode number 11 on this fine Wednesday, whether it's evening or morning for you, good morning, good evening. BootstrFM is a, well, you probably already know, weekly space about bootstrapping startups, and, my name is Erwin, hosting for you together with Dominik. I'm personally also building, a startup called Tailscan and together with Dom, we're hosting this Dom, would you like to introduce yourself as well?

Yes. Let me keep that real quick. I'm Dom, also bootstrapping for past two years, working on a project called Helpkit, which turns Notion pages into a professional help center or doc site, also doing other stuff on the side, but that's my main shtick going back to you.

And this week we have, our very special guest and friend, James. James, would you like to introduce yourself as well?

Yeah, sure. Hi, I'm James Potter. I work on a bunch of apps, but the main, my sort of main focus is, Rephonic. [00:01:00] com, which is a B2B podcast database, so Rephonic is used by, it's a database of about 3 million podcasts. It's used by a ton of big agencies and companies all over the place, people like HubSpot, BBC, Google, and on top of that, I have a bunch of other apps that I work on, which I'm sure we can get into.

Yep, for sure. I have so many questions about this. Welcome, James. Thank you for joining. I wanted to kick us off with, uh, with the question to you, how it all began. How did you end up starting building products or, you know, getting onto the entrepreneurial path?

I started really young, to be honest. I started building websites when I was like 14. So I started my first for my, it's like this society. My dad's a member of in the UK called the Roundtable and, I built for like a hundred pounds. I built their local a website, for the, for, yeah, for our little town. And that was like the lowest amount I've ever earned per hour because I spent [00:02:00] about six months on it. But I learned PHP, and then, throughout kind of what we would call secondary school in the UK, I was building a website. Websites sometimes for companies and stuff and then around I was around 16 I built a I started hosting game servers like Counter Strike and other games, like building them in my bedroom and sending them off to a data center and all that and Really struggled to make any money out of it and then really throughout my 20s.

I was kind of multiplexing between building my own freelancing consulting and then trying to build my own stuff, and, none of it really worked until about three, four years ago. And then I discovered this idea of like, Aggressively monetizing your apps and not giving everything away for free. That's a big help, and yeah, since then it's been going a lot better.

Cool. So you built for a long, long, long time, but, uh, you never actually realized, you know, the option to monetize until [00:03:00] you, did was what was the first thing that you did decide to monetize? Was that already reforming?

I did monetize stuff before, but I was just way too reluctant to do it. And I also did, in my sort of mid, early, mid twenties, I did do a funded, I know this is, uh, Haram, but I did a funded investor backed startup in the crypto space. And that was monetized and that made money. But then all the other stuff I was working on is always like way too ambitious. I realized after that experience, I didn't want to raise money again. And then I Building sort of bootstrap stuff, but everything was way too ambitious and grandiose, and then, yeah, so it kind of took me till three, four years ago when I started sort of simplifying and just trying to be a bit more realistic, I guess.

And so you started, with Rephonic after that.

So I started with the first, yeah, the first thing really was rate this podcast. com, which is a really simple app, where podcasters can make a, a link, ratethispodcast. com forward slash [00:04:00] whatever name they choose, like the name of the podcast, just makes it easy for listeners to leave reviews. And it makes it easy for podcast hosts to track their reviews too. Well, that came a bit later and, I was going to put that out for free. Then some friends, some mutual friends of ours, James and Danielle of Living on a Boat fame.

Um, they were like, why don't you charge for this? I thought, well, no one's, why would anyone pay for this? It took me like three days to build, and I did and I didn't even hook up Stripe properly. I literally was just getting the Stripe token to charge later, and, like super MVP. And then, I sold like 500 of pre orders in the first couple of days. I was like, Oh, wow. It was kind of an eye opening moment for me, and then over the next few months in building that, I sort of started to see more possibilities in the podcasting space because this thing, the rate this podcast was making, it was charging 9 a month, right? And it's really hard to, to make good money on that.

And it's not a massive market. There's only you know, at best half a [00:05:00] million active podcasts at that time. So, and a lot of them don't have any budget. So yeah, I discovered this other opportunity to build basically what's in wider social media like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, I guess. There are these websites, there are these platforms that will index all of the creators on there and make it easy for companies to go in and find them, Create like creators in certain niches creators and influencers in certain niches and get their content information and reach out and stuff And there was nothing for podcasting and I thought well that seems like it should obviously exist podcasting had been Kind of since serial came out. I think it was around 20 2015 maybe 2012 something like that. You Cy came out and podcasting had this big boom, but it hadn't really caught up. It was still very simplistic. And, yeah, so that's where Rephonic comes from, and that one was slow at the beginning, but then that really started to take off about six months later.

I remember James, when we first met, for those of [00:06:00] you who are listening and don't know, James and I know each other for like three or four years almost, and we met each other on a nomad cruise, literally on a boat in Lisbon. And I still remember when James was essentially talking about like, he's launched like this RateMap podcast tool and he made around like, I think 1, 000 MR back then. It was like right now, probably significantly lower, but I remember like listening to James. I was like, this is my dream. Like James is my role model. Like he achieved the Indie Hacker dream. And now kind of seeing the trajectory and the growth that you have experienced over the past. I guess like three years or something.

It's like absolutely insane. Also, one interesting thing I think about you is that you're not a big, like, built in public kind of, you know, standard indie hacker guy. So I was wondering, like, if you want to share a little bit about, like, why? I think you're such an underdog, have so many, like, really, really great lessons to share. What's the reason why you're, like, [00:07:00] trying to keep low key?

Okay. Yeah, I don't know. I guess I don't really like sharing stuff in general. Like I, if you were to look at my Instagram account, it's like a a bunch of pictures of some landscapes from three years ago, and yeah, I've never really jived with too much with sharing on Twitter, I don't know, yeah, I'm not sure why, I just found that other channels worked a lot better for me, and Twitter's always felt to me like, A huge amount of work for questionable gain, because I don't think Twitter converts that well, I mean, certainly for what I'm doing, but I see the other benefits, like, I'm sort of jealous hearing of you guys, like, making All these connections when you travel around meeting other indie hackers and things you have a big bigger following that would be really cool. But yeah, I just I don't know. It's kind of laziness and shyness, I guess

Alright, alright. I honestly envy you a bit because I think there is also a Like a kind of dark side to just building in public, which is just this kind of fear that you always [00:08:00] have to post something which I'm getting better and better every day, but still, I think sometimes it's just there's a beauty in like not feeling like you need to be online and like you said, I think a lot of times the traffic, you know, actually that converts is not from Twitter, like a lot of times, especially in B2B. However, James, you just literally posted it. One or two days ago, I got a little new app idea that you've been working on, which gained a lot of traction on Twitter. So you're kind of the OG of all of a sudden building in public again. You want to like talk about what you're working on and what happened there? I've seen it blowing up.

Yeah, this has been a massive surprise to be honest. I had been kind of like nagging in my brain for a few months slash a year that, I should build something with AI. Uh, Although I tend to sort of, if everyone's jumping on a bandwagon, I tend to sort of go the other direction. But I thought this thing seems to have staying [00:09:00] power and I'm actually pretty interested in it, and I don't actually know where the idea even came from. I don't really, so, so here's the idea. It's called, meals chat. And it's a, for now, it's just a little telegram bot. You send it pictures of everything you eat or drink.

And it sends it off to GPT 4 Vision, the GPT 4 Vision model, and it tries to figure out the calorie count and ingredients and macros. So, protein, fat, carbs, doesn't always get it perfectly right, but it's pretty good. Impressively good. I mean, I can't claim any credit for that. It goes to OpenAI. And if it gets it wrong, you can correct it. So you actually, you can type in the chat like this should be more calories or whatever and it will go back to OpenAI and re prompt it. And it will even chain a bunch of these, your feedback together. So you can sort of have a conversation with it, and then you can see your daily stats, monthly stats, weekly stats.

And right [00:10:00] now yeah, so that's the basic idea. I threw it together in a couple of days over the weekend and, I put it on Twitter, I didn't even, the domain wasn't even resolving yet, I put it on, so I didn't even have the, I was literally linked to a telegram group of like, testers. Because I thought it'd just be, you know, a few people would be interested. And then, our lord and saviour, Levels, retweeted it. And I was literally, like, heading out to dinner, and he retweeted it, and then my phone started exploding. So that's been really cool, and yeah, I think it's up to like 1,100 users now, since yesterday. Pretty insane today I'm like, wow. Furious furiously trying to add some kind of, I need to monetize it, right? I mean, it hasn't cost me that much. It's like $25 of open AI but, um, if that keeps up then that adds up on a monthly basis. So, today I added Stripe checkout integration and stuff. It's not live yet, and I'm going to add some pro features like goal tracking. And, I think I'm going [00:11:00] to make it so you can send like 10, 15. I'll put some photos to it before it says, hey, you need to upgrade, and price it at like 10 a month. I think. I'm curious to hear what people think about that. It's maybe a little bit expensive. And yeah, it's been really fun. It's a huge distraction, but I'm enjoying it a lot.

I mean, for those of you don't know, I'm just tuned in. Like James is actually working like full time on a fully fledged, like really, really nicely, growing and big fast app while he's doing all of this on the site. So this is not just a thing that like James just like builds his first product. This is like, he's doing like, I think you're like running actually like three like actual. Businesses while doing this like in Paris somehow, I don't know how, but one thing that I'm also curious about is that you like going back just to the, you know, B2B apps that you've been [00:12:00] working on now for like a couple of years now, you probably have like experienced a lot of like, I guess, lessons learned that were specifically. in like the B2B space, that maybe you want to share with us. I'm not looking for something specific here. I'm just looking for something like, maybe, you know, if you would like have to tell someone who's going to start in, you know, B2B kind of bootstrap software as a service products, like what would you say are like the things that are like, that you should like keep in mind things that maybe you didn't think would happen? Is there like anything that comes to your mind?

Uh, I guess I can say like what worked well for me in the beginning, and just to touch on what you just said about like having time for this and also bringing it back to the whole sharing on Twitter thing and feeling like you're obligated to post frequently I have kind of ruthlessly designed all of my, like my company to be very asynchronous. So, I really can just sort of check out for a few days and it doesn't really [00:13:00] matter, which is nice. But yeah, so what I guess tips for B2B, what worked well for me in the beginning is trying as hard as possible to not build too much. I think that's a common trap people fall into and spend a lot of time on validation.

So I basically built for Rephonic, I built a bunch of I mean, I might, this might be some revisionist history going on in my mind, but I built a bunch of mock ups, of what it was, what this thing would look like. And I had done some technical work to kind of figure out this thing was feasible. If I really could scrape millions of podcasts and get this data and try and figure out how many listeners they have and that kind of thing. So I think there was some stuff going on, but, the actual end product, I just sort of mocked it up in Sketch, how it would look and started cold emailing, cold calling these kind of agencies that I thought would be interested in it, which is completely outside my comfort zone, and it was kind of a sort of a challenge to myself to see if I had to sort of do something I wouldn't naturally do.

And, I learned so much getting on the phone. Like I think one phone call with a potential user is [00:14:00] worth hundreds of people landing on your website because you, if someone goes on your site and they're not interested for some reason, like the, the landing page is not very good or the value proposition isn't good or whatever. They're just going to do the only feedback you're probably going to get is then they're going to bounce off to 10 seconds. Right, but if you get someone on the phone, it's harder and it's annoying. You can really hear the inflections in their voice and whatever, as you explain this idea and ask them about pricing and how they react to it. It's just much, much higher bandwidth, and it really sent me on a better path, I mean, I originally thought Rephonic was going to be for podcast advertising agencies. I spoke to a bunch of them and they were sort of lukewarm about it and then I talked to some, I called up some guest placement agencies, basically PR agencies for the specialized in the podcast world. And they were just biting my hand off, basically like I've, I discovered that they were, I would potentially be saving them a ton of time, because they constantly are researching podcasts for their clients.

And yeah, [00:15:00] so I, well now I'm going, I feel like I'm sort of going off towards the story of Rephonic, But yeah, I guess, This is about not building too much. So, which is, was sort of one of the tips I started with, I did, after I got some, some of that validation, I did build, I built the absolute minimum thing I could. Didn't even have a login user system. It just had like one password on the client side, literally hard coded in JavaScript, and, I got a pre order from one of these agencies and Yeah, I think that summarizes my way of doing things pretty well. Just like keep things really light and fast and don't risk building too much.

Can I ask you, were you actually on a physical phone with them or was it like a video call, zoom call, google meets?

Uh, like a rotary phone. I was just on, uh, God, I remember, I think it was Zoom, Google Meet.

Right, right. Cause I was like, in my mind, I see James, you know, with like this kind of [00:16:00] like, Goldman Sachs, big phone from the eighties talking to all these agencies, trying to sell them software product.

Yeah, I didn't, I said cold calling. I didn't actually, I guess I didn't, it wasn't literal cold calling. It was more cold emailing, which led to a cold call, but I have tried to do cold, actual raw cold calling in the past, and that was horrible, but kind of a fun challenge.

Yeah, for me it sounds, It's a fun challenge, but for me actually picking up the phone, well, that sounds like I'm too anxious for this. Anyone also tuning in now, if you have any questions for James or in general you want to talk about in this space, you can request to speak on the bottom left. Just click on this little microphone icon and then we can also get you on stage and just shoot your questions. So James, I think one thing also I want to mention about the beauty of Rephonic and I know you're also building another tool, which is Rephonic does for podcasts, but for newsletters as well.

The beauty of this, I feel like for also people like that are thinking about ideas is that, you know, scrape, like there is such a [00:17:00] beauty in You know, data is the new gold, et cetera, and using some sort of like aggregation of data and build a whole product out of this, I think it's like insanely valuable. It has a huge barrier to entry because you're essentially just scraping millions of millions of sites. I don't even like, honestly, like it sounds like a huge technical endeavor, but it's a really, really interesting way of like, I guess building a bootstrap product. What I also wanted to ask you is, like, especially for Rephonic, if you won a share, how long did it take you to, I guess, get to round profitability in terms of months or days or, I don't know?

Yeah, so I got that first pre order in July 2020, and I think by January 2021, I was at like 1k. Great. MRR. So it took a while, my initial goal with everything together was when we met on the boat, it was like 2k a month, so I think I'd hit that by then from Rate This [00:18:00] Podcast and Rephonic. But yeah, yeah, it was pretty slow burn at the start.

Right. That's really interesting, because I think like, especially like as a Bootstrap, if you're a solo founder, which you also were, It can be very demoralizing if you're just launching a new product and you're just waiting for someone to finally buy, and in the beginning, you might get a few sales, but you still don't see the, you know, you're not, you don't know if there's current market fit and all of this, my lesson learned so far is just being patient. I think that's just the only thing you can be, especially in SaaS, because SaaS is, there's like this, they call it like slow, what is it called? The slow ramp of growth or something, which, like, unless you're Alfonso and you're building an AI tool, shout out to Alfonso here, that's kind of like usually the case.

One other question I have for you that Erwin and I were really interested in is that you have been building a team for the past few months or years now, can you share with us a little bit about like when was the stage where you [00:19:00] felt like you need to get someone new on board and how was that process?

Yeah, so I realized pretty early on I, I absolutely hate writing content, and I felt like I really needed to be doing it and I would, I think for a couple of months I was trying to force myself, I mean, you and I have had this talk, I think you've had a similar kind of issue, Yeah, I tried to force myself to write the content, and I just realized this is never going to happen. So I started looking for writers on Upwork and stuff, and that went pretty badly. I just couldn't afford anyone decent, and you really do get what you pay for, I think, with that, and then, eventually, I found a writer who is, this writer in New Zealand. She's actually a farmer and part time she helps with this and she's great.

She's been with me for like three years and then I really wanted someone, I realized pretty quick that SEO was going to be, uh, a big channel for this, for Raphonic. I think I was at about less than 10k a month, like probably 7k or something, it was a bit of a risk, but I decided I wanted to find someone to be a sort of marketing manager or marketing [00:20:00] specialist, to help me with, basically figuring out, basically like crunching all the numbers SEO wise and figuring out our strategy and what keywords we need to hit, blog posts we need to put out. Again, it's just something I'm very uninterested in, so it'd be hard for me to get myself to do it. And I found Becca in the UK, who is still with me now and does works three days a week for Rephonic, completely asynchronously. And that was probably one of the best decisions slash lucky things that happened in Rephonic, because She's excellent at SEO and figuring out what needs to be done.

She manages the writer. She manages the content pipeline amongst a bunch of other stuff. And yeah, it was a risky, risky thing to do early on, but it really, really paid off, dramatically paid off. Cause SEO is like 90 percent of where I get my customers. And then, yeah, and then customer support started to get sort of a bit overwhelming and found someone to help with that and have this kind of concierge service as part of [00:21:00] Raphonic where if the contact information for a podcast you want to speak to isn't very good, you can press a button and Someone from Rephonic, who is one person, will go off and within 24 48 hours go and research them for you.

And, yeah. So that's gone good. I mean, everything's sort of ruthlessly asynchronous. Like, no one expects anyone To be online at any time. We do everything over Trello and email and, support. We try and answer within 24, 48 hours. Yeah, that's pretty much how it is.

So, jumping in here, I also had some questions. I hear you, James, that you're a bit jet lagged. So, I'll skip over the other questions, perhaps a bit too, uh, too in depth. And if you want, we'll keep it a little bit shorter our episodes usually last one hour, but they're dynamic. If you're a bit too tired, just, just let us know. It's all right.

I'm, I'm doing okay.

Good, good, good to hear. Well, this is actually kind of related. I wanted to ask you about, about your thoughts on work life [00:22:00] balance. Right. As founders, we obviously have a task ahead of us because, you know, support is, for example, can be quite a strain or there's just many things to do and so only so much time in a day. That it can be a bit tough sometimes to do work life balance. How do you do that? How do you divide your day and how do you usually go about things to safeguard that balance?

I'm naturally a massive workaholic and I still go through phases like that sometimes, but, I had a really big burnout a few years ago when I did my funded startup and I was really burning the candle at both ends and I ended up not being able to do anything for about four months. Just couldn't work at all. So that was a big lesson learned in my life and I realized, I think that was when I was about 24, 25. Since then, I've been quite careful about not falling down that rabbit hole again. So I try to stop working ideally at sunset more, maybe probably more [00:23:00] realistically like seven or eight sometimes in the evening.

But I kind of believe I don't have much of a routine like things change a lot and I'm not someone who takes off, religiously takes off weekends. I'll Basically just work when I feel productive and I'll take time off when I feel productive. So I might work all weekend and then take a Tuesday off. But yeah, I think in general I've figured out quite a good, quite a good balance.

That sounds nice. So it's basically, yeah, just not a hard schedule. I find myself in this a little bit too. It's just not a hard schedule, but more of a phase of, you know, you are feeling productive, you work, and if you feel like you're a bit moi, then you, you tune it back a little bit. Yeah,

I think that's a great thing with SaaS, right? It sort of lets you work when you want, ideally. Especially, when you've got beyond a certain point and you can afford to hire someone with helping with customer support and other stuff, it really just becomes, I mean, in most cases, like very asynchronous, which is nice.

Yeah. Right now I'm not at the [00:24:00] point for, uh, for being able to hire someone for support necessarily. I think I'm lucky personally that my support stream is also not that big, but yeah, well, especially for me personally, also the amount of coding I do changes per week on how productive I feel and how well I feel. Oh, by the way, talking about work life balance, you surf too, right? You still do that, like, pretty much every morning.

I'm actually really lazy, I usually go at sunset time, which is terrible. But, because you want to go in the morning, really, yeah, I like, I like to surf, although I'm out of commission right now because I just had my Septum fixed, so I can't go in the water, sadly.

For that long though, it's probably a few weeks, right?

Yeah, just a couple of weeks more, and then I can do stuff. All right, that's good,

The other question that I had was, um, the question that we do ask quite a few guests on here, because we're always curious. How you are, obviously you learn a lot as you go through the entire process of building things, which [00:25:00] makes it easier to reflect on what you did in the past. And so I wanted to ask you is there, if you would have to start all over again today, or, you know, as the, as the world is and as the SaaS and the startup landscape is right now, and the technologies are right now, what would you do and would you do anything different, like have a different focus or a different niche, et cetera, or would you do the exact same thing that you have been doing?

I actually think things are in massive flux right now. And, if you'd asked me this six months ago, a year ago, I would say, I would just do the same kind of playbook of going really heavy on SEO and investing in that early and continuing to invest in that, because that's worked really well for me. But it feels like everything is changing. And I personally find myself using Chat GPT and other tools to replace my Google searches quite often. Maybe half, and sometimes I'll go back to Google, and you get these 10 blue links, and [00:26:00] like, this is old fashioned, this is clearly going to change, and we can see Google is pretty aggressively putting generative AI responses in search results now.

And for me that feels like quite an existential threat for Rephonic, and my other stuff. Because I can't see any reason why they'd do that. They don't just completely sidestep our content and just bubble up stuff from some LLM, so yeah, that might change how I would start something now. And maybe even though I've, it's not really not my thing and I've sort of been advising People sometimes who are just starting out to kind of maybe not head in this direction of, There's this common advice like build an audience first, and I think it's really bad advice, depending on the context but, maybe that makes more sense now having some other channel that's more under your control of I don't know like um your twitter following or your telegram channel or Substack and, yeah, so I would maybe change my strategy around that.

Actually, one thing that I kind of accidentally did [00:27:00] with this meals. chat, calorie tracking, macro tracking bot, which Sort of worked out quite well is the tweet that blew up links to a telegram group, of testers. So that's like the way in for most people, so they enter this group, which now has almost like 800 people in there, and then from there they go to my telegram bot and actually use it. And some people get confused and they start posting like pictures of Gado-Gado in the group, but, um, That literally happened today, because my I've got my friend, Stanley, who has a huge Instagram following in Indonesia posted it.

So, Yeah, I don't know. That's like a new thing for me. I've got this group of people, 800 people, and I can have a direct line of communication with them. And I think, hmm, maybe I should invest more in building an audience. I love this. This is interesting.

Has Dom done an interesting thing yet?

I'm curious. What do you guys think about, I mean, I'm usually a very optimistic person, [00:28:00] but I feel a bit of doom with regards to I want to, yeah,

I want to challenge that. That's why I just jumped in because I actually had a call today with Jesse from Dropinblog and we talked about this a bit. The interesting thing about this is I mean, there's one situation where I do agree with you that Google is slowly rolling out their NLM responses in like any sort of queries. However, the question that I ask myself is that you, like, unless Google is going to somehow scrape all of our SaaS products, log in, pay for them, and then just get all of our insight data, obviously there's still a mode for that.

Now, the question is how do people will find you, right? I just cannot imagine that for a company like Google that relies so heavily on Exploration, because they make money with ads. They don't make money with showing you a good result, which I mean, inherently is, I guess, is a way to make money because you can like plug ads into the LLM response or [00:29:00] whatever. But I, I feel like you will, like, if you bet on like LLM responses taking over the rationale of huge search engines like Google, in my opinion, is If you're already ranking well on Google anyways now with the current SEO presence, the LLM will just keep pushing you as a recommendation for its responses, right?

At least that's like my, that's how I rationalize this because I just cannot imagine a world where all of a sudden we won't see any blue links anymore, any suggestions on Google. And it's just going to be this like amazing helpful helper that is free and like everyone can use and like, you know, it's just there to help you, they need to make money somehow. And so the question will just be, will they add something? Like that you have to pay, then overshadow your like organic presence. These are all questions I don't have an answer yet, but I think to boil it down, if you're in a little niche, I think it would take much, much longer.

And it does still make sense to focus heavily on SEO, [00:30:00] while if you are making a product that is very, very generic. Like, I don't know, you're helping people with time zones. Well, likely that will be very soon, not relevant anymore. You know, all these calculator apps, you know, like if you build a calculator like I said, as a project where you like get ad revenue that was like in the 2000s, like insanely profitable. I don't think it's going to work anymore, but for like more niche things, I doubt it. I'm curious what you think, guys.

Hmm. Yeah. I agree with you, but there's also a little bit of a factor of, well, this is what I experienced anyway, but you know, I guess it also ties into what kind of person you are and how your brain kind of works. I guess. But, the amount of redundancy, personally, that I find in answers when it comes to, you know, chatting with ChatGPT or LLMs and stuff is, it's just, it's more redundant. So for me, it just ends up being quicker seeing those 10 blue links and knowing which one to click or explore a little bit. Whereas, you know, [00:31:00] chatting to you. Some AI asking, give me five more results. Okay. These are not good. Give me five more results. It's just I don't know, for me, it personally doesn't work as well.

And so I see the future much more with AI agents than with actual chat. And so I'm not afraid that chat is. I don't think that chat is going to be the thing that replaces Google as much. I think AI agents is probably going to be the thing. Well, that's my two cents anyway and that's much further in the future. So I'm not too worried about SEO being a thing of the past in the next couple of years.

What do you mean with agents?

Oh, as in that whatever tool you're trying to search up, or SaaS that you're trying to search up, or a solution you're trying to search up, etc. An AI agent can literally just do it for you, right? So you don't need to do that yourself anymore. Basically, you're phased out already in the solution, the SaaS solution that you're looking for you don't need any more because the AI is able to do it itself. But when it comes to like [00:32:00] processing information, I think chat is just too redundant right now to really replace SEO properly.

Yeah. I think chat, chat is, I don't think people care about like responding to the answers Google gives you and having a conversation with the search page, although they are trying to do that. But, I guess I'm referring just to sort of generative responses they give. I don't know if any of you are in the beta, Google's beta thing where you get the generative responses to some search queries.

And then I see it, they pushing it pretty aggressively with me. I see it a lot, and I, and maybe it's just, this is quite specific to me, but my company, for example, a lot of customers that Raphonic gets is from these pretty niche blog posts around things like, how do you figure out how many listeners a podcast has and stuff like that?

And I don't think blue links are going away completely. I think they're going to have to give citations and footnotes and things for these generative answers. But I think for a lot of [00:33:00] queries, that generative response is going to be good enough and people will feel, we'll have no need to go deeper, and that's my main worry. I don't think SEO traffic is going to go away totally. I just think, it's going to go down significantly, and you're going to have the table stakes is going to be you need to spend a lot on ads, so if I was a gambling person, I would buy a lot of Google stock right now.

Hey, I am a gambling person. Tell me more.

Yeah. I mean, I think Google's really, I don't feel like we're going off. Maybe it's too much of a tangent for this bootstrapping topic. But, I think, Google is exceptionally well placed for this. Like they have more data than anyone else. They have more data than OpenAI. Every website owner, webmaster, as we said, like lovingly invites Googlebot to come and scrape their site, they, because, you know, you want to be indexed on Google and that's going to continue to be the case, even if it gets replaced by [00:34:00] those generative responses with some kind of footnotes. And it's still the habit everyone has is to go to Google. So yeah, my sort of half baked prediction is the 10 links gets replaced by this generative response, it gets better and better with some kind of footnotes and they make more money on ads. Who knows?

I guess it's time for me to start learning more about ads. I think that might be a good choice. Yeah. I think I was just saying, it makes a lot of sense, and I agree this, this goes into perhaps a little bit beyond the startup bootstrapping topic, but, oops, someone just mentioned that, Oh, well, Charlie's in the space right now. She's hearing it as I speak. She mentioned in a different chat that, um, there will be, there could be a tipping point, right? Where people don't really, uh, like people will be always needed to write new things given that there's only so much to be trained on.

Right. So, once that runs out, it's starting to drain on itself. [00:35:00] There has to be a new supply, and so it could potentially be a tipping point back into more discoverable format rather than JET. I don't know. It's interesting. I think we'll probably in like two years time, know what direction this is going to head and it's just such a difficult time right now to really figure out what's going to happen. Right.

Yeah, I agree, and for everyone, everyone who wants to guess James h maybe his, uh, phrasing of a web master has given away a little bit

yeah, I was reluctant to say that. I thought you might pick up on it.

I didn't realize, but yeah, I all web monsters aren't we?

Yeah, I mean, I was coding for Internet Explorer 5. 5, I think, back in the day. That

straight up gave me goosebumps just there, oh, wow. Um, I don't have any more questions, actually, I just went through the list. Dom, do you have any more questions for James, perhaps?

Actually not right now. I would love to have James on as a, like a second time, sometime in the [00:36:00] future, cause I think there's certainly a lot of things to maybe change. Also, let's see how his meal chat app will work, but yeah, no, I also don't want to like keep James more awake. It's getting late.

Yeah, very fair. That's true too. I want to thank all of you for tuning in and listening. And I want to thank James a lot for coming on, despite the fact that he was, or still is quite a bit jet lagged from coming from the other side of the planet, still to join in. Thank you, James.

Yeah, no worries. And I'd love to see you another time to join in again. We'll be sure to invite you. Over for a future episode, for anyone, by the way, that, that tuned in, but was, later than or miss a part of the show, it's being recorded. So the moment that I end this space, you can still probably refresh the page and click on replay and listen to the rest and as always, uh, we'll see all of you hopefully next Wednesday, the same time, which is what is it? [00:37:00] 1 p. m. Universal time, have a good night, have a good morning, have a good day and see you all in the next one.

Cool. Cheers. Bye guys. Thank you so much. Thanks for inviting me. It's been really fun.

I had to do it. I just had to do it. Bye guys. All right. Ciao, ciao.