AI, SEO, and Automation: How to start marketing a new product category? Interview with Joost de Valk

it's a lot harder than it was so let's go back to when I launched y SEO this was now 15 years ago almost when I started uh started coding on that when I started doing SEO and I'm as you can see I'm old we could still look at pit Rank and we could buy links and we could say hey we've gotten this to a pr8 the existential angst that that an entrepreneur needs to some EXT send I guess is lacking hello everyone my name is mai Novak and welcome to the awesome to know podcast where we discuss all things related to building great websites my today's guest is Yos deok maybe best known for building his famous y SEO plugin Yos and his team have recently launched a new product and we are taking this as an example to discuss the cold start problem meaning how do you start marketing a new product category and U building from zero to creating that category we also talk about SEO and how y looks at the current SEO game from his over 15 years of um experience we also touch on on building versus selling software products if you don't want to miss new episodes and keep learning more about building great websites please subscribe to our newsletter at awesome studio.com newsletter this is oomm studio.com newsletter if you are watching this on YouTube give us a thumb and subscribe to our Channel this means our to us without further Ado please enjoy my conversation with Y [Music] the hey everyone it's good to have you here we're glad you decided to tune in for this episode of the awesome to know podcast hello host how are you I'm very good hi thanks for having me yeah my pleasure my pleasure um let's get straight to the you know to questions and I have a very big question for you have you ever been a person of non grata before um well maybe in high school a bit but that no that's I don't even think that's true I do think some of my teacher maybe disliked me but um uh no I I don't think I've ever been in this weird position before where you want to actually change a project for the better for everyone uh and someone responds like this that's I think that is putting you on a you know in a spotlight right like everyone is looking now at you because of being you know put in this position yeah I I guess so and um it you know the thing is I would like for all of us to get along and do and work together in a way that that actually moves us all forward and this makes that harder not impossible I still think but harder yeah not a constructive approach would you say it would not be the approach I would take all right that's very nice nicely um let's maybe like move on to other nice topics I I I don't want you you know to celebrate that no I think the negativity isn't worth a whole lot I I do think that um we all still need to get together and move forward in a in a way that that works for everyone and I still want to do that and I want to include everyone in that and everyone I've been I'm talking to and working with wants the same thing I think we all want to get rid of that negativity and also get rid of the fear that is very palpable in a lot of people because I can say a lot of these things because I don't have all that much to lose in in some ways um so I hope that we'll be able to to get away from that and get to more positive things soon but okay but do you think this is possible like because there is yeah I I I still I still think that's possible if I didn't think that was possible I probably wouldn't have started well I wouldn't have gone into this I went into this quite wide uh Eyes Wide Open knowing that this was one of the risks of what could happen but but I still think that it's very possible to to change this okay all right I'm super curious I and I think like the whole Community is super curious how this will uh evolve because the the longer the situation with the with that conflict like not like not even not like with you but the whole you know problem with WordPress was like boiling now it blew up and the longer that situation is not resolved the more we learn about stuff that happened you know in the past or is happening now or yeah it's it none of it helps anybody I don't think it's good for our Market I think all of us want stability and and then a stable platform that we can all build on um and I also think all of us wants for WordPress to move forward um so yeah I uh I still think that's possible it is not something that you do in a day um and uh well it is made a bit harder by uh the fact that people are afraid to speak up publicly it means that you have to do a bit more in back Chambers which is not really a position that I prefer in many ways I would like to do this more public but it's it's a lot harder because people don't dare to speak up MH yeah and I think rightly so if they are very tightly coupled with uh with the organization technology and you know their livelihood depends on attending ccoms for example right so it's like there is uh you know it's a position of power where uh you can do whatever you want with the contributing members for okay not everything you want but you can make their life extremely more hard for example yes yeah you can all right now we can move to nicer things so uh I think you've been very busy recently like I think I I I I see you've been busy very busy recently building um new product so you can sit still there is ailia capital but then there is also your uh uh a new product you're are building uh for workpl can you tell us a little bit more about the product you know probably you've been asked about this but you know in a nutsh show what what is it and why have you decided to build it so the product is called progress planner um the the idea of the product is that it's hard to maintain a website well and that a lot of people forget both the basic setup tasks and the well the me tasks of Maintenance so we we needed to figure out a way to make that a bit more fun and also a way to keep you working on your website because what we see happen a lot is that people build a website and then spend a lot of time making it better in the beginning H and as they do that um they they start to well work less and less on their site and their site starts to deteriorate and then four years in they actually need to uh need to build a new website because it's also out of date and we want to sort of prevent that and uh and help people do better so do better in terms of keeping their plugins up to date and things like that but also do better in in terms of keeping their about page and their contact page up to date and giving them reminders to do that um and well this it's funny as you if you've been in this space as long as I have then you you can come up with long lists of things that people forget and do wrong in their WordPress site and that we if we can tell them and figure out a way to to give them nudges to do those things better everyone has a better website so that's what progress planner is about it's very much a it takes a lot of uh learnings from du lingo in terms of gamifying how you um um how you do your things and and and gives you badges to to keep stay active on your site and yeah and well with that we try to help you build a better website in in many ways which includes SEO but also a lot of other things like how do you have you removed all the sample content that WordPress comes with for instance um if you look on Google and you you search for the slug of the sample page that ships with WordPress you'll see that loads and loads and loads of companies still have that sample page on their website and there's a whole lot of things like that that would be better if they were removed and fixed M and I I just wanted to comment on the fact that it looks like a sparring partner maybe not a sparring partner but like a personal trainer who keeps you motivated or tells you what to do to stay in shape not get better shape maybe you know not as much but well well we we'll try to even get you in better shape I I I I kind of like that analogy um I I train with a personal trainer three times a week and I have for the last nine years so I know how is how important that can be um so yeah no I I do like that analogy and it is um it is a bit like that where where it tries to be that buddy that that you you um that you help and and that and that that helps you well stay on touch of things because let's be honest most people that um have a website are not like you or me they don't want to maintain a website the website is a thing that they need to do on the side of of all their other stuff um so a bit of reminding every every week that they need maybe should you do one or two small things under side to keep it going well um is probably very welcome M and since this is a new product uh how do you find the you know managing the cold start problem because you know you have to launch a new product how do we go about this um it's hard uh and it's harder than it it's a lot harder than it was so let's go back to when I launched y SEO this was was now 15 years ago almost when I started uh started coding on that um at that point in time there were a lot less plugins the market was a lot less crowded but also the the types of users were a lot more users that looked like me um that that were relatively technical could install a plugin themselves figure out what to do Etc so yosio was built very much with people like that in mind and um over time we slowly progressed that um as my wife ma be came into the company more and we started building more for what I'd Now call average users um and now you start a new WordPress site and you're thrown into a thing and and it's actually hard there's 50,000 plugins out there and I mean like 12,000 of them are maintained but you can't even really diagnose very well without knowing what you're doing which ones are well maintained and which ones are not um so standing out in that market is a lot harder and with yosio we built an SE plugin which people already had an idea of what that concept was they were searching for something that would help them with SEO and they knew that and with progress planner we've we've got one more problem which is that people don't even know that they need this solution so the cold start becomes a bit harder so you need to talk about the topics that they run into and then work from there to what your solution to that is um which is well it's a bit more work it takes a bit more time luckily we have that time uh and and we can afford to uh not make much money on this for a while uh and still build it with the team which I'm really enjoying yeah that's super interesting because um this product being new and the category is not very you know it's a new category I would say right so not only you have to launch a product but also create the category and educate the consumers about the category and um that's a tough I would say category because the gains from the plugins this solution are not obvious it's like your website will be less bad if you do this right so it would won't get it it won't deteriorate you will be in shape would you say I'm somehow right or totally wrong no I I think you're right I think it's it is a bit of a harder marketing story um at the same time I think it's very worth it um so um one of my colleagues AT progress planner John alerson he he was with us at Yos before too we've been working together for a long time he just did this awesome presentation a while ago in which he was talking about making your website 1% better every day and what the compound effects of what that would be and I don't think many people realize what the effect is of just doing a little every day it's just on everything right on everything and it really improves everything which is how dualingo helps you learn a language it's how we try to help you make your website slightly better and the funny thing is that I it's not a pop as popular a story I think as installing an SEO plugin and I'm thinking magically you will start ranking better which is not how it works um but for some reason a lot of people thought that was how it works and I think that what we're trying to do now is going beyond that and actually getting people to put in the work on their website that they need to put in to have a good website um especially in an age of AI where creating content is two seconds work for most things and none of that stands out anymore so you you have to stand out by actually providing the right information at the right time being genuinely helpful and answering the questions that your that your uh visitors have and that also means having a website that's not breaking and not annoying it's it's uh we recently ran our first challenge which we run for pro customers where we did a broken links Challenge and on all of our own websites literally our the my website yos blog jonno's website Ma's website we had broken links and we think we're good at this stuff right we we're supposed to be SEO experts but we didn't have one or two broken links we all had in the dozens because these things happen and because nobody cleans them up but cleaning them up actually does make things better so I think that that is what what we're trying to tell everyone like okay there's there's a lot of these things and we'll guide you through them year by year on like which things on your website can you fix and should you fix um just to have a better website overall all the time and yes that's a bit of work um I would I used to say this about seo seo stands not for search engine optimization which is a weird term anyway if you think about it because you're not optimizing the search engine but for seriously effortful optimization it's a lot of work to do this well it's a lot of work to build a good website but if you're not willing to put in that work then why is the website there in the first place very good question do we need websites these days when you have so many um like the the individuals can become a brand and they can distribute their products I think you still need a website but um you need to think about why it exists and and what it is about so if you are a company then your website should be the best source to learn about your company but that doesn't mean that you don't have to do it anywhere else like if you're if you're a bakery then yes I want you to have a website and and give me the the basic things that I want to know about your bakery from your website but I also want you to update Google Maps and make sure that your opening errors are correct because otherwise I'll be in front of a locked door and I hate I hate doing that so yes you need a website um I don't necessarily think that you need to put out a th000 pieces of content a year that are not good I would much rather rather have you write a couple of good pieces of content that actually help people or that actually answer questions that people have uh and I I one of the things that we also tell you is to go through your old posts and update them which is like things that on a new site maybe don't make the the most sense but on many other types of sites um it makes sense to go back into your how-to articles and figure out if they're still correct because otherwise someone ends up in your how-to article from 2015 and goes like this is not correct anymore and goes back to the search results for tools especially uh like if you have a if you are um SAS and the description isn't accurate because the interface has changed like it's a it's a particular use case where you have a SS website with a lot of howt right or or guides how to do something and then the interface differ from your experience you're stuck because you were looking for help so you don't know how to do this and then you have the added complication of matching the UI from the guide to to what you're using yeah and it's I I think it goes for SAS tools but for pretty much anyone who changes their software or or their things that they have to update their sites as a developer myself one of the things that annoys me most is if people have changed their interfaces in their code and not actually changed their developer documentation um there's a whole lot of these things that happen people change opening hours every day like literally every store in the world changes opening hours and almost every store in the world forgets to update their opening hours in Google maps in the first week and then someone complains about it and they go and do it um I think that that that goes for a lot of these things the amount of times that I filled out a Conta form for the contact form not to work or uh or the contact details on a page not to be correct these are pretty simple things to keep correct and to keep working but you have to be reminded of them you have to actually check them every once in a while because stuff breaks over time I think that's broken links are probably the best example of that we want links to be peral links and to be existent on the web forever but they're not on site the thing that actually broke she has like seven scientific Publications and the link the links that broke were the links to her scientific Publications and I it drives me absolutely mad but even those universities just change the links MH and you had to find out what are the new links and update them yes okay yeah and it's I mean they're still all online it's it's not like it's impossible to find them but why why would people who visit your website take that trouble so yeah I think I think you have to be realistic and and say okay if we want that sort of thing to um if we want people to read that and find that interesting and want to respond to that or do things based on that then it has to be of good quality right and can we get back a little bit to starting that um that product it's so easy now to build something and then there like Twitter is literally litered with people building something in three four five hours obviously how it works is different story but that you can do something with a couple of prompts the promise is there now do you think this is the case that you can build something so easily but sell it so much harder than before yes okay yeah and I and I do I do think that the two are related um developing has become so much faster I literally this morning before we started recording I had an idea last night about how to refector some of the code in our plugin it took me 30 minutes to re do an entire refactor in our plug-in to fix all sorts of of issues because doing that in cursor just is so much easier than than it used to be in the past I I I'm I'm lit literally tabbing through changes and and just doing the first one and then it it understands what I want to do and it and it Go and it's like tap tap tap tap and it and it just does it everywhere and it building new stuff is is super easy too so your product actually has to provide value and and I think that the part of that value in the past used to be in automating things and now it has to be automating things and providing knowledge on top of that or actually adding value on top of the automation um which is a bit harder so you need to actually be capable of doing something to uh and doing it well to make money on the web I think it it does make the whole maker industry online a bit a bit harder for a lot of people because you have to dive deep on a topic and know Automation and then you can still provide real value and I also think that you can still provide still make real good money from it uh but just looking for a niche that you don't know anything about um and then starting to build will probably not result in the best results anymore because someone in that Niche who is not a developer but is smart and and can use a bit of AI can can develop and they have all the knowledge that they need to to actually do something meaningful you mentioned that the the expertise is so much more Val valuable because you can catch up with decoding so much easier I'm thinking about the distribution there's that saying that you know good product will um Prevail but I am not so sure if not the the the best distribution that's why people go to Tik Tok for example to to launch their you know apps and so on because there is there there are hundreds of similar apps but you win with the distribution but I you know that's that's a question I'm I'm that's my hand yeah no I agree uh I I um there was this this thought in the early days of the web if you build it they will will come um because well the web was slightly different it was not as crowded and PE and it was relatively easy to get picked up as something that was new and meaningful um now when you build something there's very often like 15 competitors immediately for what you're doing so you have to actually Stand Out by doing it better and I I think it was always about distribution and about reach um a lot of it was about talking to more people than just your inner circle so as much as I love word camps for instance I think we got more traction with yast from the fact that I was speaking on SEO conferences where are your customers because these these people will decide on the spent on given product that will help them their work exactly and and and it uh I uh I was actually podcasting way back in the day uh I started uh the WordPress podcast on Web Master radio in 2009 and um that was on Web Master radio was an SEO in digital marketing podcasting Network and people heard about WordPress for the first time on the on the podcast as well and started using it because it was good for SEO and I think that uh a lot of what we do in the WordPress world in the last years has been watching internally H and we need to look out a bit more and I need to figure out like when we're building products who are we talking to and how are we reaching those people because I I do think that the WordPress community that we see as the WordPress Community the people attending the word word camps is only a tiny sliver of of the actual WordPress community and you reach those other people in different ways and that's become harder simply because there are uh many more products competing for the same attention that's interesting what you said about broader community that is not present on on on the workc but would you say these are still developers you know know um agency people and and someone who are just not present on on that conference or would you say the group is much broader because you would include for example marketing people who are the consumers who are using Wordpress who build their businesses also business websites on top of Wordpress and by definition this way and users right so and and and well I think all of them go to word camps so marketers end users Etc it's just that the people that go to word camps are a tiny percentage of the overall number of users of Wordpress um which is probably always going to be true right and there's no chance in hell that we're going to have a 250,000 people word Camp Europe at any any point in time it's just it's impossible these things don't work like that which is so it's fine it's just that you have to realize that the tiny community that we see there which isn't tiny when it's thousands of people it's still it's still a big group of people but it's still a relatively small group of people compared to the overall usage of Wordpress and a lot of those people were not reaching through talking at a work camp we would probably reach them better to when we speak somewhere else so in the past for for us that used to be affiliate and SEO conferences where we reached a lot of the people that started installing Yos SEO in the beginning and now well we we have to think about that that again and have to look at a new avenues of of doing that so one of the things that uh some companies have done quite successfully is is just talking to hosts they get the new uh customers in they can actually promote new things to their customers and uh if it's beneficial to them so it's definitely something that we are uh talking about um and there so there you have to look at like where is the where does the power actually lie where does the breach actually exist where do where can you find those people and in the past that also used to be Twitter for instance but that's also a lot harder because a we've spread out across Tik Tok Twitter blue sky and all these different networks so there's no longer one or two networks where you can reach everyone easily and also there it's a lot more crowded so there's a lot more yeah you you haven't mentioned LinkedIn and is by om Mission or by you know coincidence or no I I actually do use LinkedIn a lot I probably use LinkedIn more than the other networks [Music] um I hate it when people use LinkedIn to promote their product uh because I do think that's more of a business relations Network than it is but yeah I do think that LinkedIn is very useful um and I but I also think that this is exactly the problem right so LinkedIn X or Twitter or whatever you want to call it Blue Sky um Tik Tok Facebook for if you're if you're targeting older people like there all these things still exist um but they are harder to get your message across aome so I'm also curious about um what you mentioned that you have time you you have fun building don't get this question like you know aggressive or intrusive but could it be like a count a counterproductive approach maybe where you think you have time and and and fun and not push for sales uh I I don't know what's your strategy but if you maybe drag or not push know is it is definitely a problem yeah I I I I will say that if if you're uh if you need to make money faster you'll probably get to uh to some better results there's the the existential angst that a that an entrepreneur needs to some extent I guess is lacking um I I do think that it took us a while but we are now at the point where we are replacing that existential Ang with actual um like being really really happy about what we're building and and being really enthusiastic about the product um but the funny thing is to a large degree making money has not been my driving motivation for for quite some time anymore um I just want to build a better web and and I think that we can help in that and that's really that sounds really big right but it is like when when you've built software like Yos where like six to eight% of the web is using your software you you actually start having a real impact on on how the web works and what you can do and I I think we can do that again and I think we we can once again um help people build better websites and whether we make tons of money in that process is not really the most interesting thing to me okay um and um you mentioned I also want to touch up on the SEO part uh I can't just not do this and I'm curious you know with your perspective you know starting so early in the SEO you know any kind of SEO work with this I'm leading to the space for SEO is changing as well as fast probably um as the tools are and the technolog is changing so I'm curious you know what what's your take look think on on the SEO from that helicopter view from that you know p with that huge perspective you have because of AI there's a ton of content coming on the web that looks relatively okay even when it's not real real um substance to it it it it looks like you you've really spent a long time writing something um I think that reasonably good content is no longer good enough you actually have to stand out and at the same time for a lot of websites it really means you just have to provide the Val the value that people are looking for so if you are a architect then what you should be talking about is who you are what makes you different in your projects and and and show some of your projects because that's what people want to know when they when they're looking for an architect and for an SEO that is weird right because we used to have like all these content strategies where we'd create tons of content to to get people to to rank higher that's no longer a way with in which to differentiate yourself because everybody can do that and in a lot of topics I think we can just say to some degree that the web is full like there's enough content about a whole lot of topics so what you need to figure out is what makes you different and what makes it so that search engines and AI uh tools will actually talk about you and that is funnny enough back to Old School marketing what makes you stand out why are you important branding becomes so much more important again and it's like you are on the market and there's you're you're walking around on a very large Market which stalls do you go to what what makes that difference it's no different with this um and there's no longer any any cheap hacks I think I I think that a lot of people that learned SEO in the last decade learned SEO by looking at a whole lot of tools like the ah RS the mozes ETC of this world and while those tools can be helpful in some ways they won't help you provide an actual marketing strategy and funnily enough I have not changed my SEO tactics all that much over the last 15 years because I've always been very holistic about these things I think that good SEO should be an integration of good content good branding good PR and these things should work together together and I think that becomes even more important now because if you want to show up in an AI overview then people will know need to know about your brand you'll need to actually have people remember you um so all of it well basically comes back to the same thing at the same time building a technically solid website is cheaper and easier than it ever was but most people still fail at it so I do still think that it that it takes that that part of building a website is actually important um and that for a lot of things especially if you have larger websites technical SEO is actually still a very important expertise because you have to talk to people about why is this not getting crawled why and why do you have these errors what is happening here you have to be able to diagnose that and funnily enough I don't think a whole lot of the people that have done SEO in the last decade actually know a lot know how to fix a lot of these issues and how about stuff that is like you know backlinks domain auth Authority um things like this where is it is it still relevant to I don't know GA links you know pointing to your website or it's like you know 10% or 5% I don't think you can talk about it in that sense it depends very much on who you are what you do there's no one size fits all rule um I I think that back links are if you do it well backlinks are the result of people talking about you which is very needed so I'm not going to say that you don't need Links of course you need links but you shouldn't be chasing the links you should be chasing the fact that people are talking about you and and linking to you and and whether they actually link to you or just talk about your brand is becoming less and less relevant I think I I think that the bigger search engines and all AIS are smart enough to combine these things just if they recognize your name and the context and and they will know what what is being talked about most of the time that does mean that you have to have a brand that is recognizable as such um but so I I think that domain Authority and all those terms don't really mean any anything and at the same time they are a quantification of something that is very real which is people talking about your brand people talking searching for your brand people uh linking to you because they thought you were cool or because they thought you were awful um and I I think that's always been important and in the past we when I started doing SEO and I'm as you can see I'm old um we could still look at Pat Rank and we could buy links and we could say hey we've gotten this to a pr8 and even then you could rank for a whole lot of things but if the traffic wasn't relevant to you then it didn't help you much mhm that's that's that's super interesting because let's assume you are building a new website you you you are starting a business you you you created your uh website for your product and it has you know a new domain it has zero reputation again a cold start problem not for a product but for a website what can you do about this you start from zero right well do so yeah you start from zero so you so you do something meaningful you build a website you do uh you come up with with the content that needs to be on there because you probably built that website for something you built it because you have something to say or something to sell or and then you do that bid really well and you do that not just on your own website but on all these outposts out there and you talk about it and you link people back to to what you're doing you provide them with real value it's no different than it has been to launch a product in the last 200 years in many ways it's just now the market is a bit more crowded and so in the beginning there were 50 souls and now they're at 20,000 and you have to stand out and you so you have to be creative about your marketing and I think that is in many ways which you have to be in in many of the things that we do now that AI helps us do all the menial tasks very quickly the creativity is was becoming really important again MH and I I saw a man uh a couple of days ago there is a old grandfather with his grandson and he's on sitting on his lap and and The Grandfather's saying oh but no Johnny don't use these apps take these apps that your grandfather coded with real hands not the stuff you have now all code generated and stuff like like I can't convey the how funny was it for me but it was spot on that some stuff is being replaced by you know some jobs or or tasks Minal tasks but it's it's being replaced like by Ai and this one hand you know eradicates a lot of different jobs at the other hand provides space for you know faster speed you know it allows you to run at faster pace so a lot of more stuff is going to to happen but with that I wanted to refer to the to what you said that the creativity is um is again becoming key we I think we had a short period where everyone was just blinded by what can be done with with ch gpt3 I think uh which would write you a song and then everyone was me included so hyped about that funny song about WordPress or SC or whatever you could you still can do whatever you want but people tend to learn their style of AI and the creativity is not so present I would say and then it's back to what you can do different than what will get recycled through AI tool so so so yeah yeah I agree um I I think that standing out in this thing is harder and we also start getting better to a degree about recognizing AI images and not all of them but but there is definitely styles that you that you recognize as hey this is this has been built by AI um which also means that it's not that good yet um but I I mean what what is very fundamental about how AI works is that it might it might put something that it has found in one um part of the web and apply it to something else so there might be some creativity and how it how it applies things that just seen somewhere on something new um but actual creativity is not something that we can expect from AI yet and um I I think that that is that people underestimate what that means um that that actually being able to think about something coherently and and and over a longer period of time um is exactly what gives us an advantage and and and what allows us to do a lot of things and at the same time AI can make us much more productive so I love it but I don't think it should be used for everything and in general using it for writing leads to pretty D to pretty bad results for a lot of different things um and yeah I I just feel that that is not really changing um it's not AI is not becoming more creative in in the in the new things I've seen is it's getting better at answering questions and thinking about things that have already been done um but I think that that is for for real marketing you still need to have like creative thoughts and a creative thought process um I'm curious what do you expect from let's say near future in terms of like maybe think of it as predictions you know what can you expect to get from you know all of that race do you have any thoughts predictions expectations towards you know short period of time and maybe a little bit longer I do think AI will get much better um I think in the relatively short term we'll probably run into a um limit of how much power they can get into a data center so to to calculate larger models um until we figure out how to split the the the the whole calculation of a new model across different data centers um so I I think they they will get better I will probably also hit a wall at some point and then and might and then it might suddenly take like two or three years to get across that ball again because we we need to do something something else these this will progress and it will progress fast because I think everyone realizes the power in this um and it will probably start doing more and more of those menial tasks that we think about um and over time it might even take more tasks than we thought I think one of the things that has come out of this which I think is hilarious to a degree is that we carpenters and um electricians and all those people they are not being replaced by AI anytime soon one of the biggest limits on how fast we can grow AI is how fast we can build data centers and it's not because we can't we can't get the chips the biggest problem is that we can't get the people to actually put up the data centers themselves I thought that they were the chips no well the chips are are part of a problem but but the bigger problem is actually building the data sensors and getting the power into those data sensors and I I just look at that and go like okay it's in a way it's funny and I think developers were like the most sought-after type of person for a while and that will decrease a bit because we will be able to do more work with less developers um and we'll we'll start to Value other work more again until we figure out a way to automate more more of that too um I think that is it's basically a constant change I do think that it this is very diff very different yet very similar to an industrial revolution um where suddenly how we do things changed a lot mhm and it makes sense to to study that history and and look at what happened then and and well it led to quite a bit of unrest uh but it also led to much higher prosperity and I think this will do that too and building on top of that you know that um the fact that you can build so much easier do you think that we might be facing a future and this is not in a bad context but do you think that we might be facing a future where people will craft their own applications for their particular use cases the same way as people people are cooking food you know for the dinner right now your grandmother has this style of you know soup might have different style of the soup but you know it's is the soup but it it tastes different it is the same soup instead of buying a Frozen pizza for example mass produced like uh buying a s service that is mass um for a mass customer fit for all yeah I think so um I think we we already see this to some degree it's it's much easier again to build the simple tools you need to do specific things in your company yourself and and now that's just restricted to the developers and the people that um um that know how to do that quickly um but I think that will become more widespread and I do also think that open source has a very important role to play in that because it actually does allow for more of that faster um so so yes I do I do think that people will will start making things their own more and and composability or how however you want to call that is is something that that people will look for like can I can I mold this to my specific needs well um and I think that's fine I it means that you can you get to match your software to how you work a bit better instead of forcing having software force you into a certain way of working yes thank you very much for uh jumping to to our podcast together thank you very much for all of the the answers and um it was pleasure to to have a chat with you likewise and uh I hope to do it again at some point and then and then find us ourselves in better connections between the two of us yeah certainly and by the way we can then review what happened during that you know that period you know what um which of your let's say predictions uh materialized I we'll see I I hope that I'll be very right but I probably won't be we never know we never know all right thank you very much and take care if you like what you've just heard don't forget to subscribe for more episodes on the other hand if you've got a question we haven't answered yet feel free to reach out to us directly just go to awesom studio.com / contct thanks for listening and see you in the next episode of the awesome to know podcast [Music]