The WP Minute+

Kurt von Ahnen (00:01)
Hey folks, welcome to another episode of Whose WordPress Site is This Anyway? And I'm here, I'm Kurt Von Ahnen, I'm here with Toby Kriens and we're here for, I don't know, next 40 minutes or so. Toby, how you doing?

Toby Cryns (00:15)
Hey Kurt, you just called this, whose WordPress site is this anyway? I believe this is Matt's site, pretty definitively. But I wanted to ask you a question, in my world, this is an age old debate. And I imagine you've experienced your fair share. You were talking a little bit earlier about password requirements specifically, but this could be anything. Do you want to? ⁓

Kurt von Ahnen (00:35)
you

Toby Cryns (00:37)
And I'll just paraphrase what you said. had increased, a customer of yours had increased their password requirement to, let's say required a symbol in their password. And they didn't know they did this or they forgot they did it. And then they called you, you spent three hours trying to figure out what's broken on their site. And it turns out they just changed their own password requirement. So the question here, who's at fault?

Kurt von Ahnen (00:44)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (01:00)
Is it the software developer, the WordPress, for giving them that option? Or you as the developer for giving them that option? Or is it their fault for changing the requirement?

Kurt von Ahnen (01:12)
People are going to get angry. People are going to get mad when I answer. I think technology generally works. And that's really weird, because I'm the guy that said don't use AI to make plugins last week. But short of that.

Software that is vetted things that are actively sold marketed right like established platforms I think that technology generally works and and I and I and I will I will carry that flag for as long as I possibly can I think things generally work Normally, I find its user error like almost all the support tickets that I handle whether I'm working with WP tonic Manana no mas Lifter LMS all of these different plat the Marine retailers association

all of these different platforms that I work with or work for, we get support tickets and they'll be some of the craziest things. And unfortunately, it didn't take me three hours by the way, caveat, it wasn't three hours, but

I figure in good faith, I need to duplicate what this person's complaining about. Maybe there is something crazy, maybe there is something wonky, maybe something is nuts. But you know what? The only thing that usually ends up being nuts is the client. Usually there's some kind of user error. They clicked the wrong setting, they clicked the wrong thing, they had an expectation that it was going to be automatic when it's not. There's usually some kind of customer education that's on the back end of the support ticket, not a change to the software.

Toby Cryns (02:32)
So I actually think the opposite. I think the burden of making things easy lies with the software designer and the developer. Here's an example. Today I'm trying to grant access. So I use Harvest for invoicing. It's like just one of millions of invoicing softwares. And I was trying, I granted access to one of my employees. I wanted her to see all the invoices that our company sent out. Now Harvest doesn't allow me to do that apparently.

They let you see invoices if it's like under like a certain weird scenario that we don't use. And so I'm reading their documentation going, this says we should be able to see it. I contacted their support and like their response was like, yeah, they can see it, but not in your case. like, so like, now I could be, this is user error, user, like I misunderstood the design of the software or something, but I'm like, this is first of all, why can't a user see the invoice?

doesn't make any sense, but also like, clearly like they've confused the matter in my, you know, in their documentation and in my head, confused it just like with the words they're using and I think that falls on them.

Kurt von Ahnen (03:40)
So I have a SaaS platform that I run my business off of. And I'll be the first to side with you. I have had some frustrating moments where I was like, so-and-so is a lead. So-and-so is a prospect. So-and-so is a client. And then I'm like, OK, well, I want to send so-and-so an invoice because we had a consulting call. You can't find them on the invoicing list because they are still a lead. And then once you make them a client, you can't unmake them a client.

Once they're a client, they're a client. Which I found unique, right? Because it's like, I don't want to track all these people as clients. I'm not actively working with them. But, and here's where I, it's a pretty strong but for me. All of their documentation, all of their training, all of their stuff, it states all that. It just doesn't fit my intuitive nature. But that's where I'm at with clients. And this is gonna sound really, really bad.

my daughter, I love her, she's great, she's 20 years old, right, female, does her thing, she gets a new phone, and then it'll invariably be, this doesn't work, this phone doesn't work, this doesn't, I'm like, did you read the directions? They never read the directions. No one around me reads directions, by the way.

Toby Cryns (04:56)
It's a great

point, because you talk to any cook or baker and you go to them and say, my cookies turned out flat. They'll be like, did you follow the instructions and the recipe? No, I just kind of eyeballed it.

Kurt von Ahnen (05:12)
the list mixed it up in a bowl these cookies suck that is like

That's like the conversation we were having last week when we were saying charging for things versus giving free advice and then people. So for the longest time, people would come into my office, ask me questions. I would answer the questions and I try to sell them on something. I'd never hear from them again. And then nine months later, I'd hear through a third party that somebody got bad advice from me that didn't work. And I was full of nonsense, you know? And I was like, well, that's not a customer. I didn't execute any of those things for them.

What? so they asked me for information, stole my ideas, but they have no idea how to implement anything, and then they failed. Right? And it's like, that's my fault? That's not my fault. They're a thief.

Toby Cryns (05:58)
Well,

what I wonder is like, does that person understand what you're telling me right now? Like if you laid it out, that person be like, okay, I get it. Or would they be like, no, no, you're still at fault.

Kurt von Ahnen (06:11)
I had to start getting pretty vote and then, but that again rehashing a previous discussion.

That's when I stopped. Like, there's no more free. Like, I'll give you a discovery meeting. That discovery meeting is to find out what you need from me. Let's make a list of bullet points. Now, can my services cover those bullet points? Here's how much this is going to cost you on a play or not. Like, there's no more like, well, this is how I start your social media campaign. And this is how I find more followers for your social media account. And this is how I do this. I don't tell people the secret sauce anymore. I used to. But all I found was that people would try and take notes and then try to implement it on

Toby Cryns (06:45)
Yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (06:46)
own and then fail miserably and it's like I've been doing it for 20 years. What made you think you were going to be the expert after a 30-minute meeting?

Toby Cryns (06:50)
Yeah.

This is the

cosmic shame of any experienced business. A lot of times the friction you run into at Target is because somebody abused the system. With the Mighty Mode, I do the same thing. Somebody's like, hey, can you just take a quick look at my admin and tell me what's going on? I'm like, no, you need a contract for that because I've been burned 100 times in the past. And so now I'm like, I do not log into your site until I get paid and then we can do that.

Kurt von Ahnen (07:03)
Yeah.

Yep. I don't touch the keyboard until your check clears

the bank. Which it sounds so wrong. It sounds so mean, but it's not because that's the atmosphere we've been bred in.

Toby Cryns (07:30)
Yep.

You said something interesting just a minutes ago that I wanted to ask you about. I think it's on our list to talk about. But I noticed on your website, you have an offering that's something along the lines of, will help you QA your vibe coding stuff. What's the deal?

Kurt von Ahnen (07:50)
You're going to shame me and put it right on the show?

it came up on an X conversation believe it or not somebody was like has anyone ever heard of and it's exactly what we talked about on the show like I made I made my own five coded whatever all you need to do is throw it in the website and ⁓ and people were discussing it on X and I was like no we discussed it on the WP minute podcast you know you should put that to a process you should say you know hey that's great and I

I usually answer people very diplomatically. say, no problem. Or hey, that's great. I always try to get people off the defensive. Hey, that's great. You vibe-coded your own thing. That's awesome. Good initiative. Now you want to see if it works.

Okay, we have people on the team that can validate the code for you. We have people on the team that can create a staging site for you on your hosting or our hosting. We can test that in your staging site and then view it against other competing plugins that already exist in your website to see if there's any conflicts or anything like that. And if everything works well on staging and we don't see any evidence of malware or craziness inside that plugin content, we can go ahead and move that to production for you and get that going for you. So yeah, that's a service we offer now.

you

Toby Cryns (09:01)
So

I love that. And it sparked a thing when I saw that I was like, interesting. And I was thinking like, what are some other, cause it's a whole new potential. We don't know for sure if it's going to be a success for your business, but potentially it could become your business. Like we just don't know. And so I was like thinking like, what are some other like kind of innovative, innovative idea doesn't innovative is probably the wrong word, but I just started brainstorming some ideas like,

that I could expand my business, have an offering that, you know, hopefully it becomes the business and it's a million dollar idea, but maybe it's just something like we just throw away in three months. And so some of those were like some sort of community building thing, like where you charge a fee, maybe a yearly or monthly. And by the way, these things don't need to take up the whole business. As you know, like if this becomes 25 % of your business, that's probably a huge hit.

Kurt von Ahnen (09:47)
Yeah. ⁓

Toby Cryns (10:00)
you know, like, or maybe it expands your business by 25%.

Kurt von Ahnen (10:00)
Yeah. Yeah.

I created the offering in Manana No Mas over the AI review not as a...

not as a potential new market, but really as a way to protect myself from these ongoing and future conversations. Because now I can say, oh, hey, no problem. We got an offer for that. It's on our site. And then they go, oh, you already thought about that. Yes, we've already thought about that. And then, oh, well, how much would that cost? Well, a basic plug-in that you create in Vibe Code is probably going to run you $900 to $1,000 to vet through the system. And then how committed are you? Are you $1,000 player on this idea of yours?

Toby Cryns (10:40)
Mm.

Right.

Kurt von Ahnen (10:43)
Were you thinking this whole thing was going to be free because you did it in chat GPT and you got a $20 a month subscription? Right?

Toby Cryns (10:48)
Yeah, you know,

thousand bucks seems like a good threshold too. cause in the U S anyway, a thousand bucks is attainable, but for a lot of people it's a stretch, you know, but they could probably afford it if they sold their guitar and like downgraded their car, they could get a thousand bucks, you know, like, I like that. Let me ask you a question about that.

Have you ever gotten off the phone with someone and they like You kind of had to like basically create a landing page for them that said yes, of course we offer this service Look at this page. It's on our website

Kurt von Ahnen (11:28)
I don't think I've been as crafty as you in that market. No. What I'll do is I'll have that discovery call, and then I really like to sit on it for a little bit and go, is that something I should address or should I stay out of it? My biggest problem is, as an entrepreneur with multiple verticals, because I like to be distracted, that's a problem for me, right? Every time someone comes to me with some kind of new, I had a thought. Well, you had a thought, so I should start a new vertical in my business?

My brain naturally goes that way. So I actually have to force myself to slow it down. I make notes of things inside this tablet, and then I review those notes on a weekly, monthly basis. And if something sticks, then I'll create the landing page and do a sample launch to see if we get interest in it or not. But I've got to let it sit for a while. can't just jump.

Toby Cryns (12:14)
Another offshoot of this AI code review, there's a guy I know in town that's making a living right now selling AI development. basically he's like, I will build your app on AI. And with all the shortcomings and benefits of that, I don't know any code. I don't know what I'm doing. I just am willing to suffer through the headaches of AI.

I actually really like that as a potential business model for my business. It has everything, pros and cons. You got to sell it. That's the key. But I like it because, A, it gets me learning AI more deeply in the no code, vibe coding, whatever. But then it also opens up the other opportunities for code review. Once I figure that out, then I can do the reviews and move upstream maybe. I don't know. ⁓

Kurt von Ahnen (13:04)
Yeah, you definitely have to have the right people on your team and the right talent pool to play in, right? And I couldn't just offer that service if I didn't have someone on my team that was willing to do it. Because let's be honest.

Toby Cryns (13:15)
Wait, hold it a second.

Because you started developing WordPress at some point. How deeply did you know WordPress when you sold your first WordPress site?

Kurt von Ahnen (13:27)
Really at all? Yeah.

Toby Cryns (13:28)
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Me too. So how deeply

do you need to know AI before you start selling it?

Kurt von Ahnen (13:34)
I'm scared to death getting sued now. So let's say getting started. who cares? You want me to build you something? Let's build you something, right? But when you have 400 projects online and you've got some revenue coming in and you bought a house and you're raising your family,

Toby Cryns (13:36)
Mmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (13:54)
All of sudden, it's like, OK, if I introduce malware into a corporation's website through some custom vibe-coded nonsense, would I get sued? Like, LLC aside, would I get sued? Would my insurance cover that? Does that part of E &O, or is that actually malpractice, or is it vandalism? What is that? When it actually goes to the courts,

What is that? What does that look like? And to me, that's a nightmare I don't even want to go down. I don't even want to experience it. So I kind of stay away. And that's why I've gotten so preemptively anxious about the AI thing. Like, you'll notice that offer doesn't have a price tag on it. It says, you present us with the code you've generated. We'll give it a kind of like open it up and take a quick look and then go, ⁓ you might be into this for 20 hours.

Toby Cryns (14:20)
Mm-hmm.

there's this hypothesis, there's some book, I forget what it is, but the gist of it is once you get to a certain level of size or whatever, like risk tolerant, you like you have a bigger thing, more stuff you need to protect, your ability to innovate goes down. And that's kind of what you just described. I feel you, because when I started doing WordPress coding, I knew nothing about it and I started selling it.

Kurt von Ahnen (14:58)
Yeah. Yeah.

Toby Cryns (15:08)
But I had nothing to lose. Like, you're gonna sue me? What are you gonna take, my cat? Like, yeah. Yeah, exactly. I didn't know CSS. didn't, Yeah. So it's a great point. ⁓

Kurt von Ahnen (15:11)
No,

used to dip into the file editor and be like, which one of these is colored? Which one of these is borders?

Now

I've got stuff to protect, but here's my other perspective. And here's this. As an agency, now that I've managed to niche down into, we focus on e-learning and membership style websites. So we have a certain niche that we focus on. And I have really curated.

let's say 20 plugins that I am intimate with, I understand, I know the people that made them, I have excellent relationships with support, and I look at it like, I don't have to be everything to everybody in WordPress. I don't have to be on the cutting edge of what's new because I have so much opportunity with what I've become an expert in.

Toby Cryns (16:01)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (16:02)
Right?

And I think that that's the difference. I go back to when I was brand new. People would show up at the office. Can you build an e-commerce site to sell it to salsa? Yeah, sure. And then I figured it out. But now, no. Now I've got processes and staff and clientele that I want to protect.

Toby Cryns (16:20)
And it's also like that e-commerce example. Someone says e-commerce, that's a red flag for me to be like, whoa, whoa, slow down. Like e-commerce is going to double your double my headaches. It's like, that's, whereas when I started share e-commerce, I'll figure it out and like deal with those headaches.

Kurt von Ahnen (16:31)
Yeah.

Well, and things always change. Like you've got a note in here that's for the brainstorming side of it. You had mentioned educational community and marketing and SEO and stuff. I mean.

I've got one client, literally when we started the project, I was like, well, you're going to need a CRM. What's a CRM? It's customer resource management tool for marketing automation. And then he went, I don't need the market. Our business is 100 % referral. We don't need to do SEO or marketing or any of stuff. And so we're like, okay, make a note of that. And then, you know, as we do the proposal, the proposal is more like we're going to take your content, squeeze it into this format, and then we're going to generate this for you. Right? Boom. Well, now we're nine months into the project.

and getting questions like, we noticed the page speed on this page was off and the meta tags in the code editor needed to be adjusted and for SEO here and and this over there and we're gonna connect it to Bing and Google Analytics and I was like wait a minute wait a minute hold the presses this website wasn't built with any of this in mind

Toby Cryns (17:39)
Right.

Kurt von Ahnen (17:45)
This website was built for 100 % referral business. No marketing. No marketing, no SEO, no, no, there's nothing, there's nothing, there's no, there's nothing in here for this.

Toby Cryns (17:48)
Right.

And you said it was nine months from start to that point? Did I hear you right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (18:01)
yeah, but over that nine months, a lot of things had tweaked and

morphed. And it's for a company, right? So they've had staff changes and different people in charge of the project. And you can see it morph. And you're like, the person that made the purchase is now not the person making the approval when it's done. And you're going through that.

Toby Cryns (18:12)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, almost

wouldn't it be nice if there was some clause in our contracts that said if the person that hired me leaves this contract is void. Yeah. Cause that happens, know, yeah, you get some someone new in the new people always have great ideas and you know what? They have nothing to lose by throwing you under the bus. they'll like, you know, I've been in situations where like, do this, do that, do that. I'm like, what? That's not.

Kurt von Ahnen (18:29)
And you lose your money. No, it's pretty crazy.

Toby Cryns (18:48)
Because you're not their guy, you're that old person that they fired. That guy sucked. ⁓

Kurt von Ahnen (18:50)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You say that's not within the scope of the original contract. And then they turn around and go, I don't know why we even hired this guy. won't do the work I need done. And you're like, you didn't pay for it. We can do anything you want if you want to pay for it.

Toby Cryns (18:59)
Right. Yeah, yeah. Right.

Yep. So I had to change the subject here. Question. Have you thought about how much you would need to sell your business today? And I don't need necessarily number, but how do you go about thinking about that?

Kurt von Ahnen (19:22)
This is interesting because this has come up a few times. I've had a couple people approach me making an assumption that my business is much larger than it is. Sometimes I think I'm a little bit gifted like Ducati, the motorcycle company. People think Ducati is huge. And when I got my job at Ducati, there were 30 people that ran the office. So I think Mannyano-Nomas is a little bit like that. think people do a Google search and they see all the content and they go, this must be a big company. And we're not. We're not a big company.

Toby Cryns (19:39)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (19:50)
So we've had some offers and people want to entertain. I go, what would that look like? How would I sell that? And then if you listen to the guy that wrote the book, The Sass Playback, he does The Sass Playbook. Oh, oh, oh, I have it. I might have to, why can't I remember his name? It's right on the tip of my tongue. He has an organization called MicroConf. And he does a.

Toby Cryns (20:11)
I'll Google it while you're talking.

Okay, Rob Walling, is

that right?

Kurt von Ahnen (20:19)
Yeah, Rob Walling, that's it. Rob Walling, he's kind of a genius in the space.

⁓ He, and it's mostly SaaS oriented, right? But he helps people evaluate their SaaS platforms so that they can sell. So it's generally, what is the potential of income over three years, or the potential of income over five years? And then that's the value, the valuation of the company. And then you kind of negotiate off that valuation percentage, right? And so when I look at that, I go, would I want to sell Mignon and Omas for?

X. And I gotta tell ya, you know, being in as long as I've been in, sometimes you think, yeah, that'd be cool, get some freedom, get the heck out of this thing. But the other side of me is like, I've done all this work, and I finally feel like we're seeing light at the end of the tunnel where, where it's beginning to get an energy of its own, and I'm not responsible for everything, right? And I'm like, you know what, if I can hold off for another five to eight years, this thing might...

this thing has the potential to grow. And so, yeah, I'm not really looking to sell right now, but looking at the formula to figure out what the value is can get depressing.

Toby Cryns (21:29)
Yeah, and then you go, so

I had someone been approached a couple times to buy other people's hosting businesses. And these were legit people I know. So they were like legitimately, but the amounts they were doing that calculation. And I'm like, that doesn't make sense to me. Like what I'm looking at is profit, because I'm not going to turn around and sell it. I'm looking at like, rather than the top line, how much revenue, I want to know how much profit you're making.

And maybe I would do 3x that, like, and make that back over three years. Yeah. ⁓ which is like, what do call it? A square root less than, than whatever the amount would be.

Kurt von Ahnen (21:57)
Yeah, but what's my net?

It's very difficult. And there's a bunch of other calculations, like the bigger something gets, right? So 80 % of the income for a company is generally created by the square root of the number of employees. And that's kind of damning, right? So if I have 100 employees, 10 of them create 80 % of our revenue, right? And so you think to yourself,

Toby Cryns (22:27)
Sure, I can see that.

Kurt von Ahnen (22:31)
As I begin to grow and scale and add members to my team, how do I avoid that square root thing? Like, I have to vet everybody that much harder, right? And then I have to think the bigger it gets, to your point, the revenue might increase, but that percentage of profit is not going to increase. And so that becomes the next target, right? So what do we do for efficiencies and profit margins and things like that?

Toby Cryns (22:49)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And if I were buying a company too, you know, I would look at my own sales strengths and like, so let's say I have a top-notch sales capability or I see clear path to sell a ton more. let's say it's a hosting business and I can find, I'm like, I know I have 10 people that are waiting to buy hosting that, you know, at least I would keep that in mind as I was buying it. Like I've always felt these like calculations. I mean, like anything. let's think of it. Here's an example.

Lakers just sold for $10 billion. In my opinion, now, what do I know? I think it's way undervalued. I think it's worth 40 billion because Twitter was just bought for what, 60 billion or 40 billion or whatever. And I'm thinking for the right billionaire, I mean, there's only one Lakers, you know, in the clout. That's like way more clout than a Twitter brings in terms of just like capital in Hollywood. know, you, yeah, who's going to be more

Kurt von Ahnen (23:38)
thought it was $80 billion.

Toby Cryns (23:54)
sought after the guy who owns the random guy. Let's say it's not Elon Musk. Let's say random guy owns Twitter for the former CEO of Twitter or the guy who owns the Lakers or the woman who owns, you know, the Lakers have way more juice. You know, that's why I'm like 10 billion. If I had 50 billion in the bank, I would pay 20 billion. Who cares? Like, so I just think like these valuation things, it's, it's, ⁓ I've always felt like it's, it's a weird thing, I guess that

Kurt von Ahnen (24:13)
Yeah, who cares?

⁓ the sas academy with dan martell and he wrote a really good book by the way i i really like his up by back your time book i was a game changer if anyone wants a good read but

The SaaS Academy does that, right? They work with SaaS developers and then get them to get to evaluation. And so what's your MRR, ⁓ what's your all that stuff? And I find that personally annoying. But some people are really into that. And then people get into growing and flipping these companies. And it becomes like that becomes their actual business model, right? Grow, flip, grow, flip, grow, flip.

Toby Cryns (24:51)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (24:58)
Very hard, think, very difficult for me to process. I tend to be more of long-form player.

Toby Cryns (25:04)
Mm-hmm. Taking this a little tangential on the SaaS path, software as a service. I imagine your business purchases monthly and annual subscriptions to one or two SaaS platforms. I was thinking like for this show, this podcast, it might be fun to share some context around that. I don't know if we need to share exact dollars, but like maybe how many tools roughly are you subscribed to? And if you're okay sharing the amount, you know, that's fine too, but.

I'll just start with my business. think I did the math this morning. I think we're paying for like, let's say 12 to 15 tools. And it's at least $558 a month. Probably more because I probably left, I probably forgot about some that I'm paying for that sort of thing. And so 558 a month. And that doesn't include hosting, doesn't include plugins. Like it doesn't include any of that stuff.

It's just SaaS tools. like Gmail would be one and we have five employees using Gmail. There's whatever 35 bucks a month or whatever that is. And then we use H refs. There's 130 a month that base camps, a hundred a month, you know, those sorts of things.

Kurt von Ahnen (26:08)
Yeah.

I'm going make everybody smile, I think. I'm a sucker for a lifetime deal, baby. When I first started the agency, I was signing up for this and signing up for that and trying this and trying that, doing free trials and then forgetting about them. And we were struggling, man. Beans in a pot, holes in our shoes. Like, we were not wealthy people. I had all these things. Every month, I'm getting tagged for all these things. And I was like, ⁓ I got to figure something out.

And then so there are a couple of things. So I keep Zoom professional going all the time. That's $150 or $160 a year, right? But I have that, so I'm not limited to 45 minutes on my meetings, and I can actually do real things. I had StreamYard until they sent me an invoice for $826 for the year. And I said, you know, I don't think I've gotten $826 worth of leads out of StreamYard this year. So I cut that. I keep the script.

Descript lets me ⁓ record and edit video by using the text editor. So I really like Descript, and I think that's 20 bucks a month. And I signed up to Magi, which gives me access to multiple AI platforms, and that's 20 bucks a month. And then most of my other tools were lifetime deals. Like, so for email,

Toby Cryns (27:19)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (27:22)
and I'm gonna make all of the WordPress developers cringe that listen to this. I don't use Google or MX route or any of that stuff for email. I chose to use a hosting provider that provides email and then I literally have a lifetime deal on my Outlook and I just use Microsoft Outlook and ported all of it. So I'm not paying for an email service.

Toby Cryns (27:44)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (27:45)
And when I hire people, I give them an email address, and they can port it to their phone, to their computer, to their Outlook, they can forward it to their Google, to their whatever. You do whatever you want with it. But I am not paying for Google Workspace.

Toby Cryns (28:00)
I like that. I'm sitting here going, God, I'm a sucker.

Kurt von Ahnen (28:03)
I just hate the

idea of it because it's, I don't like the idea of like, yeah, it's handy, right? then, but then every time I sign into these tools for somebody else because I have to use Google workspace for this provider, that provider for someone else I work with every time, well, you know, install Gemini for this, that, and the other thing. Do this, do, let AI take over. I'm like, stop, stop with the nonsense. I just want to read my email.

Toby Cryns (28:24)
right.

Kurt von Ahnen (28:31)
And so I just manage it all in, like I said, lifetime deals. My SaaS platform that I run my business on is called Sweetdash. And I bought that through an AppSumo lifetime deal. So I think it was $170 or something. I paid for it once. I've been using it for five years. Works great.

Toby Cryns (28:52)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I have a few lifetime deals. But I always wonder like, so here's the question. So I use Gmail and I'm like, gosh, I would love to not use, not pay the Gmail. Like it's convenient. There's a lot of convenience there, but you know, five people that ends up, let's say it's 35 a month. And now we're looking at 400 bucks a year times 10 years, whatever, you know, like I go, and I could get that basically for free. Like I know how to achieve that end.

Kurt von Ahnen (29:07)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Toby Cryns (29:21)
And so I just threw away four grand, which is a pretty darn nice guitar.

Kurt von Ahnen (29:26)
Well, but it comes down to balance, right? So what is your time worth? is it convenient? Do you like the service? And are you more productive with your time other ways, right?

there are times i send someone the email credentials to set up you the phone or whatever go well it's not receiving it's not sending it's you know and you're like ⁓ come on it's it's email why is this so hard but then twenty minutes later it's working and i didn't pay for i didn't pay for premium email service so that's the way i do it there's i i'm really cheap i'm really frugal when it comes to certain things and almost to a fault because

We, again, didn't come from a wealthy background. Beans in a pot, holes in our shoes, know, cars broken down. And I just, in the back of my mind, I'm like, I don't want to lock myself into a walled garden to steal a phrase from somebody else. I don't want to lock myself into this walled garden where I'm trapped. And even if the revenue's not coming, I have to keep paying for this stuff because it's going to prevent me from keeping the revenue that would be coming, right?

Toby Cryns (30:30)
Yeah,

it is a trade off and there's some like, this is the whole, it's kind of the same argument like do you hire an employee or keep doing the contractor thing? Because the employee solves lots of problems for you, the full-time employee. Like it's a convenience thing, but you're almost surely gonna pay way more to maintain an employee.

Kurt von Ahnen (30:44)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Toby Cryns (30:52)
And yeah, like Gmail for me, know, for me, like it has lots of advantages. The one you just talked about, but also it has some features that are nice, you know, Google Sheets or whatever. Like we can share those easily. And I know like we could do that other ways. There's plenty of ways to do that. ⁓ Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point.

Kurt von Ahnen (31:01)
Yeah. ⁓

Yeah. Everybody gets Google Sheets for free. Everybody

gets Google Sheets for free.

Toby Cryns (31:14)
But it does make it easier just to have it all one place, you know, and like one button set up, you you just set it up once and everyone has everything. But I've bought into the infrastructure and I'm without, you know.

Kurt von Ahnen (31:24)
Yeah,

there's one of the contracts that I have has me use their Gmail address.

The one thing that's really frustrating is for security reasons, they turned off a lot of the sharing things in the Google setup. So part of my workflow is I use a Google calendar. And so Outlook syncs with Google Calendar. My appointment setting software syncs with Google Calendar. And then the other people that I contract with sync to my Google Calendar, right? And so if there's a conflict, people can't schedule, blah, blah, blah. Well, this one provider won't give access to share the calendar.

So every time somebody from that organization goes to schedule a meeting, there's a conflict. that's the whole reason Calvin Lee was invented, right? It totally falls apart with this. And again, it goes back to our original subject of today's call. Is that user error or is that technology not working? That to me is 100 % user error, right? You have screwed the pooch on this thing out of your own paranoia. And now the rest of us are paying the price for this.

Toby Cryns (32:23)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's interesting. I just upgraded my Calendly. first, so Google has Calendly built into it, in their version of Calendly, but you pay per seat and there's no way to buy it just for me. I have to buy it for my whole team. so like I would be paying, so, know, I did a just quick cost analysis. That's easy. Like I'm like pay Calendly 15 bucks or like 300 bucks a month more to Google for this feature, you know. ⁓ But this.

Kurt von Ahnen (32:37)
Yeah.

I canceled

Calendly because SweetDash has an appointment setting tool in it. So it took me like three hours to learn it and figure it out and build it, right? But once I built it, I don't pay for Calendly anymore.

Toby Cryns (33:01)
There you go.

Mm-hmm.

That's a good point. like that would be thinking of SAS products. That would be if I could find an alternative, maybe a WordPress based alternative. I know there are plugins that do something like that.

Kurt von Ahnen (33:19)
Yeah.

Fluent Booking's amazing. Yeah, Fluent Booking's really good. And you can pre-charge people for appointments. So if you're going to do a consulting thing, you say, yeah, it'll be an hour consult. Book here. When they go to book it, it'll say $150. Do you want to have the meeting or not? It's $150.

Toby Cryns (33:22)
Fluent Booking, there it is. We'll give that a.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

That's a great point. Let's talk about that for a second. What if, hypothetically, you had some nominal fee? Let's say it's five bucks. you wanna talk to me? Five bucks. It's not about the five bucks. It's about getting out your credit card. Is it worth me taking the effort to get out my credit card and it's five bucks?

Kurt von Ahnen (33:42)
Okay.

Toby Cryns (34:00)
I like it.

Kurt von Ahnen (34:02)
⁓ there are things that I've purposely added friction to because when I had zero friction I had zero commitment from people.

zero commitment. They just want to know what they can get for free out of you, and off they go. And so if you introduce any friction at all to the process, that vets out 50 % of the people that you weren't going to do business with anyway. And people will argue with me. They'll say, well, that's not friendly. Of course you're not going to get customers that way. You're being obstructive. And it's like, no, no, no, no. You're missing it. They weren't going to be customers anyway. It's like the conversation we had when we said someone cancels the contract and wants their money back. OK.

not a customer anymore. You want your money back, but you're not a customer anymore.

Toby Cryns (34:45)
So interestingly enough, the no code meetup that I've been going to have now gone twice. They charge 10 bucks to show up. everyone there paid 10 bucks. I, there, you know, there are probably like 20 people there, but trust me, they're not doing it for the money. Like it's this idea, like, how, how we want to head count. Like that's really what they're after. I think is like a real head count and like a measurement of the value they're providing. Like if it's, is it worth?

Kurt von Ahnen (34:51)
You're hooked.

Yeah.

Yeah, who's really going to show up? I do

a WordPress meetup in Hutchinson, Kansas. Hutchinson's a small town, 42,000 people. I think our biggest night had like eight people at it. I can't tell you how many times I go down to Sandhills Brewery on a Tuesday, and I stand there and go, is anybody here for a meetup? And then I have a cold beer?

Toby Cryns (35:34)
Haha

Kurt von Ahnen (35:34)
And then usually one or two people will come in and we'll talk about WordPress and they're there for that. But there's no skin in the game. They might RSVP through the meetup page, but it's not like they're gonna get fined $15 if they don't show up.

Toby Cryns (35:41)
Yeah.

Right?

That's a great point. It's like a fine. Like, you're not coming? Great, we'll just fine you that 10 bucks that you've already paid me.

Kurt von Ahnen (35:52)
Yeah.

Yeah, I like the idea

that it used to be pay and then get not at a WordPress meetup, but I'm saying different organizations would have like a nominal fee, $5, $10, whatever. And then when you showed up, you got like a ticket that was good for a free beverage or for the buffet or whatever. And I really like that. I like that process because it creates the friction, gets the buy-in, filters out the looky-loos.

Toby Cryns (36:10)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (36:22)
And you're not there to get to your point. It's not to make the money. I don't need the $15. But I need to know your comment.

Toby Cryns (36:29)
I love that, because it could also build goodwill with the place.

Kurt von Ahnen (36:32)
yeah, because you're automatically building sales for them.

Toby Cryns (36:34)
Right, I like that.

Speaking of no code, I used ZipWP again. You remember we discussed that. I actually used it in a one-on-one. So I sell these one-on-one meetings with clients where they come in and come to my office and we meet for an hour and a half and we build a site. We don't build it in one session, but the first session is we converse a lot and then we start building the homepage. This is the first time I did this. And by the way, I spent 10 minutes prior like the previous week, like,

Kurt von Ahnen (36:43)
I was waiting for this conversation.

Yep.

Toby Cryns (37:05)
when we talked, I just kinda like did it really quick. It took me like 10 minutes and I was like, okay, now I kinda get it. From that learning curve, I took it to this client meeting and I hadn't logged in since and I did it and it was awesome and get this. Yeah, it was awesome. like, and I kind of explained it, I was like, yeah, this is a tool we use all the time to help you get a sense for it, like so we can get a sense for what designs you like, da da da da. And I think it produced like 40,

40, four zero designs. And he liked, I was like, let's select five that you really like. And ⁓ then he selected one. And so like in that 90 minutes, not only did we talk for an hour about his business so we could figure out some of the content, but like we now have at 90 minutes, a working homepage on a WordPress install that's using Astra. Cause that's what the zip WP uses. It was eye opening in the sense like, so I, by the way, I've done many of these before.

Kurt von Ahnen (37:54)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (38:00)
And we get to the same point, whether or not I use Zipwp or not. Like we would have left here with a website. The difference is I didn't build it. Like we spent that time, I would have spent building it, looking at Zipwp and having more options. And it was a better experience for me, I think.

Kurt von Ahnen (38:13)
Exactly.

And

so.

Newsflash for everybody listening. I cheat too. And I did a two-hour Zoom session with a local customer last Friday night. Same thing. This is a customer who, believe it or not, is a custom software developer, not in the WordPress space, but somewhere else. I used to live in India and run a team of people and all that. And so he lives here in town and he has been doinking around on Squarespace for like eight months trying to complete a website. And he's just

frustrated, right? Because it's like, whether it's Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, WordPress, there's a learning curve. And if you are running another business and you're distracted by life and being married and all those things, when do you get to learn and finish this thing? And he wanted something presentable. And I said, Hey, dude, not for nothing. No commitment. We're friends. Let's do this. I'll set you up a staging site, set you up a dev site in my server. We'll put a fresh WordPress install on there. We'll jump on Zoom and I'll just run you through the

this

platform that will build you a working sample site that you can play with. And he's like, well, that'd be interesting. So we did that. Two hours. And to your point, we had a working website on a development URL that's easy to put his URL on, redirect or whatever you want to call it. But not like a startup, not like a starter template. A starter template is someone else's content. This is.

his words. So give me a description of your business and you can have up to 3,000 letters or something in that box. So we put in a good description of his business and this thing just threw the headlines and the stuff out there. We picked a bunch of pictures that were relevant. We picked the format that he liked. And yeah, it took about two hours to roll through it but when we were done it was like, I got to tweak this paragraph and change this heading and I'm going to put my picture in place of this picture.

Toby Cryns (39:45)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yep.

Kurt von Ahnen (40:08)
And it's ready to go. He's thrilled. He couldn't be happier.

And if you think about that model, and I told you before, we have a model for this.

I have no problem doing it in front of the customer, with the customer. I think the way that you described it is the way to go, because I have a very budget-oriented platform for these people. This is the setup fee. It covers the training time with me on Zoom. It develops your preliminary content. And then I'll give you another half hour or 90 minutes. That's a big span, right? But a half hour to 90 minutes of additional training on how to make changes on your own. It's a DIY platform. ⁓

good

to go. And if we go through all that and they say, I'm still not really comfortable or I wish, well that's when I just upsell and say, you we have services available. You don't have to do this yourself. I'm trying to make it easy and show you a DIY perspective, but we're a full service agency and we can do all this stuff for you, but then we're going to do a needs assessment and actually give you a proposal and a contract.

Toby Cryns (40:58)
Yep.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I like this is good to bring us that thing. Like AI is going to change the way we do work in the next year. You know, it's already changing it. I think we should all be very afraid for like and not be afraid. Like like afraid in the sense like, yeah, if you're not using AI, you're probably losing some efficiencies that you could otherwise have. And but I don't know. The thing about the.

The no code meetup, we've talked about this before. These are people who are building businesses on apps they built with no code. And I also think we should all be very afraid of them and that. Like, just like those are the people that are, if you're in the app building game, like generally, and we kind of are, you might be more than me, like with WordPress using it as more of a business tool rather than a marketing tool. There's real...

Kurt von Ahnen (41:39)
Not good.

Toby Cryns (41:58)
stuff happening in AI with people who know nothing about code.

Kurt von Ahnen (42:02)
Yeah.

So to your point, though, we should be afraid but also excited.

I'm cautious with people that don't know what they're doing, trying to think they're experts. To your point, how much did you know about WordPress when you got started? said, well, barely anything. But I told my clients I barely knew anything. I'm going to figure this out as we go. I'm going to learn with your project. That's why it's priced the way it is. And there was always a sense of transparency about what was happening, what was going on. I don't get that sense with AI. People are playing in AI with this unbound confidence

Toby Cryns (42:38)
Yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (42:39)
that and it's telling them they're geniuses the whole way. And there's so many people that don't use AI, like you and I, have these conversations and we have conversations with our circles and everybody's talking about AI. But on a wholesale basis, the population is not interacting with AI. And so when some

no code specialist says, I created an application with AI yesterday and put it in six phones and it works great. You know, the average person's like, that guy's a genius. And you and I are like, that dude's dangerous.

Toby Cryns (43:06)
Right.

Well

part of it is the AI is literally telling him he's super smart. ⁓ thank you for saying that like it's literally saying thank you for doing that. you're right. That's just like smelling the farts.

Kurt von Ahnen (43:13)
Thank so much.

You're

a genius. I struggle with some of it.

Toby Cryns (43:24)
That's true, man. ⁓

Kurt von Ahnen (43:28)
There's the AI that's the tools, right? Like what you just talked about. We just talked about, okay, we're gonna use zip WP, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And then there's the AI for people that know how to code, right? So it helps them speed up. You know, instead of writing 400 lines of code, this thing injects things in packets, right? I'm totally down for that. That makes sense. if I were a coder and I could type in three digits and 400 lines fill in that I would have normally had to type out, I'm thrilled. Like I'm absolutely thrilled.

But when someone has no idea what they're doing and they say I've got this idea, you know, could you help me flesh out this idea chat? You know, and then it works this thing out and says here, this should be easy. Give this to your developer to put in your website. That's lunacy.

Toby Cryns (44:12)
So here's something you and I both admitted publicly here today that when we started, knew very little about what we were selling. ⁓ How many agencies exist today that are semi-successful but don't know anything about how the internet works?

Kurt von Ahnen (44:19)
Yeah.

You already know I have a pretty strong opinion about this. I think you have set me up to be incendiary. I think it's a rather high percentage that really don't under, like they might think they have a firm understanding of maybe I'm a businessman or whatever, but I don't think they really understand what they're working with. I do so many lives and...

masterminds and people I talk to on podcasts and Sometimes like the off-camera conversations Sometimes I find them really enlightening because because you'll we make these assumptions like these people are geniuses These people are very well-rounded these people are you know on top of their game and then when you talk to them They're like I wasn't really sure where that checkbox was or something like what? This is your product

Toby Cryns (45:12)
So

I was in a graduate level technology course, this was back in the day and we were working on Flash, but it could be anything, it could be any piece of software. And I'm in there, one of the students, again, graduate level technology course, he's trying to open the software and he's really struggling with it. somehow he got like multiple...

versions of the same software open, the teacher looks at me, like, I didn't even know that was possible.

Kurt von Ahnen (45:45)
Aren't you running this thing?

Toby Cryns (45:46)
Right.

It's funny man. Yeah, I think well on the one hand Much respect you started a business you not you but you you who the person who knows nothing and I know a few of these two people selling WordPress and who know nothing about technology like people selling I I got his most he's great at marketing I just and I know that cuz I get his marketing emails and today I got one it was about his Shopify thing and I actually clicked a link because it was like

You gotta read about how we're doing such and such with Shopify. And I know he knows nothing about Shopify, but like someone on his team does, you know, at least enough to write the article. Maybe AI wrote the article, who knows, but. ⁓

Kurt von Ahnen (46:22)
Someone on the team does.

I personally think of learning as being like this lifelong adventure. And I kind of enjoy it. And so I think about, you the classic editor, And then Gutenberg, we called it Gutenberg, but it's, the block editor. you work the way Elementor, Divi, right? You work your way through these things. And then Kevin Geary did that Page Builder 101 thing using bricks. And I was like, you know what? I think I'm going to take that.

It's a big course, you know, and started taking it. watching him, this is a class, and this is this, and you design like a chump, and blah, blah, blah, and he's doing his thing. And I was thinking to myself, wow, I've been doing this a long time. I don't know what the heck I was doing. I'm like, look at all these things. But it's you have to keep investing in.

Toby Cryns (47:05)
Yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (47:11)
If you're going to be a professional in the field, have to have an interest in it. And I think there's too many people that start agencies because they're in pursuit of something else other than that development, right? And so when they begin to get revenue and they begin to add to the team and they begin to, maybe they get more focused on doing the sales meetings or they get more focused on growing the team, but they lose consciousness of that connection to the product.

Toby Cryns (47:38)
Well, there's another piece, and I think the reason these people are successful, like the agency owners who don't know anything about what they're doing, they're probably, one of their strengths is probably listening and understanding humans. Like, like they can get in a room and tell people why what they built was great, you know, like, ⁓

Kurt von Ahnen (48:00)
Yeah, yeah, there's a certain part of communication that can cover up a lot of not knowing what you're doing.

Toby Cryns (48:08)
Yeah, and I always wonder like, ⁓

if that's more important than the actual work we're doing.

Kurt von Ahnen (48:18)
is it,

out of it today I can't remember anybody's name the the famous leadership guy not John Maxwell the other guy that the that that I can't remember he's the one who said people no not him people will people might not remember what you said but they'll remember how you made them feel not my quote came from somebody else it's like zip zander somebody I can't remember his name

Toby Cryns (48:29)
Genghis Khan.

There you go, yeah.

Carnegie or something. Yeah.

Yeah. I think that it and so like if you think about it, let's say that's true and you can, have ⁓ obvious examples of people running old, you know, experienced agencies that know nothing. That's an option to invest your time. Go to LinkedIn learning and learn about how to be more human around humans. know, it's not a bad investment actually.

Kurt von Ahnen (49:06)
I personally think, and I say this a lot when I train people in power sports, I say, hey, you might be the smartest guy about fixing a motorcycle, but when was the last time you had professional communications training? How do you know how to build a relationship with your customers? And that's 80 % of what we train through my training in that field is communication and leadership, because these cats have never had it. So when you take your motorcycle to a dealership and the experience is horrible,

because no one ever taught them how to talk to customers.

It's that way at the car dealership. It's that way when you get your boat fixed. And that's why it's such low-hanging fruit for me to work in those industries and teach people these things. Because it's such a broad requirement for everyone in those fields. But if you think about it, how many geeks that locked themselves in rooms and played video games until they became adults and then started their own agencies, other than talking smack on the microphone, gaming, what level of high-end relational communication have they had?

Toby Cryns (49:47)
Yep.

Yeah, you know, I had an interaction with a person recently, it's a young person, like 22 or something, very astute at business, but I left the conversation feeling like gross. Like, like, and it was something subtle that the person did. I don't think they intended it, but.

I don't know, like, we're leaving impressions. guess like it just, maybe that's just the gist of it at all is like, you're leaving an impression whether or not you like it every time and, and it can have a great effect on your bottom line or, you know, that impression can or the opposite. Oh, here's the thing. I was on a sales call the other day. This is kind of an example of that. Like, I think I'm okay at like, like maybe even pretty good at like kind of listening to people and feeling things out.

and I'm on a call and it was a sales call and I spent 45 minutes conversing about building a website for this company. Is it just this week, day or yesterday or the day before? and at the end of the call, they go, so tell us why you are better than other agencies in town or whatever. And I, I told them, go, I don't know that I am, you know, I was like,

everybody's going to tell you they're great and they're going to the good salespeople will convince you they're great but once you start with you won't know until you get deep in the project and that was my pitch and i think it resonated

Kurt von Ahnen (51:23)
Yeah. ⁓

Well, it probably did resonate a little bit. I'm very upfront. say, hey, I might not be the best, but I really only take work that I know that we're the right fit for. So you've got to be the right customer, too.

You know, are you the best customer in the region to work with? You know, that just sounds stupid, right? But if it's a good fit, if the project's a good fit, I'm all in. If the project is like weird, like, you know, some crystals and pyramids topic I'm totally not in touch with, then I'm probably less of a player. So, but you know what? I'm looking at our list and I'm thinking we've got a really good start for the next show.

Toby Cryns (52:02)
All right.

Kurt von Ahnen (52:03)
So let's give people a little bit of a teaser. We're going to talk about tools to use for ACH payments. We're going to talk about increasing client retention. We can talk about ⁓ should you hire people or should you have contractors? I mean, this stuff comes up a lot. what's interesting is I don't know too many other shows that discuss these topics the way we do. So I think we've hit a spot. I think we're doing good.

Toby Cryns (52:26)
Yeah, and so if you're listening, we have no idea if you're listening, please email us or something.

Kurt von Ahnen (52:33)
Like,

subscribe, comment.

Toby Cryns (52:36)
Whatever you do, I don't even know. But like, let us know. I don't know how. We're on LinkedIn. Kurt, tell us where we can get in touch with you.

Kurt von Ahnen (52:45)
Well, you nailed it. I'm on LinkedIn, Kurt Von Ahnen. When you find me, ⁓ you know you got me. I'm the only Kurt Von Ahnen on LinkedIn.

Toby Cryns (52:52)
Great, and I'm also on LinkedIn, Toby Cryin's the only Toby Cryin's in the world yet discovered by me, so.

Kurt von Ahnen (52:58)
Perfect. And say the title of the show, because I screwed it up at the beginning.

Toby Cryns (53:02)
The title of this show is, Whose WordPress Agency is This Anyway?

Kurt von Ahnen (53:06)
Whose WordPress

agency is this anyway? It's not the WordPress site, it's the agency. Folks, we will see you next time. Have a good one.