Qualified: AI for Marketing Agencies

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:10:22
Unknown
I heard.

00:00:10:22 - 00:00:23:13
Bryce DeCora
Except for the beginning. Well, you guys, my name is Bryce. I'm the founder of close, but is is the Qualified Marketing agency podcast. Welcome. And we have Jacob Radcliffe with us. Welcome.

00:00:23:15 - 00:00:25:25
Jacob Radcliffe
Thanks, Bryce. Thanks for having me.

00:00:25:28 - 00:00:55:05
Bryce DeCora
I've had Jacob come over and do a bunch of consultation for our dev team, connecting to high level and consulting on how to set up close bot for agencies the best way. So you guys can all benefit from an agency like ecosystem. And he's doing some crazy stuff himself. Not only has he built several apps before and his own high level agency.

00:00:55:07 - 00:01:23:16
Bryce DeCora
He's building a new ground up product right now. We're going to top talk all things tech today. So anyway, let's let's keep going on what we were going on before we hit the record button. I want to go back to the first thing we mentioned, which is cursor is IDs that help either developers put out code quicker, quicker, or vibe coders who don't know how to code put out code into the world.

00:01:23:19 - 00:01:52:18
Jacob Radcliffe
So yeah. Cursor. I literally just started using cursor, probably 3 or 4 weeks ago. And, previously the first time I tried using it, it was just, it wasn't, but it wasn't for me because at the time, I wasn't really building any full stack applications with it. And so now that I have kind of a vision or a goal that I want to achieve, it's it's easier to work with the product.

00:01:52:21 - 00:02:22:02
Jacob Radcliffe
But I think it's something that is rapidly evolving from something that is just for developers to something that is more akin to what you see with like, lovable and, bolt in some of these other products that it can do all that. And I think that if you use cursor versus these other products, it's truly a, like a, a developer ecosystem, versus just like a toy is what I would describe those as.

00:02:22:04 - 00:02:55:12
Bryce DeCora
So only a couple weeks only. Yeah. Well it's it's new. It's not like this. Something that's been around for months really to this capability. It was like cool and cute before. But so our dev team right now to to my knowledge, most of them don't use it because they're either back end. You know, back end is different. It's a different beast or like they're working off of Figma.

00:02:55:13 - 00:03:01:07
Bryce DeCora
What do you do if you need to work off an explicit Figma design?

00:03:01:09 - 00:03:25:21
Jacob Radcliffe
You know, there's companies out there that are already building solutions for that, to take the sigmas and go ahead and translate those into code. I want to say builder builder I o or something like that is is working on that project. So that's definitely one to to watch closely where they're working with translating Figma to, to code.

00:03:25:23 - 00:03:52:00
Jacob Radcliffe
So really it's more about like getting you 90% of the way and then the rest and the 10% is where you have to use your discretion as to what did it really do the task. You know, it's like it can generate the code, but did it generate the right kind of code? Does it match the phone design or does it match the the back end implementation that needs to happen.

00:03:52:03 - 00:04:24:22
Jacob Radcliffe
And before like six months ago, 12 months ago, it it wasn't even close to being there yet. It was like it would be good for writing a function and like helping do that really quickly or and then it evolved into now we can generate like, you know, entire components for something like a react app, like that's suite the now it's evolved into something where it has the entire context of your code base, including the web.

00:04:24:25 - 00:04:59:20
Jacob Radcliffe
So it's it's just echelons above where it used to be. And that was always my biggest problem with using AI was context, not having enough of it to really dial the AI into responding and giving you code that's not just functional, but it's also like industry standard level code that's actually can be put into production. And I think, before you would generate a lot of stuff and it would forget which frameworks were using and forget which libraries it would use older versions.

00:04:59:22 - 00:05:23:24
Jacob Radcliffe
And now that it's up to date, or you can search the web, it's just, it's, it's ideal, and enable solving its own problems. And for the folks that are listening that, maybe you have even a remote small amount of programing skill. Cursor is amazing. There's other products that are similar. And you may have not heard of a few of these.

00:05:23:27 - 00:05:59:24
Jacob Radcliffe
Tray, I have you heard of that? Brice. Tray, I tray, tray, I, that is, a product that is basically cursor. It's the, ByteDance. The company released this out as part of their massive rollout of just dumping their technologies on the market for for open source and, other things. But, tray, I haven't played with it yet, but it allows you to use local LMS instead of hitting the paid paid APIs that that cursor uses.

00:05:59:24 - 00:06:13:26
Jacob Radcliffe
So if you want to use deep seek locally on your machine, it has that, capability where cursor has kind of closed that off because that's their monetization model is is using their eyes.

00:06:13:28 - 00:06:17:21
Bryce DeCora
Let me so let me get, your feedback on.

00:06:17:23 - 00:06:19:02
Jacob Radcliffe
This.

00:06:19:04 - 00:06:48:03
Bryce DeCora
Okay. So it can get you 90% of the way there. Yeah. Have you ever loaded in a snapshot? Okay. It's 90% of the way there to the way you want, and you just have to go and tweak some things. You open it up, and there's just a there is a bunch of workflows. It takes time to go through the workflows and learn what's happening so you can get it to last 10%.

00:06:48:06 - 00:07:07:28
Bryce DeCora
And that's how it is with code. At least when you come in as a developer into a project, it takes like a couple months before you're working on small projects and you finally get to the point where, oh, I see the architecture of the code. I know how when I change this thing, it affects this over here.

00:07:07:28 - 00:07:20:02
Bryce DeCora
I understand the data structure. And in that couple months, maybe you could have developed it yourself any way from the ground up. How do we bridge that gap where the 10% doesn't take so long?

00:07:20:04 - 00:07:49:23
Jacob Radcliffe
You know, there's a lot of tooling with, more on the JavaScript TypeScript side because there's so much libraries with it and there's so much tooling to be able to go and easily see references with functions you're using. So if you're introduced to a brand new coding environment and you don't understand it, at least there's some level of type definitions and things that you can go and quickly understand what you're looking at.

00:07:49:25 - 00:08:03:07
Jacob Radcliffe
But I think what you're going to see more of is more like just how like react is, is is a cool technology. I don't know if you use these react breaks and yours. I your stack and.

00:08:03:13 - 00:08:06:20
Bryce DeCora
I, I have used it in other projects before.

00:08:06:23 - 00:08:35:00
Jacob Radcliffe
So for the for the people listening with what react really is, is the concept of kind of reducing something down to a component. So a function in programing is like a bunch of code inside of a function. So if I'm saying get apples and it retrieves a certain number of apples, right, or whatever that function is, and so they took that and said, okay, let's put a bunch of like web standards inside of this thing.

00:08:35:00 - 00:09:01:05
Jacob Radcliffe
Like I wanted to return, like all this HTML and CSS and all this stuff inside one component, right. Which means that developers can work in isolation and that's how Facebook was built. So basically react was designed by the Facebook team because they have all these crazy interactive little small widgets and tools within their product that they have entire teams working on this one thing.

00:09:01:07 - 00:09:31:14
Jacob Radcliffe
And, so I think what will probably happen, in the future is you'll be brought on, you'll just work on one little small piece, and then later, if you need access to more things, you'll do that. And so what, what's normally happened in this a challenge to learn is the internal APIs, is to me is the most challenging thing because, for example, I'm learning, different authentication platforms.

00:09:31:16 - 00:09:57:08
Jacob Radcliffe
And so there's a bajillion different ways to log in with Google, with different open source or paid platforms. And each of them has their own documentation on how to use it. And so if you're a developer, you might have learned this one technology over here. Now that you go to a new company and you're going to learn something brand new and it's a lot of learning of those APIs and things.

00:09:57:10 - 00:10:26:25
Jacob Radcliffe
And so consuming all that and learning how to use it is where cursor is, a beautiful product because it's less about trying to go and learn all those things. And more about the AI has context. It knows all the internal APIs, it knows the functions, it knows the language. And so when you build with it, there's this feature I just learned about where you can give it rules and standard.

00:10:26:25 - 00:10:47:02
Jacob Radcliffe
It's this is how we write functions to access our database. So the developer is more going to be learning cursor rules in the future. This is what I see it as. You're going to show up you're going to see the rules of the cursor. So when it generates the code you can then validate that against what's what's really there.

00:10:47:04 - 00:10:57:24
Jacob Radcliffe
So it's a lot less understanding the internal APIs and just getting busy using them and being creative and.

00:10:57:26 - 00:11:06:15
Bryce DeCora
Is the senior developer ever going to go away and is the systems architect ever going to go away?

00:11:06:17 - 00:11:37:02
Jacob Radcliffe
I was able to, in three weeks, build an architecture like that, that I really don't think that a junior developer would ever be able to conceptually build in a reasonable time frame, right. So what that means is really the role of the senior developer is a lot of architectural level questions and problems, like especially at the database side, it's like, what what fields do we need?

00:11:37:04 - 00:11:43:16
Jacob Radcliffe
What you know, do we need a table for this adjoin table for that. Do we.

00:11:43:19 - 00:11:45:13
Bryce DeCora
Always need that senior.

00:11:45:16 - 00:12:17:02
Jacob Radcliffe
End? I think what's going to happen is that, because it scaffold out that hard, difficult component, you will have less of a need for someone to be reviewing code, and it will become more of like, multiple reviewers. So let's say you have five programmers and you go to push, push a commit and the team reviews it.

00:12:17:04 - 00:12:37:18
Jacob Radcliffe
So really the the center's role is mostly to to look at the comments and review it. This makes sense. Let's merge it. Right. But I think it will turn more into a teams environment, versus just, you know, a hierarchical way of doing code. So it will be more collaborative and it actually will produce better code if you think about it.

00:12:37:18 - 00:12:48:03
Jacob Radcliffe
Because, yeah, if what you're doing is going to influence someone else over here that's working on another feature, then it's actually going to help make better code in the IT. That's my thought.

00:12:48:06 - 00:12:56:17
Bryce DeCora
So the senior in the architect, they're not going away. We're more so working together now.

00:12:56:19 - 00:13:23:01
Bryce DeCora
And people don't understand this. People have come into my DMs because I have opinions about all of this. And they're not senior developers. They're not systems architects. They have opinions, and they don't understand that writing code is so much different than anything else any other experience can give you. Even if you just manage developers and you think you understand what they do and how the brain works, you don't.

00:13:23:03 - 00:13:28:02
Bryce DeCora
The only way to become a senior is to write code.

00:13:28:04 - 00:13:29:07
Jacob Radcliffe
Know and lobster.

00:13:29:07 - 00:13:46:18
Bryce DeCora
The only only way. So what happens to the next generation of senior developers that have it? Maybe written code or maybe June juniors, or just doing more code writing in school and.

00:13:46:21 - 00:14:08:21
Jacob Radcliffe
What's seen this is fascinating to me because I had an intern, for a while, and he, he did a great job. He's he's getting his degree in computer science. I don't have a degree in computer science. My background, I, just a very short version of who I am. What I my background. I was in the military for, like, eight years.

00:14:08:21 - 00:14:28:24
Jacob Radcliffe
I did missile defense in the military. I did, I was going to go off to be in a modeling and simulations program, as functional area in the Army, and then end up getting a bunch of sports injuries. Got out of the army, and I was a teacher, for three years. So I taught k to five kids.

00:14:28:26 - 00:15:07:18
Jacob Radcliffe
I taught them technology. So what's really funny is I, I've always been a techie person. Right? But I never really could learn programing. I struggled with it. I didn't I have taken college courses, I would try multiple languages, and I just couldn't crack it. I just couldn't make myself do it. And then, something happened after I went to, Afghanistan and I the amount of work that I put in on that deployment, because I was doing a lot of work with intelligence and other other things where I was working at obscene hours.

00:15:07:18 - 00:15:41:10
Jacob Radcliffe
Right. Having to, analyze thousands and thousands and thousands of, imagery and intelligence, that experience in that, you know, extended length of time, like change in my brain. And then suddenly I was able to, to, to learn programing. And so, what I describe that as to people who don't understand that, who maybe you have struggled with this is that, programing is like understanding something in a thousand places at once.

00:15:41:10 - 00:15:59:13
Jacob Radcliffe
Yes. And, for people who are looking at one file and they're having a hard time reading that programmers, when they're looking at one file, understand that if they change it here, that it's going to affect 13 other places. And and they're visualizing it.

00:15:59:13 - 00:16:13:23
Bryce DeCora
And we know, like the data architecture on the back end and, and how we can query certain things and how we can't because of how we set up the database. There's so many things to keep up here. So you're saying like your your brain was changed.

00:16:13:25 - 00:16:37:12
Jacob Radcliffe
Yeah. Yeah. After, you know, and it's there's, there's a lot of, you know, maybe some studies done on, on that, like what happens after traumatic stress levels and stuff. How it changes your brain. But for me, it actually supercharged me in some ways. That I was able to, to learn and do things that I could never do before.

00:16:37:14 - 00:16:59:17
Jacob Radcliffe
And, and so for me, it was more like, okay, brute force. I'm all I'm a brute force learner, right? I'm going to keep at this because I'm just relentless. And whereas some people naturally understand programing, they'll just they just get it. And they're mathematically minded people. They're just in it. I don't I'm not good at math.

00:16:59:17 - 00:17:31:00
Jacob Radcliffe
I've never been good at math. And once I understood that it's more like building a house, and you build your foundations and your walls and your and there's a room over here that does this task. And we got to once I understood it in that way, it was like, poof, oh, I get it. And so that's how I ended up designing a lot of this tooling and stuff that I built as a company was more, I saw a problem and I wanted to give a solution to it.

00:17:31:03 - 00:17:55:16
Jacob Radcliffe
And I didn't have as much knowledge then as I do now on, on, programing. So I started with low code. Right. And so I think the transition for people who are learning is they first get the itch they can't scratch, they go find a way to an outlet for it. And so for me, it was I went in on Xabier and make and palette and I started building all these low code things out.

00:17:55:18 - 00:18:27:13
Jacob Radcliffe
And then, that just increased your knowledge. So one thing I think that for the I, it's for the folks that are maybe in this category, especially marketers, they're marketing as a whole. I think is mirroring what's happening in the software development world. You it used to be that to be a marketer meant you had a core skill set, like web design or SEO or media buying and advertising.

00:18:27:13 - 00:18:46:16
Jacob Radcliffe
You had a core skill set, and then eventually you branched out to be able to run an agency with the skill sets you don't have. Right. And, now it's like the idea that you can just show up. There's a bunch of tooling, you have no need for an expertise. You can just hire all of it out entirely.

00:18:46:16 - 00:19:14:14
Jacob Radcliffe
It can be more of an operations manager. I think the same concept has happened in software development, where we have people who are, showing up that don't have any programing skills, that are more managing these teams and managing people that they believe to be competent. Right. And I think this is where you have to pump the brakes that you some people are successful in that because they get lucky.

00:19:14:14 - 00:19:39:17
Jacob Radcliffe
They have hires that, that work for them, that are truly in alignment with them, that will help them succeed. And then they have sometimes you get just completely robbed. So I would say that there's more people getting robbed than there are people in this very small category that have no skill in the arena, who enter the arena and go, and manage a bunch of developers and go for it.

00:19:39:17 - 00:20:00:20
Jacob Radcliffe
So it's a very small subset. So I would say, and I'm curious what your thoughts are. Bryce like that. I think you still need a little bit of core skill set. So you know and understand the people that are working for you, what their challenges are like, what what you need to do as an operations manager to manage those people.

00:20:00:20 - 00:20:13:22
Jacob Radcliffe
I don't think you have to go and learn a bajillion lines of programing code, different languages, tech stacks. I don't think you have to learn all that, but I do believe enough surface level knowledge is necessary so that you don't get robbed. What do you think, Bryce?

00:20:13:23 - 00:20:19:21
Bryce DeCora
Oh, yeah, 100%.

00:20:19:23 - 00:20:48:20
Bryce DeCora
I similar sort of way. I didn't go to school for a computer science. Learn to my own brute force method. I love that, close, but it wouldn't be nearly where it is today if I didn't have the background of learning and knowing what's going on, because I know who to hire. I know what to look for. I know when they're like, especially today, where it's so easy to fake it with AI.

00:20:48:23 - 00:21:00:09
Bryce DeCora
Like in an interview, you just ask AI the questions, act like you know, I know who knows and who does it. And that's important.

00:21:00:11 - 00:21:02:03
Jacob Radcliffe
It is, it is.

00:21:02:05 - 00:21:24:27
Bryce DeCora
I'm. I'm just worried that we're going to run out of the people who know, because we're going to have so many vibed coders, you know, like throwing bullshit out there. Got a. Don't become seniors. And then like, I need to hire a senior developer. And there's literally no one.

00:21:24:29 - 00:21:49:07
Jacob Radcliffe
Yeah, yeah. And danger it is. And here's what I think is going to happen. Right. So you have, you have people who went to school. You have people who didn't go to school. Right? Right now the schools are not producing good quality at all. You know, in fact, the curriculum with my intern job doing.

00:21:49:09 - 00:21:50:02
Bryce DeCora
Yeah.

00:21:50:04 - 00:22:01:03
Jacob Radcliffe
The curriculum, my intern was so abysmal that he was in his second year and he hadn't even touched to get his second year up. I'm like, are you like.

00:22:01:03 - 00:22:02:10
Bryce DeCora
The first thing version.

00:22:02:10 - 00:22:32:04
Jacob Radcliffe
Control? Like, why am I teaching you that? Like, that's kind of weird. Okay, let's learn it together, right? Yeah. And so, you know, I, I don't feel like a degree has a lot of value, even though I have a bunch of degrees, master's degrees and all this stuff I don't feel like. So the problem is that the folks that have gone through, let's say they went and got their masters of computer science, they're truly top tier senior developer programmers.

00:22:32:06 - 00:22:56:19
Jacob Radcliffe
I think those guys have nothing to worry about, but building the next generation of those guys is really difficult, because it's when it's at your fingertips and that you can just use it. You're not learning and so to me, vibe coding is I, I try to do it a little bit, but if, if you vibe code and you generate a project, let's just go.

00:22:56:19 - 00:23:13:09
Jacob Radcliffe
Let's just use bulk, right. Because everybody in their grandma gets on there and does that. Right. Look at this cool app. It's got this awesome interface on stuff okay. And then what every video you watch on YouTube, it ends with the cool looking thing. And it does it talk about what happens next. So no one either.

00:23:13:11 - 00:23:14:25
Bryce DeCora
Ends that back.

00:23:14:28 - 00:23:44:00
Jacob Radcliffe
Either a you're going to actually try to learn what that stack is that it just spit out, which probably doesn't actually interact. Probably none of the buttons work or anything. Right. And or you're going to pass it off to a developer to build it. And my opinion is if you're a marketer or an operations guy or someone who wants to build a project, that is a fantasy tech prototyping tool to just show your developers like, this is kind of what I want it to look like.

00:23:44:02 - 00:24:07:25
Jacob Radcliffe
It's kind of what I wanted to to see, which is can be done in Figma. You don't have to have this ridiculous app that's generated. Just do Figma, right. It's just like so in their idea is their vibe coding, which is just they're trying to just scaffold the user interface to make it look right or to generate something enough that they can send to a friend and be like, look, check out my app.

00:24:07:25 - 00:24:33:09
Jacob Radcliffe
I built. It's just not quite there yet. It's it will get there where you can really build those apps and deploy them in their functional. But I would say that the biggest, issue is if you tell I, I write me a script to send an API call to such and such and such and such, it's going to put all the keys in the browser, and it's going to pull your API keys on the open.

00:24:33:10 - 00:24:36:20
Jacob Radcliffe
It doesn't care that you don't care about security.

00:24:36:27 - 00:24:47:04
Bryce DeCora
So much context. You would have to give it for it. Not to do any of these things. Yeah, obviously no, because we know the foundations.

00:24:47:07 - 00:25:02:27
Jacob Radcliffe
And so that's the problem with vibe coding. And there was a, there was a for I have to share it to you later Bryce for the lab. But there was like a like a Twitter post where a guy was like, hey guys, I recorded me making this really cool app with cursor and, I hope you guys like it here.

00:25:02:27 - 00:25:28:10
Jacob Radcliffe
You guys can log into it because. And then there was the post a few days later, you, like, somebody was messing with my app and spamming my database and, and like, all this stuff happened to it, and you guys, I'm just going to have to stop recording me putting videos about cursor on there. So, you know, most of the videos you see on YouTube are just sort of like, people trying to be influencers.

00:25:28:10 - 00:25:53:10
Jacob Radcliffe
And it's like, look what I did. And then there's never a follow video on what happens next. And so I would say if you're truly interested, if this is the passion you've found, like you've found the itch that you can't scratch, then don't your search yourself up for failure. Right? Come up with an idea, maybe use like cursor or level or whatever to generate the first edition of what you're doing, but then stop.

00:25:53:13 - 00:26:14:15
Jacob Radcliffe
Look at the whole project and ask AI to tell you what's in it. Like, what is this made from? You know, and let's start from the top. Like, teach me every step, teach me what's going on with that. And then, you know, what you'll discover is it's using an outdated library. It's using a technology that's not going to work for me and that I can't scale it.

00:26:14:18 - 00:26:49:10
Jacob Radcliffe
And then you actually get to learn enough programing to be able to replace that in your product, and then that's going to teach you how to build a real app that that you can have confidence with putting out or bringing you developer on to. And that's kind of what I'm doing, right? I built out like my next generation of for my company from the ground up using like standardized libraries, using things that I know will be easily learned by new developers and maintainable.

00:26:49:13 - 00:27:06:25
Bryce DeCora
It's a great time to be a non distracted software developer. Yes, if you're a software developer and you're nervous by all the news out there from non developers saying your job is going away, stay focused. Use the tools that make you a superhero, you know? Yeah.

00:27:06:27 - 00:27:28:20
Jacob Radcliffe
You know Bryce, I'm curious with thoughts on this. One of the challenges that I think for people that are the the software dev mind from the get go, they came out of high school, they're math geniuses. They go into college, they get the degree, and then they get into the workforce and no one will hire them. Right?

00:27:28:22 - 00:28:03:17
Jacob Radcliffe
And it's like, why can't I be hired? Because you're just a brilliant minded person, right? What they're missing is an understanding of business use cases, solving real world problems instead of, you know, retrieve ten apples from this function. Right. And there is never this sort of connection in their minds that I need to go solve a problem. Like somebody had a problem, and I want to provide a solution to that problem, or they'll build something that they think people want.

00:28:03:17 - 00:28:28:00
Jacob Radcliffe
And this is the big this is the worst case. This is everybody's guilty of this where you'll you'll have an idea, you'll build it. So I'll just give you one example of like I built like a CSV tool to be able to, upload a bunch of users all at one time and eye level. Right. I solve the problem one time for one person, but is that a product I can really go to market and be like, everybody, here it is.

00:28:28:00 - 00:28:55:22
Jacob Radcliffe
Do you need that? No it's not. And that's what typically happens with software developers is if they do find a use case, they jump on it like a grenade and they're like, oh, somebody needs this. I'm going to build out this whole massive thing around this one niche, small problem. They don't think about the addressable market. Is it something that I can easily go out and find clients and if I found one guy, can I find five others just like him that need the same thing?

00:28:55:25 - 00:29:16:01
Jacob Radcliffe
They never think from that brain. They only think from like the technical side of it. And I think that's why you see so many people partnering up and trying to to put the bots brain with the tech brain. And I'm just curious, what would your experience has been Bryce like with that? That real it's a real issue.

00:29:16:04 - 00:29:45:17
Bryce DeCora
I almost think it should be a requirement in school that they should require computer science kids to start a business and develop a product and make a certain amount of money selling that product to get a grade. Yeah. And you can make requirements like must be a subscription based system or looking at MRI or whatever. I this was maybe like four years ago developed my own CRM.

00:29:45:17 - 00:30:06:20
Bryce DeCora
It was similar sort of thing. I saw a need develop this CRM for one person. Here's my first like big round application. And then I was like, cool, I'm going to go sell this to someone else to not only did not enough people want this ground up CRM, but I had built the database in a way and it was only ever going to work for one user.

00:30:06:20 - 00:30:37:19
Bryce DeCora
It wasn't built for a multi business and multi user experience. I would have had to totally like to rip it apart and then building in a billing system on top of that, like that's hard and yeah, I manage the authentication right. There are much better more secure tools. So I'm like man not only is this not secure and I have no way to bill for it and I have no way to have a second business in this.

00:30:37:19 - 00:30:42:29
Bryce DeCora
Like that's a learning experience. So those it sounds people need to learn.

00:30:43:02 - 00:31:10:06
Jacob Radcliffe
And it's also like. You know, why build something that can be out of the box. And we were talking about this recently because, I'm using an authentication library called Better Off and you're using Clarke. And so for, for the non-technical people in JavaScript TypeScript land, there are dozens and dozens of ways to just log in to your app.

00:31:10:09 - 00:31:34:16
Jacob Radcliffe
Right? You can do it yourself, but it's painful to try to do all the different back end APIs and things to just click a log in with Google button. So there's different ways to implement that. And so some companies like Clarke have this done it all for you. Just period is put in your code rock and roll and move on to building the actual features of your app.

00:31:34:16 - 00:31:56:14
Jacob Radcliffe
Right. Whereas something like better auth is just a little bit more developer centric. You have to build a lot of it yourself and it forces you to learn. And so I think with what's interesting is you see, a lot of different implementations on, on programing where even senior programmers are like, you know what, I'm sick of doing that.

00:31:56:19 - 00:32:17:10
Jacob Radcliffe
Again, I'm going to go use Clarke. I'm going to I don't want to handle that piece again. I just want to build the actual features of the app and like, I want to move on. Right. So, with I now, I think but I is going to do it's going to it's going to help people get faster to the feature development.

00:32:17:12 - 00:32:31:02
Jacob Radcliffe
It's going to take all the boilerplate in, some of these new products, new libraries are going to be the core part of new applications. That's my I feel like that library is going to be the core piece of it.

00:32:31:04 - 00:32:52:20
Bryce DeCora
So we'll have a systems architect come in. They'll lay out the initial initial foundation, knowing where we want to go in years from now. We need to know how to set up the architecture. But I cannot will not ever be able to do that, in my opinion, because it doesn't know all the unknown unknowns. That's right. That I would have to put into its context for it to establish a foundation.

00:32:52:22 - 00:33:02:29
Bryce DeCora
But then once that foundation is in place, I can do the boilerplate, you know, set up your, your CI, CD environment. Should.

00:33:03:01 - 00:33:28:29
Jacob Radcliffe
Continue. I'm going to give people that visual in their minds. Right. Imagine you're building an app, and the app's intent is for you to build a login and. Right. A post like, like a social media post on an an in a community, right? You generate the app and then you realized, oh, wait a minute, I need to have, some kind of structure.

00:33:29:01 - 00:33:58:02
Jacob Radcliffe
Users need to be in some kind of community group. Well, now we going to make more database tables. Okay. And then two days later, you're like, wait a minute. These people need to be on the team because we're writing posts with teams. And so it it just meanders and meanders. And what I think will happen with the senior developer role is going to be more like you said, they're going to come in and they're going to give that vision like listen to the use case, understand, like write out the gate.

00:33:58:02 - 00:34:08:26
Jacob Radcliffe
We're going to need a ton of different tables for data. We're going to need a ton of different structure so that we're not having to go back and painstakingly migrate all of this data. Here's what we're.

00:34:08:26 - 00:34:37:00
Bryce DeCora
Showing in the dashboard is we need to know what we're showing in the dashboard. So we know, like how to build, how to build the the tables for optimal queries for those sort of things that we want to display. And if we build it wrong from the beginning, when we scale up to a bunch of users, eventually when we want to implement that thing, we have to take the database down to do a, a migration to a new data structure, to build a dashboard.

00:34:37:03 - 00:34:44:15
Bryce DeCora
Had we thought about this in the beginning, we wouldn't have ruined all of our customer trust later when we crashed the database.

00:34:44:18 - 00:35:08:28
Jacob Radcliffe
Yeah, yeah. And you know, for me, learning and kind of developing my own skills, like I realized that the core structure is over built over build for what you would ever want to think or build or do, because it doesn't hurt to have it and not use it. It sucks to go back later and to try to build or change fields or do things.

00:35:08:28 - 00:35:38:13
Jacob Radcliffe
And we had dealt with this, even with close bot where it was like, you know, there's unanticipated things that happen that have dramatic consequences and these programs, something simple as one, you know, letter or line can wreck the whole, the whole software. And I think that's where cursor to me, has really helped. So typical people, let's say you're a non programmer, but you're forced to take a programing course in college.

00:35:38:16 - 00:35:57:19
Jacob Radcliffe
The typical experience is you either love it or you hate it. There's really not much in between. And and you, you go in and the first thing that happens is you break everything and it's like, oh my God, how do I fix this? And if you don't love the fixing of it, then you will never be a programmer.

00:35:57:21 - 00:36:19:29
Jacob Radcliffe
If you're not like, hell bent on getting in there and fixing that problem and you're like, I'm going to work on this and brute force this until I make it work, then you'll never be a programmer. But if your mind is towards that, then what I think happens is people give up on programing because they, they don't have enough help to solve the problem.

00:36:20:03 - 00:36:44:27
Jacob Radcliffe
And their own instructors are not qualified enough to even help them write, write the code or bug, you know, get through the bugs of the code, and AI has upended that. Now you can just tell I like this is broken, fix it for me, and it just rips through it. Right. And I think that that's the challenge now is that we have programmers who are not struggling.

00:36:44:29 - 00:37:11:24
Jacob Radcliffe
They are going through their degree field, writing code, getting AI to help them bug bug, check it, and never actually returning to fix that thing. They don't have the mind to really dig into real bugs. Like like, well, we had dealt with with coursework. You would never be able to understand that without like the 20 things that we had checks to fix.

00:37:11:24 - 00:37:36:10
Jacob Radcliffe
The one little problem that we discovered with the with the closed bot body we were working on. And, and I think that's where even I doesn't have that intuition. It doesn't have an intuition to really think, like, wait a minute. It was the second and third order effect of what I'm about to do, or I change this. And it just wrecked something and I can't even figure it out.

00:37:36:12 - 00:37:37:16
Jacob Radcliffe
And like, cuz.

00:37:37:16 - 00:37:47:27
Bryce DeCora
Like that, like, that's not an uncommon thing. That's like a really abstract problem. It ends up being something totally off the wall. You never would have thought of that all the time in code.

00:37:47:29 - 00:38:10:03
Jacob Radcliffe
It does, it does. And, you know, I think what happens is people hit a wall and they want to give up. And that's where you have the divide. You have people who hate it and people who love it. And I think that education system has failed in helping people find the love for it, find the passion for it.

00:38:10:05 - 00:38:39:04
Jacob Radcliffe
Now, with the advent of like, cursor and all these awesome, amazing tools and open AI and all the stuff, it's taken away that and giving people the love vibe. Coding is about the love of what's happening. So people with Vibe coding are experiencing, the beauty of it, like people like code is actually, to me, like art. I'm not a painter, but code is truly like really, truly an art.

00:38:39:04 - 00:39:02:06
Jacob Radcliffe
And I know and when people grasp that and they learn how to compose with code and not just write code, it's, it's beautiful and it's really something special. And I think that's what people, they, they, they vibe code until they don't, they think they hit a wall and then they bounce right? So they don't ever really learn to love it and hate it.

00:39:02:06 - 00:39:29:24
Jacob Radcliffe
Right? So because if you're a program, you love and hate it because you love it when it works and you hate it when it does it, and but at least you have enough in your brain to know where to look, to try to solve the problem, or to engineer a different solution to the problem. Whereas people that are vibe coding are just generating a thing, hoping curves or fixes it, or lovable fixes the thing, and then if it doesn't, they hit the wall.

00:39:29:24 - 00:39:53:06
Jacob Radcliffe
They bounce. And I think, you know, there should be at least before you touch those products, you should go on codecademy.com. This is what I did. The silent programing I'm on coding Academy and I started on HTML, CSS, JavaScript and I just went I learned it's fantastic products best best learning product on the market at least you'll know what you're reading and looking at.

00:39:53:08 - 00:40:19:25
Bryce DeCora
You know I guess this this is applicable to let's use marketing for example. Same sort of thing if people will know enough nothing about marketing, using AI to draft ad copy in the ads flop, and they don't understand why versus the people that really know copy. And they can use AI to generate a bunch, a bunch of templates and then go through and be like, oh, I see what you did there.

00:40:19:25 - 00:40:43:28
Bryce DeCora
That's garbage. That's never going to work. And they can tweak things and then get really far really fast. So you have the people who know nothing. They're going to generate a lot of garbage and fail. Same with software development. Five coders don't understand the people who are the seniors and they can do super powerful things now all of a sudden really quickly.

00:40:44:01 - 00:41:08:29
Jacob Radcliffe
So the divide with software is I call them surface level, surface level knowledge. Let's just use high level as a context, since we all have a lot of like there's a lot of overlap here in this conversation, and the folks listening probably use that product. There's people who sign up for the product, they use a few things and that's all they do.

00:41:09:01 - 00:41:37:12
Jacob Radcliffe
And then there's people who rabbit hole the product like me that not only know the whole front end experience, but know the entire back end experience to like an extremely disgusting degree. Right. And and so like and then there's people somewhere in the middle that are just kind of like surface level, you know, hype the hype machine, like, hey, look what you can do with this.

00:41:37:12 - 00:41:58:29
Jacob Radcliffe
Kind of like you're describing earlier with the YouTube videos. Hey, look, I went on Loverboy and Bull, built this crazy app and look what it did. Surface level. It's surface level. Right. And what's going to happen is all these people existing at the surface level, there's the consumers, the users, there's the facilitators, and then there's the producers of eyes and tools and things.

00:41:58:29 - 00:42:26:20
Jacob Radcliffe
Right. The facilitators, the ones that are going to go, they're going to get wiped out. The seniors, the people developing, they're building over here, they're going to they're going to have a job, they're going to be over here. But the people who've never really gone beyond surface level knowledge, like building simple things, simple apps, not really. You know, they've just use AI their whole time to just generate code and they don't really know code programing.

00:42:26:22 - 00:42:52:05
Jacob Radcliffe
They're going to get wiped out. Yeah. And only the true people who have really built decades of knowledge to learn and actually harness the UI, the tools are going to stick around. Right. Because eventually those platforms are going to take all those things. And just offer it directly to their customers, like all the things that are being built or done are just going to be offered directly.

00:42:52:05 - 00:43:17:27
Jacob Radcliffe
There's not going to be as much need for facilitators, consultants, or even agencies to offer products. A lot of it's going to be offered directly. And so, you know, whether or not that's going to be the direction high level, I don't know. But I will say that the, the app marketplace very soon and I'm privy to a lot of internals of that, of high level, because I am a developer partner of high level.

00:43:17:29 - 00:43:47:02
Jacob Radcliffe
I will just say that, the app marketplace is going to offer pretty much everything that a marketing agency would offer for me, snapshots to the bot, templates to literally everything. So I can sign up for a direct Highlevel account, click on the App Marketplace. Have everything done for me. I can sign up for a, webinar or, one on one support session with high level to help set up my account.

00:43:47:04 - 00:44:10:16
Jacob Radcliffe
So account setup check, templates for my plumbing or electric company? Check. I buy templates are going to be in there. Check. So I mean, it's like we're the ad management as well. Oh, cool. You want ad management? We got that check. So it's like it kind of is already at that point. I just don't think people realize it yet.

00:44:10:19 - 00:44:34:22
Jacob Radcliffe
So products like yours I like but close bots doing just because it's not just about like one product, right? It's not hi one, but it was many products that are out there and it's it's more about the solution and the value of the solution that it brings. Then the thing. Right. It doesn't have to be a high level bot or a yeah, like HubSpot bot.

00:44:34:27 - 00:45:04:01
Jacob Radcliffe
It needs to be something like that adds value far beyond what what this other thing does. And so I, I'm curious where where things are headed with V2 because I've heard bits and pieces. Bryson. What? Like what you're doing. So I'd love to hear a little more about, like, some of the unique things that you're kind of rolling out on the AI front and, and how it kind of like trumps what, what they're doing.

00:45:04:04 - 00:45:05:20
Jacob Radcliffe
Well.

00:45:05:22 - 00:45:40:01
Bryce DeCora
We know AI is moving extremely quickly, so one thing we're doing to, a couple things we're doing to establish ourselves long term a have as many sources as possible. HubSpot high level, you know, building into Salesforce service and follow a boss as many platforms as we can. The other thing is reporting. So a way for you to monitor which agents are performing the best, driving to more booked appointments, and the ability to split tests.

00:45:40:01 - 00:46:10:14
Bryce DeCora
Different components of your agent like you would split test ads to see what titles working better and which image is working better at where you can see. You know which minor tweak in the prompt works better to drive toward more book deployments, and then an easy way for people to bill for these services through our platform. So it's about more than just the AI in this firm.

00:46:10:16 - 00:46:35:07
Jacob Radcliffe
Yeah. And I think the way, you know, high level or some of these other companies build is more like they roll out the feature because people are demanding it. I want ads, okay, cool. We build UX but no, no, no, I want to do x, y abcdefg okay, here's an ideas board like we've got 5000 other products we're working on.

00:46:35:08 - 00:47:02:09
Jacob Radcliffe
Right. And if you've upvoted enough then of course will pay attention. Right. Whereas if you've got a niche focused product then you build rapidly. And I think this is what people need to understand about the difference is they will never become what your product is because they're too focused on unless they hire, you know, 50 devs just for that one product and they just go hammer it, which maybe they will.

00:47:02:11 - 00:47:26:17
Jacob Radcliffe
You know, there's always going to be differentiators. But I think too, I think something that has always struck me is the idea of competition. Right. Are we really in competition with each other or are you really in competition in this company? And I would love to hear your or your take on this prize, but like, you know, the United States is a huge country, right?

00:47:26:19 - 00:47:48:02
Jacob Radcliffe
It's got a lot of human beings, a lot of businesses in it. And I think that there's this idea that you can't make a competitive product and be successful because this product exists over here and it doesn't matter. We're not talking specifically about high level, right. If I want to go and make, a tool that blurs part of my screen on my app, there might be 15 other tools out there.

00:47:48:05 - 00:48:10:21
Jacob Radcliffe
But what people can't understand in their mind is it's not about the product you make, it's about who sees it and when they see it. And are they in the buying pattern? Are they in the right spot at the right time to buy your product? So really, it's more about marketing than it even is about the product. Right.

00:48:10:21 - 00:48:12:25
Jacob Radcliffe
So you could put I don't.

00:48:12:25 - 00:48:39:01
Bryce DeCora
Understand to there they're like oh the product space is dead. Anyone will be able to make their own thing and sell it and like know their like product is as much as it hurts me to say this because I love product is so such a small part. There's the customer success fulfillment. Like dealing with the happiness of your customers and their experience with everything off product.

00:48:39:04 - 00:48:57:00
Bryce DeCora
There's your marketing campaign now, there's support. There's like so much stuff. Your network, like who's the network you're connected to and which influencers do you know that can push your product? Yeah, there's we're I.

00:48:57:03 - 00:49:17:14
Jacob Radcliffe
When we talk like let's say you go ask 100 business owners, have they heard of high level or even HubSpot or Salesforce? What would be their answer? And it's so surprising. It's so surprising. They were like, I don't know what that is. And in your world you think like, oh, wow, like they should know about this, why don't they?

00:49:17:21 - 00:49:44:15
Jacob Radcliffe
And the reality is, that an ad, let's just use an ad on Facebook, Google or whatever is just a very small fraction of time. And everybody's competing for your eyes and your, your attention to, to drive attention to your product. And so if you, just run an ad, guess what? You have visualization and attention on your product.

00:49:44:18 - 00:50:08:22
Jacob Radcliffe
So all these people that design products and services that are not running ads, that's cool. Maybe you build a, you know, a social following around your product that that would help sell it on, on different ways. But ultimately is a game that attention is not about a particular solution. And so I think people should start for they build something.

00:50:08:24 - 00:50:26:19
Jacob Radcliffe
How am I going to facilitate selling this thing? Who am I going to sell it to? Do I have an audience, right? And so just like you design this podcast, like this is an audience, this is that these are people listening that might want to buy what I have or buy what you have. And but they just don't know.

00:50:26:21 - 00:50:50:10
Jacob Radcliffe
They don't know about what you do unless you tell them what you do. Right. So if I'm telling the audience, well, I design complex integrations, okay. Like that isn't there may not be what somebody needs right now or. But out of ten people, maybe one person is like, man, I really need help. Billions. Integration with this product. Now I've captured the one out of ten that does need it.

00:50:50:12 - 00:51:11:21
Jacob Radcliffe
And I think that's where, like with close bot, you know, you may run an ad for people that have never even touched a product like High Level. And that's probably why V2 you need your own CRM, you need these things. I'm very curious. Price like, how many people have you encountered that are like that that have found your product, that are not part of oh yeah, a CRM.

00:51:11:23 - 00:51:31:16
Bryce DeCora
So many way more now that we run ads. Before it was highly just word of mouth growth affiliates, those people already kind of know what we do. Yeah. Or they come in. But yeah, you run ads and you get people that are like, wait, how do I buy a phone number within this? We're like, well, it's not a standalone CRM right now.

00:51:31:16 - 00:51:50:25
Bryce DeCora
They're like, when what does it do? And then trying to explain that and we're like, well, we're an add on for high level ad, HubSpot, Salesforce, whatever, you know, CRM you're using. And they're like, what's a CRM? It's like, oh man, we give you your money back. We're sorry, our ad must have not adequately explained what we do.

00:51:50:28 - 00:52:24:14
Jacob Radcliffe
Yeah, yeah. And it's, that's what I find interesting is I think I think people really believe that they have to have the whole kitchen sink to sell something to somebody. I remember when I first started, I had met a lady, I think, through the Chamber of Commerce, and she was running a yoga studio, and it was like a donations only like a Buddhist temple kind of thing.

00:52:24:16 - 00:52:48:16
Jacob Radcliffe
And she just wanted to be able to, like, get more visibility. And I was like, well, you only have like three Google reviews. And she's like, we'll both just try to get you more Google reviews mention, just send an email out. It didn't even have to be a technology solution. She just emailed people the link and then suddenly she jumped to position one in Google and, like, suddenly her business is thriving.

00:52:48:16 - 00:53:15:02
Jacob Radcliffe
It's like that was the most low tech solution ever. And it had nothing to do with starting a high level account and, you know, sending them out email and text messages. It was just that, like I connected her to a solution that worked for her in her her needs at that time. And, I felt bad taking 50 bucks from the lady, at the time, but, I took her 50 bucks.

00:53:15:05 - 00:53:47:12
Jacob Radcliffe
So, you know, it was, but, you know, I think that's where AI is going to make things so much more simple is knowing about solutions. And so there's this, new protocol. We just briefly chatted about it right before we hopped on. Let's get model context protocol MCP. Right now, the website for it is, model Context protocol.io, and these are dev docs.

00:53:47:17 - 00:54:17:22
Jacob Radcliffe
So if you're, a non developer person, go on YouTube and search up a guy. His name is Jack Harrington. HD rr I n g t o n find his channel. He he's an older, software developer guy, and he, with kind of, like, red hair, and he, he does an excellent video on this topic, but MCP is the next generation.

00:54:17:24 - 00:54:51:15
Jacob Radcliffe
What's going to happen with AI? It is going to dramatically change how we use it, how we consume AI. To put this simplistically, to the folks that are that are listening to this, that there's a lot of acronyms and it becomes like your brain turns to soup after a certain amount of time. What MCP will do is there's consumers of AI, and then there are the facilitators of AI, and then there are producers of AI, right?

00:54:51:17 - 00:55:23:00
Jacob Radcliffe
MCP are servers that deliver up things like prompts and tools that use AI. So essentially it's a facilitation layer where, let's say, I'm a company like slack, and I want to advertise to you all the things that you can do with the API. So you connect to that server and it tells you it does this thing called reflection.

00:55:23:02 - 00:56:03:18
Jacob Radcliffe
And it's like, okay, you can send a slack message with this, but that context is now available for the AI to use. So when you're chatting with something like a clogged desktop window and you use an MCP server, and you could do a prompt like, summarize these three websites and send it in a slack message and because you've configured this MCP server, it has access to the entire API docs library of that product, meaning not only to send messages, it can do all kinds of whiz bang stuff without you having to think or understand it.

00:56:03:18 - 00:56:34:14
Jacob Radcliffe
And so really, what it's about is a unification of service SES. So now let's say close bot wants to be able to advertise prompts with your platform. You could have it to where I connect to close bot. You respond with the tools that you have available. I pick and choose the AI. I want to run with that prompt, but I'm consuming the, the prompt that you've given to me.

00:56:34:14 - 00:57:05:08
Jacob Radcliffe
So there's value exchange. And so there's going to be a lot of, tooling as well that you can use your internal API. So close bot may not want to give up the prompt, but I could say, hey, here's the tools that you have available. Send, send a message with closed bot, right. Or send a message with this type of business or whatever the the tooling is that becomes available after you request it from the server.

00:57:05:08 - 00:57:45:29
Jacob Radcliffe
And so you're going to see not only is this helpful for programmers, because I can connect to all of these different MCP servers and have all this, this up to date documentation delivered straight pipe straight into my AI tooling. But for somebody who is, needing to do extremely advanced web scraping, you could you could connect to 25 different types of scrapers in the AI decides which one to use, which is just fascinating, adding, you could have all that there and know all the different tools they could use, and it picks the best one.

00:57:45:29 - 00:58:16:00
Jacob Radcliffe
And I think that's that's so exciting because ten years down the road, 20 years down the road, what's going to happen is we're going to be on our phones and we will have subscriptions to these servers for all the different things in our life that we would want to do. Right. I'm going to have an NCP server for Publix to know all the items in the grocery store and if they're in stock, because I'm going to be able to talk to my phone and be like, hey, I need to get a gallon of milk, from the Publix down the road.

00:58:16:03 - 00:58:38:16
Jacob Radcliffe
Use my location to know where I am. And, place an order for that item for pickup. Right. And it's going to be able to understand because it's going to go to that server, it's going to know all the tooling is available. It's going to be able to access databases and inventories and pull that all back. That's the future of what's going to happen with AI.

00:58:38:16 - 00:58:40:10
Jacob Radcliffe
On.

00:58:40:13 - 00:59:14:07
Bryce DeCora
And it'll be easier for the businesses to, let's say, close bot, for example. We forget what we used to host our documentation on, but there's like a stoplight, you know, that's what hosts the documentation for, high level. These platforms, they're they're going to automate generating that MCP or the businesses. They have the documentation they'll generate the MCP for you.

00:59:14:10 - 01:00:03:16
Bryce DeCora
So our API will have an MCP server. We don't have to generate it. It's generated by AI and instead of someone having to learn how to duplicate a bot VRA API and connect a source and check usage, like they could just have their business agent say, hey, I want you to have access to close bot and do whatever you need to to like when I make a new sub account, create a duplicate bot that's like the bot I used here and connect it and, and then send me a text message like it's just going to make it so easy for businesses.

01:00:03:18 - 01:00:31:05
Jacob Radcliffe
Right now with AI, you'll be like, okay, I need to take this CSV file. I need to like do all this stuff and it'll generate Python code and like run, screw it, give you everything you need to run the script, but compare what an MCP will do is maybe I want to go find a really, really good spreadsheet tool for MCP and bring that into my AI.

01:00:31:13 - 01:01:17:28
Jacob Radcliffe
Now I has the ability to run API calls to this external platform with all the tooling. So there's no generating all this code and running scripts. It's not going to be that anymore. The AI will have all the tools that it needs to be able to access your machine and do things, locally or with other servers. So it's going to cause an explosive level of growth with AI, because people are going to be able to design tools that you would never fathom, like you would be able to go up like in a mall and hold up your phone to something and like, see the whole inventory of the store, or know if they want

01:01:17:28 - 01:01:37:11
Jacob Radcliffe
to advertise that like or as you walk by the store, it's going to know what your likes and dislikes are and and it's going to be able to like push notifications or advertise to you like so like all these futuristic things that you've seen in movies are literally going to be part of this new protocol that was built.

01:01:37:13 - 01:02:01:19
Jacob Radcliffe
Because the only challenge the AI has had was understanding the context of what what's going on. And so if it has NTP at its core, it's very simple. It's just structured data is just this this is the tool and this is what it does. If I want to say get new messages, I use it. It's just very pared down.

01:02:01:19 - 01:02:30:28
Jacob Radcliffe
Whereas right now as developers you're going to go read this laundry list of documentation. Maybe it works and maybe it doesn't. And it's a lot of headache. And then maybe it's out of date, right? Whereas the MCP server is going to be real time sync. And hopefully they keep it up to date. But it will encourage them to, I think because people will be consuming it so much faster than they've ever consumed it before.

01:02:31:01 - 01:02:57:10
Jacob Radcliffe
Right. And it will turn, everything will become a utility from them from that point. Every app, everything will become a utility. And then you're going to see a lot of consolidation or utilities, right? Because the bigger companies are going to want to offer more and more and more and there will be less of the need for maybe super specialized utilities that, you know, now, Google offers it, right?

01:02:57:10 - 01:03:14:00
Jacob Radcliffe
So you're going to see a lot of tooling being stolen. I think, as time it was on. But, you know, even something as simple as, let's say you were.

01:03:14:02 - 01:03:35:29
Jacob Radcliffe
You could have like an NCP server for your local government to know all the services and the phone numbers and the, the people to call all the forms to fill in. This will dramatically change the construction industry when you think about it. Right. Because how much ever is spent filing permits all this junk when they could advertise out.

01:03:36:01 - 01:03:47:17
Jacob Radcliffe
This is but you can do oh, you want to file a permit application. Here it is. And it's just like you consume that. And then you use that in your applications.

01:03:47:19 - 01:04:12:17
Bryce DeCora
Do you think, high level is going to do and sidestepping slightly and being a bit bold contrarian, do you think high level is going to accelerate their cannibalism of their marketplace or, you know, to, to boost up their marketplace with all this stuff happening?

01:04:12:19 - 01:04:47:23
Jacob Radcliffe
Yeah. Well, I had a discussion a few days ago with our dev team just about, wanting access to more like, like, okay, you know, all this cool stuff, but, like, give us access to it so we can do something with it. And, I the bigger the company gets, the more problems that they, they layer in. So, for example, if you're a company and you do HIPAA for medical, then you have, a legal team that now reviews all of the new endpoints and actions.

01:04:47:23 - 01:05:09:29
Jacob Radcliffe
Right? So it actually stifles the ability to build a lot of new tooling because of the HIPAA environments need have it. Everything has to be reviewed. Everything has to be re reviewed every time. It costs a ton of money every time to have, all the security built in for every new endpoint, action is exposed to the public.

01:05:10:02 - 01:05:28:11
Jacob Radcliffe
And so I think that's, that's the challenge is as you grow and scale as a big company, are they going to cannibalize the marketplace more? I don't think they have as much of a, like they're trying to build it to where it's as open as they can make it for developers to come in and build stuff.

01:05:28:11 - 01:05:59:29
Jacob Radcliffe
So for example, really soon you're going to see, you're going to see the ability to have workflow actions that are metered, like a metered billing that's going to open up a ton of stuff, ton of ways to make money. Right. Is it really in their interest to go in and replicate, that feature probably not. They're going to build top level integrations for first party like Google integrations, Facebook, any major ones.

01:06:00:01 - 01:06:28:10
Jacob Radcliffe
Just there's an expectation that it will be built with first party. Whereas I think you got to think as a developer, what will they not build? Right? How creative can I be? What sort of fringe stuff can I build that I know for sure they're never going to build? And that's that list becomes smaller and smaller and, you know, for example, I built a little syntax tool and I have a lot of people on it, believe it or not.

01:06:28:13 - 01:06:50:07
Jacob Radcliffe
And, but the ideas board, that thing, I have a ton of votes on it. People want that feature for free, and I just have a full understanding that it's probably going to get built someday, and I'll just make my money until it goes away. And I think if you come to it with that mentality on utilities and tools, you'll be fine.

01:06:50:10 - 01:07:17:09
Jacob Radcliffe
But if, for major products like chat bots or, other things, then, you know, it's just it's part of their core product offer. Like, even like the ad management tools that they replaced apex in the replaced all these different ones that were making like Facebook ad management tools. That's their core marketers, their their core like customer of high level.

01:07:17:11 - 01:07:34:06
Jacob Radcliffe
And they demanded that product, they wanted that product enable. And so I think, from a from the dev standpoint, like I'm cautious what I build. So I don't fall into that trap. And so like.

01:07:34:08 - 01:07:59:11
Bryce DeCora
Is how but using Apex as an example, if someone went into the Facebook group and said, hey, I just want to shout out to apex, is there an app in your marketplace? Go high level. And I love the app. They do just say high level would take that post down, which is best because it's an app in their marketplace and people boasting about an app helps it.

01:07:59:14 - 01:08:05:22
Bryce DeCora
It helps the product. I understand it competes with the feature.

01:08:05:24 - 01:08:15:10
Bryce DeCora
But it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth and all these other developers that have apps in the marketplace when people can't receive recognition.

01:08:15:13 - 01:08:40:15
Jacob Radcliffe
For sure. I think that I've been in that group for a long time, made a lot of posts, is really kind of how I built my reputation. I had, helped a lot of people learned, did a lot of free work for a lot of people. And that's how people should start off, by the way, you should do a lot of free work and learn and the, so I'm very thankful to it.

01:08:40:15 - 01:09:01:17
Jacob Radcliffe
But I do think, you know, I can't even really advertise my own services in the group anymore. It's it's a little unfortunate because it is a competitive product. Essentially, you make it to a third party product that ends up competing with the first party product. Even I have this problem that you have the same problem I do.

01:09:01:20 - 01:09:22:25
Jacob Radcliffe
And then you want to share kind of more about it, or even your customers want to share about it. And then you know, they're in this weird position where if they let everybody in their grandma go in there and post their favorite product or service, that would be spammed to kingdom come. And so it's they went a little heavy handed, I think.

01:09:22:27 - 01:09:45:04
Jacob Radcliffe
And but also there's been a lot of people who use it is I don't know if it's the right term astroturfing. And I don't even know if that's the right term for this. Have you heard of that term before? Astroturfing. Let's it up. I knew that guy from, with his name. Jamie looked stuff up. Rev.

01:09:45:07 - 01:10:17:10
Jacob Radcliffe
Astroturfing is the deceptive practice of presenting an orchestrated marketing or public relations campaign in the guise of unsolicited comments from members of the public. Yeah. And so basically, that's, where people will go and try to create discourse or make posts in a fake fashion in order to get engagement. Engagement bait is another word for it. And I think there's a lot of that that happens because you have people who are software, people who don't know how to advertise their product.

01:10:17:17 - 01:10:36:29
Jacob Radcliffe
So we'll go in there and be like, hey, look, I made this really cool thing and check this out. Completely free. Just come check it out. They're using it to build their reputation, so it's really not free. They're buying your time, your energy, your thoughts. Even if you're consuming a free product from them, it still is. You know, self-promotion.

01:10:36:29 - 01:10:58:15
Jacob Radcliffe
And so it's really tough group when you have 100,000 people, like, I have a Facebook group right now with, almost 20,000 members of it, and it's hard to manage like, there's so much junk that gets posted. And so I think the future of how things need to be is more like going back to the basics run ads, you know?

01:10:58:18 - 01:11:11:07
Jacob Radcliffe
Yeah. Strategic partnerships, YouTube, you know, unfortunately, the, posting on Facebook groups like that is is kind of dead and, and a lot of people don't pay attention to it.

01:11:11:07 - 01:11:17:13
Bryce DeCora
Unfortunately, it's harder to try to close. But.

01:11:17:15 - 01:11:20:02
Jacob Radcliffe
Yep. For sure.

01:11:20:04 - 01:11:57:07
Bryce DeCora
Well man, we covered a lot of topics today. We covered MSI, MCP, the politics between high level, the group vibe, coding, running a running and building a software company. What that takes growing up, not studying software and then brute forcing your way into software. And that's all applicable to marketing agencies, too. I know a lot of marketing agencies like to dabble in code, and eventually, someday, maybe some of your marketing agencies will come over to the dark side and build your own products, too.

01:11:57:09 - 01:12:04:08
Bryce DeCora
But where can people find you if they're like, hey, this guy was amazing, which.

01:12:04:11 - 01:12:25:14
Jacob Radcliffe
Yeah. So I have two different websites, you know, curated services.com. That's my consulting. That's where you can book one on one time with me. And, so I do free consultation if you just want to have your idea listened to, I'll tell you if it's feasible. And I do work with development teams. It's not just me.

01:12:25:16 - 01:13:03:03
Jacob Radcliffe
I have a massive army of low code people that I work with. I have massive, amount of developers that build custom projects, and I'm friends with all the developer partners, so I'm guarantee I could find a way to build your project. And, as long as your budget makes sense, and then, I have the other website which is curated apps.io and, that that's where I basically put my apps company, which is all the low code, apps for high level for make, possibly Xabier.

01:13:03:06 - 01:13:19:09
Jacob Radcliffe
Sort of your power users that want to do more with the product and have found frustration building what they need to build internally. If that's you, you need to do more with the API and you want to just speed run through it with low code tools. That's the website for you.

01:13:19:12 - 01:13:41:15
Bryce DeCora
Perfect. So reach out to Jacob. He's awesome. We have consulted with him multiple times on building close by V2 and extremely helpful. Go check him out. Send him a message. You won't regret it. Thanks guys, and thank you. Jacob Bryce coming on. Thank you always.

01:13:41:15 - 01:13:47:24
Unknown
I heard.