The ONE Thing AI Can't Copy About Your Shopify Store - with Matt Edmundson

27:54Go now and get it. Shopify 1 % dot com slash Rewind. You'll get an exclusive 30 days free on me. The link is also in the show notes.

28:08It's interesting. My son is nine and my daughter's 12 and they watch not a ton of YouTube, but they have a few channels that they like. And there's this one, I'll give a little, give a mention on the show here, but it's called Ordinary Adventures. It's like travel vloggers and they go somewhere and they review the hotel. And we love going to Disneyland and Disney World as a family. And so like often they go to Disneyland or whatever and they review all the different places. But it's just, it's an older couple. Like they're probably mid 40s and they just talk like normal people. They're not like, hi everyone, welcome.

28:45Like not like, you know. And I asked my son, I was like, what do you like about this channel? this channels like he he just he he wants to watch it before bed and he wants to watch when he wakes up and he's like i don't know dad they're just they're not annoying to watch that i just like them and he's gotten to know them like they're very interesting people but they're just totally that's why it's called ordinary adventures they're just ordinary people going on adventures talking like normal people telling their story and sometimes they'll sit and when they're reviewing one of the meals they'll kind of go on a story for five minutes or ten minutes but that's what he loves and and that's what connects him and so many times i think like i fall into this trap too where if i'm speaking in any kind of a public forum whether it's podcast webinar or on stage or something i feel like in the back of my head somewhere i'm thinking oh nobody cares about this story i gotta rush through it or i gotta this but that's actually the best part and that's what connects it and even with a nine-year-old kid who we think we think that generation has no attention span anymore we're like but but they do and they crave it and you actually can tap into it it's magical yeah it is that's good for your good for your son for for for doing that i'm jealous of him i wish i did that when i was that age yeah but the world's a smaller place now isn't it it's all possible now yeah but yeah i i i think watching him i'm like we definitely need to push into instagram and social especially now social is more about search we're finding that's working quite well so yeah we're i think the brands that do social well in terms of consistency and have some kind of voice on there they're they're doing really well the trouble with that though here's the big problem i think with that is they become quite hard to sell because they're based around a founder right yeah and it's not a bad thing and i think i think this is part of the 90-day challenge is like building a sort of a brand a brand following if you like building your personal brand what does that mean what does that look like i think that's actually something founders should do or at least that's the experiment should they do it we're going to find out right it's the big thing but the there are issues with that that you then have to think through so which is why we did the podcast the way we've done it the podcast is not just me the podcast is a bunch of people that actually is good.

31:11But if that business is ever sold, it's not dependent on me doing that podcast all the time. Yeah. I had, I had this on my list of things I wanted to ask you about. I'm going to jump, jump to it because I had a couple of questions before, but you, you've been vocal about this and your whole pitch is, is building a business worth wanting, right? That's the, the kind of the slogan. So I often see, and I, I've fallen into this trap in my life where founders accidentally build a job that they build around themself. Maybe they'd end up not even liking the job, but they've created this job that they're relying to.

31:46So what is the difference between a business where someone wants and is investable or appealing to someone acquiring it versus building something that's a job you're stuck to? Well, I think every business that starts, in effect, is the job, right? Because you've got to put in the hours. But I think as you grow your business and as your understanding of it changes, and again, Jay, you'll know this, it's like, how do I grow my business where I'm not the bottleneck, where I'm not the sort of the pivot, the linchpin behind everything? And the more I can not be that, the more valuable the business is to somebody.

32:28Because if I was to sell this company here, the big question is, would it collapse if Matt wasn't involved? And if the answer to that question is no, then I've got a business that's got high value. Now, there are going to be some things that if, you know, God forbid I drop dead tomorrow, would it have an impact on the business? Yes, it would. Because I'm a bit of a personality and I get that. But I think we have enough structure and ideas in place that I'm no longer the linchpin in everything. And I think that's a critical aspect of it. And that's how you, the big question is always, if I didn't turn up to this, doing what I do for the next three months, what would happen to that business?

33:12And if there are bad things that would happen, you've got to ask yourself, is it worth me putting something into that so that I could go away for three months if I wanted to? you might not want to. And that's totally fine. It might not be the time for you. But if you're wanting to build more of a business rather than a really nice job, I think that's the route you have to go to. Do you know who Mike Michalowicz is? He's an author. He's written a lot of books. I think nine. I had him on the podcast recently. One of his, he's got, his bestseller is called Profit First. It's all about - I don't. Yeah, yeah.

33:45Sorry, I do know who Mike is. Yeah. And I've met the Profit First guys here in the UK as well. Sorry. Yeah, so they actually have like profit first coaches now they've built they've built out a whole program around it but we do profit first accounting in our companies oh amazing amazing yeah he he uh it's a it's a great episode i encourage of course any i'll put a link in the show notes to it it's a few episodes back but one of the things he does at his company and he now i think he kind of talks about it in one of his recent books but it's like forced vacations yeah and they'll take he does it himself where they'll tell you ahead like okay matt in six months you're gonna go on a two-month vacation and you're not gonna have be able to answer a phone we're gonna change your email password your social media account passwords your slack account everything like you will have zero access now start preparing because this is in six months and the only way that someone could possibly get a hold from you would be like phoning the hotel or like there is no you have no connection and he he works with founders to get to this point and sometimes they want a year to prepare, but like that's the goal.

34:55And then they, so at his company, he's got about 17 or 18 people at his publishing company and they all have to do it so that everyone is able to step up. They know each other's roles and it's not reliant on any person because it's always easy to say in practice, but to actually do it. And I mean, we've all had that experience where we've like gone away on a little bit of a trip and someone else steps up and things are okay. And you know what, actually someone did something even better than the way I'm doing it. And so it's like a forced function for that in a sense. It's a really good idea. Every August I take the whole month off.

35:30Amazing. And then can you disconnect too? Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. And I try and write actually is what I do in August. And some years actually, if I'm really well planned, I actually stop mid middle of July and then come back in September. And what you find is one not only do i i feel rested and re-envisage visions kind of thing for what's going on but the team have had the ability to make decisions that they wouldn't necessarily have been able to make whilst i was there yeah and so there's a kind of flourishing which comes from them with the founder not being present that's actually quite lovely to see so yeah i'm a big fan of it you know taking a sort of four to six weeks practical every year has been life given.

36:17I've done it every year, probably for the last five or six years. And if you get to the stage to do that, I highly recommend it. I think it's weird because as a founder, your mindset is, is work harder, you know, like, and, and a lot of times like you love work. Like I genuinely love my job. Like it's not, it doesn't feel like I wake up in the morning, I'm excited and the whole family goes to bed and I'm staying up and it's not because I have to, I genuinely love it. But I think I have rarely ever had a creative idea that has moved the company forward at my desk. It almost always happens when I'm out for a walk, when I'm driving, when I'm in an airplane or in a hotel room, when I'm away from it.

37:02like it almost like when i actually sometimes i get mind blanks when i sit at my desk i come to computer i'm like yeah okay yeah what do i do now and i start clicking through tabs or opening up slack or email and so it's not just a sabbatical in the sense of like it's actually good for your business and it is where a lot of the creative ideas come well every six weeks twice a term or semester as you'd call it but every six weeks i take two or three days off and i'll go walk in the hills i'll go sit by lake i'll i'll just get out with that very idea once a week i every wednesday morning i leave the house early it's about a 90 minute walk from my house to the warehouse if you walk it's 90 minutes and there's actually a route that i've found that goes through some sort of old golf courses and you know forests and stuff like that here in here in liverpool and it's it's it's a city thing but it's anyway it's a nice route and it's a long way do it every week and the best ideas come from those wednesday morning walks yeah right the six week sort of two day three day mini but it's like you say the best again smell from andy one of my business partners he said the best advice best ideas i've ever had have been while I've been on a surfboard.

38:18Yeah. You know, it's funny for me, it's, it's a, it's a treadmill. And at the gym, I find something, I don't know, your blood's moving. Maybe, I don't know, you're breathing more, but it's like, I just get hit with ideas and I, and I find myself like, I'll get off the treadmill. Like, okay, I got to write this down. Oh, I got to write this down. And I spend half the time at the gym, like making notes on things. And then people look, I'm like, I'm not on social media. I'm like writing down ideas that I had. Yeah. And I've, I've heard some people say they actually schedule thinking time, which is interesting.

38:48I've had people tell me they like actually block time in their calendar each day to, to just either sit in a chair or go for a walk. But it's, you know, a break in the day. It's, it's, it's really important. It is. I think starting the day off right is important. And again, I get that it's, now my kids are a different life stage to yours. And I think you go through seasons in life where certain things are possible. but now I get up the first hour hour and a half of the day I'm just sitting reading some people like to meditate or pray or whatever it is I and then I hit the gym I'm like start the day right every day it's it does wonders for your mental health right and and I think it's so important I get that it's not possible if you've got a three-year-old you know running around creating mayhem and chaos but whatever works used to be when we had young kids I would drive home from the office and I would just sit outside in the car for 20 minutes before going into the house.

39:45I've been there. I needed that bridge between working and knowing full well as soon as I walked through that door, three young kids, it was just going to be mayhem. So whatever works, I think you've got to find the space. Yeah, totally. Okay. So I want to ask about some of the businesses you've acquired because there's, you know, a lot of brands are listening, are maybe hoping to sell their business one day, even if they're not. I think it's always important to build a business that, like you said, business that people want. And so what are some of the things that you look for? You said you're in the middle of two potential acquisitions right now.

40:22Yeah, yeah. How, tell me how you, what you look for in a business. How do you find these businesses? And then I'd love to dig a little bit into like important metrics that you look at And how do you know a business is worth buying, wanting, and one that's not? It's a really interesting question. And full disclosure, when we acquire businesses that don't really pay for them, which sounds a bit counterintuitive, right? So we tend to do well, and again, this is just from our discovery, we do well with businesses between half a million and three million turnover, right? So that's kind of where they are.

40:59Like annual revenue. Yeah, annual revenue. Yeah. And they're, they're, they're more than likely selling small repeatable products like supplements, beauty products. You know, these are the industries we know quite well. We've looked at companies that sell tents, for example, they're bigger than what we know, but the gift company we acquired last year, it was your traditional sort of mom and pops kind of store. Really? They beautiful husband and wife run in this, this store and they grown it and they'd hit the ceiling and you must see it actually quite a lot. but there's a ceiling that people hit when there's one or two of them.

41:37And they get to an end of their knowledge. And so then they go, right, so what we need now is an agency to help us with paid media and we can scale. So they go spend four grand a month with an agency, they lose 20 grand on ads and they're nowhere. And so they quickly pull it because obviously every penny matters. And they're like, well, that doesn't work for us. So then they feel stuck. And we find actually with those brands, we can do really well. so with the gift company we took a part of the company we bought value in other ways so we moved the whole operation into our warehouse all our team here do all the fulfillment all the picking all the packing our web team took over the website our ads guys took over all the ads and so what happens is you bring a business in and you plug it into a bigger machine with the idea that it can scale and grow.

42:26And for the original founders, it means they're then hands off. So they still own some equity in the business. In fact, we're getting a beer, I think, in a week or two's time, which is always a nice way to catch up. But yeah, we tend to do really well with that, if that makes sense. It makes total sense. So you're a little bit different than traditional investors, you're not necessarily looking for a certain growth trajectory and certain margin ratios and that if the company actually is a little bit struggling, that's actually a good opportunity for you. They've found a product market fit. They're not a$100 million brand, but they're something.

43:12And now with your services, you could actually grow them more. So it's a little bit of a different strategy than like a private equity firm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Very much so. Yeah. We're definitely not a buying equity kind of a company. We definitely look for ways to invest in terms of value. Yeah. We've, and all, so the, the figure you mentioned at the start, the 75 million, which is probably close to a hundred now, I really should add it up if I'm honest with you. I get to a point where you don't really care, but I would say the vast majority of the income we've created has been with companies where we've had an equity stake that we didn't necessarily buy, but we bought value in other ways.

43:54Yeah. If that makes sense. So every single one of those, we took over those companies, we ran their companies, we moved it into our warehouse, we did the marketing and so on and so forth. And it's just something that's worked super well for us over the years. What's the biggest lever that you pull? Like what do most brands in that range struggle with or like the biggest opportunity to to grow some of these brands? That's a really interesting question. Let me just think through the company. I would say the one thing that I think we're really good at, that's a bit of false humility. I think we're really good at a lot of things, but one of the things I think we're really good at is if you're really good at that humility, that that's the yeah, yeah, yeah.

44:38We're good at talking ourselves down in a funny kind of way. I would say we're, we're really good at building relationship with the customer. And as a result, our repeat purchase rates are always like 20, 30, 40 % above industry averages. Right. And so we get great results there. So with the gift company, one of the things that we've learned from that actually is when people buy gifts, it tends to be a one-off and and so when we looked at their sales data like 80 90 of their business came from first customer acquisition and you're like well that's an interesting thing can we change that um and that's where a lot of our thinking has gone is not how do i go get more first-time customers because well whatever it's not my yeah i'm not interested in showing another 20 grand into ads but how can i get the 100 000 customers to go from a 1.1 purchase rate to a 1.4 or 1.5 or 1.6 if i can do that then actually we win quite a lot and so which is why i always love talking to you you know and having you on the show we talk about memberships and subscriptions and all the crazy ideas that you've got.

46:00And all of those things I love because it's all about taking a single product and creating value multiple times in a way that promotes longevity. And I think that I love. At the top of the show, I mentioned OmniSend can now talk to ChachiBT and Claude. And I want to tell you why that's even bigger than it sounds. So if you missed it, quick catch up. OmniSend is what I use for email and SMS on every Shopify store I work with. Plus for this show, as well. And you can now connect your AI cloud chat GPT straight to your OmniSend account, your data, your campaigns, your flows, everything. You open a chat and you ask, what should I focus on this week to make more money?

46:42And it will come back with real answers about your store, which flow is underperforming, which automation needs improvement, which customers are going quiet, what's missing, everything. My favorite part though, is AI segments. I used to build these by hand clicking through filters forever. Now I just type something like customers who bought twice but ignored my last campaign and it just builds it. And anything it writes already sounds exactly like your brand because it pulls from all your previous emails from your website, your logo, your color, your voice, everything. I've been doing this for 15 years and this is the closest I've ever felt to having a full-time marketer sitting right beside me.

47:20I have a link for you in the show notes that will give you 30 % off for your first three months or you can just use code J30 when you sign up, J-A-Y-3-0. If you're ready to migrate from Klaviyo to OmniSend like thousands of others, they will do everything for you. You just show up and all your campaigns and automations from Klaviyo will be set up and running in OmniSend, ready to go. And usually at 35 % less what you were paying Klaviyo.

47:47The thing I, why I'm passionate about that is I see the long-term impact it makes on a brand too and i know how hard people work and i know how hard it is building a brand and if you can build something where you have a high repeat purchase rate versus one that's don't like you you can you can spend the same amount of ad money you can spend the same amount of time on all your efforts but if you structure it in a way that is healthy for repeat and one that isn't you've built a business worth triple or quadruple on what it is if it's just if one-time workers and so yeah you just better fruits for your labor too right and unbelievably so and this is because we buy we sort of acquire companies and at the moment we're building an e-com group but we're also like we we do sell individual companies off when people want to come in and buy them and i can take the same company right keep the turnover the sales revenue exactly the same.

48:47It turns over a million bucks a year. I don't do anything to increase that turnover. But if I take that million turnover, instead of it being one-time purchase, 50 % of that turnover is on subscription or membership. And instead of getting a three times multiple, I'll probably get an eight or nine times multiple selling that business. Same. Everything's the same apart from that one tiny factor. And I think this is partly why subscription businesses caught on the way they did was because there was a lot of high perceived value but it's really fascinating how it works did we did i ever tell you about our newest launch i know i reached out to i can't remember yeah yeah yeah yeah we did we met okay yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah he came onto the podcast and told everyone about it we did that's right yes yeah yeah yeah okay never mind that's how busy my my mind is all over the place these days but yeah i like this is this is this is my my passion in life is and i think i think it's more important now than ever like for for brands because like you're probably seeing this with ad spend like you're probably spending double what you did five years ago to acquire customers i don't know what you're seeing but most of the brands we're working with their search traffic is down like close to 50 like people actually i saw a report recently google said that 61 of searches now don't end up in a click.

50:08So it's the AI overview, you get the phone number without a click, you get the address without a click, you get the hours of operations, you get the reviews, you get the pictures. You almost never have to leave Google's search results page. That's so true. So people aren't ending up on your site. And then now with Agentic Commerce kind of here-ish, like it's still early but it's here, people are going to just be asking ChatGPT for this gift company, like what's a great gift for my my mother for mother's day and whatever it recommends you can buy within your ai tool like this the when you actually get a customer like it's so expensive it's harder to get into your site and if you're not found in ai like man when you get one like if you're not doing everything you can to nurture them to get build a relationship with them and to get them coming back like i don't If brands aren't doing that right now, I really don't know if you can build a healthy business of like just paying to acquire one-time customers right now.

51:12Like it's so hard. Yeah, it is. I think there are some outliers, but the trouble is there are these outlier companies that then go on to YouTube and go, this is how you build a million dollar business and just buy my$400 course and I'll tell you how to do it kind of thing. Yeah. And actually it's an outlier. it's not actually repeatable. Correct. Yeah. What are the biggest places you're placing bets in the next two to three years? The people want to know, Matt. Where am I placing bets? In the brands that you're matching, what are you betting on? Are you going all in on this podcasting strategy?

51:52Are you betting big on TikTok? I talk to some people that are like, blogs are back because agentic and AEO, actually, I think that's a big thing that you're working on. But where's your big bets for the next couple of years? So the place is where we're spending the most money outside of what we normally do. So there's the foundation that we have that we know our systems work and our framework works really well. So what are we building on top of that?

52:22AI, obviously, because I think AI is just, it is so fascinating right now what you can do with AI. And what you probably shouldn't do with AI actually as well. Sorry, I interrupted you, Gene. No, I was going to say, do you mean AI in the sense of getting found through AI or using AI on your both? So I think there are six areas at the moment. If you want organic traffic, you have to look at six areas, right? AI search, obviously. You've got to look at traditional technical SEO. you've got to look at the content um the blogs the fourth area is youtube because by far it's i mean it still has a massive impact and youtube is feeding ai 100 so you you've got to look at that fifth area is social seo so you see now a lot of people on instagram again we've noticed this on zach's account a lot of people in hooks are now writing key phrases i think it's 61 percent of gen z or gen z millennials are searching on instagram versus google and so it's now at parity in many ways it's really it's quite fascinating so social search or social seo and digital pr that's so interesting yeah i actually have not paid i do that i do search instagram for for products or for different things because i want to see people that have it and actually see it i I have not considered the importance of the search.

53:53I mean, other than hashtags and there is actually a whole world of strategy behind that as well. It's a big deal right now. And I think it's one of those things you can take advantage of it. Because Instagram, I think it's early. And I think Instagram especially is cottoned onto it. TikTok to some extent. but i think yeah the sort of the social co i think is is is a good thing to get into well i've always heavily considered it and do it for youtube search results because that's very i i see youtube search but just for some reason instagram and and like i also tiktok would be the same thing too like you i'm leaning into the search on there because but google doesn't see those posts right like this is only within the instagram search as far as i know yes yeah i think google can see obviously google can see the youtube i mean that's the main one they they try to surface youtube ones yeah but yeah i don't think they see it unless they're logged in but once within the count yeah but that's interesting that that percentage of that younger generation is going there oh it's phenomenal now so if you think the search engine was google then it became google and youtube right yeah the second biggest search engine in the world and now they're on parity google youtube and social they're all on parity in terms of search yeah well and then ai is i guess its own version of search but it's a it's a question it is and it is and i think ai searches the wild west right now and again we get people contacting us all the time we can help you with ai search we've killed it with this brand and you're just like there's no way because there's no written rules right now there are things which we know that seem to be working.

55:35Next week, you just don't know. So one week, everybody's like, you need to be on Reddit, man. And then the next week, it's like, Reddit's not working. You need to be over here. And you're just like, I can't keep up, right? So do the foundations well. Do the basics well. And AI will definitely start to recommend you. And I think it's one of the things you should be tracking right now, actually. What are you doing with your brands for, even though it's early and like, I feel the same way. I feel like it's a lot of guessing and we're doing stuff at Bold that I don't know if it works or not, but we're doing it.

56:03Like we, we have a link at the bottom of our website that says, I think it literally says, Hey AI, this is for you. And it's, it's a very small link in the footer. And when you click it, it opens up a page that has all the details about our company. So like the founders, the founders history, how it was built, what are our exact positioning? Cause you know how sometimes you ask ChatTBT about your own company and it gets everything wrong. And so we're like, well, what if we put a page on our website? I heard someone that did it. And so we copied the idea yeah and actually after a couple weeks we noticed that ai was actually picking it up and the details that were in there were being used in the answers of ai and so like that was just a total test i have no idea it might not be that way in a couple weeks but we're right now just let's just try it try everything what are some of the things that you're trying with your brands well we're the same as you so one of the things that we've tried that works quite well at the moment is the llms.txt file yeah or the.txt file so yeah and they just i think they just announced that now that's an official part of the lighthouse score i think literally this week because up and it was it wasn't officially yeah yeah it was one of those official things yeah unofficially but now i think just as of literally two days ago it is now official yeah so that we know works yeah and especially if it's now become official we we've had some good trial with that other things that we've done making sure schema is right on the website so ai understands what the different aspects of the site are i mean you need good you need that for google anyway but actually it really helps ai and the other thing this is one of the things we've noticed with the podcast one of the reasons why i think digital pr is interesting like one of the things you could do if you don't already do it is understand the niche space that you got that you're in so let's say you sell i don't know expensive chocolates right and you if you do hit me up send me some samples but if you if you sell chocolates into a space i would go and find five or six hundred podcasts that are in that space that talk to those customers and then i would put myself out and try and get on as many podcasts as i possibly could right now does that do anything for your business maybe probably not i mean you know as well as i do podcasting is quite an interesting thing to try and get business out of right you've got to be in it for the long haul so but what it does do is it tells the internet that you're getting more and more brand mentions and so one of the stats we now understand with ai is brand recognition or the amount of times your brand is put out there by other people is way more important than backlinks, right?

58:51And so by going on the podcast, you're creating brand awareness. By creating brand awareness, you're more likely to be referred by AI. The other thing that we've done actually is we've got a Claude skill we've developed here, which once a week just goes to all the AI models and puts in like a bunch of different search terms and monitors the results and see if AI is referring us for any of those things. Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. It's truly like the accurate way of knowing if something is relevant. Like if you think about humans, like what's everyone talking about? If everyone's talking about a certain restaurant, it's likely if I, if I want to say what's the best steakhouse to go in New York.

59:34And if I ask people, well, everyone's talking about this one, everyone like that's the way that. So with AI, just looking at how many times it's mentioned, it's actually a very different way. very accurate reflection of if it's like, because like link links are a close proxy, but still there's a lot of link trading and a lot of other strategies, but a mention is, is pretty as accurate as it gets. Yeah, it is. It's super important. You can't fake it. Like it's. No, no, you can't. It's really, really important. And I, I think those things you don't see results tomorrow, but you'll see results in a month or two.

1:00:10Yes. You know? Yeah. And so, yeah, It's really, it's exciting, but it does change a lot. But I think if you start off with that llms.txt file, and if you don't know what that is, just Google it. Just go to llm, large language model s.txt, and it will come up and it will tell you exactly what to do. Okay, last question before I let you go, because I know we're getting close to our time here, but what's the biggest mistake you're seeing brands making in e-commerce right now that you think they're going to regret in 24 months? not 10 years but in 24 months that people are doing right now the two i'll give you two that i see a lot of number one is the over-reliance on ads for customer generation i think this is problematic because ads are getting more expensive and less and less people are going to the places where the ads are and so you've got a dwindling pool but the asset is getting more expensive and And I think you've got to start thinking beyond Google ads and meta ads.

1:01:10That's not to say that they're not going to work, but whilst they're working, you've got to build another system over here to go and get leads from. That would be one thing. And the second thing, I think, have you heard the phrase AI slop? it's it's this idea that there's no if you go to chat gpt or claude i prefer claude's way better than chat gpt but if you whatever your ai of choice is if i just go to it and say write me a blog post about um why i should eat chocolate it's going to just come up with some really generic nonsense right yeah yeah the trouble is people then take that and they put it on their website Or if they sell the chocolate that they're buying in, they'll go and take that product description from the manufacturer and put that on the website.

1:01:58They'll put the same image on their website everybody else is using. And it just becomes beige. And there's a phrase, AI slop. You know, it's just like, it looks like everything else. It sounds like everything else. It feels like everything else. And there's no brand personality. There's no brand story. And I think that's a real shame. and it's also detectable as ai produced which so i'll i'll something i learned i'll throw this in here for listeners there's a bunch of tools grammarly has a good one if you just google ai detection tools there's a bunch out there and you can put a blog post in your product pages anything you want and it detects if it's ai generated or not and even if you try to be creative with your prompt if it's like write me a blog post or product descriptions about this make it super fluffy, sound like a surfer dude who's confused.

1:02:52I don't know, whatever. Like give it some weird prompt. Still, it still picks it up as AI detected. But the one, like I like to use AI to help in a lot of things I do. So I'm kind of like the hybrid approach. And something I have found that works really well is like this podcast that we're recording right now, this is original content, right? So we're, your ideas, my ideas, we're sharing them. If I take this transcript, and then I go to Claude and I give it some guidance and work with it to create a blog post from it and then I take that blog post and I run it through the AI detection software it almost never says it's AI detected because it's original content but AI is helping clean it up and format it it's not producing it yeah and so what I've told a few brands recently that's worked really well is like if you want to write a blog post and yes I get it you're busy and you don't have time what i do is i have a little dji mic and when i drop my daughter off at school i clip it on my hat and i just start talking and if i have some idea of it's like something i want to blog about i'll literally just start sharing my ideas yeah i've been thinking about this thing and there's three things i think that are wrong with mega menus right now that are hurting brands and uh this this whatever whatever the thing is and i'll just record it and then i'll download it when i it home, transcribed it, throw it in Descript or whatever tool you use, and then create the blog post from that.

1:04:18And then if you do that, it's never doesn't it never shows as AI generated when you run it through all the tools. And I pretty sure Google penalizes ones that are like 90 % above AI generation, like all of my blog posts on the Shopify 1 % website, they're written by AI but their original content I'll be transparent about that but if you take any of those and copy and paste them into AI detection software they'll be less than 1 % so just throw that in there as a the only thing I'd do differently is video it as well as just record the audio because then you've got Instagram Reels and in fact I probably would just I don't know if you do this Jay but again just to show you how easy it is now i take the podcast episode so the podcast you came on right that whole episode i give that file to claude so claude then takes it off me it goes away it will transcribe it will clean up the transcript it will understand how to write the title it will understand how to generate the thumbnail and it will create the blog post i then get the blog post and I edit it.

1:05:30Now, the way I edit that blog post is I read it out loud. Yeah, that's good. Because that's where you find, I wouldn't say that. And so I, I read it out aloud and I give Claude that transcript of me reading it out loud and go, they're, they're the edits. And I use, you can use Whisper Flow or I use Aqua Voice to do that. And then it will produce all the rest of the content off the basis of that edit. And it takes like, I guess, and it, we have it now where Claude creates all the clips or the social media clips or the Instagram carousels, everything. It just does it all. So I probably spend 20 minutes on it now.

1:06:06You have Clyde doing the video clips. I actually didn't know that was possible with Clyde. Yeah, we do. We have it. It uses a Python library to edit the clips. Gotcha. Yeah, but it's pretty straightforward to do. Yeah. Yeah. It's really, really smart, actually. See, I learned something new on this. my podcast will be better because this well I know we're over time you got to run and slate the evening there already I'm just starting my day Matt okay you have an e-commerce podcast and it's literally called the e-commerce podcast e-commerce podcast how's that for like so creative do you rank first for I guess you must right like I think it depends on who's asking I've never been able to definitively figure out if we do but yeah With a great name like that, I would imagine it's up there.

1:06:58Yeah. You're over 200 episodes now, I think. Plus? Yeah, approaching 300 now, I think. Amazing. Yeah. It's been going five years. I will encourage all of our listeners to also check out Matt's show. I'll put a link in the comments. Where are you active on social media? And if anyone wants to learn more about you and what you're doing, where would you like to direct people? Just follow me on LinkedIn, Matt Edmondson. or come follow me on Matt Edmondson on Instagram as I do this crazy 90 day challenge trying to figure out if something makes sense or not. Yeah, just go there or mattedmondson.com.

1:07:34Amazing. I'll put all the links in the show notes. Matt, thank you so much for your generosity with your time. Oh, no, Jay, loved it. Thanks for having me on, man. Appreciate it.