Will AI Destroy Freelancers and WordPress Agencies
The rise of AI: Is it the end for WordPress freelancers and agencies? Uncover the truth behind the hype. Click to find out.
In this thought-provoking video, we explore the potential impact of artificial intelligence on freelancers and WordPress agencies. As AI technology advances, many wonder whether it will enhance or threaten their livelihoods. We delve into real-world examples, expert opinions, and future predictions to provide a comprehensive overview of the landscape. Don’t miss out on this essential discussion—watch the video now to understand what’s at stake.
With Special Guest Spencer Forman
Spencer Forman Founder of WPlaunchify
@SpencerForman
This Week’s Show Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
Omnisend: Omnisend
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:20.880] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 957. We’ve got a returning friend of the show and a regular on our monthly roundtable show. We got Spencer Forum with us, the founder of WP Launchify, a well-known WordPress influencer and elder. It should be a great show. We’re going to be discussing: Are we duped? Duped by a beloved trope. Are we going to be replaced by the dreaded AI? Some influences are already hinting that we’re already doing it. I’m ready. I’m ready. I’m pretty hilarious. Yeah, he’s prepared. It should be a great show. Those are some great insights. So, Spencer, can you give us just a quick 10- or 20-second intro, and we go into your background in more detail in the main part of the show?
[00:01:26.190] – Spencer Forman
My pleasure. Always enjoy being here with both you fellows. This is Spencer Foreman, and I’ve been around WordPress since almost the beginning, 2006. My primary goal is to help people build their online businesses with WordPress. But the systems I use are essentially, I think of WordPress as if it was a service so that I help people with the outcomes, not just all the parts. I also have regular office hours and other shows on YouTube. But John, Kurt, and I have all been pals working together. So this is a fun topic to see how far we’ve come with WordPress after all these years. That’s great.
[00:02:01.030] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve got my ever-great co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:02:09.810] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sure, Jonathan. My name is Kurt von Annen. I own an agency called Manana No Mas. We focus primarily on membership and learning websites and work directly with WP Tonic and the great folks at Lifter LMS.
[00:02:20.810] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Before we go into the meat and potatoes of this great show and topic, I got a message from one of my major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks.
[00:02:31.560] – Spencer Forman
Hi there, e-commerce store owner. At Omnisand, we help more than 100,000 e-commerce customers like you sell their products. We’re an all-in-one email and SMS marketing platform that enables you to reach your customers, grow your audience, and increase sales. Our customers have seen incredible results with Omnisand, averaging $72 in revenue for every dollar spent. If you ever have a question, our award-winning customer support team is available 24/7 every single day. That’s one of the reasons we have more than 6,000 glowing reviews and ratings all across the web. So, start with Omnicent today and grow your business with better email and SMS marketing.
[00:03:09.290] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re coming back, folks. I want to point out we got some great special offers from the sponsors. Plus, we got a list of the best WordPress plugins and services, all tried by the WP Tonic Agency and Hosting Company. They’re all quality products with special pricing, and I’m also listening. You can get all these goodies by going over to WPTonic.com/deals, wp-tonic. Com/deals. What more could you ask for, my beloved WordPress professionals? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’ll get from that.
[00:03:51.050] – Spencer Forman
You know what I would say, but I won’t say it.
[00:03:52.790] – Jonathan Denwood
You did remain silent for a while. I know it wasn’t easy, Spencer, but you did control yourself.
[00:03:57.820] – Spencer Forman
I did, yeah. I did have a decaf, half-cab.
[00:04:00.930] – Jonathan Denwood
I know controlling yourself is extremely difficult, but there we go. So, Spencer, maybe you can delve into a little more detail about how you got into the semi-crazy world of WordPress and SaaS. Because of your background, I understand the law and property development. But how did you get into the crazy world of online business, SaaS, and WordPress?
[00:04:34.270] – Spencer Forman
I’m going to put it in a visual so people can follow.
[00:04:38.570] – Jonathan Denwood
Is it clean?
[00:04:41.740] – Spencer Forman
Clean enough. Everybody’s heard of the Hero’s Journey, but for the GenX crowd, go Gen-X. Let’s think of the VH1 behind the music. The Hero’s Journey looks like this inverted bell, and you start at the bottom and you work your way up, and then you hit this top thing, and, oh, Drama, drama, drama, drama, drama, drama. And then you find yourself in this, I think, enviable position at the end of the drama where you enter the third part of the journey. The first part is up, the second part is the curve, the third part is the down. So I’m about 19 years into WordPress, roughly. And it started when I was going through a lot of personal turmoil and business change because I had two young kids. I had a third one on the way. I was divorced, fighting for child custody. I was a practicing real estate developer who I had tons of property and lots of tenants. Everything was going well. But the world was pulled out from under us in those days in 2006, ’08 through ’11 because of the changes in the banking industry. So myself and many of my peers had to look for alternative things to do.
[00:05:44.670] – Spencer Forman
And I had a moment in time when I really, literally had to choose about whether I was going to go back to some of the skills I had, like practicing law, which would have been a really backward step for me because I’d come from law to real estate, or if I was going to try something new. So one of my passions was flying. And there was this new thing that was a SaaS solution called Ning, started by a then singular billionaire, Marc Andreessen and his ex-girlfriend, Gina Bianchini, who now runs the company of the same name, Mighty Networks. But back then, they called it Ning to repurpose some of Marc Andreessen’s technology they had tried to sell the industry called Loud Cloud. And they said, build a social network for any reason. And I was captivated by the idea that I could share some of my flying adventures, both video and photography, even in the rudimentary form before YouTube. It got me hooked on what technology could do. The downside was I had a great degree of accidental success in that social networking that led to me being vaulted into a position of being very well paid and learning how wonderful and amazing it can be to be in software.
[00:06:52.770] – Spencer Forman
When they shut everybody down, we ultimately found ourselves going through this journey, we’ll tell in another day, to WordPress. And the cool thing about WordPress is, back then, Matt Mullenweg said, Do it for whatever you want, build it for whatever you want. You own it, control it. And that was really a refreshing change from what had just happened. Well, that’s what I’ve been doing. In the last 18 years, showing people how to basically recreate their own business processes in WordPress. But we’ve been slowly building up the library of stuff that’s necessary. We finally achieved that. And guess what? That’s when the The politics of WordPress almost make it like a deja vu, because now Molenweg is acting a certain way about the things that we’ve all built. And I’m here to say good news. Unlike the last time, this time we all can choose to do whatever we want because the software is open source. And here I am, like hero’s journey over the top, ready to enter the third phase of life, doing exactly the stuff that I like to do. And then I think a lot of Gen X and boomers would appreciate knowing how to do as well, because that’s what our future looks like when AI has replaced a lot of the other mundane tasks.
[00:08:03.580] – Spencer Forman
So that was my long, short version. Hopefully not too long.
[00:08:06.900] – Jonathan Denwood
No, it’s fine. I just got a quick follow for your question that’s always puzzled me. Well, not puzzled, but I wanted to ask you before I throw it over to Kurt. What was it about the law that made it so personally very unattractive to you to go back to your roots and the law?
[00:08:25.150] – Spencer Forman
Have you ever seen the movie Gladiator, the good one with Russell Crowe, not the second one? The second That one’s okay. But the first one with Russell Crowe, the paradox of his hero’s journey, which I feel represents some of my own choices, is that I was exceptionally good at being a trial attorney. I did medical products, products liability, and stuff. But after working on the defense side and realizing that was a game of delay and slow down people and cheat people. I went to the plaintiff side, which somebody would argue as its own smarminess. But like Russell Crowe and Gladiator, to be successful at that, you had to find people who had horrific injuries and problems. Then you had to go in and kill, kill, kill, win, win, win. There was never any opportunity in trial work for a mutually beneficial outcome. It was kill or be killed. So like Russell Crowe didn’t want to fight anymore, but he had to fight and kill people to get to where he wanted to be with his wife and kid in the afterlife. I’m hoping to do this without going to the afterlife. But I’m saying if I had gone back to doing trial work, I would have basically never been able to end up where I am today, which is building the life and the outcome.
[00:09:33.660] – Spencer Forman
It could be mutually beneficial for everybody because as anybody who listens to me or heard me before I said, I am very much a humanist and a New Age person, and I believe that humans are on the cusp of, let’s say, greatness of understanding how capable we are of supporting and loving each other and doing all good. But we have to get through a lot of stuff to get there.
[00:09:54.360] – Jonathan Denwood
Right, T. I. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:09:57.790] – Kurt von Ahnen
Isn’t it cool when you go over the Hump in the Bell and you can do whatever you want?
[00:10:01.620] – Spencer Forman
It’s a crazy ride. And I want to say I’m not there yet, but I am using the tools and I’m trying to help other people realize. Jane Fonda talked about in a podcast, she did with Julia Louis-Dreyfuss from Seinfeld. Jane Fonda had really controversial youth, and then she was married to two different billionaires. And she says, the third chapter of my life is going to be drama-free and all about me, and not in a selfish way. But that’s the way anybody who’s gotten to 50 plus feels about life, right? I only have so many dots left on my little punch card. I got to use them in a valuable way. And all of the drama of the things that motivated you in earlier days is not as important. So that’s what I feel like as well. It’s like, I have an opportunity as the elder statesman to influence the marketplace of WordPress, to influence the market of other people of my generation who want to do things differently, and hopefully influence humanity in my own little tiny way, person to person.
[00:10:55.610] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nice. Well, I got to jump us on to our next question. I don’t think the timing could be better seeing what wordpress. Com posted on their X account yesterday.
[00:11:05.870] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s very bizarre, isn’t it? I just thought it would be a good topic. This happens, doesn’t it, Kurt?
[00:11:11.430] – Kurt von Ahnen
But driving is just uncanny, but it’s just dropped.
[00:11:14.750] – Spencer Forman
It’s amazing. Just dropped. The new, it’s new.
[00:11:18.470] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s a free AI website builder on wordpress. Com.
[00:11:21.970] – Spencer Forman
I’ve never seen that before.
[00:11:23.380] – Kurt von Ahnen
Tell AI what you need and get a fully built website in minutes. No coding, no drag and drop, no stress.
[00:11:30.820] – Spencer Forman
Handles all the layout, the images and text.
[00:11:34.150] – Kurt von Ahnen
You can tweak anything. Just ask AI.
[00:11:37.440] – Spencer Forman
I tweak everybody anyway with my personality. But what I want to say about that is it’s amazing. There’s another one that came out that’s called Relationship Builder, AI Relationship Builder. It’s so awesome. You go there and you just type one sentence about the perfect relationship you want, and it just automatically fixes everything in your life. Just exactly the same as this page builder does for building websites. Just type a sentence and the whole thing is done. It’s fine. You never have to do anything else ever again. Nobody ever.
[00:12:05.840] – Kurt von Ahnen
I know we have some thoughts, but connected to AI and people feeling like freelancers and agencies and people are going to get pushed out of the space, where are you at? Do you think we’re really going to push freelancers and agencies out of the space, or do you think people are going to get so overwhelmed by the AI drama and shiny object that they’re going to go, Oh, my God, I’m overwhelmed. I need help anyway?
[00:12:30.050] – Spencer Forman
. Okay, so here’s what I think. Imagine that snow globe that you used to keep on your desk with a little Santa. You take that, that’s the world we live in.
[00:12:41.340] – Jonathan Denwood
Citizen K, here we come.
[00:12:43.950] – Spencer Forman
Citizen K, right. He’s on his deathbed, by the way, asking about Roseblood, which is also hero’s journey. All that mattered was that thing from his child. You shake it up. The way I view the AI situation is this is shaking up the current status quo where People had been utilizing the tools that normal people don’t necessarily have access to in order to achieve things that are not really in alignment with the value they’re delivering. So not pointing at any particular person. But we all know that the tools exist for somebody who stumbled in the past on luckiness to put together the same powerful results as an agency might charge $250,000 for, hardly with a straight face in today’s world. The agency is taking advantage in the same way that the cable company says, oh, we’re going to add HBO. It’s going to cost you another 60 bucks because we got to send more data down your cable. Everybody knows there’s no more data. The data is already there. They’re just choosing what to rip me off on. Okay? So by shaking up the snow globe and making it mainstream that AI is everywhere. What I think in a very thumbs up, positive way, for freelancers who wish to have human relationships, you are going to be killing it.
[00:14:01.000] – Spencer Forman
Winning, winning, winning, winning. Why? Because now everybody and their mother has heard this term AI about their business, about their this, about their that, and they all got to figure out how to… I need that AI thing. Well, guess what? You can now be their liaison, their concierge to the AI world. But guess what? You got to stop doing. You got to stop believe in the BS that there’s a AI page builder, website builder that you just type a sentence into and it’s done. Because that AI is just as fake as my example of a relationship maker that you can type a sentence into. Relationships are a give and take and up and down a drama day. It’s a lifestyle. And you have to be the same way when it comes to building websites. Even if you just choose a bunch of blocks, that’s actually closer to the final result and the skills you need than typing words into AI. What AI allows you to do, I’m sure we’ll talk more about, is to have more capability in one human with less work. So instead of me needing five or six freelancers or twelve people, Spence Solo can do what twelve people used to do and do it better, but not by pretending that I could just have AI do it all for me magically.
[00:15:11.520] – Spencer Forman
It doesn’t work that way.
[00:15:13.540] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I know Jonathan’s got an extension question on AI. Turn it over to Jonathan.
[00:15:18.640] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, you caught me out, sent. You caught me out. Yeah, I totally see where you’re coming from, and I agree. It’s a fabulous tool. Large language models. It’s amazing what they can do. But then you got this whole discussion about general AI, general intelligence. You got people, scientists, people that I semi-respect, and they’re saying, Well, it’s going to change society in the next five, seven years and totally replace some of the bedrocks of our society. I just roll my eyes because I just don’t understand how you can make such predictions with such cast iron conviction. What’s your own response to that?
[00:16:28.130] – Spencer Forman
So we were talking a moment ago, not in jest, about when you get over a certain point in your life, you just no longer are reactive to predictions and things of drama. It’s just it wears you out. So for example, I lived through in my youth, the Russians are going to murder all of us, nuclear weapons. Then next day, one day, all of a sudden, we’re friends with the Russians. Then I lived through all the various viruses and contagions. I lived through Y2K, guaranteed January first, 2000, the world is over. Then I lived through the December 2012 prediction. And now we’re There’s a million other things that I do believe are probably happening or going to happen. But at the end of the day, AI by itself is not capable of replacing the final mile, which is until or unless there literally are Terminator robots walking around with AI that can impersonate humans or something else that involves some very new agey thing. As long as humans are the ones receiving the benefit of it, we’ve already seen how this works in practice. There needs to be a cultural choice or a humanity choice, which is And by the way, I think, relevant.
[00:17:31.690] – Spencer Forman
We live in a world of infinite abundance. And I’m not going to go on a soapbox on this. But what I think is important to realize is historically, of all recorded human history, societies have only worked when there is a somewhat balanced differential between the haves and the have nots. Because the skills that we’re all doing now were promised when I was a kid watching the Jetsons to not be necessary. The point at which we had these computers and all this technology was so that we could sit around in our sky city just having a ball and maybe showed up at basically Sprackets for some reason, but not having to work 10 jobs to afford a taco on a loan from Klaviyo, which is where we’re at today.
[00:18:14.390] – Jonathan Denwood
So the real where I took my load out yesterday.
[00:18:17.750] – Spencer Forman
I needed extra cheese. Hold on. I’m waiting for my approval. Is that we need a distribution. This isn’t a politics thing. This is a human. We need a distribution that represents the true, what’s the reason we’re all here doing all this for? Are we making websites to earn money because it’s helping humanity, or are we doing it to earn a living to pay for food? Because at the end of the day, there’s lots of things that we should have had removed by robots and AI a long time ago. That’s awesome. The things that they shouldn’t be doing is making people going back into factories in 2025. It should be like we should all be pursuing a higher purpose, like teaching, education, music, something. But the problem is, society is a a capitalist society, and I’m a capitalist. You can’t just jump off from, yesterday, we all made fabrics by scratch to looms, in the turn of the century with Luddites. You can’t do that without friction. And this is what we’re experiencing right now, very similar to the industrial revolution, but at a speed that is incomprehensible.
[00:19:20.930] – Jonathan Denwood
So just a quick follow-through question, which should have been the main question, really. There seems, especially in the no-code movement, which is always totally support the ability to wrap a lean prototype, to build a minimum viable app, product, website, whatever it is, to find out if there’s any service product fit to the target audience. These are all, to me, great concepts. But recently, I’ve seen people who, I think, underestimate the amount of experience they’ve got and underplay it and then over inflate what more sophisticated no code solutions can really do for you, especially in the WordPress space. Do you think I’m on the right track there? Sorry.
[00:20:31.850] – Spencer Forman
Yeah. So let’s break out the tool set for a second. And there’s some popular topics that are now up for debate because… By the way, I can speak directly about Matt Molenweg because Matt Molenweg is Do you have to?
[00:20:45.840] – Jonathan Denwood
Because you’ve already got me in trouble.
[00:20:47.890] – Spencer Forman
I’m not really kicked out of the WordPress community by Matt Mullenweg.
[00:20:51.570] – Jonathan Denwood
I was never part of it. This is like being kicked out of a mall.
[00:20:59.090] – Spencer Forman
I I’m not really kicked out. They just erased 18 years of my history on the Blackboard, but it means nothing because it was not- You’re not bitter, are you, Spencer? No, but I feel that this is relevant to the topic. So here’s what goes down. When you have a group of people in this unusual situation where after 18, 19 years, we put together what is essentially running half of the Internet as a framework, and everybody is contributing the parts. We used to sit around a few of us in a campfire, and it grew and grew and grew into this A ridiculously large thing. And in the ecosystem, Matt encouraged everybody to independently create solutions and to sell them in some way, but with the caveat that the code is always free. The code is always the part that share. That’s the part of the open source, which is really important, which ended up being his own Lynch pin because it applies to the core as well as to the things people made. Now, I’m not going to talk about his behavior, but I’m talking about the marketplace that we’ve developed was based upon these series principles.
[00:22:00.880] – Spencer Forman
Now that we’re here, we have people who have very capably come up with bandaids or solutions or replacements for some of the things missing in the core, as well as a decision about, well, how can you use the tools most efficiently? And in that sense, we’ve now got a few big concepts. Full site editing, Gutenberg block, the various page builders that still exist. And then you got folks who are pals of mine like Kevin Geary who are on the edge case saying, look, we can replace That’s a lot of the metaphors of how even the core CSS framework works with another tool. What does it mean to mere mortals? It means that you’re left with the even more complex set of questions, because imagine if you went to a store and instead of IKEA, where everything was organized and uniform and thought through and had the same languageless instructions and uniform around the world, imagine if, depending on the day of the week, IKEA had different products from different people with different instructions, with different manufacturing with different terms, different shelves. You would never get anything done. But when you go to IKEA, no matter where in the world, everything gets done.
[00:23:08.280] – Spencer Forman
When you go to Lego store. So the difference is Molenwag has never taken a position of, let’s make WordPress as a service that makes choices from the available stuff. And in doing so, make it easier for mere mortals to just walk into WordPress like they do Wix or Weebly. When you go to Wix, there’s no who are you going to hire and what parts and what generation and which page builder. The schizophrenia nature of WordPress can be a real drag. So that is where I feel that the solution lies. It’s right now being done on an individual level by several renegades, including myself, saying this is what I feel WordPress should be. But it really has been offered up by some people as this could be the future of WordPress as a platform if we wanted it. And that’s where the AI kicks in as well, because when everybody has a uniform set of tools and a platform, we can focus our energy on improving the six singular AI use of this instead of what’s happening now, which is me too. Look, I made a page builder that uses AI, and it doesn’t do shit.
[00:24:10.580] – Spencer Forman
But you’re going to waste all week dicken around with it, only to end up realizing it would have been faster just to use a blank page and just plop a couple of blocks in there. And that’s why I’m. I see where you’re coming from, but I don’t why agree with that. I mean, That’s why we know.
[00:24:31.200] – Jonathan Denwood
Because fundamentally, to me, it’s just an added element to what a starter theme is or a starter website or what term, whatever you want to use. So you don’t have a blank sheet, a blank page, because a lot of people, it’s just like writing. My ex-wife was a fantastic writer, but She could never, half the time, she could never get over the blank paid syndrome getting going. She just froze. I’m a dyslexic, but I’ve never had that. Actually, when I get into it, I quite like putting my thoughts down. I’ve never had a problem. But a lot of people say it’s the same metaphor, but it’s on steroids, isn’t it?
[00:25:23.210] – Spencer Forman
Well, but let’s just break it out as to what’s the real thing that’s being improved or not. What I’m saying is the starter templates, Particularly, I lean on the Cadence starter templates. They’re beautiful. You can go to ASTRO, you go to Bricks. There’s lots of starter templates, but all those are the various Gutenberg block components predesigned into some suggested pages and layouts, right? But they’re really helpful. In fact, they’re so helpful that that’s what I’m saying is the only thing you need. You just take the classic starter templates, and if you see one or more pages or even a whole theme that is appealing to you. I have tested and proven many times in public on live shows. It is faster and easier to simply go, I need a home page for a membership site and get it from the starter templates or from the design elements and then change the words. That is infinitely faster and better than being forced to go through the gauntlet of some completely bullshit generic AI questionnaire and trying to hope that the results spit back by the robot are even remotely close to what you already looked at and said, yes, I want the double cheeseburger.
[00:26:25.920] – Spencer Forman
Just don’t put pickles on it. I mean, we’re talking about.
[00:26:29.870] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, thanks for that. You clarified it.
[00:26:32.260] – Spencer Forman
Does that help?
[00:26:33.060] – Jonathan Denwood
I see where you’re coming from there.
[00:26:36.230] – Spencer Forman
Ask the AI. Hold on. Like in my last show, I said, take a starter template page. Let’s see if we just ask the generic ChatGPT, even. Give me a page that has certain elements in it for selling something or other. And we did it, and we just copied the words into the starter template, immediate success, versus asking Cadence AI, make a page about this. And it came up with some random Disney parable or something. You see what I mean? There was less control because the AI is already doing that with Snow White.
[00:27:11.160] – Jonathan Denwood
We could do a live test now, but I mean, a lot of people asleep, but I’m saying that’s what happened. I think the whole film was made by AI, actually. But there we go. Let’s go for our break. We’ve had a fascinating discussion so far. I knew it was going to be a good one. We will be back in a few moments, folks.
[00:27:34.530] – Kurt von Ahnen
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[00:27:41.820] – Spencer Forman
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[00:27:48.090] – Kurt von Ahnen
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[00:28:05.970] – Spencer Forman
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[00:28:44.420] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re coming back, folks, we’ve had a feast, a feast on throwing AI into the ditch. Not really. No. Not really. I’m really kidding. But before we go into the FAB second half, I want to point out, if you’re looking for a great WordPress hosting partner, especially if you’re building a membership, a community-focused website, and you want all the latest best technology and people that really understand what you’re trying to build, why don’t you look at partnering with WP Tonic? We provide, like I say, all the technology, all the knowledge from a partner, plus some great packages aimed at you, the WordPress professional. You can find more by going over to wp-tonic. Com/partners, wp-tonic. Com/partners. We love to build something special together. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:29:46.340] – Kurt von Ahnen
Hey. Well, I feel like we’ve had some fun at the first part of the show, maybe even just poking a little bit of fun, wordpress. Com’s ex-account in their AI announcement. We mentioned Cadence and Aster and things like that, but But let’s look at the other side of this coin, the other side of the spectrum, because all three of us have admitted to using AI. I guess I’m the third one to admit it in this show, right?
[00:30:10.740] – Spencer Forman
I can’t live without AI anymore. I subscribe to what I consider a new tool, this magi.
[00:30:19.510] – Kurt von Ahnen
Ai thing, and it combines a bunch of tools together, which for me works really good because then I can pick and choose what I’m using all in one screen. I don’t like having to hunt and pack around different things. But anyway, I digress. From your perspective, Spencer, what’s the most exciting opportunity, considering the blend of AI and WordPress in your mind? What’s your perfect use case for where we’re at right now?
[00:30:46.790] – Spencer Forman
I mean, it’s a great question. And I think it’s important to say it. I’m not Luddite at all. I’m enthusiastic about AI. What I’m suggesting is what I’m about to elaborate upon, which is that we have a unique opportunity in the WordPress space in particular to deliver solutions that are based upon a framework that already runs not only half the Internet, but that has an infinite array of built-in tools, which, although this sounds very geeky because you’re in a motor sports, I’m into it. You’re in the bikes, I’m into it. If you start talking about, Hey, I got a Shimano seven speed 52 teeth crank, and somebody hears you like, What? But when you get into WordPressing, it’s super geeky. You realize, Holy moly, we have every Very high-end feature, plus a really simple pHp, HTML, CSS, even jquery, and Node. Js. We have APIs. We have everything like a fairytale to build anything. But here’s where the future is, according to Uncle Spence. What I have discovered accidentally in doing the Minute Launch Kit and having all these customers where I’ve curated out the parts like IKEA, is that all of a sudden we’ve got a private box that everybody can own and control.
[00:31:59.850] – Spencer Forman
And through selective hosting partners who go along with what I asked for, which is a modern Kubernetes container with CDN built in, all the hosting stuff just taken out of the equation, almost like with cell phones. We don’t think about it anymore. It’s just 5G. It works. You have a box into which Uncle Spence and other people can use the AI to take your data and keep repurposing your data and the feedback loop of users to make it better and more attractive and more intelligent and more purposeful. And a singular entrepreneur, huge big thing here. A singular entrepreneur using that system can literally be like the Wizard of Oz, can literally be like Willy Wanka. But without the oompa loompas. You can essentially generate a business for the type of income that an individual definitely can live very comfortably on, but even a multimillion dollar a year company. Why? Because you’ve eliminated all of the variabilities and also So you’ve made free in a private box all of the data to train this infinite brainpower upon. And that’s where you can focus its energy like a magnifying glass on the sidewalk onto a pinpoint of what you wanted to do.
[00:33:15.620] – Spencer Forman
So what I’ve done in a practical sense now is taken my clients and with the data they collect, products, product sales, customers’ journeys, the marketing automation, the forms they filled out, the content they posted, the social networking stuff. All of that data is now available on the back-end to be used as training in a private way for the AI to spit out customer support responses, new blog content, social media, answering questions in public. Even with my voice. Jonathan has to do this. I have my voice in 11 labs so I can make, hey, you want to listen to me on your jog or while you ride your bike instead of reading my stuff? Here’s an audio answer. That is the future that’s amazing because what I’m focused 100 % on, and so are my customers, is the relationship I ship with people who say, I don’t know what this AI thing is, but I really need it because all my competitors have it, or I’ve seen it on the TV. Can you please spoon feed it to me? And I do it at a price that is a SaaS price. You can get the whole kit and caboodle for 97 a month or parts of it for 47, 20, whatever.
[00:34:19.230] – Spencer Forman
But most people, the 97 bucks achieves a replacement for tens of thousands of dollars of time, money, effort, heartbreak. And it still gives you that full ownership and control, which, by the way, it’s important to me because when you full circle back to the Ning thing I mentioned, 2006, they shut down 12,500 of my customers, all of their customers who used my stuff. They just threw them in the garbage. Does that sound like anything we’re hearing about today, I think it does. I got kicked out of WordPress after 19 years, threw away all my stuff because somebody got the word from Mullenweg. Well, guess what? I already knew that was going to happen, so none of it affected me this time or my clients. Huge difference when you’re building a business today. You can’t just build on a SaaS platform without fear that somebody’s going to don’t like the way you’re looking and shut your whole thing down. So you have to be proactive. And that’s why I’m very bullish on AI. And by the way, the tools like you use, the compilation tools, those are amazing. I use several of those, Lindy, and I can go down a list.
[00:35:24.600] – Jonathan Denwood
Don’t go into that. Yeah, that’s a separate question.
[00:35:29.060] – Spencer Forman
I actually I wanted to follow up with part of your answer there.
[00:35:32.400] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m really intrigued by this because I have certain clients in these spaces, or I should say close to these spaces. When I’m talking to a pure startup and they’re talking about, oh, I want to automate this and AI that and AI the other, I’m like, you don’t have any data yet. You don’t have any content. What are you training this thing on? If you think you’re going to open it up and say, give me an answer from the internet, and it starts pulling data from Prudential Insurance Company from 1978, you’re given the wrong information. So there’s a certain level where if you’re going to train the tool on the content, they have to have that content. Where do you see customers as a barrier of entry to these kinds of tools?
[00:36:17.140] – Spencer Forman
Well, I mean, one of the big topics you’re just alluding to, which is that we don’t really have any guarantees other than a contractual promise that they’re not going to use public data for their own purposes. So if you use a tool that’s got a public interface like most LLMs, you’re essentially in the terms of service, agreeing that whatever you put in there is likely going to end up in some training somewhere. Who knows? Now, there are promises and contractual ones that have yet to be proven in court, that if you use a promise of a API in your own website, or if you use one of the new… Like, Clawn and Perplexity, you have these things which they claim they’re your private reservoirs, containers, whatever. But either way, at least you’re one step closer to what is promised to not end up pictures of you in the shower on the Internet. Okay. Now, what I’m saying to people is, as long as you’re using a public LLM, instead of, ironically, that very controversial Chinese one that came out, it was available in a standalone do it yourself. And they said they looked through the code and it looks like it doesn’t have any nefarious stuff if you host it yourself.
[00:37:17.990] – Spencer Forman
But if you do use the hosted one, you know it’s going right to the CCP. So in this case, if you use one of the private LLMs, or if I think you use a reputable company like Cloud or at GPT OpenAI, to API into your WordPress site, I think you can say safely that your data will remain inside of your site. That’s the best I can offer to people because I’m an attorney who did trial work And one of the things that always amazes me, especially when the Mullenweg thing comes up, is people who don’t understand how the court system works, think it’s like some LA law drama or a modern lawyer show where you just have contract and the whole case is over. No, it’s just people arguing. And then the trier effect decides who’s got enough information to persuade them. And it doesn’t always work out that way. So if your private stuff ends up in the public realm, for you, because I don’t think I can promise you it’s not going to It’s not going to happen. But the benefit of trying it, at least in a limited way, super leverage. So your client can train it on some sample data.
[00:38:24.180] – Spencer Forman
But then as they and their clients interact with the products, with the sales, with the social networking community, with reading blog posts, with submitting forms, all of that stuff can be used to improve and republish more stuff. And that’s where the echo chamber effect, when done properly, can work in your favor. It can magnify something that’s very small into something very efficient.
[00:38:47.530] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nice. Thanks. Jonathan, over to you.
[00:38:50.420] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I got a follow-through question. I just wonder if you got any advice. I’m already noticing from some of our larger clients that are not that knowledgeable about WordPress, but they think they are. They’re already suggesting, Well, we Why don’t you just use a prompt and get some code and put it on a fully functioning production website that’s driving their business? And, Bob’s your uncle, we have to solution. I’ve noticed on a few forums, so-called WordPress professional developers suggesting that they can develop a plugin instantaneously for a client on a live Zoom. I can develop your solution and I can give it to you almost now and just put it into your live website. Yeah. And I listen to this and I just shake my head. I just think I’m losing the plot, really. Is it me? Is it me, Spencer? Am I’ll just hold.
[00:40:16.550] – Spencer Forman
No, you’re missing the important point. I don’t usually ask you to do this because we’re just going to show you real quick. Can you share? Can you add this one thing in that I’m showing you? The screen. Okay, so this is a screenshot from one of my The demo sites were, again, I as a developer, I’m mediocre. As a marketer, I think I’m exceptionally talented because I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. But coding skills only the last decade or so. Ai has made it possible for somebody with basic coding skills in WordPress, I can do things in one hour that took me a month before to do. Now, this interface here is an example of what I was saying. This is an actual product. It’s just I haven’t released it to my audience officially yet, but it connects to the other things that I do. Where as I was trying to explain to you, this allows me to take any number of AI engines with a key, 11 labs for Coding Voice, choose which of the custom post types or standard post types I want to use as a source. I can create all kinds of different product prompt templates, like how to answer this and that, and I can save them.
[00:41:19.900] – Spencer Forman
And who is the responder? Like Dr. Hoover or Spencer Foreman. Now here, along with whatever automated connections I have, I can input the question or the prompt, which template, which responder, and I can even automatically generate the voice, which, by the way, here’s examples of that, where once I generate it, I save it in the very same website. Why is that important? Because then this actually becomes the content that’s used by the AI along with the other stuff to generate new content.
[00:41:50.970] – Jonathan Denwood
I think that’s fine. But what I wanted to get from you is that there must be a middle ground here because I don’t want to come across as anti productivity productivity enhancements. Okay. Have you got any advice how you deal with a client that says these things? It’s great to use all this new technology, but you do have to test it. Where does it… Is it always been these people that just hack away a full production website and it’s just put it on steroids? Is it always been there, really.
[00:42:31.760] – Spencer Forman
Well, there’s a decision tree that I’m going to say, I think is universal here in WordPress. And it’s different than, let’s say, using a tool like Wix or Weebly Squarespace or something that’s like automatic one-page page builder. Let’s start with the basic premise. You have to always start with why does a client need a solution? Some clients only need a one-page web solution. They don’t need anything dynamic. They just need a billboard. For those people, WordPress is infinite overkill. Infinite overkill. So once you’ve eliminated that, now you have people who need something dynamic. You ask, what do you want to do with it? Weebly, exactly. What do you want to do? It’s still there. What do you want to do with it? And if the features that you want to do involve things like transactional, membership, subscription content, if they have to do with really attractive layouts or learning management. Those complex things can be done elsewhere. But WordPress really offers a complex array of options in a very simple number of features like Lego blocks. Now, the question I’m answering is, what’s the point? What’s somebody to do in the future? The thing that you need to do now is decide, does your client give two hoops about you being such an awesome designer, or are they okay with just picking a decent starter template?
[00:43:49.310] – Spencer Forman
And the mechanic, that’s my where pound. They’re 10,000-year-old wolf pounds that I recreated from DNA, or whatever the dire wolf I was. So what I’m saying is, Kevin Geary would talk about this as well, but it has to do with full site editing or the page builders. Does it really matter to your client about design, or do they really just care about function? And for me, my clients are running businesses. Yes, they would like something reasonably attractive, but anybody who has an iPhone knows that the iPhone’s all look the same. It’s what they do that matters. And I’m saying to my clients, we got some basic starter templates Let’s get your design thing from there. Take two minutes. But really a logo and a basic color palette, that’s all you need. Other people, and Kevin services those needs, are professional designers. They need a set of tools to make the rainbows and the unicorns and whatever. Okay, so what I’m saying is if your clients fit into the first category, the things that I’m alluding to are just snap together a select group of plugins with whatever AI tool you want to improve your ability to create content, post content, aggregate information, report to customers.
[00:45:06.550] – Spencer Forman
And in doing so, you will have a box that you or your client owns that does the mechanics you need at a very low cost and at a very low cost of maintenance versus going off into the woods and chopping down trees and building forts out of wood and painting and all these. As soon as you go into the detail work, you’ve lost the whole purpose of what I’m talking about, which is just an off the shelf, go to Ikea, have a lunch and buy stuff. Anyway.
[00:45:34.370] – Jonathan Denwood
Over to you, Kurt.
[00:45:38.860] – Spencer Forman
I’m going to have to admit, I got lost. I think we’re at the last question, aren’t we?
[00:45:42.630] – Jonathan Denwood
No, you got a question about the AI tools.
[00:45:45.290] – Kurt von Ahnen
Oh, well, there we go. Here we are with… Because I thought we touched it, but are there any AI- I told Spencer to save his AI family of tools for this question, didn’t I?
[00:45:58.470] – Jonathan Denwood
Save them.
[00:45:59.890] – Kurt von Ahnen
So let’s just spit it out, man. What are the tools? So what are your favorite AI tools or services that you’re using?
[00:46:07.310] – Spencer Forman
So what’s interesting… Sorry, I didn’t mean to cut off what you’re asking. So this is like relationship. Llms. All right. So when you think of and you start to play with it, first, I didn’t understand this. Now, I infinitely understand this. I have a teenager who’s 14. I have two adults. One is 21, 24 as my son. And I remember they’re little kids. I had to speak differently Certainly with them, I got different responses as they matured and so forth. When you deal with LLMs, you have different companies providing different flavors and features, but they’re also like teenagers to adults. Sometimes they’re like infants to adults, and sometimes they’re like adults with senility. Because depending on who you try and when you try it and whether they’ve upgraded it, you can have a tool that’s the best at coding. For example, out of all of the The ones that you can look, you got OpenAI, you got Anthropic, which is Claude, you’ve got Gemini, you’ve got Grok, you’ve got LLaMA. I could go down the list. All the individual engines and the Chinese one, I forgot the name of because I just… What is it again?
[00:47:16.020] – Spencer Forman
Deep Seek. Deep Seek or Deep Seek? Deep Seek, right? Deep Seek. Okay. So of all of those, Claude, Sonnet 3. 7 has been the one that’s given me the best results of coding. Now, what that means is, Spence, instead of sitting down and hand coding stuff and asking questions and searching Google and all this stuff needs to take me forever, I can figure out a pain point I want to solve that’s either a standalone plugin or part of what I’ve offered and just get that solution in an hour, go to lunch, take a walk, and publish it. Now, the problem with Claude Sonet is up until this week, yesterday, they set a limit on the output at what is called 200 kilobits, which Which is essentially maybe 200 lines of code. An average plugin is going to be 1,500 to 2,000 lines of code. So when it would give me the answer, it would go, I’ve got the best answer. I have hit my limit. And I think enough people like me complain that they at least put a continue button in. But it’s like if you asked your friend, hey, where should we go to lunch?
[00:48:21.140] – Spencer Forman
And they go, I know the best restaurant. And they hit their limit. They go, continue. So Claude Sonet now has a plan. You can pay 10 10 times more to get 10 times more output. I can pay instead of 20, I could pay 200, or I could pay five times to get 100, which might be worth it to me because it’s the best coder. Now, what does the best day to day stuff? Openai has six, seven flavors Divers. It’s insane. I don’t know what’s going on with those guys. But the mini ’03 was the closest that was good at making code. And then they bastardized that thing and cut its brain off because now it doesn’t understand how to answer a question. Now they’ve got mini ’04, they’ve got 4. 5, they got 4. 5 with Canvas, they got Super light, they got Diet, they got Cauture. They got everything under the sun. I don’t know which one to use because every time I get used to using one, if you gave the same prompt to four of their models, you get four different answers. But I do think it’s the best one for the general population because it’s available everywhere for everyone.
[00:49:23.310] – Spencer Forman
And now, of the other two that are free and basic, before I talk about perplexity, if you use Twitter, whether you like Elon Musk or not, if you ask grock questions, it’ll give you like 20 or 30 free really good answers, believe it or not, even coding answers. But it’s very unreliable because you can tell that they’ve taken all of the safety nets off of it for their own selfish purpose. If you ask a lunatic question of ChatGPT, it goes, Are you feeling okay? With Grok, it gives you a straight-face answer that you’d be shocked at. Llama, a complete waste of time. I don’t know what’s going on there, but Zuckerberg does not know what he’s doing with this thing, and it reflects itself. Try llama, try to ask it to do anything, and you wonder what’s happening.
[00:50:09.960] – Jonathan Denwood
Too busy in the green.
[00:50:12.840] – Spencer Forman
Gemini is a more atrocious bastardization because that’s Google. If you go into google. Com and ask a question, it’s using Gemini to come up with the first answer. Everybody sees this now. But if you ask it to do things like coding or what’s the best topic, you know that they’re dicken around with the algorithm on there. They’re trying to turn it into a business model that is like pointing to answers that nobody would point to. Now, there’s intermediary tools that are actually a hybrid without being a full compilation like you were talking about. So instead of using a service that has multiple LLMs, one of the LLMs that’s unique is Perplexity. Perplexity is like a hybrid between a search engine, a librarians, a file cabinet, and a really good friend. Because perplexity is where I go to do research on my medical stuff. I have a lot of long term chronic back pain and other surgical stuff. Perplexity allows you to create what we talked about, which was, I think, a reasonably private assumption of your data not ending up there. And you can put it into a folder. I know. Someday you’re going to see my MRI.
[00:51:18.280] – Spencer Forman
But the point is, I was able to, for example, put in my MRIs, put in my CT scans, put in my surgery reports, and actually do research on… I know this sounds funny, but hold on, Jonathan, I want to actually… Because you’re a person who had some medical treatment as well. Anybody who deals with the modern medical system, and I used to be a professional trial attorney, a licensed real estate person. I don’t have a medical license, but I was dealing with malpractice. I know the people who are doctors. They’re all my peers. They’re with the eight-year-old men and women, okay? They’re just human beings. If you go to your doctor and you’re lucky enough to get an appointment within the next decade, and they actually see you, and they have more than 30 seconds to talk to you, their answer in no way possible is as good as what you can get right now by asking the question of perplexity. I put my medical records into perplexity, asked it a series of questions, and I compared it to what my doctors told me, and it It’s really scary, sad, scary.
[00:52:17.250] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, my God,
[00:52:19.160] – Spencer Forman
In the same way, let’s relate this to web developers. If somebody had an honest tool, like the kid in the Embers’ New Clothes story, and said, I just want to do this with my business, It would be able to give them an answer about, you don’t need a $250,000 agency, and you don’t need to pay HubSpot $1,700 a month, and you don’t need to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the problem is there’s not one singular source of truth, but that’s what happens. Perplexity is a cool, elegant tool for anybody who wants to save a lot of stuff mixed with private data. And by the way, they have a feature where you can build a public web page on a topic, which is like, what’s that? We wiki. I forgot Jimmy Whales’ thing. Wikipedia. It’s like a Wikipedia thing you can make on a topic you can share publicly. Finally, there’s Chris, and that’s true. It’s academic gold. And then, finally, there are these compilation tools, which are services. I can name many of them, but I will mention only Lovable, Poe, and Lindy. What they’re doing is they’re third-party people that do, like I was showing, what I’m doing in a plugin form of adding all of your favorite engines into this thing.
[00:53:31.950] – Spencer Forman
And then you can save private data. You can set up your prompts. You can do it in a way that lets you cross purposes around many teenagers instead of asking one teenager. Because here’s what happens to me. I save an infinite amount of time because I know what I want and what it is supposed to be. If you don’t see what you want or what it was supposed to be, you better strap in because your 14-year-old just put you in the back of the station wagon with your hands tied in a blindfold, and they’re driving with a six-pack in the front seat. Because that’s what most LLMs are giving people today, just random answers out of the Yeah, I think creation is the keyword here.
[00:54:13.500] – Jonathan Denwood
I think we’re going to end the podcast part of the show. Can you stay on for another 10 minutes, or must you be? Sure. I’m going to ask Spencer about intellectual property, IP, and I’m going to ask him his views where we find the WordPress community at the beginning of April. But we’re going to end the podcast show. So, Spencer, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you, what are your latest thoughts and ideas, and what’s the best medium?
[00:54:46.720] – Spencer Forman
You can get WordPress as a service directly from me at Wplaunchify. Com. And my socials are all at Spencerforman, F-O-R-M-A-N. Com. What I offer is a 100 % money-back guarantee because the kit itself is the software, unlimited support from me via email, and hosting if you want it. You can buy it all a cart. But the neat thing is that it’s like going into a SaaS company, but you own it and control it for yourself and your clients. And that’s the big differentiator, as I indicated. So come on and try it out. There’s virtually nothing to lose. And it works with all the other stuff you want to use. You’re just on your recognizance. Once you start attaching stuff to the things you bought from the Lego store, you must figure it out alone or pay me to help. I’ve gotten rid of all the uncertainty when everybody uses the same stuff that’s been curated out.
[00:55:37.290] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. And, Kirk, what’s the best way for people to discover your latest thoughts on what you’re up to?
[00:55:45.080] – Kurt von Ahnen
My business stuff on the blog is at maniananomas, maniananomas. Com. If you want to connect person to person, contact me on LinkedIn. Jonathan, I don’t know if you know this, but I’m the only Kurt Von Ahnen on LinkedIn, and I’m easy to find.
[00:55:59.470] – Jonathan Denwood
Unique. Just unique. We’re going to end the podcast of the show. We’re going to have some bonus content. You can watch the whole interview plus the bonus content by going over to the WP Tonic YouTube channel and subscribing to it. It’s rapidly growing. I’m getting close to 10,000 subscribers. So please do that. We’ll be back next week with another great interview. I’m fully booked for the next couple of months. I’m amazed at the quality of people who have agreed to come on this show for a chat. We will be back next week. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye. Hey, thanks for listening. We do appreciate it. Why not visit the Mastermind Facebook group? To keep up with the latest news, click Wp-tonic.com/newsletter. We’ll see you next time.
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