Navigating "SaaS-mageddon", AI Answer Engines, and the Power of the Specifier – Episode 170

Just talking about like buyers versus specifiers, you can analyse maybe your customer list and see you've got all these job titles and like, okay, most of our buyers are procurement, something like that. But are they the right people going out and just targeting them? That may not be right. So I used to work in kind of construction related stuff if you're making a building. So the person doing the buying is probably like the building contractor, construction company. They're going out and buying all the materials, but they haven't decided which types of materials to use, what brand of material, what color the architect's done that. And so if you're going right, all our customers are construction companies and you start like speaking to them, you're completely wasting your money because the person making the decision to use your company, your product is actually the architect. They're not your customer technically, but they're the person you actually need to be influencing.

Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface.

The coalface is very sunny today.

It's very sunny coalface today. Yeah. Before we start, actually I want to make a recommendation for a podcast. It's rather excellent. Okay. It's called Digital Marketing From The Coalface.

Uh, yes.

I'm, I was saying just before we started, before we started recording, I do actually listen through to these. I listen into the start to see what Leslie's picked out. They talk about.

People who like the sound of their own voices.

Yeah, but I don't particularly. I mean, I, I, I sing in a band. I listen to my own podcast. Yeah. There's a pattern here.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's funny that I said that. I just said I sing in a band. I actually am first and foremost a drummer. Yeah. I play the drums and sing in a band. But it's funny, I immediately went to sing in their.

Well, because we were talking about the sound of your own voice. Yeah, if you're drumming.

We had a gig on, uh, Saturday night in a local hostelry hostellerie hostellerie hostellerie hostile place. It wasn't actually hostile. It was a very good gig. It was good. And I would have did the sound for us, as you know, and he made a good job of it. It was good. It was, yeah, it was good fun. It was spoke to a few people who'd gone along because they'd seen us there on Hogmanay. So we've got a fan base.

Oh how exciting. I mean, the pub only holds about three people, so five. But yeah.

But it was.

Not large space.

No, it's not a large space. I do like, I mean, we could make loads of money doing weddings and all that kind of stuff, but I just can't be arsed.

No, if it's a hobby then you've got to.

Do it to.

Enjoy.

It. They're just the worst gigs to do. Yeah, they just are. They're just the worst gigs.

Although you did have the ladies who'd just been at the ladies prosecco drinking afternoon.

Massive, big what used to be an enormous cow shed. Yeah, it doesn't sound very glamorous, but it's actually called the coup Cathedral.

Yeah. Coup cathedral.

It's a bit high. It's just big. It's massive.

It's massive. It's a big wedding venue normally. Yeah, but there was obviously some sort.

Of how many? I mean you'd have to have like one hundred and fifty in there to make it even remotely have an atmosphere because it's that big.

Yeah.

I mean, it's like, it's like there's like thirty of you.

You'd know it must have been huge. I don't, I don't know quite what was on, but it was like some like.

Something happened in the local area that involved sitting around drinking prosecco and you never knew about it. I know how how did that happen?

I'm feeling a bit miffed actually. Like, how could I not know about that?

Did you not know about that? That's right. Um, okay, so enough of this waffle. Let's do some different waffle. What have you what have you got on your list? I've got a few things. So if you want to talk through them and, uh, you know, some of mine might be related to AI, they might not be.

Yeah, I've got one. But like the, the whole our blogs dead. Our blogs not dead. Apparently they're this week blogs aren't dead. Okay, so this is good.

What's the background to that?

This is some research. I'm not sure if it was Hubspot's own research or somebody who was talking to HubSpot on another podcast talking about blogs and some research they've done. And apparently in the research, they had looked at, sixty two percent of the AI citations actually came from blogs, um, not other places from Reddit. Well, I will get on to that. I will get on to that. But it's difficult to, to sort of match that up because if you're cited in a blog, and I think we spoke about this last week, you're not necessarily going to see that coming straight through to your like Google Search Console traffic or whatever. You're not going to be able to measure that directly because the they'll see you, see you in the blog, and then they'll go away and think about you and maybe come back another way. But if you look at the actual citations, sixty two percent of them come from blogs. Okay. But what they were saying is that the purpose of the blog has changed. It's not there to sort of drive traffic to other pages. It's more there to influence people's thinking. It's still it's still there to educate and inform, which always was, but it's not there to sort of directly get traffic anymore. It's there to indirectly get traffic instead. So you've got to attract attract bots and agents to your blog rather than necessarily humans, because they get it from the AI engine rather than directly from your blog, which I think is kind of what we were saying last week or some previous occasion, but it is they are getting cited. Blog posts are important. So that that's good news.

I was reading um, post, I can't remember it might have been on Neil Patel site, but it was, it was basically talking about. No, it was on search engine land and it was saying that blogging has changed as in, you know, there's no point just like manically blogging and doing tons of blogging, um, because you're gonna like dilute your crawl budget. You know how much Google, how much time Google spends crawling your website and you're going to, you're going to be competing with yourself. If you're just kind of talking about the same thing over and over.

It always was.

I mean, she always has been. Really? Yeah. That's right. But to me, I mean, I wrote a post today, which I haven't published yet, which is about and I'll mention it, it's one of my subjects today about the, the SaaS Armageddon. Um, basically the, you know, the whole way that the SaaS shares collapsed, not collapsed, but crashed significantly dropped significantly. Um, you know, when Google announced core work, sorry, when I'm all over the place today when Anthropic's announced core work. Yeah. So I'll talk about that a little bit. Um, yeah, for me.

Building stuff all over the.

Place. Yeah. But it's not really that isn't really the reason that the share price has dropped. Like I say, if we get on to it, I'll talk about it. But um, for me, you know, I was reading something, I thought, yeah, I want to investigate that, do some research, write a post about it because it's interesting to me and I think it might be interesting to other people. And, you know, first and foremost, you should be creating content that's going to help people learn something, even if that learning is like you trying to persuade them to give you a ring or fill in a form on a website or whatever, or get in touch or demonstrate, you know, demonstrate your, your expertise if you like. And to me, if, you know, I think blog posts fall into two categories. You can do some research, find some keywords and try and write some blog posts in order to try and rank for those keywords that people are using in search. And you might get more traffic and you might get some enquiries from that traffic.

Yeah. Yeah.

And all that stuff. Yeah. Or you can just do it because, you know, it's almost like journaling. You sort of as you're learning things and sussing things out and you have an opinion on something, then you write a blog post about it.

And.

Some people might read it, some people, you know, most people won't read it. It's like this podcast. I mean, we, you know, we know we don't get hundreds and hundreds of downloads. Yeah. But we get some downloads and we enjoy doing it. And like, you know, you live once, you know, like you just kind of sometimes just doing things and doing them well, you know, because like, imagine in, you know, a year from now, suddenly, like having tons and tons of blog content becomes important. You know, it's really hard to catch up. It is. Whereas if you've done it and you enjoyed doing it and you think it's got some value and you can see some value coming from it, even if it's just, oh yeah, we've written a blog post about that, you know, and pointing people at it, you know, when you're having a conversation or whether it's, you know, a conversation with a potential client or whatever it is. So, you know, there's all sorts of reasons, I think, for doing blogging. You know, like everything doesn't have to have an absolutely nailed down hard and fast. Oh, well, you must do it and you must do it this way. And this is what will happen when you do it. Like, you know, as if everything is preordained. It's just absolute bullshit.

It's, it's all changing so much and apparently.

So much guesswork in it as well.

Apparently the average prompt on ChatGPT now is about twenty five words. So any prompt, any blog post you write, it could only it could reach one person because they happen to look for that exact thing. And if that's the one person you need, then that's one person you need. That's right. So it's almost the the fact that it's getting it's more obscure and you're writing it because, you know, you found it interesting is probably a good thing because it's, it's something that someone else might find interesting. We've written it's not, it's not a mass market now really for like three thousand people a month. Search this keyword. It's like two people a month. Search this specific specific, but I can't see it specific prompt. So, you know, go for it and write.

Optimising for specific prompts is, I mean, obviously we've started using Ottilie and Ottilie. You know, that's what Ottilie is saying. Like, you know, this is, this is the generic prompt on that subject, but there could be a, you know, thousands of variations on it. And it's, it's fine.

So the reason HubSpot were doing the podcast on this is because HubSpot now have something probably exactly the same as utterly built in to HubSpot.

Yeah.

The, a section of HubSpot.

But you can only use it for sites that are built in HubSpot. Is that right? Or is it just a tool you can use for anything?

We can use it if you're using HubSpot. It's built into your, um.

Have we tested the efficacy of it? Have we have we have we sort of compared its results with ottley's results, for example.

Just I've put some things in, but I haven't really started.

Does it have a limit on prompt monitoring and stuff like that?

It does have a limit as well.

Yeah.

Yeah. Um, but you can buy it standalone. Apparently it's about fifty dollars a month and you can buy it standalone.

That's a lot cheaper than utterly if it's any good. Yeah I suppose. Yeah. I mean we're not locked in with utterly. I mean, I'd like I'd like to stick with it and see if we can make it work and, you know, try and use it, but I know we keep getting a reach out from, I don't know if it's the CEO or somebody.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And so we should really take him up on the offer because he said, oh, I'll go through it and audit it with you. I guess what they, what they might be noticing is people are signing up for it and then going, oh, I don't know if this is any good. And I've.

Been using it.

Away from.

It.

I saw you.

Using it for, for a client. Um, so I am finding it quite useful actually.

Well, we don't know if it's useful, do we, until we see some results. And by results I mean enquiries. Yeah. You know, cash in the bank. Yeah. That's the only time we know it's useful.

And we've got a client who uses, um, HubSpot. So I've started setting up the HubSpot one for them.

We should set it up for ourselves as well because we use HubSpot one.

I think I've said, yeah, I think I started it running for hours. I just sort of.

How is it working? Does it, does it reverse engineer or, or does it go off and figure out how people are arriving from AI engines to your website and go from there?

I think it does look at actual prompts, but so.

It's helping you.

Figure out.

What.

Content.

To create then, or is it is it just looking at what you are appearing for?

It's got a recommendation section that tells you sort of what to do next. So I need to dig into it more. But listening to that yesterday, um, it does seem that it's, it's going to be quite helpful. Okay. Um, it said you can see what channels are influencing visibility and what content types it recommends content strategy and actions. And then it can track what you do. So I don't, I don't, I'm not sure about the whole actual prompt thing. I don't know if any of them can do that, but I got.

Be impossible because they're all different.

Yeah. So I think it's pretty much the same as ultra. It's, you know, it generates prompts and then goes and tracks them and shows you like where it's all coming from. Um, the other thing that HubSpot said was.

This was in a podcast.

Yeah. Seven percent of their traffic is coming from LMS. But when they spoke to prospects, when they did a survey of prospects, half of them had used AI at some point in their journey. So although the traffic that's actually coming from from the engines is seven percent, the the influence is greater than that. The influence is much greater than seven percent. It's part of the the sort of research that people are doing before they kind of go and speak to HubSpot. And about half of half of those people, you know, used one of the the answer engines lm things at some point before they got hold of HubSpot. So yeah, it's, it is valuable, important, and really hard to track is where the conclusion was there.

Yeah. And you know, the way that the AI engines are deciding, you know, what information to share or who to cite in the in there. It's very similar, isn't it, to, to search. It's the looking for sites that have got longevity, credibility. They've got they've got.

Expertise and authority.

Profiles. I don't know.

And apparently ranking well on Google helps you show up in Google AI mode and AI overviews. ChatGPT doesn't really pay any attention to rankings.

Mhm.

So yeah.

So it'll be interesting.

To know it doesn't.

Matter. So is it. Yeah. Okay. It's interesting to try and unpick it though, isn't it, to, to try and understand.

Yeah. So Google does kind of pay attention to its own rankings. ChatGPT just goes and looks for the best answer and doesn't seem to pay much attention to where you are at all.

Okay.

Um, the other thing you mentioned Reddit before. So, um, not just Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn seem to be the biggest places that they, they're pulling information from. So if you, if you.

So it's really.

You don't like Reddit. You have two other options.

It's user generated content that the engines are.

Yeah. People generally citing it's instead of backlinks. This is these are sort of the the new backlinks. So like places that that aren't your own website that they can get information from. They're not that bothered about backlinks. But yeah, Reddit still YouTube is important and LinkedIn. I'd heard that, but it seems to be a lot more important than that than I'd kind of imagined.

It's odd because there's there's no reason that information in you, you know, on YouTube and or in LinkedIn is actually any good.

No, I mean LinkedIn.

Anyone can post videos. Anyone can post in LinkedIn. You know, it's, it's.

It's the same as backlinks. I was worried, you know, you just pay some dodgy website to, to put your link in. So it's the same thing. YouTube. They were asking, you know, how is it getting the information out of YouTube? Is it watching the videos? Is it reading the descriptions?

I think Leslie spoke about this.

Yeah. She was she.

Said.

That they can actually get information out of the videos themselves. Yeah. Um, and the transcript as well, they seem to think it, it reads the transcript. So, but I don't know if that's fact or just guesswork at this point.

Yeah, I think I'm sure it was it was it a podcast of me and Leslie she spoke about.

Yeah, the one when I was away. Yeah. Yeah. She was speaking about how they, um, they sort of get signals out of the pictures and they can figure out what it's about. So yeah, they seem to be reading well, descriptions, transcripts and, and also sort of looking at the actual pictures in the video. Yeah. So yeah, YouTube is, um, is really important.

You know, it's really interesting though, isn't it? It's unless my take on this is completely wrong, which I wouldn't be surprised, but it's like we've got to figure out how to please the new, the new kid on the block, if you.

Like the new lords.

And the people who know what they're talking about and provide fantastic services and are credible, businesses have to now prove themselves to a whole new, you know, set of rules. They have to play by a whole new set of rules. It just seemed crazy. You know, it's always like the, you know, the cat being led by the horse or the horse being like, well, that's the way it was Put.

The cart before the horse.

Yeah. You know, it just.

Seems it always was.

With.

Yeah, with SEO, it always was. It was like it wasn't about how good it was. It was about was it targeting the right keywords? And originally like, did you have the keywords in the number of times and did you have a heading and, you know, and were headings in the right order and stuff like that? And that all makes sense. It makes it easier to read, but.

It still doesn't make it doesn't mean the cream rises to the top. It just means that people that understand all that, all that stuff. Yeah. And, and, you know, bow to the, the rules based approach of putting content out there.

Totally. Yeah. And so the companies who are like really, really busy making good stuff and doing it well and aren't paying too much attention to this. Same as always, aren't going to get found as much as the people who kind of, you know, maybe spend more time on this and less time actually making good products. And it has always been the same, hasn't it?

Mhm. yeah. Anyway, that, uh, dead horse has been overly flogged, I would say.

Yeah, exactly.

Um, what else do you want me to talk about something?

Yeah. You go.

Okay. Um, it's a really be a quick one. Um, really the, one of the issues with digital marketing is that it's, it's easy. So, you know, it's easy to chuck out an email to three thousand people. It's easy to throw up a web page. It's easy to throw together.

An ad.

On an advert on Facebook or in paid search or anything else. So this week we got, I got an email from the Alliance of Independent Agencies and it's the Alliance of Independent Agency Awards.

I've literally just unsubscribed from them because I realised I never read their emails.

That's probably not a bad thing. So there was there was two CTAs in the email because there was they were trying to encourage us to apply to, um, or rather to apply or what's the word I'm looking for, enter the competition in a certain category. And when I clicked on the link, it took us to a completely different competition or a completely different something to do with tourism or some nonsense like that. But there were there were two links in the email. So I clicked the other link and that went to a four hundred four page. So it's like this kind of I read it and went, huh? And then left it and went back to it and thought, oh, well, we don't really do awards and things, but maybe we should because certainly we, you know, listing, they listed out what they're looking for for this particular category of the award. I thought, well, yeah, you know, tick tick tick tick tick. Yeah. Actually it's not a bad idea. So, you know, I say click the link. It took me to something completely different. Clicked another link four hundred and four delete.

Forget it. I know.

But it's like did nobody think to check the links? Did nobody think to kind of read the email through? Right. It's just going to be sent out to a bunch of people. Do the links work? Do they go to the right place.

Email newsletters.

Kind of intern or, or rookie is just kind of throwing it together. The people above them don't really care. They just assume it'll be right and off it goes. And then they go. It's funny, nobody's entered that competition, you know, and maybe even now oblivious to to why nobody's entered that particular category in the competition. And it's purely because the shite they sent out didn't work.

It's so simple. I mean, sending email newsletters, it's. Yeah. You know, when I'm going to press the send button, I'm always really nervous because once it's out there. Yeah. It's not like a web page. You put it live and you find a typo. You can go straight back in and change it. Once the email's out there, it's gone. You can't do anything about it.

Well, how often do you get emails like. And then then you get another one, you know.

Sorry.

Yeah, sorry. And this.

Happens.

Or whatever like that, but didn't even get that.

They didn't even do that. No, it's um.

It's like a local local business association. They sent an email out and I don't really bother with the local business association. But anyway, they sent this email out and it was sent out to, I don't know, it was about eighty or ninety people. And then, but they actually sent it out so you could see all eighty or ninety people's email addresses. Oh, please delete that last email. Please delete that last email. You know what I mean? It's like, do it again. It's like, well, you know, I think, you know, we used to do it. We used to be involved with it and we gave them the MailChimp stuff so that they could do it properly and they still managed to.

Well, they can be doing it from MailChimp. If it's doing that, they must.

Be.

Doing it straight out of someone's email.

I don't know how it worked. It worked, but it was.

Just.

You know, yeah.

It's not this isn't new technology. And I mean, we send out our monthly email.

Of the signal.

The signal, which is also in LinkedIn, and more people actually read it on LinkedIn than on the the newsletter.

But as in what, three instead of one?

Yeah, something like that. Yeah. But I.

Always.

Get.

Through it. This morning I noticed it on LinkedIn, so I reposted it. And yeah, I.

Always get someone else to check the for typos and, and check the links because it's just, you just feel such a twit if you get it wrong.

And to be fair to these people, everyone's, everyone's done it. We've all sent an email, but this was like nothing worked in it. There was two separate links. One four hundred four and one went to the wrong place. It's just. And it was kind of they kind of got me. I was kind of like, okay. Yeah. And obviously they would have probably been money changing hands as in from us to them to to enter it and all the rest of it. But that's not going to happen now.

What they've done is they'll have cloned what's wrong?

Like a vintage one. Very pretty.

Oh, really? Oh, right. Okay. Oh, like a Robin Reliant or something. Like. Like Del Boy. Oh, no. An old one.

Yeah.

Oh, right. Okay. Just one wheel at the back and two wheels at the front. One wheel at the front. Oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

It wasn't a Morgan then. Okay. Did you see Sunny Day brings everybody out. Magnus. Magnus wants to come round. He wants to bring me his Noddy car, as I call it. He bought him a little little red M.G.. Oh, really? Tried about three times now. Come round today. He's like no, I'm going out anyway. Anyway, so that was it. It was just this idea that it's very easy to do it, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't take care with it and check it and make sure.

It's an old one, but not actually. Then just just changed the words and completely forgotten to change the length. But just check things, people check them. It's not that hard. Just send it to yourself and check it.

Yeah. Although I did check something that we put out last week.

Okay. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah, I had an extra word.

And it didn't have proper England like.

No it didn't. I sneaked an extra word into the, um.

Yeah.

The words on the page here.

Right. Go on.

What have you got enough. Um. Yeah, it was an interesting one. I can't even remember why I thought about it, but just talking about like, buyers versus specifiers. So, you know, you can look, you can analyse maybe your customer list and see you've got all these job titles and like, okay, most of our buyers are operations directors or whatever. I don't.

Know people.

Yeah, procurement, something like that. But are they, you know, are they the right people going out and just targeting them? That may not be right. And that I was thinking of like specifiers. So I used to work in kind of construction related stuff. And so if you're making a making, making a new building, so the person doing the buying is probably like the, the building contractor construction company. They're going out and buying all the, the materials to build the thing, but they haven't decided which types of materials to use. They haven't decided what brand of material, what color the architect's done that. And so if you're going right, all our customers are construction companies and you start like speaking to them, you're completely wasting your money because the person making the decision to use your company, your product, one specific product is actually the architect and no money changing hands. They're the architect isn't, you know, they may be getting in touch with you at an early stage. They might be looking at your website, ordering a brochure, whatever it is they do, but they're not, you know, they're not they're not your customer technically, but they're the person you actually need to be influencing.

With, you know, content like podcasts and blog posts and or case studies and all the stuff.

That we've been talking about ads and images and videos and YouTube and everything else, because they'll be, they'll be out there researching it and getting samples. Maybe, you know, obviously if they're asking for samples, then, you know, you'll have details of them. But if it's not such a physical product as, um, you know, bricks, then, you know, you might, they might just be watching videos, you know, looking at your website and they might never get in touch. They might just make a decision and then send the, the actual buyer out to get in touch. So it's, it's really important to sort of figure out, you know, work your way back and figure out, is this person the person making the decision or are they just placing the order?

Yeah, I mean, it kind of related example of that would be, um, having last year embarked on, um and finish last year actually finished last year um massive refurbishment on the holiday cottage that we've got sites now firmly turned on to our own house, uh, where we've just done a refurb of the kitchen, but now we're back to bare walls in what we call the middle room. And we're going to put a new front door on, which is just ridiculously expensive these days. But anyway.

Yeah.

But if that, if I think it's rock, we put a rock door manufacturers called Rock on the cottage, and then we're going to put the same one on a same manufacturer we're going to use. But if they're marketed to us, we'd have been like, I don't know any good. But you know, our builder who we trust and, and, and work with all the time, he brought the brochures. So, you know, their market, their, their ideal customer is, is people like people like Roy, the builders who then recommend to us. And if, if Roy's saying this is this is these are good, this is a good brand.

Yeah. Great. Because you don't know where would you somebody said, go and buy a front door. Where would you start?

That's right. You wouldn't know whether you were buying good, bad or indifferent. You know what I mean? So it is really important, like you say, to understand who's who is specifying. I mean, in this case, you know, Roy has specified to us these are good dogs. Pick one that you like out of this brochure sort of thing. And it will be, you know, and it won't, it will be exactly what you need and it will keep the horrible weather out and everything else. Yeah. Um, so yeah, it makes a lot of sense because, you know, we've, there's like a reverse of that. And I can't remember what we were talking. I was either talking to somebody or I was reading a blog post or something, and it was along the lines of, oh, it was to do with our client who was in the nuclear industry, because I was looking at like keyword data and establishing that there was, for example, something around, um, E, C and I engineers, you know, like, what is an e C and I engineer or whatever.

Yeah.

And that kind of question. And you think, well, you know, you think like, why would we write content about that? But the people in the nuclear industry who are tasked with, you know, going out and finding a company who can do a certain thing, they might well start banging my watch on the table. They might well start by thinking, well, what is E, C and I in engineering? You know, I need an explanation of it. I need to understand it.

Yeah. Are these the right type of people that do the thing that I'm looking for?

Well, not even that. It's actually it's actually like, what is it? You know what I mean? I need to educate myself. I mean, we we often do that when we were going to be, you know, we didn't get the gig with the CNC, the company that sells CNC machines. But I spent quite a lot of time re-educating myself because it had been a long time since I'd been involved in CNC stuff. So I spent a lot of time just reading content and sort of getting back up to speed with, you know, what is a, you know, a five axis CNC machine and how do they work and all that kind of stuff. And it was just all educational content that I was hoovering up. And, and so having that content available means that you can then influence people, um, to potentially then, you know, take the next step and engage with you.

Yeah. Because you kind of assume, oh, well, if they're looking for one of these, then then they're in the industry. They know what they do. But yeah, the other people involved in the decision who maybe don't know what they do. And you've got to think about that because the sort of people we work with, it's not like one person makes a decision and, and that's it. There's like hundreds of people are like loads of people involved in the decision. There's the board and there's the finance people, and there's the people on the coalface and the people that are managing them and the people managing them. There's all sorts of people that could be involved, and they're all going to need slightly different levels of information because, you know, the the engineering types obviously know, but the other people maybe don't don't know exactly what they're getting into.

Mhm. Right. SaaS Mageddon what do you know about SaaS? Mageddon. It was actually called something else. I can't remember what it was. I've just written a blog post about it as well. It was there was a term that Bloomberg coined and it was to do with basically it was like a different way of saying SaaS. Mageddon.

Yeah, because people can go out and build apps.

No.

Okay. It's not that.

No. So basically, the reason that the share prices of SaaS companies crashed was because more SaaS companies are Percy licensing based, right. So if you're going to use something, you need X number of licenses and so on. Yeah. And when anthropic brought out Claude core work.

Yeah.

Which is not like a chatbot answering questions. You know, Claude core work helps, you know, actually does stuff. Yeah. So it can do stuff like connect to, um, different systems and you don't need to go into HubSpot, for example, for it to pull stuff out and do stuff using MCP. And we've, you know, we've written a nice long blog post about MCP servers. And so basically what the market and it probably, and it's kind of, you know, widely thought that it overreacted, not surprisingly, but it's the reason it that the share price of the SaaS companies fell was because people saw a fall in, um, the number of licenses that people would need because tools like cloud core work could actually, um, would actually be able to, you know, go and without having a license for the software, as long as they can access the MCP server, access it using MCP server, they could actually pull information out and do all the, all the, all the stuff that you need to do. And that's what's really driven it. There is, I suppose, a, you know, there is an element that people and not just programmers now can write software, but, you know, you're not going to write an enterprise piece of software like Salesforce.

Just.

By blabbing away at a cloud. Core work and cloud.

Might.

Not necessarily, it might take a while and you could finish up tying yourself in knots with it. But, but, you know, that was, you know, when I think about how I'm using, um, core work to talk to not only the system that we built, you know, for managing deliverables and everything else, but at the same time, talking to Monday, talking to zero, talking to HubSpot, and I can't remember what else I get it to talk to or talks to things like, you know, um, Google worksheets and Google Drive and all the rest of it. All that interconnectivity means that, you know, I don't need, I actually don't need the tools inside SaaS itself. It's actually way more efficient for me to actually do what I need to do and just get the data as I need it. But, you know, these tools still have a part to play. I mean, there's still the guardians of the data. They're collecting the data, holding the data and everything else.

So maybe, yeah, you don't need so many licenses. Instead of having somebody whose job it is to go and get the data out, you just ask Claude to get the data.

And we know how much HubSpot likes to flog a license. You know, we've seen it, you know, where people have been sold licenses they didn't need and, and, and finished up, you know, paying a lot of money for software, paying even more money for the software than they needed.

And a lot of them do them in batches as well. So you maybe have to buy like up to ten or something. And then or if you, if you get more than ten people, you've got to buy the next level up, even if it's just eleven of you. And we ran into that at one point, I think. Yeah. So not with HubSpot, but with other things. Yeah. So yeah, if, if people say, well, actually we don't need that extra license, we can just get Claude to do it. And then, you know, someone else, someone can then get the data out and do what they need.

Because that's what core works really good at. It's good at taking care of the busy work. Yeah. You know, the tasks, the things that you know exactly how to do it. Uh, it's going to take me like hours and hours to do it. And, you know, that's where it really excels. And, um, it's worth, if you're not familiar with core work, it's, it's, it's worth investigating it. And, um, I've just written quite an extensive blog post about the whole, you know, SaaS mageddon thing and then some background on Claude core work and why it's worth taking notice of. I mean, Microsoft, I didn't realise, but Microsoft created more pilot corps work or something like maybe. Something like that. But basically, no, basically using anthropic technology. Okay, so because Microsoft saw what, what, what anthropic had done with Cowork and just went, wow. And like, you know, immediately invested in and, and have brought it inside there.

Okay. So I thought Microsoft were like ChatGPT down to the.

Well, they may well be, but I mean, it's like Google. I mean, Phil pointed out to me last week, you sent me an ex post that he that he'd seen and Google are investing billions in. Guess what anthropic anthropic. Yeah. Google are investing in Claude as well.

It's Claude seems to be. Yeah. Ahead of all the others. It feels like we.

Backed the winner. But I mean all right we use Gemini as well. Yeah I know you still maybe use ChatGPT sometimes for some.

I use it at home on my phone because I can speak to it on my phone. And I just, I can just ask it a question.

You can do that with Claude as well.

I haven't got Claude on my phone, though.

Well, you We should have. It's just an app.

Okay. Yeah. I'm just exhausted with the whole lot.

Yeah, it just depends if you want good answers or bad answers. If you want good answers, install the app.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, it's not you haven't got core work and stuff like that. You've got a thing called um oh, what's it called? Oh it's gonna annoy me now, I can't remember, but basically you can from your phone, you can control the app on your laptop if you want, if you want it to go and do things. But at the moment you haven't got core work as such. Yeah. On, on your iOS devices.

I mean, with, with ChatGPT, I've just got the free ones. You only get a certain number of questions a day. It's not very many, but I don't, I don't often ask it questions, but it is just handy sometimes like, just tell, tell me the answer to this because I can't be bothered typing.

Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm just I'm just going into um, well trying to. Yeah. And trying to get into Claude on here. Continue. What, what? Just go. Just do it. Oh, for goodness sake. Honestly, it's like it just. oh, I saw a Ricky Gervais skit and he was, he was talking about, um, you know, how he finds himself moaning about stuff more these days. And it's like he was moaning.

About quite a.

Lot about technology. And it's like, you know, I just, I kind of got what he was saying. It's like he's, you know, he's like saying, oh, I'll go and use my, um, remote on my telly. Yeah. And it works. And I go back fifteen seconds later and it doesn't.

It's not working.

I was going out for a run last night and I just as I do, went to my watch. And why is it doing that. See, my watch is now still recording an outdoor bike ride that I haven't done.

Um.

It's funny when I, you know, I said to play the drums and sing in the band and I, uh, I start doing really resent.

Oh no, you don't need it that badly. No. Two step verification. Yeah.

When I'm playing the drums in the band, it comes up.

Do you want to.

Record this outdoor.

Run?

Yeah, yeah, it's quite funny. But anyway, I was, um. I went out for a run last night. Just went to touch the little man on the screen there. And instead of coming up with, um, like, what do you want to do? It just showed me the time at the top of the black screen and that was it. I had to restart the watch. I had just gone out, you know, to go off my run.

Off.

Fire service just for enough time to go and do what I needed to do, but I had to restart my watch. Technology was dictating to me.

Ah, so annoying.

It can be. Can it, you know, it's all it's wonderful. But yeah, it can be so annoying.

And sometimes it's like I've been using like running app to record it and sometimes it'll just pause. Um, like, no, I'm, I may not be fast, but I am still running, you know, and then you're like, you want to see like where you went and you did six k or something. It's like you did two K. I'm like, no, I didn't. That's not fair.

Yeah. Technology. Love it but hate it. Right. What have you got? Have you got anything else on your list? I'm kind of running out of ideas really, although we've been blabbing away for nearly forty minutes.

Have we? Oh, God. Well, um. Pizza.

Oh, yeah. You went to Edinburgh yesterday for a pizza. That's a long way to go for a pizza.

I don't know, it was worth it. I would say it was really worth it. Yeah. So about a couple of weeks ago, I was making pizzas at home and making pizza base. And every time I make pizza base, I'm like, right, I want to do a really nice, thin and crispy one. Get another recipe. This recipe was all right, let's try another one. And they're never they're always okay. They're nice enough, but they're not. They don't taste like proper pizza.

I made pizza base once and it was a disaster. And that was it. After that, I just buy them. Even if I make my own pizzas, I'll buy those. Is it Napoli pizza bases? The ones that come in a foil wrapper? I quite like that. They are a bit, but. But they were better than the sheet I made.

Actually, I think mine might be marginally better than them, but there's still two two squishy.

Why is that? Is it because you can't do the throwing it around thing? Is that does that actually serve a purpose?

I mean, all the recipes have yeast in. But surely these thin and crispy ones, do they have yeast in. I don't know, because they don't they're not risen. So anyway, I'm I'm baffled as to the whole pizza base thing. So then I'm like, well, maybe I should just stop and let the people who are good at making pizzas get on with making the pizzas and not even try. And then I was like, oh look, there's a nice marketing analogy. Instead of a car analogy, we've got a pizza analogy here. Maybe you should just let the marketing people do your marketing and stop trying to do it yourself, because it's never going to be as good.

Everyone can do marketing. You know that.

Everyone can make pizza bases.

But I know exactly.

You know.

I know, I know, I know what you're saying, but I'm just I'm being facetious.

Oh, you know.

But everyone, because everyone thinks they can. So everyone thinks they can.

Everybody thinks, yeah, everybody thinks they're a marketer. But, you know, it's, it's the difference between yeah.

And now we call a chord. Everyone thinks they can chord.

Everyone thinks they can build software. Yeah. Um, but yeah, it is the difference between something that is, is absolutely fine and it'll, you know, it'll fill your tummy and it's a decent meal.

So you genuinely weren't talking about going to Edinburgh yesterday for a pizza because you did.

I did go to Edinburgh yesterday for pizza. It was a networking event which involved pizza.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was good. No, we um, were Scott worked. ScotRail worked perfectly. It was so good.

Yeah, they had a sort of relaxing train ride home full of pizza.

Yeah, it was very, very sleepy on the way home. But yeah, it was, it was a good networking event. The Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce events are good. They always do.

Really.

Good turnout. They always get a really good mix of people at their events.

So when you go to the Edinburgh Chamber, do you ever do you. I mean, it might just be me because I I'm, I don't mind networking events. Like I said, I play in a band, I'm not shy, but I just find them tedious and.

I'm quite.

Particular. I used, I used to do quite a lot of it with BNI and stuff like that, but.

I think that puts you off for.

Life. Well, it can do. Yeah, I think so. But how do you find Edinburgh Chamber events? Do you feel like, you know, like you fit in and you're part of it and everything else? Or do you find you find yourself feeling a bit outside looking in?

No, I don't think so. They're very relaxed is there's no formalities, there's no presentation or anything. You just go along and you speak to people and you eat pizza. So, you know, sometimes, you know, if you end up sitting in a table with a load of people who all really know each other really well, and they're just there for a bit of a catch up, then you like feel a bit of a prat. But mostly, you know, it's just people who are wanting to, to speak to other people. And yeah, yesterday's was really good.

Yeah. And you made a couple of contacts that you know.

Yeah.

It could be they're often slow burn things aren't they? I mean you've you've brought in business.

Yeah. That was a lucrative sort of like going happened to sit next to somebody who happened to be looking for somebody to help with the marketing. And, and that was it. But it doesn't usually work like that. It's usually somebody. And then they speak to somebody. And yeah, a lot of it's just getting your name out and, and making sure that people in Edinburgh do know that we're a, you know, Edinburgh, we have Edinburgh clients, we want to work with. People in Edinburgh have a presence.

Mhm.

You know, it doesn't do any harm just to, to.

You spoke to an agency as well. who really only do B2C.

PPC with us at all. And so there could be some some nice synergies there, hopefully.

Okay, good.

Yeah. It was a all in all, a very good day.

Mhm. Sounds like it. What else? You got anything? Yeah. I've just had a bit of a manic day, so my brain's a bit scrambled because, like I said, we're doing this refurb on the house, and, like, basically Roy came in Monday and yesterday or Monday and today. That's right. It's Wednesday isn't.

It? I have no idea.

I think it is. So he came in yesterday and today Tuesday for half a day and today and basically took all the plaster off the wall and plasterboard off the wall and carpets up and all the rest of it. And. And anyway, I borrowed a van. I borrowed a van to get it all to, you know, the way, the way the world these days, builders are not allowed to put it in their trailer and take it to the.

They get charged an absolute fortune.

Yeah. Whereas if you take it yourself, you don't. And it's like, um, it just seems to me just like.

It's the same rubbish. It's going to the same place.

Yeah. yeah. That's right. Yeah, absolutely. But anyway, there'll be a reason for it. Um, so that just turned into yeah, a couple of hours or more because, uh, but so I'm kind of like, yeah, feel like I'm.

Kind of done.

Now. I'm kind of done. And it's fire club tonight as well. So I'm going to be absolutely

I'm supposed to be playing tennis

done by half nine tonight.

tonight, and I hurt my foot and I could barely walk. So the tennis is going to be great isn't it? Oh, God. Oh well never mind. It's a nice night to be standing on a tennis court waving a racket around and not moving my feet very much.

It sounds like a nice thing to do compared to what I'm going to be doing. Going to a fireclub and doing drills and putting up ladders and being all sweaty and stuff. But anyway, I choose to do it. Right. Okay. You've been listening to Digital Marketing From The Coalface, which I listen to as well.

Sometimes you are the listener.

I am the listener. We'll be back with, um, more of this nonsense soon.

Bye.