Brand Mentions Are Exploding in Value - But Do Backlinks Still Matter?

Charles Float, one of the most wellknown people in black hat SEO and just SEO in general. What's going on, brother? Not much. A lot, dude. Congratulations on just getting married. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah. Thank you a lot. It's uh we we're doing the actual official wedding next year. So, it's this is like the marriage on paper. I'm officially a visa husband now. So, that's fantastic. Sixmonth honeymoon in Europe. Yep, exactly. Yeah, I read your post. The uh the plan next year we we've we've started mapping it out and kind of got the initial flights and things booked. Where are you starting? We're flying into Amsterdam because that's the easiest place to fly into basically. Um hub airport kum were good and we're flying with our dog and things. So wanted to make sure that it was like the safest route. Are you going to meet just amazing SEOs all around Europe or are you just going to be like h just chilling? I I I'll run into a few entrepreneurs and SEOs, but most time I want to see the sites and see Europe before I think the the world descends into AI tyranny. Dude, you have a So, so yeah, I read this post. So, you are staying with press wiz, but like you're like doing different things now. Press wiz and you built press into the biggest link building marketplace. Yeah, basically in terms in terms of users, monthly active users and revenue and things. Yeah. What's going on? Why are you why are you doing that? I know. So, essentially, I'm an optimist in a world that is currently I feel on a bit of a downward trajectory in terms of most of people's opinions of where search is going, where SEO is heading, where the clicks are heading, all of this kind of stuff, right? And to be fair, from speaking to other people in like kind of connecting industries with like ads and email and all this kind of stuff, they're experiencing some of that too, right? like it's not it's SEO and search definitely we're at like the forefront of changes and it seems to be AI has a massive impact on SEO as a whole but there's still big changes happening in other industries and still increasing increasing costs to get clicks increasing cost to get traffic increasing consolidation of traffic all of these kind of things right dude where what did you think of uh the Google IO announcements did you think it was a death sentence or were you just like eh business as usual. People have been saying SEO is dead for the last two decades. Well, I I saw it as an bit of an inevitability, right? Like if you've been listening to the earnings calls, Google's been going on about trying to make AI mode the default search experience for at least the last year and a half or so. And they were saying on the last earnings call before Google IO that they were aiming to have a default AI search experience by the end of this year, so Q4 this year. So, from a lot of the announcements that they made weren't massively surprising if you looked at what they were saying to their shareholders. However, it's pretty surprising in terms of how quickly they're trying to roll things out and how aggressively they're trying to change the user experience and try and change user behavior. What do you think uh what do you think that default looks like? I mean, I saw so uh I think it was the VP of search commented on one of Glen Gab's posts and he's like, "Yeah, we're not going to make AI mode the default in Chrome." And I mean, if they're not going to do it in Chrome, they're not going to do it anywhere else. That's that's what I would guess. So, what do you think? What do you think like a default A cuz honestly, I feel like they had that I feel like they had default AI search by the end of last year where just you had an AI overview on everything. Yeah. So there there's still certain niches that aren't affected by a views. So I gaming for example is still they're still not rolling out in I gaming. And there's certain other industries in like Y and I'm whale and things and stuff where they they don't roll out and even like personal queries and things. I've actually found that out kind of recently that a lot of personalized query. So if you're saying who is somebody that isn't famous or something like that then they don't show up with their views just for privacy reasons and things like I suppose. However, I really see the major in interesting thing of how they've done it is now you can imp import additional things into the search. So the search bar is now not just a text search bar. It's kind of a multimodal search bar. So you can put tabs in, you can drag images in, you can upload files, you can add all this additional context that you used to not be able to have anywhere near that level of context. And I think if they do successfully change the user behavior to adapt to changing the context of the search, then that itself is going to massively change SEO. Let alone if AI mode or something becomes the default. How do you imagine that will massively change SEO? Well, so I think number one, if the context is substantially different in terms of number one, you're importing a tab or you're importing a document or you're adding additional reference points or things like that, then personalization changes the token output of the AI output substantially. And if especially if you've very you know that it might even be to the point where you have a copyrighted name of a company in a document or something that you've uploaded or it could be that they're using the software on a on a web page or they're using the theme for that Shopify theme on a web page or all sorts of things that end up changing the actual context and those are probably very small things but in the grand scheme of how users interact with search and how they interact with the not just Google I think it is going to be how they interact with Chrome and how they interact browsers and kind of the UIs of the i web operating systems and all sorts of things. I think that's going to change over the next few years and that's what's really going to be interesting to see how because again market forces can only do so much. This is how users adopt things and users actually are what will set the market in the long term. So what let's say that happens what will an SEO's how will an SEO's role change? What will they do different? So I I think in terms of the different differential I think number one a lot of the additional marketing areas like especially email marketing any anything that adds additional personalization onto that layer that becomes more important and then number two the actual brand trusted layer so the arbitration layer of how Google or whatever AI model or whatever interface you're interacting with how they actually choose the end recommendation that's going to become really really important important and trust signals and how you're weighted within the AI's kind of uh mesh is going to be even more important going forward as well. But but like what is that does that mean that you're writing as Google calls it non-commodity content with like more firsthand experience? Does does that mean you're you're building a brand elsewhere so people recognize your URL in the SERs or or they try they click on your citation like what what yeah what does that actually mean for SEOs? Yeah, it's it's definitely going from, you know, search engine optimization to every optimization, but the waiting is still different, right? So, there's going to be specific sources or specific areas or specific even types of information, how that information is presented and formatted that are going to be weighted higher by the AI models than others. So, there's going to be specific areas and it might be in the case of Google, it might be the non-commodity content, it might be reviews, especially in Google's own ecosystem. It might be YouTube content. It might be podcast episodes like we're doing. It might be all sorts of things to actually build that trusted entity in the underlying uh knowledge base and then hopefully Google recommends and trusts you and associates you with the direct query that you're trying to build. But that's the SEO's job. We have to be building those associations and building that trust. Now that's what the future will become essentially. So here's an interesting question. What how does that change what for like a general business? Okay. But what if you're doing something? What if you're in eye gaming? What if you're in porn? How are you going to do it in niches like that where it's like are you supposed to do you're supposed to have a podcast on YouTube about porn? Like or or I mean I mean maybe maybe you could just talk about it like I don't know. Maybe again this is where I think certain vectors as well will have higher waiting as in certain niches. So, I can imagine that if you're looking for a landscape gardener, it's probably going to have the AI is probably going to weight the local reviews for that area, local newspaper testimony, if you're like an a sponsor of local charities or any mentions in that regard a lot higher than it would the blog post on your site or your non-commodity content and things like that. However, when it comes to porn or eye gaming or something like that, especially the niches which actually a lot of them don't even have content on their money pages. So you can imagine a lot of the slots websites out there don't actually have any content on the actual slots money pages. But if we're trying to create trustworthiness and authenticity and those sort of things, then you would have press releases, you would have company updates, you'd have a change log, you would have devs, you'd have a community, you'd have active social media, you'd have customer reviews, you'd have all of those sort of things. And they would probably be weighted higher in those categories, in those areas by the A models than the waiting would be for landscape gardening in your local area. Sounds like you're describing eat. So the the issue that I have is that the AI models are getting better at arbitration, which is building that trustworthiness, understanding if something's a real entity, understanding if the the it's essentially what the what the AI models and AI frontier company's aim is, which is mapping the real world, like creating and having the AI understand real world physics and being able to interact with things and that kind of stuff. that to some extent it is EAT but EAT is a bit more of a jargoned term that was brought up and created by the SEO industry whereas it all just goes back to computer trust signals right machine verification like these kinds of things were 1980s before I was even born let alone the SEO industry kind of developed into what it is today this method of marketing is so effective I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept using it. It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions, how, what, when, compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy. These pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago, I couldn't believe this was allowed. It's less work, too. The average compact keywords landing page is only 415 words. Compact Keywords is a 13-hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer said, "We spent nearly 18,000 in the last year and a half on marketing and SEO through different agencies locally, and that did nothing. We decided to take the leap on the compact keywords course. We're now getting about 6 to eight calls per day on a good day, which is just unheard of." Another customer said, "Give it to a junior employee. Have them follow it exactly as Edwards laid out. You don't have to do anything and you're going to gain a six-figure SEO level employee just by having them go through this course. Compact Keywords is about setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years. It works with AI. It's less work than traditional SEO and it makes way more money. You can get it now at compactkeywords.com. Back to the podcast. I mean, but but for me that like you've always wanted as an SEO, I think you always wanted to have a brand that people trusted. You always wanted to have a brand that people viewed as an authority. Well, user engagement signals have always, despite what Google has said. Yeah, exactly. For for a long time, have always played a massive role in terms of how much trustworthiness, how much ability you have to rank, how much authority you have, all these kind of things. And also there's also some kind of association with certain users could have higher associations with your content, etc. That's kind of more recent. However, there's always been that connection for Google and I I I think that as we move into the AI search and AI mode default experience, and again, I think the AI we we kind of hopped over this a little bit, but I do think the AI mode default is not going to look like anything that it looks like now, right? And I think that as I think it's Nick Fox that made that comment on uh on on Glenn's post, he also made a he also did an interview with the Wall Street Journal that I actually watched. It was about 3 or 4 days ago. And in that they basically say the entire concept of search is going to completely change. And that it's not going to be people searching for pages and clicking through. going to be a summarize a summarization of sources, a summarized answer or an answer in there and an interactable answer as well. That is another caveat that I think is really interesting. But I think the AI mode and AI search experience is going to essentially try to control people inside of Google's ecosystem. I think it's going to be harder to be a fake brand with no outside signals doing SEO. But I also think that the best brands throughout the last decades doing SEO were the ones who tried to also get brand signals from lots of different places. Well, so the the the issue is that the AI can only understand so much and it's basically has three layers. It's training data, its retrieval, and then the arbitration against what it's actually going to choose. and a brand can go and produce all of this content, but then a billion-dollar company that has had 10,000 employees that are posting on LinkedIn and do does real world PR and all this other stuff, they're going to beat you anyway. So there is going to be some level of centralization in terms of the real world modeling that the AI is trying to do if that is going to be 100% realistic in terms of like this is going to actually understand humanity and understand people and understand the world and businesses and companies and the environment and all of those kind of things then yes it's going to favor the big heavy brand signals and marketing signals and things. However, the realistic technological understanding is that they have weighted signals and that they prefer sources and that they have partnerships with certain news companies and those kind of things. So, there's always going to be a technical and weighted ability above the kind of brand awareness. And that's also what and thank god this podcast wasn't me de debating David Quaid, but I think that's Well, that was a good episode, right? That was a good episode, right? It was a good episode, dude. Dude, I did that on purpose. Whenever I have geo people pitch me, I'm like, "Oh, wow. This is great. Do you think geo is really different from SEO?" And then they'll be like, "It's completely different." And then I'll forward it to David and I'll be like, "David, want to jump in on this?" Like, "Let's do it." And so they have no idea that they're jumping into the ring with David. And I but I phrase it to them. I'm like I'm like, "Do you want to do a podcast where we discuss the differences of geo versus SEO with someone who believes that SEO is the same thing as geo?" And they're like, "Yeah." Yes. It's a lot of fun to do that. Yeah. So, you want to debate it with David Quaid? I think we'd agree a lot of the time. I think I think so, too. I think so, too. I think so, too. I think in terms of this specific thing however I I agree with David in the sense that the underlying machine and the underlying system is very very similar or at least very uh connected to all of the same techniques that we've been doing for SEO for the last 10 20 25 years and even if there are specific layers that are put on top of that like personalization for AI mode and that's a really interesting point that Garrett Susman brought up I if you saw that where he basically showed that AI mode is is so personalized now that it will actually change the sources because of query fan out and that's another thing that a Google IO kind of covered. There's so much that's happening and and again that it's kind of all interconnected and in my opinion this is why I'm trying to change my workflows and trying to change my career path and I and I do feel to some extent that I'm slightly blessed to be in a position to do so because I feel like a lot of people probably if I connected to their salary in a way that they can't just go and say you know phone their boss tomorrow and say quit right and I feel thankful that I can because I can be I can be react reactive to an industry and an environment and a technological um adaptation that is very very quick to change. And I think the issue that we're having in SEO is that we're basically peering into a black box and trying to figure out what we're trying to achieve in 2 years, 3 years, four years. But we're only going to be able to achieve based on how we can react to the changes that Google are making, the changes the AI companies are making, the changes that the browsing companies are making, the change that the operating system companies making, all of these things, right? We're going to essentially have to be reactive to whatever the users force changes and whatever the market forces changes, whatever these companies force changes. And I think that you can invest in all the brand awareness, all the branding you want, all of that kind of stuff. But I still know for a fact that you will get beaten by somebody who has 5% of the budget, who is highly efficiently tuned to how the models are waiting for your specific niche, and what sources have the highest co-occurrence and what specific types of tokens they prefer over other types of tokens for that specific corpus of text. So I I want to go I want to go in two different directions. I want one I want to ask like okay why so why does this make you leave the top link building marketplace or or or backlink marketplace? Why does it make you leave uh press wiz? But also, can you discuss more about how different niches have different waitings and how you can build a great brand and it in all these different areas, but you're still going to get beaten by the I I don't know, the the indie hacker who just understands the algorithms perfectly. Yeah. So, I'll I'll try to answer the last one first and then I'll backtrack to to my career decisions and choices and life decisions as well. But they're all they're all related. Exactly. Yes. Exactly. And that that's also what I try to always have is try to understand the broader picture of where trends are headed and try to understand the broader picture of where money's headed where investment is being put where people where clients are spending money where AI SEO is now probably having more budget being thrown at it than SEO is having budget being thrown all those kind of things right. So in terms of where everything is headed, where everything is changing, all of these kind of things, I'm a massive believer that the market is shifted by money and it's shifted by investment. So if the investors believe in a X proposal then that's where the market is going to adapt towards and then users changing the interface is going to be based on the users adapting to that technology and the first early adopters of that technology power users etc etc because they're going to be adapting based in reinforcement learning the actual big brands who have been putting investment so far into trying to achieve this kind of scope within the AI models at the moment haven't been able to achieve it because oh sorry I'm I'm kind of mixing myself a little bit this is quite a large question as well they haven't actually been able to achieve it because they don't understand the algorithms in the same way as the people who are interacting as power users with the AI models on a day-to-day basis who are reading the research papers who are interacting with engineers on X who are going into that day-to-day most of the agencies most of the CMOs most of these people who are actually trying to do these ASO campaigns don't have an under understanding of the underlying technology and that causes a shift of where money actually gets put into. And so far, I think a huge amount of money has been spent on stuff that probably so far hasn't had a result and isn't going to have a long-term result going into any sort of a future like what type of stuff. Yeah, I don't want to call out specific companies or brands or things, right? But we we gagen constantly posts about it on X of these kinds of blogging softwares that will just mass-produce content for your site with very little look at cannibalization or like query relevance or how your brand tone is positioned. All of these kind of things, right? That's a good example of just a wasting money, but also sacrificing some of the SEO benefit that you already had from that existing presence, hurting your site long term and also hurting your site long term because it's going to the the algorithm that is powering the AI retrieval. So the Google algorithm, the Bing algorithm, all that kind of stuff, if they don't like your content because it has a thousand lowquality content signals, they're not going to retrieve it for the AI model to summarize it in the first place. So you're going to long-term hurt your campaign. the indie hacker who can fully understand the argument, like I said, has gone through the research papers, who's done that kind of stuff. They know Reddit is the number one source site in the thing. I'll go buy 100 Reddit comments. I guarantee you that 100 Reddit comments has got more brand visibility boosting than the thousand blog posts that they just invested $5,000 a month into building through this random software. 100% completely agree with that. I I mean with however the exception is it can be you can also there's a lot of horror stories and I mean David can talk about this about about brands who try to manipulate Reddit. They have no experience doing it and then they get their brand blacklisted from either a subreddit or sometimes from all of Reddit. This is what I'm just saying is like the indie hacker that Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The indie hacker who's a hacker who's experienced Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's where I and also this is where I have kind of positioned my career going forward. So this is where it all kind of connects. Yeah. So why why why leave why why leave PressWiz? Because you I mean it sounds like you were crushing it with PressWiz and you haven't totally left but but yeah. No. So so I I was CMO and it was dayto-day. I was doing the meetings, hiring people, running the uh writer, running the newsletters, running the ads, running the community, running the social media, all of these kind of things, right? And I had people in place to do all that kind of stuff. AI systems in place to do all these kind of things. But it was getting to a a point where we stopped being that startup mentality. You know, I'm friends with the founders. We're on Slack every day getting into new ideas, new concepts, new things. And it started getting into compliance and tax arrangements and processes and systems and hirings and meetings about meetings and 2, threehour meetings where I'd have a 9-minute duration segment and things like that. Right? That's not me. And I like I said, you're the indie hacker. I I like I I I like Yes and no because I still have my own team, right? Yeah. So I I think that the real advantage of like what I was just saying there where the little indie hacker can beat that big brand is if you can amplify that a little bit larger where you can have a small hyperefficient team that is the you have the expert designer the expert dev SEOer and the expert project manager to lead it all right those four people now with the power of AI can outperform a 25 50 100 man agency or team or company or even massive corpor corporation and I want to put my team's resources into trying to create that. And it might not be the $100 million brand that Press Whiz is becoming in the next several years. However, I'm going to have 100% control of it. I'm going to be able to know where and what is going on at all times and I'm going to be able to react to a market that is very, very quick to change, quick to adapt, quick to have all of these things happening. And I'd like to think that even if we look at the trendbased industry that we have been kind of living in through AI where as an example open claw last year blew up and became this massive massive thing right if you can be reactive with a very very small team and jump on those trends very very quickly even if that trend is only for a short temporary amount of time 6 months 12 months something like that if it makes10 billion as a whole industry in that 6 12 months time if you make 1% or 0.1% of that you've made $100 million right like it's insane amounts of money that is on the table and insane amount of opportunity that is there for reactive small highly efficient highly expert teams to go and jump on and as and I want to try and be proof of that right and I think that this opportunity is limited to our lifetime I don't see this happening again and I don't see this happening in the The the only thing I see this happening again is if suddenly we get access to like robots that can go and build crazy infrastructure like 3D print that well yeah that that's maybe where I see physical builders like actually changing things but virtual builders this is this is the time frame and also I feel like over the next 20 years that centralization that kind of click control that we've been talking about is going to make those top three top five top 10 companies the most dominant powerful players on the internet and I think that a lot of the revenue that is on the entire internet is going to be funneled more and more to them for every dollar that the internet makes right now it might be like you know 5 10 15 cent is 15 cents is going to Google and Amazon and people like that I firmly believe based on AI in the next few years 50% of that $1 is going to go 50 cents is going to go to those big companies are backlinks are backlinks still important backlinks or brand mentions what's more important like what should you be focusing on. So 100% back links don't matter. I know as much as they did before because if you're trying to explicitly get AI overviews to mention you, AI SEO outputs, AI mode, chat GP, whatever it is that you're trying to optimize for. And also, I think that we could have a whole conversation on which model you should be optimizing for based on your niche, right? Like if you're in B2B, maybe you should be optimizing for Claude. If you're in B2C, very, you know, generic niches, maybe it's chat, GPT, AS, that kind of thing. However, I think the the bigger picture on on all of this is that we'll end up with a uh system where backlinks don't matter as much because the algorithm doesn't need to weight those physical links because it can still take into account mentions based on its training data and it will still take into account mentions based on the retrieval. So I think mentions have gone from, you know, very very little value to suddenly being massively massively increased and links have just slightly being slightly devalued because they're not as powerful as they were previously because of mentions have kind of taken over some of that vacuum. What are some good tactics brands can do to get more mentions? It depends on how white hat black hat you want to go. If if you want let's do yeah let's let's do white hat and we'll do gray hat and we'll do black hat. Okay. If you want to do white hat then reactive stuff. So like trying to get involved with like what the world cup or any kind of physical events trying to newsjack launchjack all those kind of things because you'll get users mentioning your brand and engaging with your brand on social media as much as you can. Um, in terms of kind of more white hat things, sponsorships, charities, events, anything like that, that tends to help massively. And especially if you're trying to rank or get ranked in local areas, local queries, that kind of thing, you can those will help massively. Other white hat areas, it's just digital PR basically. Like that's it. Like there's no real Dude, I I was having the same thought this morning. I was like I was just thinking like the best link the best link builders now are just extremely good at public relations. Yeah. One well or or who have direct connections to tons of journalists. This is the other thing. So if you if you are just connected to a thousand different journalists and all of them owe you a favor, you're suddenly the best link builder on the planet. However, if you can actually get into the into relationships with editors, journalists, bloggers, site owners, that those sort of things, which is what press is is trying to achieve, I feel like that does give you leverage, especially if you're niching down. If you can niche down and the top 50, top 100 co-occurring sources, you have direct ability to go and publish on all of those websites. Be it paid, be it contribution, be it uh UGC contribution, whatever it is, you have the ability to go and post on all of those. you have a massive advantage over seeding the AI than anybody else does in that specific niche because of how powerful the waiting of those co-occurring sources is. I liked what you said in your post about how these major tool suites are right for disruption because you can unbundle a specific and I I I made a IG post about this a few weeks ago and and how you can just unbundle something and then it it you can you can really double down on the specific niche that this was made for and there's a tremendous opportunity for builders to do that and you shared like HubSpot as an example and Adobe. Yeah, both of them both of them are down like 50 60% just in the last 12 months. And I think that's a I do believe that the market a lot of the time tends to be right. Like you you tend to have some belief in the market even if there is some weird fishy stuff happening right now with kind of bigger picture stuff going on and things. You I I tend to believe in in kind of the market's reaction to things. if they're pulling out their investment, I'm telling to kind of pull my investment too, right? Um, that shows massively in how AI is rolled out and where investment is moved and how things are kind of being shown across there. I don't really I I don't really think that over the next few years we're going to see a major technological shift away from LLMs, but I don't think that LLMs by themselves are going to be able to have the AGI/ASI unlock that most people think. So, I think that whilst we're going to be massively affected in search and SEO and day-to-day, I think for us to be able to have like the entire market affected, it's going to need that next technological unlock/step to be able to get there. Are you are you going to build your your next how many like uh how many new companies do you do you want to start now? So, like are you is it going to be like one thing that you that you go all in on? Is it going to be like five things? I've started three in the last month. Oh my gosh. Okay. So, you're doing the fear levels, 12 startups in 12 months type thing basically. Yeah. So, the the we have one core one that we're building right now and that we're putting, you know, 90% of our effort into launching and getting that out the door because it's not SEO related. It's AI, bigger, bigger TAM, bigger everything. It's going to hopefully be the biggest possible launch we can do at least for the current ideation period that we're in. Can you share what it does? No, I I can I can show you after this call, but I can't share publicly, unfortunately. Right. Just because it is so it's it's like when you when you see it, you're going like, "Oh, wow. I'm surprised nobody else has built this yet." It is kind of a Yeah, it's it's I'm I'm surprised that nobody else has built this, you know, and I'm building it. Um the other products that we're trying to build have either got connections to stuff we've already done so we can immediately integrate it into something and that we already have kind of a TAM there. We already know the TAM there and we already have a uh revenue source. The secondary projects that we're trying to build are stuff we've already built for training customers. So if we've done like custom GPTs or little tools or like databases or things like that and it's worked and we've gotten really good feedback, we're going to expand them. And then the third final thing is just open for investment, open for ideas, open for kind of collaboration kind of stuff. So anything that kind of comes through the door or any reactive stuff that we can do based on the market, like I said, changing things, the the next open claw, the next fidget spinner, whatever it is, kind of hype based trend that we can jump on. That's kind of what we're looking at as well. So those are the three key things, but right now we've already got three companies that we've built in the works and we've got two MVPs for two of them already. So, so all of all of these things are still within martekch. The first one is pure AI actually. So, so this biggest tool Yeah. It's not like influencing AI. It's actually It's actually like Okay. It's an It's an AI company. It's an AI company. Nothing to do with SEO. Nothing to do with And not like influencing AI like not like Okay. Nope. Nothing to do then. Okay. I'm very curious. Yeah. And then the the the next project that we have is 100% to do with our tech, you know, AI, that kind of stuff. Um SEO. And then the third project that we have is uh collaboration with press basically. Okay. Very cool. What are you are you building all of these with the same team or do you have different teams for for them all? It's the same team, same project manager, Udish, who's been working for me for like No. Yeah. 15 years at this point. Wow. Um, and then we just have contract devs for each one. So, we've hired a dev specifically for each project. And then the the long-term aim is that either one of those devs is going to become like CTO of the entire kind of group or we'll try and give them individual equity over their own domain and try and have devs kind of running their own shops individually while we whilst we have the project manager, the marketing team the same. And do you have do you have a specific marketer for each of the companies or are you just just going to share it on your platforms and you're the marketing? I'm the captain of the marketing ship. I'm doing all the marketing. I'll set up the lander, set up everything. We'll be running like ads. We're starting to do uh short form stuff. I actually again the the only person that we are struggling to hire has been a video editor. I don't know if you've ever run into this experience. Oh, I get pitched like a billion video editors here. What I did, what actually uh I can recommend something. So, I used yt jobs. I maybe I shared this with you before. I used ytjob.co to get my editor for this. First, I had an editor who pitched me. He was great. And then this I mean, so he edited for me last year. Then he quit. I was paying him so well. He had an easy job and he quit to do his own startup. And that startup failed because he's like 20 years old and he doesn't know anything. But the fact that he was the fact that he was and then he ran out of money and then the fact that he quit an easy fun job to do his own startup convinced me that he was really about the the grind really about the startup grind. So now I'm paying him even more than I was paying him before to do a startup that's completely outside of Martekch and SEO and marketing. And it's growing off my method of SEO and branding and marketing. And uh it's it's entirely vibecoded in a niche that has easy SEO. So like just companies in that niche don't know how to do SEO and in a niche that simultaneously people don't want to vibe vibe code their own solutions cuz we want to be in something where people aren't going to try to like build their own stuff. They're going to go to search, they're going to ask chat GPT and then they're going to find us and then we're going to grow based off that and talking to users and iterating based off what users are saying and literally specifically because I I I've had this conversation recently. SEO is the hardest is I think it's like the hardest niche to do marketing in. It is like the worst niche to do marketing in. And marketing to marketers, right? So So they they smell everything, right? They smell everything, but they're also savvy. It's like I don't want to go up against Hrefs. I don't want to go up I don't want to go up against you. Like I don't want to Yeah. I don't I don't I don't want to go up against David. I don't want to play in that game. I don't want to play in in in uh I don't want to I don't want to play in this niche. like it's it's hard. Um it's Yeah. And it's like you could you could put the same amount of effort into a different niche that's way easier. And so that's like um that's that's what we're doing. And um man, I totally forget why I brought that up. I I was uh but yeah, so much to discuss today. There's so much Yeah. Yeah. But um but but yeah, we're growing out completely outside of outside of Martekch and uh yeah, it's crazy that you're doing an AI company. Yeah. So So like like I was saying, video editor, the the only Yeah, that's that's why Oh, yeah. So my recommendation to you is So So he left and then I got a new video editor. This guy is great. ytjob.co co and you don't want to use their inplatform solution to find an editor. You want to actually direct people towards a an outside job form. Have it go to a Google sheet. You will get literally hundreds of submissions. I got nearly 300 submissions and it was too much for me to go through myself. And so I had I think it was like 20 questions which meant 20 columns in in the Google sheet that everything went to. And then I just used Google Sheets AI to equals it's like equals AI to filter because like people will will answer questions in different ways. And so it's it's hard to get a boolean yes no to filter through. And then I just use Google's AI to to narrow down the sheet of 300 applicants to 40. And I and then I was able to find somebody who was awesome out of those 40. And so, so you if if you're saying you're finding if you're if you're having trouble with a video editor, ytjob.co are people who want to edit and a lot of them are experienced and there's so many of them and then you can filter through them with AI and it's pretty inexpensive. I think I paid $275 for the job. I had to do it twice because I didn't know what I was doing the first the first time, but it was like 275 bucks for the post. Fantastic. I'm going to go and make a post tomorrow. Yes. It's it's I mean could dude everyone like I feel like man I get pitched three video editors a day. It's but it's still better to be in a in a place for that. What what are your thoughts on SEO being at an all-time high in interest according to Google Trends? It's not that surprising when you look at the a you look at kind of the wider community ex LinkedIn everybody's just talking about it non-stop even the people who I used to follow from the indie hacking community who never talked about SEO because true they're talking about SEO as they Peter Peter Levelville hired an SEO for uh for his photo AAI company that's that's what I mean a lot of these people even the entrepreneurs and stuff that just or in fact actually a really interesting one was I ended end up speaking to the CEO of AODA. Um he unfortunately passed away a couple of years ago. He used to live in Rome and I spoke to him and his wife on a flight a long time ago. And he asked me what I did and I said, "Oh, I do SEO." And he and he turned around and he goes, "Oh, isn't SEO like going out the door? This was a couple years ago." So he'd obviously got the SEO is dead kind of information. But then about a year or so ago, I see all of the CEOs of Airbnb, Booking.com, all of these kind of massive travel companies going to the SEO events, going to the ASEO events, going to like the profound summit and all this kind of stuff, right? So that market change and the change of how kind of the normies or the entrepreneurs or the AI indie hackers or all these kind of people, right? All of them have suddenly adapted. It's not surprising that it's now suddenly the number one kind of uh the all-time high it's been in search and trends. Yeah. I mean it's it's crazy cuz like I thought that SEO was hyped up 10 years ago and it according to Google Trends it's like I don't know like five or 10 times the interest that it was a decade ago. That's in that it's probably there's more people online, more people can build things and do their own their own projects and there's like there's more creators than ever who are spinning up their own companies as well. Yeah, I think you've got kind of the whole Mosy class and stuff that has made the entrepreneurship game a lot more accessible to a lot of people and there's all these people that are very interested in it and immediately as soon as you start a company, what's the way to grow without spending money on ads? Organic SEO, right? connection to people, listening to how to build a business, how to make a website, how to do all of these kind of tutorials online, or even just speaking to the AI, it's very very quickly pushing them into that SEO journey as well. Are you feeling optimistic? So, you you said that you you are an optimist. Are you like are you feeling optimistic about SEO about uh about search about about targeting people who are like looking for what your brand offers and uh yeah just the future of of basically the niche that you've been building in for the last you've been in SEO for how for how many years? Well over 10 years. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. I so I'm an optimist recently in probably the last two years and it came about mostly because chat GPT did a big update where they started kind of forcing grounding for a massive amount of queries and that change of and especially the other AI companies Google Anthropic perplexi etc all started making kind of similar changes as well obviously already kind of being ahead of the game there when that started becoming the 80% 89% of queries that were getting grounded or retrieved uh sources back. I suddenly realized backlinks, guest post, mentions, co-occurring trusted sources are going to be weighted significantly higher and the technical aspects of things. There's going to be some role in terms of structure and site setup and how you uh engineer the structure of your content and formatting and all those things of the content itself. But the technical SEO aspect of one domain isn't going to be as valuable as being able to go and post across all of these different sources. So I was very optimistic as soon as that happened. But pri prior to that, I thought, damn, AI is going to change SEO. It's going to replace Google. It's going to really upset everything and I'm going to having to go and fill out my McDonald's application or something. Right, dude? But but yo, that's Well, so that's I'm excited about that as well. But that's why I think you need to you you need to have like uh if you're if if you are a company and you're making lots of money, I think you need to actually invest in owners of specific channels. I don't think you can have like I I if you really want to go hard and make as much noise as possible, I think you want to have like one person managing just a couple of channels and not all of the channels at once. Exactly. So I think the the game is going to be a lot smaller levels of expertise but powered up by automation and connections and systems and tools and things that that weren't accessible several years ago. So that's also where I kind of I'm also kind of trying to hedge my bets more against you asked earlier why am I not trying to to go with press wiz even though if backlink is going to be that thing I also want to hedge my bets against a a smaller number of ideas that have less connections and less overlap because if things do massively affect SEO and tomorrow you know they come up with some new system that doesn't need grounding or doesn't need retrieval and stuff like that and massively affects press or something like that's future or something like that. my other five sasses aren't affected and I can try and double down in them and kind of cut my losses here because I do really see a lot of people's businesses changing very rapidly and a lot of the people who I thought were kind of the most stable entrepreneurial uh people are actually struggling the hardest right yeah like like can you can you share some examples you don't have to name names but like yeah well so I wanted to name one name because it's a it's a good example there's a guy on YouTube called James Sinclair he does uh he's a British entrepreneur He's worth about 50 or 60 million pounds and he's only he's only like 40 or something like that. And for throughout his entire career, he's gone from high to high to high to high. And he started as a uh children's magician. So he started like going and doing kids birthday parties and like weddings and like you know uh theme parks and stuff like that. built his own business, built his own website, learned SEO, learned web development, built an agency, then started doing uh like built now he owns like a a local theme park, a kids daycare chain, all of these kind of things. And he's really struggling. He he's implemented all of these systems. He's tried to adapt to AI. He's got the personal brand. He's got all of these things and he's still struggling, right? So, and again, a lot of that might be the UK sucks, especially right now, right? And it just sucks to do business in the UK. But I don't think it's just a UK specific issue. I think and I do see this across other areas, other people. I see it in Thailand here. I see it in the US when I was just in Las Vegas a month ago. I see it in Europe when I visit Paris and Amsterdam and all these kind of cities, right? I see a lot of the normal people struggling with the small to mediumsiz businesses. And I think that as AI and robotics and things change the game very very quickly, that's going to amplify even further. Unfortunately, what would you do if you were in his shoes? I don't know. So, again, because I haven't ran um he he has a thousand physical employees in the UK, you know, like that's a game that I've never been a part of. My family business has about 290 employees right now in the UK. And we cut down, bear in mind, quite a lot to try and be more efficient with machinery and AI and all this kind of stuff because that's what investors want realistically. Um and again we still struggle to kind of adapt to some of the stuff that is coming out of China and India in terms of their machinery and tools and adaptation because they get away potentially with also shoving technology that is against some of the regulation in the US UK and kind of the western environments and can kind of put that straight into work where we maybe take two three years to to be able to put that stuff into practice. Did you see uh how I think it was Square was like cutting its its uh employee base. What do you remember the percent? I think it's 75% or 80%. Yeah. Yeah. I I I was just I I when I heard that I was thinking how were they so inefficient that like were they inefficient or is there that's Yeah. Actually, I was wondering two things. Were Were they in inefficient or was there some new secret AI magic that they discover that that makes it so they can cut 80% of employees? I I've I've seen it in manufacturing. So, I've got a bit of a um a two-folded advantage or a double-edged sword advantage or whatever the the terminology is, where I can physically go into my family business's factory twice a year and have a look at what's going on, speak to the people who are actually doing the job and see what they want out of it and see what their other friends who work for other companies who are doing similar things are doing as well and trying to get a industry consensus for that. And manufacturing is changing massively. It's actually very very interesting but also kind of a bit scary about how quickly things are changing. So even just things like logistics moving things around the factory that's there's no longer people doing most of those jobs anymore. It's physically moving from bit to bit. Even the larger piece of like wood and things like that from machinery to machinery that's now automated to most extent or they have like these massive draw cables that you connect things to and you just pull it along a line. Before you used to have three, four people physically moving carting things around the warehouse. That's cut, right? Then you have like laser uh laser machinery that's now automated. You have uh the wood cutting that's now automated. Like so many things are slowly slowly slowly getting automated. And I think that is a good reflection of the real world and the SEO world because I think that the real world it's much more difficult to try and do the things that you're trying to do physically than you can do on a computer because it's a lot easier to just get an agent teach it what to do on a computer and it can do it. But in a real life environment there's so many other variables that you have to take into account that it's a lot more difficult to do. So the fact that they've been able to automate a good portion of the uh manufacturing side already shows how quickly things are going to adapt for the the virtual side Is there anything in SEO and marketing that you feel people shouldn't automate or try to automate like personal branding is probably one of them. I've seen a lot of people automating like LinkedIn posts and it doesn't look great at all. I've seen a lot of people replacing themselves with AI avatars, but they're not editing scripts and things like that, and it just looks really, really bad from your end personal brand. And if you do lose subscribers that, you know, one, two subscribers could end up spending three, $400, $500 with you or something along those lines. That's a massive chunk of change that you've lost overnight from the personal branding kind of perspective. The other things are payments is a massive one. anything like refunds and stuff like that should definitely not be automated and it can be gamed and it can be systemized and all sorts of things can affect that massively quickly. Uh and then customer service to some degree depending on what you're selling. If if you're selling like super lowlevel, super cheap stuff like that, then you can get away with, you know, kind of automated emailing and things like that. But if you're selling $500, $1,000 plus items, especially e-commerce, then having like AI phone call answers and things like that, just makes your brand perception lose value, and you get negative reviews, you get brand sentiment, you get refunds, you get all of that kind of stuff happening. Dude, I I made a podcast about how important customer support is for AI because if you have you first of all, if if you have good good customer support and a good product, you are going to all of your customers are going to be doing the most incredible giving you the most incredible brand mentions for you. You don't you might not even need to hire the brand ambassador on Reddit. Your customers are going to do all of that stuff for you. If you have a bad product but really good customer support, you still might not get a lot of negative mentions, which is going to really really benefit you. And uh it and so it drives me crazy the amount of brands trying to automate customer support because it is such an important thing. Yeah. And the there's a it it's massively dependent on what you're doing to be fair as well. Yeah. Yeah. Because if it's an expensive product Exactly. And like if you're owning a McDonald's franchise versus running a law firm, they're very very different kind of ball games, right? But I do I think that people tend to implement stuff as as a cost-saving efficiency mechanism too quickly without taking into account the bigger cost of the brand awareness, the brand impact, the customer impact, the day-to-day. And again, if you do have and a lot of businesses do have individual customers or individual clusters of customers that represent a large portion of their revenue and if you just immediately or accidentally piss them off, you can lose a huge huge chunk of your revenue overnight for for stupid decision-m. Yeah, man. You know what I you know what I think um what I see because you know like like you I also interact dayto-day with so many entrepreneurs and marketers. The biggest thing is people trying to automate SEO success when they've never actually had SEO success. I don't know. I don't know if you see that as like all the time too. I see a lot of the indie hackers and stuff and ex trying to like PSO their startups and things and I'm like you would have been better off not doing any of that PSO, just having like your brand on there and maybe doing like an occasional blog post that's really relevant to your site than you would have trying to set up this super complex AI PSO system when you have no idea about any of it, you know? Yeah. And it's the same it's the same with personal branding. It's the same with social media. It's a like you I saw someone I I saw someone post this on X. How many of these people making like social media automation tools have actually had success themselves with social media? And it's like none of them none none of them actually have have made many viral videos themselves or have like successful personal brands with social and they're they're making tools to automate it and it's yeah same thing with SEO. I think yeah I think with my career as well that's also kind of going back to I want it to be proof of concept. I want to show that you know you can go and build stuff by yourself. You can have a team very small efficient team of people. You don't need huge amounts of investment. Like we're going to bootstrap this entire thing for less than $100,000 and stuff like that, right? Like it's going to be that there's this opportunities. There's still opportunity for little guy is what I want to try and show as much as possible. Are there any aspects of the marketing that you're doing that you're really excited about? I I think there's a lot of stuff that I've So video is one thing that I actually got pretty interested in. I was like all of these video editors that I'm testing and that just failing to deliver on time or doing the wrong thing or like interpreting stuff and doing like really cringy like um overan animated, you know, vlog edits or something like that. That sent me a bit down a rabbit hole of like, huh, I wonder where video AI is at right now. Could I just replace an editor 100% with AI? And it turns out the answer is no. Unfortunately, right? Like I I actually I tested Dcript. I tested uh what's TechSmith's Camtasia and someone else that they have as well. I tested Da Vinci Resolve which I was fantastic actually. I thought that was pretty amazing. I tested Sony Vegas. I tested a bunch of different softwares. Nothing can replace the answer. Exactly. Yeah. I spent like $25,000 to figure out that I don't need any of these subscriptions and I need to hire an editor. Like, dude, I'll tell you. I don't know. I I don't know. Um, well, so yeah, what what niche are you hiring editors in? So, this is like B2B SAS kind of. Okay. So, so you know, let me tell you, let me tell you what was huge for me is I had two questions. It was like a 20 question u application and I had two questions which is these are what I ended up filtering yes or no for and and then I used the rest kind of just for me to like read through. But the two biggest questions are one do you know how to inspect element in Chrome because people who know how to inspect element in in Chrome I know that they are more like technically minded they're more interested in how things work. they're more curious and they're going to they're going to put more effort into understanding the subject matter and ultimately for me editing better podcasts. Uh and then two, I asked, "Do you have a MacBook?" Because I I I look what I found especially with editors is that editors who own who own a MacBook, they tend to be more creative and care more about creativity. And so the I don't think I had yes or no answers for these. I I I actually allowed people to like write sentences for for these things. And so then I had to do equals AI in Google Sheets. Does what this person say said mean that they know how to inspect element in Chrome? Only answer only write yes or no. And that was the prompt to AI. And then I did the same thing for like the MacBook. And then you you you know I don't know if you've used the equals AI formula in Google Sheets. And then you just drag it down and it analyzes e either cell or I think it can analyze multiple cells. And yeah and then I was able to filter for filter through through like 300 applications. But those two questions I think honestly for anybody who's in B2B will be relevant. Yeah. I I I need to probably look at our uh project brief and everything and stuff because I think it was just mostly a claude small edit kind of video editor job. Dcript also dscript is really makes it really easy to edit fast. So you can't automate everything but like I edit you know you've probably seen me on on Instagram and Tik Tok. All of those are made with dscript. I remove gaps between words with one click. I remove retakes with one click. I like and then I have everything transcribed and I can edit. Half of the time I'm editing the rough cut without actually playing it back. I'm editing the rough cut entirely in the transcript like I'm editing a word document. And and then like Yeah. And then I and then I play it back and it's like oh let me just rearrange these things or fix the or trim this clip because it was mistranscribed a little bit. And then I just drag in a caption layer which I literally have designed for every single video that I make. So I don't have to design it for each for each video. And I can make a video in like 20 minutes. Are you doing long form or shorts? So both. So So initially what we need is um like a trailer videos for the actual projects and b walkthrough videos. So those are the two things that we were initially hiring. Yeah. Exactly. So, but Oh, you think what's your budget? What's your budget for an editor? Uh, so it depend. We were doing an Audi rate, right? We were just doing like 25 bucks an hour and trying to get somebody who was who was a decent enough hire. But again, so so far we've only to be fair so far I actually made a short video that I ended up using as like a a basic example. And I want to try and create a system like you said with dscript where I can do a lot of the short form stuff myself and then anything long longer form I just have an editor that I can send off to on a contract basis. Yeah, dude you can do it. I I I could send you exactly how I do it cuz I have like all of my documentation I literally have it written out so I can that's all on my site. I can send that to you. Um and then and then like oh man dude like I don't know if you've seen David has started going really hard with video because David is like wow video ranks for everything and I can rank and David is putting up just David is putting up SEO content on YouTube because it works like it and uh I mean you really can use video to rank for everything and then you put in really detailed descriptions and these are influencing AI like for me it's so the opportunities with video especially videos will rank in couple of hours. You can make a video and it and it'll it could be within one to three in a couple of hours. They can they can change a views. There's like a bunch of different things that happen. We actually have an example. I think if you Google best link building marketplaces, I did a YouTube video example with James just to show that we can be I think we're the number one source in our views with a YouTube video as an example as a test for that specific query. Are there any other any other parts of marketing that you're really excited about? I think that email is still the the one that has had the least amount of uh or has been the least impacted by like this zero click kind of move. So I I still feel like email is a massive opportunity going ahead and I have been maybe trying to buy some email lists and things like that here and there and try and uh do some tests. And also cold cold emailing to some extent does still work. It's just you have to be really really good at like uh delivery rate and getting into primary inboxes and how you get subject lines open and that kind of stuff. It's interesting. Definitely not something that I want to be going down too much because it's such a big rabbit hole and and there's so much to do with that. Um but there's a lot of stuff that's very interesting in in regards to email. Other stuff is like I do want to try and do more video content eventually. There's there's um a kind of a barrier to entry in terms of what video content I want to actually create and how that will end promote the the projects that I'm trying to build. Is that going to be like a vlog series? Is it going to be a podcast series? Whatever. I'll try and figure that out over the next couple of weeks and months. Um other than that, it's just personal branding, right? So like trying to get bigger on X, trying to get bigger on LinkedIn, looking at how those algorithms are working. X is putting their algorithm on GitHub now. So, it's really interesting to see how they're using AI to change things, the kind of custom Grock model that they've used to to uh change the algorithm and how that is actually changing some of the stuff that you get back in your own feed. Um, all that kind of stuff is really really interesting. Have you been changing, we were talking about this before, have you been changing more of like what you're posting on X based on what you're seeing with the algorithm? Yes. So I am definitely right now I'm doing more article style stuff. Yeah. And then quote retweet of those articles and then trying to get people to engage in certain ways with them. Um apart from that I've got a massive plan that I'm currently developing. So I'm not actually posting or or I haven't posted that much over like the last week or two. It's because I'm developing a huge social content calendar that hopefully will come out and be able to be consistently making advantage of even like the time differentials. So there's actually an algorithm basis of if your post succeeds in the first 5 hours, then you have a window of the next 3 hours after that to try and jump even higher. And if it doesn't succeed in those uh eight hours total, then you want to post your next post to try and get the next window of opportunity. There's a bunch of stuff like that that's happening and I want to try and get it to be almost automated so that B I have agents that are basically in tune with if this post is performing or if it's not and then okay if that post is not performing then we're going to post the next one. If that post isn't performing then we're going to delay post the next one and we're going to hype hyper post this one by doing a quote retweet of it using this etc. Yeah, that's my end goal with this whole kind of system and then hopefully I can develop that into like a copyable strategy system for other people as well. Are is there like a be do you think there's a best time to post on X within this niche? It's it's always uh yeah it's always niche dependent and how all your dependent on your followers. So in SEO for example I think most of my followers something like 24% is UK and US right and then next is India right and it's almost like all men to be fair I think it's like 97% demographics men um and the time zone window means in my time zone it's like 400 pm is around about the correct time or it's around 11 p.m. my time right which is Thai plus 7. So, if you want to adapt that to your own time zone, there you go. But I don't know if you if you think about um about like other just marketing in general. Like I was watching uh you know, I'm from New York and so I was watching the Nick celebrations in New York City and and and and how companies were doing marketing around these celebrations. And I saw this one ad right before we started recording this about Nike. And it was like this most it was the simplest ad. And I started thinking about how companies like Nike or Red Bull are so built off just brilliant marketing, brilliant creatives. And I I'm constantly like I used to play a lot of Halo and I love the marketing that Bungie did around for the early Halo games. And I'm just I am constantly inspired by really really good creative marketing. I just I love it so much. I don't know if you think about this all the time. I just I think I I think about it constantly. Yeah. I I look I look at elements and things all the time and stuff and how people do stuff and especially in I I tend to either look at how algorithms are judging things which is probably not the healthiest way to view the internet to be fair and like but you can learn a lot from but you can learn a lot from that. Like how how that's what Mr. Beast did. He's like yeah exactly. So I do it for YouTube thumbnails and things like that. I'm like this this got 1.2 2 million views. I think it's like a super base in the middle. I do stuff like that quite a lot. And then the um other side of it is lost out my head for some reason now. I just had it in my head. That's okay. Last la last question. Last question, Charles. And thank you again for coming on and sharing sharing everything that you're doing. Uh last question is what should marketers do right after listening to this episode? Follow me on every platform. Subscribe channel. Make sure you're following Ed on Tik Tok, on Instagram. So, I I I think that it again it depends, guys. I'm sorry. I'm an SEO. It the answer to every question is it depends. But it depends on what you're doing. Um I would try and I I I always go back to let's look at how more let's instead of looking at how much more efficient I can be, let's look at how much more value I can get out of something. Right? So, if I'm trying to do a new campaign for a project, then I'll try and optimize my time in that campaign. If I'm trying to look at a uh investment of a new project and the project is already doing fairly well, then what is my what am I going to be able to do to get the highest percentage ROI increase for that project? Generally speaking, I know what it is for most of the partnerships and investments that we do. It's almost always CRO. Like the number one thing that we do in terms of effective hourly rate is CRO. Trying to get more people to convert on the landing pages. There's basically nothing else that I've done in my career that has got the longevity in terms of direct revenue impact that doing zero has done. I c I could not agree more. I mean, I I've like it's crazy when you have a bad landing page and you swap it out for a good landing page and you're suddenly making 25 to to 50 times what what you were making before easily or or more just and it's it's flipping it's like flipping a switch. It and and then you could go back to the bad landing page. Oh, sales stop. It's exactly and Yeah. And most and most people also they don't realize the opportunity that they have to increase a landing page. Like they don't really realize how bad their landing pages are. Yeah. I I actually think a lot of people's ideas and businesses and things fail because they have such a bad representation of their business and of their product via their landing page and via their website. It wasn't the fact that they had a bad idea or a bad product or a bad business. It was that they just showed people in a very bad way of what they were doing or or what they were selling. Well, that's that's why people like us exist. And hopefully we can we can help we can help other businesses just crush it. Charles, thank you again for coming on the show. Congratulations on everything in your life. You are a killer and and you deservedly are are killing it and having having a good time and uh yeah, it's always a pleasure to have you on, Charles. Appreciate it, Edward. You're one of the other few people I feel like I can relate to in this crazy world of AI vibe coding. That means a lot. Um, this is episode 1 178 of the Edward Show 1 178 days in a row doing this podcast. Let's go. If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.