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The Factory Floor is hosted by the three co-founders of Conversion Factory, the marketing agency at the forefront of SaaS growth, marketing, and tech trends. Episodes are released on Twitter one day early, @coreyhainesco.
Every other week Corey, Zach, and Nick break down what’s working right now in SaaS marketing, share real-world lessons from the field, and give you the strategies you need to outpace the competition.
You can also find us on YouTube, X, and everywhere you listen to podcasts!
Don't fall behind. Subscribe. Like. Drop a comment. Or not. The ball is in your court.
Nick Loudon (00:02)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the factory floor. I am stoked to be back with my fellow homies here, Cory and Zach. We're going to be talking about a bunch of great stuff. And I'm actually going to send it to Zach to explain what we're talking about today and probably a little bit about why we're talking about it today.
Zach Stevens (00:22)
Today, children, we're going to be talking about what founders and CMOs don't get about AI marketing design and development, specifically about what goes into it and their expectations around what is actually possible regarding time and efficacy with the outputs of the entire process. And the reason this came up was because I've...
We had a client a while back who had mentioned something like that they were expecting us to do a full website rewrite and redesign in six minutes. At least that's what they had indicated. And they said this because they had built a series of programmatic pages, so a templated page, and they built several of them. I would imagine they could probably do hundreds of these templated pages.
and their assumption is completely false.
everybody who has tried to code a site, even with Claude code and rewrite it knows that you cannot do that in six minutes unless you are okay with shoddy output, bad copy, bad design, and all of the trickle down negative effects of doing something in one shot, even with the tool that is loaded with Corey's marketing skills, it's got front end design skills. It doesn't matter. Those things do not stop you
from creating something really bad with that expectation. So we go and talk about it.
Nick Loudon (02:02)
Was it you who ended up responding to that?
Zach Stevens (02:06)
I did, yeah. Well, there's, for some story, ⁓ this particular founder had mentioned some other websites that I know for a fact have spent millions of dollars on their visuals, on the photography that goes into them. These are like multi-million dollar Department of Defense level websites that they were aiming for as their aesthetic. And...
They also didn't have anything regarding copywriting. Like there was nothing, a zero level foundation for this website. It's different if you have a site like ours, like Conversion Factories, before we started working on it in Cloud Code, we had a solid foundation. Like the copy didn't change really, we were just polishing the visuals and that still took a couple days to get right to the point where we felt really satisfied with it.
So what we want to talk about, the reason I want to bring this up is because it sounds akin to what I would hear in some of the early days of my design career, which was, hey, just Photoshop it. You know, like, can't you just Photoshop it? Can't you take this really crappy picture of like a beached whale and turn it into, I don't know, Jessica Simpson or something on the beach? Can't you just Photoshop it into that? It's like, sure, if you give me...
I don't know, a month to turn this beached whale into Jessica Simpson. And I think that's what this sounds like. It's like you're trying to turn chicken shit into chicken soup in five minutes and nothing is that magical.
Nick Loudon (03:49)
my my sense on why there's such a like misunderstanding of of what people want versus what they how they think it gets done is that a lot of people don't really have a good sense of like what the outcome should look like and so any outcome
is a good one. Like if you press a button and you don't really know what you need or want and something happens and you're like, I had nothing and now I have something. That something is amazing because it took 10 seconds and you clicked a button and then it showed up. But it does not relate to if it's the right thing. I think that's where the biggest like that is kind of like, I guess, similar to the like just Photoshop it button. If you really don't know what you want and you click this button.
you'll get something and if you don't know what you want, then you can't know if it's right when you get it. If that makes sense. Am I kind of in line with maybe where you're like, where the spirit of the like, what are you talking about? You don't know what you're talking about kind of came from.
Zach Stevens (04:53)
I think that that is part of it. The novelty of like, couldn't do these things before and now I can. That's how I felt when we were like, you know, just getting started with cloud code and felt like I had the potential to do things that as a designer, I know would have taken a really long time to code by hand or even to communicate to a developer effectively. ⁓ and the fact that, I mean, you can look at conversion factories website, that's spark animation. That's on our homepage.
or hero, that would have taken weeks to try and do by hand. And I could do it because I'm familiar with the terminology. I was able to communicate what I did and did not want with enough technical sophistication that the bot understood me and with a good amount of patience. Because doing that still took...
Corey Haines (05:28)
you
Zach Stevens (05:45)
like half an hour to nail and really get right. was like, no, no, it's not. Because it initially gave me things like flying embers all over the screen that looked like these really weird solar flares that you would make in Illustrator or Photoshop and they were ugly. So it still took a lot of finesse and that's half an hour spent on one animated piece of our website to get that level of polish. And the funny thing is it's like,
You obviously trust us based on the caliber of our website, because that's where we get judged on our work. It's like if our site looked like garbage, no one would come work with us. And I can tell you...
that it's not something that's done in one shot or an hour or even several hours. It took time. And we also had an aesthetic established before we jumped into that, which is a big piece of it and getting alignment on it between the three of us of like, this is where we're going. We're starting from nothing. It's ex nihilo creation that then has to be agreed upon and get consensus before we move forward. And that's made
Nick Loudon (06:54)
Mm-hmm.
Zach Stevens (07:00)
doubly long when it's not you guys who trust me and our team to just do stuff, where it's somebody who's gonna have other opinions. And that's fine, they should have opinions about the way that things look and the way they sound, way that they, like the way things feel. But it's not gonna get done in six minutes.
Nick Loudon (07:19)
Mm-hmm.
We have design, we have creative direction, we have copy for the entire home page, we have all of our images, all of our graphics, we had ⁓ case studies, case study images. We had everything to then develop it, and it still isn't like a one-click, I just built 11 pages in six minutes. That isn't how it works. Or at least if we tried to do it like that, the output would be incorrect. ⁓
Zach Stevens (07:48)
Yeah.
Well, mean, so Corey, I'm interested to hear what you think about this because you've done this as a non-designer and like, what do you think about that perspective? I mean, I, I'm full aware of like, if you can get something out there that gets traffic and gets you people signing up for your website, go for it, man. You got to start somewhere. But when you're coming to somebody else, I feel like I had this thought actually, it's like, if you.
are gonna pay somebody the level of amount of money that you like the amount of money that you were going to pay us even just on a monthly basis if you pay anybody $6,000 to do something that you could do yourself in five minutes you're a retard
Corey Haines (08:29)
You
Nick Loudon (08:31)
Don't pay
Corey Haines (08:32)
that that
isn't a very apt observation. Yeah, it's true. I mean, if, if you could just do the exact same thing in five minutes, then like go for it. And I feel like that's been a lot of the conversation that we've been having is cool. If you can, why don't you do it? And the answer is because they don't and they can't. Every time I hear somebody say, well, uh, I'm not going to say who, but I had another comment today about someone who was like, Oh, um,
Can't you just do this with your $200 a month cloud code subscription? And my answer is, yeah, let's see what you got. It's not going to be the top tier level of design and copy and SEO perfection that we put out. and, and maybe one day you can, but that day is not today. And I don't really think that you will be able to one shot those types of things. It takes a lot of rounds of
iteration, lot of polish, a lot of, ⁓ going through like over and over and over again and experimenting with different layouts. Because if you do want something that breaks the mold of what the AI slop, ⁓ generators just create from the get-go, ⁓ then it's going to take time. just by default or sorry, by definition, you're going to have to spend a lot more time on it than the average person to get something.
that doesn't look average that they created. ⁓ so I just don't think that they're actually spending the time to do it or to try it. It's just like baked baked in their head now. Like you said, with Photoshop, I that's actually a really, really good analogy where they have this conception that, in five minutes you can just use Photoshop to fix anything and turn a beach dwell into a bikini babe. That's not how it works. It's going to take a long time to do that. ⁓ and so you hire us to,
not only spend the time to do that level of polish and to get at that level of quality, but also to have a better starting point in the first place where you don't have to transform something ugly into something beautiful. We just make something beautiful to start with and then we can get it from 90 to 100 much quicker.
Nick Loudon (10:32)
you
Corey Haines (10:52)
That's kind of what, I don't know, every time I hear it too, I'm like, well, I think the bar is just getting way, way higher. Like, sure, maybe to you this is a really nice website. I don't think it's a very nice website, to be honest. Yeah, like.
Zach Stevens (11:04)
Not to us, no. I've
never seen somebody who said that, who has sent over a site. It was like, hey, you know, that's nice. Never. I've never ever come across somebody who had one shot at it in like six minutes and got something gorgeous.
Nick Loudon (11:22)
Yeah, I was going to ask because I think the craziest part about this to me is that, in my opinion, humble opinion, we are of the more AI forward, creative marketing agency. You know, there's there's other people who do the same type of work as us. And from what I can see, it feels like a lot of agencies.
kind of die when they don't adapt. They have a way of doing things. They like doing things that way and they know it works to some extent and so they don't want to change it when the new tool or the new thing shows up. I feel like we aren't that. We're like new thing.
This is, you know, there's a new thing that's actually like helpful and is kind of like integrating itself into this work. And we want to be the experts in that thing. And so of this group of people, we're some of the more willing to dive into that. Yet we still, I can't imagine what the other agencies level of pushback is on. Well, no, you can't. We can't use Claude to do that. Like that would be, that would be bad. Or like we can't use any AI to help us with, to help with copywriting. Obviously,
Zach Stevens (12:27)
You
Nick Loudon (12:32)
like, hey, we're not just pushing a button and then giving it to you like, here's your copy. There's work that goes into it, but I can't imagine the level of pushback that people get. That being said, we are using it.
⁓ But we all can agree that it's not a push a button fix problem thing. And Zach, I know you kind of mentioned like this is just kind of like reshuffling the work where the work lives. And so maybe I know his daughter is knocking on the door. Yeah, well, it's cute. It's all good. ⁓ Maybe you can give us an idea of like when you say, hey, this is kind of just reshuffling how the work gets done. And why can you kind of like break down
Zach Stevens (13:04)
Yeah, she is.
Nick Loudon (13:16)
that thought and maybe we can all color it with some awesome conversion factory knowledge.
Zach Stevens (13:22)
So, sorry,
I was distracted by a little munchkin outside my door. You were, you were, you were asking when I say that this is just a reshuffling of how things were done previously, ⁓ but with an augmented base, well, like.
Nick Loudon (13:25)
That's fine.
Zach Stevens (13:40)
Until it is actually like a Willy Wonka level of like I push a button and all of a sudden there's this beautiful thing in front of me and that happens 10 out of 10 times, you always need a human in the loop. You need someone who is directing the charge. I mean like the difference now is that you like.
I haven't touched client work or like most design files in a while, because we have a team that executes on Figma for me and takes a lot of the ideas that I come up with and then is the hands and feet to them. The difference is now everybody on our team has hands and feet in the form of an agent that is going and creating things, but you are still directing and it's almost like.
It's totally different of like all of our designers now are now creative directors guiding a developer to bring things to life that they had otherwise envisioned. It also doesn't take away from the fact that you still need a bunch of other assets that get created to put into your site and give life to it. Sure. There's some instances where, like if you're doing an abstraction for a software, Claude's really good at doing that.
but now you have to double check it and make sure, is it actually pulling away the right information? Is it adding color in appropriate places? Is there anything that I can do that will embellish this to make it feel more branded and bespoke? All of that has to be dictated. And we're dictating the smallest details that I can fathom. I'm saying things like, move this inner shadow at like,
200 milliseconds, two pixels down or the REM equivalent on hover and then have it go exactly back out the same way. It's the same, same level of detail and prescription that I'm, that I would otherwise be executing in Webflow or Figma. But I'm just talking to it now. And there's even a little bit of a trade off there as far as timing, because I can move a lot faster and quicker in Webflow than I can in, or in, Figma than I can in Claude code for details. Like that's where you run into the.
this messy trade off of like, Claude's great at doing big swats of work, but it is not fast at the detail stuff where changing a bunch of things haptic real time is time consuming. Like I can make four variations of a button, change the color on each of them, change the border stroke on all of them in Figma in 30 seconds.
But to do that in Claude, it's gonna take me twice as long to try and do that.
Nick Loudon (16:32)
Mm-hmm.
Zach Stevens (16:35)
So.
Nick Loudon (16:35)
Can
I let me play devil's advocate because if I'm listening I'm like still not worth the money maybe you know like I'm just gonna like not I agree with what you're saying and that there's reason to it, but so someone listening might be like I Don't care about the two pixel hover and I don't care about the little details. I just need it to go live I just need it to you know, it's all about speed speed speed speed speed ⁓ Is it that they're not seeing that?
Zach Stevens (16:44)
Yeah.
Nick Loudon (17:02)
the quality that you put out is directly kind of related to the quality of the product that they're buying or the service that they're buying. Is that the reason to care more about those details?
Zach Stevens (17:14)
100%, but right now, particularly when you are building a software company, your website is the equivalent of a storefront.
Like when you look at the windows inside of an Apple store or Louis Vuitton or Hermes or anything that has any kind of semblance of design and intentionality, you can very clearly see that they put thought into even things like the trim, the flooring of their shop because it matters. put like, you know when you get a good tag on like, you you go into a store and a shirt has a super cool tag on it.
someone actually paid attention to that. And that's cool. That's why this has a higher price tag on it. And if you say, well, my product's not a premium product, it's like, doesn't matter because you are going to, do you want to be the person who looks like they don't care or do you want to be the person who looks like they do? Because if you don't, there's nothing economically smart about being stupidly ugly.
Nick Loudon (18:17)
There's nothing economically smart about looking stupidly ugly. It should be on a t-shirt. I want that completely out of context on a shirt. that's so good. Corey, you take a lot of one shots at things. You take a lot of one shots at websites and stuff. So I kind of want to hear your flavor to it.
Corey Haines (18:24)
That's a line right there, bars.
Zach Stevens (18:25)
Thank you, Jordan Peterson.
people
Corey Haines (18:42)
Yeah, one more thought about that just a little bit earlier was just that, okay, let's just say that it does take five minutes because at some point, well, not at some point, just the way that the LMS go, the models, the other research they do, they get better over time, right? So maybe today, yeah, it takes five minutes to make something pretty mediocre, but like not horrible, right? Maybe it takes.
let's just say it takes three hours to get something really, really good, right? Um, and then maybe in three months it takes two hours and another three months it takes one hour. That doesn't change anything because at the end of the day, someone has to be in the driver's seat doing this, working with the agents to produce this. And number two, that value is going to get passed along to the client. And that's why I think that our altitude are on a horn, but our pricing model is pretty
impervious to these kinds of changes and updates because, ⁓ we're not charging per deliverable. We're not charging for, ⁓ a certain guaranteed amount of anything. We are a retainer. And so with our number of work streams that you have active, we can crank things out at the speed at which the tools allow us to. And that will just get passed on to the client. So it doesn't change anything. If at the end of the day,
we end up producing things in five minutes for our clients. Then guess what? The client's going to see something five minutes later and then they're going to see the next thing the next five minutes later. Right. But, um, yeah, going back to the one shots, uh, yeah, there's, there's this tweet that someone had recently and they're like, there's going to be two types of people. And this is like the dynamic duo in the age of AI. There's going to be, they had these really clever names from them forgetting now, but there's going to be the person to
Zach Stevens (20:12)
Great.
Corey Haines (20:38)
basically go from like zero to 80 and they're going to start something. They're going to flush it out, outline it. They're going to get a V one. They're going to kind of one shot it and then they're going to leave it and move on to the next thing. And then person number two is going to take it from 80 to a hundred. They're going to be the Polishers, the connectors, the person that makes it work, the QA's it, that takes it to that next level and applies that level of
craftsmanship and detail and hands on attention. And so, yeah, I one shot a lot of things. I was doing it yesterday where I just one shot it like four pages. And then I was like, Hey guys, take a look. Let me know what you think. I'm not going to spend all the time to nitpick it and detail it and like go through all of it because it's actually better and more valuable. Yeah. For one, I'm, I have a ceiling.
Nick Loudon (21:11)
you
Zach Stevens (21:31)
You wouldn't be able to do it anyway. ⁓
Corey Haines (21:36)
I have a cap on my talent and able to take it over the finish line. But number two, you guys with fresh eyes are going to be able to uncover and tell me things that a lot faster that would take me a lot longer to find the same things probably. And so, ⁓ I think that that, that working relationship and that model of like, yes, there's always going to be the five minute zero to 81 shot, but then there's also always going to be the
one hour, 80 to 100 polishing, refining, iterating. And the devil's in the details. know, there's, this is how work has gone forever, especially here in the internet where it's like the last 10 % takes 90 % of the time. Cause there's just so much detail and there's so much polish and there's so much ⁓ work and creativity that goes into making something go from good to great. And that's our job. Our job is to make it go from good to great.
People can go DIY going from bad to good all day long. I'm happy to let them do that. Sure, go ahead. But as soon as they want something to go from good to great, that's where they're going to start to feel that ceiling. That's where I feel that ceiling personally and why you always need someone to come in and, and bring it over the finish line.
Zach Stevens (22:52)
Totally.
Yeah. mean, well, even like the, like the stuff that I was doing for ministry match, Corey, like the, illustrations, there's no way that that's going to, Claude can't do that. It physically cannot create those illustrations. Believe me, I've tried and it can't do it. So you have to use other models and then even using other models, it's like, these are
Corey Haines (23:03)
Yeah, exactly.
Zach Stevens (23:22)
To put it into perspective, to have someone do those illustrations by hand the way that they look, maybe we can have Michael show them just so people get a feel for what I'm talking about. To achieve that level of consistency and have somebody else do that for you, you're gonna be paying, bare minimum, just for three of them, $1,000 a piece.
So 3000 bucks for each one of those illustrations. It's also not easy to achieve that same kind of consistency with the AI. It's getting better with the node-based tools and AI's recognition of these things,
It's small details like that that actually make the entire website delightful and useful and set you apart from everybody else and help you create the aesthetic that supports the message that makes you irreplaceable and unlike anybody else.
Corey Haines (24:18)
Yeah.
Nick Loudon (24:19)
Yeah, before we
continue, I have something really important, which is I did not know we could ask Michael to do things. So can Michael, you put a cowboy hat on my head and like a toupee on Zach and I want to see. Yeah, you're to have a toupee. then Corey, I want you to shave his head. So I want him to be bald. There's no way this happens. He's just going to put like no on the screen or he won't even notice. So, OK, sorry, Corey, you're going to say something.
Corey Haines (24:28)
You
Zach Stevens (24:30)
I don't want it to pay.
Corey Haines (24:37)
switch.
test.
Now I was going to say like on principle, right? Any one of these examples that we could give about, okay, today, cloud code can't do this. It's going to be hard for anybody to do this. So you have to have someone with the level of expertise and time to do that. That thing is going to be available for the masses in the next six months. Just like that's like the rule of AI now, right? But that doesn't matter because then in six months there's going to be another thing.
that AI is going to struggle with that if you want to take it to the next level and go above what the other person does, it's going to take that level of care craft expertise and the know-how with the two lanes to be able to make it work. So there's always going to be this carrot to chase of, okay, now that everybody is doing these products, UI illustrations, and that's pretty easy to do. Now they all start to blend together and what is going to be the thing that helps me stand out? now it's going to be,
these custom, uh, you know, painted, um, pictures basically that are like overlaying behind a, I don't even know how to describe them. It's really, yeah, like lifestyle, artistic pictures, editorial art. Okay. Now AI is good at that. Now the thing that's gonna help me stand out is why now the things that was done about is Z and so on and so forth. So there's never going to be a point where
Nick Loudon (25:55)
Like NFTs.
Zach Stevens (25:57)
Like
editorial art.
Nick Loudon (26:12)
That is so true.
Corey Haines (26:15)
where like, okay, AI checks the boxes on everything. My job was obsolete. Going from good to great is always going to require the experts to come in and get you there.
Nick Loudon (26:27)
Yeah, like there's problems that we don't know we have yet. Like we don't know about the problems that we need to solve until the AI starts to solve the problems that we currently have. Or like we're the ones who can solve it and then at some point the AI will solve it and then we'll realize the next problem higher on the list. there's never gonna be a point where we're all just, you know, like Wally sitting in chairs and just like screens in our eyes. Well.
I shouldn't say never, but we are a long ways away from not having a problem that a human would then solve on top of the AI. Also something worth noting when you were talking, Corey, about that example of there's the zero to 80 people and then there's the 80 to 100 people. It makes me think of the like, what's rule? About 20 % of the work producing 80 % of the value.
Zach Stevens (27:20)
Yep.
Nick Loudon (27:20)
It's the
same idea, and we hit this a lot with clients. Like the amount of times that we're meeting with someone or we're working on something, and they're like, I just want you to do this thing, and that is the AD thing. And we have to be like, hold on, I need you to just be ready that we're gonna ask to do something after that that seems more boring, seems less useful, seems more painstaking, and it takes longer, but we know that it will be the highest producing potentially part of the process.
but it's not flashy, it's not a new site launch necessarily, it's not even like a new logo or new colors, like it's not even necessarily like the thing that's the most exciting and seems to make the biggest splash. It's like the dumbest, smallest thing like A, testing a headline or rewriting your onboarding emails. It's like all these are like some of the most boring marketing tasks that can have the strongest amount of lift. And I think that's worth noting with your example. ⁓
Zach Stevens (28:03)
Yeah.
Nick Loudon (28:18)
Yeah. OK, Zach, what else you want to go through with this topic? Is there anything we left unsaid?
Zach Stevens (28:24)
Sure,
think one thing to touch on was, so that person who mentioned that I want to color a little bit more context and give the show where I think AI is actually extremely powerful and that is as a multiplier. Here's the issue and the difference that I want to point out. What this person had referenced was they said they created...
Several different versions of a template page that already existed meaning all they did was swap out copy and maybe some images, which I don't know if they had or if the AI was generating abstractions for it. Maybe they didn't even need to change out images because that's entirely possible too. It could just be the same image and then they're swapping out the copy.
That's going from one to 50 and adding a multiplier within there. If you multiply 50 times zero or 0.5,
you end up like, cut yourself short. like, yeah, you have 50 blog posts, but they're only worth 25 because you multiplied it by, with a half-baked thing. You know, that kind of force multiplier doesn't work until you have a solid integer, a whole integer that you can then work off of. And if you're starting with nothing, it's not gonna multiply anything. It can't do anything with nothing.
Nick Loudon (29:34)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, it's like almost like a template like an email template. You're like if I just send a million emails, I will make money and you're just your email template is like just crap. It's like you're actually doing it work. It's actually making it worse by sending more emails. You need like an at least okay one to send to a million people better yet have a perfect one to send to a hundred like you niche harder target harder better craft equals like a better result per se. Sorry, Corey. I cut you off.
Corey Haines (30:13)
People,
people have actually always thought about this for a lot of other parts of marketing, like blog posts, for example, because AI solved texts a long time ago, right? People started cranking out mass amounts of blog posts. were like, I'm going to create thousands of blog posts and I'm going to get millions of visitors to my site. And then the opposite happened. Google penalized them and then they got no traffic whatsoever and they were banned and their domain was completely shot.
And, ⁓ and people are still tempted to do this. They're like, well, if I can write about anything, I'll just write about everything. So they write all these blog posts and then Google doesn't know what to rank them for, why they should be ranking. ⁓ the blog posts themselves are bad. They're not ranking on the first page of Google. And that's, that's because again, in order to produce something that is first page worthy and that is actually good, and they'll actually get you customers as well.
you can't just rely on the first thing that AI spits out for a blog post. You have to take the time to guess what? Take it from good to great to go from 80 to a hundred to polish it, to refine it, to add to it, to beef it up. And you have to keep doing that for every one of your blog posts, not just the first one. because yeah, they can like drag everything else down. ⁓ and so I like, I like that example of like, yeah, if you scale,
crap, you still have crap.
Nick Loudon (31:43)
haha
Zach Stevens (31:43)
Yeah.
Well, I mean, so they, they did multiply it by a whole number. It was just the wrong side of zero. They, they multiply to three, was three times or negative three times 50. So it brought them way, way down further than they could have imagined. Yeah. It's a multiplier. That's what it comes down to. It's not a, you have to give it something in order to go up, go off of in order for it to be really, really effective. It's got to have a, a good element to then work.
Otherwise it's going to flop. It's worse if you give it something bad for it to then replicate and work with. Yeah.
Nick Loudon (32:27)
Okay, what should people do? me a, I'm SaaS founder and I just hit 10K MRR and I can't, I don't wanna pay for a service or another company to do it and I'm on my own. Give me at least like, give me like two things, okay? Like don't do this and do this or something along those lines. I feel like, I wanna try to make sure we leave with like, you can do this. Yeah, like you're not doom and gloom and you will die without us, you know?
Zach Stevens (32:49)
positivity.
Well,
I don't think that you'll die without us. If you have ⁓ 10,000K MRR, you're doing something right. What's going to happen is you are going to realize the extent of your capabilities as a founder.
are limited, even with AI. Especially if you care about the design, if you care about the copywriting, if you care about all of those polished details, and you should, because other people will, and if you don't, then it's going to come across. Your time is gonna be better spent elsewhere. That's what it's going to come down to.
And until the AI is able to completely take this off your plate and produce something to your standard in a timeline that is of use to you, because right now it can't, it might to, might be able to at some point, you have to decide what is more valuable, your time spent working on this or...
Is it spent better somewhere else? I'm going to wager that it's better spent somewhere else, unless you want to go to design school and put in the thousands of hours that it takes to develop your eye and sharpen it, and then be able to use that on your project as it stands right now. Cause even with like the front end design skills, it messes up. It's not perfect. And even
our site, it's not perfect, it's really really good, it's not perfect and you don't have the time to dedicate all the hours to this. You're not a copywriter, you're not a designer and that's okay. Part of becoming a good founder is relinquishing some of that control to other people that are better suited to do it than you are. If you want to get better at it, you as a founder got to get out of your own way.
Nick Loudon (34:54)
Hmm.
Zach Stevens (34:55)
I'm not going to tell you to go learn design courses because that is a giant waste of your time.
Nick Loudon (35:01)
Especially as a founder, don't do it. Don't go do that.
Corey Haines (35:06)
Yeah. Yeah. Of course there's always this question of taste too. So it's like, well, if you just want to be able to avoid making generic slop or kind of things that are average compared to the average person study what's really, really good and like get some tastes, get out there and dissect and analyze and really think about what makes something
great versus just being good and, ⁓ and have some opinions, have some style, have some, ⁓ be able to notice and appreciate things that are outside of your own opinions and style. ⁓ and then practice going from zero to 80 and then going from 80 to a hundred, not being content with just what's good and what AI produces in the one shot, but pushing it and going further and being able to understand and nitpick, okay, these are the things that it usually struggles with and
these are the things that I need to fix every time. And, ⁓ that'll, I think that'll help people avoid producing something that will just make them blend in with everyone else. And then also be able to appreciate the value of getting someone else to take it over the finish line for them. ⁓ and when necessary and when you have the resources to be able to hire that out and delegate that.
Nick Loudon (36:32)
My sense is that the AI there's good like the AI hesitation when it comes to buying software is not It's gonna be around for a while like even just before this we saw a random website, right? And I was like obvious AI website calm, know, it's like blue buttons white background like everything you would expect ⁓ and When I visit sites like that my I have like a very innate just like automatic like
discount that happens in my head. And it's not because I hate AI. In fact, I used to really hate AI and all that stuff. But as it goes on, I'm like, this is amazing. ⁓ But I still have that like, is there anyone out there like hello, know, like tapping on the glass where no one's behind the curtain and ⁓ the mess and the like little things in a website that make it obvious that people worked on it.
are actually still valuable and they do actually provide a lot of relationship to customers.
Zach Stevens (37:35)
We, it's gonna like.
You think of beauty as just like a superficial thing, but it is probably one of the biggest biological indicators that we have as a species. You know, if you look at somebody and you're, say you're looking for a perspective mate. If you see someone that is like, let's, know, overweight or, ⁓ it looks like they might have something wrong with them on the surface. It's an indicator that are not healthy. And so you are not going to waste your time with it. It's the same thing.
Nick Loudon (38:02)
you
Zach Stevens (38:09)
happens with food, right? If you look at a piece of fruit and it doesn't look appetizing or appealing, perhaps it's, you know, the nicely, like you look at a tree of apples and let's say all the apples are misshapen even though they all look very ripe, but some of them are off. You know, like you have some that are kind of wonky, maybe one started growing it over a twig and it's got this giant twig sticking out of it. And you see the one apple that is perfectly shaped or
It's like, it's the most well constructed out of all of them. It's beautiful. Which one are you going to pick? Which one are you going to trust with your calories and your life? Cause it could be poisoned. There's like, I'm going to bet that that one right there that looks the best is the safest bet for me. And we do the same thing with everything else.
Nick Loudon (38:44)
Beautiful.
Yeah.
Zach Stevens (39:05)
You know, if you, it's a trust signal. It tells you, I'm worth the calories. If you spend time with me, I'm not going to waste your energy and make you die quicker.
Nick Loudon (39:18)
Yeah.
Corey Haines (39:19)
Maybe, maybe
the only exception to that rule is sumo oranges, cause those things are delicious and they look atrocious. Sumo oranges, they look atrocious. They look like they are literally diseased.
Nick Loudon (39:24)
What oranges?
Zach Stevens (39:26)
They look what? Sumo or? Yeah.
Yeah, but that's like, it's in the context of a Sumo Orange. It's different if like, it's rotting or has like mold on it or fuzzies, you know, that's, that's what the, that's what the AI imperfections would be. So.
Corey Haines (39:36)
I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
It still
does look very plump and ripe. I'm gonna eat one after this.
Zach Stevens (39:50)
Yeah, you could tell
it. It sends signals to your brain. It says, that's good. I can eat that. That's okay.
Nick Loudon (39:57)
Yeah,
those plump signals. You got to take those, Cory. ⁓ Okay, I know you guys gave some of those, your kind of like more practical thoughts. I guess I suppose my parting thought is there's a little bit, there's quite a bit of fool's gold still with the AI marketing trends. And that is that you can do everything for everyone.
If you use AI in the right way, your product can serve all these different ICPs, your website can speak to all these different people, but that's really not what you should be doing. You should be making, you should be doing more for one ICP. You should be doing more for one, you know, group and basically taking what you already have and making it better rather than taking what you have and being like, I could just repurpose this for these thousands of groups of people and be, and you could just thousand X my, my
you know, MRR or whatever, that's not really how it works yet, but it can help you do things pretty good. Like you can have something now and actually make it better just by asking, Claude, how can I make this better? It might actually help you. ⁓ So I think, yeah, that's, guess my main takeaway from the conversation is don't try to do more than you should just because it could go fast.
Because it probably will hurt you more than help you any final thoughts. know we're kind of over already overtime anything else You guys want to talk about before we peace?
Zach Stevens (41:26)
I think I've said enough.
Nick Loudon (41:28)
You said enough, yeah. Cory?
Corey Haines (41:29)
Yeah, there's
no silver bullets, only a thousand gold BBs and AI is not a silver bullet for copy, for marketing, for design, for development. It's pretty fricking cool. It's definitely, there's a lot of golden BBs, but it's not going to be something that just completely automates everything once and for all. ⁓ at least not today.
Nick Loudon (41:34)
Yep.
Yeah.
Yeah. Awesome. Great work, gentlemen. OK. We will talk to you guys next time. Peace out.