#2275 He’s doing SEO on ChatGPT

0:00Hey there, Freedom Fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I'm the founder of Mixergy where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. is. You know, lately I've noticed that I always have a chat GPT window up on my screen. And if I don't have it up on my screen, I hit command shift space and I immediately start asking it a question. And not only does it give me a great answer, it's lately been giving me sources, direct links to where it got the information, which I love. I'll click the links. And what I've noticed is at the end of it, it says utmsource equals chatgpt.com. And I think, whoa, it is now starting to both drive traffic to websites and it's starting to tell the websites how much traffic it's getting them.

0:42This is like the future of getting traffic to your website. Well, joining me today is someone who realized that long before, frankly, before it was a realization and long before I did. His name is Chirag Kulkarni. His company, Taco, helps businesses get into those answers in ChatGPT and perplexity and others. And he also does SEO the traditional way so companies can rise up in the Google rankings. And even there, he uses AI to help them get better results and do it all faster. The company name is Taco. Chirag, good to see you here. Thanks for having me, Andrew. You know the first question. How much revenue are you doing with this bootstrap business of yours?

1:27Well, the good news is that because we're a private business, we don't have to share the specifics. But the business is doing several million in revenue today. Several million. Like the fact that you added the several to it, can I take to mean more than$3 million in revenue? you? You can take whatever you want from it, but I think for us, the most important thing is how do we build a profitable monster of a business and grow in a very disciplined manner? Are you profitable right now? Yes. You are. What are you doing with the money? My belief is two things. Personally, what we're doing with the money is a portion we invest into product and other interesting stuff.

2:12But personally, I invest in non-traditional assets as well as before the markets took a turn, I was doing a lot of just dollar cost averaging into the S &P 500 and just NVIDIA. So I've done, luckily that's worked out before things have taken a turn. You know what, actually, I want to get into the AI stuff that you're doing and how you listened to MixerG interview years ago and what happened to you and how you built up this business. But you got to tell people about the non-traditional part because you and I have been friends and you told me about an investment you're considering. And I think give people a taste of where you're thinking about putting your money or where you are putting your money that's non-traditional.

2:48Yeah, I think like, look, with AI, I mean, nobody knows what's going to happen, right, with any business that we have today. And so, you know, one thing I know for sure is non-traditional things, right, like even, like, for example, you know, we bought a condo last year, right? Like, that's an example of something like people will always need places to live, people will need food, right? Like the means of how we're going to create food is going to become more and more fishy with AI. And so my belief is, you know, make money from AI and invest in non-AI assets, right? And some AI, I guess, if you say the stock market.

3:23So I get it. I've been getting very interested in even like farming, for example, right? Like how can you use... That's what it was. You were pinging me. You go, hey, Andrew, what do you think of this farmland? And I go, farmland? What do you know about farming? And apparently, you know stuff about farming. And anyway, all right, let's get into this thing. Give me an example of what you're doing with AI. Like, what is it that you're doing that makes it that makes it easier for you to build your business? Sure. So one of the realizations that I think I had was, and I think everyone today is having, is that AI is helping us become more and more effective as business owners, as well as as individuals, right?

4:01I saw a really interesting video by Satya Nadella, which said that just like we go to a job and we have skill sets, right? So we have Excel as a skill set, whatnot. People are going to bring agents as a skill set, right? And so if I think about a world where you have hundreds of people working for you, and those are hundreds of agents, how can we basically take off a lot of the root work that needs to be done? So for example, you know, when we started Taco, we had writers, right? And today we have agents that we custom build for each company that we're partnering with or that are clients of ours.

4:35And we've actually upgraded those writers to editors, right? And so the difference is - You mean your old writers are now editors? You have zero writers on staff? An AI agent is writing the first draft and an editor human being is fixing it up. How much work is that editor doing? Are they really editing or are they doing basically 40 % of the writing? They're probably doing, yeah, I'd probably say 40 % of the writing. So instead of doing 100%, right? So let's say something like a piece of content would take four hours before. It's now taking two hours, right? And I'd say that their time is probably better well spent because writing a piece from start to finish today and in today's day and age and finding out what's going to be the right H3s, what is ChatGPT mentioning for a specific query and pulling that data into a piece and then deciphering what should be first, what should be second and third within a piece of content is not something worthwhile for a human to be doing.

5:31They need to be bringing their own expertise and authority into a piece of content. And that's what we feel is just a more effective use of their time. Okay. That writing part doesn't feel so special, to be honest with you. I'm wondering, is Taco really an AI tech-enabled service? Or is it using AI just like the rest of us are using it? I mean, kids are using it for their homework. Are you using it at that level? Or what makes you so special with AI that it's part of your brand that you're the AI company? A lot of what we do, Andrew, is we take a process and we think about what are the ways that we can use AI to streamline that.

6:10So the content example is one example. The other example I'll give is even when it comes to things like competitive positioning from a search standpoint, right? What we'll do is we'll build an agent to go and actually fetch who are the competitors in the space, what are the keywords they're actually bidding on, and or ranking for competitively that have commercial intent. And instead of the specialist doing all this root work, the agent is doing that work on their behalf so that the specialist has all the data in one place and they can make strategic decisions as to where the focus needs to be for a particular campaign.

6:42Okay. So that's kind of the difference is like with a traditional business like an SEO agency, you know, they may be including AI, you know, using off the shelf tools, but all the agents that we're building are custom for a company. And that's the difference here. All right. And then on the other part that really excites me, and we're going to get into how you built up the business and your background. I love entrepreneurial stories. But the other part that really excites me is you showed me a tool that you use to tell you how your customers are ranking for different questions in tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, et cetera.

7:17What is that tool? And how does it even know? Yeah. So we have some tooling that we built internally. We also leverage some external like third party tools. Right. And what we do basically is we will query chat GPT and perplexity 50 to 100 times a month for a specific question. Right. So, for example, what's the best business podcast on the Web? Right. And how do we get MixerGee to show up? Number one. those are the questions that we'll query and to determine who is actually currently showing and what are the references that we're pulling from so we'll pull all that data so that it's accurate into a dashboard so that we can see who's number one who's number two who's number three and then that helps us understand what are the actions we need to be taking to optimize this so that mixtures just shows up number one if it's not today and then what are the things that you can And what's the name of the tool that you're using?

8:11So we use several. We use one is called Profound. The other one is a tool called Scrunch. The other one we haven't, I mean, we just internally call it as Guac. But we'll use these different tools to give us insights into where rankings currently lie. What it's actually shifted from is from rankings to visibility, actually, is what this looks like. And what's working to get these AI chat experiences to rank a site higher? There's a few levers that I think we are noticing. And there's some kind of hackier things that I can talk about that we've tested and some have worked, some haven't. The first thing that I think is important is to understand what is the correct content structure that LLMs like to pick up on, right?

8:58And so if you notice the content structure for Google, it tends to be very heavily indexed on keywords, right? Right. For content on LLMs, it's much more around questions and driving the right intent around what the question is being asked in that piece of content. So that's the first thing that's really important. The second thing that's really important is inclusion in citation. So like you said in the beginning, when somebody asks a question like, what is the best business podcast? Right. ChatGPT is basically crawling or any LLM. ChatGPT is an example of that, is crawling the open web, synthesizing this information, and then reasoning it on their end.

9:37And so when you have inclusion in places like certain high-authority sites, right, or organic social, like, for example, with Grok, they tend to cite Twitter, right, naturally. For perplexity, they tend to cite YouTube. For ChatGPT, they tend to cite Reddit. it, we need to basically figure out for specific queries, where are the right citations being pulled from? And then how do we get inclusion in those relevant citations? I see. Okay. I noticed that it's for my search right now that I happen to have on my screen, I'm going to interview the founder of Matt Mullenweg in a little bit. And I asked a couple of questions about what's going on with them with a lawsuit.

10:19And it's a lot of tech blogs. and then it's Wikipedia and Reddit. And so if it's tech blogs, do you have anything that you would do to go and be in there? Yeah, one thing that we've been doing, which has been fascinating, is this idea around creating kind of content on those blogs, but also, you know, some cases it's been picked up, some cases it hasn't is, many of these large tech blogs have affiliate type content. And so what you can do is you can go to them and say, hey, I want to pay you guys X amount of money, and I want inclusion in this specific piece of content. And when you see inclusion happen, you tend to notice visibility on AI traffic.

11:01And Andrew, one of the interesting things that we're anecdotally seeing is, even though you're getting less traffic from AI search, your conversion rate is much higher. And what I mean by that is, a lot of times you'll get traffic from Google, and the traffic from Google may not have the same quality as AI. And what that's what's the fascinating part is because when we're using agents, for example, to do work on our behalf to actually determine where is the right, for example, product for us to purchase, say, I'm trying to find a GLP one product, you'd go tell deep research, hey, here are the two products, go figure out like, which is the best product for me based on these health parameters, the chances of you converting to buying is much higher, because now the heavy lifting is being done by deep research instead of us.

11:49So I definitely see that. You know what? I hosted a dinner here for 30 people, 30 speakers from a conference. And so I had a company come out and cater it. Actually not cater it. They just set up the tables and then I hired a catering company. The company that set up the tables on their way out of our property just smashed into the gate. Now I don't know how to buy another gate. So I go to chat GPT. I say, I need a gate that is 11 feet wide, that is made out of steel, that does this. It gave me three companies. I looked at the first one. It was perfect. I talked to them yesterday. They could ship a gate.

12:24It's fantastic. And you're right. Ordinarily, I might do a lot of back and forth research here because I gave it so much information. I was able to get a result that is much more customized to me. All right. I'm curious about you as an entrepreneur, largely because you had listened to one of my interviews years ago and you reached out to the guest. Who's the guest? Yeah. So it's probably helpful, Andrew, if I share a little bit about why did I even listen to that podcast? Yeah. When I was younger, I was just really fascinated by you don't have to go door to door to sell cutco knives. You can basically create a website and people will just come to you on their own and that to me was really fascinating and so I started to kind of dive into this world of affiliate marketing how can you basically not even own the product but still get paid for getting sales and that led me to this whole world of search engine optimization and I just started to go online and I found this guy named Neil Patel and I was like man this guy's making hundreds of thousands a month from SEO and he I remember he had quicksprout and he was like writing about like yeah his black car and all this stuff and and that's where I I was like okay I got to learn and one of the things that I do is when I find someone I need to learn every single thing possible about them and so I saw I think you guys did two or three interviews on Mixergy he had a course on Mixergy So I listened to all that.

13:59So I'm like, all right, I got to get in front of this guy. And so I'm like, well, I don't know him. And so I emailed him a ton of times. And I knew some things about SEO, but I knew he was the SEO wizard. And so I was like, I want to learn from this person. And he gave me a shot. He's like, yeah, here's a contract for 10K a month. And the rest was history. Whoa. So he paid you 10K a month to do what? So he had some work that he needed done on neilpatel.com. and I think he just needed the support and maybe he found me enticing or aka aggressive enough that he's like, yeah, whatever. Let's just give this guy some work.

14:36Sounds like he'll do a good enough job for what we need, so. You know what? He was really good about being public and then having people reach out to him and spotting talent and ambition and drive ahead of time and one of the reasons why I've suggested that you do this interview and why I've pushed for you to do this interview and I think it took us several months to get this to happen is because I think you are going to see what other people who I've interviewed will see, which is the more public you are about your story, the more you teach people, the more you're going to start to gravitate the right people to you, whoever that is.

15:09For Neil, it's a certain type of hustler. For you, I don't know, probably more of like a meditative, very thoughtful, very disciplined type of thinker. Whatever that is, you're going to start to bring them to you. And yes, the audience gets a benefit, but I found that people I interviewed get a bigger benefit maybe all right why did you leave neil and go on to medley well i didn't i didn't necessarily leave him i'll tell you a funny story um i was at northeastern at the time northeastern university i remember being in the back of like a psychology class i wasn't listening to anything about the psychology class i was just busy doing the work that he had had me do and he's so funny because i i got a glimpse andrew into how a high performer works tell me because he would he would literally within seconds of me sending an email call me directly to my cell and i'm like this guy you know he's worth millions of dollars is calling the 17 year old 18 year old at the time and wants to talk about something so minute and specific and so i learned that you know high performers have a very innate ability to zoom out and then zoom in really fast right and i just like watching that and learning from that taught me like what what did what are some of the good qualities to kind of take from any person right and so i remember he was like hey like i'm gonna be in new york um let's hang out and i was like what the hell like this guy wants to hang out with me like that's crazy and so i took the peter pan express overnight to from boston the bus I love the bus, by the way.

16:44I still love the bus. I'm with you on that. There's some buses that are really high-end and wonderful, but okay. Well, by the way, this is not that. Oh, really? Okay. And so I took the Peter Pan Express. I got to the Baccarat Hotel. I won't forget it. And I remember him, he was writing a book at the time called Hustle. And he's like, hey, I have a company that I'm going to introduce you to. And I was thinking, all right, this is probably going to be some random company. and he did the introduction and it was Expedia. And so I just built like this like small consulting-ish business. I did some white label work for other agencies and I just like kind of doing a little stuff on the SEO side.

17:26One of the companies was Medly and they were like, hey, like we want you to do some keyword research for us at the time. And I think what excited me about them was it was an opportunity to be in New York City. It was an opportunity to go from just SEO to learning about full funnel marketing. And like, what does that look like? And I felt like at the time I was 21, like, why not lean into this opportunity and see where this goes and learn about healthcare and all this stuff. So that's why I kind of like left what I started more or less. I hired a GM to kind of like maintain and just continue the stuff that I was doing.

18:04and I joined Medley as their chief marketing officer. Medley is an online pharmacy, right? Yeah, Medley had brick and mortar pharmacy businesses and then did same day prescription delivery in the city. So instead of having to go to Walgreens, stand online to get your prescription, your doctor would immediately send the prescription to Medley and Medley would deliver to you the same day for free. So that was the battle for us. um you were telling me about how one of the things that you tried there was social what happened with social so look as a 21 year old you're you're around grubhub and uber and all these businesses and they're spending millions a day maybe on facebook and so i thought okay you know what like these businesses are spending so much on facebook and google and these other channels I need to start doing that.

18:58And so, you know, I remember like we set up these individualized landing pages. We said calling doctors from New York City was like the tagline that we used. And I thought, you know, it's a B2B business where we're going to doctors and other stakeholders and getting them to refer their patients. They've got to be on Facebook and they are on Facebook, right? And so we got to go reach out to them. I even remember that there was a company that I looked at that sold to chiropractors and their acquisition channel was on Facebook. So I was like, all right, dermatologist, chiropractors, they've got to be one in the same.

19:31And I remember just spending so much time optimizing this landing page. We had like a design hire at the time who like created this nice creative of like somebody doing some admin work at their desk. And so I said, Hey, let's leverage that. And Andrew, like the campaign just like just did not work. We were not able to get clicks. I remember even talking to somebody who ran marketing at one of these companies at Grubhub, I believe. And I even had him come in and audit the campaign. He's like, yeah, like, this is just not converting. Maybe it's the creative. So like, I went to the design person, I went to our CEO, and I was like, we need to fire this design person, like, she's not able to like match the same tone and voice and creative that we need to actually convert for Facebook.

20:17i just learned like the hard way that you know what like the channels and the customer um acquisition channels that i would be compelled by are not going to be the same as a docker and maybe that's obvious today but like i learned that the hard way really fast that like it's just different why didn't they just throw you out and say listen you're an seo guy we clearly hired the wrong person get out of here we'll go find someone with more experience maybe they didn't they weren't experienced enough to realize that i think that was one i think the other thing too was um i i think they liked that i had like an innate ability to learn and just to have a network to like i think i learned really quickly that you don't have to have the answers you need to know who knows the answers and extract that knowledge and experience yeah and that's why i had the answer by the way that's what i said that's exactly like why i was excited to work with neil right is so then who had the answer for medley for the solution that got you guys to grow say that one more time so who had the answer that helped you save medley's marketing well i think what we learned was is that selling to doctors through specific channels some channels work better than others and i think any business that raises money you have to test and learn and most things are not going to work.

21:38And so I think what we learned was, when you build relationships with these doctors, and you go to their offices, very similar to like how pharma does it, that actually was the best way to build relationships with doctors. And then marketing his job was to support that. But it was also spent on how do we get in front of the right stakeholders, such as hospital executives, right? And hospital executives, again, sending them letters and sending them cold emails is not going to be the way to convert them. For them, it's going to be conferences. And so part of it just came down to we're going to test a bunch of tactics that work.

22:11And most of these are not. And the things that do are going to work. I think you can find that person and somebody who's had experience, but what you trade off of is like the technology experience and like the relatability to like how a consumer is going to think in a technology-driven world versus some of these other channels. So yeah, in theory, they could have gone and hired a big wig CMO. And I think towards the part where I ended up leaving, they were starting to think that as the company matured, which is natural. Okay, so what worked for you? It was tchotchkes at the pharmacist, at the doctor's office?

22:44Tchotchkes worked really well. Creating like educational leave behind. So like if you're an HIV patient, having information about the HIV drug, side effects, whatnot, and giving that to doctors to give to their patients is really effective. um we also did like um billboards within the offices that had like information about a therapy and then like we had like the brand underneath there and that drove brand recognition um we did like there's like digital advertising um that were specific to certain emrs so like when a doctor was in an emr and typing in the prescription they could see our brand so these are the things that worked really well.

23:25Not at all the sexy stuff. I wouldn't have known. Non-sexy stuff, exactly. The company filed, they sold, filed for bankruptcy. I think they were even, I mean, they had some legal issues too. How much of that were you aware of? Where, let's see, the three executives were charged with fraud. Yeah, I honestly, I remember I was at home. I just finished a sales call and I got a text from a friend of mine. He's like, hey, what's going on? And I was like, I don't know. And I thought, hey, maybe somebody said something about taco and things were blowing up. And then I saw this document and I just couldn't believe what I was reading.

24:12And so I had no idea, to put it clearly. Wow. what do you know about what happened to them and why why they why they went bankrupt so when i left the business i left the business for two reasons the first reason was i knew that there was some general like tightening in the market there was like a bank restructuring that was taking place and they were trying to get a loan for that so i think that was one of the one of the issues. And then the second issue is, unfortunately, my mom had cancer at the time. And so, you know, I just felt like, you know, it's been such an incredible journey to go from a handful of employees to 1000s of employees at the at such a young age.

24:59And I also felt to some degree, like, it's time for me to be with my family and take care of my mom. And so that coupled with like some of the financial challenges within the business, I thought it was just the best time to leave and just think about what was next so that's why i left the business how's your mom doing or she's good yeah she's she's much better so during that time i actually it was during covid so i completely moved to uh richmond virginia and it was great i mean like just being able to at a young age take care of your family right from an emotional support standpoint like i would go to the hospital quite often.

25:38Like, I think those are the things that looking back, like I wanted to do and I care deeply about. So yeah, she's doing much better now. You know, I got to pat myself on the back for growing as a person in the past in these interviews. I'm so ratatat machine gun that I don't take a moment to acknowledge that someone just said that their mom had cancer and just check in. And now I'm like, all right, I could be a human being for a minute. It doesn't have to, I don't know, it doesn't have to hurt the conversation that people came in to listen to. I feel good about that. Thanks for helping me grow.

26:09All right. And so the way that you came up with Taco was you were at Medly. You saw what that led you to create this agency. Yes. Like SEO was an acquisition channel for us, right? Because when you acquire a physician, when I say acquire, basically go to a physician's office. The physician tells their patients about Medly. Now you have a bunch of patients and you need to do something with them. And consumer marketing, it's not that it wasn't important. It just wasn't as efficient as these B2B channels were. And so we were doing SEO. And what I found was we were hiring freelancers. We were hiring contractors.

26:45I thought, hey, I know SEO really well. I don't need to hire some massive agency. But as a CMO, you're doing a bunch of things. You start to end up hiring other folks. And yeah, one or two of the agencies that we hire, I just realized that they don't really have this like revenue first mindset when it came to search, right? It's one thing to drive traffic. It's another thing to drive revenue. And I think that was one thing that was really critical. The second thing is that they were not really search experts. They were really good at a bunch of different things. They knew paid ads. They knew SEO.

27:18They knew affiliate marketing. They knew out of home. But being really skilled in one thing I felt was a differentiator. And the third thing, of course, now hindsight is search is going to change. People aren't going to go to Google. They're going to use LLMs and they're going to ask questions and aren't going to get their answers. And so all of that led me to believe that there needs to be a business that I wish I could have hired that I can go out there and create. And that's why we started Taco. You know, this was two years ago. The thing that happened two years ago was people were saying, yes, AI is coming up.

27:52And this was just the beginning of it. But the feeling was that no one would need a link to a website because the answer would just come into chat Why didn't you believe that at the time? What was it that made you realize this is going to be a source for traffic? I didn't honestly know is the honest answer, right? I believe that search was going to change But I knew that the one innate thing that humans will always do is look for things and now even even non-humans, even agents, right, on our behalf will always look for something. And so I knew that search was going to change. I didn't know how it would change.

28:33But what I did do, Andrew, is I just said, let me just jump into the water and go with the current. And as I'm starting to go with the current, I'll feel where makes the most sense for us to move to as the market moves. And I think when I left Medley and I was doing some fractional CMO work, I was like, you know, I'm like the CMO. Like I grew a hundred plus million dollar a year business, right? Like I'm not going to freaking do SEO. Like SEO is for chumps, right? Before. But I think what I ultimately came back to is like, that's what I know really well. And having that pattern matching experience is like really helpful, right?