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Hosted by Toby Cryns and Kurt von Ahnen, the Agency Action Podcast (Part of the WP Minute Podcast Network) dives into the real-world ups and downs of running a WordPress agency. Each week, Toby and Kurt share open, honest conversations about the challenges and victories that come with building client relationships, pricing projects, finding the right tools, and growing a sustainable business.
Whether you’re just launching your agency or refining your systems, you’ll get practical insights from two agency owners who live it every day—along with stories that remind you you’re not alone in this wild WordPress world of global teams, AI disruption, and constant change.
Follow the show and explore more at TheWPMinute.com/podcasts
Kurt von Ahnen (00:01.252)
Hey folks, welcome to another agency action show. I'm here with Toby Crimes, my awesome co host. And hey Toby, I'm just wondering what would it be like if like you woke up to your phone dinging and you looked down and there was an ad to sell you a WordPress company for two hundred thousand dollars? Would would that would that motivate you first thing in the morning?
Toby Cryns (00:20.142)
I would be definitely curious about that, Kurt. And it's interesting that that pretty much happened to me today when you sent me the thing that you woke up to. so there's a Flip Flip WP which is a site that I think helps people sell their WordPress businesses. And somebody's selling their WordPress business. And now this is just straight from them. I haven't verified this beyond the ad, but they are asking $200,000. They have 24 clients with $60,000 of annual recurring revenue.
Kurt von Ahnen (00:27.786)
Ha ha ha.
Kurt von Ahnen (00:40.168)
yeah, yeah, no. Yeah.
Toby Cryns (00:50.214)
And apparently $50,000 of one-off revenue in addition to that. So you're looking at $110K a year. If you buy that site or if that business for $200K, and assuming nothing changes and who knows what the expenses are. But you know, so what do you think of this, Kurt? Like, like what how would you what questions would you ask out of the gate? Let's say you had you're interested, you had money, you're interested in expanding. Like what are the questions you might just bring initially? Let's just talk top line questions.
Kurt von Ahnen (01:20.992)
I would so the ad said, the ad said WordPress repair, like WordPress repair and services. In this day of of AI, and and remember, I'm the AI reticent one, right? You're the guy who jumps in with both feet on AI. I'm getting more and more comfortable with the AI thing, and then I'm doing some, and I have to ask myself,
What is what is WordPress repair gonna look like a year, two years from now? Like, like what's the the value of what's being put in this ad to me doesn't even make sense. And so so I was like, okay, so out of those 24 clients, you know, $60,000 in recurring income, it is is it hosting? Is it updating? Is it like like you're kind of wondering, like, where is that? And then to your point.
That's just top line revenue. It doesn't even cover like, is there a team? Like, like it's is there a team? Do do we have to do we have to pay salaries out of that 60 grand? you know, e even if they're in other countries, you know, it's money. That money's gotta go somewhere. what do the tools cost? You know, what what are you spending on? And then you have to ask yourself, and and I think
Toby Cryns (02:16.674)
Right.
Toby Cryns (02:26.668)
Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (02:37.283)
I think you and I are in this position, right? We have existing agencies that that are somewhat notable. We're not buying a company to buy a company and get established. Like if I'm gonna buy a company, I want a man, I want a strong mail list. I want good marketing. I want I want access to tools I didn't have before, you know? And so I I really struggle with a valuation of $200,000 for a list of 24 clients.
Toby Cryns (03:03.767)
That's the question I was wondering. Like the money is almost secondary to me. Like, I'm like, if I buy this, do I need to do all the work to run it? Or is it already running? You have your employees, you have your CEO, you know, whatever it is. Like, it just runs itself 60,000 a year and the expenses are 40,000 or something. I go, I can cause I would think about that as a purchase. Like, and this is kind of like I understand it now, like why.
This was a a thing. Apparently it increases your business's value quite a bit if it runs without you, because then you can just sell it and people are like, we can just acquire this whole thing. We don't have to do anything. It'll still churn that money. And then we can figure out slowly how to how to make it make more money by integrating our systems. And I I think like that's what was unclear about the ad to me. is like, are we buying a fully functioning business that doesn't require the
Whoever's selling it? Or or am I gonna be the CEO of that business? And maybe the frontline developer too.
Kurt von Ahnen (04:08.537)
Well, and and remember that every time a a business changes ownership, there's gonna be a certain amount of fall off, right? There's gonna be a certain amount of those twenty-four customers that are like, I was just I was just here every month because Bob was a nice guy, right? Like, like those people are like so at least three or four people out, right? And so if you break that into percentages, you go, Okay, well, you know, three or four out of twenty-four, you know, that that's kind of a chunk, right? And so then you go, okay, well, so instead of sixty, maybe we're gonna make forty-five.
Right. Just just knowing that you're gonna lose some right out of the shoot. and I know I'm I'm doing a pretty good job of picking apart somebody's business from an ad where we don't have the details. but I think in our space it really makes us think, Toby, because I'm getting older every single day, buddy. I I'm one year away from 60. So we've had this talk before, but it makes me really double down on the idea of how do I build value into Manana Nomas?
How do I get it so that in eight, 10 years, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe I'm crazy then, right? And my kids don't want to do it, my wife doesn't know how to do it, and we just want to liquidate it. Well, I want to make sure it has a valuation of $400,000 or $500,000 or something. So what creates that value? And it's gotta be more than a a name list with some emails. It's gotta be some processes or some assets that come with it that that would take work to recreate, rebuild. Like
Toby Cryns (05:18.723)
Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (05:35.179)
Non duplicable value.
Toby Cryns (05:39.191)
Yeah, well, there's a coffee shop near my house that's been around I forget how long, but at least twenty years, maybe forty years, I don't know. But it's been here forever. Very successful by all I don't know, it seemed to all these be packed and everything. And it was owned by a woman here. And she just shut it down just recently. She's like, I'm gonna retire. And she just closed it. And I think like that's another way to look at this. Like, hey, I've ex I've it's provided for me and my family for the last twenty years.
Kurt von Ahnen (06:08.653)
I don't wanna do it no more.
Toby Cryns (06:09.836)
I don't want to do it no more. Maybe I'm just done. And I think that's very reasonable too. Like it you know, I I I think like a lot of people are afraid of that or like don't see how that's possible. But I'm like, that's most businesses. Most businesses don't sell. They either go out of business or they just disappear.
Kurt von Ahnen (06:29.379)
Yeah, yeah. And and even s like when you think about small like lawn care businesses, right? If it's some dude doing fifteen lawns he's not gonna be attractive to some corporate takeover. You know, they're just gonna wait for him to pack up his lawnmower and trailer and they're just gonna move in and go, Johnny quit. Do you want us to do your lawn? And it's it's gonna be that simple. They're not gonna have to pay an acquisition cost for those customers. And so
And and again, I dry, I can't help but drive back to like WordPress repair. Like, like, it's been so long since I've seen that phrase. And I think to myself, especially after just the 7.1.3 came out last night with what, six or seven security updates, right? It's like, what does WordPress repair actually look like? How would you define that today?
Toby Cryns (07:13.708)
Yeah, well, I have two friends here locally. one's a younger guy, one's an older guy. they both tried to sell their WordPress businesses. The younger guy was basically selling his hosting business. and it he was selling it at roughly like three X annual recurring revenue, which is what this guy's doing. He you know, if you get 60 grand a year, he's trying to sell it for 200 grand, that's about three X annual recurring revenue.
Neither neither of my friends were able to sell their businesses. And they both had very successful hosting businesses. And they were both selling hosting businesses. just reseller hosting, like like you or me would do. Like, you know, we're hosting through the cloud somewhere, maybe through a well-known provider, maybe not. One of them had all their stuff on WP Engine, for example. The other one used something else, but they ended up both giving away the businesses. They would they just said, I couldn't find a buyer.
Kurt von Ahnen (07:52.111)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (08:12.536)
Who wants these clients? And that's kind of like how they ended their their businesses. And it makes me wonder about the whole Silicon Valley three X recurring revenue valuation. Like I'm d I got an offer at the for the Mighty Mo last year. It was a legit offer.
It was let's just say it was like point five ARR, something like that, maybe less. I don't know. But I'm like, I think I'd rather just take my salary and keep going. Like But it makes but that you can see is but you can see a scenario if I wanted to close it down. Someone offers me, you know, a decent chunk of change. It's not life changing, but I'm like, yeah, it gives me like six months runway to find something else. Like
Kurt von Ahnen (08:39.054)
Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (08:45.071)
Yeah. I th I think I'll just keep I'll just keep this one going.
Kurt von Ahnen (09:01.539)
Well, you almost hit the segue talking about those guys with their hosting companies. I I I ran into I ran into an interesting thing this week, Toby. over the weekend sometime, the email that I have associated with the Manana no Mas website just stopped working.
Like I could receive email, but I couldn't send email. And Apple Mail was saying, you need to reconnect or something, right? And I was going, Well, that's weird. I keep putting in my password and I keep getting this error signal up. And, you know, I blew it off for the first couple of emails I sent, because I was like, I'm busy, you know? and then I realized, wait a minute, it's not their email that's not receiving, it's my email that's not sending.
And I was like, crap, right? And so I I start doing some research and and almost to my own fault, I always try to research these things on my own instead of just asking for help. So finally I got with my host who does my site, my DNS, and my email. I know everyone's gonna come for me for that, but I was really into this thing for the convenience. I really just wanted one-stop shop.
And and they're like, yeah, your email's blocked. And I was what? And they Yeah, you're sending too many emails are being sent, too many, too many sending requests are being sent within this time frame. And I said, show me the logs, right? There's no there's no logs, there's no unusual activity, there's no I have sendgrid that's is an email server that sends you know marketing emails using that email address. And I thought, did something go wrong with SendGrid? Did SendGrid connect to the server somehow? Did like I just started like, what happened? I'm and I'm
Racking my brain on this. this was Monday. the host tells me, yeah, there's really nothing you can do. We can't manually like reset it. You just gotta wait it out. And I said, wait it out. They yeah, to see if it fixes itself. And I'm like, no, that doesn't make any sense. And so I started doing some more research and I found out that
Kurt von Ahnen (10:57.091)
You know, I needed a way to check my email in my phone and I wanted to keep it separate from other junk. and so I use this tool called Blue Mail. Have you ever heard of Blue Mail? So I put Blue Mail in my phone. Well, Claude tells me that tools like Blue Mail and Outlook.com, for example, right? So that's not a that's not an unknown. they serve your email information on multiple machines, like all over the place. So especially if you're on mobile, if you're on mobile, it's
Toby Cryns (11:05.709)
Have not.
Kurt von Ahnen (11:26.113)
It's randomly pinging all these IP addresses that it uses in its server farm to execute the work that it's trying to do for you for the app. And so apparently this Blue Mail IP server farm was hitting my host like crazy with these new IP addresses that my phone's trying to retrieve email from. And it just said, security breach and locked everything down. So I removed the app, I changed the password in my email.
I got in touch with the host and said, I've taken all these steps. I've done the research you haven't done for me. You know, I've done all these things to fix it. And they said, Well, thanks for letting us know, but we should probably wait another 24 hours to see what happens. And that was it, man. Nail in the coffin. Move the email address over to MX Route, move the website over to Xcloud. page speed jumped up again. Now we've got a hundred on page speed. And I think we're like 90 something on mobile. Email's working fine. Psh, gone.
Toby Cryns (12:23.852)
What's with the the acceptance of twenty four hour twenty four to forty eight hours is such a normal web development time frame, but it's ridiculous in the real world. Like
Kurt von Ahnen (12:34.923)
It's it and to be clear, you know, I have other tools, right? So I have a CRM tool that uses that email address. So so I could create if it was an emergency, I could create a message, send test email to Jim, right? Boom, off it goes. Like you could figure out a way to get around it and get a message to somebody.
But in this day and age, man, when when the email goes down, and there's a reason why. So, like when you're on CloudWays, that doesn't come with inbox. When you're on WP Engine, it doesn't come with inbox. When you're on Kinst, it doesn't come with inbox. And so I chose a host that did come with inbox because I hate dealing with email problems. but then when I had an email problem, it turned out they didn't want to deal with email either.
Toby Cryns (13:18.806)
It speaks to how fragile like the client relationships are. Like, and this was probably a great lesson for us as business owners, like we were talking earlier, like if each client is its own little beehive and you stir the beehive by saying like, like your email's down or your website's down and we can't do anything. Wait twenty four to forty eight hours and then we'll see. it just gives them an opportunity to reevaluate the whole thing.
Kurt von Ahnen (13:48.674)
Well, I I d I really don't want to turn this into a commercial for XCloud. 'cause I I there's other great hosts out there, right? This is just my personal experience. But because the Manano no Mass migration went so well, I'm like, now I gotta look at like what other clients do I have on these bigger websites that are slow that I can increase their performance on. And so we had a buddy boss build on a it's it's a site that serves our local community here. It's called Living Hutch dot com.
Just local. I don't need a bunch of SEO and all that stuff, right? But it's a Buddy Boss website. It's big. It's heavy. And those were the excuses I used to say that it was slow, like all this time. I just kept saying, that's a buddy boss site. It's gonna be slow, right? That's Buddy Boss, it's gonna be slow. It's a heavy plugin. I moved it over to XCloud today. We went from a 72 to a ninety-six on the Google Page Speed report. And there was some work to do. Don't it wasn't like a simple. It took there were some there were some toggles to move around.
Toby Cryns (14:29.294)
Mm.
Toby Cryns (14:38.285)
Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (14:47.405)
But, you know, we got from seventy two to a ninety six. You know, and I've got users in this website now that are going to experience like going to the news feed or clicking into a private group and like seeing it come up right away. Like that's the user experience is gonna be so much better.
Toby Cryns (15:02.357)
Uh-huh.
Kurt von Ahnen (15:03.895)
And I'm not spending any more money.
Toby Cryns (15:06.956)
Yeah, I mean this is like a classic hosting conversation and I I feel like what I wonder is like, XCloud's good today. Will they suck in a month? Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (15:18.191)
Yeah, is it gonna suck next week?
Are they gonna pull some PHP workers out?
Herzler, I I guess we might as just start throwing out all kinds of names. they attracted a bunch of people here in the States, you know, going back like six, eight, nine months ago. Bunch of people jumped off, you know, of whatever, jumped on Hertzler. they're out of Germany, super fast performance, awesome pricing, like the pricing was crazy. And then just a month or two ago announced a giant price increase, you know, and it was like, okay, okay, you know.
And so you gotta be really vigilant, man. You gotta keep your eye on the ball.
Toby Cryns (15:56.303)
We had an interesting conversation about pricing on one of our local tech groups. The gist of it was this person runs a SaaS service, but it could be anything. It could be like your monthly maintenance or this hosting. And what they were saying is they run this service and they're they have one client that provides 75% of the revenue. And they want to increase, they basically want to double the cost that they're charging the client. And the question on the group was like,
what should we do? What red f what you know, what should we think about? And every everybody on the list is like, you have to be ready to lose them, first of all, because that's they don't understand any of the reasoning you're gonna give. They're just like twice the cost, well we'll just go somewhere else. And they don't even think like maybe it's still the best deal. They're just out of there. Like they're like pissed now and they're like, too much, I'm gone. Like we can't deal with this. I think that there there is like something about
Kurt von Ahnen (16:42.957)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (16:53.548)
the raising of prices that gets at people. And and I don't know what the numbers. I raised prices a few years ago on all my existing clients for like hosting and maintenance. And I didn't lose a single one and I raised it by about five percent. And I'm thinking I might do it again soon because it's been three years and inflation's through the roof and all that. and so I'm like, another thing I'm doing that just testing out now, just in the pricing end is
Passing on the cost of credit card fees and and bank fees to my clients. And I don't know how that's gonna play out. I think more people are just gonna pay me with paper checks now, which is frustrating. But like I'm like, you know, the money's getting tighter and the you know, in terms of the just like stuff's getting more expensive out there in the world and it makes just these questions about who's paying the credit card fees become more interesting. Like
But I don't know, we'll see. Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (17:46.522)
The the idea of paying with cash or a check is incredibly attractive until you gotta reconcile all that stuff. You know, I can't tell you how many times we give somebody a check and for some reason in today's culture it's like it's too much of a pain in the butt to go deposit it.
You know, and and they sit on it for two weeks, three weeks. You're looking in your bank account, and then you start to think, we're doing pretty good. You know, and then all of a sudden, boom that check hits and you're like, it's just, I don't think people are as prepared or like mentally cognizant of like details in life as we were 30 years ago. You know, I think there's just so much going on now that everything's got to be in the second. I mean, there's times when I'm at the pump.
Toby Cryns (18:14.904)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (18:28.546)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (18:37.271)
And I'm I s I put my debit card in and I'm paying and I know I'm paying four dollars more a gallon for fuel or whatever it is, right? And then my kid's like, I'm gonna run in and buy a soda and I'm like, why didn't I just give him thirty bucks for the pump? I mean, it's five bucks a gallon, but I mean it's we we just we've become so sterile to the idea that everything's costing us more.
Toby Cryns (18:50.606)
Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Toby Cryns (18:57.526)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's and I I think the question like when times are tight, it starts making because for the whole history of my company, I've just been like, I'll I'll just cover the fees on the credit cards. But it's like on a ten thousand dollar bill, that's three hundred bucks, you know, like and I've been paying that throughout the years. And I'm just like that's just cost of doing business. But now I'm like, I don't know, I haven't raised prices, like if times are tighter, like
Kurt von Ahnen (19:17.7)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (19:24.832)
And there's real costs and and there's an option to pay no fees. I don't know though. Like like it causes other headaches, of course, because they would rather just swipe their card and be done with it. And frankly, I like the convenience as a business owner too, but it it's expensive.
Kurt von Ahnen (19:38.98)
We activated that you can make payments through a vendor and stripe thing on our site. And we had a client wanted to do a $9,000 project with us, hit that thing in Stripe, and then we got an email as the vendor that said, so-and-so needs approval for this account. We'll approve it, but you have to approve like an $800.
Toby Cryns (19:44.258)
Mm-hmm.
Kurt von Ahnen (20:02.307)
processing fee or some nonsense like that. And I was like, I am not paying eight hundred bucks to get a nine thousand dollar contract, you know, on top of whatever other fees that are coming with this. Like, nah, forget it. I'm just, you know, I I said, nah, forget it. Like if you could get this financed, you can go to the bank and get a loan. You can you can the SBA'll help you. The and now that that instance caused me to reach out. so we sell training services also, right? For
B2B training sales, I don't finance any of it anymore. Like I used to say, 10 payments of $2,000 a month or like whatever. Now it's $20,000. And they go, Well, how do we make payments on that? And I go, Contact this guy. Hey, you know what? I we don't do the finance. If you qualify, they'll they'll get you financed. They give us the payment. You're set. You make payments to them.
Toby Cryns (20:51.95)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (20:58.146)
Got it, yeah. See if that relationship yeah, that makes sense. Let's change the change a tune here a little bit. how many these AI bots are joining your Zoom meetings these days or your Google Meets or Microsoft Teams? You join a meeting and then it's like bong bong bong bing bong bong.
Kurt von Ahnen (21:02.766)
Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (21:17.081)
Bing bong, bing bong, bing bong. I was on literally, I I'm I'm on like an executive committee now with a with a college, and which is kind of hard to believe. But I'm on with two other people. The three of us make the executive committee. And there's three AI tools signed in. Well, I don't have one. So I asked, so I asked the other guy, I go, I go, which one of these tools is yours? He goes, I don't even know what they are. And so I asked the third guy, I go,
Why do you have these three tools in here? Like what So there's three of us with six windows open. Like w six black windows with words on them, you know? and and I just find it so distracting. And when you're doing like
webinars or office hours. So I do the office hours with Lifter LMS. Do it every week, right? So we we let people that have universe and infinity bundles sign in and they get to talk to me and Emily one on one, ask us questions, screen share all kinds of stuff. And for a while I was letting these things in. But then I realized I got 15 windows open in the screen and six people, seven people. People that don't even come to the meeting have these things running in the background.
And I'm like, you know what? J I'm just I'm just disallowing all. And s I d my plea, can we just normalize that? Just being like, No. If you don't have the time to come, you don't have the time to watch the replay. Done.
Toby Cryns (22:40.908)
Yeah, why not? I I think it it's your meeting. If it's your meeting, kick all out, you know.
Kurt von Ahnen (22:46.211)
Well, trying to entertain empty windows isn't easy either. You know, you're you're trying to like when you're speaking, when you're training, when you're teaching, you know, you're supposed to be reading the room. And in Zoom it takes I think it takes an extraordinary effort in Zoom to read the room, right? And so now you're in there and half the faces are on some other screen, you know, half the screen you're on is just black squares and it's like, nah, I I'm done.
Toby Cryns (22:50.37)
Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Toby Cryns (23:04.545)
Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (23:15.491)
They gotta go. They're out. So I don't let in anymore.
Toby Cryns (23:17.08)
Great. We're gonna kick out. All right, next topic.
Kurt von Ahnen (23:23.395)
Yeah, but do you agree?
Toby Cryns (23:24.864)
I agree a hundred percent, man. I was in a meeting the other day, not a meeting. I was like, so there was this like guy who was presenting on AI. And I don't know if you've seen ads, there's like these devices you connect to your phone that like record everything. And and I saw he set he set it on the table and we're having a conversation. I'm like, I don't feel comfortable with that device here. Like, there was no permission exchanged, you know, nothing. Just I'm just like, it was just weird.
Kurt von Ahnen (23:37.871)
like fieldy or something.
Toby Cryns (23:53.581)
And I think like in general, like this is the world we live in now. You have to assume everything's being recorded, but like what a crappy world, you know, in that way. Like like it's not a positive development.
Kurt von Ahnen (24:05.559)
I think it takes a real sense of entitlement. Cause like even in Zoom, if you're recording the call, the banner comes up and says, This meeting is being recorded. And you can say o okay, or you can leave the meeting, right? But if someone takes something out of their pocket and goes and throws it down, like one of these cool bracelets or now neither wear these necklaces, the plod thing or the fieldy thing. yeah, I'm with you. I I no disclosure and I got a pretty weird sense of humor, man. If I think the room is
Toby Cryns (24:24.13)
Mm-hmm.
Kurt von Ahnen (24:34.703)
If I think the room's a safe room, I might say something crazy. And if someone takes an excerpt out of that, you know, and then I know people will listen and they'll say, well then don't say something crazy. But that's that's the fun of working with me.
Toby Cryns (24:37.677)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (24:48.824)
Well, it it's that in and of itself, even the people who say that can't believe that. Like, don't say something crazy. What you've never said something crazy. You never had an idea that later you're like, That was a dumb idea. Like, this is a normal process of living.
Kurt von Ahnen (25:03.233)
Yeah. Whew, that was a really stupid idea.
Toby Cryns (25:05.186)
You never in college kissed somebody that you later thought was ugly? Like I'm glad that wasn't on tape.
Kurt von Ahnen (25:12.013)
So much of my childhood is not on Facebook. I'm very happy about that.
Toby Cryns (25:13.39)
Yeah. yeah. yeah. I mean it's it's a a bonus for sure.
Kurt von Ahnen (25:20.345)
So so maybe the sneaky AI recording's not in your lane, but I know, I know that, I know that I know that you like vibe coding internal facing stuff. Tell tell me what you coded most recently.
Toby Cryns (25:33.689)
So yeah, it is fun. I will say this like the vibe coding thing is making coding fun again. That's what I will say. I I'm not like taking a stand on like just generically, like should we have vibe coding and you know that's a little murkier, but just from the like somebody who's been coding for 20 years, I go, this is fun again. It was pretty boring for the last 10 years. Now it's fun. So I don't know. but anyway, today, like today, I
We're we've launched a a product. it's actually a product I've been selling for a long time, but we repackaged it. And my sales guy was like, Can we just like build an app to kind of like onboard our clients into this process? It'll have checklists and they walk through it, they have a login. And I was like, Yes, we can. And so just this morning I started coding it. I'm doing 10 other things and it's running in the background. And and we now have it's not quite done and it's always takes longer than I thought. I'd probably put five hours in today already, and it's probably another five to get done, but like
At 10 hours, we're gonna have a pretty nice custom app that our clients can log into, see the progress, it has a bunch of checklists in there. and this is like the fun of it is like this code writing code is now free. There's no cost to writing code. There's cost to humans like sitting here like I did and be like, no, that's not quite right. Rethink that, do it this way, you know, thinking through the product. But it's a lot of fun. So I'm like, just today I built a whole nother app that I would have never considered.
before because it's just too much, it would have been too much effort, too much time, and maybe I don't even have the know-how. you know, I deplied it to clo deployed it to Cloudflare, it's got logins working, it's got da-da-da. Before I would have been stuck in the WordPress environment. And by the way, like I don't by stuck, I mean like this is what WordPress it was actually really fun to build apps in, but it was like also kind of sucky because you could never it was you had to do everything the WordPress way, everything looked like WordPress, and now it's like
No, this is just like an app. I can design it however I want and the interfaces can be whatever. and so it's a lot of fun. I like I I coded three other two other apps over the weekend, at least the last week. One was an RBI baseball ROM decoder encoder. So like if you ever play an this old baseball game for Nintendo that, you know, it hasn't been updated in forty years, but like you can now go in and add yourself as a player on the California Angels, you know.
Toby Cryns (28:00.011)
similarly I updated my I have a Tecmo Super Bowl ROM. Same thing. You can now join the nineteen ninety one Buffalo Bills and give yourselves ninety nine ninety nine you know, so you're the greatest player in the history of the league, you know. this it it's fun, you know, like I'm just having fun with it, I'll say. And and and it's causing other problems that we can get into if we want here, but
Kurt von Ahnen (28:21.955)
Well, I'm you know again, not where you're at, right? But but I'm in Claude, I'm working, right? WP Vibes doing its thing, Claude's doing its thing. And there's times where, like, to your point, it's working. And I open up another tab, start doing something else, I get distracted, I fix something, I make something, I write an article, I do whatever, come back and it says, Click this to approve me. I go, click, go back over, finish the article, blah, blah, blah. Come back and says, I'm all done with that. And then it I I go. And when it's working, I'm like,
This is kind of lame. And then all of a it goes, it's done. And I go click and poof. Like, holy crap. Like, all this is done. But then I sampled AI in descript today, trying to edit a video. Usually I do the edits myself. And this time I use their AI tool. And I, the weirdest thing happened, Toby, it argued with itself for like 15 minutes. I started to wonder if I just asked it something stupid. But it would say,
Like one paragraph would say, We see this, blah, blah, blah. And then another paragraph would say, Well, I'm gonna do this, this, and this. And then now we see this. And I'm like, How many AI people are in this machine? Like, apparently they don't get along very well. I think the user wants the the framing to go to the left. Well, he most definitely said he wanted it to go to the right. And they're like, and I'm re and you see it go, you know, it's talking to itself as it's going, and I'm and it says.
Toby Cryns (29:31.022)
Ha ha ha
Kurt von Ahnen (29:47.62)
And then at the end, it finally went, you know, how how do you like this now? And it I was like, and in the end I was still like, it's kind of what I wanted. Right? It's not perfect, but it's kind of what I wanted. And I was like, you know, download, we're done. But it it's definitely weird to see the way the different tools converse, react, and and especially like this descript thing to me was wild because I definitely I definitely felt like I was dealing with you ever see that you ever know that you that music artist Ren?
Toby Cryns (29:56.653)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Toby Cryns (30:17.155)
No.
Kurt von Ahnen (30:18.787)
See, now you got homework after the show. He's got this famous video where he's like in a mental institution and he's playing the guitar. He's a phenomenal artist, but he's got voices in his head. And that's like it's like, you know, is the script crazy? How many how many AI people are in this machine right now arguing with each other?
Toby Cryns (30:20.278)
All right.
Toby Cryns (30:33.238)
Right. Yeah. I will say too long these lines. I've had a debate with one of my developers. We're we're collaboratively like learning AI together yesterday or the day before. and I go, How long is this gonna take? He's like, Well, AI says it's gonna take 40 hours to do X, Y, and Z. And I was like, Forty hours? That seems way too much given like what you and I have been through in the last week learning this stuff.
And he's like, I that's what AI says. I kind of believe it. And da da da And today I was notice I was I don't always read the AI threads as it's talking to itself. But today I saw one that goes, this pro this thing's gonna take a few hours to stand up. I'm like, what are you talking about? And like two minutes later it's done. And I'm like, Where are these estimates coming from? Like
Kurt von Ahnen (31:23.107)
Have you seen where like people that exercise lie to their AI things? Like they'll say, I'm gonna go out and run a 5K and it says, Okay, good luck. And then five minutes, 10 minutes later, they'll they're like, they're like, I'm back. And they're like, Wow, you really did great today. That that only took you, you know, 47 minutes. And it's like, no, I I've gone 10 minutes.
Toby Cryns (31:38.057)
Ha ha.
Toby Cryns (31:46.063)
Exactly. I clearly like AI is still not there. And I think like to your point, like you're like, I did it and it was like pretty good. And I think that's the best we can hope for. And frankly, from a business perspective, usually that's that's a huge time saver, frankly. It can if it can get you eighty percent of the way there on a design, on a website, on a page, on a mock up, on a whatever. I mean, without AI you gotta do that eighty percent. Now we just
Kurt von Ahnen (32:14.115)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (32:14.998)
And now and I've been debate talking with my team who's like scared of this 'cause they all think they're gonna lose their job. I'm like, I don't think so. I can go out and sell more work now. I the only thing that's holding us back is you and your capacity. Like now you have more capacity, we can sell more work. You're still gonna have a job.
Kurt von Ahnen (32:35.181)
So I know that we mentioned this before, but like you just put the framework on it, right?
Your point, I don't like we could sell more. I don't think we've lost the value of what we're bringing to the client. The client has a problem, we are still answering the problem. Like our problem as agency owners isn't like, my god, everyone's gonna figure out WordPress is easy with AI now. Like, that's not our problem. You know, our our problem, our our challenge is how do we best offer value to a client? That client could be a business owner, could be a hobbyist, could be whoever that whoever that client is, right?
But how do we as an agency offer the most value to that client for a rate that everyone agrees to, right? And it's we can argue about, that's a rip-off, that's not a ripoff, whatever. Like when I was making websites for 1500 bucks a website and I heard of people charging 15 grand or 20 grand, I was like, man, I can't believe they ripped that guy off. And now I'm the guy with the 15 and $20,000 websites. And you know what? Those people get every single penny of that value out of us.
Toby Cryns (33:35.544)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Toby Cryns (33:39.982)
Yeah, yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (33:40.43)
You know, so so I I don't feel I don't feel like AI is stealing anything from us. It's put us in a really good position to be the experts in the room to use discernment and really lead a project to completion. And I think that's where a lot of newbies leveraging AI miss the mark. Like you just talked about getting that 80% and then that 20% can be hard to do. I think we're in a unique space where we can really leverage AI, but we have the capacity to steal another one of Toby's words.
We have the capacity to for completion on that 20%. And my version of that is justify that value and increase our monetary value on the outside world. I I see this completely going our way. And I see so many other people saying, it's the doomsday, it's over, you know, everyone's gonna go to the no code with Toby and make set 10 friends.
Toby Cryns (34:33.006)
I think that's a great way to end it here. Kurt, how can we get in touch with you?
Kurt von Ahnen (34:37.839)
All right.
Kurt von Ahnen (34:43.051)
I keep saying LinkedIn, but I'm getting so much spam there I might have to rescind that invitation. manana no mas, manananomas.com, manana no mas on all the socials. Toby, yourself?
Toby Cryns (34:54.488)
You can find me at LinkedIn as well. C-R-Y-N-S is my last name. And you can find me at the Mighty Mo. And that's T-H-E-M-I-G-H-T-Y-M-O dot com, where we can do everything WordPress for ya.
Kurt von Ahnen (35:09.231)
Perfect. Folks, we'll see you very, very soon. Have a good one.